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. 

The Spanish Prisoner

 Stichomythia, I remind you, is a method of writing theatrical dialogue using short half-lines, full lines of verse, or, even, sometimes, couplets; stichomythic verse employs these staccato utterances as spoken by alternating characters.  The Spanish Prisoner (1997), written and directed by David Mamet employs stichomythia in its dialogue, characters vying with one another in competitive ejaculations.  (Mamet's verse also involves strange patterns of repetition, odd elisions, and the use of proverbial impressions:  "I'm loyal and true blue," a female character insists although she is anything but...)  The effect of Mamet's theatrical verse style is to insist upon a sort of headlong acceleration in dialogue scenes and to create the impression that everyone is severely paranoic.  The language conceals more than it reveals, as if the characters were afraid of anything approaching intimacy or true revelation of motives or intentions.  No one seems trustworthy.  Similarly, everyone seems to be playing a role and, in fact, not performing that part too successfully -- the stilted stichomythic exchanges are self-consciously theatrical, ring false, and, in fact, the enhance the film's tenor that no one can be trusted and that everyone is lying.  Mamet's unique and highly artificial dialogue, accordingly, enhances the themes of his movies about con men and long cons --for instance, House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner.

The plot of The Spanish Prisoner is too elaborate and intricate to reveal.  And, in any event, a thoroughgoing description of the story would confound the viewer with too many spoilers as to the twists and turns that the story takes.  The general premise is that a young man, a mathematician, has figured out some highly lucrative "process" that is worth a fortune to its possessor.  The process is, somewhat quaintly, written down in a red notebook in longhand.  With his corporate bosses, the young man pitches the process (he refers to it as "making widgets") to investors.  The movie is coy about this "process" and the wealth to be derived from it -- numbers of dollars projected are written down on a white board turned away from us.  This is because the details of the process are immaterial to the story that involves an extremely elaborate confidence trick designed to wrest the "process" out of the hands of its owners so that it can be sold to the Japanese for a king's ransom.  There are probably holes big enough to drive a semi-truck through in the movie's scenario but the exuberance of the rat-a-tat dialogue and the curious oratorio-style of the diction and presentation -- there's a distinct Brechtian "alienation effect" at work in this movie -- inspire interest in the viewer and, even, pleasure with respect to this highly stylized film.  There are lots of empty corridors, vacant streets, and the climax occurs on a strangely empty ferry crossing Boston harbor.  The film's paranoic subtext is so strong that everyone seems to be under surveillance -- mere extras in some scenes, for instance, people loitering around the Central Park carousel take on a sinister appearance:  are these just random onlookers or some kind of spies.  

The film is entertaining because of its excellent cast.  Ben Gazzara plays an unscrupulous corporate mogul.  Ricky Jay, part of Mamet's repertoire company, is an equally sinister corporate lawyer.  (People are constantly threatening litigation against their adversaries and the plot turns on the question of who really owns the so-called "process", some sort of airy combination of technology and pure mathematics, invented by the young man, Joe Ross (the earnest Campbell Scott).  Steve Martin is conspicuously oily as an oligarch with a mysterious sister who is a tennis pro and who baits one of the many hooks dangling down into the murky waters in the film.  Rebecca Pigeon (then, Mamet's wife) plays a naive secretary who tries to seduce the rather dour hero, Joe.  There are other assorted rogues and scoundrels in the film.  Everyone is excellent and, if this sort of thing is to your taste, the formula here on display can't really be bettered -- except, perhaps, by House of Games, a similar Mamet picture, that has a more dream-like and abstract mise-en-scene.   Jean Doumanian and Letty Aronson (nee Koenigsberg) produced; both Doumanian and Aronson are associated with about a dozen or more Woody Allen films, picture that share a similarly cool and ironic style.  (Aronson is Allen's sister.)

To Die For

 To Die For is a raunchy neo-noir in which a femme fatale schemes to further her career by plotting the murder of her husband.  In classic noir, the characters would possess a certain charisma and elegance.  This is not the case in Gus van Sandt's 1995 To Die For.  The deadly black widow is a dim-witted weather girl on a cable access Tv station in rural New Hampshire.  Her husband is a similarly dull Italian stud, resolutely middle-class, whose family owns a popular Italian restaurant.  The hit man enlisted in the murder plot is an ignorant metal rock headbanger who is flunking out of high school -- he fancies himself as a romantic hero, but his wimpy high school teacher sadistically humiliates him, cuffing him in the face without any consequences.  The hit man's buddies form a ne-er do well trio with him: they are another headbanger who is like Butthead on the well-known TV show and a chubby girl who pathetically thinks that the others in the movie, including the glamorous weather-girl, are actually her friends -- in fact, they have nothing but contempt for her and betray her confidences (as does she as well) at the first opportunity.  This is all bargain-basement noir -- instead of Fred MacMurray you get Joaquin Phoenix mumbling and stumbling around in one of his first roles with the other sad sacks in the cast.  Successful films are built, often, on a disjunction or disconnect and this is the case with To Die For:  the dissonant element in this squalid film noir parody is Nicole Kidman as the scheming weather girl, Suzanne Stone.  Although she's playing a character with aspirations far beyond her rather meager grasp, Suzanne Stone is radiantly beautiful and seductive -- she elevates the film's low life milieu into the realm of classic film noir, playing an evil heroine who can compete with Barbara Stanwyck or Veronica Lake.  Kidman delivers a hypnotic performance that is riveting and intensely erotic.  She exudes cool, technically sophisticated sexual technique deployed with complete heartlessness -- this is dramatically contrasted with the one moment in the film in which we see her unmasked and without artifice, a memorable sequence in which, hearing the song "Sweet Home Alabama", she dances in the headlights of her punk boyfriend's car:  the camera falls in love with her and so does the audience.  

Suzanne Stone is ambitious and aims to become a TV news journalist, although she has no real talent and isn't too smart.  She's married to a hapless Italian stallion husband, a pretty boy who is all looks but with nothing much underlying his handsome features -- he's played sullenly by Matt Dillon.  His wife finagles her way into a very low-rent cable access TV show where she pesters her bosses into letting her do the local weather (she makes it into a big melodramatic spectacle) and, also, aspires to produce a documentary on local disenfranchised and alienated youth.  It's through her documentary efforts that she encounters the derelict trio of teenagers, Lydia, Jimmy (Joaquin Phoenix) and Russell (Casey Affleck); they are hopelessly inarticulate and miserable subjects for the documentary.  More out of boredom than anything else, Suzanne seduces Jimmy and starts a torrid sexual affair with him. When her traditional Catholic husband Larry demands that she stay home and act the part of a housewife, Suzanne persuades Jimmy to murder her husband.  There's a gun that Lydia has kept to deter her mother's boyfriend from sexually molesting her and the trio break into Larry's house and shoot him dead.  They leave a trail that is ludicrously easy to follow and the cops immediately arrest Jimmy.  Russell rats him out to save his own skin and Lydia, who has been cruelly rebuffed by Suzanne, agrees to wear a wire to entrap the black widow.  But Suzanne, not by design but by accident, speaks in an ambiguous way and the evidence is lacking to indict her.   She eludes arrest while Jimmy goes to prison for life and thirty years.  (his only solace remembering the love affair with Suzanne).  Lydia never really figures anything out and remains a pathetic bystander; Russell gets a shorter sentence.  Larry's family runs an Italian restaurant and has connections with the mob.  A hit man lures Suzanne down to the river with a proposal to get her a contract in Hollywood.  Larry's sister is an Icescapades skater.  In the final scene, she skates over a frozen millpond where Suzanne's corpse, who was called an "ice queen" earlier in the movie, is immured in ice.  

The film is beautifully shot, effectively suspenseful in its own way, and all the players are brilliantly cast and directed.  But the film's great incongruity is the glacial beauty of Nicole Kidman which is truly stunning and the impoverished milieu in which the action transpires.  The movie is also shot in a very glamorous way with bright shiny surfaces and brilliant lighting -- the film is very pretty although the story is not.  The glossy aspect of the film, and its fancy narrative technique (it hops around in time with some sequences featuring news and talk show interviews) contrasts very strongly with the film's low-rent pastiche of a film noir.  I've been comparing the movie to Billy Wilder's classic noir, Double Indemnity (1944) but the better, more apt comparison is to The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) in which a similar plot is played about against the background of a greasy spoon diner.  (The film features a cameo by the author, Joyce Maynard, of the novel on which the book is based plus uncredited appearances by George Segal as an unscrupulous motivational speaker who gropes Suzanne and David Cronenberg, oddly sinister as the mobster who kills the heroine.