Film group essay -- Monsieur Verdoux

 Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux

Charlie Chaplin’s soul is ruined by sudden fame and fortune or, at least, it might be so maintained.

Before 1920, Charlie Chaplin was reported to be making $640,000 a year, a monumental sum at that time.  (Currency converters assure me that this sum of money equates 20 million dollars by today’s purchasing power.) A mere ten years earlier, the young music hall vaudevillian was living in poverty in London’s Soho District.  The actor’s rise to fame and fortune has the quality of a fairy tale.

Chaplin’s father, Charles Chaplin Sr. was a music-hall performer in Soho specializing in patter songs in which he impersonated various London types.  A good music-hall character singer in the late Victorian era could sing like a nobleman, a cockney, a farmer from the sticks, an elderly Jewish man, a tar (sailor) and soldier, and a black minstrel.  Chaplin Sr. was accomplished but also alcoholic.  He beat his wife and children and drank himself into an early grave.  Chaplin’s mother, whose mental health was fragile, went mad.  She was locked-up in a lunatic asylum, apparently an incurable schizophrenic.  Other family members, aunts and uncles, succumbed to gin, opium and suicide.  Ultimately little Charlie Chaplin was committed to the workhouse with his brother.  Yes, this is as bad as it sounds.  

After a short time, Chaplin and frere were released from workhouse.  The boys begged on the streets but could sing and dance and so they took small roles in music hall emporiums in the slum and around Leicester Square.  With his brother Sydney, Charlie, then 19, joined the Fred Karno Company.  (Fred Karno produced pantomime shows, music hall entertainment, and was reputedly the inventor of the pie-in-the-face gag.)  The Karno Company toured America in 1912 and, when the Company went west, Charlie decided to cast in his lot with Keystone Pictures and Mack Sennett, an early Hollywood studio that specialized in slapstick comedy.  This was in 1914.  By 1918, Chaplin was paid one million dollars by First National Exhibitors to produce eight two-reeler comedies. (23.6 million in today’s currency.)   The rest is history.  By 1920, Charlie Chaplin, still a subject of the British Empire, was the one of the most famous and wealthy men in the United States.  

This kind of meteoric success, perhaps, isn’t good for the soul.  By 1947, when Chaplin directed and produced Monsieur Verdoux, a sardonic and biting picture about a serial murderer, he thought he had mastered every aspect of film making.  He wrote the scripts for all of his movies, composed the music, a considerable feat because he couldn’t read or write musical notation, tried to conduct the performing orchestras, directed and edited his films, and, then, managed marketing and distribution.  Chaplin was arrogant and self-assured, an artifact I suppose of his fabulous rise to power in Hollywood – when the rest of Hollywood adopted sound, Chaplin held out for the poetry and romance of silence; one of his most famous pictures, Modern Times, released in 1936 was made as a silent film, years after Talkies had taken over Hollywood.  The fact is that Chaplin narcissistically insisted that he was a law unto himself.  He was “liked” but not “well-liked.”  He never bothered to become an American citizen and, therefore, as we would say today, his immigration status was uncertain. Since his business model was that of a lone wolf, when the feds came for him, he had no real allies and no defenders agaimst the HUAC and the blacklist came for him and, so, had to flee to Europe.   But, more on this topic anon.   

At first, all Chaplin’s movies made money

Chaplin’s deal with First National was sufficiently lucrative for him to build his own studio.  No longer would Chaplin be beholding to the other film production facilities in Los Angeles.  In 1917, he purchased a large lot at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and La Brea (300 x 600 feet).  On that lot, he built a residence, constructed like an English Tudor manor with tennis courts, stables, and a swimming pool with several outbuildings.  The Chaplin studio had several open air stages (initially films were made outside to take advantage of southern California’s sunlight) as well as indoor facilities that were ultimately rebuilt as sound stages.  Chaplin integrated his entire operation into this studio – a row of English-styled cottages concealed behind its genteel facade business offices, an editing suite, developing laboratory, and a screening room.  The studio was completed in 1919 and opened to much acclaim.

In this studio, Chaplin shot The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), and Modern Times (1936).  All of these movies were popular with both critics and audiences and made a lot of money.  After finishing Modern Times, Chaplin spent 18 months touring the world with his wife Paulette Goddard – she had starred in the 1936 film.  During that tour, Chaplin met all of the luminaries of the decade and there are photographs of him posing with Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Gandhi, and Winston Churchill.  Chaplin’s next film, The Great Dictator (1942) marked a departure from the sentimental-comic formula on which the director’s fortune was built – The Great Dictator was a satire, spoofing Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party.  This picture, although not featuring Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” character, was warmly received and, also, made a good profit – the film’s attack on Hitler was perceived as patriotic and attendance at the film was, more or less, mandatory as support for the War Effort.  In 1942, the government recruited Chaplin to travel around the country is support of the War, particularly to proselytize in favor of the so-called Second Front – that is, the Soviet campaign against Germany waged from the East.  Chaplin spoke enthusiastically about our Soviet ally and lauded the Communist system – this turned out to have disastrous consequences for him only a few years later.

Orson Welles writes a script

Some time in 1942, Orson Welles prepared a “treatment” for a film called “A Comedy of Murders” about the celebrated French murder, Henri Landru.  There is dispute as to whether Welles’ text was just a story idea or a fully complete script.  (Welles claimed it was a script; Chaplin maintained that the text was just an “idea”.)  Welles wanted to direct the picture that would star Chaplin.  Chaplin, however, didn’t think he could appear successfully in any picture that he didn’t control and direct in all respects.  Accordingly, Welles sold his film treatment to Chaplin for $5000.  “A Comedy of Murders” was the initial title on the script of the film released in 1947 as Monsieur Verdoux.  

With Paulette Goddard

Chaplin claimed that he married Paulette Goddard in China during his 18 month tour.  However, no record exists as to whether the couple were actually married.  Paulette Godard lived at the house at the Chaplin Studio and the two were a glamorous Hollywood couple.  Life magazine sent Ms. Goddard to Mexico for a photo-shoot.  There, she met Diego Rivera.  Rivera had the habit of seducing every woman in his orbit and Paulette was photographed holding hands with the homely, fat painter.  (He resembled a corpulent frog on his very best days; most of the time, he looked worse.)  Chaplin and Goddard divorced in 1942, also in Mexico – we don’t know if they were really married but they were certainly divorced.  Charley “played the field”, embarking on a number of casual liaisons – one of which involving an actress named Joan Barry turned to be catastrophic.  

Joan Barry

Joan Barry was an aspiring actress from Detroit.  She was 21 when Chaplin (then 52) began an affair with her.  Chaplin was grooming her for a lead role in a movie that he was preparing to produce Shadow and Substance – the picture was never made.  Chaplin hailed her “ethereal beauty” and paid for orthodontia and two abortions.  However, Barry developed a drinking problem and didn’t attend classes in acting at the Max Reinhardt School due to her alcohol abuse.  Chaplin thought she was too erratic and abandoned her.

In 1943, Barry initiated a paternity suit against Chaplin alleging that he was the father of her baby daughter.  Chaplin denied paternity and, in fact, commissioned a blood test that showed that he couldn’t possibly be the father.  However, in California in 1943, blood tests in inadmissible in paternity suits and Chaplin’s lawyer wasn’t able to produce the evidence in Court.  A highly salacious and much publicized trial was convened.  Barry’s lawyer, Joseph Scott, was a nasty old school attorney, an old lion with a flair for insults and picturesque epithets.  He famously characterized Chaplin as a “pestiferous lecherous hound,” “a cheap caddish Cockney” and “a little runt of a Svengali.”  Scott, further, claimed that Chaplin was a Communist fronting for the Soviets in his speeches advocating for a second front in WWII.  The case was tried on emotion and smears and the Jury found that Chaplin was the father of the child.  (In fact, modern commentators suggest that the woman’s pregnancy arose from a liaison with J. Paul Getty.)  Chaplin, who knew he couldn’t be the baby’s father, nevertheless paid child support until the girl attained her 21st birthday.  

Joan Barry moved from Los Angeles, married a railway clerk in Ohio and had two children with him.  When she was 33, Barry was found wandering the streets at dawn, barefoot, carrying a pair of baby shoes and a child’s ring.  She was muttering: “It’s all magic” over and over.  She was admitted to the Patton State Hospital.  She died in New York City at 87 in 2007.

Oona

Shadow and Substance, a film that Chaplin hoped to make, had a productive “casting couch.”  After Joan Barry was rejected for a starring role, Chaplin interviewed Oona O’Neill, the daughter of the American playwright, Eugene O’Neill.  One thing led to another and, although O’Neill, who was only 17, was considered too young for the part, she wasn’t too young for Chaplin.  He embarked on an affair with her and she married him one month after her 18th birthday much to consternation of her famous father who was only three months older than Chaplin.  (Eugene O’Neill disinherited Oona as a result of the liaison with Chaplin.)  

Chaplin’s marriage to Oona was considered scandalous and, together with the paternity suit allegations and the claims that Chaplin was a Communist, seriously damaged in the eyes of the public.  By all accounts, however, the marriage to Oona was happy and lasted until Chaplin’s death in 1977.  (Oona died of pancreatic cancer in 1993 when she was 66.)  With Chaplin, Oona had eight children, most notably Geraldine Chaplin who became a famous actress in her own right. (Geraldine Chaplin appeared in Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) and is most renowned for her star performance in Carlos Sauros Cria Cuervos (1976).  She played her own grandmother, Hannah Chaplin in Richard Attenborough’s bio-pic Chaplin made in 2002 – she was nominated for a Golden Globe for her performance and has won many other prizes for her work.)

The relationship to Oona cemented the image in the collective minds of the public that Chaplin had an unfortunate and predatory affinity for very young women.  This aspersion contributed to the failure of Chaplin’s 1947 Monsieur Verdoux and his later expulsion from the United States as a Communist.  

“Let the Butchery begin –“

Monsieur Verdoux received scathing notices from all mainstream critics.  The film’s only champion upon its release was the novelist, movie reviewer, and screenwriter, James Agee.  The movie lost money and was declared “an assault on the audience” for its cynicism.  In 1947, Americans were not interested in a film that decried World War II as mass murder.  Indeed, the American Legion of Catholic Servicemen denounced the film and it was also declared off-limits for Catholics by the Church.  Faced with rejection, Chaplin’s studio changed its advertising strategy – initially, the film had been promoted as a comedy in the spirit of The Great Dictator, a picture that had turned a profit; after the film’s initial disappointing first week, the movie was marketed under this slogan: “Chaplin has changed.  Can you?”  This somewhat presumptuous marketing was rejected as offensive.  

Chaplin tried to salvage things by agreeing to appear at a press conference emceed by Ed Sullivan, a prominent red-baiter.  Chaplin didn’t improve things by commencing his comments with the preface: “Let the butchery proceed –“ He was met with a chorus of questions alleging that he was a card-carrying Communist and subversive as well as a despoiler of young women. The conference was a disaster; in the audience, Chaplin had only one supporter, James Agee, who asserted that the movie was the best film produced in the Talkie era.  No one else thought so.    

Chaplin the Red

In Hollywood, Chaplin had been friends with the German emigre community, particularly Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, and most importantly the composer, Hanns Eisler.  Eisler was an avowed Communist as was Brecht.  Both were summoned to appear before the House Unamerican Affairs Committee (HUAC).  Eisler was defiant; Brecht pretended that he knew no English and couldn’t answer any of the Committee’s questions.  (Within a week, the two Germans left the country.)  Chaplin’s name was mentioned, particularly in connection with his speeches arguing for Soviet intervention as a “second front” in the War, speeches Chaplin had made at the request of the Department of Defense. Ultimately, Chaplin was blacklisted.

The Red Scare was in full spate when Chaplin released his film Limelight in 1952.  The movie was a commercial flop and only seen by a few people.  (Most famously Helen Frankenthaler, the abstract expressionist painter, went to the film and always remembered the scene in which Chaplin declares to the neurasthenic Claire Bloom – 18 when the film was made – that “desire is the theme of all life”; Alexander Nemerov recounts this episode in his adoring biography of Frankenthaler called Helen Frankenthal, Fierce Poise.)  Limelight was buried by the Studio and, after a week, withdrawn from circulation.  Chaplin with Oona and his children traveled to London to appear at the premiere of Limelight in that city.  Whereupon the State Department revoked his visa on the grounds that he was a non-citizen (he had never bothered to become a U. S. citizen) and a communist subversive.  Chaplin and his family moved to small village near Montreaux, Switzerland where he lived until his death in 1977.

Final Films

After Limelight failed, Chaplin wasn’t able to raise money to make additional films until 1957.  In that year, he released A King in New York.  The film was made in London and Chaplin wrote the script, directed, starred, and composed the music for the picture.  A King in New York was made at the height of the Hollywood Black List and was not released in the United States where Chaplin, the red despoiler of virgins, was anathema.  The film is a comedy about a middle European monarch who exiled to New York City.  He is accused of being a Communist and forced to appear before a Senate committee – hilarity ensues when he uses a fire hose to spray the senators in the committee room.  Chaplin’s character, the exiled King, is forced to make TV commercials to support himself and give lectures.  At one lecture, he meets a 10 year old boy (Chaplin’s son Michael), a precocious lad who becomes the monarch’s protegee.  The boy is forced to “name names” to secure the release of his parents from jail.  Chaplin’s character lectures the audience about freedom and democracy.   Later, he is reconciled with his Queen from whom he is estranged.  The few American critics who saw the picture disparaged it as “very bitter”, an angry movie in which its various messages were subordinate to story and comedy.  Predictably, the French for whom Chaplin could do no wrong greatly admired the picture and Cahiers du Cinema named it as one of the ten best of 1957.  In Europe, the film was reasonably popular.  Anti-American films often do well in Europe.

Ten years later, Chaplin’s last film, A Countess from Hong Kong was released.  This picture was also made in London with Chaplin writing, directing, and scoring the music.  The film stars Marlon Brando as an American diplomat and Sophia Loren as the titular countess, a White Russian emigre who is living in Hong Kong and working as a prostitute.  Brando’s character agrees to allow the Countess to stowaway in his cabin during the long ship ride back to America.  Hilarity is alleged to ensue.  In fact, the film was a box office failure; released in the US it made no money and, generally, garnered poor reviews – even the Europeans couldn’t be persuaded to endorse this movie.  The picture was Chaplin’s first made in technicolor and only the second that he directed in which he did not star – the first was Chaplin’s 1923 A Woman of Paris.  Tippi Hedren, who was, more or less, fleeing from Alfred Hitchcock’s unwanted overtures, was recruited to play a small part.  Like Brando and Loren, she hadn’t read the script.  (If the script had been available, most likely none of the stars would have agreed to perform in the movie.)  Hedren, in her memoir, gives an interesting account of Chaplin’s directing technique: He acted out each part, mimicking the speech patterns and voice of his stars, and, then, instructed them to imitate his impersonation.  Hedren notes that she had never seen this done before.  Needless to say, this kind of directing did not endear Chaplin to the great Method actor, Marlon Brando.  He hated Chaplin, threatened to beat him up, and, often, didn’t come to work, or appeared late in the day.  Brando in his memoirs said that Chaplin was “monstrously cruel” and that he was the “most sadistic man” the actor had ever encountered.  Brando was particularly disgusted by the overt cruelty that Chaplin inflicted upon his son Sydney who had a small role in the picture.  Andrew Sarris, a great Chaplin admirer, found some merit in The Countess from Hong Kong – to the critics who said that the movie was overly sentimental and vulgar, Sarris remarked that these writers seem to have forgotten what the director’s earlier work was like: “It was always sentimental and vulgar...this film is the quintessence of the man.”

A riposte to a Method Actor

Paul Newman, like Brando, was a method actor, a veteran of Lee Strasburg’s school, and he demanded that his director’s explain to him the motivation for everything that a character did on-screen.  Newman appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, a Cold War spy thriller, and, also, disliked Hitchcock’s approach to directing – Hitchcock began his career in silent films and his directorial style was to tell the actor’s where to stand and where to look when reciting their lines; that was about it.  Once Hitch asked Newman to sit down in a chair.  “What’s my motivation?” Newman asked.  “Your salary,” Hitchcock replied.

Henri Landru kills lovelorn war-widows

The crimes of Henri Landru were famous between World War One and the Second World War.  Welles’ film treatment (or script if you believe Welles) for Monsieur Verdoux adapts the story of the serial killer, Landru, to the screen.  

Landru was born in Paris in 1869, a petite bourgeois, whose father was a boiler-tender and a foreman at a small factory.  Landru worked at a variety of jobs prior WWI, mostly low-level “white collar” work.  He claimed that he became disillusioned with this sort of employment when the owners of an accounting firm for which he was employed embezzled money and fled to America.  By this time, Landru was married with a wife and four children.  

Landru began his career in crime, so far as we know, by committing fraud.  He developed plans for a motorized bicycle, “the Landru”, solicited investors and, then, absconded with their money.  He engaged in these scams for a decade or so, climaxing in a scheme to defraud investors in 1914 by taking their money for the production of automobiles when he neither had a patent for that product nor a factory in which to make his vehicles.  Landru was charged with criminal fraud, went underground, and was sentenced in absentia to a prison term in New Caledonia, a French island in the South Pacific near Papua New Guinea.  This criminal prosecution didn’t deter Landru who, then, embarked on the serial murder era in his career.  French war losses at the Marne, Ypres, and Verdun (to name only a few) were horrific and the carnage on the Western Front resulted in millions of lonely and desperate war widows.  Landru scrutinized “lonely hearts’ advertisements in the papers and embarked on a romantic correspondence with over 280 vulnerable widows.  He carefully screened prospects by keeping a ledger in which he noted the women’s appearance and financial qualifications – the candidates for murder were listed as “impoverished”, “needs further study” and “well-to-do” and, also,“well-to-do owns house or land.”  Landru courted the more prosperous women often posing as a wealthy man himself – he rented villas for his assignations with his victims.  Typically, Landru would arrange for marriage to his victims, persuade them to transfer land and assets to him, and, then, kill the women, burning the bodies in a backyard or kitchen incinerating stove.  Landru efficiently hoovered-up all assets, selling gowns and jewelry on secondary markets and arranging for furniture and household goods to be auctioned off – sometimes Landru’s sons helped him with the liquidation of these estates.  The families of Landru’s victims, generally, objected to these women engaging in romantic liaisons with the killer.  Ultimately, several children of two dead women met, compared notes, and demanded that Landru’s activities be investigated.  Police search of Landru’s property uncovered bank notes, jewelry (some of which the complainants were able to identify) and, in his furnace, several pounds of calcined bones and human teeth.  Most damning was Landru’s notebook, with its ledger of prospective victims.  Landru’s motto was “no body, no crime” and, in fact, no identifiable bodies were ever discovered.  Authorities charged Landru’s wife and eldest son with complicity in the killings, but they claimed that although they knew the man was a crook, a fraudster, but had no reason to suspect that he was murdering people – these defenses prevailed and mother and son were released without charges.

Landru was charged with 11 counts of murder.  Police noted that 72 of his correspondents had vanished without trace, but there was no basis to charge him for any additional murders.  He was tried and sentenced to death, then, beheaded by guillotine at Versailles in 1922.  Many celebrities attended his trial including Maurice Chevalier, Colette, and Rudyard Kipling.  Landru enjoyed his fame and enlivened his murder trial with many witticisms, all dutifully recorded by the gentlemen of the press: for instance, when asked about women’s rights, he said: “A woman’s place is in the home” – in French, the idiom is “at the hearth” in which the word for “hearth” is the same as oven.  He also famously quipped that women “count their age, not from their birth, but from their confirmations.”  Facing the guillotine, Landru was confronted by a priest who wanted to “save his soul.”  Landru said: “Father, worry about your own soul.”  When a newsman shouted out to him, asking whether he had killed the women as alleged, Landru replied: “That’s a very rude question to ask at this moment.”

While awaiting trial and execution, he received many gifts, boxes of candy and sweets, as well as hundreds of marriage proposals.  In a Paris election, there were four-thousand write in votes for Henri Landru.

He is the subject of  a Twilight Zone episode in which a waxwork figure representing him comes to life, and Claude Chabrol’s 1966 Landru, also a black comedy.

At the Museum of Death in Hollywood, you can see Landru’s severed head.  Of course, whether the dessicated artifact has anything to do with Landru is anyone’s guess.  In that same museum, you can see Jayne Mansfield’s toy poodle, also killed in the carwreck that decapitated the star – it has been taxidermied.  There is a quilt made by members of the Manson family, gruesome crime scene photographs, and paintings made by serial killers, most prominently John Wayne Gacy.  

Laurel and Hardy versus Charlie Chaplin and an embarrassing confession

John Gallos was a Minnesota broadcaster who worked for Channel 11 (WCCO) in the Twin Cities for more than 40 years.  Gallos fought in World War II and, then, returned to St. Paul to attend Macalester College.  He went to work for the TV station in the fifties, playing a policeman on the Casey Jones noon show (called something like “Lunch with Casey”) – the part was that of Clancy the Cop.  Clancy had a sidekick called Willie Ketchum (Alan Lotsberg) and, for a time, hosted an afternoon kid’s show as well.  Casey Jones was played by Roger Awsumb; his son is a lawyer and I was in several cases with him and got to know him well – he was a fine lawyer and a very nice fellow.  John Gallos was a talk show host as well and presided over religious panel discussions that were broadcast on ‘CCO for more than 30 years.  You can learn about him at the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting, formerly the Museum of Questionable Medical Devices near Lake Calhoun.  Gallos hosted the John Gallos Comedy hour on Sunday morning’s on ‘CCO’ (channel 11) from 1970 to 1985; the show ran from 10:30 to 11:30 and later became known as The Laurel and Hardy Show.  In 1970, Gallos hosted the show wearing his Clancy the Cop uniform with guest appearances by Willie Ketchum.  After a couple years, he discarded his costume and appeared as a sort of pundit with respect to two-reeler comedies from the 30's and early forties.  The show featured a couple two-reelers made by Mack Sennett with Laurel and Hardy and, usually, a cartoon or two (sometimes the spooky stuff by the Fleischer Brothers); often there was one Little Rascals two-reeler on offer as well.

My father slept in on Sundays and watched Laurel and Hardy in his underwear.  With my siblings, we went to church with my mother at 9:00 and usually were home by 10:30 to watch Laurel and Hardy with my father.  The house smelled of pot roast and potatoes, our regular Sunday meal, which my mother put in the oven at low temperature before we collected our Lutheran hymnals and she put on her Sunday church hat.  My father was attending church in his own fashion as well – he worshiped Laurel and Hardy and, although he knew all the dialogue from their comedies, he watched them with perennial and unfailing delight.  My sisters were afraid of the comedies – there is something sinister and unsettling about many of them.  But I liked to watch as well.  My brothers didn’t care anything for Stan Laurel or Oliver Hardy.  

Laurel and Hardy were far more anarchic and less sentimental than Chaplin’s “Little Tramp.”  Gallos was Catholic and, probably, abhorred Chaplin for his predatory womanizing and his unAmerican politics.  Although sometimes, other comedians were shown on Gallos’ show, for instance, Fatty Arbuckle and Harold Lloyd, in scratchy scarcely legible prints, nothing by Chaplin was ever aired.  But in all of the film books that I read, critics praised Chaplin to the highest heavens – his comedy was said to be incomparable.  I now know that most of the critics that I read were Leftists – for instance, Andrew Sarris who wrote for the Village Voice, Jim Hoberman (likewise The Voice), and Amos Vogel whose books Film as a Subversive Art I read so many times that I almost had it memorized.  I didn’t understand that Chaplin was under a political cloud, a non-person from the fifties who had been denied re-entry into the country by Immigration.  In those days, polls always claimed The Battleship Potemkin has the greatest film ever made – I also wondered at this, but didn’t grasp that there was a political agenda at work with respect to these rating.  

My Father was a pastor’s kid from central Nebraska who had fancied himself a beatnik, a jazz fan although his interest in that art didn’t go beyond Louis Armstrong, “Cannonball” Adderly, and Count Basie.  Once, I asked him about Chaplin.  He was brief and blunt: “There was nothing funny about that man,” he said.  Case closed.

Everything I know about morality, marriage, and telling the truth, I learned from Laurel and Hardy’s short feature, The Sons of the Desert.  I don’t think the boys intended anything didactic in that movie, but I took it for my history, my testament, and my gospel.

In which Telegramss are sent

Samuel Goldwyn (Szmuel Gelbfyz or Sam Goldfish) was one of great movie moguls of the classic age.  Goldwyn is supposed to have said: “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.”  The quote is misattributed.  Probably, the remark was first made by Moss Hart in 1954; Hemingway and Humphrey Bogart are also said to have made this statement. 

Goldwyn grew up speaking Yiddish in what is now Ukraine.  His relationship to English was always a bit uncertain.  He is known to have said: “I don’t think anyone should write an autobiography until he’s dead.”  He once remarked that if a film involved American Indians, “we can always get as many Indians as we want from the reservoir.”  Once, he was supposed to have said to a movie proposal: “I have two words: im - possible.”  As is the case with many others, the quote that a verbal contract “isn’t worth the paper it’s written on” is also attributed to him.

I grew up in an era in which the popular arts were supposed to both entertain and instruct.  Tv and movies were popular art; if you wanted something high-brow, you went to the Guthrie theater or perused Abstract Expressionist paintings by Mark Rothko. Sit-coms invariably made their points by presenting ethical parables – the virtue of people like Andy Griffith, Marlow Thomas, and, even, Bob Newhart and Mary Tyler Moore was celebrated in their TV shows.  Such performers, at least, in the roles in which they appeared were presented as paragons of moral virtue; even their failings were didactic and taught audiences foibles to be avoided.  TV westerns also inculcated virtues of honesty, courage and loyalty.  Many police shows, particularly Dragnet, specialized in “teachable moments” as to civic responsibility and respect for law and order.  People of my age may recall how Seinfeld was decried by some viewers as being wholly amoral and devoid of any didactic content: since all TV comedy before Seinfeld was didactic, people, often, said that the TV show was “about nothing.”  Everything on the tube prior until about 1980 (when Cable began to make inroads) was presented as simple entertainment, “a spoonful of sugar” constructed around a moral or ethical parable.  Watch any episode of Twilight Zone, for instance, and you will see science fiction and fantasy deployed in support of popular morality.

Because I was raised on TV and with this mode of moralizing, I don’t have any problem with Chaplin’s lectures to his audience, his patronizing tone, and his Victorian sentimentality that is coincident to his Victorian morality - in fact, I kind of like this sort of stuff.  I suppose modern people, reared on much more cynical and nihilistic fare, may have other opinions as to the pedagogical moments in movies like Monsieur Verdoux.  In fact, contemporary critics in the forties denounced Verdoux not because it was didactic, but because the morals that it taught were wicked.  In the context of Chaplin’s apparent misogyny (his distrust and fear of women), some of the lessons proposed by Verdoux are bitter and unpalatable.  That said, it’s important to understand that Chaplin is an exponent of art that is supposed to “instruct and delight.”  This notion dates to Horace and his Ars Poetica (circa 19 BC) although earlier versions of the concept obviously were extant.  Horace uses these terms: miscuit utile dulci (‘a mix of useful and sweet’) and delectando pariterque monendo (“art consists of delighting and advising.”) An audience leaving a Chaplin picture should be both entertained and, also, taught some useful lesson.  This is an alien concept, I think, today but worthy of consideration when thinking about a film like Monsieur Verdoux.

Inspector Ike

 Inspector Ike (Graham Mason, 2026) is an interesting demonstration of the limits of irony.  Co-written by Mason and the star, Ikechukwu Ufomadu, the picture takes parody to its logical, if futile, limit -- that is, the parody is essentially identical with the thing parodied.  The mirroring is so exact that the point of the exercise becomes suspect.  In Inspectors Ike, the filmmakers produce a replica of a 1970's movie of the week made by one of the three major networks for broadcast on prime-time TV.  The reproduction of this longlost media artifact is so exact that there are almost no clues on-screen that the thing is a parody.  Inspector Ike is like something from a time capsule stuffed with sixty-year old stuff mostly not worth saving.  The picture imitates prime-time detective shows, most specifically Columbo.  These programs, usually about 90 minutes long with commercials, were cheap to produce, could be shot on-location on city streets, and, more or less, replaced Westerns as the staple of TV viewing between about 1965 and 1980 -- the studios made innumerable numbers of these things, most of them more or less identical.  These shows featured a charismatic lead actor playing the detective, a cast of nobodies in support, and, often, an equally charismatic, and recognizable villain.  A crime is staged in the first half hour -- often the detective who will solve the murder doesn't appear until after the second commercial break.  The detective engages in a duel of wits with the killer whose identity is established beyond any doubt in the first ten minutes.  The killer is arrogant and thinks he is smart enough to get away with his carefully designed plot.  But the detective intervenes and, after a series of encounters with the bad guy and witnesses, solves the crime.  The audience is gratified to see pride and arrogance rebuked (all TV in this decade was didactic) and everything is neatly tied-up with perfect clarity (and without any moral or narrative ambiguity) by the final titles.  There is very little violence and no bang-bang shootouts or car chases.  After the initial crime, no one is in any danger.  The victim is usually pretty abhorrent as well and, so, in these light entertainments there's nothing really at stake.  These shows had a catchy theme and clever title sequence.  The shows were brightly lit and wholly lacking in any atmospherics.  Everything is shot like a engineering diagram for maximum clarity.  Zoom effects and iris shots are used to highlight plot points.  The color is watery and diffuse.  The hero detective is the reason to watch the shows -- the part is generally played by a half-retired Hollywood or TV star:  for instance, Peter Falk as Columbo or Angela Lansbury or Andy Griffith.  The show rides on the shoulders of its star who is charming, ingenious, humble, and with winning ways.  

Inspector Ike mimics this formula with uncanny precision.  Ike is New York's greatest detective.  The title sequence shows handcuffs being literally served up to bad guys.  The handcuffs are gold and glint.  Inspector Ike winks winsomely at the camera and raises a glass of champagne in a toast -- the crystal of the champagne glass also twinkles.  An arrogant, selfish and entitled avant-garde theater actor is tired of serving as the understudy to an equally arrogant and selfish leading man.  The villain takes his longsuffering date to a theater production that is eight hours long and consists of two slobs on stage replicating their daily activities in a business called Al's Pizza.  Needless to say everyone in the audience falls asleep. The villain sneaks off for a couple hours to bump off his rival; then, he returns to the theater for the end of the show.  His alibi is that he's been with his girlfriend for the duration of the eight hour staging of "Al's Pizza."  Two hapless uniformed officers investigate the disappearance of the leading man.  It turns out that wife of the leading man has conspired with the villain to eliminate her husband, also the scion of a wealthy real estate mogul.  After complications, Ike solves the murder, slaps handcuffs on the villain and, then, raises a glass of champagne as a toast to his acumen -- the crystal of the glass twinkles like his eyes.  

The duplication of circa 1970 Tv "movie of the week" detective shows is so perfect that there's no reason to watch Inspector Ike.  If this sort of thing interests you, watch reruns of Columbo or Matlock instead -- those shows are slightly better and lack some of the dithering dialogue that the director and leading man apparently intend as amusing.  The film's eerie replication of shows of this sort makes Inspector Ike superfluous.  I don't doubt that this is part of the movie's strategy, that is, wholly intentional -- Inspector Ike is a form of conceptual art.  It's more interesting to write about than to watch.  

Night Moves

 In John Ford's Western, My Darling Clementine, in the first twenty minutes, the director sets up the fundamental conflict that will motivate the shoot-out in the last reel with Ike Clanton and Clanton brothers.  Then, Ford relaxes and lets a little domestic comedy play out over 50 or so minutes -- nothing much happens in that part of the movie, but it's pleasantly atmospheric, a sort of pastoral involving lots of drinking and courtin' (as they used to say) that gradually mutates into the violent gunfight that serves as the movie's climax.  This is the same structure that organizes Night Movies, a picture starring Gene Hackman, some staples of TV action shows (whose names I don't know but whom I immediately recognized) and the 16 year old Melanie Griffith.  Robert Altman in The Long Goodbye employs a similarly relaxed and languid pace.  Arthur Penn, who directed Night Moves, attacks the plot hard and fast in the first half-hour, then, forgets about it, for 45 minutes.  The ending is rushed:  the conflict with which the movie began is pushed back into the forefront and we have some killings before the story is resolved.  The story itself doesn't make much sense and I wasn't able to figure out who was killing whom or why.  If you are interested in this film, and I recommend it with reservations, the part of Night Moves that really sings is the middle part in which nothing much happens -- it's an exercise in brooding atmospherics and steamy tropical lust that is the real raison d'etre of the picture.

We have mostly forgotten about Arthur Penn, but there's no doubt, that he was one of the most exciting American filmmakers in the sixties through the nineteen-eighties.  After that period, Penn lost his touch and his movies aren't just bad, they're embarrassing.  Penn was famous for his work on the Gore Vidal script The Left-Handed Gun, an early Paul Newman picture (it's about a homosexual Billy the Kid); he made some impressive art films in the sixties before directing his magnum opus Bonnie and Clyde.  (Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is a masterpiece and, if you haven't seen it, you must do so at all costs.)  Little Big Man about Custer and the Indians is very good, with some spectacular set pieces.  Night Moves is chaotic and makes no sense --  this is surprising because the film was written by one of Hollywood's most accomplished screenwriters, Alan Sharpe who penned Ulzana's Raid, one of the best Westerns ever made.  After Night Moves, Penn directed the wildly idiosyncratic Western, The Missouri Breaks, starring an uncontrollable but very funny and menacing Marlon Brando as a cross-dressing regulator (gunfighter).  After that Penn couldn't find his metier and everything made later is dull or cringeworthy.

In Night Moves, woman who acts like a slatternly Messalina (she's middle-aged and grimly sexually promiscuous) hires Gene Hackman a private eye to hunt down her 16 year old daughter (Melanie Griffith). Hackman has a little porno actor's moustache and he plays the romantic lead -- this is improbable due to his pudgy shapeless face, but he's in good shape in this picture and channels his inner Burt Reynolds.  The job involving the nymphomaniac mother and the lost daughter morphs into some kind of plot involving a group of two or three stuntmen, all of whom have slept with the mother (and, maybe, also with the nymphet played by Melanie Griffith.)  The plot doesn't make sense and is completely implausible -- it involves smuggling a Mayan or Aztec idol out of the Yucatan for sale to some one or some several rich collectors.  Ths "Maltese Falcon"-style narrative is underwritten and hard to follow.  It involves a dead man with fish eating his eyes sunk under the Gulf of Mexico off Key West.  The plot has some intricate twists and turns, but they're not worth discussing and would be spoilers in any event.

At the center of the movie are some nude and sex scenes featuring Melanie Griffith (the production of the film had to be paused until she could reach 18) and Jennifer Warren.  If you are my age, Jennifer Warren will be instantly recognizable to you from TV although you won't be able to recall her name.  In the idyll at the center of the movie, Jennifer Warren's character is the wife or girlfriend of a stuntman who has retired to remote bay somewhere near Key West.  She is raising dolphins for people who are so depraved that they want a dolphin for a pet.  Her much older husband or boyfriend spends his days out on the ocean game-fishing, presumably with tourists.  He spends as little time at home as possible because he has been fondling the little girl and fears that he will be unable to control himself with the child.  Jennifer Warren looks frighteningly severe in her first appearance, but softens as the movie progresses:  with her hair under a hat shielding her from the sun, she looks like a man.  Later, she lets her hair fall free and turns into a seductress.  She offers herself to Hackman's private dick who is becalmed in the little compound where the woman and ex-stuntman live on the water with the nubile nymphet.  This entire sequence is languid, goes nowhere, and exists primarily I think to show Melanie Griffith diving naked in the limpid waters of the lagoon; the sequence also features a sexual encounter with Jennifer Warren's somewhat tarnished and bored siren.  (It turns out that she has bedded Hackman, who is rather implausible as a sex symbol, to distract him from shenanigans out at sea.)  Melanie Griffith has a high-pitched squeaky voice, but exudes raw, unbridled sexuality -- she knows her power over men and exercises it.  I can recommend Night Moves for the strange, soporific sequence at the Keys -- water laps against rotting piers, the sun blasts the lagoon and, at night, the sound of insects is deafening.  It's the kingdom of the Lotus-Eaters and the movie barely escapes from it.  And, indeed, when the escape is consummated, the picture is far less interesting.    

The Choral

 The Choral (2025) is uplifting and verges on the sentimental.  However, the movie has a satirical edge and falls into the "uncanny valley," as it were, between kitsch and sober toughmindedness -- the film is interesting primarily for the expectations that it defeats.  The movie's director Nicholas Hytner (and the writer the esteemed Alan Bennett) want the picture to affirm the power of art in the face of war and mindless patriotic jingoism but constantly undercuts this wholesome message with cynical political and sexual subtexts.  The movie is interesting in a high-toned BBC manner.  Viewers of Brit Box and PBS will recognize many regulars from BBC productions, familiar faces from Downton Abbey and the UK mystery and crime shows.  Ralph Fiennes stars as a beleaguered choir director who works tirelessly to produce Edward Elgar's Dream of Gerontius in a provincial English milling city.  (There's a gorgeous vale disfigured by several mill buildings perpetually spewing smoke into the pellucid air.).  I like this picture and recommend it:  it's modestly inspiring but, also, acknowledges the darkness at its heart, the Great War that is raging in 1916 in France and Belgium.  Indeed, one of the principal characters  is employed delivering telegrams from His Royal Majesty to local housewives and mothers advising them of the death of their next of kin on the Western Front.  As Pauline Kael remarks in her review of a Renoir film, it's easy to be anti-war in the context of WWI, an entirely misguided and futile exercise in carnage that left the world far worse than before -- it's harder mobilize those sentiments in the context of WWII.  The film doesn't make easy anti-war points, despite the size and slowmoving quality of this target and, to the contrary, the picture focuses most extensively on the relationship of art, with its aspirations toward the eternal, and current affairs.

Fiennes plays Dr. Guthrie, an acclaimed choral director.  He agrees to rehearse and conduct the St. Matthew Passion by Bach in the West Yorkshire town.  The locals are incensed at the selection of "Hun Muck" by the local choir, threaten its members, and throw bricks through the windows of the rehearsal space.  Guthrie, with his fey piano accompanist, Roger, working with the local Alderman, a mill owner who controls the town and the choral society, decide to abandon the Bach and instead present Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius.  Auditions are held, introducing the film's viewers to the various characters.  The Alderman is enlightened and well-meaning but not a good singer; notwithstanding his vocal defects he wants to perform the leading part (Gerontius) -- the Alderman's wife is mourning for a son lost in France and has withdrawn into herself.  There's an attractive Black Salvation Army missionary who all the boys in the chorus lust after.  A frisky young war widow, her fiancee, I think, lost in France, sparks up a romance with one of the other lads -- then, her husband or fiancee returns from the Front sans his right arm, the arm and hand he uses for masturbation we learn in a scene in which he importunes his former lover to satisfy him digitally with her hand..  Guthrie is gay and suspected of being a German spy.  This is because he reads newspapers in the local library and always studies the reports of naval engagements -- it turns out that his German lover is naval officer in the enemy navy.  Roger is in love with Dr. Guthrie but can't bring himself to act on his emotions.  The film proceeds briskly, efficiently setting up the situation and, then, developing the relationships between the characters with comical and poignant incidents  (Alan Bennett is a leading screenwriter and playwright in the U.K. and his construction of the script is excellent and exemplary.)  As it turns out, Elgar is in Manchester accepting some kind of prize and he's invited to the Chorale society that is bold enough to present his massive oratorio.  The wounded soldier missing his right arm turns out to have a gorgeous voice and he supplants the Alderman in the tenor role of Gerontius.  The score has to be modified extensively because the choral group is quite small and Elgar's huge Victorian orchestra is reduced to about five musicians who appear at the Sunday Brunch and evening dinners at the local hotel.  The plot of Gerontius is that an elderly man has died and, then, finds himself escorted into Purgatory -- this oratorio also stirs up a lot of dispute among the vicars who are members of the choral society and staunch Church of England Protestants.  Everyone agrees the 19 year old soldier missing his arm lacks the gravitas to perform the challenging role of Gerontius.  But the young man who is just returned from the Western Front says that he knows what purgatory is like -- it's No Man's Land and so it is agreed that he can successfully perform the role if he is allowed to appear in his uniform to make the connection between purgatorial fires and trench warfare,  This idea leads the Choral Society to decide the stage the oratorio (resulting in a funny quibble as to whether the thing is an oratorio or an opera).  In any event, the Black Salvation Army girl is cast as an angel, but wears an uniform as a nurse.  The male choir members are dressed as soldiers of the Great War.  When Elgar discovers the changes intended to be wrought upon his magnum opus, he pitches a fit and is revealed to be a boorish prig.  He stomps off in rage, shouting that the chorale society can not perform his work, scheduled for that evening.  But the society offers admission to the work free of charge and advertises by word of mouth.  The show is a success and greatly moving to the audience in attendance.  Overhead camera angles and slow swooping crane shots show how the oratorio has been converted into a tragic account of fighting on Western Front.  After the show, on the next morning, about five of the boy singers board trains for the War.  Roger, the accompanist, is taken away as a conscientious objector by MPs.  The moving performance has restored the Alderman's mourning wife -- she has come alive.  The Salvation Army girl goes back to performing "Onward Christian Soldiers" on street corners.

Bennett's writing is crisp and unobtrusive but he manufactures some excellent scenes.  When the chorale society receives word that Elgar has approved the performance (before his unfortunate visit to the town), everyone rejoices.  At the same time, news arrives that a German battleship, the Pommern, has been sunk.  This causes more rejoicing and the chorists sing "God Save the King."  But the news also means that Dr. Guthrie's lover has been killed.  Guthrie can't show his emotion but obviously is griefstricken.  Roger, then, tries to console Guthrie but is rebuffed.  This is a very effective and powerful ensemble of events.  Bennett's script defeats expectations.  On the night before they are conscripted, one of the boys tries to seduce the Salvation Army girl.  Her formidable mother has talked to the boy and told him that she supports his efforts to have sex with her daughter -- she's upset about the religious business and the self-serving piety.  She leaves the couple alone and the poor kid begs and begs but gets nowhere with young woman.  (You expect she will capitulate but she does not.)  The film sets up the expectation that the Bach Passion will be performed and effect some kind of reconciliation, at least, through art between the German and English -- but the Passion isn't performed due to the jingoistic behavior of the local bullies.  One expects that the great man, Sir Elgar, will behave magnanimously but he doesn't and shows that he's a prig.  Characters reverse themselves in plausible but surprising ways.  The only defect in the film is its notion that a 1916 chorale society would restage the oratorio using the modernist conventions of anguished dance and high-concept costuming that would be more fitting to a performance of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem than the rather stodgy Elgar work.  But an artist must be allowed his donnee as Henry James said and this plot device is central to the story and, therefore, belief must be suspended with respect to this anachronism. 

The Huddlefield Choral Society (in West Yorkshire) performed The Dream of Gerontius in 1916 and this renowned choir believes that the movie is about this event.  (Sir Elgar actually conducted.)  

The Quatermass Experiment

 The Quatermass Experiment is a serviceable little horror film made by Britain's Hammer Films in 1955.  The movie is a shortened version of a live TV series shot consisting of six episodes (two of which are lost today) shot by the BBC in 1953.  (In those days, series were filmed live -- this accounts for the rather static quality of the movie which, apparently, mimics the style of the TV program.)  In its day, the movie was thought to be shocking -- it was rated "X", a feature xploited in its advertising:  "The most Xtreme Horror!"  The movie is an example of what we now call "body horror" avant la lettre.  It's pretty entertaining although the shocks are very mild by today's standards.

A rocket-ship shot to the moon misses and ends up in deep space.  Then, for an unknown reason, the space ship returns to earth.  A young couple are literally having a roll in the hay when the rocket falls into the farm field and embeds itself half buried in the ground.  The proprietor of the rocket, a certain Quatermass, appears at the location of the fallen rocket.  Quatermass is played by Brian Donlevy, an American who can't avoid looking like a particularly smarmy used car salesman.  After various preliminaries, a survivor tumbles out of the rocket, badly traumatized and unable to speak except to croak "Help me!"  The survivor is hospitalized.  The other two men who comprised the crew of the rocket have vanished -- their space suits are empty.  (It turns out that the space monster has turned them into some kind of pulpy slime.)  There's a bad kinescope showing the doings in the rocket before it crashed.  It's not clear what the pictures show but they look eerie.  The survivor whose name is Victor Caroom is hospitalized.  He is very gaunt with long anguished face -- he is effective as the man-monster in the movie.  Caroom shows a strange affinity for a bunch of roses brought into his room.  We learn he's trying to merge his genetic material with the roses to become some sort of man-monster rose bush.  A little later, Caroom smashes his fist into a cactus plant.  This act causes his fist to turn into a club-shaped cactus complete with thorns.  Caroom is slowly turning into a cactus and escapes the hospital wandering around the more seedy, if picturesque parts of London.  Like Frankenstein's monster, he meets a little girl who is playing with her doll next to the Thames at a spectacularly grim series of concrete lagoons and rotting ships -- the crumbling boat is called The Plaudit.  The monster kills a few people (I can't recall x-actly what happens with the child except that her doll ends up beheaded).  Meanwhile, Quatermass and a group of scientists are trying to hunt down the man-monster who has eloped from custody.  The creature hides in a thicket where we see his face is now coarsened to grimacing cactus.  The monster decides to hide in Westminster Abbey and there is some excellent hard-edged black and white photography of the tombs and crypts in the Abbey.  Quatermass gets all of the power plants around London organized to provide a jolt of current to the man-monster who is otherwise impossible to kill.  (We get an excellent brooding shot of what is now the Tate Modern looming over the dark river.)  By this time, the monster has become a cactus-skinned octopus with one glaring eye and some asymmetrical tentacles.  It's a nasty pile of meat that leaves a slime-trail where it goes.  The creature is shown briefly and its far more pathetic than threatening, a kind of  heap of goo with some gangly tentacles sitting on a couple of girders like a gymnast on a balancing beam above an ornate medieval chapel.  Quatermass zaps the monster and it obediently dies right away in a cloud of smoke, flashing sparks, and steam.  Quatermass, mindful of the need for a sequel, struts away saying he will continue his experiments,  He strides along dark streets and past odd ominous shadows and so the movie ends.  (There were, in fact, three sequels, both on the BBC and, then, as Hammer films, the most well-known being Quatermass and the Pit, also a very good picture of its kind.)  

The movie has its oddities.  There's a cop or chief of police who x-tolls the virtues of reading the Bible.  It seems they're still fighting it out over Darwin versus religion in the UK.  A comical cockney trollop speaks in an accent totally indecipherable to American audiences.  Some critics purport to find all sorts of anxiety in the movie over the cultural state of Britain in 1955.  I don't see anything of that sort in the movie.  It's just a cheap monster movie with some very unpleasant stuff -- the scenes with the monster in its final incarnation, a shambolic mess, is no more frightening than an acacia ot hydrangea bush, and is completely uninteresting and laughable.  But the images of the cadaverous Caroom wandering around in agonizing pain, the mask of his face drawn tightly over this skull, are, indeed, quite frightening.  If you like this kind of thing, I recommend this picture.  Quatermass and the Pit (1967), which is in technicolor, is better and so, if you have to choose, opt for this later picture.  By reputation the BBC TV shows are said to be even better than the Hammer Films  based on them but how does anyone know? -- not all of the episodes of the Quatermass Experiment as a Tv show even x-ist today.  

The Christophers

 The Christophers is a civilized, witty, minor entertainment.  Directed by Stephen Soderbergh, who apparently can work well in all genres, the movie is diverting with an intriguing premise:  an elderly artist, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) suffers from an artistic block and has given up on making new pictures.  Sklar painted several series of portraits celebrating his love affair with "Christopher" in the early 1990's.  The last set of pictures, eight all told, were begun but abandoned.  Sklar has kept the unfinished pictures but locked them away on the third floor of his house in London -- he claims that he wants nothing to do with these failures.  Sklar has a daughter and son with whom he is estranged and that he apparently despises -- he calls them "Buzzard Barnaby" and "Hyena Sallie".  Barnaby and Sallie hire a brilliant art critic and restorer, although she isn't known to the general public, to work as their father's assistant, locate the unfinished "Christophers" and mimic the old master, creating forgeries that they can sell.  (The last sale of a "Christopher", years earlier, grossed 2.5 million Euros.)  The critic and restorer, Lori Butler accepts the assignment and applies for work as the old painter's assistant.  She clashes immediately with the elderly painter who is autocratic, selfish, and loquacious -- she can scarcely get a word in edgewise.  Lori finds the Christophers but is told to destroy them.  Instead, she paints close imitations and, then, tears them up with a box-cutter.  The old painter discovers the deception and says he wants her to help burn the unfinished canvases.  But, when she asks him why he has kept the pictures in their incomplete form for 25 years, he can't bring himself to destroy them.  The film is mostly a sort of mystery, with riddles to solve, but, also, a very mild satire of the art business.  Julian Sklar seems to be modeled off Lucien Freud with elements of Francis Bacon.  

The film seems a record of a very tightly organized and parsimonious theater production.  The dialogue has the elevated quality of topnotch British theater and the play is essentially a two-hander, a kind of odd couple comedy with strains of drama involving the old artist, played as a nasty, sarcastic curmudgeon and the restorer, Lori Butler.  Lori is acted by Michaela Coel, a striking actress of Ghanian heritage -- she has a classical profile and enormous eyes and, according to your preferences, is either a very beautiful woman or some sort of space alien.  (I tend toward space alien -- but this is prejudice: in any event, she is very ethereal-looking and seems somehow other-worldly.)  The duel between these two characters is at the heart of the movie and, when the two of them are together, the dialogue crackles and pops. There is a backstory involving Lori -- she was inspired to become an artist by seeing a picture made by Sklar when he was a six-year old child; later, she appeared on a TV program called "Art Fight" in which Sklar as a panelist (like Simon Callow) excoriated one of her canvases when she was 19.  Lori is no shrinking violet and can give as good as she gets.  She repaid Sklar for this televised contempt by writing an essay about him for an art journal in which she calls him a "bloviating failure" among other, even, worse insults. The plot is too complex to detail, involving different variations on the destruction, reconstruction, and revival of the paintings.  In the end, they are completed albeit not as anyone expects.  Sklar has a retrospective entitled Julian Sklar reviled or revived -- the handwriting from which the title derives is unclear.  The movie has a happy ending and the characters are rewarded according to their just deserts. Soderbergh, nothing if not reliably flexible, can direct this sort of material in his sleep -- and, in fact, there's something mildly somnolent about the movie.  It feels like a version of Hacks with McKellen playing the part of Jean Smart and the young acolyte (Hannah Einbinder) in the TV show played by Michaela Cole.  The film is intelligent, very effectively written, and diverting.  It's not exciting but who needs a constant diet of excitement?  In my estimation, the movie seems like a typically well-crafted British mystery show with good production values and excellent acting.  James Corden playing Barnaby Sklar and Jessica Gunning (late of Baby Reindeer) act the parts of the scheming artist's children    

King Roger (Des Moines Opera -- July 9, 2026)

 The audience at the Blank Performance Hall in Indianola, Iowa has gathered for Karol Szymanoski's opera King Roger.  The opera is sung in its original Polish -- indeed, a Polish language advisor has been retained to assist the singers with respect to their pronunciation of words in the libretto written by Szymanowski and Jaroslav Iwaszkiewicz (tell me how that name should be spoken).  The audience in attendance is overwhelmingly White -- I saw only a single African-American -- and most of the men and women look very much like the couple in Grant Wood's "American Gothic"; they have lean faces ringed with white hair, a demeanor that suggests both skepticism and suspicion, and they gaze down at the stage  with that wary reticence shown in the famous painting -- in fairness to them, at the end of the short opera (only 80 minutes long), I should acknowledge that they are on the feet, crying out with adulation for the singers and applauding the curtain call ecstatically.  But there is a disconnect between the staid crowd assembled for the show and the spectacle that they are attending -- the second Act features an orgy with a dozen couples woozily embracing, everyone ending up semi-nude and the handsome hero, playing the role of Roger the King, spends the last Act prancing around in his BVDs, tight underpants through which his penis is pretty clearly visible.  What the hell is going on here?

King Roger was first performed in Warsaw in June of 1926.  It had three other performances before the War, one by a regional company in Germany, one in Prague, and the last in Palermo, the place where the opera is set.  After that, the show was mostly forgotten, although it has been periodically revived in Poland where, of course, the challenges of language are not an issue.  I don't believe the show has been mounted by any of this country's leading opera companies although I suspect that the bold revival of the piece  (Szymanowski's opus 46) in Iowa will lead to additional performances. (It was performed about a decade ago by the Santa Fe Opera,)  The Des Moines summer opera festival is one of the best in the country and noteworthy for its interesting advocacy of modern opera -- I saw Berg's Woyzeck in Indianola several summer's ago and Stravinsky's Rake's Progress last year together with a performance of Wagner's Flying Dutchman.  The performance space is intimate, the audience's wildly enthusiastic, and the staging lavish and impressive.  You are not likely to see an exotic work like King Roger anywhere else -- the show requires a huge orchestra, world-class singers, and a great deal of uninhibited, partially nude dancing.  

King Roger is nominally about Roger II, the so-called Great King of Sicily and Africa who ruled from Palermo between 1130 and 1154.  Roger's kingdom was culturally diverse, a syncretic mixture of Norman Frankish culture, Byzantine and Greek influences, aspects of Muslim north Africa (Roger's royal mantle was embroidered with words in Kufic script), all mixed together in a Sicilian stew.  I have seen Roger's Norman Palace in Palermo with its famous church -- the church, the Capella Palatina has Fatimid arches and a dome decorated with Byzantine mosaics of the highest quality; the inscriptions on the mosaics are written in Greek supplemented by Islamic calligraphy and the ceiling is studded with stalactite muqarnas characteristic of  Islamic mosques.  (The set for Act One provides us with a glimpse of this architecture.)  It is likely this strange, almost unheard-of, syncretism that attracted Szymanowski to this subject and, it was during a tour of north Africa and the Mediterranean that the composer first began to acknowledge his homosexuality.

The plot of King Roger is vestigial and people have said that the opera is an oratorio or, perhaps, a Mysterium, that is, a religious mystery play.  The piece begins with a droning chorale in the Capella Palatina.  An altar attended by gilded and winged beings rises from the floor and there are priests and a choir of boys as well as monks and other ecclesiastical figures.  Attending the service is King Roger with his bespectacled advisor (an odd touch) Edrissi, derived from a historical figure, Roger's Muslim counselor named Al-drisi.  Roger's serpentine wife, Roxana, is with the sovereign.  She is dressed in a form-fitting gown that shows off her breasts and slender hips -- the singer is very beautiful in a Jugendstil or vampish Art nouveau manner.  People say that a shepherd is rousing the people, declaring that he is the prophet of a God that lives in nature, that smiles on human copulation, and that is embodied in the waves of the sea, the green forests, and the stars.  Needless to say, the message is enthusiastically received by the populace as well as Roxana who seems apparently enamored of the new cult.  Of course, the priests are vigorously opposed to the new religion that the shepherd is preaching.  The shepherd arrives with an ingratiating smile on his lips, blonde and bare-chested.  Roger challenges him and, ultimately, summons the man to a trial that night at the royal palace.  The second act depicts Roxana singing in praise of the shepherd and his God.  The shepherd arrives for his trial.  But he isn't condemned but, instead, seems to be the condemner -- a group of 20 people appear in evening clothes (dressed in late 19th century finery); the shepherd organizes an orgy, the formally dressed people wriggling out of their gowns and tuxedos.  During the orgy, Roger seizes the shepherd and puts handcuffs on him.  Houdini-like the shepherd slips out of the handcuffs which he, then, uses to fetter Roxana so that he can draw her after him in a procession of the half-naked celebrants in the orgy.  In the last Act, Roger and Edrisi listen to Roxana singing offstage.  The shepherd has vanished. Roger rips off his clothes, stripping down to his underpants.  It begins to rain and Roxana appears in the downpour under an umbrella with several dancers.  Roger lights a fire which explodes as a frightening display of pyrotechnics on the stage, a big 12-foot pillar of flame -- I didn't know at the time that this was supposed to depict Roger offering a pagan sacrifice at a ruined Greek altar in an old amphitheater where Greek plays were once presented.  (There's no clue of this context in the Des Moines production and the effect, although impressive, seemed somewhat gratuitous to me without being grounded in the classical framework depicted in the libretto.)  The sun rises.  Roger, almost naked, salutes the sun and with rapturous ecstatic music, the opera ends.  The story, if it can be so characterized, starts the shepherd praising the new Dionysian God; in the second Act, the shepherd has become the living embodiment of the God that he serves; the Third Act takes place, probably, inside Roger's skull -- the shepherd is gone and Roger seems to take his place as an adherent of the cult.  

Although this narrative is devoid of outward events -- most of the action occurs as a psycho-sexual drama in the heart of King Roger -- the oratorio is spectacularly staged.  The first act takes place in a highly particularized location, the Capella Palatina in Palermo.  At the Blank Theater, the orchestra is assembled in a pit under the middle of the stage, an oblong opening through which we can see the musicians and the glint of their instruments.  Above this stage, an incense censer about the size of a tractor tire is suspended on a large rough rope.  At the start of the Act, the censer is pulled to the side of the pit and, then, set in pendulum motion, sweeping back and forth like a mighty artifact from a story by Edgar Alan Poe; incense billows out of the colossal censer, fogging the stage which is occupied by a colorful choir of ecclesiastics, priests, and a bishop who gather around the altar that jut up above the stage in the foreground. Above the much floor, decorated with patterned terrazzo tiles, we see individual clerics, each enclosed in transparent separately lit cubes -- the figures look like saints in their niches but they are, in fact, three dimensional and sing with the chorus.  It's very spectacular and impressive.  Roxana and King Roger enter to church to a solemn chorale -- later we see the bare-chested shepherd.  Roxana's gown is such that she seems nude, although her flesh is fully covered.

In the Second Act, we behold a fortress gate from inside a high wall where guards are restlessly marching.  The Self defends its prerogatives against the destructive impulses incarnated in the shepherd and his God.  Roxana appears at the iron grill of the gate, on its outside in the realm of the shepherd.  Later, a procession of portly and corpulent bourgeois enter from the left and gather around the inside of the fortified gate.  The shepherd appears wearing a sort of tunic of gold chainliks which encloses his torso like two slices of sandwich cover a piece of meat.  The shepherd is naked except for this tunic which is draped over his chest and back -- the sides of his buttocks and legs are completely bare.  Dancers enter and an orgy ensues.  The fat bourgeoisie wriggle out of their suits and tuxes and the women slip from their evening gowns.  Male and female are draped in shifts that scarcely cover them.  There is a lot of biceps caressing and hands petting thighs and some of the threesomes start nibbling on each other's shoulders and kissing.  (Clearly, the Des Moines Opera Intimacy Coordinator earned her pay with respect to this scene.)  Orgies are tough to orchestrate and run the risk of looking ridiculous, a scrum of half-naked people who seem to have forgotten what they supposed to do to consummate their passion -- they writhe and wriggle but decorum keeps them from getting down to business.  (You can successfully choreograph an orgy but only if you're Bob Fosse -- see the airline dance "Fly with Me (Airotica)" from All that Jazz).  This is less successful in the opera, but it's still startling.  The crowd of formerly bourgeois opera-goers on stage has now become a group of Bacchantes who follow the shepherd offstage to sound of tam and tambourine -- leading the procession is Roxana whose hands are fettered by handcuffs. 

The Last Act is abstract and modernist.  It's before dawn in what seems to be darkness.  Roger is alone with his Arab counsellor, Edrisi.  Roger tears off his clothes, creeping along the front of stage by an overturned chair that seems to symbolize the topsy-turvy nature of the Kingdom under assault by the great god Dionysius.  A rainstorm begins toward the rear of the stage with sheets of water falling from the proscenium.  Roxana appears under the downpour an umbrella raised above her head by an attendant -- she looks naked here as well although she is completely covered.  With the slave, Roxana appears in procession with two dancers, male and female, who are bathed in the falling water causing their shifts to become, more or less, transparent to their figures, a wet tee-shirt effect.  King Roger has stripped to his tight black under pants.  The sun represented by a large semicircle of pure white rises slowly and Roger approaches the radiant diagram of light, stands before it, and salutes the dawn.  It's unclear what this is supposed to mean and, probably, Szymanowski didn't know himself.  The sun is the insignia of Apollo, the god who opposes the riotous excess of Dionysius.  So has the naked King, now at the height of his delirium, become an adherent of logic and reason as embodied by the sun?  But the orb also seems lunar, and, perhaps, the King is paying obeisance to the moon somehow rising over the empty stage instead of the sun.  The ending is confused but radiant with the orchestra producing a wall of sound of the most voluptuous kind in the closing bars of the opera.

The singing was very good, but secondary to the spectacle.  The music is frenzied, a mixture of Wagner, Alban Berg, and Richard Strauss.  There are no memorable arias and Roxana's songs (there are several of them) are impressive while they last but you can't reconstruct them in your mind.  The action on stage is derived from Euripides Bacchae but without the violent and horrific climax to that play.  The music appears to me to be very difficult and the performance of the highly poetic and lyrical verse in Polish must have been a great challenge as well.  This is a production to be cherished and long-remembered.