Fallen Leaves

 Holappa, a courtly blue-collar alcoholic in Aki Kaurismaki's Fallen Leaves (2023), says that he is depressed.  He explains that he is depressed because he drinks too much.  "But why do you drink so much?" a friend asks.  "Because I am depressed," Holappa says.  Fallen Leaves advances, by implication, two theories for why many people are isolated, lonely, and hopeless:  first, blue collar workers are the victims of oppressive social systems that flatten their emotional affect and keep them in a perpetual state of impoverished unhappiness; second, coercive social systems make the proletariat particularly protective of their personal dignity -- in many cases, it's all they have -- but this very defense mechanism tends to make them suspicious, unduly reticent and reserved, and, further, aggravates their social isolation.  And, then, of course, there's alcohol.  This resume, I'm afraid, may deter my readers from watching Fallen Leaves.  This would be unfortunate because this little film (only 82 minutes long) is a charming dead-pan comedy and well worth your attention.  The movie exemplifies a certain romantic stoicism that exists in the comedies of Charlie Chaplin (who is referenced in the film) and the quieter parts of Buster Keaton's movies.  Fallen Leaves doesn't aspire to much, but it achieves it's modest objectives -- it's a low-key inconsequential movie invested with a palpable sense of silence and melancholy.  Kaurismaki is a modest filmmaker who makes highly stylized, poetic movies about everyday people -- his work stands at the antipodes to cartoon super-hero movies that dominate the market and, also, it should be said big self-important prestige pictures like Oppenheimer or Killers of the Flower Moon.  On this spectrum, I have to admit that I prefer pictures like Fallen Leaves to the big-budget movies that I have mentioned.  Fallen Leaves is made with so little money that it can't even afford, it seems, a license to shoot on public transportation in Helsinki, the place where the picture takes place.  After a couple of early shots, obviously made on an actual bus or subway train, the movie shows its heroine shuttling to and from work in what appears to be a waiting room of some bureaucratic office -- shadows rhythmically sweep by the unseen window and we hear rails rattling under the location, but the image looks nothing like actual public transportation: it's brighter, better lit, and much more spacious.  Kaurismaki is so assured as a film maker that we simply accept the convention that he establishes with these shots without really questioning it.

As Shakespeare reminds us in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the "course of true love never did run smooth."  This is comically obvious in Fallen Leaves.  Holappa, a laborer, lives in a storage container with some emigrants from an Arabic-speaking nation.  The boss lets his workers live in the storage container, about six guys to the little room, as part of their compensation.  Ansa, a middle-aged woman, works in a grocery store where she is under surveillance on suspicion of theft by a burly co-worker; he looks like the Golem and is less expressive.  The characters meet at a surreal karaoke bar (in keeping with Kaurismaki's aesthetic, the place looks nothing at all like an actual karaoke place).  This is Finland and no one speaks much.  Holappa's buddy, a vain older man, sings -- he thinks he's so good that he deserves a record contract.  He tries to flirt with Ansa's friend, a dishwater blonde, but she mocks him for his age.  (People are too polite to point out that Holappa's friend is a terrible singer.)  In this scene, Ansa and Holappa exchange glances and are obviously interested in one another, but neither acts on this attraction.  The Karaoke bar exemplifies Kaurismaki's expressive, yet completely impassive style of film-making.  We see the bar from only a couple of angles:  a bartender stands motionless in front of shelving where liquor bottles are stacked; the bartender looks like an elderly biker with long grey hair and he seems incapable of motion and doesn't even turn his head to look at the karaoke singers.  The performers stand on a tiny stage and sing in full-frontal shots under a little garland of Christmas tree lights:  Kaurismaki didn't bother to license rights to any sort of actual karaoke video and, so, we have to accept that this is a karaoke place simply because people call it that.  The singers perform rather eclectic selections -- there are show tunes, straight-ahead and infectious rock and roll, and, finally, someone sings a Lied by Schubert.  Holappa who drinks all the time -- he has booze stashed all over the place where he works sandblasting rusted parts so they can be sold as new --  runs into Ansa a little later and asks her to go to a movie with him.  (They see Jim Jarmusch's The Dead don't Die, a zombie picture -- during the picture Ansa says that there are too many zombies for the cops to defeat them; after the show, she tells her date that "(she) has never laughed so hard in her life" although Kaurismaki doesn't show her, or any one in the movie, ever laughing.)  Ansa gives Holappa her phone number but he loses the little sheet of paper on which she has written the information.  She wants him to call, but, of course, he can't because he has lost the number and neglected to ask for her name.  Ansa gets fired from the supermarket for taking home expired food that would otherwise have to be thrown in the dumpster.  She is very poor and has to shut off her lights to conserve electricity.  But she's resourceful and, after working as a "kitchen assistant", gets a job doing heavy labor in a foundry.  Holappa injures himself on the sandblasting job and, because he is drunk, gets fired.  He goes to work at a construction site and has to stay in a sort of homeless shelter -- the bed in his room is comically short given his lanky build (this is the kind of gag you would see in a Keaton or Chaplin movie but it's so understated that it doesn't register as funny.) He also drinks on this job and gets fired again.

When Ansa's job as a kitchen assistant ends -- the boss is fired for drug dealing -- Ansa and Holuppa meet -- offscreen we hear a brawl between the crooked boss and the cops who are arresting him; this is also characteristic of Kaurismaki's style -- dramatic events are implied but not shown.  Holappa goes to the Ritz Theater, a repertoire place, and spends hours chainsmoking and waiting for Ansa to appear.  Finally, she shows up and, after some guarded remarks, invites Holappa to come to  her house for supper.  (She has to buy two Dollar Store plates and a couple forks since she has been eating nothing but microwaved food from its store containers up to this point in the film.)  Holappa's jacket is wrecked and he has to borrow a coat from another homeless man.  At Ansa's house, Holappa wants to get drunk.  Ansa tells him that her father and brother died from alcoholism and she will not tolerate drinking in her home.  Holappa says that she can't boss him and stalks out of the house.  After awhile, Holappa gets sober and calls Ansa.  By this time, Ansa has acquired a dog, a mutt that was hanging around the foundry and half-starved.  Ansa agrees to see Holappa and he says he will come right over to her flat.  But on the way, he gets run over by a train.  (I kid you not.)  After being stood-up, Ansa learns that Holappa is in the hospital in a medically induced coma.  She visits him with her dog.  (Although I don't trust Kaurismaki's realism on this point, the film suggests that mutts are welcome in Finnish hospitals.)  Ansa reads to the unconscious Holappa.  When he revives after a few weeks, the two of them depart the hospital together.  She strides purposefully across a big park strewn with fallen leaves, walking very quickly so that poor Holappa, who is on crutches, can scarcely keep up with her.  The dog, named "Chaplin", trots alongside.  

Kaurismaki's touch is very light and his staging minimalist.  The film looks like a combination of Jim Jarmusch's Strangers in Paradise and some of Ozu's later pictures -- there is a stylistic disposition to film characters in full frontal shots and the movie has a ravishing sequence of so-called "empty frames" that is, shots of objects and landscapes without people that establish a sense of anomie and melancholy, lacrimae rerum, the tears of things.  The film features fragments of rapturous classical music, for instance, Tchaikovsky's Sixth symphony, pop songs including a Finnish version of a Gordon Lightfoot standard, that comment on the action.  The colors in the movie are precisely calibrated with Ansa's red garments a focal point.  The movie posters at the Ritz provide commentary on the action -- for instance, we see a poster advertising David Lean's Brief Encounter just before the couple are separated and can't re-connect.  (This is the kind of picture in which you suspect that the hangdog figures at the margins of the movie are all drinking buddies of Kaurismaki; at the Ritz, two dorky cinephiles comes out of theater and compare some unnamed picture to Godard  -- one guy says the movie reminds him of Pierrot le Fou, the other says "No, it was more like A Band a Parte.")  This is very precisely made, mindful and intentional movie in which every effect, or absence of effect, is exactly calibrated.  There's only one kiss in the movie; Ansa tries to kiss Holuppa but he's too tall and their lips miss one another.  (There are several production companies in the world of cinema that have appealing and distinctive names:  I like Spike Lee's Forty Acres and a Mule and Kaurismaki's Sputnik Oy.) 

The Tourist

The Tourist is an Australian six episode thriller.  It's fun but inconsequential.  My notes on this show, appearing on Netflix, are intended to draw a contrast with the bombastic, pretentious, and confusing True Detective (Night Country).  

There's certainly nothing particularly remarkable about The Tourist; it doesn't stretch any boundaries and aspires to nothing other than to be a solid work of genre filmmaking.  There are no political messages encoded in the series -- it's moral principle is that kindness, courage, and loyalty are better than cruelty and betrayal.  Most effective genre works of this kind have a similar message.  The show's objective is to tell a conventional story with broad appeal.  When this sort of thing is done effectively and with panache, the result is sufficiently entertaining that the viewer stays engaged for the entire six hours and, in fact, even looks forward to each successive installments of the story.  The Tourist is easy in that the viewer isn't constantly fighting the narrative, fly-specking it for incongruities and absurdities; likeable characters and well-choreographed and plausible action sequences urge the narrative forward and, although the show has some flaws, they aren't enough to embitter the viewer.  The audience victims of Night Country were alternately hectored and insulted; the narrative was configured to make various ideologically motivated points, most of which, on inspection, were racist (the show was insulated from criticism because written and produced by a woman and, apparently, endorsed by the indigenous people represented in the program) -- if a White writer and director had "appropriated" the True Detective narrative that relies heavily on cliches about Arctic tribal people, the show would have been universally denounced.  The viewers of Night Country were also insulted by a plot that was told in a convoluted, perverse manner leaving numerous loose ends unresolved and rife with absurdities and blatantly ridiculous plot points.  The Tourist has a shapely, if well-trodden narrative -- the classic double-chase in an exotic and desolate setting -- and, because the audience sympathizes with the protagonists, the show holds the attention of its viewers.

A man is involved in a violent road-rage incident in the middle of "Whoop-Whoop",  Australian slang for the utterly empty desert of the Australian outback.  The man is injured in a collision caused by a semi-truck that has been driven to force him off the road.  He wakes up in a hospital in an outback hamlet with no idea who he is or how he got into this predicament -- the hero, called Eliot as we later know, is played by an Irishman, Jamie Dornan, who gives a well-tempered and appealing performance.  The man is fantastically handsome and appealing to women, but he has no idea how he had come to be injured in the remote outback.  A female constable, a chubby girl with an overbearing boyfriend/fiancee is enlisted to investigate the case -- she is completely inexperienced but a hard-worker and she's willing to take some risks to try to solve the mystery.  A killer with an American accent wearing a big cowboy hat and boots with curled toes comes to murder the hero in the hospital.  He escapes but only in the nick of time.  In Sydney, a famous inspector, who is dying of some kind of cancer, is dispatched to the Outback to capture Eliot.  At the same time, a Greek drug smuggler flies to Australia.  He has some kind of mysterious connection to Eliot and it's apparent that the hero used to be employed by the Greek -- apparently, as an accountant.  There's a bag of money, a poor bastard buried alive in a 55 gallon drum, and a series of car chases and shoot-outs that take place in vast, empty, and beautiful outback.  The show is carefully calibrated as to location and the events take place against a picturesque backdrop generally shown by beautiful, if standard issue, drone shots -- after a couple episodes, we come to recognize the aerial shots of the various places in which the story takes place.  The Hitchcockian double-chase involves Eliot pursued by the police for complicity in a homicide and the Greek criminal, a psychotic monster of cruelty, who is also chasing the hero.  The chubby girl is allied with Eliot and tries to protect him.  There's another woman who seems to have once been Eliot's girlfriend, a more conventionally beautiful girl, who is also involved in the action -- sometimes, she seems to want to kill Eliot; other times, she acts seductively and desires to renew their romance.  Everyone has secret agendas and, at one point or another, each of the main characters are taken hostage and menaced by the others. Everything is effectively juggled up to a convincing, if complex denouement. 

The Tourist's strong points are its interesting setting in small hamlets and dusty highways in the Outback.  There's never any traffic on these roads; you could picnic in the center of them -- we know this terrain a little from the Mad Max movies, although this part of Australia seems more varied: it has wooded hills, long stately ridges and, of course, lots of desert.  The climax is set at a place called the Nala Stone Men, big cairns of rock that look vaguely like human beings -- they have the appearance of similar cairns built by tribal people in the Arctic.  This is an impressive location for the final two episodes where things unexpectedly veer into the surreal and psychedelic.  There's obvious sexual chemistry between the leading characters; the plot involving the chubby female cop's involvement with the hunky hero has a classic wish fulfillment aspect and, I think, will be intensely appealing to most viewers.  The protagonists are complicated, fully rounded human beings that are neither wholly good nor wholly evil.  A good example of the show's fair-minded approach is the way that it treats fat cop's fiancee -- the man would be a grotesque in most versions of this story, but, in fact, the part is well-written and even sympathetically developed.  The story telling is crisp and the locations seem authentic (unlike True Detective which had Iceland stand in for the Alaskan Arctic).  The exposition of plot points is ingenious, indeed, to a fault.

This last aspect brings me to the criticisms that might be made of this show.  The complicated enigmas in the plot have to be worked-out in several long expository scenes.  To keep this from becoming too obvious or tedious, the hero's recollection of his past occurs during a long series of scenes in which he is hallucinating on LSD.  This is exceedingly clever in that plot points are made in a dream-like, elliptical manner, thereby, softening the effect of the exposition and involving the viewer in solving the mystery.  But this sequence is showy in its own right, goes on too long, and, also, seems implausible -- is LSD really an aid to memory?  Here the show's ingenuity, I think, works against it -- although the program does present an interesting solution to the plot problem of making an explanation sufficient to unravel some of the show's mysteries.  (This was also a big problem for Night Country:  True Detective in which long sequences had to be devoted to implausibly explaining various supernatural enigmas in the story.)  There's also a Sixth Sense subplot in The Tourist that seems unnecessary, although it is also thought-provoking and interesting. 

The second season of The Tourist airs on Thursday, February 29, 2024 and I will certainly watch.  Australian customs and standards for TV apparently requires that everyone wear seatbelts when riding in a car.  Most of the show's action takes place in vehicles of various kinds and, so, it seems that about a fifth of the program involves carefully observed shots in which characters buckle-up for the ride. 

True Detective (Night Country -- Series 4)

Spoiler alert:

An international team of scientists is working at a station in Alaska far north of the Arctic Circle.  The scientists have unlocked a "microbe in the perma-frost that can save the world."  There's only one catch:  to activate and isolate this microbe, the scientists must use a process that contaminates the water in the nearby Inupiaq communities, resulting in cancers and still-births.  A group of Native women work as janitors at the secret laboratory; one of them discovers that the pollution destroying her people originates at the high-tech ultra-modern station.  The scientists, including her boyfriend, murder her and, apparently, conceal her corpse in an ice-cave connected to the laboratory by a hidden passageway.  The dead woman apparently comes to life again in the ice-cave and manages to record her second, or possibly third, death on her cell-phone.  Then, a corrupt cop moves the corpse, neglecting, however, to deep-six the incriminating cell-phone video which later surfaces, inexplicably left, I think, in some sort of abandoned shack.  The other maintenance workers learn that their sister has been murdered and, armed with hunting rifles, raid the laboratory, herd the scientists out on the floe ice, strip them naked, and let the men freeze to death.  (The show condones and applauds this mass-murder:  there are eight scientists killed in this way although one somehow escapes, hides in a sea-bottom dredger, and haunts the action until he's caught, and, then, murdered by the corrupt cop who is, in turn, killed by a head-shot by his own son who is protecting a virtuous chief of police played by Jodie Foster.)  The solution to the mystery that I have now spoiled for you by this explanation is laboriously (and tediously) worked-out by two neurotic and border-line hysterical law enforcement officers, the local chief of police for the town of Ennis where most of the action takes place (Liz -- Jodie Foster) and a State Highway patrolwoman, Evangeline Navarro (played by the professional boxer Kali Reis).  Evangeline, like Liz, is mentally ill -- she suffers from PTSD as a result of combat experiences, witnessed her mother's murder as a result of domestic abuse and takes the case involving a "missing and murdered indigenous woman" personally.  She may also be traumatized as a result of being told by the ghost of her mother (who is hanging around on the battlefields of Iraq for some reason) that her indigenous name is Sucks-a-numchuck.  Navarro has frequent hallucinations, most of them, it seems, derived from other Netflix and cable TV horror shows (and derived in turn from Japanese horror movies like The Ring):  these visions involve mutilated corpses with white eyes and stringy long hair pointing as they howl vengefully.  The  two women are bound together by their complicity in another murder:  Navarro offed a handcuffed villain, a perpetrator of domestic abuse, in the presence of Liz, the two of them staging the homicide to look like a suicide.  This summary presents the tale in chronological fashion -- of course, the show scrambles the narrative and is afflicted by dozens of flashbacks usually grim sequences involving mayhem or grief.  Liz's baby son was killed in a car crash and she's become a sort of zombie, carrying around a stuffed polar bear that represents her little boy and ferociously demanding sex on occasion from the hapless older cop who seems to be her fuck-buddy.  (Navarro has a bearish boyfriend whom she sometimes rapes as well.)  In my review, I have made the plot seem relatively clear.  But, as dramatized, the story is totally obscure, involving all sorts of unresolved mysteries -- for instance, the action is triggered by the discovery of severed tongue on the laboratory floor (this is a reference to the amputated ear in Lynch's Blue Velvet) -- at the end of the show, someone acknowledges that no one cut out the dead woman's tongue and that, therefore, no explanation exists for the sudden appearance of this grisly relic.  Night Country is full of absurdities that would be laughable if they weren't so tedious:  a woman commits suicide (there are lots of suicides in the show) by walking into the icy ocean in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a month of darkness when the sun is hiding somewhere in the Arctic winter.  But the suicide is immediately discovered by the Coast Guard and conveniently announced by radio.  The natives can assemble when needed on the basis of the "Mukluk telegraph" -- that is, the Eskimo version of "hearing it on the grapevine."  But, when the plot requires people to remain ignorant of story developments, the "Mukluk telegraph" inexplicably goes silent.  In one idiotic scene, Liz needs to gather some clues and so she throws some kind of bioluminescent fluid on a hatch cover, barking out "get me a UV light."  Fortunately, like the fluid, a UV light just happens to be within arm's reach so a hand print can be visualized glowing on the metal.  Exactly how Liz deciphers the meaning of the handprint  how she figures out to whom it belongs is left completely unexplained.  The series' central mystery, involving a "corpsicle" -- that is, dead bodies frozen into contorted positions and all interlocked like some kind of Arctic Laocoon -- is never really explained.  At one point, someone claims that the grotesque and macabre artifact is the result of a "slab avalanche" -- exactly what this is supposed to mean is never explicated.  And, in fact, the show wants to have it both ways:  there's supposed to be a natural explanation for all the apparitions and supernatural enigmas, but the show, also, suggests that mystical and malevolent supernatural forces are also at work.  The result of this ambiguity is that neither the supernatural nor the rational explanations make any sense -- they just contradict one another and the viewer is left with a gruesome mess, a grisly melange that is like the frozen corpses, inert and impossible to decipher.  (On the basis of various specious explanations, the "corpsicle" is kept in a local hockey arena in the Arctic village, a spectacle that is presumably open to the public as the mutilated corpses gradually thaw while tormented characters mutter and jawbone over their bodies.)

There's nothing in the show that is even remotely original.  Everything has been done in other TV shows and films with much more authority and coherence.  For instance, the opening scene involving a Inupiaq hunter, a sort of Nanook of the North, shooting at caribou as the sun is about to set for the next month of darkness, is derived from initial sequences in John Carpenter's The Thing; the "corpsicle" is also an artifact cribbed from that film.  Every lame cliche imaginable about Arctic tribal people is dusted off and trotted out.  About every second episode someone (or some several) have to go into a haunted house.  Of course, the explorers of the haunted house can't turn on the lights and the Arctic winds are howling outside and tour heroines always separate so that they can each encounter the monsters lurking in the place each alone.  Haunted houses in the show include a haunted sea-dredge, a haunted ice cave, several eerie and abandoned shacks, and, of course, the haunted research station itself which looks like the setting of The Thing, a series of corridors and laboratories that is always dark, chilly, and full of hidden menace.  The show even shamelessly steals the "flattened time loop" theory from True Detective's first series, a digression, if I recall correctly, based on Nietzsche's idea of the eternal re-occurrence of the same, although dumbed-down for nitwits. Major revelations to Evangeline occur on the smoky desert battlefields of Iraq (or Afghanistan) where the poor woman consorts with gruesomely mutilated revenants.   

Night Country is a misfire.  It's surprising to see a post-George Floyd show featuring cops who torture people, murder them at will, and, then, lie under oath about mass murder -- all of this misconduct is supposed to be justified because the officers are portrayed as righteous, mostly, it seems, because of their exorbitant suffering and mental illness.  (I don't think these sorts of defenses would have availed Derek Chauvin.)  It's as if Dirty Harry were to justify his depredations by some hard knocks in his child hood. The program is vastly more incoherent and confusing than this review suggests and it would take pages to list the various plot developments that make no sense at all.  Faulkner, who was one of the writers on The Big Sleep, admitted that he had no idea who had committed one of the murders important to the plot of that film noir classic.  So, certainly, it's possible to make a sprightly and amusing crime show with so many twists and turns that the story can't really be reliably deciphered.  But The Big Sleep features Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall supported by a number of fine character actors in eccentric roles and, ultimately, the movie is witty, has some good hard-boiled lines, and doesn't wallow in misery.  By contrast, the equally incomprehensible Night Country goes on for six hours with dialogue consisting primarily of ominous, if meaningless, portents -- "we're all going to enter the night country now!" someone declare as if this makes sense.  The supporting characters in the show, for instance, the doughty pioneer woman Rose, play parts that are either completely gratuitous or rife with implications that the narrative never takes the time to explain:  why is Rose also haunted by a barefoot ghost?  who is he?  why is she expert at disposing of corpses in the icy sea water? why is she shown to be cleaning a long gun in the last episode, a weapon that is ostentatiously portrayed but never used.  Jodie Foster acts her heart out, in some shots displaying four or five emotions in quick succession or, even, simultaneously, but the part is derivative and poorly written.  Kali Reis is monotonously grim and violent; she just scowls at everyone.  

It's unfair to pummel this 60 million dollar production with reference to a far better story by Arthur Conan Doyle that has the same structure, the famous novella The Hound of the Baskervilles.  A demonic dog, acting according to an ancestral curse, kills people at a remote country estate.  Two detectives, Holmes and his sidekick, Watson, investigate the case and, ultimately, reveal a non-supernatural explanation for the apparently ghostly homicides.  This is similar to the Arctic moors in Night Country, the herds of ghosts and revenants haunting the place and the gruesome killings that have to be solved by Liz and Evangeline.  But the Hound of the Baskervilles is a classic, makes sense and remains entertaining to this day.  There's been a lot of controversy on the Internet about Night Country -- the show has been recruited for both sides of the culture wars:  some claim the series is too "woke" with its lesbian characters, pervasive themes involving domestic abuse and its endorsement of violence by Native peoples to protect their rights.  Some commentators explain the distaste for the show by the franchise creator Nic Pizolatto as evidence of his sexism or even racism.  When a program fails on its merits, Internet advertising tries to create a buzz about the show on the basis of polemical pros and cons that are claimed to have political significance; it's a highly "meta" approach to marketing -- if the product is no good, attack those who point out that it's no good on the basis of their supposedly revanchist politics.  (The same approach was used to create specious controversy about the very dull and inept movie Barbie -- liking the movie was a kind of virtue signaling against the reactionary political forces supposedly directed against the film.)  You can pretty much identify a turkey today by the amount of controversy that internet pundits labor to create about criticism of a show.  The more controversy, the less likely that the show or movie is any good. After the furor dies down, the fourth series of True Detective (Night Country) will be totally forgotten.

Issa Lopez wrote most of the episodes of Night Country and directed all six shows. 

 

How Green was my Valley

 In John Ford's 1941 How Green was my Valley, there is a startling disconnect between the film's elegiac tone, wistful, melancholy, and romantic, and the rather stark series of tragedies that make up the picture's plot.  Ford invites us to feel nostalgia for a way of life that is shown to be cruel, isolated, and impoverished.  There is something similar at work in Ford's Westerns (the 1941 Oscar-winning film is set in a coal-mining village is Wales) but the ultimate emotional effect is different.  In pictures like My Darling Clementine and She wore a Yellow Ribbon, Ford celebrates tightly knit communities isolated by the deserts and mountains of the American southwest.  Terrible things happen in these movies but the doom or tragedy that hovers over How Green was my Valley is avoided by our sense that everything turned out for the best in the end -- the West was settled, civilization prevailed, women tamed the brutish outlaws and ranchers, the noble but unpredictably violent Indians were defeated; as in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, gunmen and desperadoes gave way to lawyers and school marms and journalists. In America, at least, we in the audience are evidence that there was a happy ending to the events chronicled in these films.  Ford can't supply this happy ending in How Green was my Valley and, so, the viewer leaves the movie with a sense of terrible, pointless loss.  Obviously, audiences originally responded to the movie's apparently warm-hearted nostalgia, but an account of what actually occurs in the film will belie the notion that the picture is cheerful or happy in any way.

A village in the mountains of Wales supports a coal factory that seems to be the only enterprise (except for a church and a pub, The Three Pennies) in the town.  (This is similar to Ford's isolated ranches in Monument Valley and his frontier cavalry posts and hamlets -- usually characterized by a saloon, a grave-yard, and a clapboard church.)  The people in the town seem to be satisfied with their lot in life as epitomized by the Morgan family, the focus of the film .  The Morgan's consist of five stalwart brothers who labor alongside their father in the colliery, a beautiful adult daughter, and a small boy, the baby of the family, played brilliantly by the young Roddy McDowell as "Hue."  The family's religious and worn-out mother provides this clan with huge roast beef suppers and everyone eats well; although a family this large crammed into a row-house a few hundred yards from a purgatorial coal pit would likely be living in squalor, Ford shows clean spacious interiors, plenty of room for feasting and bible-reading and joshing around.  But, after a brief idyllic introduction, overlaid with scrumptious and poetic narration from the 1939 source novel, verse spoken in terms of remembrance of things past, things begin to go badly wrong.

The owners of the coal mine reduce workers wages arbitrarily.  This leads to the sons, who are firebrands, planning to form a Union.  But the father, played by Donald Crisp, opposes unions as "socialism" and tensions threaten to tear the family apart.  Two of the boys depart for America, despairing of a any sort of equity in the village.  When the father continues to oppose the Union, violence erupts and brickbats are thrown through the windows of the Morgan home.  The mother with Hue in tow attend a Union meeting in a driving snowstorm.  The mother fiercely says that if anyone harms her family she will kill the perpetrator "with (her) own two hands."  On the way home, however, she and Hue somehow fall through the ice in a creek and are left wallowing in the icy water for several hours.  Both mother and the little boy are badly hurt and the doctor says that Hue's legs, "frozen to the bone," will be paralyzed.  (The prediction turns out wrong and Hue gradually learns to walk again, encouraged by the local pastor.)  The labor unrest is finally brought to an end by the kindly preacher, Mr. Griffins, who endorses the Union as long as it plays by the rules.  The preacher is in love with the adult daughter in the family (Maureen O'Sullivan) and she requites the affection.  But, after the the strike is settled, the owner of the mine, Mr. Evans, sends his son to court the young woman who is the town beauty.  She marries Evans' son and departs for South Africa, blighting both her life and the pastor's romantic hopes.  One of the sons is killed in a mine accident.  Hue, who is a clever boy (and a surrogate for the author of the novel) does well in school, with the help of the preacher studies for exams, and is admitted to a nearby "National School".  Here the little boy is brutalized by bullies and savagely beaten by the fey, sadistic schoolmaster who despises him as "as coal vermin."  Hue is taught by a local pugilist to box and defeats the bully but, then, gets flogged by the schoolmaster until "the flesh is ripped from the bone."  The pugilist and one of his buddies then beat the schoolmaster senseless and leave him for dead in his classroom.  Hue, despite his intelligence, decides to follow the family tradition and goes to work in the infernal-looking black hole of the mine.  (The other two brothers have departed for Canada and New Zealand).  The family's sister returns  from South Africa as a rich, but miserable.  She understands that she has ruined her life by marrying the son of the colliery's owner.  She is apparently divorced, although this information leaks out only gradually to the complete horror and Schadenfreude of the local gossips (who seem to comprise the entire female cohort in the village).  Rumors about the sister lead to more strife and fist-fights.  There's a cave-in and explosion at the mine and the father is crushed to death in the debris.  His son, Hue, the pugilist who is now blind, a few other heroes search through the frightening flooded mine-shaft to discover the old man pinned in the wreckage -- this is a spectacular sequence filmed in the florid style of silent cinema.  The corpse is lifted out of the pit with other bodies on the elevator that serves as a visual motif through the film. And, on this note, the movie ends.  As if to underscore, the unhappiness that we have witnessed, Ford ends with a montage of the family together at a meal, then, the daughter courting the kindly preacher, and, at last, Mr. Morgan, the father, and little Hue strolling through a flowery meadow.  But we know that the meadow no longer exists; the slag heaps now have destroyed the valley.  (The movie, apparently, dilutes considerably the novel's pro-Union and socialist subject matter.)

The film is extremely beautiful and carefully constructed.  The set, a fish-hook shaped lane ascending a  hill on which a Golgotha of colliery works is silhouetted against the sky, is one of Hollywood's greatest creations -- the row-houses and the curving street are all beautifully depicted and the mine smoke against the sky lend a dramatic aspect to the vista.  The row-houses all have their own small yards, enclosed by white picket fences shown in perspective.  The visual aspect of the film often invokes D. W. Griffith -- pictorial space is clearly defined, rhyming shots establish place, usually in tableaux from the same perspective, and the interiors are all spacious, luminous with light, each household item where it is supposed to be, often outlined (or underlined) by shadow. (The impression that Griffith underlies many of the epic shots is strengthened by the fact that the father is played by Donald Crisp, a stalwart in the Old Master's movies -- he played the vicious brute "Battling Burrows" who beats Lillian Gish to death in the 1919 Broken Blossoms.) Everything in the picture is clean and tidy.  The platoons of coal-blackened men trudging along the lanes are like the workers in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, automatons in an industrial army.  There are innumerable pictorial effects -- for instance, when the daughter is unhappily married to the rich man's son, she wears a long white veil that balloons out above and behind her like baroque wings.  Everyone is always singing.  When the town's choir is invited to sing for the Queen, we see the men standing on stone risers, performing a chorale while the camera tracks discreetly to the side, showing the last two adult sons leaving town to go abroad, shadowy figures vanishing down the gloomy street.  A woman who has had an illegitimate child is accused by the hypocritical church deacon whose trembling, pointing figure is shot in huge close-up at the center of the screen.  In some scenes involving the strike and labor unrest, Ford imitates Eisenstein, showing us friezes of marching men, tilted upward by the sharp ascent to the colliery on the hilltop.  Music of all sorts abounds-- the narrator in his voice-over tells us that "song was in the hearts of the people like sight is in their eyes."  It's a spectacularly beautiful movie, exquisitely shot and imagined.  And it's certainly "adult" in ways more challenging and alien than many contemporary movies.  The viewer expects that the beautiful daughter will somehow be reunited with her lost love, Mr. Griffiths.  But this doesn't happen.  Griffiths gives a bitter speech about the small-mindedness and bigotry in the village, accuses himself of having failed to teach anyone the gospel, and, then, departs forever.  Presumably, the daughter will live out the remainder of her life, embittered and solitary, trapped in the big white house on the hill.  The lyric tone of the film -- it is intensely poetic -- doesn't match the parade of horrors that we have been shown.   

Helen of Troy

 Strangely bland and uninteresting, Robert Wise's Helen of Troy (1956) has some good ingredients but they are combined in a way that makes the whole far less than the sum of its parts.  You can count the compelling shots on one hand -- there's a fine image of the Trojan horse amidst smoke, fire, and orange-black chiaroscuro; a couple of pictures of triremes plying the deep are memorable; there's an odd landscape near the beginning of the movie comprised of low cliffs topped with strange-shaped bulbous trees, and, in one love scene, the blonde sleek heads of Paris and Helen rotate mechanically about the pivot of their lips creating an interesting and metallic effect of gold on gold.  The sets are imposing although the matte work is pretty evident -- you can guess where the seam between the fortified city painted on glass and the actual photographic image. combine.  Some chariot sequences, filmed with unwieldy-looking bronze carts, are marred by terrible rear-projection.  The acting is uniformly wooden.  Helen, played by the Italian glamor girl Rosana Podesta, didn't speak any English and so she recites her lines mechanically -- she learned the part phonetically.  The script is middle brow and, therefore, doesn't really appeal to anyone.  The film isn't tawdry, but rather staid and solemn (it comes equipped with an eight minute overture by Max Steiner played to the accompaniment of a painted image of Doric columns and some sort of strange stanchion -- Steiner's music sounds like a mixture of Rachmaninoff and Debussy; it's okay but not memorable.)  The movie's script also falls between stools -- at times, the picture is sophisticated, requiring a working knowledge of Homer's Iliad and parts of the Odyssey; there are several allusions even to the thesis that Helen never went to Troy and that it was her eidolon (or "image") that stirred up all the trouble in the Eastern Mediterranean.  The movie depicts the Homeric-era Greeks as freebooters and pirates, a realistic approach to this material -- Odysseus in particular is little more than a vicious pirate as portrayed in the Odyssey  But this material subverts other aspects of the epic.  We are supposed to admire Paris, the Trojan responsible Helen's abduction, but this also cuts against the grain of the Iliad which is primarily about Greek (Achaian) heroes.  Most of the time, the characters speak in a sort of fortune-cookie diction, uttering quasi-poetic aphorisms -- the dialogue is too "poetic" for the popcorn crowd and too vulgar for those who know the source material.  The substance of the plot, an extra-marital love affair with tumultuous results, is pretty racy for 1955, and so has to be denatured into a series of winks and nods -- the adultery between Paris and Helen of Sparta is portrayed as basically accidental.  No one really has any culpability here.  This approach to the story could be managed if the gods were admitted into the epic.  But the gods, who in Homer control everything and even insert their thoughts into the minds the characters, are completely excluded from the narrative.  Thus, the defense that "some god" made me do this act -- a motif ubiquitous in Homer doesn't appear even by implication in this stolid and unimaginative rendition of the story.  

The movie starts in Troy, visualized as big city something on the model of Babylon in Griffith's Intolerance -- it has huge walls that are sixty feet high, vast temples and palaces, and acres of ornate buildings (painted on the camera-lens glass).  (I've been to Troy -- it's a couple of acres of knee-high ruins and broken crockery on a wind-swept bluff-top; I can't imagine the place ever looking like the images in the movie but this is probably a defect in my understanding.)  Paris is a devotee to the goddess Aphrodite; strangely enough, Pallas Athena is depicted as a scowling, witch-like war goddess -- something that seriously falsifies the Homeric text.  (We see Paris mooning about in city council chambers decorated with triple life-size monochrome statues of Aphrodite and Athena -- real Hellenic statues, of course, were polychrome with painted pink flesh and gemstone eyes.)  The backstory is weird but no doubt based on one of the lesser-known Homeric hymns.  The Greeks destroyed Troy once but it has been rebuilt into something called "New Troy".  Paris leads a delegation of Trojans to Menelaus' Sparta in an effort to establish a treaty with the Greek principalities -- the Greeks have been engaged in piracy on the high seas.  A tempest at sea intervenes and only Paris survives, washing up on shore like Odysseus in the Nausicaa episode in the Odyssey.  He is found by Helen, unhappily married to the belligerent Menelaus, and Helen's slave, Andraste (played by a young, winsome and innocent-looking Brigitte Bardot -- here she is a healthy strapping maiden ten years before her ascent into international stardom as a rather depraved-looking sex symbol).  Paris and Helen fall in love.  The Spartans catch them in a tryst and the couple have to escape by jumping off a sea-cliff and, then, being rescued by Phoenicians while the Greeks haplessly shoot arrows at them.  Helen wants to go to an idyllic island called Pelasgius as a sort of romantic retreat but the dutiful Paris has to go home to Troy -- so Helen agrees to accompany him.  Helen is, as they say, "liked but not well-liked" in Troy and her reputation suffers further when the Greeks appear in the  harbor with a thousand ships -- this is a pretty effective shot.  There's a big initial battle in which the Greeks are repelled although they do briefly breach the city -- this is the movie's big battle scene involving seventy-foot high ladders, lots of fire, and burning siege towers.  Everyone settles in for the ten-year duration of the war.  We are shown little snippets of the Iliad:  Achilles wrath at being denied Brisius, the captive slave, some skirmishes and, finally, Achilles dispatching Hector after the death of Patroclus; Achilles drags Hector's corpse around in some tight circles in front of the horrified Trojans.  By this point, Helen has been accepted as a citizen of the city.  Odysseus contrives the plot to sack the city using the Trojan horse.  (Helen says "beware Greeks bearing gifts" and Cassandra bleats out some sinister oracles.)  The Trojans drag the big wooden horse into the city and, then, have a giant orgy, complete with girls squirting wine into the mouths of their lovers, all this activity taking place right under the belly of the horse.  When the Trojans are all hungover, the ungentlemanly Greeks emerge, slaughter the bemused and mostly naked Trojans and yank open their city gates.  Ten-thousand Greeks storm into the citadel and kill everyone.  At the end of the movie, poor Helen is shipboard with her doughty, dim-witted husband Menelaus, heading back to Sparta.  Paris has been lanced in the back and, after some tender kissing, lies dead in the streets of the ruined city.  In a voice-over, we hear Helen bemoaning her fate but remarking that Paris will always be with her -- at least in her thoughts -- and that they will be re-united after death in Elysium.  

Robert Wise, after a strong start (he edited The Magnificent Ambersons and directed several brilliant films produced by Val Lewton during World War Two) had the singular skill of making everything that he touched dull.  He would have sank West Side Story except for Leonard Bernstein's score and managed to wreck The Sound of Music, also a picture with a fantastic musical soundtrack.)  The  1956 film is shot in big scale Cinemascope but Wise has no idea how to position the camera or use the broad aspect ratio -- the images are almost completely inert.  In the big battle scenes, Wise wants to show the audience the money and so he keeps the camera a long way from the action to capture huge masses of men and chariots swarming across the screen.  These shots are uninteresting, however, because Wise doesn't know how to insert details into the action -- it all looks remote and antiseptic.  Homer's epics are claustrophobic -- most scenes involve two or three participants in a sort of god-lit glowing enclosed space.  Even Homer's big action scenes have the effect of intimacy -- we see a few people in action but the rest of the image is empty or shown in close focus.  (This is a result of Homer's famous enargia, that is, his immediacy which as Erich Auerbach noted casts everything into the foreground.)  Wise' s approach is the opposite -- everything seems a long way from the camera.  Helen is attractive but not sexually imposing -- she's pretty and her clothes fit her well, but she doesn't have any particular charisma; simply put, she's no Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor (or, for that matter, Brigitte Bardot); Paris, played by Jacques Sernas has a oddly shaped head -- it's a sort of truncated triangle, huge at the top but bending inward to his rock-hewn square jaw. He looks pretty ridiculous and the love scenes between the couple have a automated effect; they are robotic and risible.    

MIA: Gordon Parks and Ella

 I traveled to the Minneapolis Institute of Art but found that there were no ticketed shows.  Works from the collection, of course, comprise the vast majority of things on display and, so, I just walked around at random for an hour, exploring parts of the museum not familiar to me.  Unlike the Walker Art Center, where much of the art is intentionally ugly and confrontational in a superficial way, the objects assembled for viewing at the MIA are mostly beautiful with interesting and complex histories and, so, the place is ideal for browsing.  You will almost always find something to delight you.

In a gallery that I haven't entered for years, small figurative paintings from Persian are displayed, most illuminated books particularly images culled from The Book of Kings (Shahnemah).  Much Islamic art is abstract or calligraphic, limited by religious prohibitions on graven images.  But the Persians seem to ignored those restrictions and created many lively, brightly painted images, small format illustrations to books.  A tiny work of genius, "Two Drunkards", was made in the Sefavid era (about 1600).  The image, displaying extraordinary draftsmanship, shows two elegantly clad men in a garden represented by faintly limned flowers, more like shapely brownish stains than actual vegetation.  The men look alert, although one of them seems to have fallen, but the title of the work is "Two Drunkards."  The older upright man reaches down to lift his fallen comrade.  Both have knotted turbans over their handsome faces and the upright figure sports a black smudge of sfumato beard.  The men carry little daggers on their hips and their fingers and hands are exquisitely diagrammed by the ink used to outline them -- this is ultra-stylish calligraphy transformed  into an image and the black and grey and brown-blotched picture (leaves in the garden) is a masterpiece.  The drawing is decisive, expressing the figures in what appears to be a continuous perfect line showing no trace of hesitation or pentimenti.  I don't recall seeing this picture before but its the sort of thing that transfigures your entire day once you have spent some time with it.  (The image probably has something to do with the Sufi sect of Islam, a mystical order of dervishes who celebrated their love of God with ecstatic whirling dance -- equated here, I think, with drunken revelry.)

A show of photographs by Gordon Parks comprises a photo-essay made in 1942 about a Federal janitorial worker in Washington D. C., Ella Watson.  The images are black-and-white and very lucidly composed.  Watson was a charwoman who worked evenings cleaning federal offices.  During the day, she cared for three small children and a teenage girl who shyly peeps around corners or is glimpsed in mirror in several of the photographs -- the adolescent was probably too self-conscious to allow Parks to take her picture.  Parks' celebrates Watson's dignity, her apparent selflessness, and piety -- she was a deaconess is a "Spiritualist" church, the Verbrycke Spiritual Church in her neighborhood.  In some images, we see her with head bowed in church wearing a simple black frock and a silver cross pinned to her shoulder.  She cooks for the children, reads them Bible stories, and bathes them in Park's luminous images.  In several pictures, she works in federal offices wielding a mop and broom.  In the most famous and charismatic of these pictures, she stands gazing out at us in front of a big American flag, holding her mop and broom as if they were weapons of war.  Parks invokes the WPA-style murals painted in the preceding decade featuring farmers and laborers as heroes and Ella Watson, who looks dour and unsmiling, is celebrated in his pictures as a proletarian champion, a heroine of courage, faith, and steadfastness. (The show is called "American Gothic" since Parks imagined his frontal portrait of Watson as a commentary on the famous "American Gothic" painting by Grant Wood.)  Watson is not conventionally attractive but the photographs make her look highly intelligent and, despite her slender, willowy frame, powerful -- it's impossible to figure out how old she might be in these pictures.  Parks later worked as chief photographers for Life magazine and he pioneered the form of the visual essay -- the genre to which these pictures belongs.  (Parks lived for part of his life in St. Paul and, in his later years, made movies, most notably, The Learning Tree and the influential crime film Shaft -- one of the first, and most notorious, Blaxploitation films.)  A haunting image in the show pictures Ella Watson at church wearing cross lapel pin and a necklace (no doubt a religious charm) next to a sort of terrarium in which a foot-long naked saint rests on his side surrounded by plush curtains.  Lettering on the wall tells us that this is "Joseph's New Tomb"; on the wall above the aquarium-shrine, a framed photograph shows the pastor of the church preaching to his flock.  It's a very strange, impressive, and mysterious image.  I liked this show and recommend it when you have some other business at the MIA and, also, urge you to seek out the little picture of the two Sufi drunkards.  (The drunkards are in Room 207 I believe, the last room on the right side of the big hallway leading to the ticketed exhibitions in the Target Galleries; the Parks show will be on display until mid-June 2024.)

The Elixir of Love (Minnesota Opera)

 It's a common critique directed at opera:  the singing, costumes, and sets are all magnificent but the show's plot is idiotic.  Although this isn't always true there's enough truth to this proposition for the sentiment to be common.  No one can doubt the brilliance of Mozart's Magic Flute, but does anyone really understand the work's libretto with its tortured reversals, ordeals, and Masonic symbolism?  A refreshing example of an opera with a brilliantly ingenious and well-crafted libretto is Gaetano Donizetti's The Elixir of Love (1832).  The Minnesota Opera company's production of this show that I saw on February 3, 2024 skillfully exploited Donizetti's admirably plotted story for all of its comedy and romance, presenting an infectiously compelling, funny, and, even, profound experience for the audience.  There's an archetypal aspect to the show -- Donizetti's characters are stereotypes, cliches, but they behave in ways that make sense within the framework of the plot.  For instance, the heroine, Adina, is first seen reading from a love scene in a volume about Tristan and Isolde, a story that revolves around a fatal love potion.  Although no one really believes in love potions -- these elixirs have a mythical aspect -- the characters exist in a world in which, at least, such ideas still exist, although, perhaps, in debased form.  And, even, today people still believe in proud and haughty maidens, too self-sufficient to submit to the folly of love, ardent suitors whose very neediness repels their objects of affection, the allure of wealth  and the depredations of predatory seducers -- all of these aspects of human life remain current and are portrayed in Donizetti's opera in a way that makes its issues and problems intensely relevant to those watching the show, now almost 200 years after it premiered.  

A farm boy named Nemorino admires the beautiful and arrogant Adina.  She's clearly beyond Nemorino's caste and physical attributes -- the Minnesota Opera production portrays Nemorino as a burly, clodhopper wearing blue-jean coveralls.  By contrast, Adina clad in a stylish white blouse and jodhpur pants, a sort of equestrienne costume, lords it over a host of suitors.  Adina likes Nemorino enough to taunt him and, no doubt, feels a faintly sexual frisson in teasing him -- but it's a love that's doomed to be unrequited.  In fact, Adina boasts that she takes a different lover every day so as not to be come bored with legions of men who desire her.  A quack doctor appears in town with his sidekick, the driver of the jalopy on which he enters.  (The producers of the Minnesota Opera company have imagined the plot as taking place in southern California around 1916 -- the set is an attractive Spanish revival palazzo with terraces and mission-style arches and the grounds are luminous with dark green trees heavy with brilliant oranges; everyone is always carting around crates of oranges.)  The quack doctor sells the opera's colorful chorus0members patent medicines good for killing bed bugs but, also for curing acne, heart palpitations, and other ailments.  A bottle of rot-gut Bordeaux wine with some oranges squeezed into it is all that remains after the chorus members depart with their own bottles of snake oil.  The quack convinces Nemorino that this last bottle contains the elixir of love and that, if he consumes it, women will find him irresistable -- the only problem is that it takes the elixir twenty-four hours to become efficacious (enough time for the quack to escape town before his customers discover that they have been defrauded.)  A boastful military officer, a stock figure in opera, the miles glorioso, named Belcore seduces Adina who decides to humiliate Nemorino by marrying the soldier.  She calls for a notary public to draw up a marriage contract, presumably because she finds Belcore attractive but, also, more importantly, so that she continue to torment the poor farm boy -- there's something unseemly and perverse about the sadistic, and ill-disguised pleasure that she takes in teasing Nemorino.  But to her dismay, Nemorino, now convinced that he will soon be utterly and irremediably seductive to her, is now completely indifferent to her blandishments.  He's just biding his time before the potion makes him irresistable.  

After the intermission, Belcore and Adina are hosting a feast to celebrate their betrothal.  Nemorino who is now convinced that he can't but succeed erotically with Adina  (due to the elixir) stays away from the party.  A chorus of gossiping women reveal that Nemorino's wealthy uncle has died -- thus bestowing upon Nemorino a fortune of several millions.  (Nemorino remains unaware of his uncle's death).  Suddenly, all the women in town begin to ardently pursue Nemorino since money, of course, is one of the truest of the true elixirs of love.  Nemorino takes these women's interest in him as evidence that, of course, the elixir of love is now fully operative -- although he has also rushed matters (out of concern about Adina's  imminent nuptials with the vain and boastful soldier) by purchasing yet another bottle of the elixir, claimed to be doubly potent and quicker acting. To buy this magical potion, the penniless Nemorino (as he thinks) has sold himself into the army for the recruiting price of 20 dollars.  Belcore, the nasty military officer, is enthused -- not only will he enjoy Adina's charms but, also, has the pleasure of removing his rival, Nemorino, from the picture by forcing him into the army.  Adina realizes that Nemorino has a noble heart and has remained loyal to her, notwithstanding the hordes of local girls now chasing him for the fortune that he is not yet aware that he possesses.  Adina, nothing if not confident, proclaims that her beauty and "tender glances" will be enough to enthrall Nemorino and, so, she buys out his contract with Belcore, in effect, purchasing the farm boy for herself. Nemorino, who is still madly in love with Adina (and drunk to boot) sings a famous aria about his perception that his beloved now requites his affection -- "A furtive tear."  Adina and Nemorino are united, the vain and boastful soldier departs for a "thousand other women" whom he intends to conquer, and the quack patent medicine peddler, who has concluded that the oranges squeezed into the Bordeaux have given the potion real efficacy, says adieux and leaves town as a kind of hero carrying crates of fruit on his jalopy.

All of this is performed at lightning speed accompanied by engaging music that is tuneful and vivid -- there are military marches, dance numbers, wildly flamboyant patters songs that have the flavor of two-hundred year old rap music with lyrics dissolving into wild cascades of rhyming syllables  The chorus is on-stage for most of the show, engaged in various gallops ala Rossini, in which the music seems to accelerate into a frenzied, insistent, and rhythmic pulse -- the effect is not achieved by really significantly speeding up the tempo but rather by increasing the volume of the singing and music.  There are duets, trios, a bacarole, and many scenes in which the chorus sings to a metronome-like beat providing a sort of continuo ornamented by woodwinds and floral outbursts by the mezzo-soprano.  The entire spectacle is pervaded by a Italian sprezzatura -- that is, a bright, sparkling elan that takes pleasure in its spirited and glittering superficiality,  But the opera has some important things to say about love:  an overly needy and persistent lover's importuning is generally unsuccessful -- indifference attracts women more than pleading.  Money is, at least, one of the true elixirs of love; equally important is the interest that other women show in the object of affection -- as soon as Nemorino is pursued by most of the eligible girls in town, Adina becomes convinced that she must win him for herself.  Pride is the enemy of love.  But, also, some degree of pride, at least confidence in one's own charm and sexual attractiveness and, of course, self-esteem, is also necessary to succeed at romance.  Of course, the elixir is efficacious only when it is fervently believed in -- in erotic affairs, mind influences matter; the soul must be convinced before the body is willing.  The quack doctor's side-kick, a handsome woman who acts the role of harlequin, the commedia dell' arte character, is instrumental to the opera and provides an amusing mocking counterpoint to show's love themes.  Whenever, Nemorino anxious for any another dose of love potion approaches the doctor and his assistant and startles them they throw their arms in the air, expecting to be arrested;  "Don't shoot," their gestures proclaim.  Donizetti composed this marvelous work in six weeks.  It is said that once a wealthy paramour paid off Donizetti's military contract to seduce him.  The poor composer died of tertiary syphilis in 1848 when he was 51 and had been demented for three years -- spirochetes that he passed on to his wife and children killed them all.  

The Winter Carnival was in full spate on the night I attended the opera at the Ordway in St. Paul.  Rice Park was full of people and fire trucks, the vehicles usually occupied by the Vulcans with the soot-blackened cheeks and foreheads, were parked alongside the curb where men sprayed huge gouts of fire into the air from furnaces used to loft hot-air balloons in the air. The plumes of fire hissed melodramatically and ascended thirty feet in the air.   All the trees in the park were garnished with strings of fairy lights and crowds blocked the roadways waving lighted wands and hoops in air.  On the street corner. a preacher stood on some sort of rickety platform screaming at passers-by, flanked by a half-dozen somber confused-looking teenagers bearing anti-homosexual signs and gruesome images of aborted fetuses.  The air smelled wet, like Spring, and the last tincture of sunset shone ever the bluffs beyond the High Bridge.  Sirens sounded and revelers stormed here and there and, at every intersection, barricades and police lights were whirling in the grim, grey canyons between buildings.    

The Mask of Fu Manchu

 Fu Manchu, who is a doctor of philosophy (Oxford), science (Cambridge) and medicine (Harvard), plans to acquire the death-mask and sword of Genghis Khan.  Armed with these accessories, he will lead a yellow horde who will wipe out the White man and enslave their women.  Curiously, Fu Manchu's henchmen are all giant, mostly naked Black men who are very photogenic when they kidnap writhing blonde women in lingerie.  MGM's 1932 horror film, The Mask of Fu Manchu (Charles Brabin) sounds like kinky, disreputable fun -- after all, it stars Boris Karloff as the Oriental Menace.  But the movie is stiff, poorly plotted, and soporific despite its modest 68 minute running time.  It would be fun to report that this film is some kind of masterpiece maudit disregarded by polite society because of its wildly offensive racism.  But this simply isn't the case -- the picture is close to being unwatchable.

Some archaeologists from the British Museum (really just looters in safari gear) believe they have found the Khan's grave on the edges of the Gobi desert.  They are aware that Dr. Fu Manchu lusts after the grave-goods which he believes can be used to foment a rebellion against the White Devils. On the way out of a secret explorers meeting in the British Museum, a Malaysian thug creeps out of an Egyptian sarcophagus and kidnaps one of the archaeologists.  The poor bloke is spirited away to Fu Manchu's palace, a place that has no exterior (it's all shadowy corridors, torture chambers, and altars on which to sacrifice lissome Caucasian women).  The captive is subjected to the Torture of the Gong to make him reveal the location of the grave of the Khan.  (The Torture of the Gong involves tying the victim under a huge bell, ringing the bell incessantly to "liquefy the ear drums and magnify all sounds until they are unendurable -- or something like that.  Now and then, Fu Manchu appears to taunt the starving gong-mad victim with grapes or provide him salt water to drink to exacerbate his thirst.  The gong torture seems to be just as much an affliction on those perpetrating the atrocity as the victim.  Doe Fu Manchu have sound-proof chambers in his vast palace?)  While the Gong Torture is underway, the scientists are busily digging a big hole, also on some sound set -- the movie has no exterior shots except a couple file images of a sunset, a ship at sea, and London in the fog.  The archaeologists bust into the tomb of the Khan, lowering a host of explorers down into the crypt where they force apart several ornate double doors to find the corpse of Genghis Khan wearing a mask, holding a sword, and enclosed in elaborate armor. (When they remove the death mask, a big spider is crawling around in the Khan's eye-socket)  The guy undergoing Gong Torture dies, I think -- although I drifted off to sleep during this part of the movie.  Fu Manchu uses his Black giants to abduct Sheila the daughter of the hapless Gong Torture victim.  Pretty soon, all the archaeologists are trapped in Fu Manchu's labyrinthine palace where they are subjected to various kinds of elaborate and ridiculous tortures.  One elderly gent is poised over a pit full  of snapping, aggressive crocodiles -- this character is played by Lewis Stone, the fellow who impersonated Andy Hardy's father, the Judge, in the later Mickey Rooney comedies.  Another guy who speaks in a German accent (or, even, in German) -- this is Jean Hersholt -- finds himself in a chamber with razor sharp spikes slowly advancing to impale him.  Sheila's boyfriend, who has been subjected to The Whips (pretty much what it sounds like) now is in the thrall of the scrawny Myrna Loy playing Fu Manchu's sadistic and nymphomaniacal daughter -- she is, as Karloff bellows, "my ugly and magnificent daughter".  Sheila is being sacrificed to a mob of Black and Asian extras in a dark room when Tony comes to his senses, wields a Tesla coil death-ray and electrocutes all of the bad guys.  The movie is so negligent it doesn't even accord Dr. Fu Manchu with a spectacular demise -- I can't recall what happens to him.  In the last scene, everyone is going home from the Gobi desert on a steamer and the Brits have the mask and sword of Fu Manchu for their collections at the Museum.  

Karloff is unrecognizable under heavy make-up that turns his eyes into black slits and otherwise distorts his features. He shouts and threatens in his exquisite accent but isn't even remotely frightening. Myrna Loy is likewise disfigured and inconsequential.  Sheila wears a form-fitting pre-Code slip that shows off her figure impressively.  The special effects, mostly involving discharges from Tesla coils, are risible.  There is one incredibly impressive shot:  this is an image about ten minutes into the film introducing Fu Manchu.  The villain stands with his face magnified and horribly distorted by some sort of convex mirror next to his head, tinkering with a machine that produces sudden vivid bolts of artificial lightning.  Find this shot on your DVD or stream, watch it and, then, ignore the rest of this movie.  Probably, the picture raises interesting critical questions as to how the filmmakers managed to convert the spectacularly lurid scenario into something so unbearably dull.  But to accomplish this the critic could need to formulate a theory about boredom and, then, apply it to this movie and that task would be dull in and of itself.  

Love me Tonight

 Film historians credit Rouben Mamoulian's 1932 musical Love me Tonight with revolutionizing the movie musical.  Of course, musicals were a form inapposite to silent pictures and, so, Mamoulian's innovative picture invents the genre.  As a stylized type of theater, the musical had to be opened-up as it were, expanded beyond the proscenium arch, in its adaptation to cinema.  Indeed, musicals often make this process thematic:  Singin' in the Rain, for instance, is all about innovations transcending the boundaries of an art form -- early sound film's limitations are overcome by dubbing and the climactic dance and ballet sequence, "The Broadway Melody" begins in a theater and, then, expands into a cinematic universe completely incommensurate with the spatial restrictions of the four walls of a playhouse.  The Band Wagon similarly uses a ballet number, "The Girl Hunt" to smash through theatrical space and develop motion expanding through variously incongruously vast and varied locations.  (Of course, the ballet invoking different Impressionist painters in An American in Paris takes the same form.)  All of this seem to have been invented in Mamoulian's picture, a film that shatters the concept of the stage-bound musical.  From the first sequence, a "city symphony" at dawn in Paris in which various naturally occurring sounds, emanating from disparate locations, combine into a rhythmic pulse (pounding, sweeping, beating carpets, sawing wood and snoring all conceived as percussion) that, then, accompanies rhymed patter and, later, song lyrics, Love me Tonight bursts out of theatrical strictures and, even, when indoors invokes a sort of boundless and fantastic spectacle.  The film is dated, of course -- it will be a hundred years old soon -- and the acting is highly stylized and, often, somewhat grotesque.  Jeanette MacDonald, the leading lady, doesn't sing so much as warble and her operetta-like arias are alien to modern taste (and, probably, would have seemed archaic to most viewers by the mid-thirties), but the picture is wildly inventive and worth seeing. In my view, the films most similar to Love me Tonight from its era are the malicious and surreal cartoons by early Disney and the Fleischer brothers -- those animated features have the same bouncy elan and unexpected imagery with which Mamoulian invests this film.

The film's plot is so slender as to be non-existent.  A jaunty Parisian tailor, a sort of Boulevardier, played by Maurice Chevalier (and called "Maurice" in the picture) leaves Paris to collect a debt owed to him by a French nobleman.  The nobleman lives with his pompous uncle, a prince, in a comically enormous castle -- it has a stairway that seems to lead literally to heaven and characters dash up and down the endless steps as a repeated motif in the film.  A melancholy, sexually frustrated princess lives in the castle. (Jeanette MacDonald as "Jeanette"). Maurice pretends to be a Baron so as not to embarrass the penniless nobleman who has fled to the castle to avoid paying his debts.  (Maurice is owed 64,000 francs for dozens of suits that he has made for the caddish nobleman; and his subcontractors, a shirt-maker, bootmaker, and milliner are owed equally huge sums.)  On the way to the castle, Maurice's car breaks down and he encounters the princess Jeanette riding like a Greek goddess in a sort of chariot.  It's love at first sight, although Jeanette initially rebuffs Maurice's overtures.  At the castle, the nobility orchestrate a stag hunt, complete with a hundred dogs, a whole herd of horses, and an equestrian band with elaborate hunting horns.  Maurice, of course, knows nothing about horsemanship.  But he boldly rides a fierce bucking bronco assigned to him (presumably for humiliation) called "Solitude".  Solitude is so-named because he "always returns from the hunt alone" -- that is, having rid himself of his inconvenient rider.  Maurice somehow subdues Solitude sufficiently to chase the stage into a hunting lodge.  The stag is a beast right out of a Fleischer cartoon; the petite animals with huge eyes hops like a bunny and dances like a chorine.  Jeanette and Maurice are alone in hunting lodge and the tailor kisses the princess.  She resists at first but, then, succumbs to the tailor's charms and they seem to spend the night together -- the film is a pre-code picture in which all the dialogue is double entendre of the most bawdy kind.  However, the movie shows the couple chastely snoozing in separate beds as they sing a love duet on the soundtrack (the titular "Love me Tonight".)  In the morning, it's revealed that the supposed baron is merely a tailor and he is booted out of the household -- even the butlers and serving women are filmed from below so as to seem to tower over the poor tradesman.  Maurice departs in disgrace, leaving the castle and its village on a steam locomotive.  Jeanette, however, is still in love with him and she hops on her steed and races the train in a sequence of staple to a hundred silent movies.  (Mamoulian stages the sequence with big dreamy close-ups superimposed over racing wheels and steam gushing out of the train's smoke-stack -- it's a very strange and irrational sequence with surrealist overtones.)  Jeanette gets in front of the train, installs herself in the middle of the tracks in defiance of the engine hurtling toward her and the locomotive stops so that the happy couple, united again can embrace in foamy white clouds of steam.   The movie has a number of inventive sequences:  at the start, the penniless nobleman and con man, fleeing an aggrieved husband, has to join a footrace of skinny-clad runners; he's wearing his "BVDs", a word used often in the movie's lyrics for its rhyming potential.  (BVD refers to a then-popular brand of men's underwear.) The nobleman hides out in Maurice's tailor shop where the hero provides him with a stylish suit so that he can escape the wrath of his lover's husband.  Three dowagers in the castle form a clucking, gobbling chorus commenting on the action -- they are filmed alternatively as the witches in Macbeth (intoning imprecations and casting vast scary shadows) or as grotesque cackling hens.  The movie features women who seem to be almost naked -- they wear slinky lingerie that leaves nothing to the imagination.  There are two scenes involving men undressing Jeanette MacDonald -- in the first, the actress is stripped by a doctor who diagnoses her fainting fits as sexual hysteria (she was married at 16 to a 72 year old nobleman who has died and has been a widow for three years at age 22 when she and Maurice begin their love affair; the movie assumes that she needs sexual intercourse to be cured from her episodes of syncope.)  Myrna Loy, as a sexually voracious cousin, slouches about half-dressed as well.  At the film's climax, the tailor, still impersonating a Baron, comments on Jeanette's ill-fitting equestrienne garments, peels them off of her, and, then, lasciviously measures her bust and hips -- this episode results in the assembled nobility figuring out that he is a tailor and not a peer of the realm. 

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart wrote the clever songs and the film's rhyming patter.  The picture was written for the screen adapting a French play called "The Tailor at the Castle."  Even by pre-code standards, the movie was pretty raunchy and the studio cut eight minutes, mostly Myrna Loy's part, as too risque and featuring too much near nudity.  The movie is accounted a masterpiece, but it's performance style and operatic singing makes it a hard-sell for modern audiences -- it's a film that you have to be educated to enjoy.  I'm not sure if my tepid response to the picture is based on the fact that I watched the movie on You-Tube (where you can see it for free) in a perfectly legible, but a little bit blurry format.  Characteristic of the era, the movie has only a few close-ups but when they are deployed it is to maximum effect.  Mostly, the figures on screen seem slightly too distant from the camera but this is because the movie has been carefully designed to be seen in a movie theater, that is, as godlike figures towering over the audience on the "silver screen."  It's interesting that Jeanette MacDonald had a heart condition that caused her to frequently faint.