Modern Art and Politics in Germany 1910 to 1945 (MIA)

It's a powerful testament to the excellence of art collections in Minnesota that the two indisputable stars of the current show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts are both from museums in this state:  these paintings are Franz Marc's "Blue Horses" from the Walker Art Center and Max Beckmann's "Actors" which is part of the permanent collection of the MIA.  "The Blue Horses" is a thousand watt acetylene torch of a painting -- you can see it through open doors three galleries away; no Virgin Mary was ever arrayed in such splendor as Marc's large, nobly fierce horses; indeed, it seems that you can see the thing through the walls if your imagination is strong enough.  Beckmann's late triptych, "Actors" is a magisterial work, endlessly provocative if, I think, more than a bit muddle-headed -- the huge painting's larger than life-size figures are compressed into an allegorical frieze:  the draftsmanship and design of the three conjoined canvases is astonishing as is the exuberance of the painting and facture.  You can stand in front of this triptych for an hour and not plumb its depths.  (It's part of the permanent collection at the MIA).  The core paintings in the show are from the famously austere (architecturally) Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, a structure that hides underneath the edge of Potsdam Plaza, concealed beneath a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe glass pavilion that looks like a particularly rigorous enclosed bus shelter..  There are many splendid things in the exhibit but the best paintings are from Minneapolis museums.  

After the obligatory and doleful time-lines displayed outside the galleries, the show opens with a small annex, a collection of about a dozen works exemplifying German Expressionism -- these are small, brilliantly vivid, canvases that seem somewhat set apart from the balance of the large galleries; it's as if the exhibitors think Expressionism is a bit beside the point with regard to what follows -- this misconstrues the central importance of the movement in the art that succeeded it, the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) in the following gallery.  After the first big gallery, the show is designed along thematic lines:  there are rooms displaying art connected to the International Avant Garde, abstraction (with many Kandinsky paintings including another transitional canvas between figurative and abstract that is part of the MIA collection as well), politics, war and a final valedictory gallery entitled "Before and After" -- this room collects thoughts, as it were, with regard to the significance of the Hitler period in German art.  The arc of the exhibition is exemplified by two paintings both by Konrad Felixmueller -- at the very outset of the show, we see the hideous, mask-like and wildly agitated face of Otto Ruehl, a German Communist, haranguing a crowd of workers; Felixmueller's work was declared Entartete ("Degenerate") by the Nazi regime and he destroyed all of his objectionable work except the portrait of the insanely agitated Ruehl in full spate.  After the war, Felixmueller recreated the entire painting that he had burned with the exception of the face, and this canvas is the last picture in the show -- I think it is meant to show some kind of reparation after the years of atrocity.  There is nothing calming about this painting, however, and, although Felixmueller was a man of the Left, the painting of the Ruehl as a wild-eyed fanatic is by no means complimentary to the man -- in fact, the picture suggests the problem with German interwar politics:  extremism in which the best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.  The same effect arises from a work by Otto Dix showing the German art dealer Alfred Flechtheim -- Dix's attitude to his subject seems highly problematic:  the painting is an anti-Semitic cartoon, albeit unforgettably vivid.   Flechtheim is painted with claws for hands, avaricious and grasping, and he looks monstrous with a small head and a huge hooked nose -- I don't know whether Dix intended an anti-Semitic caricature or whether Flechtheim just looked like this, his features heightened and exaggerated according to Expressionistic norms of representation.  But the image is disturbing.  (I'm not alone in my distress, according to the Catalog, Flechtheim had to flee to England where he died in poverty; no one would exhibit the picture in post-war Germany and so Dix died with it in his personal collection.)  

The Expressionist movement (there is no reference in the show to DADA, an equally influential art avant-garde that greatly influenced the painters of the New Objectivity) is represented by Kirchner, Pechstein, and Nolde among others.  Pechstein's livid portrait of a young girl is very impressive, showing that the Expressionists could create beauty in spite of themselves.  Emil Nolde has two paintings in the show and he seems to be the most accomplished of the Expressionists on display -- there are astonishing paintings of Jesus with the sinner Mary Magdalene (part of violent cycle of paintings on the subject, erotic with smeared, glandular streaks of color) as well as a wonderful picture of the Pentecost with the disciples like African totems, each with a little cone of flame on their mask-like heads.  New Objectivity is represented largely by portraits, most of which are extremely accomplished.  Christian Schad's 1928 "Sonja" is the mascot for the show and, indeed, a great painting depicting a beautiful,but beleagured-looking "modern woman".  Schad is technically accomplished to an alarming degree and a  very interesting artist not well-known in this country -- his important works are mostly portraits and images of himself painted in the candid, but self-aggrandizing style of Albrecht Duerer (he was apparently very handsome).  When I was in Aschaffenburg a suburb of Frankfurt that stands in relation to the metropolis as Northfield is to Minneapolis, I had a chance to tour Schad's studio and home -- he moved to Aschaffenburg after the War.  I didn't know anything about the artist and so, I looked at other things first (mostly a garishly restored Cranach altar piece) and, when I reached the door to the Schad gallery, the place was closed.  I regret not learning more about Schad when I had the opportunity.

As you might expect, the show becomes increasingly grim with, however, some bright highlights -- there are two resplendent and jewel-like paintings by Paul Klee that occupy an abstract and glittering space that is outside of history and time. A side gallery exhibits 17 or 18 works by the great Kaethe Kollwitz -- these include the supremely moving sculpture "Tower of Women", showing burly matrons forming a protective circle around their children.  As if in riposte to the Kollwitz sculpture, there is Barlach's famous "The Avenger", a bronze that depicts a berserker with a saber lunging blindly forward -- Barlach made the bronze before he went away to World War One; when he returned, the sculpture had a different meaning to him -- it no longer expressed enthusiasm at the war but  the frenzied insanity of combat.  A large monochrome triptych shows people cowering in a subway bomb shelter -- it looks like a Beckmann painting without the bright colors of indescribeable hue and the verve of his expressive brushwork.  Two rather dour portraits flank another Beckmann masterpiece, his Weimar era portrait of the great actor Heinrich George, rehearsing his lines for a performance of Schiller's bellicose Wallenstein while wife and child cower before his fury -- George glowers out at us, wearing a sinister butcher's apron of some kind.  The labels on the wall for, at least, half of the works are melancholy -- the painters were sent to concentration camps, tortured, and killed; in other cases, their paintings were denounced as "degenerate" exposed to ridicule, and, then, deaccessioned to foreign lands.  German history seized a good number of these artists by the throat and destroyed them.  State-sanctioned Hitler period art is limited to a single impressive example -- this is a giant heroic bronze of a nude young man, genitals prominently on display; there's nothing wrong with this figure -- indeed, I thought it had wonderful presence, like an archaic kouros stoic, powerful, and enigmatic.  

(I will note that after perusing the catalog, the array of very fine Kollwitz etchings and woodcuts are from the collection of the MIA as is the splendid "Avenger" by Barlach, a counterpart to the great "Angel of the Reformation" that stands guard atop a lion outside the museum entrance.)

Upstairs, in the print gallery, you will find a group of hand-colored engravings of Egypt and its antiquities by David Roberts.  The images are fascinating.  Roberts toured Egypt traveling all the way up the Nile to Nubia where he records the appearance of Abu Simbel.  The pictures were published as part of a folio of something like 200 engravings documenting the ruins as they looked around 1840.  This was one of the last books of its kind, this genre of reportage supplanted by photography.  The pictures are all very entertaining -- I particularly liked one of a simoom or dust storm approaching the stoic-looking battered sphinx with the camels of a caravan sprawled out on the sand with their long serpentine necks ducked down to avoid the storm of grit and pebbles about to beset them.

Cobra Woman

 Universal Studios Cobra Woman released during World War Two (1943) sounds like a horror movie, a throwback to the classic monsters like Frankenstein, Dracula, and the werewolf that the company produced during the Depression.  This is misleading.  In fact, the picture is an exotic escapist fantasy, a brightly lit technicolored dream, more akin to The Wizard of Oz or The Thief of Baghdad -- indeed, many of the Moorish-style sets with domes and filigree-covered windows look like they were borrowed from the latter picture.  This is a war-time diversion, brilliantly lit and expensively colored, that also doubles as a rather lurid erotic spectacle.  The picture is extremely entertaining in a garish, hallucinatory way:  every frame of the picture is designed to monopolize your attention -- if things seem to lag, the director Robert Siodmak spices things up with nubile slave girls, human sacrifices, threats of  torture and  an avuncular chimpanzee as jester, ambling around in a weird batik apron and diaper.  The cast  is good for this sort of thing:  Jon Hall plays the love-smitten jungle explorer hero with a big square head and big square jaw and an "aw-shucks" demeanor.  Hall's character, oddly named Ramu, is passive, generally spending his time tied-up in a dungeon or, otherwise, ineffectually mooning over this missing girlfriend.  The girlfriend, indeed, Ramu's fiancee, is the lissome Tollea, played by Maria Montez, as beautiful and remote as a Greek statue or the moon.  Tollea has a twin sister (also Montez of course) who is more lively -- she's the titular cobra woman, the High Priestess of a snake cult on a small island dominated by a smoking and, sometimes, fiery volcano that looks just something contrived for an eighth grade science fair.  The High Priestess is more lively than her sister, a sadist who requires her longsuffering people to hurl themselves into the volcano to preserve her dictatorial rule.  The Cobra Woman's muscle is priest called Martock, who runs around in a brilliant scarlet robe with a hat that looks like an oversized tulip just sprouting from the earth.  (The movie seems to put most of its budget into resplendent costumes:  the Cobra Woman wears a meter-high tiara of coruscating gold and gems -- it looks like a peacock's tail extended over her head -- and her slinky, high-fashion vestments are embroidered with more jewels that glitter against the red fabric.  The women in the Court are all showgirls -- they wear clothing that is so tight-fitting that that they might as well be completely topless.  Although the story takes place in a South Seas jungle, the girls all prance about in high-heels.)  Lon Chaney Jr., who always looks as if he's being tortured, plays the part of a beggar whom we first see with gruesome white eyes -- he can't talk because his tongue has been ripped out.  The beggar, in fact, is an emissary from the old Queen of Snake Island, the mother of Tollea and her evil twin, the High Priestess; the picture is about regime change -- the old Queen Mother wants to install the more humane and reasonable Tollea in the role of High Priestess; the evil twin is a kind of usurper.  When Chaney's enigmatic beggar abducts Tollea and takes her to Snake Island, her aggrieved fiancee Ramu (Jon Hall) pursues her, crossing over to the dangerous island where all strangers are tortured to death.  Accompanying him is Kado, played obsequiously by Sabu, the handsome and loyal jungle boy with his pet chimpanzee named Koko.  On the island, action is non-stop and breathless and the action proceeds on the principle of "one damn thing after another."  A black panther stalks Ramu but the jungle-boy uses a blow-pipe to kill the critter mid-air as it springs from a cliff onto the hero.  The protagonists climb a cliff, nearly falling off and, then, see Tollea with an entourage of Vegas-style show girls bathing in the sacred pond -- Ramu leaps in and Siodmak cuts to underwater shot in which hero and heroine embrace in the turquoise-colored depths.  Ramu is captured by Martock and thrown in a dungeon.  The poor jungle boy gets savagely tortured by being stretched by the tension of a bent tree while his feet are fettered.  ("Take him to the tree of torture!" someone commands.)  The feisty ape frees the jungle boy who is none the worse for wear.  The High Priestess does a cobra dance wiggling around while a gigantic serpent glares at her.  The serpent rests on a sort of silver platter, the kind of thing on which you might be served paela in an expensive Spanish restaurant.  (Siodmak is a product of the German film system -- the dance sequence is indebted to the similarly erotic performance by the robot Maria in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.)  Two-hundred peasants are selected for human sacrifice in the gullet of the volcano which rumbles threateningly.  Ramu escapes from the dungeon and, finally, there's a huge brawl in the ornate cobra temple with the jungle-boy and great White hunter swinging back and forth on conveniently placed ropes tethered to overhead candelabra to lunge onto their enemies while the chimp gloats, turns his lip back over his lower jaw, and pitches pieces of fruit at the combatants.   During this battle royale, the volcano erupts and spews rocks and red hot magma all over the place.  All ends well.  The oppressive reign of the Cobra Woman comes to an end and peace and harmony are restored on the island.  

The dialogue is precious, little chunks of overheated nonsense chanted by the characters:  for example, a villain characterizes the Queen Mother's hopes for the future as "the wild dream of her decaying brain."  During the brawl, the two-hundred human sacrifices are heard climbing the "thousand steps to the volcano's" top, singing their "fire death hymn".  The sacred pond is a round pool in an idyllic forest edged at the far side with a whole flock of flamingos -- the flamingos never move and its obvious that their just lawn ornaments seen from a distance; the filmmakers hope you won't notice but you do and that's part of the charm of this picture.  Similarly, the mise-en-scene alternates shots of a real cobra looking rather timid and beleaguered with a prosthetic creature, probably a puppet, that's twice as large -- again the filmmakers sort of hope that you won't notice the discrepancy but,  of course, you do.  The opening titles assure the viewer that you're in for a good time:  two massive bronze braziers are burning with orange flame -- they produce vertical columns of bright green smoke that flank a huge gilded image of  a cobra about to strike.  

Reputedly, Cobra Woman was Kenneth Anger's favorite film, admired by the director of the libertine The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and Lucifer Rising among other pictures.  I should also note that Cobra Woman has a peculiar message or moral:  "Fear has made them (referring to the Snake Islanders) religious fanatics."  Curiously, the picture suggests that the problem on the island is that Martock representing law (secular authority) has got entangled with the religious sect of cobra worship.  This seems a sort of "Why we Fight" aspect to the film. In an oblique way, the film seems to be a part of the war effort.

1984

 Director Michael Radford's 1984 is grim, grey sarcophagus of a movie.  Made between April and June in 1984, the film replicates in its production the period of time depicted in the novel (the action seems to occur in that time frame.)  The movie is excruciatingly faithful to George Orwell's novel published in June of 1949.  Big Brother says it is your duty to see this film, but you will suffer.

I have always found Orwell's novel 1984 highly unpleasant and a real trial to read.  The novel is so humorless and unrelievedly depressing that it's actually left scars on my imagination.  I recall with pain the scene in which some thug casually smashes Winston Smith's elbow, inducing horrible pain; Smith finds it particularly degrading to be writhing on the floor and screaming over an insult to his elbow.  (The movie with its commitment to literal adaptation of the book reproduces this scene.) There's another moment at the end of the book in the Chestnut Cafe, a sort of junkyard for enemies of the regime who have been reduced to skeletal zombies, when Winston meets his former lover Julie.  Julie earlier told Winston that she didn't like children, was afraid of childbirth, and didn't ever want to be pregnant.  Winston notices that she's somewhat "thickened around the middle" (I'm approximating) -- apparently, this is due to the fact that she's been raped and impregnated and seems to have borne a child.  There are some horrible suggestions made as to how she's been tortured by a regime that she now loves (as a result of brainwashing) far more than she ever loved Winston.  Winston also stares at the telescreen on which Big Brother is shown and swoons with love for the autocrat.  Orwell imagined 1984 to be a satire, but there's not a shred of comedy in the book (and movie) except ironies that are too dark to be funny.  1984 is one of the 20th centuries greatest novels and an abiding presence in our culture -- but, as far as I'm concerned, the book is too profoundly disheartening to be entertaining and here, unlike many other writings by Orwell, the author takes himself with brutish seriousness.  The severity of the book carries over into the movie and makes some of it well-nigh unwatchable.

The film begins with a two minute "Hate Session" in which the lower ranking members of the Party shriek and howl at the great nemesis to Big Brother, the evil spy and reactionary Emmanuel Goldstein.  Winston,  whose job is erasing apparatchiks who have fallen out of favor from the historical record -- he covers their faces with the pictures of other party functionaries and throws all evidence of the erased figures into a "memory hole" where flames instantly flare to burn the proof into ashes.  Winston who is secretly guilty of thought-crime (he has procured a notebook and writes subversive things in it) despises Julie for her compliance with the regime -- it's not that she does what she is ordered to do, but that she does so enthusiastically.  Julie, wears the red sash of the anti-Sex league around her belly, and manages machines (some kind of AI) that writes porn for the proles.  Everyone swills Victory gin.  War is perpetual and sometimes buzz bombs shred parts of the gloomy, half wrecked city.  There are painful flashbacks in which Winston sees his mother devoured by fat, black rats.  In one flashback, he steals food from his dying little sister.  When he returns to the squalid apartment after eating the chocolate bar, his mother and sister have simply vanished.  A man named Charrington runs a second-hand store and sells Winston a bit of coral that is enclosed in a sort of snow-globe.  Charrington has a furnished bedroom above the shop and, later, for four dollars a week rents the place to Winston and Julie for their romantic trysts.  (The movie doesn't acknowledge that Winston is already married when he has the affair with Julie, a detail from the novel that is elided.)  For some reason that is inexplicable to me, Julie, who seems a frisky damsel, passes Winston (played by John Hurt in an utterly morose and tediously sorrowful part) a "mash note."  No sooner is the note handed to Winston than he and Julie are having sex in the country, writhing on the floor of a forest, near a vista of trees and bare hills that looks exactly like a screensaver on a computer -- a bit like the rolling Dublin, California hills famously used as an image of a restful green world on a million million monitors.  (For some reason that I couldn't fathom, the screensaver shot, which re-occurs every ten minutes or so, is located behind the door to Room 101, the infamous torture chamber where victims are forced to confront whatever they most fear in all the world.  Winston's love affair with Julie features a lot of nudity -- this is an intentional strategy to make the lovers look horribly vulnerable against the ruins of the shattered city, the thugs in black leather garments and the hovering helicopters.  Richard Burton, who was dying when he performed in the movie, plays the part of the Grand Inquisitor and torturer, O'Brien.  Briefly, O'Brien seems to treat Winston as his protegee, explaining that the bureaucrat isn't using Newspeak correctly and that he needs to master new words in the vocabulary.  O'Brien insists that when the language is perfected (that is Newspeak), the revolution will have achieved its objectives.  A few minutes later, goons arrest Julie and Winston, who are both naked, and beat them up.  Winston is, then, tortured for about a half-hour, an episode that is hard to watch and that is singularly unpleasant.  Winston is reduced to an emaciated figure who looks like a concentration camp inmate.  The objective of the torture is torture; there's no purpose to it.  The idea is to destroy Winston so thoroughly that he can believe that 2 + 2 = 5 or 3 or whatever the party says the sum should be.  Winston is tortured with electric shots to the point that he doesn't know what the 2 + 2 sum is -- when he tries to avoid the crippling jolts of electricity by saying "five", he's accused of lying and the electrical charge is increased.  This goes on and on.  At one point, O'Brien says that Winston thinks he is upholding the dignity of man -- O'Brien, then, drags him to a mirror and shows him his reflection, a hideous, scabby, lice-infested scarecrow; then, he rips one of Winston's teeth from his gums -- starvation has made this an easy thing to do.  This spectacle is followed by the infamous episode in Room 101 involving hungry rats.  Winston screams that O'Brien should torture Julie with the rats and spare him.  Finally, O'Brien is convinced that Winston loves Big Brother -- the whole exercise is without meaning or practical effect; the Party will require Winston to confess all manner of ridiculous crimes ("I went to prostitutes to intentionally infect myself with syphilis so I could spread the disease to party members") since the plan is to put a bullet through his brain at some point after his abject humiliation has been sufficiently shown to the world.

Clearly, the movie is about Stalin and Stalinism in the Soviet Union.  Orwell's novel is bitter, a result of the dissolution of his early idealism that led him to fight for the Communists in the Spanish Civil War -- all his idealism was reduced to a mouthful of ashes when he saw that the Party was corrupt and rife with betrayal.  This experience seems to have led to the book and, therefore, to the movie.  The film's bitterness is pathological and the form of the movie is utterly consistent with its subject -- the picture is shot in color reduced to a grey, concrete-colored monochrome; the editing is quick, sometimes suggesting Soviet style montage and the movie is comprised of big hideous close-ups:  everyone looks terrible in the sweaty close-ups that the movie features.  Even Julie is decidedly plain and Richard Burton looks wan, chalky, and bloated, like someone who has spent too much time boozing in a wretched pub.  During the movie's 110 minutes run time, I yearned for escape.  In my imagination, the escape was Terry Gilliam's Brazil which is the same movie  on the same subject but far more entertaining, it's surreal humor not blunted by all the misery and torture.  Everyone should see 1984 --it's your duty.  But cleanse your palate with the much more engaging if equally savage satire you will find in Gilliam's great Brazil.  

The Chase (1946)

 After World War Two and Citizen Kane, Hollywood experimented with different and, sometimes, radical approaches to narration.  Films featured false (or badly remembered) flashbacks, narration delivered by a corpse floating in a swimming pool at a mansion off Sunset Boulevard, and stories nested within stories.  The late David Bordwell has written a book on this subject, characterizing it as Hollywood's reinvention of narrative.  Godard said that his pictures had a proper beginning, middle, and end but just not in that order.  The same can be said for many post-war film noir.  Arthur Ripley's 1946 noir, The Chase (adapting Cornell Woolrich's The Black Path of Fear) is a noteworthy example of the sometimes hallucinatory innovations in narration characterizing that period.

A troubled war veteran is starving on the streets.  While ravenously watching a cook making eggs and bacon through a glass window, the vet, Scotty, finds a wallet on the street.  Fundamentally an honest man, Scotty treats himself to a meal, buys a cigar, and, then, sets off to find the owner of the wallet.  In a lavish marble mansion, Scotty encounters a smarmy and sadistic gangster named Eddie Roman (Steve Cochran).  The mansion is filled with Greek and Roman statuary; there's an obsequious butler, a henchman played by a lithe and serpentine Peter Lorre, and, of course, a blonde moll as cool and marmoreal as the statures strewn about the place.  Roman admires Scotty's sangfroid and honesty and hires him to be his chauffeur.  First, he tests Scotty's driving ability by making him steer the limousine while Roman operates a floor accelerator in the backseat, goosing the big car so that it roars toward a train on a railway track at over a hundred miles an hour.  Roman and Scotty narrowly avert a crash.  Peter Lorre wipes sweat off his face.  Scotty gets the job.

Scotty is played by Robert Cummings who purses his lips and spends most of the movie looking baffled.  He gulps down pills by the score, apparently some kind of tranquilizer since he has PTSD from his service in the Navy in the War.  Scotty's main assignment is carting Roman's moll, Lorna, around southern Florida.  Needless to say a romance ensues between Lorna and Scotty.  Scotty buys tickets planning to elope with Lorna to Havana.  They cross the sea on a steamer and, in Havana, someone knifes Lorna and plants the murder weapon on Scotty.  He flees through the shadows of Havana and takes refuge in a curio shop.  A Chinese merchant, an old woman, appears as a figure of doom.  Ultimately, the bad guys, including Lorre, pursue Scotty through the blackness of the curio shop, having gunned down the old woman.  Scotty is shot and falls down some stairs.  But it's revealed that this has all been a dream.  Scotty has fallen asleep in his room, waiting for nine pm when he intends to abscond to the port with Lorna.  Now, Scotty is completely amnesiac and can't even recall who he is, let alone his plot to elope with his fearsome boss's girlfriend.  He finds the number of his psychiatrist, possibly on the pill bottle and calls.  The two men meet and, then, adjourn to a glitzy nightclub  - how this could be construed as therapeutic is hard for me to see.  Eddie Roman and his gun-thug, Peter Lorre also come into the same glittering and overlit night club.  Scotty sees Roman and, then, remembers his mission for the night.  He darts away in a hurry to pickup Lorna.  Roman and Lorre chase after him, Lorre holding the steering wheel and Roman manning the accelerator from the backseat.  The limousine races to beat a speeding locomotive but slams into the train crossing at the same time that the locomotive has reached that point.  There's a big, fiery wreck.  Meanwhile, Scotty and Lorna sail for Havana.  They reach Cuba and the film repeats previous shots of them in front of a nightclub --  images we saw in the first half of the film.  Lorna embraces Scotty and ostensibly the film ends happily ever after.

The plot is barely serviceable and compromised by the use of dream to rewrite the fatal history of Lorna and Scotty's elopement.  But it's flamboyantly made achieving surreal effects on what must have been a very low budget.  Cochran, who plays Eddie Roman, was a bad guy in real life, "pretty much a douche" as Guy Maddin characterizes him on the commentary -- in the film, he viciously slaps a girl giving him a manicure, taunts his wife, and makes strange quasi-homosexual remarks.  In feeds a business rival to his mastiff in one memorable scene; Ripley accomplishes the murder with just shadows, darkness, a broken bottle of Napoleon cognac, and the sound of a growling dog.  Havana is filmed like a von Sternberg location -- it's all shimmering moire patterns of light and dark, shadowy grillwork, steps and ladders lit to cast huge shadows, a tropical pattern of dark lattices and roving points of light; no one's face is ever visibile.  There are odd dreamlike kinds of interference and paralysis.  When Scotty tries to leave the crowd in front of the night club, the hack driver suddenly starts speaking impenetrable Spanish and no one can understand him or communicate their destination.  It seems that the man would refuse to go where they want anyway.  Some early love scenes are shot with rear projection of the stormy sea, a tropical pier, and someone with a bucket of water simulating surf by sometimes tossing white handfuls of water into the range of the camera. Oddy enough it's very effective in a turbulent, Emily Bronte-style  a kind of demotic Gothic.  After the dream we have a sense of fatality, events repeat themselves in a strange way.  Everything has more or less already happened and now is coming back as farce or delirium.  The editing seems slightly agitated, disjunct, shots don't exactly fit together right leading to a sense that the space in which the movie happens is full of fractures, gaps, parts that don't mesh right.  The climactic scenes with the speeding train and the limousine in its pursuit are filmed with obvious miniatures -- it looks completely phony, but the hero is the plaything of fate and the spectacle of a tiny car and locomotive colliding somehow seems symbolic of the movie's dreamlike aura.  

I bought the DVD primarily for the self-effacing commentary of the great Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin.  His narration is primarily biographical, sketching outlines of the careers of the principal figures in the movie, including a memorable and hair-raising account of Steve Cochran's death.  Maddin is fanatical about dates and film titles and presents a queer perspective that is simultaneously hard-boiled and fey.  At one point, he says of Cochran:  "you wouldn't want to be his cell-mate", then, pauses and murmurs "Or, maybe, you would."   The leading lady, Michele Morgan, was a French actress who had fled to the United States during the war years; she died in 2016 at the chronological age of 96 but technically was only 24 -- she was born on February 29, 1920.

 

The Stunt Man

 Released in 1980, director Richard Rush's The Stunt Man is a vibrant example of seventies' counter-culture film-making at its best.  There's plenty of casual sex, nudity, and grind-house style violence.  The picture has a loose, "anything goes" atmosphere.  At the same time, there are pot-head profundities on display:  the movie is about the ubiquity of betrayal in Hollywood, about the effects of the Vietnam war, and, even, a meditation on the nature of reality:  since the picture is the backstage chronicle of an ambitious director shooting a World War One epic, we are invited to deliberate on what is real and what is fictional.  The director is played by Peter O'Toole, probably a caricature of Francis Ford Coppola on t location for Apocalypse Now.  O'Toole as Eli Cross, a narcissistic director, never has his feet on the ground -- he is literally suspended on his crane, hanging in midair, generally with no obvious means of support, or zooming around in a small helicopter, the so-called "chopper" as it is called in the movie.  I said the movie features pot-head profundities, a comment that is not intended to be derogatory, and the film insists, I think, that Cross is not only a flamboyant film maker but, also, "the grand inventor" of all things, God himself.  (O'Toole is more convincing in this role than the deity that appears in the Bible.)  The picture is a peculiar and unstable mixture of serious subject matter, high-flown eloquence, and down-and-dirty pulp fiction with gratuitous sex, tits and ass, and lots of elaborately staged explosions and chases.  The director, Richard Rush, is an enigma -- he cut his teeth on low-budget exploitation films, made The Stunt Man, which was highly regarded in its time, and, then, slipped back into audience-pleasing genre pictures. Critics determined that Rush was neither 'fish nor fowl", not exactly Francis Coppola but, also, considerably superior to the exploitation films that he ended up making.  Hollywood likes type-casting not only in its actors but also directors and, since no one could really assimilate The Stunt Man (famously praised by Pauline Kael as one of the best pictures of the year) Rush wasn't given the right material for his talent and ended-up slipping out of view.

The Stunt Man was one of two novels written by the New Yorker investigative reporter Paul Brodeur.  It was published in 1970 before Brodeur became well-known for his crusading journalism -- he was one of the investigators that exposed the carcinogenic effects of asbestos and was, generally a specialist in pollution and toxic tort exposes.  My suspicion is that the unique qualities of The Stunt Man derive from what were probably literate and, even, high-toned aspects of the source novel.  The picture involves a Vietnam war veteran on the run from the cops and probably suffering from what we would call today "PTSD."  The veteran stumbles onto a film set involving a classic car crashing off an old bridge into a river.  The car is driven eccentrically and the vet believes that it is trying to run him down.  He interferes with the car and, then, sees it plunge off the bridge and into the river.  (Although the car crash is an effect in the film that Cross is making, the vet interprets it as occurring because of his efforts to avert the vehicle from running over him.)  A stuntman drowns in the crash.  The vet continues his escape and ends up at a beach where a battle is being filmed "with five cameras", a big spectacle involving many showy explosions, fragmentary corpses (they turn out to be men in make-up half buried in the sand) and bi-planes strafing the advancing troops.  A cop is investigating the disappearance of the stuntman whom we know to have drowned in the river.  He harasses the director and his crew and, under pressure, they claim the scruffy fugitive is, in fact, the missing stunt man.  The cop smells a rat but he can't get to the bottom of the ruse.  Cross hires the vet who is impersonating a stunt man to perform real stunts in the movie.  They call the vet "Lucky."  Lucky turns out to have genuine gift for "hell for leather" stunts involving significant danger.  He has sex with a make-up girl and, then, is seduced by the film's leading lady played by an angelic-looking Barbara Hershey.  After some amusing chases filmed in Keystone Kop manner by Cross -- Lucky evades an army of inept German troops wearing comical Pickelhaube (that is, Prussian helmets with spear-point tops) by clambering all over the complicated gables and eaves of the Coronado Hotel (a landmark on the beach in San Diego).  Some of the stunts seem lethal and are increasingly dangerous and Lucky comes to believe that Cross is trying to engineer his death -- probably to conceal the actual death of the stunt man in the river.  In the course of his love affair with the film's leading lady, Lucky learns that the character is also sleeping with Eli Cross.  This leads to some quarrels.  Hershey is puzzled by Lucky's naivety -- she says that actresses having sex with directors is just the way the industry works.  Lucky and the actress get drunk and have a slapstick love scene involving a set that they partially destroy and about forty gallons of paint.  (There's a fantastic purely seventies' line in this scene -- Barbara Hershey who is half-naked and covered in paint, cries out:  "We gotta get organized!")  Lucky acts out the offense for which the cops are chasing him -- he beat up his wife's boyfriend  (she was unfaithful when he was in 'Nam) in a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop -- and persuades Hershey that he is fundamentally harmless.  (As a Vietnam vet everyone has suspected him of rape, murder, and various war crimes.)  Cross persuades Lucky to perform the stunt that killed the other stunt man.  He and the leading lady plot to flee the film set and avoid the potentially deadly stunt in the river.  This sets up the climax of the movie.  

Pauline Kael commended the movie as "kinetic" and film's mise-en-scene is, indeed, a triumph of controlled, vivid chaos.  In the opening scene, a buzzard snatches an apple as two line-men look on and, then, are confronted by the fleeing vet.  The sequence involving the first river stunt features a picture perfect stream running in a narrow gorge -- there's a tree off-balance and about to topple into the water, a memorably strange image.  Much of the film is staged like a silent comedy, in particular, the scene in which the vet clambers all over the facade of the Coronado Hotel as dozens, if not hundreds, of German soldiers pursue him firing guns and dodging bullets blasted down on the crumbling structure by a pesky bi-plane -- this is a triumph of action film-making both comical and scary and it's as good as anything Steven Spielberg has done.  Even dialogue sequences jerk and spastically dance around -- huge waves batter a sea-wall splashing thirty feet in the sky in one scene.  The camera placement is exemplary and the editing is sharp as a razor.  Pennants whip in boil in the wind.  Surf pounds the beach and, overhead, the helicopter banks and turns and spirals.  Peter O'Toole's Eli Cross seems sometimes to underplay and act down to earth, but, most of the time, his British diction is perfect and rotund and he declaims his speeches as if they were Shakespeare.  O'Toole's dramatic delivery if offset by the grungy appeal of Steve Railsbeck who plays Lucky -- the contrast between the two acting styles is one the pleasures offered by this movie.  Expensively made and brilliantly acted, The Stunt Man is as fun as a cult movie, but better, I think.  

Sentimental Value

 Joachim Trier's 2025 Sentimental Value is an ambitious picture that explores, among other things, intergenerational trauma, art as therapy, self-destructiveness, and intricate family dynamics.  Trier is painting with a broad brush and freights his film with too much material -- there is too much neurosis, guilt, and reconciliation in the movie; I found it exhausting and, after ninety minutes, was longing for the thing to be over -- I think its two hours and 13 minutes long.  This is an estimable movie by an important director but it's excessive in the sense that the viewer can't quite keep the various patterns devised by the director in mind -- presented in short sequences that end with the screen suddenly dark, the movie has a staccato rhythm and, despite its potentially lugubrious subject matter, the film has a light touch -- it's like one of Woody Allen's pictures from the eighties without the one-liners and Borscht belt gags; in fact, the movie has a role that seems tailor-made for Woody Allen -- this is the part of Gustav, the manipulative director, who seems brazenly willing to sacrifice everything on the altar of his art.  With a little spin, the movie's rather Gothic subject matter could be presented as a black comedy -- Trier doesn't opt for comedy but, I admire him, for not shaping his material into some sort of tragedy or melodrama either.  He's a realist, at least in this movie and most of what we see and hear is plausible on the level of quotidian observation -- these seem to be real people and their interactions aren't heightened, nor do they veer into Bergman's metaphysical darkness.  In its odd way, it's a companionable movie.

The intergenerational trauma underlying the movie is socio-historical and, also, personal.  Gustav's mother was a psycho-therapist, practicing in the family's wonderful-looking early Victorian house.  During World War Two, she was betrayed by neighbors as a member of the Resistance, sent to a camp, and severely tortured.  When Gustav was eight, his mother hanged herself, an enigmatic and catastrophic act that is either over-motivated or under-motivated depending upon how you view things.  Gustav is a film-maker and has achieved international fame.  He's also seventy and hasn't made a movie for fifteen years.  But he has written a script about his mother which he regards as his magnum opus.  Netflix is interested in financing the movie and Gustav is engaged in machinations to cast the film, hire a director of photography and a technical crew, to get the picture made.

Gustav has two daughters by his wife whom he has divorced.  The movie begins at the family home where people are gathered after the funeral of Gustav's ex-wife.  No one seems particularly griefstricken -- these are Norwegians and they are masters at maintaining a stiff upper lip.  Nora, the eldest sister, is an actress who has appeared in a TV series but is mostly active in Oslo's theater.  She suffers from severe stage-fright.  In an early scene, we see her refusing to go on-stage during the premiere of some classical drama -- it may be Chekhov's The Sea Gull or some other work in the classical repertoire.  Nora flees through the backstage area, fights people trying to drag her on stage, and, then, summons her married boyfriend and demands a lightning sexual encounter with him.  He says there's not enough time and, so, Nora replies that he should hit her hard in the face to knock her out of her hysteria.  He slaps her and, after some more struggles, she goes on-stage and, apparently, amazes everyone with her performance.  Later, Nora says that she's only 20% functional and 80% fucked-up.  Her dysfunction consists of anger and loneliness with depression.  By contrast, Agnes, Nora's little sister, is successful -- she seems to be happily married, has an eight-year old son on whom she dotes, and works as an "academic historian" as she says.  Gustav's flamboyant and belated appearance at the family Leichenschmaus or funeral buffet destabilizes the situation and knocks the sisters back into memories of their childhood.  Agnes starred as a child in one of Gustav's movies, indeed, probably his last movie before the fifteen years dry period.  The movie, a fragment of which we see, harkens back to the Occupation of Norway and involves Nazi soldiers snatching a young boy while his sister, played by Agnes, watches from a nearby train.  Since that movie was shot, neither of the sisters has had much to do with Gustav -- he's selfish and has been an absent father.  Gustav approaches the older sister, Nora, and asks her to play the role of the mother in his new play.  Nora refuses angrily and won't even read the script.  At a retrospective of his films at Deauville, Gustav meets a Hollywood starlet, Rachel (played by Elle Fanning) and, after a night drinking with her on the beach, casts her in the role of his mother. Rachel comes to Norway where Gustav is planning to shoot the movie in the family home (where Agnes is living).  He intimidates Rachel by showing her the footstool that his mother used to climb up to a noose to hang herself in one of the rooms in the house -- this is a lie:  everyone in the family knows the footstool came from Ikea.  It turns that Rachel is a bad fit for the part.  The plan is to shoot the movie in English which seems problematic.  Gustav has Rachel cut her hair and change its color so she looks more like Nora.  Finally, Rachel, recognizing that she is miscast, graciously withdraws from the movie.  Gustav has written the role for Nora, whom he recognizes as sharing traits with his mother.  He hopes her performance in the film will free her from the burden of the past.  At first, Nora refuses to even read the script.  But, then, at last, Agnes prevails upon her to study the script.  (This is in the context of Gustav trying to cast Agnes' son, Erick, as the little boy in the movie -- that is, as Gustav himself as a child; Agnes refuses and accuses her father of egoism and being opportunistic and malevolently manipulative.)  Gustav has a heart attack but is too mean and tough to die.  He directs the movie with Nora playing the part of his suicidal mother and, in fact, Erick as the child.  There's an intentionally confusing sequence near the end in which we don't know whether we're watching the movie or a film within the film.  (This echoes an earlier scene in which Nora begins crying and curls into a fetal posture by her bed -- a scene that turns out to be a part in a play in which she is acting; we can see the audience in the long shot of her on the floor.)

This summary omits many interesting things in the movie.  There's a bitter and moving meditation on old age:  Gustav's long time cameraman is not sufficiently spry to manage the hand-held camera shots in the proposed film and his old friend, at first, seems to reject him for the project.  Nora's married boyfriend gives up on her -- now that his wife has divorced him, Nora thinks that they can expose their love affair, but the boyfriend isn't interested in committing.  There's biographical scenes from Gustav's youth and middle-age and a long sequence in which Agnes, the historian, researches her grandmother's capture and torture by the Occupation forces. Trier films family squabbling about the dead mother's possessions and there's conversation about the status of the old house -- Gustav's wife was granted the house in the divorce but the papers were never filed and Gustav expects the home to revert to him.  Much of this material, broadly speaking, is superfluous.to the main plot which involves Gustav persuading Nora to act in the role of his mother.  The staging of the final scenes suggests that, perhaps, Gustav has re-written history so that his mother does not commit suicide -- but this is very unclear.  (The clue is whether we hear the Ikea foot stool knocked over when the act occurs -- Gustav's mother has shut the door on the chamber where she commits the act.,)  Another curiosity in the film is narration, seemingly by the old house itself.  The house has a crack running from its foundation up to the attic -- it's like the fatally flawed House of Usher.  

Sentimental Value is never less than highly cultured, subtle, and beautifully made and acted.  It's a little too diffuse for my taste and I prefer Trier's earlier The Worst Person in the World which seems more focused and coherent to me.  But it's probably important for those interested in cinema to see this movie and the time spent watching the film is certainly not wasted.  

Macbeth (Guthrie Theater on February 8, 2026)

 It pains me to say that culture in the United States is slowly, but inexorably, renouncing Shakespeare.  The urgency, it seems, that once underwrote prestige productions of Shakespeare has leaked away and, somehow, dissipated.  You won't see evidence of this tendency anywhere but in the repertoire theater companies that once regarded Shakespeare as central to their project -- elsewhere Shakespeare's theater is so far from the mainstream as to be invisible, a tissue of misinterpreted legends buried under detritus like Grand Theft Hamlet.  However, this trend is most obvious at the regional festivals once mostly dedicated to Shakespeare but now slumming with musical comedies and politically correct and virtuous shows about oppression, abuse, and fortitude in facing hardship.  In the little town of Lanesboro, picturesquely nestled under the pale cliffs looming over the Root River bridge and the old grain elevator, an Ibsen festival flourished for about twenty years.  The sponsors of the festival produced all of Ibsen's major plays, including a heavily redacted version of Pillars of Society, but, then, energy flagged and audiences diminished and, two years ago, I think, the Ibsen festival announced that it was pleased to continue is summer repertory productions except without any Ibsen at all -- the shows on offer now are versions of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, British farces, and other audience-pleasing fare.  What is the cause for Shakespeare's shrinking importance?  (Ibsen has already been forgotten.)  I think this has something to do with the notion that post-George Floyd and post-me-too feminism, the works of the Bard have become increasingly irrelevant -- when a play needs apologies and contorted justifications to be presented, the work seems unnecessary.  Color-blind and gender-blind casting can supply some rationale for a new look at Shakespeare's plays, but, ultimately, those measures create more havoc and trouble than they are worth; in Elizabethan theater largely concerned with dynastic issues, the tyrannical power of fathers, and intricate family melodrama, gender- and color-blind casting is a distraction on which many progressive directorial ambitions have foundered. There are no queer subtexts in Shakespeare, although this sort of emphasis can be provided from outside (and, indeed, far outside) of the Shakespearian canon.  But just because you can distort a text to support a currently fashionable thesis or interest doesn't mean that it should be done.  I'm wounded to say that Shakespeare, with his peculiarly impenetrable diction and surfeit of plotting, hasn't got a lot to say to audiences in 2025.  And, so, I can feel the Bard of Avon slipping away, his plays drifting toward the status of artifacts in a museum.  This process has been continuing all my life -- people older than me will recall Lawrence Olivier's versions of Hamlet and Henry V; I recall Peter Brooks mounting a Midsummer Night's Dream that featured Diana Rigg in a state of (mostly) undress.  But, as Shakespeare became more and more culturally remote, the plays began to seem less and less important, perfunctory exercises in tongue-twisting diction.  They say that a frog will sit in water with the heat gradually increasing until it is boiled to death.  (This is a myth).  The new Guthrie production of Macbeth, however, is the performance for me that has made this particular frog leap far and wide away from the water in which it is immersed.  Shakespeare, I'm afraid, is no longer persuasive of anything.

A famous man of the theater, Joe Dowling, has directed this Macbeth.  Everything seems hastily contrived and slipshod.  The play is cut to an hour and fifty minutes, which, in itself, is not a problem.  Macbeth has to move at lightning speed to dramatize the sudden and lethal destruction of its two main characters.  There should be a sort of ritualized frenzy about the play.  In this production, the violence is downplayed -- the bloody soldier who announces Macbeth's berserker courage and ferocious slaughter of the King's enemies is scarcely wounded at all.  He was not bloody, in fact, as far as I could see.  Modern sensibilities in polite theater-going have banished the gore (beheadings and so on) to an offstage status.  There's a bow to horror fans -- and Macbeth is more akin to a modern horror movie than a well-made play -- in the show's final moments in which dead Macbeth is hoisted by his ankles above the stage, to dangle head downward at the curtain.  But this effect is spoiled by the time it takes to engineer this effect -- supernumeraries are busy attaching bondage-style cuffs to dead Macbeth's ankles and this labor seems contrived.  (Better to just sever Macbeth's head off-stage and have MacDuff brandish the thing by its gory locks at the final blackout -- again, confident velocity is everything in the staging of this show.)  The play looks like it's done on the cheap -- when Macbeth tells his servant to strap on his armor for the final showdown, the harness looks like a poorly made leather vest; it's not armor at all.  The only elaborate effect is saved for the penultimate scene when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane -- six or seven soldiers stand behind neon-lights configured like straight 30 foot tall pine trees; it's showy but, also, tone-deaf:  a glitzy Las Vegas effect imported onto the dour, grim Wurtele Thrust Stage.  The show's is badly cast.  Macbeth is played by a handsome pipsqueak of a boy -- he has absolutely no charisma and no gravitas.  Lady Macbeth is better and she seems palpable older than her youthful husband.  The witches aren't frightening.  They prance around a hole in the stage from which some fog emerges, chanting in unison, an effect that doesn't ever work successfully in the theater.  Mercifully, the dramaturge has cut the two scenes intended to cater to King James' morbid interest in witchcraft and demonology -- these are the scenes in which Hecate makes a completely redundant appearance.  The idiotic scene in which Malcolm claims all sorts of damnable vices to test MacDuff (I think -- the whole thing makes no sense) is inexplicably retained.  "I'm a really bad, bad guy," says Malcolm and, then, tells the baffled MacDuff that he's exceedingly temperate and virtuous -- this is awful stuff and really should be omitted from any reasonable performance of the play.  Otherwise the cuts are mostly local, inconspicuous, and scattered -- of course, the witches aren't going to be allowed to put boiled Jew in their potion.  The Scottish troops wear black jumpsuits and have little red berets like Curtis Sliwa's subway vigilantes.  The final duel between MacDuff and Macbeth is staged as a knife-fight -- it looks tawdry and unconvincing, a couple of slender pretty boys pretending to be bar-toughs in a tavern scuffle.  Ultimately, this production by the much-vaunted Guthrie Theater smells like a High School show featuring a precocious, but callow, cast.  It's not the Guthrie's fault -- it's the Zeitgeist.