Dead Calm

 1200 miles from land, on a sleek yacht, Nicole Kidman (Rae) battles a psycho-killer.  Fifty miles away in fierce squall violent with lightning, Rae's husband, John fights to survive as the larger schooner on which he is trapped begins to sink.  People get shot with spear-guns, mangled by boat propellers, threatened with a shotgun, and shot in the face by emergency flares.  A cute little dog named Benjy who lives on the yacht, is murdered.  Boats burn and rescue rafts are set afire and lightning snaps a mast dropping the massive wood pillar into the guts of the sinking schooner where John (Sam Elliot) is trapped.  When John has to breathe through a metal pipe, the outlet of the tube swarms with cockroaches.  George Miller, who made the Mad Max pictures, produced this movie and directed second-unit sequences.  Dead Calm, is the name of this 1989 Australian picture and, as you can imagine, the movie is anything but calm.

In some ways, Dead Calm (directed by Phillip Noyce) resembles Scorsese's Cape Fear -- there's an isolated boat, a woman in peril, and a psychotic villain who can't be killed.  No matter how badly mutilated, these sorts of psycho-killers keep reviving to continue their brutal crusade to rape and murder the heroine. Robert De Niro's scary monster in Cape Fear is, at least, motivated by revenge (he's trying to torture the wife of the prosecutor who put him in jail); by contrast, the psychopath in Dead Calm is just a ferocious madman, an example of more or less "motiveless malignity."

Based on a well-known 1963 novel by an American author Charles Williams, Dead Calm begins with a completely irrelevant prologue before getting to thriller business out on the high seas.  Rae and John have embarked on a sailing trip to the Great Barrier Reef (the Whitsunday Passage) to salve the young woman's psychic injuries incurred when she was involved in a terrible car crash in which her toddler son was killed.  Rae seems to be rallying when the couple, idling like a painted ship on a painted sea on a yacht called the Saracen sight a schooner adrift and obviously weather-battered.  A young man appears in a dinghy seemingly fleeing the "black schooner" as it is called -- he claims to be the sole survivor of a botulism outbreak on the vessel; it has, he claims, killed the other five people on board.  The young man seems weirdly manic and his story doesn't make sense.  John locks him in a stateroom on the Saracen and, then, rows over to the black schooner where he will spend almost all of the rest of the movie.  It turns out that the young man, Hughie (Billy Zane) has apparently butchered the other people on the vessel.  From clues discovered on the eerie ghost ship -- it's got naked carytid figureheads below deck and other sinister furnishings, strange messages scribbled in blood, and pale mangled corpses floating in the bilgewater -- John figures out that Hughie and an older man, a war correspondent, have recruited four beautiful models ("broad-minded" according to am\n advert on the boat) for a sex-cruise around the South Pacific.  But something has gone badly wrong and Hughie murders everyone on board, making a sort of "snuff film" that John views before things go badly wrong on the vessel.  There's a squall and the boat begins to sink and a mast knocked down by lightning traps John below deck.  Back on the Saracen, Hughie menaces Rae. She has sex with him to calm him down and, then, sets to work figuring out ways to disable him.  She poisons him with soporifics in his lemonade and this knocks him out, after some scary scenes in which he chases her around with a shotgun.  Having disabled Hughie, Rae doesn't kill him or throw him overboard -- this would be the logical way to deal with this mad dog.  Instead, she ties him up and locks him in a room with the predictable outcome that he escapes and chases her around  again, this time in the storm, for about a twenty minutes.  She finally kills him, but this is the sort of insane bad guy who has to be killed, at least, three times before he stays in the grave and so more mayhem ensues, all while Rae is sailing the Saracen through heavy seas to reach and rescue John on the sinking schooner.  (She has, as they say, her "hands full.")  

The movie is pretty good and has some nice Hitchcock touches.  Billy Zane is creepy as the ebullient sadist.  It's not entirely clear that Rae doesn't enjoy her sexual interlude with him.  The little dog is a good actor as is Sam Elliot as the stoic, unlucky husband, a naval officer which explains his seamanship with, nonetheless, goes awry.  There's no deeper meaning to the movie.  It's a simple straight-ahead suspense film with horror movie overtones.  The opening sequence, presumably motivated by fidelity to the novel, features a  horrific car crash and some nasty hospital scenes in which John has to tell Rae that their little son has been killed.  This scenes have nothing to do with the rest of the movie and lead nowhere and I don't understand why they were shot, let alone retained in the movie, except as filler.  The subject matter is rather thin and, therefore, it seems that the movie had to be padded.  At one point, the psycho-killer says that Rae has beautiful bone structure "behind her face" and that when she's eighty she will still be unavoidably beautiful;  Nicole Kidman was 22 when this movie was released.  She's starring on Amazon's limited series Expats in January of 2024 as I write and the madman's observations about her in Dead Calm remain pertinent and true.  

Society of the Snow

 J. A. Bayona's Society of the Snow is a two-hour twenty minute film, shot documentary-style, about an airplane crash in the Andes in 1972.  The victims of the crash, mostly young men who were team members of a Uruguayan rugby club, were trapped on a glacier for about two months and had to resort to cannibalism to survive.  This is harrowing subject matter and the film is something of a slog.  Edgar Alan Poe, in prefatory remarks to his short story "The Premature Burial", observed that there were certain historical events in which interest is "all-absorbing" but that are too horrible to be represented in literary fiction -- his examples include the earthquake in Lisbon, the passage of the Berezina, the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre and the stifling of the prisoners in Calcutta's Black Hole.  I suppose it would be valid to include the story of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 in this list.  The movie is very good, tactful and restrained given its subject, but most of the characters in the show die, and die horribly, and so you have been forewarned.  

The movie is nothing if not business-like.  A couple of chaotic close-up shots on a rugby field  in Uruguay establish the situation and, then, we see the characters planning a holiday in Santiago -- they have apparently chartered a plane to fly them over the Andes to Chile.  There's some cheerful banter, a church service, and farewells at the airport, then, the protagonists are up and aloft for their fatal flight.  Bayona doesn't bother to establish the characters of his movie, more than half of whom will end up dead anyway in the first half-hour.  (It's probably significant that the rugby team is called "The Old Christians.")  The viewer can't keep track of the young man, although they are scrupulously named, but, as the film progresses, some of them become sufficiently salient to be identifiable to the viewer.  The movie isn't really a study in character; the extreme exigencies of the plight of the aircrash victims flattens them all into the mold of either survivor, all of more or less equal in desperation, or one of the dead.  There is a cunning trick played on the audience with respect to a voice-over narrator who identifies his team members and plane-mates when they are killed and, now and then, interjects some commentary to the events.  Toward the end of the film, the quasi-poetic voice-over from Numa, the 25-year old narrator, has a whispered, lyrical quality like the soft voices that sometimes underlie scenes in movies by Terrance Malick (for instance, The Thin Red Line) although Bayona is less philosophical and more pragmatic in the way he uses Numa's narration.  

Bayona's breakthrough film (he was previously a director of Spanish horror movies) was 2010's The Impossible, also an impressive if almost unbearably grim movie about the tsunami that ravaged Indonesia.  In that movie, there is about twenty minutes of exposition, a spectacular scene involving the tsunami, and, then, another ninety minutes of harrowing and gruesome narrative about surviving in the aftermath of the catastrophe.  The Society of the Snow is constructed in the same way.  After some business-like and efficient scenes establishing the situation, there is an impressive plane crash sequence, complete with shots of the plane ripping itself open on rocks, people being sucked out of the torn fuselage, and bones being broken like toothpicks in big close-ups.  After a blackout, the protagonists find themselves half-buried in the snow, about fifteen people dead or dying.  (Whenever someone dies in this movie, that person's name is shown on the screen in a title simulating the typing on an official report.)  After a horrendous night in the smashed fuselage, the survivors drag the dead out of the plane, tend to the wounded, and wait to be rescued.  But no one comes.  When a group of young men walk up the snowfield toward a ridge a thousand feet above the crash, they discover to their horror that the smashed fuselage blends into the glacier and can't be seen.  The plane has crashed in a snow-covered valley beneath high peaks and the area is totally desolate -- there aren't even any birds frequenting this glacial wilderness.  Later, the survivors set up a radio using batteries salvaged from the plane and learn that efforts to find them have been suspended due to bad weather and the fact that no one ever survives a crash of this sort in the Andes. After about ten days, the protagonists, after much debate and soul-searching, agree to eat the frozen corpses of the dead -- the bodies are apparently cut apart using broken glass by two cousins, the Strauch boys.  This happens off-screen and the characters are shown eating little pellets ofwhitish pink meat.  Things improve enough that the survivors expect that they will be rescued when the thaw occurs -- the crash occurred in the third week of October and, in the southern hemisphere, the young men think the snow will soften and melt in the third week of November.  The folks in the plane fuselage are telling jokes and making rhymes when an avalanche buries them.  This leads to more horrific episodes of characters suffocating in the snow.  No sooner do the survivors dig themselves out from this catastrophe than another avalanche buries them again.  These calamities result in about a dozen more casualties.  Numa, who emerges as the most dominant character in the film, has been training with a couple other young men for a long hike down out of the mountains.  The boys try to escape from the valley but the first night outside proves too cold for them.  Apparently, there are a enormous differentials between day and night time temperatures -- at one point, someone says that the t temperature drops 80 degrees when the sun goes down.  (This explains why the survivors can roll around in the snow during daytime without getting frost bite.)  Numa and a couple others finds the tail of the plane in which there are more suitcases, boxes of cigarettes (everyone smokes) and even a little food.  The team members planning to hike down into the inhabited part of Chile sew together some rain-proof insulation to make a sort of communal sleeping bag for use at night.  They set forth again but Numa, who has an infected leg wound, can't make the march and he limps back to the main shelter in the plane's fuselage.  Some more kids die due to inanition and wounds that have become suppurating abscesses.  The two member rescue party, with great effort, reaches a ridge but finds that their valley is surrounded by miles of white, mountainous terrain.  Nonetheless, they forge ahead, sustaining themselves on rotting human flesh.  By this time, they are sick and vomiting from the foul meat.  However, they reach a green valley and, while trying to catch a reptile for a meal, are discovered.  The surviving team members are rescued by helicopter.  We see nurses bathing skeletal men covered in unhealed wounds.  The ordeal lasted 72 days.  Sixteen of the 46 people on the plane survived the crash and their travails on the glacier.  Bayona, who is committed to naming names, lists them all as they are rescued.  The story of the so-called "Miracle of the Andes" has been told in a half-dozen books, an opera, and another half-dozen movies.  

The film is shot in very tight close-ups interspersed with long shots of the desolate mountains in which the fuselage, itself, appears as a mere speck in the white gorge among the peaks.  The method of direction doesn't call attention to itself except in the showy sequence of the crash and this is so frightening that the viewer doesn't have time to think about what is happening.  The picture is matter-of-fact and immersive and the acting seems to me impeccable.  Those who survive the ordeal remain alive due to luck.  There's really little or no heroism involved -- it's just a matter of some making it and others dying.  (In one scene, after the avalanche, a man says that he had to step on his wife buried below him to push himself up out of the snow -- she perished and he survives.)  The kids on the plain aren't particularly ingenious and there's no Robinson Crusoe flavor to the film -- the situation is so nightmarish that there's really nothing anyone can do but huddle together in the shattered plane and eat little candy-bar sized chunks of human flesh.  In one moving sequence, one of the kids who has hiked to safety, carefully buries his little parcel of meat near a stream, crossing himself and saying a prayer.  

You can't really like a movie of this sort.  It's well-observed, masterfully made, and harrowing.  If you like this sort of thing (grim survival films), it's well-done.  But if my plot summary above troubles you, stay away from this movie.  Your interest may be as Poe said "all absorbing" with respect to the horrific details but a movie like this doesn't really make you a better person -- the subject matter is so remote from ordinary experience that it's hard to evaluate and, although I thought the picture was gripping, I was happy when the film was over.  

Eastern Bloc Art at the Walker Art Center

 I drove one-hundred miles (two-hundred miles round trip) to see Multiple Realities:  Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc (1960's to 1980's at the Walker Art Center.  I would gladly cross the street to see this show so long as the street was not too wide and nor the sun too hot.  In other words, this exhibit is mildly interesting but, more or less, unimpressive -- the work on display doesn't conform to any standard canons for beauty, nor is it memorably ugly.  It's just grey and morose, more or less in keeping with the way things were behind the Iron Curtain in Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia (and similar places).  The former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia (and Poland as well) hosted a vibrant "new wave" or film renaissance during the twenty years covered by the show -- I am thinking of some of Andrzej Wajda's movies, Dusan Makavejev's Sweet Movie and W.R. the Mysteries of the Organism, as well Jan Svankmayer's scary and beautiful animated films.  But the show focuses on the conceptual art, by and large, as well as various sorts of avant-garde performance art and so the efflorescence of cinema in some of these Eastern Bloc nations is mostly ignored.  An exception is made for Vera Chytilova's Daisies, a remarkable surrealist film in the anarcho-feminist vein -- Daisies is funny and genuinely disturbing and a loop showing part of movie's climax, a food fight that evolves into a full-fledged orgy of gastronomical destruction, represents some of the more radical impulses in Eastern European feminism.  About a half of the art works on display have feminist implications.  These are largely drab installations involving sloganeering and lots of naked women inserted into political tableaux.  (There was a genre of feminism that operated by just showing lots of pubic hair -- I  don't think these interventions are particularly profound; a naked body isn't necessarily subversive or politically cogent; if this were the case, Rubens would be the most subversive painter who ever lived.)  A third of the stuff on display is Gay-oriented, also almost entirely dull pictures of people in bars, men wearing garter belts, and various cross-dressers.  The remaining objects have vaguely political implications -- for instance, there were a couple of exhibits showing Polaroids taken by STASI (State Security or secret police) operatives in East Germany. (The pictures were made so that the STASI agents, acting with commendable Germanic efficiency, could ransack people's apartments and, then, put everything back exactly as it was before the raid.)  An East German artist with the unprepossessing name of Cornelia Schleime produced some witty variants on images and reports in her own STASI file, including a memo that she doesn't seem to have many friends and favors "western style" clothing.  (Schleime also made a striking "Picture Diary" with thick paint, interesting drawings and collage images that seemed to me quite beautiful and an exception to the grim monochromatic Fluxus-influenced art on display.)

East Germany sponsored vibrant, if grisly, experimentation in performance and theater.  The chief exponent of this State-sanctioned avant-garde work was Heiner Mueller, the playwright most well-known for his work Hamletmaschine.  An artist named Lutz Daumbeil collaborated with Mueller (and several others) to create a large installation piece -- it's bombastic and ugly after the manner of Mueller's nasty theatrical practice (lots of vomiting and simulated copulation in his plays):  a film shows a mostly naked man wearing a Greek warrior's helmet (and other peculiar headpieces) pacing around stiff-legged under a shattered curtain flanked by distressed classical statuary and two big transparencies labeled Eigensinn ("Stubbornness") and Strafen ("Punishment") in brutal neo-expressionistic lettering.  The work is called "Revising of Herakles", referring to Heiner Mueller's theater work named Heracles that is largely concerned with excrement -- that is, Herakles cleaning out the Augean stables.  There's a final room featuring experimental music scores and works of optical art; that stuff is more colorful but it's not very interesting.  An exception to this generally bland and dull work in the show are four linocuts made by someone named Juergen Widdorf commissioned by the Leipzig Academy of Sports in the early 1960's.  The big images are laugh-out-loud funny.  Widdorf, apparently, persuaded the authorities that he was making neo-classical prints of athletes; in fact, Widdorf had great Communist credentials -- he taught drawing classes to East German border guards.  But the pictures are hilariously homo-erotic -- in one image, a group of East German workers look exactly like the Village People (minus the Indian Chief) in tight jeans bulging at the crotch, each hunky lad brandishing some kind of tool. some butch women are gathered around a swimming pool and, in another picture, a bunch of half-naked men pose while one of them points his camera at the groin of another man -- apparently, this is supposed to depict a Leipzig photography club.  The most explicit of the four big lino-cuts on display shows a bunch of naked men taking showers in a locker-room -- it looks like something by Tom of Finland, but, seemingly, the authorities thought it was an impressive depiction of the highly muscular physiques of East German youth.  These pictures were very funny and, on reflection, it might be worth looking at these things if you are in Minneapolis and have a spare half-hour to kill.  But the rest of the show is instantly forgettable.  

A collection of porcelain works (coffee mugs and vases) and plywood assemblies by Tesuya Yamada on exhibit are similarly uninteresting.  This is a large show and it's handsome in a way, but the objects on display look like the sort of thing you could buy at Walmart or a Dollar General Store.  There's an interesting low plywood bench with brown cow-patty-shaped ceramics on which to rest your butt if you want to sit.  

Part of the fun in going to the Walker Art Center is to observe the other visitors and security in the galleries.  There are several angry-looking Transsexuals wearing mini-skirts and combat boots who are as interesting as works of art as most of the stuff on display.

Magic Mountains

 Magic Mountains (2024) shows us a new way (or ways) for a movie to be bad.  Beautifully filmed and edited, the picture is nothing if not stylish.  It's fairly suspenseful with a damsel in distress plot.  The characters are opaque and enigmatic with obscure motivations.  The picture looks great and has obtuse dialogue that seems influenced by Harold Pinter, but, ultimately, the movie is vacuous, caught between genres (it's either an elliptical study in existential isolation and anguish or some sort of mountain-climbing thriller).  The viewer is left with the strong sense of having been defrauded. The handsome appearance of the movie belies its plot defects, its unintentional absurdity and emptiness.  Emptiness in a movie can be cipher for existential angst or it can merely simulate feelings that art-house audiences are used to experiencing, without really earning that effect.  

Lars, a famous writer of bestselling novels, seems to be stalking his ex-girlfriend. Hannah.  He meets her in a bar where she is inexplicably waiting alone.  (The action seems to take place in Belgium).  We have no idea why this beautiful woman is alone in an empty bar under the surveillance of the handsome, if creepy, Lars.  She talks to Lars, a bad idea, and he announces that he has written the last of his bestselling "Emily novels", implying that Emily is a surrogate for Hannah who left him several years ago.  In a rather sinister manner, Lars says he is going to "retire" Hannah and won't write about her anymore.  But he wants closure and so he suggests a mountain-climbing excursion for the two of them.  (He claims they were always happiest while climbing together; Hannah responds that they always quarreled climbing down from the summit and, so, Lars says he will hire a helicopter -- he's now fabulously wealthy -- to take them down from the peak.)  Of course, Hannah, sensing malign motivations on Lars' part, turns down this ridiculous and overtly hostile invitation and the movie ends happily after about ten minutes.  I'm just kidding.  For inscrutable reasons, Hannah agrees to accompany her threatening ex-boyfriend on a trip to the mountains -- yes, just the two of them.  

Hannah and Lars stay at a cabin high in the Tatra Mountains, a range of the West Carpathians on the border between Poland and Hungary.  A Polish mountaineer, Voitek, lives in the cabin with his mother, a sweet grandmotherly figure who sings (untranslated) ballads to her son and the estranged couple.  Voitek, a handsome soulful figures, has contempt for Lars and says he prefers Bulgakov to his guest's novels.  (Later, in the movie, he uses one of Lars' books as kindling for a fire.)  After some tense exchanges between the arrogant Lars and the equally arrogant Voitek, the three set off for the high Tatras.  They camp out in the forest primeval after doing a test climb on a spire of rock to demonstrate that Hannah and Lars are sufficiently skilled for the trek to the summit on the next day.  The men are obviously suspicious of one another and Hannah suspects Lars of treachery.  So, of course, she refuses to climb with Lars the next day and the movie ends happily for her.  I'm  just kidding.  Hannah continues the expedition with the increasingly deranged Lars and, indeed, consents to climb in the sheer, barren wilderness dependent on Lars for her safety.  (Voitek who suspects Lars of bad intentions agrees to shadow Hannah at a discrete distance as they make the climb and gives her a whistle that she can use to summon him  if the novelist goes off the deep end and tries to harm her.)  There's a long spooky cave that leads through the bottom of talus field, emerging in a spectacular glacial cirque ringed by nasty-looking thousand foot cliffs.  Hannah senses that Voitek isn't actually following her -- she blows her whistle in the cave but the guide doesn't appear.  (It's implied that the soulful Voitek is in cahoots with Lars.)  So, of course, she crawls back through the cave into the meadow and forests, hikes back down to Voitek's cabin where his mom greets her and all ends well.  But, I'm just kidding -- even though Voitek now seems to be nowhere around, and even though Hannah has earlier fallen and been left to dangle off a cliff with no help from Lars, she decides "What the hell?" and continues her fatal climb with the completely psychotic and vengeful novelist.  (People with experience in mountaineering tend to be literal-minded -- they deride the movie for its poorly imagined climbing sequences, the fact that no one is dressed for this Alpine endeavor, and that no one has bothered to bring a radio or GPS system with them on this ill-considered expedition; characters seem to be climbing in their tennis shoes.)  

The climbing scenes are quite thrilling -- I don't know enough to critique technical details -- and the landscapes are forbidding and spectacular.  The film's photographers have a real gift for natural details and some sequences with water flowing over boulders or shaggy, tortured trees have a wonderfully palpable immediacy.  You can almost feel the cold and wet. But the movie is devoid of any common sense, ludicrous on its face, and, although fantastically stylish and elliptical in a tendentious way, there's no disguising the fact that the movie makes no sense.  It's a micro-budget murder movie with art-house pretensions.  The film's interest lies in its sophisticated surface, it's appearance, that almost deludes the viewer into thinking that they are seeing something not only beautiful, but profound.

The Curse

 Asher (Bennie Safdie) and Whitney (Emma Stone) are two self-absorbed yuppies working on a pilot for a HGTV reality show in the Showtime limited series The Curse.   The couple are frustrated with one another, neurotic, and (increasingly) unhappily married.  The situation is complicated by the director of their TV series, Dougy (Nathan Fieldler), a character who is both deeply sinister and ingratiating and, also, perhaps, a bit mad.  Whitney is self-confident and completely incapable of imagining how others perceive her -- she thinks she's a gracious, idealistic activist when, in fact, she's completely spoiled and self-aggrandizing.  By contrast, Asher is a tangle of masochistic impulses:  he perceives that Ashley is too good for him, obsesses about his small penis, and imagines degrading scenarios in which his wife sleeps with other men.  In one riveting, if horrifying scene, Asher is shown Whitney's disdain for him, pictured in sequences in which his wife mocks him shot for the TV show.  The material is profoundly humiliating and Asher storms out of the screening, only to return a minute later to tearfully plead for his wife's attention.  The show is unflinching in its portrayal of an intrinsically asymmetrical relationship -- Asher can't imagine life without Whitney and clings to her with a combination of ridiculously aggressive and, even, possessive gestures that oscillate between wild declarations of passion and humiliating supplication.  Whitney cares a little bit for Asher, but doesn't share his melodramatic jealousy and commitment.  The whole situation is configured to make the audience feel uncertain about the show's premise, episodes frequently revolving around cringe-inducing encounters between the couple and their orbit of friends.  (I use the word "friends" advisedly; Asher and Whitney are too selfish and narcissistic to really have any real friends, a point that the show makes repeatedly in a series of lacerating vignettes.)

It's hard to identify the exact tone of The Curse -- it seems to be a comedy, albeit one that involves characters so perilously close to clinical mental illness that it feels a little shameful to laugh at them.  The show is intensely observed and never less than gripping, but it's also very unsettling:  most of the episodes are shot like scenes from a horror movie. You're on edge expecting something terrible to occur -- and, when this happens in the last show, it occurs in spades.

Asher and Whitney are pitching a show to the home improvement network.  The show is initially called Flipanthropy based on the notion that the couple's houses are Green ecosystems, so-called "passive houses" that are carbon neutral.  The pair purport to community activism; they want to build a community of like-minded ecologically conscious people in the town where the show is set, improbably enough Espanola, New Mexico.  (Anyone who has driven through the grim, wasteland of Espanola understands what I mean; the place is an inescapable crossroads that you have to traverse when driving north of Santa Fe -- you end up there if you are going to see Georgia O'Keefe's Abiqui, Los Alamos, or Taos.  But the town seems impoverished, full of drunks and junkies, with sinister side-streets leading nowhere, a kind of open-air desert ghetto.)  The show, ostensibly about the couple's quixotic ambitions, really features the increasing dysfunction in Ashley and Whitney's marriage, a theme that Dougie exploits since he understands that network executives like reality shows with teeth in them -- in fact, Dougie delights in stirring up trouble for Asher with regard to Whitney and suggests that the real title of the program should be Green Queen since "every queen needs her jester" (in this case, the hapless Asher).  Of course, no one really wants to live in the bizarre mirror-walled houses that Ashley and Whitney are building -- the structures are impractical, hard to heat and keep cool, and very, very expensive.  Ultimately, no one bids on the second of the two houses built in Espanola and so Ashley has to recruit local people to act as if they are interested in the project.  (The guy living in the first house built discards the "induction" oven and puts in a gas-fired range in defiance of Whitney's ecological;y correct demands.)  Whitney's relationship with the local pueblos is problematic.  She dutifully recites a land declaration with the Tiwa (or Tewa -- the confusion is never really solved) governor acknowledging that the houses occupy property misappropriated by colonialist oppression from the local Native Americans.  But in the same breath she is quick to proclaim that the tribe has no legal rights to anything that she is building, expressly stating that tribal concerns about the land don't apply to her title and her easements.  Whitney has an acquaintance who is a Native American artist -- but her protestations that she is "friends" with the woman are, more or less, rebuffed by the artist.  (Whitney has to pay for her friendship -- she engages the artist to work for her as a consultant on the basis of a $20,000 contract, the funds paid in cash borrowed from Whitney's parents who are, in effect, slumlords who own apartments in the vicinity.)  Whitney's community-spirited ventures all fail.  She starts a coffee shop but it tanks. She runs an emporium that sells expensive jeans.  But when local people start to shoplift from her she simply tells the counter-girl and clerk to put the stolen items on her own (Whitney's) credit card.  Of course, this isn't sustainable.  She and Asher hire a local thug to provide security -- he was supposed to work as a barista in their failed coffee shop and they have promised him a job.  The man brings a long-gun to work and has a pistol tucked in his pocket, weapons that horrify the liberal-progressive Whitney.  This fellow thinks that Whitney's policy of looking the other way when locals steal from her is "a cancer" eating away at the community -- in other words, he opposes Whitney's refusal to call the cops on shoplifters.  

The show's title The Curse refers to a little girl of Somali ethnicity who puts a "tiny curse" (as she calls it) on Asher when he stiffs her with respect to some cans of pop that she is selling to support her impoverished family.  The "tiny curse" is that Whitney and Asher's Pad Thai take-out will not have chicken among the noodles -- "I take away your chicken," she says.  (Before Asher discovers the nature of the curse, he is angry that the Pad Thai that he has ordered has been delivered without chicken; later, someone sticks chicken in a toilet that he is using at a fire station where part of the show is being filmed -- Dougie has encouraged the firemen to flirt with Whitney about their big hoses.  Dougie buys a whole chicken at a Mexican restaurant and, then, goes to the Somali girl's house to see if she will curse him -- she refuses.  But Dougie and Asher get into a terrible fight, involving in part the director's wife who was apparently killed in a drunk driving incident in which Dougie was involved.  So Dougie, then, curses Asher.)  There's a great scene in which Asher is told to not talk about curses by the Somali girl's father -- "they get in your head," the man says.  Asher asks if this is part of his culture.  The man nods.  "Well, where are your from?" Asher asks.  "Minnesota," the man replies.    

The appearance of The Curse is really extraordinary and the peculiar manner in which the show is staged and shot embodies an important theme.  Conventional film grammar is mostly repudiated for nine-tenths of the show:  images appear on grainy, distressed film-stock, impressionistically blurred and bleached-out as if shot on a poorly functioning cell-phone.  Framing is unconventional and, whenever possible, the characters are shot through a palimpsest of foreground figures, bars and blurred obstructions.  Generally, camera angles suggest that the cameraman is spying on the characters, taking pictures of them covertly.  Figures are often too far away f rom the camera to register their features clearly.  Everyone is framed between walls or trapped in niches and alcoves; the sense of claustrophobia induced by this staging is palpable -- the characters are confined by the interiors in which they exist, perversely shot through tiny apertures in walls, slot windows, or only partially opened doors.  Mirrors are everywhere so that the viewer is never certain whether he or she is seeing a reflection or an actual image; in some scenes, entire landscapes full of cars and pedestrians are visible as reflections on glass surfaces through which we glimpse the characters.  This distancing technique, obstructing the viewers understanding of the images, is carried to perverse extremes; some dialogue scenes are filmed from interior rooms in which we see people in the foreground watching TV or a secretary typing on her computer -- the part of the image to which we are supposed to be attending is only partially visible through a slit of window in a corner of the frame.  Eye-lines don't match -- in one early scene, Dougie flirts aggressively with Whitney but the two of them remain in separate small enclosures that don't intersect in any way and they seem to be looking away from each other.  There are many so-called "empty frames" -- that is, shots of random exteriors that seem accidental:  these images don't have the classical composure of Ozu's "empty shots"; they aren't carefully composed and appear arbitrary with no real thematic connection to the plot or adjacent dialogue.  The "passive houses" that Asher and Whitney are promoting are entirely glass , made from mirrors and so they simply vanish into the dusty shrubbery in which the buildings are set -- you literally can't see them.  It's only in the 9th episode when a pilot of the HGTV show is screened that we can actually see the mirror-houses and understand their layout.  The alienating manner in which the great bulk of The Curse is shot is intended to contrast in the strongest possible way with conventional TV photography, shown to be lucid, bright, schematic, and, even, in some cases, equipped with helpful arrows and other diagram signs. (We are shown this type of footage in the pilot of the HGTV show.)  The entire strategy of the show's mise-en-scene is to repudiate the typical techniques used to produce Home Improvement shows or, in the last (10th) episode, TV cooking programs.  

I suppose a "spoiler" alert is here mandatory although I doubt the application of that term to the jaw-dropping finale to The Curse.  A "spoiler" is the description of a plot development that the viewer could reasonably anticipate from clues and foreshadowing in the show leading up to its last episode.  But in The Curse, the show's ending is so surreal and, seemingly, arbitrary that telling you what happened isn't going to spoil anything in the rest of the show for you.  There's no careful groundwork laid for the last episode which strikes like a bolt out of blue.  But you have been forewarned.

In the 10th and last show, a year has passed.  Asher and Whitney appear on a screen projected on a wall on the set of the live-shot Rachel Ray cooking show.  (Rachel is making meatballs with a mobster who has published an Italian cookbook.)  Asher and Whitney are on-camera to promote the second season of their TV show called Green Queen.  Whitney is clearly pregnant; Asher grins like a jack-o-lantern.  Rachel Ray pays no attention to them and scarcely allows Whitney to promote her show; Asher's efforts to talk about their baby -- who will be featured in the second series that the network has picked-up -- don't seem to interest Rachel and she reverts to flirting with mob boss in an embarrassing way.  Asher and Whitney are shown in Espanola where their appearance has been filmed.  They are doting over their unborn baby. (It turns out that the passive house, always described as a thermos bottle, is not good for the baby and, so, Whitney has hired a contractor to subvert the home's design to provide more consistent air conditioning in the child's room.) As a gift to her, Asher decides to deed the house in which the Somali father and his daughters are squatting to the immigrants.  Together, they go to the house where they are met by the father who is clearly distrustful and seems completely unimpressed by their benevolent generosity.  (The little girls are not home and we see a figure traipsing around the background in the house who seems sinister and whose identity is never established.)  The Somali father's lack of gratitude is disconcerting.  In the next scene, a cell-phone alarm sounds.  Whitney wakes up to find Asher inexplicably plastered on the ceiling of the "passive" mirror home.  Gravity has been reversed for Asher and, for some reason, he is falling upwards, that is, being pulled away from the surface of the earth into the air.  Asher's dilemma, involving creeping around on the ceiling like a spider, is compounded by the fact that Whitney has gone into labor  After desperate machinations to get her cell-phone (Asher thinks the house is causing the gravitational inversion), Whitney is taken to the hospital with her burly male Doula, Moses.  Moses isn't too helpful because the child's presentation is breech requiring a C-section.  Meanwhile, Asher ends up outside, clinging to a branch on a nearby tree resisting the violent pull upward by the reversal in his gravitational field.  Dougie is called and taunts Asher for climbing a tree to escape the obligations of paternity and the rescue crews also misconstrue Asher's posture high above the ground -- they mistakenly believe that he is about to jump to his death.  Ever the opportunist, Dougie calls for a drone and launches a camera to better photograph Asher's plight.  As the infant is cut out of Whitney's womb, Asher is "freed" from the tree with a chainsaw that drops the branch to which he is clinging while freeing him to blast straight up into the sky.  Asher ends up in outer space, presumably dead or dying.  Some neighbors speculate that the whole thing was a stunt to gin up interest in the HGTV show.  The camera prowls around the mean streets of Espanola and the show ends.

The sequences involving Asher's fight to stay earthbound in the face of a gravitational pull upward are staged with great and fearsome authority.  Although the condition is bizarre, the show imagines Asher's plight effectively and presents his upside-down exploits with impressive aplomb.  The effect of the show's last forty minutes is Kafkaesque in the sense that the imagery resists symbolic or allegorical interpretation -- like Gregor Samsa's transformation into an insect, Asher's desperate situation must be accepted as simply an inexplicable vagary in the laws of nature; it's not clear that his tendency to fall upward into outer space means anything at all.  There is some sense that Whitney's childbirth may ground her and hold her down -- this what having children means.  By contrast, poor Asher ends up doomed, drifting in outer space.  In a way, the show is about establishing "roots" in a place and community; Asher and Whitney are privileged, selfish, and, I suppose, "rootless" -- this is exemplified by Asher's fatal difficulties in the last episode.  But this interpretation is too glib, too facile, I think, and the utterly confounding climax to The Curse has to be accepted on its own terms -- it is an instance of the inexplicable that can't really be decoded.  

Poor Things

 Poor Things is an episodic, picaresque movie with horror overtones.  The movie uses the story of Frankenstein's monster to explore moral and ethical issues.  In many ways, the film is squarely situated within the territory of Rousseau's Emile or Voltaire's Candide -- Poor Things is a filmed Bildungsroman with an emphasis on carnal knowledge. (The movie is already famous for its many explicit sex scenes).  The picture feels somewhat formless and has a strange coda in its last twenty minutes that seems excessive in all respects, a nod to horror movie conventions.  That said, the movie is beautifully produced on all levels -- indeed, if anything it is almost too visually opulent.  Emma Stone is excellent as Bella Baxter, the Frankenstein monster; Willem Dafoe is poignant as her hideously scarred creator -- she calls him God.  Mark Ruffalo makes an effective caddish man-about-town and the movie features superb cameo appearances by Kathryn Hunter as the Dickensian brothel-keeper Madame Swiney and Hannah Schygulla as a philosophical older woman that Bella meets on a cruise across the Mediterranean.  The picture is a voluptuous visual feast with elaborate belle epoque (Jugendstil) sets, radiant seascapes and cities under lowering, turbulent skies that look like scenery in paintings by Albrecht Altdorfer or Jacob Ruisdael -- purplish clouds are ripped asunder by apocalyptic beams of light and strange lighter-than-air vessels ply the heavens.  Buildings seem half-melted with colossal figures draped over doorways and strange baroque curves and expressive round window like eyes.  The cities of London, Lisbon, Alexandria, and Paris, to name some of the locations, are depicted in terms of complicated courtyards, peculiar and eccentric flights of stairs and great fairy-tale facades half-visible in the distance, sun-gilded domes and minarets.  The movie is populated with various grotesques; the habitues of the brothel where Bella works are particularly memorable, deformed looking apparitions with bulging, hideous eyes. Small horror film details abound in the corners of the frame -- there are ducks with pig heads, dogs spliced to swans, and all sorts of grotesques manufactured by God, Bella's creator.  The movie is an unstable combination of ravishing pictorial beauty and disturbingly hideous imagery -- people perform surgery on themselves and there are forty or so cadavers lying around in various states of disassembly.  When Bella returns to God's laboratories in his wildly curvilinear palace, she inhales deeply -- "Formaldehyde," she says, the smell of home. The movie is somewhat schematic and makes its points without any subtlety but it's beautiful written, with elaborate, highly stylized diction and speeches that never falter with respect to wit and intelligence.  Clearly every element of this movie has been carefully imagined and lovingly transferred onto the screen for maximum authority and effect.  The movie is heartless, but this is to be expected.  As with all other movies made by director Yorgos Lanthimos, you watch with a coldly clinical eye with your emotions mostly disengaged so that you can follow the film's argument.  It's like reading something by Alexander Pope -- the rococo effects all fall into perfect place and snap shut with rhymed couplets; the imagery is almost too rich -- it's a feast for the eye and mind but you remain strangely disengaged from the grotesque events depicted.

Beginning in black-and-white (after a spectacular opening shot of a woman plunging to her death from a Victorian-era bridge -- the water of the river looks dark and vicious like the Styx), the movie chronicles the adventures of Bella Baxter, God's creation.  Dafoe's character has fished the suicide, a woman named Victoria Blessington, out of the river, dissected her belly, and removed her full-term fetus.  God has, then, placed infant's brain in the adult woman's cranium.  The result is a beautiful fully mature woman with the mind of an infant.  The movie chronicles how this infant's brain develops and how she comes to full consciousness as a human being -- in effect, the film is the story of one person's education from infancy to maturity.  In its first fifteen minutes, the picture channels The Miracle Worker showing a willfully violent and destructive toddler in a woman's body.  Sex begins the baby's education -- first, Bella, as she is called by her creator, begins to masturbate, then, she makes advances on her tutor, a young man that God has hired to document the phases in her intellectual growth.  God wants Bella to remain always at his side -- he loves her with the suffocating warmth of a parent.  But he is willing to regulate her sexual passions by espousing her to his assistant -- he sees this as part of her education.  Bella is sexually adventurous however, and wants to have adventures, mostly with respect to "wild jumping" which is what she calls sexual intercourse.  She elopes with Mark Ruffalo's character, a seducer who quickly learns that he has bitten off way more than he can chew.  Bella is sexually insatiable and wears him out.  She is also intellectually adventurous -- we see her reading Emerson and demanding that she learn about philosophy.  Like the young lord Siddhartha, she has no knowledge of human suffering.  But in Alexandria, she gazes down into a slum that is like a hideous open grave and sees corpses and women with dead and dying babies.  Horrified by this spectacle, she gives away all of the money that she and her lover have accumulated.  By this time, the ruthless lawyer played by Ruffalo is smitten by her, jealous, and possessive and he's appalled when he finds she has given all their treasure to the poor -- actually to a couple of dishonest ship stewards.  Bella ends up in Paris where she works in a brothel.  These scenes allow the filmmaker to insert a whole panoply of perverse sex acts into the picture, imagery that is either comical or disturbing.  The lawyer can't abide Bella's whoring and so she gives him some money and tells him that he should return to London.  After a time, Bella learns that God is dying of cancer and so she returns home to be by his side. (By this time, she has become something of a feminist and socialist as well.)  She meets her tutor again, a gentle and kind man whom she is now willing to marry -- she has, as it were, sown her wild oats.  On her wedding day, a man appears to disrupt her nuptials; this is Victoria Blessington's husband, the officer married to the heroine when she threw herself off the bridge in the movie's opening scene.  The soldier asserts his claim on Bella and inexplicably she walks away from her wedding to the mild-manner and kindly tutor and to join the sadistic military officer at his remote manor -- his chest is a salad of medals and he constantly brandishes a gun.  The depraved British military officer  threatens his servants with a revolver and plots to surgically mutilate Bella --he plans to amputate her clitoris.  The military man is a dyed-in-the-wool villain of the most villainous sort and, I think, a sort of blemish on the film; this stuff is too histrionic and exaggerated even by the terms of this movie.  It's also baffling that Bella, who now has extensive experience of the world, would voluntarily join this man, a fellow who is obviously vicious and cruel.  However, the final scenes with the military officer set up the movie's horror film finale -- a climax that is little like the ending of Freaks.  

It seems like about half of the film involves sex scenes of various kinds.  Bella's education is sexual and she constructs her sense of self around these liaisons.  Emma Stone is fearless and, like Isabelle Huppert, willing to expose herself, both literally and figuratively, in ways that would be inaccessible to most actresses.  The role requires her to develop from a uninhibited, monstrous, infant into a sophisticated courtesan and woman-of-the world; the amplitude of her performance is astounding and she throws herself without reservation into all phases of the character's sexual pilgrimage .  The amount of sex and nudity in the movie is a throw-back to the seventies, when actresses were far more uninhibited about their appearances onscreen -- whether the amount of sex in Poor Things is excessive, that is, a bad thing or good thing will depend upon the tastes of the viewer.  But this aspect of the film is its most notable feature.  By contrast, Willem Dafoe plays a neutered monster -- he seems to be have been systematically tortured by his gruesome father, apparently Baron Frankenstein himself:  at one point, for instance, he father broke both of his thumbs when he was a child to see how if the bones would remain infantile in size when the rest of his body developed into adulthood.  (This is not the worst of the things that were done to  him.)  As with all the details amassed by the movie, the make-up and prosthetic work used with Dafoe is remarkable -- the character has to be horribly mutilated but also endearing and his features need to be recognizable and expressive beneath the make-up.  All of the film's incidental features are profoundly intentional and aggregate toward making the effects that the movie wishes to achieve -- this applies to Dafoe's make-up, the Brueghel-like animal composite monsters, the sets and brooding, ominous music, even the titles that have an elongated, somewhat tortured appearance.  Everything is designed and engineered exquisitely to create an effect that is both fascinating, but, also, stifling.  The movie's images and scene-setting are so lush and detailed as to be overpowering and it's a relief when this thing is over.

The film is based on a book by the Scottish writer Alasdair Gray (he died in 2019).  Gray was an important novelist in his time, best known for his first book Lanark, but, also, the author of a number of other novels, including Poor Things.  Gray's work derives from Tristram Shandy and is full of idiosyncratic post-modern devices -- narratives are embedded in essays with footnoted commentaries on commentaries.  Yorgis Lanthimos seems to have extracted the post-Modern shenanigans from Poor Things and, in fact, films the central narrative in the novel as if it were a work by Dickens or Flaubert -- that is, the playfulness of Gray's approach to this lurid material is suppressed.  I don't view this as a defect, but it's different from the author's vision of the novel -- as should be the case with a fully imagined film.  Some parts of the movie that don't work, in my estimation, seem to derive from elements of the book that have been retained but, not, as it were, fully digested.  (This includes the horror-film coda involving the vicious Major Blessington and several minor characters, including another version of Bella, a beautiful girl also created by God who is supposed to correct the willful and headstrong aspects of the heroine, but who remains a baffling cipher in the picture.)  

Simply put, Poor Things dwarfs the other movies released in the summer of 2023.  It's infinitely better than Barbie, a silly and frivolous picture (but also somehow heavy and tedious), better than Oppenhemer which is well-made but ultimately inconsequential, much lighter on its feet than the grave and death-inflected Killers of the Flower Moon.  It's undoubtedly the best picture of the year from a technical standpoint.  But it's not exactly likeable and, despite all the sex, the film is very frigid.  But this is by design.  Poor Things is self-contained, insular, and it doesn't care if you like it or not.  

Godland

 Godland (Hylnur Palmason 2023) is advertised as being about a young pastor's loss of faith when confronted with the tribulations of the Icelandic wilderness.  This may seem promising, but it misrepresents the movie.  In fact, Godland concerns a highly parochial subject, the fraught relationship between Danish and Icelandic speaking people in the former Danish colony around 1870.  This subject matter is reflected in the film's title -- the movie is called both Volatha Land  (Icelandic) and Vanskable Land (Danish), both names translating to the English Godland.  Palmason notes that Denmark annexed Iceland in the medieval period and ruled the place from Copenhagen for five-hundred years -- Iceland achieved some measure of self-governance in 1918 and opportunistically seized full independence during Denmark's occupation by the Nazis in 1944 (that story involving Iceland's complicity with the German occupiers is a vexed aspect of the the country's history).  In his interview on the Criterion disk of the film, Palmason observes that Iceland's slow-motion separation from Denmark was "very soft" and that the subject is, perhaps, not intrinsically interesting -- there are no freedom fighters, martyrs, or terrorism.  Apparently, there was some fairly significant hostility between speakers of the two languages, perhaps, because linguistic distinctions also had socio-economic implications, although Palmason is far too austere a film maker to dramatize anything of this sort.  (In fact, Palmason is so rigorous that he scarcely dramatizes anything at all; he's a highly ascetic filmmaker.)  In any event, the viewer should be forewarned:  the movie isn't about anything likely to be the subject of banter at your next cocktail party; rather, the film is essentially about two men who for reasons of pride refuse to speak one another's language with ultimately dire, if mostly inexplicable, consequences.   The film is ultimately disappointing and very ineptly made -- crucial plot elements are left in obscurity not as a tease to the viewer, or to inspire thought, but because Palmason was too lazy to work out these details.  ("Lazy" is the wrong word; the film was made over a three-year period, extensively re-written and re-imagined from its original scenario -- "indifferent" is a better word; Palmason in the interview made part of the Criterion CD admits that he's uninterested in plot and this shows in the film.)  The movie is very beautiful but this is a by-product of Iceland's majestic landscapes -- anywhere you point your camera, you will record spectacular images.  For this reason, shows like the 2024 iteration of True Detective are filmed in Iceland although the show is ostensibly set in Alaska; Iceland is the new Monument Valley for the 2020's and, it seems, that half of the population of the small nation is somehow involved in filmmaking.  

The first third of Godland is the best part of the movie.  A Lutheran pastor named Lucas is dispatched to Iceland, apparently to build a church in a remote area.  (Iceland was converted in 1000 and piously Lutheran after the Reformation -- exactly why a mission to Iceland is required in 1870 is unclear; the movie doesn't bother to explain the hero's mission to a place that is already full of churches and parishioners.  There is some implication that an exploding volcano may have displaced people to another part of the island, although why these folks wouldn't move with their pastors among them in unexplained.)  The Bishop in Denmark portentously warns the hero that the volcanoes smell so bad it is "as if the land shat its pants" and that the odor of sulfur (and the interminable summer days) drives people mad.  Lucas sets sail and tries, unsuccessfully, to learn Icelandic on the vessel.  The language is daunting -- it has, we learn, at least 20 variant words for rainfall.  But, one would think that an educated man would be able to master at least the rudiments of the language before reaching his destination -- and aren't there books in Danish providing instruction in Icelandic?  In any event, Lucas is set down on a wholly uninhabited and desolate shore.  A group of about 6 Icelanders led by the formidable Ragnar meet him and are charged with escorting the pastor over dangerous and wild country to some place about a week's travel away.  Again, Palmason doesn't have a rational motivation for this bravura sequence, about forty minutes of spectacular landscape photography depicting the cross-country slog on wiry, furry Icelandic ponies.  Why didn't this idiot priest sail to Rekyavik and, if he wanted to see the landscapes, make forays out into the country from that place?  Much of the plot is motivated by Lucas' hobby -- he is an amateur glass-plate photographer and he carries on his back an elaborate kit including the bulky camera, it's stilt-like tripod, plates and chemicals, and, even, a tarp used for developing glass plates in the field.  Lucas has a cross that is about four feet tall -- why he's carrying this thing is also inexplicable.   There are certainly plenty of crosses in Iceland. But it's a burden that the Icelanders reasonably resent; Ragnar suggests sawing the thing in two.  (The cross gets dropped in a river and floats away, never to be seen again except in a few morose inserts wallowing in the water.)  The pastor isn't particularly religious, doesn't seem pious just socially inept, and his real religion is obviously his hobby -- that is, photography; he's more attached to his camera equipment  that the accoutrements of his faith.  Tensions arise during the arduous trip cross-country.  Ragnar describes Lucas as a "Danish devil" and, although he obviously understands the priest's language, he refuses to speak to him in that tongue.  While crossing a swollen river, one of the travelers falls from his horse, is swept away and drowns.  (Ragnar has opposed crossing the river; Lucas, who is an idiot, demands that they cross -- it's not clear why he's in a hurry.  Viewers are baffled when Ragnar inexplicably agrees to the dangerous river crossing with fatal results.)  Midway through the movie it's obvious that Palmason's objectives are in bad faith -- he doesn't want to explain anything and just wants to leave the viewer confused.  The people wander around singing utterly impenetrable folk songs -- either lists of names or ballads about trolls cutting people up into pieces while referring to them with honorifics.  The characters do things that make no sense:  two men strip down and stand in the mist from a thousand-foot waterfall -- it looks like it's about 40 degrees.  Why would anyone do this?  People are always trudging through water -- don't their feet get cold and doesn't this damage their boots?  Ragnar does weird calisthenics every morning that seem to be part of some religious ritual.  What's this about?  The problem is epitomized with shot of steaming horse dung early in the movie.  A large pink earthworm is crawling in the horse dung.  What is this supposed to show?  Are we supposed to think that the earthworm came out of the horse -- that is, that the pony had worms?  Or did Palmason happen to find an earthworm crawling on the ground and just put on the dung?  (The obviously freshly deposited horse-shit would be on top of the worm not below it.) The shot makes no sense and does nothing but confuse the viewer.  Ultimately, Lucas, who is very bad horseman, falls off his animal and goes into some sort of suspended animation or coma -- he has his eyes open and we think he's dead.  In fact, this is just some sort of state of extreme exhaustion as imagined (implausibly) by Palmason and designed to further baffle the viewer.  The end of the picturesque first part of the film is signaled by gaudy shots of volcanoes erupting (where?  how is this related to the movie?) and, then, luscious underwater footage of young women frolicking in waist-deep tidal pools -- don't people in Iceland get cold when they dip themselves in frigid 35 degree sea water?  

The second half of the movie details Lucas' attempts to assimilate with the community where he builds the church.  The place is like one of John Ford's isolated farms in Monument Valley, a stony seaside with huge boulders fallen from pinnacles of rock jutting up over the sea-shore.  How or why anyone would live in such a place is unclear.  A Danish-speaking merchant (what does he sell? where? our of what kind of store?) lives in a nice clapboard house with a piano and pleasant amenities.  The merchant, who is named Carl, wryly asks Lucas why he came "the long way" -- that is, cross-country. (Where's his wife?  Why isn't there any trace of her?)  "You could have just sailed here," the merchant speaking for the viewer says.  Lucas stammers that he wanted to see the country and its people to which the merchant responds:  "So how many people did you see out there?" The answer, of course, is none.  Carl doesn't want Lucas who is  ahaggard, ugly Ichabod Crane kind of guy, messing around with his attractive nubile daughter, Anna.  But, of course, Anna is interested in the ghastly pastor and seduces him.  (There's a scene in which Lucas takes a picture of Anna and the two of them go into the canvas darkroom tent "to see what develops."  Dear reader, I kid you not.)  Ragnar is hanging around.  For some reason that Palmason doesn't bother to explain, Ragnar kills Lucas' horse -- except that Lucas doesn't have a horse so I guess it's Carl's pony that bites the dust here.  (The horse picturesquely decays over the course of two years in images shot at monthly intervals it seems -- the effect is like the decaying zebras and other animals in Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts.)  At a community dance, again staged like something out of John Ford's My Darling Clementine, the men stage a wrestling tournament -- in a grimly symbolic sequence the haggard pastor wrestles first Carl, whom he beats, and, then, the burly Ragnar whom he fights to a draw (apparently since Palmason can't be bothered to resolve this fight sequence and just cuts away to a baby, presumably to underline the childishness of the endeavor, and, then, mist rolling over the mountain.)  Exactly how the frail Lucas, who nearly died of inanition two reels earlier, manages to defeat these tough Icelanders is another mystery that Palmason doesn't bother to solve.  Ultimately, Ragnar, who can speak perfectly fluent "Sunday Danish", demands that Lucas take his picture -- after all, he's been photographing everyone else. Lucas refuses, claiming that he's out of chemicals, and insults Ragnar.  There's another fight which the frail Lucas wins, killing Ragnar in the process.  The weakling Lucas can be pretty strong when the bizarre plot requires this.  At the inaugural church ceremony, Lucas hears Ragnar's dog barking (a baby is also crying) and, in a scene cribbed from Macbeth, darts outside and falls, getting his vestments all muddy.  (No one seems to wonder what has happened to Ragnar who has just disappeared -- I think the explanation is that Ragnar supposedly has departed Carl's ranch for the other side of the island.)  Lucas flees on horseback but he's an inept rider and Carl catches up with him easily.  Carl stabs Lucas to death for no reason that I could figure out and, like his pony, poor Lucas is left out in the elements to decay and "become part of the earth and flowers" as Carl's younger daughter, Inga, says.  (Palmason has cast his own daughter in this role and she's very good.)

The film is shot in old Academy (pillar-box) aspect and its very beautiful -- although, of course, a chimp with a camera could take beautiful landscapes in Iceland.  The people that Lucas films are painted white for the camera and have a funereal aspect -- this relates to the Roland Barth's notion of photography as a mortuary art, a way of embalming the dead.  As in Fargo, there's an opening title that says that the film is based on a box discovered in Iceland containing seven glass plate photographs.  Like the whole film, this is a fraud.  There's a riddle as to whether Lucas could, in fact, have taken a picture of Ragnar, thereby averting the two killings at the end of the film.  I counted the number of pictures that we see Lucas making and come to a total of six (if you don't count a picture Lucas may have taken of the Bishop in Copenhagen which, presumably, would not have been transported to Iceland.  But the number of glass plates actually exposed is a red herring since Lucas says he can't take the photograph of Ragnar because he is out of silver nitrate -- so the number of exposures made, like most everything else, in this comically inept movie means nothing at all.  Lucas is played by an actor who bears a resemblance to the young Max von Sydow in The Seventh Seal -- but an much uglier version of that performer.  

Fargo (Fifth Season)

 Fargo's fifth season is a well-written and suspenseful fantasia on Western themes.  Featuring men on horseback, lonesome windmills on the lonesome prairie, and a villainous sheriff, the show is handsomely mounted with some big stars and picturesque wintry landscapes.  In this iteration of the FX series, the show takes place largely on the barren plains of North Dakota, of course, a reversal of the original Coen brothers' film in which the action was primarily set in Minnesota notwithstanding the movie's misleading title.  Fargo (fifth series) looks like an expensive Hollywood movie with a funky, atmospheric soundtrack, carefully composed images many of the redolent of classic John Ford or Sam Peckinpah(there are low angle shots of figures with long guns statuesquely displayed against roiling fog and fields of snow).  But the TV show, mimicking the quirky dialogue and dead-pan humor of the original Coen brothers' film also ventures into some very strange territory -- the show references horror movies and many scenes are clearly influenced by the nightmarish imagery in David Lynch's most recent TV series, his spectacular 2017 re-boot of Twin Peaks.  Less a fully imagined independent work of film art, Fargo is more of a compilation of impressive sequences alluding to other movies -- but the film is so well-acted, has such compelling villains, together with an outstanding heroine who is unexpectedly and memorably ferocious, that the series is compulsively entertaining and, even, from time to time profound.  It's about as good as long form TV gets and so highly recommended.  

Fargo, as a TV series, is a pastiche of elements that were integral to the original film.  The TV show begins with a dire, faux-serious assertion that everything that you see is true, that the events took place in Minnesota during a certain year, and that the names have been changed to protect the innocent; everything else is said to be shown exactly as it occurred out of respect for the dead.  (This was the prologue to 1996 film as well.)  FX's fifth season features an embattled female cop, a kidnapping, several rival gangs of villains, bickering family members, and snowy Midwestern locations; everyone speaks with a Scandinavian lilt, a dialect that parodies some Minnesota accents, although, in truth, in a grotesquely exaggerated manner.  (The singsong Scandinavian prosody is applied with a trowel and, sometimes, used in ways that don't ring true -- in the show, the female cop seems to be either an American Indian or, perhaps, of ethnic origin in the India located in Asia; the joke is that you can't tell whether she's an American or Asian Indian; a person of this kind would not speak in the dialect used in the movie, particularly if she were Lakota or Ojibway.)   People pretend to be "Minnesota Nice" but harbor all sorts of dark and vicious motives.  There are repeated contrasts to the way people want to seem and the exorbitantly violent or vicious way in which they behave.  A rural/suburban standard for normal conduct is assumed and forms the contrast to the barbaric events that the show depicts.  The morality of Coen brothers original film was that behaving decently is a default position that is easy to accomplish; it  takes real energy, wit, and cruelty to behave badly.  Therefore, characters should be ashamed from departing from the easy path of virtue (which is, more or less, doing things like everyone else) and behaving badly.  Both the original movie and the Fifth Series features a memorable scene in which a good character denounces someone who has behaved badly by saying:  "You should ashamed of yourself."  The program has excellent acting, forceful direction, and, unlike many long form TV shows, doesn't flag after its third episode -- there are some scenes that feel like they are just killing time in order to devise ten hour-long episodes, but they are relatively few and far between and in the Fifth Series, an episode that turns out to be an extended, and very strange, dream sequence initially feels superfluous, but, in fact, later develops into a pivot point on which the plot turns and, also, is a tactful solution to an esthetic problem -- the driving theme in the Fifth Season is extreme domestic abuse and, yet, the movie wants to preserve a quirky, entertaining tone and, so, it can't get so dark as to be unwatchable or seriously disturbing; the dream episode casts the horrifying elements of the story into a puppet play within a play (it's a kind of dream inside a dream) and, therefore, makes those aspects of the plot bearable.  The show is exceptionally violent in the conventional sense that audiences are now desensitized to accept:  people get beaten to pulp, brains are sprayed all over walls and ceilings, corpses covered in quick-lime rot in a cistern in which the heroine hides, holding a gruesome-looking femur as a weapon; in one scene, a gruesome distinction is made between the blood-splatter blasted off a living victim and the darker, less fulsome spray caused by a shot to the head of the corpse of a person who has been dead for ten hours.  This sort of imagery is expected on crime shows on cable TV and FX has to deploy this sort of imagery in order to compete with other programming, including its own prior episodes.  The shows are calibrated to contemporary concerns -- there is a strong and obvious anti-Trump aspect to the Fifth Series.  Generally, the programs feature female characters who are more savage and relentless than their male counterparts.  Kirsten Dunst in the second series plays a casserole (hot dish)- toting character who makes Lady Macbeth seem like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.  The Fifth Series is the story of Dot, aka Nadine, a community-spirited church lady who is tiny, speaks in a cheerful chirpy voice, and weighs about 80 pounds; she turns out to a be a murder-machine with the skills of a member of a Navy Seal team.  Posed against the show's villain, Sheriff Roy Tillman, Dot is about one-third of his size (Tillman is played by a beefy, corpulent Jon Hamm -- embodying the principle expressed in Once upon a Time in Hollywood that when handsome leading men are cast as villains their downward trajectory in the  industry is assured.)  Nonetheless, Dot proves to be a worthy antagonist to the criminal Tillman and her machinations, once he makes the mistake of kidnapping her, lead to his ruin. 

Fargo (Fifth Series) is replete with amusing and colorful supporting players.  There is a suave nastily efficient family lawyer, Danish Graves who wears pale suits and an eyepatch -- he's a representative of the various skillful and conniving lawyers that populate Coen Brothers movies; referring to his picturesque name, Tillman asks whether he's a man "or a really serious breakfast."  Dot's mother-in-law is a billionaire who runs a predatory debt consolidation business.  This part is played by Jennifer Jason Leigh who channels Katherine Hepburn in her diction, albeit a wholly monstrous Katherine Hepburn; with her mouth an ear-to-ear scowl slashed across her face, Leigh gives a very stylized performance -- her drawl contrasts with the Scandinavian lilt in the voices of the other characters and, although she plays a villain, she has a feudal loyalty to her servants and retainers that is heroic in its own right.  (At one point, she calls in a debt from that "orange idiot" to whom she has given campaign money -- obviously referring to Donald Trump.) There are sleazy bankers, weird-looking FBI agents (they are variants on the sinister men-in-black), assorted henchmen and a courageous, if ineffectual, Black cop, a North Dakota state trooper.  In keeping with some of the Coen brothers less well-known pictures, there are supernatural events that are rather casually incorporated into otherwise realistic plots -- in the Fifth Series, an immortal Welsh sin-eater stalks around, speaking in a bizarre way that is either an idiolect and the ravings of a madman.  (The Sin-Eater seems a misstep to me, an arbitrary invasion of the uncanny into a show that is already filled with a lot of strange, and bizarre, content; but the figure is very frightening -- he's conceived as a combination of Boris Karloff, to whom he has a physical resemblance, with a terrible haircut similar to the coiffure sported by Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, an implacable force of ancient, undying malice that the various parties to the conflict in the show try to harness to their own ends.  Roy Tillman, as played by Jon Hamm, gets a number of spectacular speeches -- "This is our Masada" and "I'll show you how a patriot dies a-singin'."  He's surrounded by a posse of Western movie grotesques, including his feckless and sadistic son (who Tillman despises), a rancher-wife pretty much always disfigured by bruises that Tillman has given her, a Black compadre who looks like Woody Strode, and Odin, Tillman's grimacing gargoyle of a father-in-law who cites Hitler from time-to-time:  "What I wanna know," he asks Tillman, "is whether you are Hitler at the Reichstag or Hitler in the bunker?"  All of these supporting figures are richly imagined and they all have their own way of talking.  Some of this is over-rich:  at one point, an National Guard commander reproaches one of his men by saying:  "Don't interrupt me when I'm bantering."  But, by and large, the audience is willing to suspend disbelief with respect to this picturesque cast of goons and villains and eccentric minor characters.  The show even manages to make pure and unadulterated virtue seem faintly interesting, something unusual in shows like this -- Dot's husband, the son of the tyrannical debt consolidator, runs a car dealership, also a nod to the original movie; he's a figure of saint-like if idiotic virtue and, in one scene, in which he trades a brand new car for a rustbucket ("Give a car, get a car," he babbles), his kindness is genuinely moving.  All of these figures act against an intensely realistic milieu of snowy small-town streets, empty prairie, and decaying farmsteads -- arrow-straight roads run across endless snowy steppes interrupted here and there by a bleak truckstops.  (Noah Hawley, the show's producer and, with others, script writer, doesn't know the actual geography of Minnesota -- he seems to think that rural North Dakota is only a couple of hours from Scandia, the St. Paul suburb in which the Minnesota characters live -- the distance is more like six hours at least and, probably, eight to ten hours to the areas in western North Dakota where Roy Tillman and his far-Right militia rule.  Again, you have to accept this with a grain of salt, just the way you react to the obviously false claim of documentary truth with which the show always begins.

The Fifth Series takes place in 2019.  The show starts with a riot at a School Board meeting, shot in slow-motion with people throwing things and punching each other.  Dot, the heroine is at the meeting with her daughter and, when someone threatens the girl, she responds violently.  A cop tries to intervene and Dot blasts him in the face with some sort of pepper spray.  She gets arrested and this incident is shown on TV and results in a mug shot showing Dot broadcast to law enforcement nation-wide.  Dot turns out to be Roy Tillman's second wife (he beat the first wife to death).  Tillman still loves Dot, whom he calls Nadine, after his own grotesque manner, or, at least, regards her as chattel that has gone astray.  He dispatches his henchman, the eerie Ole Munch (a five-hundred year sin-eater) to kidnap her in Scandia, the Twin Cities suburb where she lives with her husband, a car dealer who is the son of an overbearing and cynical debt consolidation magnate, Lorraine Lyon.  When Nadine/Dot thwarts the first attempt at kidnaping her, kills one of Munch's henchmen, and grievously injures Munch himself. Tillman sends his ineffectual son, Gator with a couple of other thugs, to snatch the woman.  This effort succeeds, although only temporarily.  The resourceful Dot again escapes.  Her flight ends in a shoot-out in a remote North Dakota truck stop where a Black state patrol officer is wounded, but saved by Dot when the bad guys try to kill him.  The Black cop becomes central to the plot and is Dot's ally as the show  progresses.  Dot gets back to her adoring husband, who has been electrocuted inadvertently by one of Dot's home-defense traps (her house has been burnt down in the second kidnapping).  The electrocution has knocked Wayne, Dot's husband, into a strange state of grace.  Dot's mother-in-law who despises her has the young woman committed to a mental hospital, but, after politely apologizing for the mayhem she is about to commit, Dot escapes from that confinement as well.  On the run, Dot leaves her daughter, Scotty, with a helpful local police officer, an Indian woman who is married to a useless would-be golf pro and flees the State.  She ends up in North Dakota where she encounters Linda, Tillman's first wife, whom he has battered to death -- in an extended dream sequence, Dot finds herself at a "Camp Utopia" where the victims of domestic abuse support one another's healing by acting out Punch and Judy shows depicting the crimes committed against them.  Dot, who has fallen asleep, while driving, crashes her car, is hospitalized, and, then, checked-out of the hospital by Roy Tillman and his gang.  Dot is taken to the Tillman ranch where all the forces in the film converge for the final episodes.  (I have left out some torture scenes, a guy getting his eyes gouged-out, and various other encounters of that sort.)  

The show's final episode is unusual in all respects and quite audacious in its brazen disregard for audience expectations.  The battle at the Tillman Ranch is staged in discontinuous shots, each scene interrupted by a short black-out.  The effect is to create a strange staccato rhythm to the scenes showing the attack on the compound.  The black-outs punctuating this action scene prevent the viewer from becoming emotionally engaged in the combat; we see only glimpses of the fighting and, therefore, can't become emotionally engaged in the sequence and, certainly, would find it impossible to register the violence as somehow exciting or spectacular or suspenseful.  This is an alienation effect, designed to prevent an aspect of hypocrisy that always vexes anti-war or anti-violence scenes -- it's hard to decry mayhem that is filmed as charismatic, thrilling, and pictorially engaging.  This is the Apocalypse Now effect -- that is, an anti-war movie that proceeds through cinematically thrilling sequences of highly choreographed violence.  Thomas Bezucha (the director of the last couple episodes and a show-runner with Noah Hawley) interpolate brief glimpses of violence with empty, darkness so as to alienate the viewers from what is happening.  It's effective but off-putting exactly as intended.  We can't really see what is going on, but know that it is dire.  Toward the end of the fighting, the movie stages the action more conventionally so that we can see the fates of the major characters enacted on the screen.  (A criticism I have of this sequence is that it requires a long underground tunnel from a bunker to an exit manhole in a plowed fields.  This bunker and illuminated tunnel is introduced into the show in the penultimate sequence; this seems like violation of the audience's trust:  if this underground passageway was present all the time on the premises and is going to play a crucial role in the show's climax, I think, we should have been earlier introduced to this place and shown the lay-out of the tunnel which is vital to the impressive final scenes in the battle.  This is a minor cavil, but Fargo is so well-made and carefully engineered that this sort of defect in the show's planning is not only visible, but feels obtrusively significant.)

The fight at the Tillman Ranch occupies the first half of the last episode.  The last half of the episode seems anti-climactic following the fortunes of the surviving characters in the year following the stand-off with Tillman and his militia.  To end the ten episode show with this sort of anti-climax is a bold strategy but one that pays off, I think, with regard to the larger significance of the Fifth Series' thematic concerns.  This season of Fargo has been designed around notions of debt, and the forgiveness of debt.  Debt is construed by the movie's script-writers as a kind of sin.  Ole Munch, the implacable 500-year old sin-eater, represents a sinister parody of the Christian doctrine that Christ redeemed mankind by taking upon himself humanity's sins and expiating them on the cross.  The sin-eater is engaged for "two coins" to eat food served on the casket of a wealthy man, thereby devouring and assimilating to himself the dead man's sins -- or his metaphysical debts within the show's framework.  (Recall that Dot's nightmarishly brutal and fierce mother-in-law is also a kind sin-eater for hire -- she acts to consolidate people's debts so as to better, and more aggressively, collect on those obligations.)  In the shows last twenty minutes, the concept of debt as interminable and ubiquitous (debt as original sin) and forgiveness of debt (sin) becomes central to the scenario.  Lorraine, who proudly asserts that she owns many judges because she is the foremost contributor to the radical right-wing Federalist Society (of course, a source for the jurists that Trump has placed on the judiciary) stands for the proposition that the collection of debts is integral to a Capitalist society and that such debt collection includes the notion of revenge that is just as unrelenting and interminable as original sin.  Lorraine uses the judicial system to devise a mechanism for repayment of debt, construed as revenge that is potentially unlimited.  In effect, she stands for the proposition that society can't function without debt (otherwise there would be no credit) and the powerful are entitled to their pound of flesh, that is, revenge, stretched out to infinity.  By contrast, the show's final scene reverses these propositions and argues, implicitly, that civilization is not possible unless claims for revenge, even if arguably just and valid, are relinquished.  Debt as sin must be forgiven if people are to live together in something approximating grace.  These are complex assertions and both claims -- that is, that debts must be ruthlessly collected and that debt should be forgiven -- must be accorded, perhaps, an equal standing in human affairs.  Increasingly, I have observed that TV shows in the long form often implicate issues involving revenge or comeuppance -- those who are the victims of oppression or extortionate threats of violence must get their revenge.  Justice, as it were, must be violently served.  This sort of structure of villainy, oppression, and, then, a reversal of fortune is satisfying to the audience because it offers the satisfaction of seeing evil revenged has always been a mainstay of narrative art.  (Odysseus' violent revenge on the suitors in Homer's Odyssey is the template on which plots of this sort are premised; Odysseus is insulted and injured and humilated for thousands of lines before he turns the tables and kills every one of his tormentors.) But this kind of narrative, although compelling, doesn't exactly appeal to "the better angels of our nature" (if, indeed, such exist).  Just about every long-form cable and streaming crime show features revenge as an important element in the plot -- for instance, shows like Succession, Billions, Beef and so on all involve baroque threats of violence made by the wealthy and powerful that, in the end, give rise to revenge served cold to the villains.  This is a satisfying plot line and always enchants viewers.  But, perhaps, there is another way and Fargo (Fifth Series) is willing to, at least, explore another paradigm -- maybe, we should consider, in our fractious politics and relationships, whether forgiveness might not be better than violent revenge.  Fargo has plenty of violent revenge luridly enacted on the wicked -- a good example is a particularly petulant and foul-mouthed patient in a hospital, awaiting cancer surgery, who bullies everyone that he encounters, gets accidentally snatched as a result of a misidentification, and is tortured to death as a result of this mistake.  We thoroughly dislike this minor character who is presented as completely loathsome (and who remains vile even during his torture) but it does seem a bit excessive for him to be punished so spectacularly for what was really just a nasty and vituperative tongue.  The show presents this inconsequential character's torture and murder as comical -- the guy is getting his comeuppance and, then, some and he is shown to be so despicable that we can't really sympathize with him.  In a way, it's an unfair "stacking of the deck" against the character.  To Fargo's credit, the last hour of the show is far more profound as to the subject of revenge -- we are allowed a sneaking sympathy with some of the most vicious characters and, at the end, the show argues that forgiveness is better than revenge.  

  

 

Under Capricorn

 An atypical Hitchcock film, Under Capricorn (1949) is an operatic, gothic melodrama.  There is no suspense and Hitchcock's trademark effects are limited to some impressively complex tracking shots, several of which seem to be unmotivated and pointless. Ingrid Bergman is very good, playing against type, as a half-crazed alcoholic and the technicolor has a particularly bronzed appearance -- fleshtones are radiant in a sort of golden, metallic light, perhaps, meant to simulate the glaring sun in Australia where this Victorian period picture is set.  The picture has very peculiar sexual undercurrents and focuses perversely on class or caste distinctions.  It's a fairly nasty piece of work with a distinctly sado-masochistic edge:  convicts on leave from their prisons are treated as slaves and routinely beaten.  Ingrid Bergman signifies her dominion over her house-slaves by burning the whip with which they are flogged, showing that she will rule for force of will and not violence.  Because of the extremely melodramatic imagery and a bravura soliloquy by Bergman's character, the film's roots in trauma aren't readily dismissed and, so, the picture's supposedly happy ending feels seriously compromised -- too much bad stuff has happened for it to all be blithely overlooked in the final scene.  

An Irishman, as signified by his emerald green jacket, disembarks in Sydney, Australia where his pompous cousin is the Royal Governor.  (The opening scene is an inert piece of pageantry featuring dull speeches and brilliant red coats on the soldiers.)  The Irishman, Adair, comes from declining nobility and so he has journeyed to Australia to make his fortune.  Although he is warned about the man (and his gothic mansion), Adair falls under the sway of Flusky, also an Irishman, although from the lower class -- he was a groom at an estate in West Ireland before being transported to Australia for an alleged murder.  Flusky, played in a soft, opaque manner by Joseph Cotten, who is really too pretty for the part, is married to Henrietta (Ingrid Bergman).  Henrietta is a hopeless drunk who sometimes suffers from the DT's.  Although Adair, who has been engaged by Flusky as an accomplice in a strawman real estate transaction (this is a classic MacGuffin, a plot device that goes nowhere but is merely designed as an opportunity for the two men to interact) has been told to stay away from the allegedly sinister self-made man, he, nonetheless, goes to Flusky's foreboding mansion on the seashore.  There, all the neighbors have been invited to a dinner party but no women appear -- they are all snubbing Henrietta who is notorious for a number of reasons.  At the dinner party, Henrietta enters, extremely drunk, disheveled and barefoot, with red-ringed eyes.  (Bergman's repertoire doesn't really include this sort of role and so she is a very beautiful and elegant drunk notwithstanding the plot that requires something more slatternly in the role).  Staggering upstairs on the arm of Adair, whom she recognizes from the Old Country, she claims to see a rat on her bed and Adair has to discharge his derringer to send the hallucination scurrying -- "it's a pink rat," one of the men at the soiree observes.  Flusky engages Adair to squire Henrietta in the hope of drying her out.  It's obvious that this will result in cuckoldry and Flusky's motives here seem to be both perverse and complicated -- it's as if he wants Adair to make love to his desperately unhappy wife.  When Henrietta locks herself in her room, Adair climbs up the side of the mansion in an impressive feat of agility (both for the character and the tracking camera) and, essentially, makes love to her while Flusky sulks downstairs.  Flusky's maid, Nelly, also a low-class ex-convict is in love with her master and she conspires to keep Henrietta drunk all the time so she can flirt with her boss.  Nelly stirs up trouble in the already fraught household and, when Adair takes Henrietta to the royal ball (hosted by his bombastic cousin), Flusky makes a surprise appearance, denounces all of the "nobs"and "swells", and drags his wife, who is the belle of the ball, back to the remote villa by the sea.  Adair follows, there's a fight, and Flusky's prize mare gets lamed by the Adair's incompetence as a horseman.  After Flusky has to shoot the horse, he's enraged, confronts Adair and Henrietta and there's a struggle over the gun -- Adair gets accidentally shot, an enormous problem for Flusky who, as an ex-convict, can be transported back to jail for any subsequent crime that he has committed.  As it turns out, the main motivation for Flusky's rage is not his wife's relationship with Adair, which he has after all perversely encouraged -- it's the fact that Flusky (and his girl Friday, Nelly) are low class peasants with criminal background while Adair and Henrietta fancy themselves nobility (at least this is Flusky's perception).  The relationship between the principles turns out to be very complex, as revealed by a long monologue spoken as an aria by Henrietta.  (I won't detail the revelations in that monologue but it suffices to say that all of the characters, except for Adair, have very complicated and torturous back stories.)  Nelly, who sees that Henrietta may reconcile with Flusky, since Adair is now wounded and out of the picture, decides to intervene.  She starts pouring booze into the alcoholic Henrietta and plots to poison her.  In an instance of overkill, Nelly also is gaslighting Henrietta with a shrunken head, driving her into a frenzy of terror that is attributed, wrongly, to an another instance of delirium tremens.  Flusky figures out what is going on, just in the nick of time, and rescues Henrietta from the torments inflicted on her by the pathetic Nelly.  Adair recovers from his wound.  After some legal complications, Adair returns to Ireland, wiser and sadder, and Flusky is reconciled with Henrietta.  (The hapless and rather sympathetic Nelly is just forgotten.).  How exactly Flusky and Henrietta are going to be able to repair their shattered marriage, afflicted by booze and betrayals of various kinds, seems to be an open question as the film concludes, ostensibly with a happy ending.  

The acting is excellent.  The speeches and monologues are over-the-top, although this is typical for an overwrought "women's picture" of this sort.  Hitchcock seems to direct with kid-gloves and his ordinary perversity isn't incidental to the movie, but, in fact, at its center, on full display in the masochistic behavior shown by Flusky. (This seems to make Hitchcock a little shy and reticent in his direction.)  Class distinctions, not lust, are the center of the movie.  It's intriguing enough, but only a few grades above mediocre, elevated mostly by the bizarre love-triangle at its core.  There's one very elaborate tracking shot, following as Adair walks through a mansion where his cousin resides -- the camera dutifully follows him up some stairs and through several doors that the protagonist opens, tracking him to -- where?  A bathroom in which his middle-aged cousin is washing in a tub while dictating his orders to a male secretary.  It's a strange anti-climax to a very, very elaborate shot and seems to be in the movie simply because Hitch was bored with the plot and needed to spice things up with a bit of virtuoso camerawork.  

Underworld U.S.A.

 A fourteen-year old street kid is out rolling drunks on New Year's Eve.  Another hoodlum fights with him over his ill-gotten gains and the kid gets his eyebrow badly gashed.  He retreats into the backroom of a bar where a matronly dame, probably an ex-prostitute, cares for his injuries.  Later, in the alleyway behind the dive, he sees four men beat his father to death -- the man is also a penny-ante criminal.  When the cops arrive, the DA asks him if he knows who killed his father, but adhering to the code of the criminal underworld, he says that he "won't fink", jumping on the side of the morgue wagon as it hauls his father's corpse away.  A few days later the kid gets arrested and sent to prison.  Released after a couple years, the kid (he's called Tolly Devlin) finds out that one of his father's murderers is serving time in a local penitentiary.  He promptly commits another crime to get himself thrown into that jail where he old gangster is dying -- by this time, the young man, marked with the New Year's Eve scar on his brow, is 32 years old.  Devlin cozies up to the prison infirmary doc and gets access to the dying murderer.  He threatens the man with a scalpel and gets him to name the other three criminals involved in the murder of Devin's father.  The old man pleads for forgiveness, but Devin strangles him to death.  This summarizes about the first 7 minutes of Samuel Fuller's Underworld U.S.A., a garish blast of mayhem released in 1961.  

Fuller wrote, produced, and directed Underworld U.S.A and it's pretty much all of a piece.  The characters dash around in a film noir landscape in which every article seems to be labeled -- there are signs on windows and roadways, lettered boxes sit on the sidewalk and cars with advertising on them are everywhere.  Fuller directs in all exclamation points inserting enormous close-ups into confrontation scenes (the whole screen becomes a pair of alarmed or brooding eyes) and moving the camera eccentrically -- within the first minute, Devlin who has snatched a watch and wallet off a drunk guy fallen into a heap of New Year's Eve balloons has to flee from a cop; he runs right at the audience, effortlessly leaping over obstacles as the lens glides in front of him.  Everything is overlit in the clinical style of late fifties and early sixties TV shows.  The only chiaroscuro in the film are shadows deployed to hide the identity of the killers whose murder of Devlin's father triggers the movie's revenge plot -- and this effect is motivated by the narrative requirement that the young man not know the identity of the thugs that he will hunt down and slaughter.  In the final scenes, the protagonist lunges around in a weird landscape of brightly lit facades and sidewalks under ominous, ink-black skies -- the streets are absolutely deserted as Devlin staggers into his confrontation with mob leader and, then, succumbs to bullet wounds in the same desolate alley where the movie began.  Fuller's dialogue is over-ripe with criminal jargon and bizarre ripostes:  the prison doc who suspects Devlin's motives when he signs up to be a trusty in the hospital says:  "You're just trying to get your hands on some joy powder."  The villains that Devlin pursues and systematically kill are respectively the mob bosses responsible for Labor, Drugs, and Prostitution, the three departments of the criminal enterprise treated as well-organized divisions in the crime syndicate, the whole enterprise overseen by a fat bureaucrat who spends his time lounging around a roof-top swimming pool somewhere in south Chicago.  (The crooks have their tentacles in legit business and they sponsor swimming competitions for disadvantaged neighborhood kids.)  The bar run by the frazzled ex-whore is now a coffee-shop, described in derisory language as a place where intellectual types hang out, no doubt discussing Sartre while gangsters recruit criminals in the backroom:  we need "more teenaged drug addicts" the portly mob boss says, ordering a henchman to put more drug dealers "in the school yards" (where school girls are also being groomed as prostitutes).  The politics of the movie are so right-wing and law-and-order as to seem deranged -- although the cops are also on the take; one of them commits suicide on-screen when confronted with his misdeeds; he's drawing a cool five-thousand a week in protection money from the mob, but also motivated by the fact that the mob boss has threatened to run his daughter through a meat-grinder.  When a bookkeeper threatens to testify, Gus, the dead-eyed assassin working for the mob boss, blithely hunts down the accountant's six-year old daughter and runs her down on her bike with his big Lincoln Continental. 

Fuller's script is ingenious.  He engineers the plot so that Devlin doesn't actually really murder anyone (except maybe the guy on death's door in the hospital). Instead, he sets the criminals against one another by planting forged documents showing that the bad guys are all about to inform on one another to the righteous federal prosecutor (the DA who tried to get Devlin to "fink" in the beginning of the movie).  Listing his accomplishments, Devlin boasts:  Farrar died in the hospital, Smith's getting the chair, Gunther got barbecued, and so on.  Fuller fills up the movie with lurid baroque effects:  the ex-whore who mothers Devlin lives in an apartment full of hideous dolls, "I guess cuz you can't have kids," Devlin remarks.  A hooker who refuses to make a heroin delivery gets beat up, has her smashed cheek tended to in gruesome close-up, and, then, spends the next couple scenes traipsing about with a huge bandage on her cheek.  The hooker is Devlin's love interest and she wants him to make an honest woman out of her.  When he rejects her marriage proposal, the matronly ex-whore berates Devlin:  "You're just a scar-faced ex-con.  She's a giant.  You're a midget."  Devlin kisses the hooker.  She says:  "I die inside when you kiss me."  The hooker's name is "Cuddles".  This is about all you need to know about Underworld USA.  It's trashy but fun.  I didn't know any of the actors by name (Devlin is played by Cliff Robertson).  But all of the villains are staples of B movies and sixties TV shows -- you'll know them all even if you can't identify them by name.