The Childhood of a Leader

 The Childhood of a Leader, a 2015 film directed by Brady Corbet, is an inexplicable chronicle of inexplicable events.  I have no idea what it is supposed to mean.  Sartre wrote a novella called "The Childhood of a Leader" intended to expose the psychological forces that induce anti-Semitism and Fascism.  There are no convincing correlations between Sartre's Bildungsroman, focusing intensely on the protagonist's latent homosexuality, and his admiration for various strong-man figures that he encounters in his adolescence.  Corbett's picture shows us a few events that occur when the hero is about ten years old with a tiny, if grandiose, epilogue depicting the character's manhood.  In the Corbett film, the youth has no friends, impulsively seeks a sexual encounter with a governess, and the story is devoid of any ideological content -- there is no trace of the anti-Jewish influences that motivate Sartre's 100 page novella.  So, we must begin with an understanding that knowing about the Sartre story, which shares a title with Corbett's picture, does nothing to enhance one's understanding of the movie.  The film, which is grim and rather dull, is, nonetheless, a work of art, carefully designed and beautifully lensed with an alarmingly sinister and bombastic musical score -- in some scenes, the score, sounding like a cross between Morricone and Shostakovich, rife with grotesque effects, actually seems to drive the action.  (The soundtrack was composed by Scott Walker, a musician who began as a teen pop icon and, then, evolved into an avant-garde post-punk composer; he died in 2019 at the age of 78 -- someone characterized  him as "Andy Williams turning into Stockhausen.) The picture has to be analyzed on its own terms.  In cases, where there's no interpretative help from genre or precursor works (the film closest to The Childhood of a Leader is Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol), we must begin by looking carefully at the evidence at hand.  

The Childhood of a Leader consists of an "Overture", three sections (:"Tantrums" 1 - 3), and a brief epilogue entitled "A New Era -- or Prescott the Bastard" -- I have no idea as to the identity of "Prescott", although I presume this is the name of the title character, now grown-up.  The three "tantrum" sections are about the same length -- probably about 30 minutes each.  The "Overture" begins with a self-referential "alienation effect":  we hear an orchestra tuning up, then, someone says something about getting to work, and the percussive and impressive musical overture follows.  A montage of documentary shots establishes that it is 1919, the Great War is over (we see some footage showing combat and starving children), and Woodrow Wilson has  come to France to great acclaim to negotiate a lasting peace.  Trains chug past ravaged battlegrounds and wrecked villages.  Wilson looks smug and confident.  Local peasants stand by the tracks holding signs that praise the American president.  In the first "tantrum", we see a group of children descending a stairs, shot through a window -- one of the children is a cherubic youth with long blonde hair wearing angel wings.  The camera comes inside the building that turns out to be a church and we see the children rehearsing in French a nativity pageant.  Afterward, the cherubic youth goes outside, collects stones (we hear them clinking in his fist) and, then, begins throwing the rocks at the people emerging from the church.  A man chases the boy who runs into a tree and is slightly injured.  The boy will not explain why he pitched the stones at the congregational members leaving the church.  At the  boy's home, we are introduced to his mother, a stunning woman with black-hair and a stern demeanor (she turns out to be a  German missionary's daughter).  The boy's father is playing billiards with a handsome young man named Charles, apparently a journalist.  The two men discuss how evil triumphs if good people aren't engaged to defeat bad forces in the world.  There is a question as to whether vengeance or forgiveness should be applied to the defeated Germans.  No one knows why the boy threw the stones and he refuses to answer questions about the incident.  The next day, he is taken to the Catholic priest and asked to apologize.  The lad refuses.  That night, the boy has a strange dream, apparently prescient of an unusual pompous building shown in the film's epilogue -- the dream features a dome with rotunda and eerily moving old man-lift elevators.  The boy wets the bed.  On the following Sunday, the priest preaches a homily suggesting forgiveness and reconciliation should guide the negotiations for the treaty in Versailles.  We know that the boy's father is the Assistant Secretary of State, an American advisor to Woodrow Wilson and that he is involved in the treaty negotiations in Paris, apparently close enough that  he can drive there after spending weekends with his family.  The father seems to favor a course of punishment in assessing reparations against the Germans.  After the church service, the boy has to stand next to the Priest and, as people shake hands with him, he is supposed to apologize.  Someone mistakes the boy for a girl and he is enraged -- but he does look like a beautiful young girl.  During the service, the children have presented the Christmas pageant.

In "Tantrum 2," an attractive governess is engaged to teach the boy French.  They read together a fable about a lion and a mouse.  The moral of the fable is that "Little Friends may prove Great Friends."  The governess is wearing a translucent white blouse through which the boy can see the woman's nipples.  The woman looks as if she could be his mother's twin sister.  Impulsively, the boy grabs at the governess' breast which offends her.  Then, it's Ash Wednesday and mother and son walk  in a spooky religious procession with people wearing long pointed black hoods.  (On the soundtrack, we hear someone incongruously crooning "I'm always chasing rainbows.")  The father plans for a secret meeting with his allies at the rural house -- they are conspiring against Wilson who has a more reconciliatory program for the peace.  A test of wills ensues between mother and son -- he refuses to eat supper, despising the French cuisine (which a maid verifies to be disgusting).  The  boy is locked in his room for refusing to eat.  But the maid, Mona, who has taken a maternal attachment to the boy (in lieu of his icy mother's affections) sneaks in food for him to eat.  The mother discovers this and fires the maid, Mona, despite her pleas.  Mona then vows to spend every waking hour "destroying your (the mother's) family."  The boy also refuses to see the governess but tells her to "return in three days."  The father's allies gather and vow to cut off coal to Germany.  One of the father's associates congratulates him on "having a beautiful little daughter."  This enrages our hero, the future leader, and he traipses about the house naked (presumably to reveal his actual sex).  Dad beats the kid and, maybe, injures the boy's arm.  He seems to have a seizure as he sprawls on the floor.  Dad tries to persuade mom to have sex with him but she has a migraine and refuses -- obviously, standard operating procedure for this marriage.  The boy again reads aloud the parable of the Lion and the Mouse, demonstrating his proficiency in French.  Mom pays off the governess (Ada is her name) and gives her some advice:  remain a teacher and never marry.

In "Tantrum 3", documentary footage shows us that the peace treaty has been signed.  There's a big party at the rural mansion where the family lives.  Charles, from the first "Tantrum", is at the party.  Some critics see an implication that Charles is, or has been, the mother's lover and, further, the protagonist may, in fact, be his son.  There's no doubt that something odd is going on between the boy's parents and the handsome Charles (he is a widower whose wife, also a journalist was killed at the Front), but nothing is ever dramatized or even implicitly presented to explain the situation.  (In fact, Charles seems to have a girlfriend at the party.)  The boy goes outside and picks up a bunch of stones (they click together in his fist).  At the party, the boy demands to sit among the adults.  When his mother asks him to lead the assembled diplomats in a prayer, he refuses and, then, shouts "I don't believe in praying any more."  He repeats this with increasing agitation.  When his mother confronts him, he bashes her on the forehead with a big stone and knocks her out (or she swoons).  Dad chases our hero, catches him at the top of the stairs, where he seems to have a seizure.  (The seizure is shot from a bizarre overhead camera angle that tilts the action of people running up the stairs to where the boy is lying so that they move upside-down.)  

An epilogue follows.  Some ministers are meeting in a weird official building with man-lifts, dark corridors and a rotunda above a third or fourth floor space.  (We have seen this building and the circular rotunda before in the nightmare that the boy experienced that caused him to wet the bed -- this scary sequence, involving vistas on remote monuments and strange untenanted corridors with the manlifts continuously gliding up and down occurs in the first "Tantrum" scene.)  Some nondescript officials in  boxy Soviet-style suits mumble some urgent gibberish -- it's all spoken in euphemistic circumlocutions.  The bureaucrats descend from the upper chamber under the rotunda and meet a huge, roaring crowd outside the elaborate structure.  Cops and soldiers are wearing hats decorated with red asterisk-shaped insignia, apparently the sign of the regime.  A procession of big sedans makes its way through the cheering mob.  Inside one of the cars is a man with a moustache and  shaved head, apparently the little boy now grown up (although there is nothing to really establish this).  The man gets out of the car while people shout and the camera rolls over and over again, spinning between sky and the crowd while the musical score builds to a percussive climax.  A small child cranes her neck in a strange way to look up into the heavens above the crowd.   

The picture is handsomely made, although gloomy.  The images have Rembrandt-style lighting, burnished and dark with amber glowing areas.  Shots are often quite long and, sometimes, action is filmed from idiosyncratic angles.  In several instances, the movie cuts from medium shots to extremely long shots, small figures lost in a big, sere landscape.  There is no sunlight for the first 30 minutes of the 115 minute movie -- the first bright exterior occurs at that point, showing the leprous-looking, vast, and decaying mansion.  Parts of the film are shot like a horror movie.  The bland and angelic protagonist who is continually mistaken for a  girl looks like other uncanny and demonic children in past movies, most notably like Damien in The Omen.  The film's impressive symphonic score underlines the action and, in many cases, seems to precede the movie's images and drive their organization and editing.

I have almost no idea what this impressive, if somewhat dull, movie is supposed to mean.  The first riddle is to decipher the relationship between the frame involving treaty and reparations negotiations with the defeated Germans.  I suppose this may have something to do with deterring aggression and, of course, a  theme in the picture is the boy's unmitigated and unmotivated aggressive conduct.  It's unclear how the twice repeated parable of the mouse and the lion is meaningful, although the text is afforded pride of place in the movie.  (Is this to suggest that the little boy is now a mouse but will grow up to be a lion?  If so, it's hard to track the parallels between the story and the action in the film.) Clearly, the child is friendless with a cold mother and a remote indifferent father.  The picture shows that the person he most loves and trusts in the world, Mona, is callously driven away from the household for caring for him -- but this is also ambiguous and its hard to know what to make of Mona's  threat that she will spend the rest of her days ceaselessly trying to destroy the family.  Some parts of the film are simply impossible to interpret or, even, really see clearly:  why does the epilogue begin with images of gears and machines that seem to be imprinting some kind of seal on documents?  Why are there no names used for major characters -- we don't find out that the boy is called "Prescott" until the last five minutes of the film. What are the ministers speaking about before the leader's arrival in the last section?  Does the protagonist suffer, like Julius Caesar, from the "falling sickness" or some kind of epilepsy?  Why is the film named after a celebrated novella by Sartre but, as far as I can see, completely different from  that story and its themes?   All of these things, and many others are riddles,  but I'm not sure it's worth working out answers to these questions -- or, if answers, even exist.  Most fundamentally, the story takes place in 1920 -- this means that the epilogue occurs around 1940 in what seems to be an middle European country?  Where is this supposed to be?  What is the country posited to be ruled by an American?  These questions are probably too literal-minded.  We first see the boy in a shadowy stairwell, descending with angel's wings on his shoulders.  Is he a supernatural figure, some kind of demonic angel of destruction and apocalypse?   

Dark Winds (Netflix TV series)

Dark Winds is neo-noir crime show that represents state of the art genre story-telling.  The program is diverting with fascinating characters and locations.  Production values are excellent and the acting is persuasive.  There's not much substance to the show, but it's entertaining and can be recommended.  Dark Winds is interesting in that demonstrates certain formulae and conventions that are effective mainstays of programs of this sort.  (Dark Winds can be seen in  two six-show series originally made for AM in 2022 and 2023.  As a result of this origin, episodes are about 48 minutes long and cut into 12 to 13 minutes block with fades signifying were commercials were originally inserted.  The show has picked up for a third season, now in production.)

Dark Winds is a police procedural detailing the efforts of its protagonist cops with respect to solving a several crimes.  Shows of this sort capitalize on unfamiliar settings that have an exotic appeal.  In this case, Dark Winds takes place on the 27,000 square mile Navajo Nation reservation in New Mexico, Arizona, and southern Utah.  This setting provides very picturesque locations in which the action plays-out -- sequences are shot in Monument Valley and scenic canyon country with towering buttes and colorful rock formations. (There are many spectacular night scenes with a psychedelic aura -- the buttes and cliffs glow in a turquoise aura under dark skies dense with stars.)  The show contains a lot of dialogue in Dine, the language spoken by the natives on reservation and the cultural folkways of the Navajo (Dine) people are exploited to full effect --  the show has an anthropological flavor featuring rituals, good and bad medicine, malign witches and the like.  As with many shows of this kind, supernatural agents and events are suggested, although, in most instances, the plot progresses toward establishing a naturalistic explanation for these things -- although often malign and criminal.  The door is kept open a crack with respect to supernatural intervention in the plot. The story-line is classically designed.  The presiding good cop (Joe Leaphorn) is confronted with a savage double-murder, possibly committed by supernaturals.  The FBI, who here appear as foes or antagonists to Leaphorn, are investigating a bank job in Gallup, New Mexico in which a helicopter carrying loot was last seen flying into Navajo country.  Of course, the two investigations will turn out to be related and Joe's detective work on the double murder will have implications that will draw him into the bank heist story.  

When a program is set in an exotic and unfamiliar milieu, the viewer needs a character who appears as a surrogate for the audience, someone who doesn't know the local customs and practices, and with whom the other actors can interact to explain what is going on and provide necessary plot exposition.  The role of newcomer is played by Jimmy Chee, a cop who is Navajo but new to the reservation -- he is the vehicle used for exposition in which other characters "fill him in" on necessary information. The protagonist in this kind of program must be either flawed or suffering from some past trauma that afflicts him emotionally and may cloud his judgement.  Joe Leaphorn, the main cop, has lost his son in an explosion that may or may not have been triggered by terrorists attempting to drive the mining industry off Navajo land.  The show is set in 1971 so that the cast can include hippies, damaged and violent Vietnam vets, and Navajo militants of the kind associated with the American Indian Movement (AIM).  Furthermore, the setting more than 50 years ago allows several things:  first, there's more overt racism against the Indians and more politically incorrect imagery (for instance wood carvings of cigar store Indians) available to the show than might be the case today -- although in  truth not much seems to have changed as to FBI, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), and racial  tensions shown in the program.  Second, the period setting in 1971 allows for a classic rock-and-roll soundtrack to enliven the proceedings.  Of course, there's a comely lady cop to provide love interest for Jimmy Chee, the handsome newcomer to the Rez.   

The cast is led by Zahn McClarnen (Joe Leaphorn).  McClarnen who has chiseled features and a dark complexion looks the way everyone, including Indians, imagines a brave and stoic native warrior would look.  His character is highly intelligent, intuitive, and married to a loving and supportive wife.  McClarnen has tremendous charism, looks spectacular, and he carries the show.  (McClarnen was indelible as Officer Big in the comedy Reservation Dogs.)  The other characters are also memorable including Noah Emmerich, an actor who specializes in playing corrupt FBI agents, and Rainn Wilson (formerly of The Office) who has a cameo in a couple episodes as Devoted Dave, a flamboyant hypocritical and corrupt used car dealer -- there's no enough of him in the show.  There are a half-dozen very good Indian actors in the show, all of them unfamiliar to me, but who provide a quirky and interesting cast of characters as well as local color -- we see the hogans in which the Navajo live, their flea markets and trading posts and are privy to their customs: a Navajo girl's coming of age ceremony (it involves sashes, much grinding of corn into meal, and long distance running) is prominently documented in a couple episodes.  The eccentric characters in the show and some of the subplots are similar in flavor to the Coen Brothers' crime films -- and the show also invokes (and looks a bit like) the FX series Fargo, the program in which I first saw Zahn McClarnen playing the scary Indian assassin Hanzee.  

Dark Winds has an impressive pedigree:  it's produced by George R. R. Martin (the author of The Game of Thrones) and Robert Redford and the program has an authentic vibe -- it's actually shot in the places where the action takes place.  Further, the show adapts crime novels by Tony Hillerman set on the Navajo Reservation (the so-called "Leaphorn and Chee" mysteries) and the story, although implausible in many respects, is well-plotted and compelling.  It's not padded and moves along a serviceable clip.  When your interest flags with the rather routine villains and gun fights and cop procedural details (autopsies and qualitative testing on water samples), the fascinating Navajo lore retains your interest.  It would be a mistake to make any claims that this series is anything more than an amusing, well-crafted detective show -- but that's sufficient in itself and I recommend the program.  

 

The Fountainhead

 King Vidor's The Fountainhead (1949) is a strident melodrama based on Ayn Rand's famous (and notorious) novel.  Rand wrote the script and the movie veers frantically between over-the-top sado-masochism and bizarre political posturing.  The whole enterprise is pretty much insane, full of whacky speeches that you might associate with an Ed Wood production.  For better or worse, this is a film about ideas and adheres scrupulously to the political philosophy that Rand promotes, a sort of radical "egotism" that seems derived from Nietzsche -- it's about the triumph of the Will, a melange of bodice-ripping rape fantasies with half-baked Nietzsche (and, in fairness to Rand one must note that the Nietzschean original, The Will to Power, was never fully cooked  in the first-place.)  The movie has a sort of crazy integrity -- it's not wishy-washy and it stands for something, that's for sure.  Rand's script doesn't compromise and Vidor's lavishly direction doesn't compromise either -- if anything, Vidor amplifies the madness implicit in Rand's text. But, it seems to me that the picture's politics are as insane as the film's narrative and bombastic mise-en-scene.  With it's weird sexual dynamics and a climax that is brazenly unrealistic (it's purely wish-fulfillment), the movie is bigger-than-life, operatic, wildly overwrought -- it feels very similar in its excesses to Vidor's 1946 epic Western, Duel in the Sun.  

Gary Cooper plays Howard Roark, an architect obviously modeled on Frank Lloyd Wright.  (His plans could be rejects from Wright's Taliesin designs.)  At first, we see Cooper's designs being rejected by several firms with which he is seeking employment.  After some speechifying about Truth and Integrity, Roark gets hired by a man who is meant to simulate Louis Sullivan, Wright's mentor and, with Dankmar Adler, his first employer.  Like Sullivan, Roark's boss is a drunk and wanders the streets in a delirium.  An evil media mogul, Wynand (played by Raymond Massey) is persecuting Roark's boss for his radical designs and his dictum that 'form follows function.'  Roark opens his own office but his tedious and argumentative "integrity" scare away clients.  And, in any event, Wynand's tabloid newspaper, The Banner delights in persecuting Roark --the real villain of the piece is a nasty architecture critic, a fancy-pants writer named Ellsworth Toohy.  (It will give you a sense for this picture's insane plot that the main story involves conflict between two architecture critics, a plucky girl named Dominique Frankon and the power-hungry Ellsworth Toohy.  Issues of beaux arts esthetics (the "bozart" as Mencken sardonically  called it) versus Roark's prairie-school modernism mirror, it seems, the clash between collectivism, with Bolshevik implications, and good old American individualism. The film posits a world in which mobs of people are whipped into a violent frenzy over whether a skyscraper stands on modernist stilts or has a classical facade at street-level -- in other words, the movie takes place in a fantasy-land as weird and remote from every day life as Oz is from Kansas.)  Wyand needs a designer for a skyscraper bank building.  He tempts Roark but the architect refuses to bow to his demands that the design incorporate classical or beaux arts elements.  Roark turns down all commissions that don't allow him complete autonomy.  In the context of the movie industry, The Fountainhead sometimes reads as a parable about the conflict between art and money that is central to moviemaking.  In these introductory sequences, Wynand's girl architecture critic praises Roark's work and yearns to meet him; Wynand is in love with the beautiful young woman who is herself the daughter of a sell-out architect -- a strange twist that adds an oedipal subtext to the perfervid proceedings.  Roark's uncompromising refusal to accommodate his clients results in the failure of his firm.  We next see him running a rock-drill in a vast, cubist quarry that just happens to be next door to the mansion where Dominique Frankon (Patricia Neal), the girl architecture critic, spends her time lounging around in silk pajamas and galloping about on her horse in dominatrix get-up wielding a riding crop.  Dominique has espied Roark manfully driving his iron drill through rock and fantasizes about the hunky laborer -- we see her face dissolving into shots of the rock-drill penetrating marble.  She tries to seduce Roark, but he's too proud to succumb to her blandishments.  Dominique, then, uses a fireplace poker to smash up the marble on her bedroom chimney, summoning Roark to her chambers and demanding that he fix the ruined stone.  She tries to rape him.  He rejects her again and, so, the next day, she rides to where the laborers are leaving the quarry and slashes Roark across the face with her riding crop -- cutting s big gash in Gary Cooper's cheek.  (This stuff has to be seen to be believed.)  Thwarted, Dominique hurries back to Manhattan where she accepts Wynand's standing offer of marriage -- although she tells the mogul directly that she doesn't love him.  Roark returns to Manhattan as well and gets a commission to build a gas station (presumably the famous Cloquet, Minnesota station designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) and, then, accepts, on his own terms, larger and larger projects until he has become famous.  Roark designs a big apartment called the Ellsworth House (it looks like a slender and finned radiator).  Wynand, the newspaper boss, he is a bit like Charles Foster Kane, gets his lap-dog architecture critic Ellsworth Toohy to denounce the structure even though Wynand's wife, Dominique, admires it.  People get all hot and bothered over the structure -- a mob mentality, an important theme and betes noir for Rand, threatens the man of principle, Roark; the building is said to be an eye-sore.  Wynand, probably a bit miffed over his wife's love for Roark, says he will use his paper (and Toohy) to destroy the architect.  Then, when he finds that he can't cow Roark into submission, Wynand shifts course and becomes the architect's greatest admirer.  In fact, Wynand who is helplessly in love with his wife, Dominique (who heartily despises him) pays Roark a kingly sum to build a huge home for the couple, a "temple to (his wife.)"  At this point, Wynand seems to be as much in love with Roark as his wife. This sets up a lavishly melodramatic triangle in which Dominique again sets her sights on the intransigent Roark (whose motto remains non serviam) notwithstanding Wynand's love for her.  A hack architect is hired to build a huge low-rent (publicly subsidized it seems) housing complex, the Courtland project.  The hack architect has no ideas as to how to build cheaply and, yet, with skill -- this, of course, is Roark's expertise.  So the hack persuades Roark to design the Courtland Housing project without attribution to him; Roark agrees to this quixotic task but, on the proviso, that no changes of any kind be implemented in his designs.  But the hack architect can't  control the public housing client and the administrators of the project demand changes.  The ostensible architect on the project has no choice but to make the changes, disfiguring horribly Roark's austere modernist plans.  Roark is not a man to be trifled with.  He sends Dominique, who is now his girlfriend (sort of), to the housing project which is partly completed.  (I wasn't able to figure out why Roark sends his mistress into the middle of an explosion.)  Roark blows up the whole site and everything on it, allowing himself to be captured after some apocalyptic imagery of explosions, with the dynamite plunger in his hand.  Meanwhile, Roark has also agreed to erect the tallest structure on earth over the Hell's Kitchen slum where Wynand was born and raised -- this will be a monument to Wynand and his empire.  In the explosion, Dominique picks up some glass hurled at her by the blast and severs an artery in her wrist in a suicide attempt  -- I couldn't  figure out why; by this time, the story has  gone completely off the rails with bizarre love-scenes (like scorpions mating) between Roark and Dominique; she pretends to resist him and he pretends to rape her.  Roark is put on trial, not surprisingly, for blowing up his own project.  Ellsworth Toohy, leaves the employ of The Banner, and lures all of Wynand's journalists away from their jobs at the paper.  (It seems that he has been secretly courting the army of writers and print-setters so that he can summon them away from The Banner to a eompetitor stranding Wynand alone (except for Dominique) in the huge news room.)  Toohy's architectural writing must be pretty good, because without his column on New York buildings The Banner collapses completely.  From his perch with a competitor of The Banner, Toohy stirs up the "collective", the mob, to attack Roark and, also, destroy The Banner as well.  But, at the trial, Roark (who is representing himself pro se) delivers an impassioned speech about the importance of the individual in opposing the hive-mind of the collective.  Gary Cooper isn't equal to this speech which is a bizarre harangue about integrity and the Will to Power.  He recites his lines robotically, but somehow they take root in the minds of the jury.  Roark is acquitted, even though he has admitted publicly that he blew up the low-income housing project.  Wynand, bankrupt and alone in his news room, commits suicide.  In the final scene, Dominique, who is now married to Roark, goes to the site of the tallest skyscraper in the world, built over the ruins of the slum neighborhood of Hell's Kitchen.  She rides an open elevator high into the sky to the very pinnacle of the tower where Roark stands, wind blowing in his garments and a mallet in his fist, the master builder atop the biggest erection in the world.  

The Fountainhead is less than two hours, but feels like an odyssey that is much longer.  Vidor shoots the movie is an imperial style.  Everything is bigger than you expect, larger and more lavish.  Wynand's offices have huge windows that show all the architectural masterpieces of  Manhattan rising from concrete jungles and walls are decorated with large Piranesi engravings of the ruins of Rome.  Houses are equipped with vast gleaming stairways and enormous vaulted rooms in which scores of people sipping cocktails and dressed in evening clothes gather.  In the quarry where Roark labors, shots show a landscape of white rock, a gorge that is a hundred feet deep and crawling with thirty or forty laborers drilling at the marble faces.  We first see Dominique hurling a Greco-Roman (Hellenic) torso of a god down an airshaft -- she is destroying the artifact because she loves its so much she would be in thrall to its beauty if she didn't pitch it into the abyss.  (This is a key and precursor to the sado-masochistic relationship with Howard Roark.)  The movie isn't afraid to dramatize its philosophical propositions in the fiercest way imaginable.  Roark blows up low-income housing presumably designed to provide the poor with decent places to live -- it's not a rich man's vanity project that he wrecks, but something useful, socially important, and, even, necessary, more like a bridge than a church or factory or office building.  (The role of the poor in the movie is interesting and problematic -- the picture's characters are resolutely against both welfare and empathy, seen as instruments covertly destroying human initiative.)  As if conscious of the social cost associated with Roark's grandiose and perverse act of vandalism, the judge, when he instructs the jury, makes a distinction between criminal and civil liability.  Roark, it is implied, may well be liable for breach of contract in a civil proceeding, but he shouldn't be found criminally culpable for destroying his own project when the authorities tamper with his sacrosanct design.  It's all larger-than-life:  when Dominique ascends to the master-builder on his tower, the elevator just goes up and up and up.  

I don't like this movie.  It's palpably absurd and nonsensical.  But it is certainly well-built and the individual scenes are both powerful and lunatic at the same time.  (This is particularly true of the quarry sequence.)  It's hard to articulate what's exactly wrong with ideas expressed in the movie.  If you concede their premise, then, you will have to accept the film's logic -- that is,  that the only thing that matters in the world is the iron will of the genius and that a man of genius has the right to ignore all conventions, including conventional morality, in pursuit of his vision.  The existence of the movie, however, shows that this idea is wrong.  No one man makes a movie.  A movie is the product of an army of people contributing ideas and their skills to the end-product.  An architect's ideas will remain unrealized unless there are contractors, bankers, plumbers and electricians, real estate and contract lawyers and a thousand other interdependent trades involved in prosecuting the physical, financial and social labor required to enact the vision.  No one makes it on his own.  And, so, the premise that the man of genius stands apart from the mob is false.  The man of genius, most often, is the living, breathing embodiment of the mob mentality -- not its opposite.  There are probably many other reasons for rejecting Ayn Rand's ideas.  But in The Fountainhead, Vidor has certainly represented her philosophy in the most lavish, and, I think, faithful terms possible. 

Innocence (opera by Kaija Saariaho)

 By most accounts, Kaija Saariaho is the most important composer to have worked in the 21st century.  The Finnish composer died in Paris in June 2023.  She was known primarily for lieder and classical compositions in the form of concerti and sonatas.  However, her fame is most likely to endure on the basis of her three operas L'Amour de Loin, Adriana Mater, and Innocence.  When New York's Metropolitan Opera performs Innocence during its 2025-2026 season, this will mark the first time that the Met has performed two works (with Amour de Loin) by any female composer.  Critics tend to write about Kaija Saariaho in tones of hushed (or enthusiastic) awe.  If you are interested in knowing what this furor is about, go to You-Tube and watch the filmed version of the 2022 Aix-en-Provence festival performance of Innocence, a rather harrowing musical theater piece about a massacre at a Finnish school.  In this version of the opera, the work has been handsomely filmed with fluid cinematography featuring many close-ups, carefully edited sequences, and other cinematic flourishes.  Unfortunately, the opera is subtitled in French and I had difficulty following the action.  In fact, I was so baffled by the absence of an English translation of this work that I watched the whole thing under the misapprehension that one lanky actress (Julie Hega -- she looks like the female basketball star, Brittany Greiner) was playing the role of the school  shooter in the opera.  (In fact, after reading a half-dozen reviews and summaries of the work, I now understand that the shooter never appears on-stage and Julie Hega with her jean-jacket and long braids and, generally, menacing demeanor is playing Iris or Student #3 as identified by the libretto).  Of course, a fundamental mistake of this sort significantly colors my rather tentative interpretation of the opera and my remarks here must be regarded with caution.  I hope that my brief summary, necessarily omitting aspects of the opera that I simply couldn't construe due to language difficulties, might be helpful to other adventurous souls who may wish to view this performance.  It is worth noting that if you have some High School level French (and I don't) my guess is that you will be able to follow the events depicted.  It's also helpful, I think, to know that language problems are intrinsic to this opera -- the events take place, in  part, as an International School in Helsinki and seem to revolve around a classroom in which English is being taught.  The students all sing in the language of the operatic performers enlisted to present the show -- therefore, the students' internal discourse, at least, and some of their interactions are in Spanish, German, French, and Finnish.  When the students speak to one another, they converse (or declaim -- in most cases, the libretto is performed in Sprechstimme, a hybrid of spoken and chanted/sung recitative invented by Arnold Schoenberg) in English.  The teacher who has a prominent role also sings in English and words exchanged by members of the wedding party involved in the opera's action parallel to the shooting seem to be intoned in a combination of English and French.  The production is pretty much a Babel of languages.  As anyone who has attended operas will know, the fact that someone sings in English is no guarantee that the viewer will understand much of what is spoken -- I could only understand about half of what the English-speaking parts were saying -- in fact, coming to opera as a neophyte with no advance knowledge about the show, I couldn't ascertain that parts of the libretto were in English until about fifteen minutes into the 105 minute one-act play.  

Innocence involves an archetypal plot, reminiscent of a very dark fairy tale -- it's the story of the uninvited guest at the feast, in this case, a wedding rehearsal or, possibly, groom's dinner.  Tomas and Stella are getting married.  They are celebrating in a modest banqueting hall with colorful helium  balloons.  One of the waitresses hired to cater the banquet is a middle-aged woman named Tereza.  From the outset, we can see that there is something seriously wrong with Tereza -- she's wild-eyed, her face disfigured with a look of perpetual wide-eyed horror; she looks like an  actress in a horror film by Ari Aster, a figure displaying utter shock and disgust as in Midsommar or Inheritance.  Teresa has discovered that Tomas is the brother of the school shooter (apparently just released from prison) who killed eight or nine students at the International School ten years earlier.  One of the students gunned down by the unnamed murderer (Tomas' brother) was Marketa, Tereza's teenage daughter.  Marketa is loitering around the banquet hall and the school as a ghost, clad in white and black, and singing in an unearthly high-pitched timbre -- the part is played by the Finn, Vilma Jaa, and invokes Finno-Ugric folk songs and peasant herding calls; some of her performance involves grating nasal tones, a bit like "throat singing", loud shrieks and yips and other vocal acrobatics including (literally) cow-calling.  (The part is so demanding that only Vilma Jaa, who originated the role in Aix-en-Provence, can successfully perform it -- she has been featured in all five versions of the opera to date and will appear at the Met next year.)  Somehow, Stella, Tomas' betrothed doesn't know that her fiancee is the brother of the notorious school shooter.  The ghastly Tereza makes certain this fact is made public at the banquet, a revelation that results in all sorts of soul-searching and disclosure of awful secrets about the shooting.  The libretto by Sofia Oksanen renders the opera's name ironic -- it turns out that everyone is somehow complicit in this school-shooting or thinks themselves to be.  Needless to say, the revelation that the Groom's brother committed mass murder is pretty much of a buzz-kill and the party deteriorates into mutual recriminations -- it seems that the actual wedding is going to be indefinitely deferred while the unfortunate guests ruminate on their own entanglement in the shooting   This dysfunctional fiesta includes a scene in which Tereza, bringing out a white wedding cake on a cart, actually shoves part of the pastry in the face of the groom's mother -- a rude intervention that is both risible and a breach of etiquette.  Although the opera is resolutely serious, grave, and shocking, it's also more than a little comical when viewed from a perspective not wholly cowed by the horrific subject matter.  One of the problems with the opera and its libretto is that it dares you to laugh at the unruly and melodramatic proceedings at the wedding party -- and viewed dispassionately what takes place at this ill-fated party is pretty funny; I found myself laughing out loud, particularly during the cake-fight, pie-in-the-face episode.  Not funny at all is the parallel action which occurs, more or less simultaneously with the wedding dinner -- this is a depiction of the shooting at the school.  Although we never see the actual bullets being fired what happens is arguably worse.  As the opera progresses, the set fills up with twitching, writhing, spastic bodies of gun shot victims and the walls and floors are emblazoned with bright red gouts of blood and brain.  The school sequences involve scenes in which the students blame one another for the killings -- why? I couldn't divine since I wasn't able to read the French subtitles and the German and English singing was impossible to decipher.  The teacher at the school says that she has become paranoid -- she thinks she should have read warning signs in the murderer's essays that she graded and, now, she looks at all writings submitted to her with an eye toward diagnosing symptoms of mass murder.  (It's not clear to me why this matters to her now, since she was killed in the shooting -- there are many aspects of the show that remain completely obscure to me.)  A priest similarly confesses that he should have realized that the shooter was on the brink of mass murder.  He says that "love forgives all," a cliche that no one on hand is willing to credit.  The groom ultimately admits that he knew his brother was harboring murderous rage, but, nonetheless, didn't do anything to prevent the killing -- he even says that his brother was his hero and that he still admires him:  "I loved my brother; I love him still."  This admission is a deal-breaker as far as the upcoming nuptials are concerned.  At the end, the dead students line-up and each sings a bit.  The insane, grief-stricken Tereza confronts her dead daughter, Marketa, and the two of them sing a sort of screechy duet.  Then, Marketa says:  "Let me depart."  Marketa walks out the door which Tereza gently closes and the strings gasp in a kind of very high-pitched whispering tremolo as the opera fades out, more with a whimper than a bang. 

Opera experts opine generally that Innocence is presented with impeccable skill and musicianship.  The set consists of a house-size two-story cube, divided into two interconnected spaces top and bottom on each side.  The set, mounted on a sort of turntable, rotates continuously showing different arrays of locations to the audience.  There is a minutely detailed schoolroom, the outer facade of the school with some exterior terraces, lots of nondescript white boxes -- the area where the banquet occurs and the adjacent toilet and corridors gradually fill up with mutilated corpses as the show progresses.  The mise-en-scene gradually collapses the banquet and shooting at the school ten years earlier into one location.   

I'm ambivalent about the opera and don't understand it well enough to form any clear conclusions.  The subject matter is meretricious and, in more cultured times, this opera would be regarded as a vulgar work of exploitation -- it hijacks a school shooting to achieve its sense of profundity and gravitas.  On the other hand, the show is quite disturbing and, certainly, leaves the audience with a strong impression of the enduring horror and chaos caused by an event such as a school shooting.  Whether this effect, which is pretty obvious if you think about it, is worth displaying in this way is an open question.  I can't comment with any confidence on the music.  It sounds to me like Richard Strauss around 1900 -- the tonal vocabulary and the big band sound (a very large orchestra with an offstage choir) reminds me of Salome or Elektra.  The music has the character of a soundtrack for a particularly gruesome slasher movie or horror picture -- it's got shrieking off-key glissandos, enormous leaps of several octaves in a single bars of vocal line, battering drum cadences that are like something from Rammstein, and all sorts of eerie tremolos, strange fluttering arpeggios and the like.  There is nothing like a melody in the score --it's all whoops and whispers and screams.  Professional musicians believe that the score, which is tremendously overwrought, is a fantastically ingenious and, if not beautiful, then, expressionistically powerful.  In fact, the music sounds like German expressionistic compositions by Alban Berg, but with more ornate and peculiar orchestration.  The opera's theme is tonic and should be reiterated every time cable news pundits pontificate on a mass shooting -- look down at your own hands and you will see that they are dyed in gore. 

Kaija Saariaho was dying of brain cancer at the time that the opera was premiered at Aix-en-Provence.  She appears briefly at the end of the filmed version of the opera, taking a curtain call in her wheelchair.      

Alain Delon and Le Samourai (film-study note)

 

Alain Delon and Le Samourai

1.

The director of Le Samourai (1967), Jean-Pierre Melville, thought about the project for ten years.  In the course of this gestation, Melville imagined Alain Delon playing the title role.  Melville finagled an invitation to Delon’s home, brought the script with him, and began reading from it.  After a while, Delon said: “There’s no dialogue for 7 ½ minutes.  I’ll do it.  What’s it called?”  Melville told him that the title of the film would be “The Samurai.”  Delon nodded and asked Melville to come with him to a locked room in the middle of his house.  The chamber was empty except for a leather couch and a lance and samurai sword.  

2.  

The Anglo-American critic, David Thomson, in one of his books, writes that Melville’s The Samurai is a film so implacable and so relentlessly impassive, in other words, so tough that it seems comical.  Thomson compares Delon’s mask-like beauty with Buster Keaton, the other great stone-face in cinema.  It is certainly true that the film exposes a vast cleft or fissure between Delon’s elegant and ostensibly lethal assassin, Jef Costello, and his weirdly inept behavior.  You can’t decide whether Delon is supposed to be a ruthless and efficient killer or a fool pretending to be a ruthless and efficient killer.  Perhaps, we are meant to attend to both aspects of the protagonist’s personality simultaneously.  

3.

The great French director Bertrand Blier describes Le Samourai in these words: “The Samurai (is) a completely bizarre film.  There has been only one film made like this in France. And it’s so much like Delon, this film, a completely mute narcissistic role in which practically nothing happens.  Delon sits in front of a mirror for an hour correcting the position of his hat.  It has a lot of charm.  It (is) a fascinating film.  It (is) an extraordinary analysis of these two men, a formidable joint portrait of Melville/Delon.”  

4.

Alain Delon who died on August 18 2024 was born on November 8, 1935.  His father was a film projectionist who later owned cinemas.  His mother worked in a pharmacy.  When he was four, his parents divorced and, in the aftermath of their separation, the little boy was placed with a foster family.  The father of that family was a prison guard and little Alain was traumatized by his foster-father’s vivid accounts of executions in the penitentiary where he worked.  After a few years, Delon’s foster father died and, as a teenager, he was returned to his parents who shared joint custody.  This part of Delon’s life was chaotic.  He got into fights in school, beat up other kids, and was expelled.  He was apprenticed to a meat cutter in a charcuterie and worked there, as a delicatessen assistant for three years.  During this time, he engaged in petty crime, stole a motorcycle, and was involved in frequent bar fights.  In his old age, Delon said that what he yearned for most in heaven was to be re-united with his mother and father as an intact family in heaven.  

At 17, Delon joined the French Army.  After training, he was sent to Indochina (Vietnam) and, in 1954, fought in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (where the French were decisively defeated).  He was a bad soldier, insubordinate, and prone to theft and ended up with a dishonorable discharge.  Delon returned to Paris where he dabbled in petty crime and seems to have been an apprentice pimp in Place Pigalle and Montmartre.  He lived with prostitutes and met some show-people around the edges of the demi-monde.  His beauty made him attractive to women and he ended up living with the actress Brigitte Auber who had worked with Hitchcock in To Catch a Thief.  Auber took Delon with her to the 1957 Cannes Film Festival.  There he was courted by several producers including David O. Selznick.  People in the film industry were impressed by Delon’s almost supernatural beauty and, after some false starts, he went to Rome and loitered around the edges of Cinecitta studios.  Selznick, still courting Delon, offered him a contract in Hollywood if he would learn English.  Delon, then, left Rome, returned to Paris, where he promptly began an affair with the wife of the well-known French direct Yves Allegret.  This connection led to several small parts.  (Delon seems to have forgotten that he was supposed to be learning English.)  He continued to womanize and party; he was almost killed when he rolled a sports car in the St. Cloud tunnel.  

Delon’s breakthrough occurred in 1958 (he was 23) when he was cast with Austrian actress Romy Schneider in a French romance Christine. (Christine is a remake of Max Ophuls Liebelei, a thirties picture that starred Schneider's mother..  Initially, Romy Schneider (who didn’t speak French) heartily despised Delon (who didn’t speak German).  The feeling was mutual, but, as they say, opposites attract and soon enough the two were involved in a torrid love affair that catapulted Delon into the limelight at least in the tabloids.  (Romy Schneider was, then, one of Europe’s most famous actresses.)  The two were engaged but the love affair was too intense and tempestuous to survive and they were never married.  (About ten years later, they reunited with much fanfare to do another film together, La Piscine, and, possibly, renewed the affair – they were called “the eternal betrothed” or the "mythical couple" in the press; they made another movie in 1972, The Assassination of Trotsky. )  Delon always maintained that Romy Schneider was the great love of his life.  

By 1960, Delon was a major European movie star in his own right.  He appeared as Tom Ripley in Rene Clements’ Purple Noon (Plein Soleil) a version of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley.  He, then, worked with Visconti in two famous movies Rocco and his Brothers (1960) and later The Leopard (with Burt Lancaster in 1962).  He acted for Michelangelo Antonioni in L’Eclisse also in 1962.  For several years, he worked in Hollywood in mostly forgettable movies, playing “latin” lovers.  By this time, Delon had married the actress Nathalie Barthelmy, renowned as one of the most beautiful women in the world.  (She plays the role of Jef’s alibi witness in Le Samourai).  People have remarked that Delon and his wife look like twins; they have spookily similar faces and bone structure.)   Nathalie had a son with Delon.  The couple divorced in 1969.  Nathalie went on to have affairs with dozens of people including Louis Malle and Jessie Franco and was said to be “the muse” to the Rolling Stones. 

Around 1968, Delon was involved with underworld figures again, Corsican gangsters.  One of them Stefan Markovic, a criminal originally from Belgrade (Serbia), acted as Delon’s bodyguard.  Markovic supplemented wages paid to him by Delon by organizing orgies in rooms equipped with hidden cameras.  He used evidence of these sex parties, involving elite French officials and their wives, for blackmail purposes.  Delon may have been involved in some of these affairs.  (It was rumored that there were pictures of Delon involved in homosexual acts, an allegation that the movie star neither admitted nor denied.)  Markovic wrote a letter indicating that he believed he was about to be killed and that, if this happened, Delon would be to blame.  Around this time, Markovic was reputedly blackmailing Georges Pompidou, a politician who was campaigning (successfully) for president of the French Republic.  Markovic was said to have compromising pictures of Pompidou’s wife at these orgies.  Markovic’ was found shot to death in a garbage dump on October 1, 1968.  One of Delon’s closest friends, Francois Marcantoni, a Corsican Mafia figure, was charged with the murder but charges were dismissed – the case remains unsolved.  The pictures of Madame Pompidou never turned up and some believe that the blackmail rumors were scandal intended to oppose Georges Pompidou’s political aspirations.  

Delon made more than a hundred movies.  He worked for many of his era’s greatest directors including Jean Luc Godard with whom he made a movie called Nouvelle Vague in 1990.  He appeared on stage and, after retiring from the cinema, appeared in a popular and long-running French crime show as Inspector Fabio Montale.  As late as 2022, he was still involved in producing pictures – he interviewed Volodymir Zelenskyy in Ukraine in that year for French TV.

The actor’s final years were marred by accusations of abuse inflicted upon the old man by his children.  These allegations involved protracted litigation initiated by his romantic partner, Hiromi Rollin against his children.  This dispute resulted in a judicial guardianship enacted to conserve Delon’s estate.  By this time, the actor was fabulously wealthy, having lent his name and image to Christian Dior, various perfume and clothing retailers, and, even, a brand of customized sunglasses popular in East Asia and made under the auspices of Delon and the Chinese action star (who idolized Delon), Chow Yun-Fat who wore the shades in John Woo’s famous thriller A Better Tomorrow.  Delon also invested in real estate and promoted boxing matches.  In the last couple years before his death, Delon was charged with possessing 72 firearms and cases of ammo -- notwithstanding the fact that he didn't have valid firearm's license.

Characteristically, Delon’s funeral was inflamed by scandal.  In his Will, Delon specified that his beloved ten-year old Belgian Malinois, Loubo, be euthanized and buried with him on his estate.  The French version of PETA and the Brigitte Bardot animal protection society intervened and the hound was spared.  The funeral was conducted behind closed gates at Delon’s estate and said to be rather grotesque due to the obvious acrimony between Delon’s partner and his children.  Cell-phones were collected at the gate and not returned to mourners until they had left the premises.  The heat was oppressive and about a half-dozen people passed-out during the funeral Mass.  Like Frederick the Great, Delon was buried alongside his dogs – over his life, he owned more than 30 Belgian Malinois.  The Estate was said to be poor repair, dilapidated and the electricity is supposed to have failed several times in the hours before the ceremony.    

   

5.

Jean-Pierre Melville was born Jean-Pierre Grumbach in 1917, the child of Alsatian Jews.  His father was a rag-picker and recycled clothing.  Melville studied American literature and worshiped Herman Melville.  When he joined the French Resistance movement, he chose the name Melville as his nom de guerre and, then, continued using the name throughout his professional career.  Initially, Melville was a member of the Communist party (an elder brother was a well-known Socialist journalist) but abandoned the cause when Stalin made common cause with Hitler by way of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939.

During the War, Melville enlisted in the French army and had to be evacuated to England from the beaches of Dunkirk.  He returned to France where he joined the Resistance and was involved in a number of terrorist attacks.  With the Gestapo in hot pursuit, Melville fled across the Pyrenees into Spain.  He returned again to the Front as a member of the Free French army and fought at Monte Cassino in Italy among other battles.  Melville’s brother was captured by the Germans and tortured to death, something that he didn’t learn until after the war.  (This event has many echoes in Melville’s work, particularly in his signature film, Army of Shadows about the French resistance made in 1969, immediately after Le Samourai.)

Melville’s first film is a masterpiece, The Silence of the Sea, a love story shot like a Universal Pictures horror film.  The movie is about a cultured German officer who is billeted with a French bourgeois family who have vowed to never say a word to this German interloper.  The picture was made in 1947 - 1948 but released in 1949.  Melville, then, directed a brilliant adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terrible premiered to great acclaim in 1950.  The production of the movie was fraught; Cocteau had been a leading collaborator with the Germans and the two men clashed repeatedly on the set.  Melville’s film noir Bob le Flambeur (1956) invented many of the practices that later characterized the French nouvelle vague (New Wave).  Both Godard and Truffaut declared that Melville was their master – Melville appears in a bit part in Godard’s Breathless (1961).  

Melville was a difficult man and he refused to cooperate with the French film industry.  He founded his own studio in Paris and shot his movies there until a fire burned the place down in 1967.  His first famous gangster picture was Les Doulos (“The Wolves”) released in 1962 and one source for Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992).  Including Les Samourai, Melville made five crime movies, including the epic Zen-Buddhist heist picture La Cercle Rouge (“the Red Circle) released in 1970. All of his pictures originate in horrors that he experienced during the German Occupation and his movies all culminate in Army of Shadows, a harrowing picture about the French Resistance – it’s full of  torture scenes and noteworthy for a graphic, and extended, murder sequence in the first half-hour in which Resistance fighters kill one of their own men suspected of collaborating with the Germans.  Themes of loyalty, resistance, coercion and duress and radical uncertainty which play out in Melville’s crime movies (in particular) are all explored in terrifying depth in Army of Shadows.  (The subject of the French Resistance is a particularly vexed and problematic subject in France and French movies and Melville is probably the greatest exponent of this subject.

Melville died of an aneurysm at 55 in August 1973.  He was an admirer of Americans and America who wore a cowboy hat on his sets and drove a huge Cadillac with streamlined fins and hood ornament.  As shown in Les Samourai (and many other pictures as well) he revered American jazz.  Although not as well-known as he should be, Melville is one of the most influential film makers in cinema history.  He is the “father of the French New Wave” as acknowledged by its masters. His influence on Robert Bresson is obvious and he has been admired (and his films cited) by Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch (Ghost Dog - Way of the Samurai), Tarantino, Michael Mann, John Woo and, even, directors such as Aki Kaurismaki and Nicholas Winding Refn.  The John Wick cycle of ultra-violent action films repeatedly cite Melville’s films.    

  

6,

Le Samourai is exquisitely shot in a nearly monochromatic palette of greys, very light scuffed blues and greens, with streaks of yellow suggesting sunlight in some scenes.  The movie looks like a concrete block, heavy and impenetrable.  Roger Ebert said the picture suggested to him the first light of dawn “on an ugly day.”  The movie cuts unpredictably between scenes and sports a literary flourish in wipes that are almost all executed from left to right.  As with Robert Bresson, the movie demonstrates an obsessive concern with showing how things are done in real time – if someone walks across a room or down a corridor, Melville typically shows us the entire action without cutting.  The effect is to produce a documentary style sense of reality presented without edits and through shots of long duration that invite the viewer to carefully scrutinize the details of the image.  The movie’s pacing is very deliberate.  By modern standards, the film is extremely slow, with protracted sequences that are presented without montage and cutting.  Actual duration is essential to the film – it depicts the last two and a half-days in the life of its titular assassin.  The effect of the movie is one of relentless paranoid pursuit.  The hero, Jef Costello, is on the run for most of the picture.  Although the chase scenes occur across vividly depicted Parisian locations, the overall mood of the picture is one typical of film noir (and central to Melville’s war and resisaence movies): an overwhelming force of destiny bears down upon the movie’s characters and destroys them.  

Several of Melville’s movies depict heist scenes filmed in long, silent takes.  (Such scenes are central in La Cercle Rouge and Melville’s last picture Un Flic – that is, “A Cop”) Le Samourai contains several extended set-piece sequences, also shot mostly without dialogue.  The film’s first 18 minutes is a nearly silent depiction of Jef’s plans to kill Martey and his execution of that crime – a weirdly flawed endeavor in which just about everyone in the night-club sees his face and, later, can be enlisted by the cops to identify the killer.  The line-up sequence in which Valerie, the Jazz pianist (who has clearly seen Jef) inexplicably refuses to identify him is also protracted far beyond its narrative necessity – the scene runs for 18 to 20 minutes.  Accordingly, the first half of the movie, about 47 minutes, takes place in a continuous sequence beginning with Jef’s resting in his one-room apartment with his caged bird (a symbol of the enclosed and imprisoning nature of the film and the destiny that it depicts), his preparation of this alibi, the murder, and, then, the line-up sequence which concludes when Jef returns to home-base, his apartment and the caged bird.  There are two rigidly symmetrical sequences involving the removal of licenses on get-away cars that bookend most of the action – these episodes (each about two minutes long) are filmed with analytical rigor and are like scenes in an austere Bresson film.  Another block of film is devoted to the pursuit in the subway – this is an eleven minute sequence.  By this point, the movie has evolved into a double-chase, a narrative device most famously deployed by Hitchcock in several of his films – Jef is pursued by the police led by the indefatigable Commissioner (who acts like a Gestapo commandant in some scenes) and, also, by the gangsters who hired him to execute the hit on Martey.  The film is laconic in the extreme: we are given no dialogue to explain why the gangsters want Martey killed; the relationship between Martey and Valerie is ambiguous and never explicated.  I don’t understand the picture’s last five minutes.  Do you?

Throughout the movie, Melville declines exposition and provides only a bare minimum of narrative information – the viewers are left to work out the relationship between the parties.  We have no backstory as to the assassin.  In fact, there is no backstory provided with respect to anyone.  In Hemingway fashion, characters are defined by how they act.  The film is an existentialist exercise par excellence, also a feature arising from post-war trauma as to the Resistance.  No one has any essential character – the way that people act under circumstances of stress or duress (for instance, under interrogation) is all that matters.  

The film grammar in Le Samourai is simple, basically two-shots cut together.  There is only one conspicuous camera movement in the film, the last image dollying away from the bandstand in the nightclub after Jef has been gunned down.  (There is another upward shot before the final image beginning with a low angle, somewhat heroic framing of Valerie that, then, resolves into a higher angle as the camera is moved upward.  This is the film’s penultimate image.)  I believe there are some hand-held camera shots, but they are mostly unobtrusive.  As noted before, much of the film eschews editing to present action in real-time – for instance, when Valerie walks through the house where she lives with Martey (apparently), the camera follows her in real time: the sequence is about 90 seconds.  

The film’s imagery and themes involve entrapment, betrayal, various mechanisms of surveillance, and a struggle against oppressive forces that have overwhelming resources to coerce and spy.  This imagery is clearly an outgrowth of Melville’s experiences with the Resistance and would be foregrounded in his next movie Army of Shadows.  

    

7.

Melville said that he didn’t show women in mini-skirts in Le Samourai because he wanted the movie to be set in an eternal dream-time.  This is also why the men all wear fedoras or other types of hats.  “I’m not interested in realism.  All my films hinge on the fantastic,” Melville said, “A film is first and foremost a dream...and it’s absurd to copy life... I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing.”  David Thomson, who reveres this film, says that the Jazz pianist is the figure of Death.  She selects Delon when he sees her in another car in Parisian traffic.  White and black signify death.  (Jef puts on white gloves when he purports to menace the Black musician.)  Valerie, Thomson thinks, is Death calling the already ghostly Jef, isolated and hermaphroditic, neither male nor female, to her realm.  

8.

When Le Samourai was being shot Melville’s studio burned down.  The director darkly hinted that this was intentional, arson by his enemies in the French film industry.  At this time in his life, Delon (then 31) was tangled up in the Underworld again and had criminal associates.  Possibly, these relationships were involved in the fire.  But the truth has never been established as to why this fire happened.  

  

Rage

"Collateral damage" is a military term for harm inflicted that is incidental to the intended target.  One might argue that the 30,000 women and children killed in Gaza are "collateral damage" to the Israeli Defense Forces campaign against Hamas.  (I think this argument is probably wrong -- the massacre in Gaza is a war of  revenge for the October 2023 cross-border attack and the killing of civilians seems to be the whole point of the exercise -- that is ethnic cleansing.)  If  you fire a missile at a terrorist target and, inadvertently, kill ten non-combatant bystanders, they are "collateral damage."  The concept arose in Vietnam, although I'm not sure the term was used at that time:  "We had to destroy that village to save it."  George C. Scott's 1972 Rage - he stars in the picture and directed it -  is about "collateral damage"; this was not widely understood when the movie was released to bad reviews and flopped in '72.  In fact, the picture is considerably more thoughtful than advertised and worth watching on that basis.

Dan Logan (played by Scott) is a widower who owns a sheep ranch in Carbon County, Wyoming somewhere near Rawlins.  (Curiously, the movie uses the names of real places in Wyoming although the landscapes look more like Nevada or the Great Basin (or the Mojave desert) than Wyoming to me.)  Logan's ranch is apparently adjacent to a military base, although, like most of the exposition, this isn't revealed until later in the movie.  (The narration is oblique; for instance, we don't learn that Logan is a widower until he makes a casual remark about that status half-way through the picture.)  Logan is tending to his ranch, herding sheep and teaching his 12-year old son, Chris, to drive his pickup truck when the two of them see a helicopter coasting by overhead.  They camp out for the night.  The next morning, the boy, Chris, is unconscious with blood coming from his nose and urine-soaked pants.  Logan takes the child to the hospital where the boy is admitted and the father placed in quarantine.  Several hundred sheep are dead on the ground and Logan's German shepherd bleeds from the nose and also dies.  In some cut-away scenes, we learn that the military has been testing a nerve gas agent, MX-3, and accidentally sprayed the ridge where Logan and his son were camping.  The doctors and bureaucrats with the army understand that Chris will die and that Logan is a "dead man walking" -- the agent has a cumulative effect and kills within ten days.  Government bureaucrats and representatives of the nerve gas callously plan to study the effects of the toxin on Logan and his son.  Military physicians separate Logan from his son who dies in a harrowing and brutal scene -- the child perishes gasping for breath and making a strange, high-pitched keening moan.  Of course, the military personnel all lie and cover-up their error and the collateral damage it has caused.  Logan's condition deteriorates but he is still ambulatory and can even run -- the film's argument, as it were, requires its protagonist to have the ability to take violent action -- this isn't really plausible but the viewer is willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of the plot.  Logan, who is being sedated against his will, recovers enough to escape from his hospital room.  He explores the facility and finds his son's autopsied corpse in a freezer in the morgue.  Logan, then, eludes pursuers, steals a motorcycle, and proceeds to take revenge on those who killed his son. 

The revenge scenes are stark and realistic.  Armed with a semi-automatic rifle that he has bought at a Rawlins' gun shop, Logan confronts one of the more repulsive and deceitful governmental doctors and forces the truth out of him.  Logan, then, goes to the company that has manufactured the MX-3 agent and, in a night time raid, kills the security guard and blows the place to smithereens with dynamite charges.  (Presumably, he is planning to release the MX-3 toxin into the air near the base and kill everyone there; probably, this would kill everyone in Rawlins as well.  But, it turns out that the nerve gas is not on-site -- he's blowing up an empty laboratory, lots of lab animals, and offices.)  Logan hijacks a truck and goes to the military plant where he blows off the head of a sentry.  He crashes the truck in the base in a vacant field, gets out and starts firing without effect, and, then, drops dead, expiring under the searchlights of a hovering helicopter, pinned to the ground and twitching like an insect on a specimen board.  He dies at dawn.  The MPs led by one of the villainous army doctors collect Logan's body so that it can be dissected and the camera, again in a helicopter (these would be drone shots today) rises over the camp, moving into a final shot of soldiers who seem to be playing baseball.

Logan's climactic revenge occupies about 15 minutes of the film that is an hour and 45 minutes long.  Accordingly all of the movie, more or less, builds in a "slow burn" to the final mayhem.   Unlike the initial Rambo film, First Blood, which has a similar premise (revenge against the military and local authorities), Logan doesn't have any special skills, he's not a Navy Seal or Special Forces operative, and his lethal conduct involves shooting security guards and blowing up an unoccupied lab and office building.  In the final shoot-out, he fires a few rounds that don't hit anyone and, then, simply slips into a gruesome seizure as he dies.  The film's implicit point, which is made subtly and without emphasis, is that the victims of Logan's lethal rage are either sentries, bystanders, security guards and hapless police and some lab animals.  (The film lingers on the trapped lab animals -- rabbits, puppies, guinea pigs -- as if to emphasize that these blameless beings, like Logan's son, are the victims of callous government experimentation and, in turn, will be killed by the hero.)  When Logan confronts one of the bad guys, the film doesn't show the protagonist killing the villain -- instead, Logan guns down the man's cat, an action that epitomizes his revenge against bystanders and people who just happen to cross his path.  The film's point seems to be that Logan and his son were collateral damage to the army; the people and animals that Logan kills in revenge are also collateral damage to his real targets, the government bureaucrats and heartless doctors (one of them is played by Martin Sheen), who all survive his rampage unscathed.

The movie is directed in a workmanlike manner with odd flourishes.  There are some weird slow-motion sequences that don't really address the film's main point and that are not used to illuminate or aestheticize violence (after the manner of Peckinpah).  We see Logan spitting out tobacco juice from his chaw in slow-motion, a very strange shot, and, later, coffee  is shown in slow-mo dowsing a fire.  The scene in which Logan invades the home of the evil and dishonest military doctor begins with a sequence in slow motion showing a cat prowling around.  We are completely disoriented and wonder why Scott is focusing on the cat.  Later, the cat is gunned-down and the earlier slow-motion shots of the animal seem devised to highlight and underline the feline's later killing -- something that takes place in an instant without slow motion and that seems thematic to the movie.  We don't see the bad guy killed, just his cat, again emphasizing the idea of collateral damage.  The last third of the film involves explicitly expressionistic imagery.  We see Logan trotting along a dark wall.  Then, when more light is cast on the scene, the dark wall seems taller and more massive, an ominous image.  Much of the final part of the movie is shot in darkness with raw, angular shadows cutting across the images.  The effect of the movie is troubling:  the picture is set up so that the viewer yearns to see the arrogant and vicious military personnel punished for their  crimes.  But the people who die aren't culpable at all -- they just happen to be around.  The script is laconic.  We're not told whether Logan's motive in blowing up the munition's laboratory is revenge against the company or some insane plot to destroy everyone in sight by releasing the nerve gas.  The action is generally underexplained and we are left to our own devices to interpret what we see.  In the final scenes, Logan, sweating heavily with a bloody nose, staggers around like a zombie, one of the living dead, on his wrathful errands.

Quentin Tarantino has said that Rage is his favorite movie and, indeed, there's much more in the film than meets the eye.  (George C. Scott has strangely feminine lips; he always seems to be primly pursing his lips -- it's an odd aspect to his physiognomy and subverts the notion that he is an "all-man, he-man" hero.  In keeping with film practice in the early seventies, the opening titles don't occur until about ten minutes into the movie -- this was a habit with filmmakers of that era.) 

The term "collateral damage" dates to 1905, used in non-military contexts (for instance, civil engineering as to dams and other water projects).  An army targeting manual printed in 1961 uses the phrase in a military setting, but the expression didn't come into common parlance until the mid-80's.  The phrase, usually blamed on Vietnam (like many things in our recent history), was almost never used during that conflict.  It's not a term that George C. Scott would have known in 1971 and 1972. With each year, the term is more and more in vogue.  High-minded critics of the phrase as a euphemism haven't come up with any convincing substitute for the expression which is, in fact, reasonably precise and meaningful and does not seem to have been invented in bad faith -- "collateral damage" can come in many forms:  killing, wounding, traumatizing, as well as destruction of property, infrastructure and the environment; the term is a useful phrase that covers all of these effects as well as others.