Emitai

Emitai is a 1971 film made by the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene (pronounced Ooz-mahn Sem-Benah).  I have known about this film-maker for most of my life -- he became prominent in the late sixties with his third feature, released in America as Black Girl (1966) and made about 12 films, ending his career with Moolade (2004) about female circumcision.  Summaries of the content of his movies have deterred me from seeing them -- he was reputedly a feminist, educated in movie-making in Moscow, and, on paper, his pictures sound like rather arid, didactic works, calculated, it seems, to either bore or offend viewers without a stake in the history of colonization and oppression in Sub-Saharan Africa.  This is a racist perspective, of course, and it is worth exploring Sembene's pictures to assess whether their merits equal the praise often lavished upon them -- indeed,  usually, a particularly fawning sort of laudation that suggests a bad conscience on the part of White critics tinged with a distinct aura of condescension.  A three-film collection issued by Criterion, unfortunately without much in the way of commentary or annotation (the history and customs presented in these films present a challenge), provides viewers with an opportunity to assess for themselves Sembene's work. (It's worth noting that Sembene is called "the Father of African cinema," although this characterization makes female critics a bit uneasy and that he was also a famous and estimable novelist who published his books in French.) 

Emitai is a 103 minute movie focused on a stand-off between French colonial troops and the Dioli (dee-joe-lee) villagers occurring in rural south Senegal during World War Two.  (Sembene is Wolof-speaking and not Dioli, although he obviously knows a great deal about these people.)  The situation is that the French need soldiers to die for them on the battlefields in Europe.  Accordingly, they have instituted a policy of forced conscription (they disingenuously characterize draftees as "volunteers" or "recruits").  In addition, the French need foodstuffs to supply their troops and, so, they demand that each family contribute several hundred pounds of rice to the war effort.  (A subtitle has someone saying that the village must produce 50 tons of rice for the French army -- this seems excessive to me, since the village, seems to have only two or three-hundred inhabitants; I suspect this statement is some kind of mistake.)  The villagers are defiant and resist.  (An opening title dedicates the movie "To all the Militants of the African Cause.")  The colonial regime in French West Africa (now Senegal) sends about forty African soldiers wearing elongated furry-looking red fez hats to enforce these levies.  The rather officious and baffled-looking native soldiers are under the command of two White men -- a hirsute fellow who says the villagers must be treated with an "iron fist" and, also, the captain, an ineffectual soldier who looks a bit like an anguished Donald Sutherland and who claims to be sympathetic to the villagers, but is, ultimately, just as bad as his sidekick.  This situation seems tailor-made to demonstrate the villainy of the French overlords and the virtue of the colonialized and oppressed Africans -- and, in summary, the film does have that aspect.  But the movie is actually very funny, a sort of black comedy, in which the Africans seem just ignorant and just as delusional as their French masters.  

In the first couple scenes, we see hapless male villagers accosted by bumbling red-hatted soldiers and hustled away to Dakar where they will be sent into the meat-grinder of World War Two, ostensibly to save the Free French and Marshal Petain.  The African "volunteers" are childishly cooperative once detained and forced to serve and they are quite willing to march around barefoot singing a tune that includes the lines "Marshal, we are coming!"  The women in the village are far fiercer and less compliant.  In Dioli villages, rice is said to be "a woman's wealth" and we have seen the females in the town engaged in backbreaking labor to plant and harvest rice from mucky fields that their men stir up with big paddle-shaped hoes.  The women are not about to donate their rice to the French cause and, at night (clumsy day-for-night footage), they load their provisions in huge baskets that they carry on their heads to some sort of refuge in the thorny-looking outback.  When the French blunder into the village, there is no rice to be found and the remaining men have taken to their heels and are hiding in the bush.  The men seem to be incompetent and vainglorious idiots.  A sort of tribal council of five elders sits around a spooky-looking dead baobab tree.  The tree is cleft and reputedly the home in our realm of about six or seven blood-thirsty deities including the titular Emitai.  So far as I can see, Sembene has contempt for this animist religious system -- and, in fact, the movie was perceived as sacrilegious and banned in Senegal, at least for a time. (Senegal is a 97% Muslim country).  The tribal elders guzzle palm wine from totally inefficient gourd cups, spilling half the stuff all over their face and on the ground as they imbibe the sacred intoxicant.  Now and then, they slaughter an unfortunate rooster or goat in hope that the deities will come to their rescue.  Sometimes, Sembene shows the gods as animated stacks of hay and straw capped with grotesque masks -- he shoots these scenes through a red filter as if to emphasize the gods' demands that their thirst be slaked with blood.  The gods dance around but offer no useful advice.  The village elders, then, conclude that the warriors should fight the French soldiers.  "A warrior must die with a spear in his hand," the elders announce.  The men attack the French troops in what must surely be the most pathetically ineffective assault ever filmed.  They chuck spears at the troops that fall ten yards short of the skirmish line, embedding themselves in the earth without harming anyone, and a couple of men fire flimsy arrows from equally flimsy-looking toy bows.  The French colonial troops fire a volley equally ineffective but, more or less, by accident mortally wound one of the elders, a guy named Djimeko.  The wounded man is hauled off the field of honor by his cronies and dragged to the grotesque dead tree where the hay-stack deities are consulted to no better effect.  Djimeko dies and is wrapped up in a red sarcophagus with an outline of his features displayed in pearly white beads.  But the French troops intervene, capturing the corpse and posting sentries next to the body in its red shroud with the horns of a bull attached to the cadaver.  Meanwhile, back in town, all of the women have been herded into the square or plaza where they are forced to sit in the hot sun.  (This is the punishment of choice in this equatorial country.)  The women used to laboring all day long with babies strapped to their backs don't really seem to suffer that much -- they mostly fall asleep when they are not singing their defiance in a monotonous sort of chant.  An afternoon and a night passes.  In the morning, the town elders at their tree (where is it? Sembene's geography is stylized -- it seems to be right in town somewhere but in a different dimension than that occupied by the Colonial troops) bicker, drink some more palm wine, smoke their pipes, and some of them decide to cooperate with the French.  (At least, one elder delivers his levy of rice to the French troops guarding the women.)  There's a riot and the women, who really can't be controlled in any way, bolt, knocking down some frail fences that demarcate the village into odd little sectors.  One of two boys, seemingly orphans, who have been hanging around the edges of the action, providing some aid and comfort to the village women, gets shot down.  The women become agitated and, ignoring the French troops, march with the corpse out to where Djimeko in his red mummy-case is rotting.  The men appear on the road carrying huge baskets of what appears to be rice on their heads.  But, instead the baskets are full of what may be raffia headdresses and not rice at all.  The women are enraged, dancing and singing by the corpses.  Out on road on the edge of town, the French troops take aim at the village men who are lined up by a ditch.  The screen goes black and there is a volley of gunfire.  

The movie is made with the utmost simplicity.  There are almost no moving shots.  Some of the acting, particularly of the two White soldiers, is absolutely (and comically) terrible.  Everything is lucidly presented and the camera is always positioned so as to provide us with a clear understanding as to what we are seeing.  Nonetheless, Sembene suggests that the men and women occupy wholly different locations -- they coexist in the same space but seem to be radically apart, on different planes of existence.  (The gods live in their red-filter zone; when the elders butcher animals for their benefit, they just casually toss the carcasses into a hollow in the sacred Baobab tree.) The movie is very funny.  Toward the end, the French have orders to substitute posters showing Charles De Gaulle, a mere brigadier general for the seven-star marshall, General Petain.  This is completely baffling to everyone except the two feckless White Frenchmen.  The troops and the villagers count only two stars on de Gaulle's lapels and, therefore, can't figure out why he is suddenly in command -- this almost causes a mutiny among the otherwise rather somnolent colonial troops.    

As they say, "one robin doesn't make s Spring," but on the evidence of this film, it seems apparent that Ousmane Sembane is a very funny, intelligent, master film-maker.  

The Locket

 The 1946 RKO picture, The Locket (John Brahm) is a notable example of a Hollywood picture involving an elaborate structure of flashbacks embedded in flashbacks, a complex narrative strategy that seems to mimic psychoanalysis -- layers of superimposed memories are excavated to reveal psychic trauma motivating the interaction between characters.  This sort of storytelling became prevalent in Hollywood in the 1940's and early fifties as demonstrated by David Bordwell, the great film critic (now deceased) in his penultimate book: Reinventing Hollywood:  How 1940s Filmmakers changed Storytelling (2017).  The Locket is one of the works cited by Bordwell exemplifying the intricate narrative techniques characterizing movies made in that era; he devotes a number of pages to the picture.  Bordwell's concerns were formalist and The Locket, although fascinating as specimen of complex storytelling, isn't particularly pleasurable.  The movie is a maze or a thicket through which the viewer must hack his or her way -- it's interesting and challenging, but not much fun; indeed, the picture is a glum and humorless little thriller, with some distinctive chiaroscuro sequences, but, like many movies based on psychoanalytical theory, the narrative is contrived and not really plausible -- theory, as Goethe, I think reminds us, is a grey reduction of the vibrancy of actual life, a simplification of human motives and actions that doesn't really ring true.

In Russian formalist film theory, a great influence on David Bordwell, a distinction is drawn between the plot (or fabula) and the manner in which the plot is presented -- that is the syuzhet.  In the 40's innovations in cinema, the story is frequently told in flashbacks, often in reverse order as to the chronology of events comprising the fabula.  (For instance, Sunset Boulevard begins at the end with the narrator floating dead in a Hollywood swimming pool; the syuzhet, then, backtracks to show the sequence of events leading to the protagonist's death.)  The Locket is a picture that demonstrates a yawning gulf between the narrative's confusing system of flashbacks and the relatively simple story or fabula that the film dramatizes.  A tired-looking middle-aged woman works as a servant in wealthy family's palatial house.  The middle-aged woman is the mother of a little girl, about seven years old.  The little girl is best friends with the daughter of the mistress of the house and, therefore, is invited by the rich woman's daughter to participate in a birthday party.  As it turns out, the rich woman is embarrassed by the presence of her servant's daughter at the birthday party and excludes the little girl.  Her friend has given her a locket which the rich woman takes from the child, requiring that it be returned to her daughter.  (Later the locket goes missing and the child's mother is dismissed from her employment, wrongfully as it happens since, in fact, she didn't steal back the jewelry.) The little girl, who will be the protagonist in the movie, is humiliated -- she prays to God that she be allowed to keep the gift, but the locket is taken from, enforcing her sense that she is inferior to her friend.  This psychological trauma scars the child and she grows up to be woman who uses her wiles to steal expensive jewelry -- this kleptomania is in compensation for the shame that she suffered when she was seven years old and had the locket given to her by her friend taken (and, then, was wrongfully accused of theft -- the same kinds of thefts that she now actually commits.)  The protagonist in The Locket seduces a number of men, but uses them primarily as instruments for her kleptomania, as vehicles affording her access to the necklaces and brooches that she covets.  Her thefts trigger homicide, suicide, and one man accused of theft is wrongfully imprisoned and apparently executed after being convicted of a murder actually committed by the vengeful and insane protagonist.  This femme fatale worms her way into the household of the rich woman who humiliated her twenty years earlier -- she becomes engaged to the rich woman's son (her little playmate has long since died).  On the day of the wedding, the protagonist, given the fatal locket by her future mother-in-law staggers down the aisle in the mansion where her mother worked as a servant long before -- the very carpet underfoot accuses her of all sorts of crimes, writhing with flashback images of thefts and other terrible things that she has done.  She swoons and the film ends with her, apparently, incarcerated in an insane asylum. The film is scrupulously ambiguous about whether the protagonist engineered the wedding to the wealthy man to revenge herself on his mother or, perhaps, is just the victim of a bizarre coincidence.

This story is told by flashbacks within flashbacks; the core of this Russian Doll structure of stories within storiesi a representation of the triggering trauma -- the moment when the heroine's mother is wrongfully accused of theft and fired from her job as the rich woman's servant.  The syuzhet starts on the day of the wedding.  A man appears and tells the groom that he knows his bride, psychoanalyzed her, and was once married to the woman.  The psychoanalyst's story triggers a flashback about how he met his bride-to-be; this flashback, in turn, contains a flashback narrated by the psychoanalyst about he discovered the woman's previous sexual relationship.  In that flashback, we learn that the heroine was once romantically involved with an artist (played by Robert Mitchum); the artist has painted an image of the heroine as Cassandra, a menacing, voluptuous female figure with blank, white eyes.  The artist's patron is a rich industrialist.  The heroine, attending a party at the industrialist's mansion, steals a diamond necklace from the rich man's paralyzed wife.  When the theft is discovered, the industrialist accuses the protagonist who shoots him dead, pinning the crime on another party-guest.  Thus man goes to prison and, in fact, is executed for capitol murder.  Mitchum's character (here he plays against type -- he acts the part of a sensitive artist) learns that his girlfriend has, in fact, framed a man resulting in his execution.  The artist can't reconcile his love for the insane heroine with her evil deeds and commits suicide by throwing himself out of the window of a skyscraper.  The heroine, then, goes to London where she works as a nurse during the blitz.  There, she steals another precious necklace, but is thought to have been killed by bombs during an air raid.  In fact, she hasn't died in the raid and ends up in New York with the psychoanalyst.  The psychoanalyst has a nervous breakdown and the heroine divorces him, changing her name in the process.  She, then, runs into the wealthy heir to an American fortune, apparently at some place like Key West -- she literally "runs into" the man; their bicycles collide.  She, then, seduces the man who turns out to be the brother of her little playmate and the daughter of the wealthy woman who humiliated her years before. So far as I can recall (and determine) the narrative is structure is this:  the psychoanalyst's appearance before the wedding triggers his flashback which, then, contains a flashback narrated by Mitchum's character, the doomed artist.  The woman confides in Mitchum's artist that she is haunted by an experience in her childhood which then triggers a flashback within the artist's flashback which, of course, is embedded in the psychoanalyst's flashback -- this is the core memory of trauma that engenders the film's plot.  After Mitchum's character plunges out of the window, we, then, return to the psychoanalyst's story which involves the moody scenes shot with flaring fires and wreckage during the blitz in London.  This part of the narrative ultimately returns us back to the initial situation -- the wedding in the mansion in which the heroine seems to go mad.  If this seems confusing, it is.  The best part of the film is the flashback inside the flashback involving the artist -- some aspects of this part of the movie are eerily imposing and the suicide scene in particular has a grim aura of inevitability about it which characterizes some examples of 40's film noir.  The heroine, played by the actress Larraine Day, is beautiful but seems somehow (and appropriately) stunted -- she's like a poor man's Elizabeth Taylor but with a head and gorgeous movie-star face that seems too large for her body.  (Day later married the hideous Leo Durocher).  The men trapped in this web of intrigue are mostly uninteresting stiffs; this was Mitchum's first major role and he's weirdly soft and quiet, a bit like Rock Hudson in some of his pictures made a decade later.  The picture is not worth the effort required to decipher it and, in fact, it's completely unconvincing -- the notion of compensatory kleptomania seems improbable and false.  (Hitchcock's Marnie, which has a similar plot and structure - it also relies on flashbacks - is a better movie because it equates the protagonist's mental illness to her sexual dysfunction.). 

Film Group note: Burn!

 Burn!

Gillo Pontecorvo was an Italian film maker who died at 86 in Rome in 2006.  He was born in Pisa, one of ten children in the family of a wealthy Jewish industrialist. Pontecorvo was a lifelong Communist.  His brother Bruno Pontecorvo was a leading Italian nuclear physicist who defected to Russia and died in Moscow.  

Pontecorvo was a journalist, anti-Fascist resistence fighter, professional tennis teacher, and deep-sea diver among other things before becoming involved in cinema.  His first movie about class conflict in a fishing village was released in 1957 as The Wide Blue Sea.  He made a concentration camp picture in 1960 called Kapo.  In 1966, he garnered international fame for The Battle of Algiers.  This was followed by Burn! in 1969 and, then, in 1979 Ogro, about a political assassination in Spain.  After that, he made shorts, documentaries, and television commercials. 

Pontecorvo’s tracking shot at the climax of Kapo inspired one of the most notorious controversies in the history of cinema criticism.  The writer (and, later, great director) Jacques Rivette denounced Pontecorvo’s “reframing” of an image of a corpse danging on an concentration camp electrical fence as inspiring in him “the most profound contempt” for the Italian director.  Rivette thought that Pontecorvo was guilty of “aesthetizing” the horrors of the concentration camp.  (Probably, much of the problem was related to miscasting the American actress Susan Strasberg as the protagonist in the film.)  By contrast, Bernard Henri Levy wrote that Pontecorvo had been “criminalized” on the basis of a single shot when directors like Quentin Tarantino (in Inglourious Basterds) and Scorsese with his film Shutter Island have exploited the Holocaust for melodrama.  (There is a fine essay on the “tracking shot in Kapo written by Serge Daney reprinted from Cahiers du Cinema in Senses of Cinema on February 12, 2004.)  

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Gillo Pontecorvo’s most famous film is The Battle of Algiers (1966).  The movie is about the insurgency in Algeria between Fronte de Liberation Nationale (FLN) and the pied-noirs (or French).  Algeria was not a French colony but, in fact, organized as a part of France itself, that is, a territory annexed to France with participation in the French government.  The movie was commissioned by Saadi Yacef, a member of the ruling military junta who had been a leading FLN commander during the conflict.  Yacef had written a memoir and wanted this to be filmed.  (The original plan was that Paul Newman would be cast in a starring role.)  The resulting movie written by Franco Solinas was shot on the original locations where the actual events depicted in the movie had occurred.  Pontecorvo cast non-actors in all roles and used prostitutes and beggars in key parts.  All of these measures were supervised by Yacef, who was the film’s producer and who stars in the picture.  Although the movie has been praised as being even-handed in its depiction of war atrocities and terrorism, recent commentaries argue that Yacef white-washed his role as a leader in the FLN and that Pontecorvo, in fact, slants the movie against the French colonialists – something that was pretty apparent to most viewers of the film in the sixties who were unabashed in their praise of the picture’s Leftist politics.  (Yacef turned out to be a murderous dictator himself and his regime slaughtered thousands of Algerian collaborators, tortured people with impunity, and enforced violent repressive measures against the people.)  

Pontecorvo said that the picture was subservient to the “dictatorship of truth”.  By this, he meant that he rejected the overtly propagandistic script endorsed by Yacef and opted for a more nuanced portrayal of the conflict that showed both sides engaged in war crimes.  (The most famous sequence in the film is a sequence in which FLN terrorists plant a bomb in a movie theater and kill scores of civilians.)  Pontecorvo imagined the film as being in the lineage of the Italian neo-realists and similar to pictures like Rosselini’s Open City and Paisan.  Lastly, he strove for authenticity, using grainy newsreel-style camera work, nonprofessional actors, and footage imitating TV reporting from actual locations.  (This was part of a trend at the time; in the U.K., Peter Watkins made several similar films employing newsreel style filmmaking – including Culloden and The War Game.)  The Battle of Algiers was closely studied by the Black Panthers in the late sixties.  In 2003, the picture was screened repeatedly as a training film by the Pentagon.  Pontecorvo is reputed to have said: “Studying the film will train you to make cinema, not war.”  

By virtue of Pontecorvo’s international success with The Battle of Algiers, the director was able to amass Hollywood financing (and the involvement of Marlon Brando) for his film, Burn!  Upon Pontecorvo’s death, the government of Algeria sent a crown to be set on his bier to honor his depiction of the armed struggle against the French in that country. 

*****  

United Artists working with the French company, Les Productions Artistes Associes, agreed to finance Burn! like The Battle of Algiers, based on a script by Pontecorvo’s reliable screenwriter, Franco Solinas.  (Solinas had written all of the Pontecorvo’s previous films.)  This film was supposed to combine a swashbuckling action movie with political ideology – that is, “(a) romantic adventure and (a) film of ideas.”  United Artists suggested that Pontecorvo hire Charles Bronson or Steve McQueen to play the film’s protagonist William Walker.  Substantial money was budgeted for battle scenes, period costumes, and sets – whereas The Battle of Algiers cost only $800,000 (and earned many times that amount), Burn! ended-up significantly over its allocated budget of three million dollars.  

Brando admired Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers and seems to have watched that movie at the behest of his associates in the Black Panthers.  He was politically engaged with the film’s ideology and agreed to reduce his ordinary fees to work with Pontecorvo.  However, ultimately, the association was catastrophic and Brando, true to form, set about subverting the film and wrecking its production.  The initial problem was that the movie was shot on locations near Cartagena, Columbia – these places were scalding, infested with bugs, and relatively inaccessible.  Brando was associated with disastrous problems that vexed Mutiny on the Bounty, another film shot in an exotic locale, and, for all his posturing about authenticity, was, in fact, a product of the Hollywood studio system and didn’t like working on location.  After several months in Cartagena, Brando simply walked off the set, demanding that the movie’s production be transferred to places that he found more congenial. Brando’s intransigence, probably, saved Pontecorvo by forcing him to leave Columbia – he was close to collapse due to the harsh conditions on the set and both his wife and small son were extremely ill.  Apparently, Brando’s refusal to cooperate was based in part on the fact that he had some kind of tropical rash and was suffering from amoebic dysentery.  In any event, after a pause, shooting was commenced again in Morocco. It’s for this reason that the film’s landscapes don’t always match, inexplicably shifting between lush Caribbean forests and lagoons and mountainous high desert.  When Brando eloped from the production, United Artists threatened to cease financing and pull the plug on the movie.  In the alternative, United Artists considered re-casting the lead role with Burt Lancaster or Richard Burton or some other bankable star.  Pontecorvo, however, mended his relationship with Brando sufficiently to persuade the American actor to demand that the picture be completed with his involvement.  The scenes involving the guerilla war between Walker’s army and Jose Dolores’ insurgents comprising the second half of the movie were shot in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, hardly plausible as a Caribbean island such as one of the Antilles, Haiti, or Guadalupe.  The big sequences showing the carnival street-fighting and the rebel march along the beach were shot in Columbia at the outset of the production.  Sequences on the seashore were filmed either at Cinecitta studios near Rome or in St. Trinidad in the Virgin Islands.  Some interiors were shot in Paris.  (These locations seem to have been chosen by Brando for his convenience.)  

Brando and Pontecorvo clashed at the outset of the film’s production.  Pontecorvo, who was extremely superstitious, was afraid of the color lavender.  For some reason, this hue signified failure for him.  But in the opening scenes, Brando insisted upon wearing a silk lavender scarf.  (Brando was in a phase of interpreting roles with overtones of homosexuality – he had done this with his characterization of Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty and in the film Reflections in a Golden Eye).  Pontecorvo protested because he felt the color would jinx the movie (which did, in fact, turn out to be jinxed) – but Brando was intransigent about this detail and, in the end, Pontecorvo succumbed to his demands.

Accommodating Brando’s whims wasn’t a successful strategy in the end.  By the final weeks in the nine month production, Pontecorvo wasn’t speaking with his star.  The two men communicated through intermediaries.  Furthermore, Brando petulantly worked to undercut Pontecorvo’s credentials as a Marxist - Leftist director.  He accused Pontecorvo of underpaying the Black actors involved in the movie and, even, discriminating against them by reducing their food rations and providing them with nutrition inferior to the White European cast and crew.  Production was complicated by the fact that Brando spoke with his fellow actors and Pontecorvo in French; the crew and director communicated in Italian; the extras and second-unit production personnel all spoke Spanish exclusively.

Brando successfully destroyed Pontecorvo’s reputation for efficient and low-budget film-making.  After shooting Burn!, Pontecorvo didn’t work on a feature for another ten years and his last picture, 1979's Ogro was seen by next to no one.  Adding insult to injury, Brando claimed that his acting in Burn! was his best movie performance and his favorite work. 

*****

While Burn! was under production, Franco’s Spain pressured the French production firm and United Artists to change the movie’s title from Quemada (“burn” in Spanish) to Queimada (the spelling of “burn” in Portuguese.)  Franco’s government said that Spain would boycott the movie if it purported to depict Spanish tyranny in a Spanish colony.  In 1969 and 1970, Spain was a country with big audiences and large ticket receipts.  For this reason, United Artists acceded to Spanish pressure and set the movie in a fictional Antilles island mysteriously controlled by Portugal.

*****  

Another complication in Burn!’s production was Pontecorvo’s penchant for casting non-professionals in important roles.  The part of Jose Dolores was played by Evaristo Marquez.  Marquez was an illiterate Columbian cane-cutter (or, in some references, described as a shepherd), living in the hills with two wives.  Marquez, reportedly, had never seen a movie before he was cast as a co-star with Marlon Brando.  (This is mythology – in fact, Marquez had appeared in three short documentaries before he was cast as Jose Dolores in Burn!)  

Marquez couldn’t read the script and had to be taught his lines by dialogue consultants.  To his credit, Brando liked Marquez and did everything he could to support and assist him on the set.  Scenes with Marquez are shot from angles to disguise the fact that Brando had to nudge Marquez off-camera to cue him to speak or, even, move.  From his experience making this movie, Marquez concluded that he was a movie-star.  He appeared in three other films, but was hopelessly inept.  It is reported that after debacle of these latter films, Marquez returned to cutting sugar cane (or herding goats depending upon the account.)  He lived in San Basilio de Palenque in northern Columbia, now a UNESCO protected heritage site, a village established by runaway slaves (“maroons”) in the first half of the 17th century.  (Linguistic problems with Marquez’ work were exacerbated by the fact that he didn’t speak conventional Spanish, but a highly distinct and unusual Creole dialect.)  Marquez died in Cartagena in 2010.  

Marquez said that “(Brando) never made me feel inferior to him; he regarded me as a brother...”  Marquez continued: “Indeed, there was no one like Brando, that way of changing his expression, his eyes, even more he was a brave man.”  Roger Ebert interviewed Pontecorvo in Cartagena in 1969.  Brando was missing in action – he had gone to Los Angeles and was expected back any day.  (In fact, as it happened, Brando had left Columbia for good and did not return, necessitating shooting the picture  in other locations.)  Pontecorvo said that working with Marquez was a extremely difficult.  The first scene required 44 takes and was never completed in a form that Pontecorvo found satisfactory or, even, adequate – the sequence had to be rewritten entirely.  Pontecorvo said that Marquez had to be “taught how to walk”; he couldn’t do anything right.  In one shot, Jose Dolores is supposed to show “irony” on his face.  It was impossible to explain to Marquez what this meant and Pontecorvo despaired of getting the shot.  Brando kicked Marquez hard while the camera was running and Pontecorvo reported that his resulting expression could be construed as irony, although it was really a mixture of surprise and anger.  

Marquez’ bad acting accounted, in part, for the film running far behind its original 17 week shooting schedule for Cartagena.  This protracted shoot under difficult conditions in Columbia led to Brando walking off the project with further cost overruns involving completing the film in Paris, Rome, the Virgin Islands, and Morocco.

Ennio Morricone

Burn! is sometimes said to boast the one of the greatest movie scores of all time.  In the year that Ennio Morricone wrote music for the film, he completed no fewer than 29 other film soundtracks. Morricone composed music for the cinema beginning when he was 35 in 1961 (he was born in 1928).  Prior to that time, he studied classical music, wrote some pop tunes, and scored music for radio dramas.  Morricone led a jazz band and was accomplished in all genres of music.  (In fact, he collaborated with the Pet Shop Boys and wrote a number of pop songs including one recorded by Paul Anka).  He was always a bit skittish about publicity arising from his famous film scores; Morricone had hoped to become famous for his “serious” music.  When he died in July 2020 at 91, he was generally regarded as the best and most influential composer in film history.    

Morricone’s music for Burn! is an unusual and singular combination of Caribbean influenced rhythms and syncopation matched to hymn-like music with Gregorian chant tonality. The processional music, “Abolisson”, is often performed in concert, generally with astonishing effect.  (“Abolisson” means “abolition” and the music signifies the freeing of enslaved people in Burn!)

Morricone composed the famous music for Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns, most notably A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, Bad,and the Ugly and the lyrical (and operatic) soundtrack for Once upon a Time in the West.  One of his last scores was a return to the Western genre with the score for Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. (Morricone, who won an Oscar for this music, said that the score was “(his) revenge on the Western.”) But, as shown by the indelible music written for Burn!, Morricone wrote soundtracks for all sorts of movies, including Cinema Paradiso, various gangster films including Leone’s picture Once upon a Time in America, Bertolucci’s epic 1900 (in which he pays tribute to Verdi) and the famous melody for pan-flute in The Mission.

After Burn! was shot, Pontecorvo was working in a Roman studio editing the picture.  The soundtrack for Liliani Cavani’s film The Cannibals was being recorded in the studio and Pontecorvo heard the theme that would be developed into “Abolisson” in Morricone’s score for her picture.  (Cavani’s picture is a counterculture retelling of Antigone involving lots of nudity and student riots.)  Pontecorvo asked Morricone to “give him” the theme written for Cavani’s film.  Pontecorvo, who like Handel and Bach, was not averse to borrowing from himself, rewrote the music slightly, converting it to the form in which appears as a highlight in Burn!  Morricone was trained as a trumpeter.  Indeed, his first important spaghetti Western scores featured variations on the Mexican trumpet melody Deguello, called the “cutthroat song” in the John Wayne movie Rio Bravo.  The last time that Morricone played trumpet in public was for Pontecorvo’s wedding in 1964  at which he played the famous trumpet fanfares from Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” from the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  

In Burn!, Morricone borrows from Bach’s sacred song, Komm Suesser Tod, Komm heilige Ruhe (“Come Sweet Death, Come sacred peace”) for the music in the final scene associated with Jose Dolores’ death.     

On Insurgencies

An “insurgency” is a form of asymmetrical warfare.  According to the Rand Corporation, the world has seen 181 insurgencies since the end of World War Two.  Insurgencies are characterized by the use of guerilla tactics with fighters that are lightly armed and that seek refuge in the local population.  Most insurgencies emanate from rural areas, although there are notable examples of urban insurgencies, including aspects of the Algerian uprising and the fighting in Baghdad after the American invasion.  Insurgencies, sometimes called “the other war,” last on average ten years.  Fighting is low-intensity without pitched battles or military (army v. army) confrontation.  Insurgents often control local populations by terrorist measures undertaken to demonstrate that the ruling authority (or target of attacks) has no ability to protect civilians against fighting and depredations.  Insurgency is possibly the oldest and most pervasive form of conflict.  Studies of prehistoric populations show that over 10 % of males died violently, but there is no evidence of battles or military campaigns.  This suggests that low-levels of persistent raiding, hostage-taking, and ambush have characterized almost all of human history.  Paradoxically, conflict between equally armed states is a development that results in massive amounts of killing in specific, limited circumstances (on battlefields) but a lower level of casualties over time.  

About half of modern insurgencies are successful.  Democracies don’t do well in counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare since public support wanes in the course of these persistent conflicts and because concern for human rights hampers COIN efforts.  Anocracies – that is regimes that pretend to be democracies but are actually autocratic – fare worst in this kind of fighting.  According to the Rand Corporation studies, insurgencies that involve closely knit ethnic or religious groups are more successful than more diffuse insurrections.  The Rand Corporation observes that insurgencies in which fighters have relatively safe, remote, and readily defended havens from which to operate are also likely to be successful.

Examples of recent insurgencies are

– The French defeat in Indochina (Vietnam);

– Castro’s guerilla war in Cuba;

– The U.S. defeat in Vietnam;

– The U.S. incursion into Somalia which engendered an insurrection and U. S. withdrawal;

– The Russian defeat in Afghanistan;

– The U.S. defeat in Afghanistan;

– The U.S. defeats in Iraq;

Unsuccessful insurgencies, or, at least, insurgencies brought under some level of sustained control are

– The Syrian government’s repression of an insurgency in that country;

– Russian repression of Islamic insurgents in Chechnyea and the South Caucasus;

Some insurgencies are not defeated but simply weaken over time, ending with a whimper and not a bang.  Examples of this phenomena are the Shining Path rebellion in Peru and the upper Amazon basin (this is the fighting in which the CIA with local forces “bagged” Che Guevera) and the Tamil uprising in Sri Lanka as well as the Maoist Naxalite uprising in rural India, in which there are still over a 100 local police killed per year, but without any other significant or decisive outcomes.  The United States was successful in suppressing an insurgency in the Philippines between 1898 and 1902; tactics used against the Filipino guerillas, including widespread collective punishment, and torture, would likely not be condoned today.  

On Franz Fanon

     

Franz Fanon (1925-1961) was an important writer on subjects involving anti-colonialism, revolution, and anti-racism.  He is most notorious for his advocacy of violence as a tool for liberation.  His ideas are integral to Gillo Pontecorvo’s cinema, most notably The Battle of Algiers and Burn!  In the United States, Fanon’s book Wretched of the Earth (1961 in French Les Damnes de la Terre; published in English in 1963) was regarded as a primer for revolutionary consciousness among the Black Panthers and other sixties radical groups.  Brando was associated with the Black Panther movement and, in fact, became interested in working with Pontecorvo after becoming familiar with Stokely Carmichael and others who were heavily influenced by Fanon’s theory.

Roger Ebert interviewed Pontecorvo on location in Cartagena.  Ebert told the director that The Battle of Algiers had played for 13 weeks in Harlem to mostly African-American audiences.  (The movie played for several months in a theater in a Black neighborhood in Chicago as well.)  Pontecorvo expressed surprise but said that he had made the film under the influence of Franz Fanon’s writings and that this response was consistent with his intentions.  Pontecorvo said that he borrowed motifs from Fanon and said that the writer was “so important (because) he clarifies the Third World.”  In Pontecorvo’s view, Fanon was wrong when he ascribed evil to the colonialists; “they were not bad but only that they were wrong.”  

Fanon was born in the Caribbean on the francophone island of Martinique.  He was raised speaking creole or pidgin French, the language in Martinique, and, of course, conventional French.  When he was 18, he left Martinique to fight with Free French in World War II.  After the War, Fanon studied psychiatry in France (Lyon) and was a a licensed psycho-therapist.  In his practice, he treated victims of the war in Algeria – both the victims of torture and those who had been torturers.  In 1956, Fanon left his practice and went to sub-Saharan Africa, gradually working his way to Algeria where he become a member of National Liberation Front (FLN) and fought as an insurgent against the French.  By that time, Fanon identified as African and carried a passport stating that his country of origin was Tunisia.  During the Algerian War, Fanon became ill with leukemia.  He was a Communist and sought treatment in Russia.  His Russian doctors recommended that he seek more advanced treatment available in the United States.  Somehow, he became entangled with the CIA, who covertly transported him to the National Institute of Health hospital at Bethesda, Maryland.  It’s unclear to me whether the CIA was trying to treat him for his leukemia or engaged in an effort to delay and impair his therapy so that he would die.  But, in any event, he died at Bethseda.

Fanon published three books in his lifetime.  Two of them are highly influential: Black Skin, White Mask (1952) and Wretched of the Earth.  A third book contains essays about Africa and political theory.  After his death, a number of other essays as well as psychological case studies authored by Fanon have been published as well.  Fanon wrote in French.  Wretched of the Earth was made famous, in part, because of its foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre.  

Here is a sketch of Fanon’s principal ideas:

1. Fanon is a phenomenological existentialist.  He derives his ideas from his own embodied consciousness and experiences as a Black man in White dominant society.  He also bases his ideas on experiences of patients that he saw when he was psychiatrist;

2. Fanon identifies colonialization as a totalizing project.  It affects all aspects of human existence and controls every kind of human relationship – work, language, psychology, ideology, etc.

3. Racism and colonialism throw their victims into a limbo, a “zone of non-being” – this induces an experience of depression, desolation and helplessness, but, paradoxically, also liberates its victims from constraints so that they can forge new identities;

4. Language is an instrument of oppression.  Fanon denounces pidgen or creole tongues as internalizing abject responses to the Master language – in his case, French.  But there’s no escape from oppression.  A Black person who masters French diction remains, nonetheless, a colonial subject or subaltern.

5. All Black people suffer from “epidermal” racism – that is, racism that is systemic and inescapable due to the color of one’s skin.  (“What do you call a Black man who speaks seven languages, has a doctorate, and is an accomplished surgeon?”  This is an old joke that expresses the nature of racism.)  In reality, there is no such thing as a Black Man or a White Man; these are constructed identities;

6 Interracial desire is always pathological and embodies necessarily a master-slave dynamic;

7. Fanon began as an exponent of Negritude, a Black arts movement that expressed the notion that Black writers and artists should embrace their Blackness and African roots.  (Richard Wright is sometimes considered a practitioner of this idea.)  Negritude is essentialist – that is, asserting that a Black writer must be true to his or her essential nature.  As an existentialist, Fanon opposed all forms of Essentialism (although see 18, “strategic essentialism” below).  Therefore, he rejected Negritude as a valid ideology;

8. The end of race prejudice comes with a “sudden incomprehension” –at some point, a person grasps that racism makes no sense and turns away from it as “incomprehensible.”

9. A human being must never succumb to any fixed identity but must remain an interrogating/questioning being: O mon corps, faid de mois toujours un homme quid interroge!  (O my body, always make me a man who questions!)  You should not seek the truth, but perpetually question the truths presented to you;

10. We must de-colonize being-in-the-world, desire, language, and subjectivity – that is, every aspect of what it means to be human since the colonial project is always totalizing;

11. Revolution is impossible without anti-colonialism.  This is because a revolution not based on an anti-colonialist ideology merely replaces one form of colonialist oppression with another.

12. Violence is a pre-condition for revolution and the anti-colonialist endeavor;

13. Colonialism is based upon the logic that the colonialized are weak and feckless and, therefore, deserve to be abject subjects – this is an assumption that creates a psychological reality of weakness and ineffectuality in colonial subjects.  It is only violence that can disrupt and break this logic;

14. Revolutionary violence creates a new consciousness in the oppressed.  It is the Revolution that makes the future, not some sort of vanguard of thinkers or ideas that precede the Revolution.  Revolution is a practice that is fundamentally thoughtless.  Violence is an end in itself in the practice of revolution and, therefore, self-actualization of the oppressed;

15. Revolutionary violence counters the violence of colonialization that relies upon coerced subordination of colonial subjects and extraction of resources;

16. A colonialized society consists of three classes: (a) workers whose relationship to the colonial power is that they work for it, primarily to extract value (mining gold or harvesting sugar cane for example); (b) colonialized intellectuals who have adopted the language and theories of the European oppressors; ( c ) the so-called Lumpenproletariat – these are the surplus people, the disposable population that provide nothing to the colonialist project; they don’t produce value and are ignored by the masters and their colonialized intellectual servants.  The Lumpenproletariat consist of vagrants, refugees and displaced people, petty criminals, slum dwellers, sex workers, subsistence farmers;

17. The workers are too embedded in systems of extraction to be revolutionary.  The colonialized intellectuals are counter-revolutionary.  The revolutionary class par excellence is the Lumpenproletariat.  

18. Essentialism may be deployed as revolutionary tactic – that is, the Lumpenproletariat should be persuaded that they express fundamental aspects of being African that are in opposition to the colonialist ideology.  This is called “strategic essentialism” – that is, creating a class consciousness based on identity that is essentialist and, therefore, fundamentally a false consciousness (but, nevertheless, one that is strategic in fomenting revolution);

19. Violence committed by the Lumpenproletariat shows the workers that it is possible for them to resist oppression;

20. Revolution makes everything revolutionary – so revolution is also totalizing;

21. Armed violence is a form of psychotherapy.  Violence is an affirmation of human dignity;

22. Don’t look to emulate European models of enlightenment or politics.  Don’t look to revive archaic pre-colonialist forms of government or consciousness.  Make it new.

23. Europe will be cast into crisis by anti-colonialism.  This is because all aspects of the European state, relations, and psychology are based on colonialism.  If colonialism is stripped away, nothing remains of the “static” and “strange foundation” of the West.  European economies and thought are all based on subordination and extraction.  If these aspects of colonialism are destroyed, Europe will cease to exist as an ideological construct;

24. Violence makes a new start and creates a new way of thinking.  From this, the “new man” will develop.  We can’t define or describe the “new man” because he doesn’t yet exist.  

25. We don’t know what the future holds except that with anti-colonialism it will be completely new and, therefore, indefinable at the present moment.

These ideas have interesting consequences.  I think it is possible to be inspired by these ideas and, yet, reject them mostly out-of-hand. On a relatively trivial level, Fanon embraced bebop in jazz as embodying the revolutionary consciousness of energy and dynamism.  By contrast, he rejected the Blues and traditional Jazz as the product of the “old Negro with five drinks under his belt whining for the delectation of his masters.”   Fanon was a relatively young man (36) when he died.  His ideas are the thoughts of a young man.  We have no idea how his thinking would have evolved if he had lived to see many of his ideas in actual application and commerce – for instance, as adopted by the Black Panthers or various National Liberation Movements (for instance, the Viet Cong, the Taliban, and the violence in Gaza – the Palestinian raid in Gaza was a Fanon-style gesture of violence for violence’s sake; hence, difficulties that college elites expressed in denouncing the attack.)  

Burn! dramatizes some of these propositions.  The workers are unable to foment a revolution because they are too entangled with the politics and industrial activity of sugar cane production.  Walker begins the revolution that he will later destroy by encouraging the commission of a crime – that is, a bank robbery. (It should be recalled that the Symbionese Liberation Army in Oakland, California engaged in a number of bank robberies with shoot-outs – the SLA, of course, were violent radicals acting on Fanon’s theories.)  Crime of this sort is the province of the Lumpenproletariat.  The villagers encouraged to commit the bank robbery live in a remote place and are really not closely associated with the cane industry.  This gives them a perspective as, in effect, displaced persons or surplus people from which they can mount revolutionary acts.  The raison d’etre for the bank robbery is greed, the commission of a crime, but Walker regards this crime as the fuse that ignites the revolution. The pan-African celebration with the masks and totemic figures represents the deployment of “strategic essentialism” in the service of the revolution.  Revolution can not succeed unless it makes everything new.  In the film, we see Jose Dolores agreeing to replace the old form of sugar cane slavery with a new form of capitalist wage slavery – that is, the fundamental economic relations in society are not altered in any meaningful way.  One form of oppression simply replaces another, leading to a new revolutionary movement.  A revolution that does not change the economic order of capitalism or capitalist production of value will inevitably fail in that the new regime will merely supplant one form of oppression with another.  Since revolutions almost invariably simply replace one set of corrupt and avaricious masters with another, the revolutionary project is doomed to fail.  And, yet, there will always be revolutions and revolutionaries.  There is a certain “Principle of Hope” that animates human existence – in the face of a certain knowledge that our revolutionary efforts are doomed, human beings remain fundamentally revolutionary.  We seek a New that is unknown to us.  You can kill revolutionaries but you can’t kill the principle of Hope from which revolution inevitably springs. 

Most people have never read Fanon and can’t discuss his ideas.  But, as with Freud and Marx, it is possible for thinker to influence society by creating a whole diffuse climate of opinion based on that thinker’s ideas.      

 

A Gentleman in Moscow

A Gentleman in Moscow (2024) is a Showtime limited series consisting of eight episodes each about 45 minutes long.  The episodes, although shown commercial free, seem to have been designed for conventional TV broadcast -- the shows each contain four interstitial pause that cut to black momentarily, seemingly where commercials could be inserted.  The series has good production values with fine, if somewhat monotonous acting by Ewan McGregor as the titular "gentleman" and a good performance by Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the hero's mistress.  The program adapts for television a celebrated and popular novel by Amor Towles, a pastiche apparently of 19th century Russian novels by Tolstoy, Dostoevski, and others set during the Bolshevik revolution and the Stalin era thereafter.  (The time encompassed by the series is from about 1918 through Stalin's death in 1953.)  The TV adaptation differs from the 2010 novel in some significant respects -- and it's not apparent that these changes inure to the benefit of the production. A Gentleman in Moscow is fairly compelling and has two noteworthy suspense sequences that will poise viewers on the proverbial "edge of their chairs."  It's all reasonably interesting with appealing characters.  But the show is also predictable, rather maudlin in some respects, and, I suppose, trivializes the ghastly history that it dramatizes.  Like most limited series, the narrative is padded and repetitious to bad effect; for instance, a charming relationship between the hero and a little girl that intrigues viewers in the first few shows is repeated at greater and more tedious length in the last four episodes when the protagonist finds himself caring for the daughter of the original little girl, grown up now only to end up a mass grave in Siberia.  The same sort of thing keeps happening throughout the show, an effect of repetition that is integral in some ways to the premise of the show. 

For reasons that are never completely plausible, the 'gentleman', a scion of a noble and aristocratic family, finds himself under house arrest in Moscow.  The gentleman, Alexander Rostov (a name clearly alluding to Tolstoy's character in War and Peace) has returned to Moscow for patriotic reasons during the October Revolution.  Obviously, Rostov is perceived as a reactionary (in fact, he's completely apolitical) and a potential counter-revolutionary.  However, because he (apparently) wrote an anti-Tsar poem a few years earlier, he's viewed as not so much of an enemy of the people as to merit execution.  Therefore, he's placed in house arrest at the Hotel Metropole, a showy luxury hotel that the regime is maintaining in its former splendor as a specimen of pre-revolution hospitality mostly for the use of high party officials and visiting dignitaries.  Rostov, who has a spectacular suite in the hotel, is moved to a chilly garret in the servant's quarters and ordered to remain on-site for the rest of his life.  The movie's gimmick is that, if Rostov, leaves the Metropole, he will be immediately executed.  Accordingly, for the 35-year time span dramatized in the show, Rostov is confined to the premises.  The Metropole is a petri dish containing all elements of Soviet society and dissent and, therefore, provides the viewer with a highly concentrated perspective on developments in the Empire, including echoes of the Ukrainian holodomor or famine of 1932-1933, the purges and show trials, Stalin's gulags, World War Two, and a  hint of the thaw attendant upon Stalin's death and Nikita Kruschev's rise to power. Various characters embody these historical developments, most notably a KGB operative named Glebnikov who forms an alliance with Rostov.  Rostov maintains his highly civilized and somewhat aloof demeanor throughout the program, even when he is obliged to serve as head waiter in the hotel's gourmet restaurant.  (He wears specially tailored suits and is an expert sommelier; the economic aspects of Rostov's confinement are obscure and never convincingly explained.)  In the first few episodes, Rostov is menaced by Glebnikov but gradually wins him over and serves as his tutor with respect to imparting to the apparatchik a veneer of sophistication.  Rostov has a close friend named Mishka Mindich.  Mindich courted Rostov's sister resulting in some kind of pre-revolutionary scandal leading to the young woman's suicide.  This is trite and uninteresting backstory that provides lots of inconsequential sturm und drang and interminable blurry flashbacks but goes nowhere.  (When characters become inconvenient in this show, they are banished to Siberia -- this is Mishka's fate.)  A precocious little girl is also living in the hotel (it's not clear why nor do we have any sense as to her parents); Rostov becomes her mentor and raises her to be a princess.  The best-laid plans of mice and men oft go awry and the little girl, Nina, becomes a true-believer in the Revolution  when she grows to adulthood -- of course, she also ends up in Siberia. More interesting is a character named Anna Urbanova, a film actress who seems casually promiscuous at the outset of the show, but gradually assumes the role of Rostov's constant companion, in effect, his loyal and glamorous wife.  Before Nina goes to Siberia to search for her missing husband, she leaves her daughter, also a precocious child, with Rostov in the hotel.  Thus, the relationship that Rostov had with the child's mother, Nina, is replicated without any particular benefit when Rostov becomes responsible for Sofia, Nina's daughter.  (With respect to Sofia, Rostov is more in loco parentis and, therefore, more possessive and doting.)  Sofia somehow falls 20 feet down a stairwell and fractures her skull.  This calamity leads to Rostov's one foray outside of the hotel, a trip to a squalid and crowded hospital where, with the assistance of the unctuous and sinister Glebnikov, Sofia's brain injuries are surgically repaired.  Stalin's death results in chaos and Rostov is enlisted by a CIA agent to record a  conference between party bosses as to the succession.  Rostov has to wear a wire and this leads to some predictably suspenseful proceedings -- well-done but territory that will be very familiar to most viewers.  (And this plot development is questionable -- why does Rostov have to wear an incriminating wire when all he would need to to do is listen to the party dignitaries in their debate and report on the outcome to his handler, namely that Kruschev will become the new Soviet leader?)  In exchange for his service, Rostov bargains with the CIA to accept Sofia as a defector.  (She is an accomplished pianist and scheduled to perform with a youth orchestra in Paris.)  Sofia's defection, also a very suspenseful and frightening sequence, is the climax of the series.  With Sofia successfully ensconced in the democratic West, Rostov and his loyal mistress, Anna, are free to die which, apparently, they do in a slightly surrealistic denouement in the last episode.  The hotel is a main character in the show and we see it sometimes as a menacing implacable kind of palace wreathed in falling snow and glaring over the wintry landscape from its mask-like lit facade.  The hotel is full of interesting nooks and crannies including a secret passage way into an abandoned suite where Rostov sets up some of his souvenirs -- the roof is shattered and snow sometimes sifts down into the rooms.  Nina somehow procured a skeleton key that opens all doors in the Metropole and so Rostov can generally go where he wishes -- he has access to the roof top and can look across the Moscow skyline; on one occasion, he contemplates suicide and is about to fling himself from the parapet when a friend appears to show him some bee-hives on the hotel roof.  There's a large cast of re-occurring characters, mostly hotel staff, and a villainous manager who never really gets the come-uppance that he deserves.    

The show has some bizarre features that would be inexplicable but for the murder of George Floyd.  About a third of the characters including Mishka are Black.  This is inexplicable since people of African origin are as rare as hen's teeth in Russia -- even today the population of Black people in Russia is less than .03%.  But in this show Mishka, who appears in about half of the episodes is Black as are many members of the hotel staff, including the head chef's wife, as well as many guests at the Metropole including the commissar in charge of the Soviet film industry who is not only of African origin but, also, homosexual.  (He's a protector to Anna Urbanova, although not particularly effective in saving her foundering career.)  This is simply weird, casts some odd shadows on the pre-revolutionary affair with Rostov's sister, and represents a deviation from Towles' novel.  (The role of Anna as Rostov's love-interest is also considerably enhanced and amplified in comparison with the book.)  There are some blemishes on the show:  the scene in which Sofia falls down the stairwell makes no sense and the ending is confusing and not well-considered.  We see Rostov and Anna at a dacha where there are black apples on the trees.  This alludes to a folk tale about a tree bearing black apples that is hidden in the middle of a great forest -- if you eat of the black apples, you will forget all your past life and be granted the chance to begin things anew.  Rostov and Anna have spoken about this tale and agreed that, although their lives were thwarted in various ways by the Soviet regime, they have no regrets and would not taste the black fruit -- their memories are important to them.  So it is confusing to see them at the end of the movie, partly concealed by a long shot, and surrounded by trees bearing black fruit.  Has Rostov reconsidered?  Is he now prepared to forget his past life and begin again without any memories of his dead sister, his dead friends, his sexual encounters and love affair with Anna, his recollections of Nina and Sofia?  The ending is unclear and not in a satisfying ambiguous way -- it's as if the people making the show didn't know how to end it.  

A Gentleman in Moscow is discretely didactic and illustrates the importance of good manners and civility.  Rostov, despite his various challenges, remains admirable and unfailingly polite and kind throughout the show.  He never exhibits any of the brutality or indifference to others that seems to characterize the Soviet regime.  As I watched the show, I imagined Rostov, a devotee of literature and the arts, as being akin to Vladimir Nabokov and, in fact, recommend that viewers who like this show read Nabokov's splendid autobiography Speak, Memory.  The series advocates civility and gentlemanly conduct and, for this reason, can be recommended for its modest, benign, and fairly charming attributes.    

The Go-Between and Sunday, Bloody Sunday

 TCM 's Saturday night double bill, selected by Todd Haynes, showed Joseph Losey's The Go-Between back to back with John Schlesinger's Sunday, Bloody Sunday.  Both films were released around 1970.  The Go-Between is tedious and somewhat pretentious.  Much better is Sunday, Bloody Sunday, a movie that is very strange, off-center, and not at all what the viewer expects.  Haynes was asked to curate these films and introduce them with Ben Mankiewicz, apparently on the basis of his recent picture May-December in which the music for The Go-Between, a celebrated score by Michel LeGrand is lifted wholesale from the fifty-year old picture and inserted to great effect into Hayne's excellent movie.  Mankiewicz wanted Haynes to focus on the homosexual elements in the Sunday, Bloody Sunday film, an emphasis that Haynes rejected rather bluntly, correctly I think directing the viewer's attention to other, more idiosyncratic, features of Schlesinger's movie.  Both pictures are worth watching and make an interesting double-feature; however Losey's film is primarily of historical interest while the Schlesinger picture feels much more current and compelling.  

The Go-Between involves a 12-year old boy seduced into carrying messages between a wealthy well-bred heiress and her plebian lover.  The movie explores aspects and gradations of the British class system circa 1910 that were of almost no interest to me.  (I don't know why Losey, the scion of a "Magnificent Amberson's" family in Lacrosse, Wisconsin would care about this material either -- he was, I expect, seduced by Harold Pinter's laconic and elliptical screenplay.)  Leo is a 12 year old boy, remarkably innocent, who has been sent by his widowed mother to a lavish country estate.  The nobility on the estate treat Leo with condescension -- he's sort of a mascot for the vicious aristocrats assembled in the enormous house with its grand spaces decorated with Elizabethan era portraits.  It's extremely hot and Leo has garments that are too warm.  So Marian (Julie Christie), a kind young woman, takes the boy into town to buy him a "Lincoln green" suit (it doesn't look any cooler than what he's already wearing) that makes him appear as either a lackey in livery or an organ grinder's monkey depending on how you see the thing.  Leo's buddy, Max, who is the baby of the family, roughhouses with Leo and repeatedly insults him, again demonstrating the nasty noblesse oblige (or lack thereof) of these cartoonish aristocrats.  In town, Marian vanishes, apparently spending time with the brooding, hunky tenant farmer, Ted Burgess, a sort of plebian stand-in for the gardener in Lady Chatterly's Lover.  Burgess is played by Oliver Bates who dashes around shirtless (it's very hot) for much of the movie.  After Max gets measles and is sidelined for few weeks, Leo is left to his own devices.  Wandering around the edges of the vast estate, he trespasses on Burgess' farm, gets injured there when he jumps of a hay-rick, and, then, agrees to deliver notes back and forth between the handsome youthful farmer and the beautiful heiress.  Leo's motive is that he wants to understand what adults do behind closed doors -- he's desperate for someone to tell  him about sex and, of course, gets a first-hand education at the climax of the film.  Leo has doubts about his role as messenger ("Mercury" someone calls him) and tries to back-out of his go-between function on several occasion, but Marian, in particular, uses her social status to bully the boy into continuing to deliver her assignation notes.  Marian is betrothed to an upper crust gent with a nasty scar on his face, but, of course, her heart belongs to Ted.  Little Leo tries to wriggle out of the situation which is becoming increasingly untenable, but his mother insists that he stay longer on the country estate.  Of course, the inevitable occurs including a pointless and implausible suicide.  This slender narrative, mercilessly padded, is really more of a slight anecdote than anything else, although it's tricked-out with a confusingly filmed (intentionally so) frame story set fifty years after the catastrophe in 1910.  A crucial and lengthy scene involves a cricket match.  This episode will be wholly impenetrable to American viewers.  People play croquet, herds of deer roam the vast estate, and Ted Burgess sings a song at a gathering to accompaniment by his secret lover, Marian.  The acting is very good and the photography redolent of suffocating summer heat -- a thermometer shows temps above 98, reminding us that even in the pre-climate-change past there were notable heat waves.  Julie Christie is radiantly beautiful, something announced in an early scene in which Max remarks "my sister is remarkably beautiful."  The movie heaps one tired cliche on top of another; people have plummy names like "Lady Trimingham."  This picture is probably better than it seems but I found it, more or less, insufferable.  The movie begins with a familiar quote:  "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there."  These are lines from the source material, L. P. Hartley's 1953 novel of the same name. 

Michel LeGrand's score consists of an ominous sounding four note motif that is elaborated at various times into complex fugues and variations.  The motif has the unusual effect of sometimes sounding like something from Beethoven but, in other cases, developing into shapely variations that sound a bit like Bach or Handel.  It's an excellent score, better than the movie that it decorates.  

Sunday, Bloody Sunday is ostensibly about a triangle between a woman in her thirties, Alex, played by Glenda Jackson, her lover, Bob, and an older doctor - he seems to be about 55 - named Daniel Hirsch (Peter Finch).  Bob is sleeping with both the middle-aged doctor and Alex, a situation that is understood, if not exactly accepted by the two recipients of Bob's sexual favors.  The movie was renowned at the time of its release for its nonchalance about the gay affair between Bob and Dr. Hirsch and, indeed, the picture's bluntly direct depiction of this romance remains impressively aloof from tendentious posturing, identity politics, or hysteria even today.  Dr. Hirsch and Alex know that they are sharing Bob and, even, have a number of friends in common also aware of the situation and, apparently, Bob has qualities of some kind (mostly invisible to the viewer) that persuade them that the arrangement is worth the pain that it causes them.  The movie depicts about a week in the course of this relationship, ending with Bob's departure from London to New York City -- it's pretty clear to both Alex and Dr. Hirsch that once Bob leaves town, he won't be returning any time soon.  Despite his protestations that he'll soon be back, Bob is not likely to resume his love affairs with Alex and Daniel.  At the end of the film, Alex and Daniel briefly encounter one another and, of course, are perfectly civil and polite but both are grief-stricken. (There's a remarkable coda in which Peter Finch talks directly to the camera, not just violating the fourth wall, but blowing it to pieces.)  The film's narrative is slight and insignificant. The love triangle is treated with circumspection and, contrary to viewer expectations, is not the film's central focus -- the movie is highly civilized and eschews any elements of melodrama.   The competing lovers don't really have to compete.  Bob attends to both of their needs with aplomb and, then, simply exits from their lives.  The movie's primary emphasis is the eccentric milieu in which the story is embedded.  The script explores Alex and Daniel's families in detail and we see their friends engaged in various activities.  This opens up the picture, keeps it from becoming overly sentimental, and, in fact, gives the movie the feeling of being extremely generous and expansive -- an aspect of the picture that some people might find disconcertingly diffuse and ill-defined, although it is precisely the film's broad scope that I found intriguing and, ultimately, much more compelling that the minimally developed drama involving the romantic triangle.  Alex and Bob's first sex scene in the film takes place in a bedroom at a London house in the suburbs where the heroine is babysitting.  The adults in the family, an unsightly man in horn-rimmed glasses, a middle-aged woman, and a Black professor of some kind (also, perhaps, some sort of love triangle) have many half-feral children and live in a house with a rhesus monkey and a huge black mastiff.  There's all sorts of chaos around the edges of the love story -- Bob's friends are inventors who are working on some sort of mechanical drawing device and Bob designs sculptures with vertically oriented tubes full of colored water.  Daniel's friends have drunken parties in which married couples out of Edward Albee maul one another during disorderly games of charades.  A dog gets run over only to be replaced "by another."  Bob plays "Exquisite corpse", the surrealist parlor game, with the little kids.  Apartments are cold and drafty causing sex-scenes to be conducted under heavy blankets, lots of turbulent tossing and turning in bed, and local hoodlums march down the boulevard mutilating cars with shards of glass.  The street scenes are similarly turbulent with mobs of motorcyles and lorries turning into the smog-encased sunset; in the darkness, crowds of girls on roller skates cruise by.  Dr. Hirsch has a number of miserable, co-dependant patients whom we see in his clinic; he seems to be a compassionate, excellent physician but tormented by being perpetually "on-call."  (Doctors worked all the time in the seventies and, even, eighties -- modern physicians aren't on-call and are like factory workers, mostly seeing patients from 9 to 5.) We meet one of Hirsch's previous "rough trade" lovers and there's a sex scene involving Alex with another older man who has lost his job.  (Alex sleeps with the man who is her client -- she's an employment counselor -- and, then, hopes to make Bob jealous about the encounter; Bob, needless to say, doesn't take the bait.)  Near the end of the movie, we see Daniel attending a lavish bar mitzvah complete with gorgeous Torah scrolls and, then, an expensive reception at a posh hotel.  The movie is full of interesting minor characters, seemingly random encounters, and every shot teems with fascinating detail around the edges of the screen.  The movie seems more akin to something like Robert Altman's Nashville than a conventional romantic melodrama, an ambitious portrait of a time and place (London 1969) and, certainly, isn't limited to merely an account of the doomed, triangular love affair,  As a measure of the film's generosity, a number of scenes involve the answering service used by Alex and Dr. Hirsch -- ringing phones are a motif in the movie -- and the camera prowls along labyrinths of electrical cables and switches, dramatizing how the phone calls that form much of the basis of the story, are shifted and transferred from exchange to exchange; even the answering machine woman, someone insulted by Dr. Hirsch, gets some lines of dialogue and is sympathetically portrayed.

I've seen Sunday, Bloody Sunday before and, probably, have previously written about the film.  It's the kind of picture that you can't keep in your mind because it is so wonderfully diverse and complex.  I've always had a prejudice against the film because it's script is by Penelope Gilliatt.  Ms. Gilliatt took over Pauline Kael's movie-reviewing duties at The New Yorker for a six-month period when Kael was working in Hollywood, attempting to put her formidable criticism to work in the real world of movie production.  (It didn't work out for Kael; she was soon enough, as they say with reference to Plato, "back from Syracuse" to lick her wounds.)  During the time that Kael was off-duty, I read Gilliatt's reviews and thought that they were "precious" and mannered; she certainly lacked Kael's highly sexualized and vulgar, if compelling, approach to cinema.  So I have a predilection to disrespect Gilliatt's work, particularly the screenplay for Sunday, Bloody Sunday.  But, in my old age, I've now come around to admiring this movie and primarily because of its rather epic treatment of not only the triangular love affair but the social landscape in which the romance occurs.  (If you look up pictures of Gilliatt on the internet, you will find several images of Pauline Kael misidentified as the British critic -- objectively, Gilliatt was far more attractive than Kael so I don't know what to make of this peculiarity.)

  

Ennio

 An argument can be made that Ennio Morricone was the greatest composer of classical music working in the last half of the 20th century.  It's now increasingly apparent that the romantic style, fused with modernist influences, fled from the concert hall to movie theaters around 1935 with the influx of German Jewish composers to Hollywood -- composers like Erich Korngold, Franz Waxman, and Bernard Herrmann, who was a New York Jew but steeped in the German classical tradition.  Film scores made by these composers, and their progeny in Hollywood, sound like Strauss with tints of Stravinsky and, even, Schoenberg.  Morricone, who was Italian, was also educated in the classical tradition; I'm not qualified to judge these subjects, but there are many who feel that Morricone should be ranked with Mozart and Beethoven and that history will, in fact, yield this evaluation, although, perhaps, on the basis of artificial intelligence analysis two-hundred years from now.  In fact, I think Ennio Morricone is better equated to J. S. Bach -- Bach composed for the occasion; he had to write a cantata every week or so as well as masses, religious hymns, and all sorts of other Gebrauchsmusik (that is, music for practical use).  Bach had to recycle themes and borrow from himself and others; Morricone is compelled by similar exigencies to also re-use musical themes and motifs developed for one film into scores for other other movies.  In the year 1970, when Morricone composed his majestic score for Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn!,  this was among 28 other movie soundtracks that he had also written during that same 12 months.  (Morricone seems acknowledge the affinity with Bach; he notes that one of his scores is signed, like Bach's Art of the Fugue with the musical initials of the composer:  B-flat - A - C and H -- that is, the old notation for B natural.)

Giuseppi Tornatore's Ennio (2024) is an inordinately long and mostly unsurprising and uninformative documentary about Morricone. The film is wonderful primarily because of Morricone's music which is performed at length, either in concert settings or, more indelibly, as sound and image inextricably and gloriously linked in clips from the movies that the composer scored.  The breadth, subtlety, and expressiveness of Morricone's compositions is astonishing -- he could work in all genres.  It's characteristic of his scores that they all sound different and are intricately devised to accompany and, even, form the images in the films for which he wrote, but, at the same time, somehow all bear his signature sound.  (Hans Zimmer, one of the movie's innumerable "talking heads", says that you can hear Morricone's personal style in the first note played in any one of his scores -- this is an exaggeration but I understand the point that he is making:  there is a unity among the fantastically varied music that Morricone wrote).  After an introduction, rather embarrassing in its intimacy -- we see the old man doing energetic calisthenics on his floor -- Tornatore proceeds in a roughly chronological fashion, outlining the principal events in Morricone's life in the order in which these things happened.  As it turns out, almost nothing much is worth saying about Morricone's private life -- he was married for sixty or seventy years and seems to have lived, breathed, and died (at the end) composing music.  Morricone's father was an autocrat who forced his son to learn the trumpet -- father was a professional trumpeter himself -- when the teenager hoped to study medicine.  "Play trumpet," his father told him, "and you will always be able to feed your family."  Morricone became an expert player and, then, studied composition.  Until he was around 35, he worked largely in jazz bands, but had his own ensemble that performed extremely advanced musique concrete -- that is, blasts of sound with weird bangs and blips interpolated between the fortissimi.  He made a little money writing bits and pieces for radio and, then, in 1961, was asked to score some low-budget spaghetti Westerns.  Morricone seems to have regarded this work as humiliating, a downward departure from his dream to be a well-recognized avant-garde classical composer.  Showing his disinterest in movie music, Morricone scored his first couple Westerns for a man whistling, blows on an anvil, and the cracking of a whip -- in other words, parody musique concrete.  To his surprise, these practical joke compositions were wildly successful and, soon, he was working with Sergio Leone on his big-budget Westerns, including the trilogy of films starring Clint Eastwood.  On these pictures, Morricone developed his sound-effect oriented compositions to include drumming, more whistling, and howling coyotes.  Leone recognized that Morricone's scores were intrinsic to the success of his horse operas and encouraged Ennio to further experimentation, creating lavish soundscapes such as "the Ecstasy of Gold" music from The Good, Bad, and the Ugly.  The most spectacular of these scores was the Wagnerian music for Once Upon a Time in the West.  This movie commences with an array of sound-effects:  dripping water, a rusty windmill turning in the desert breeze, spurs jangling on plank floors, the lonesome hoot of a train, and, then, the harmonica-theme that sounds when Charles Bronson, as a deadly killer, arrives at the deserted station to gun-down the three assassins waiting for him.  The rest of the film is scored with memorable themes for each of the major characters.  The most gorgeous of these leit-motif elements is the music accompanying Claudia Cardinale's character.  I still remember with tears in my eyes the scene (watched in black and white on a little TV more than fifty years ago in the middle of the night) in which Claudia Cardinale waits for her husband (she's a mail-order bride) at the deserted train station, then, to a soaring musical theme, walks through the station as the camera climbs into the sky on a crane to reveal behind the building the entire vista of the old West: wagon trains, false-front saloons, Indians, prospectors, everything you can imagine extending to the horizon where we glimpse the red buttes of Monument Valley -- I don't know any sequence in film more lyrical and moving than the conjunction of Morricone's music and Leone's lavish imagery.  (It's odd that one of the greatest moments in any Western was made by two Italians with Italian cast and crew.)  The documentary proceeds to show us film clips with short technical explanations by Morricone (he sings the themes in a sort of atonal yipping voice) and, then, close-ups of critics and celebrities praising his brilliant work.  The picture is an unabashed example of hagiography featuring encomiums by Bruce Springsteen (he uses the theme from Once upon a Time in the West to begin and end his concerts), Quentin Tarantino, Bernardo Bertolucci, and a hundred others including rap artists and pop singers of all kinds.  The movie is worth seeing for the fantastic film clips showing how precisely and wonderfully Morricone creates mood and meaning with his music -- in many instances, the music animates otherwise stale subject matter and is, often, far better than the movies that it inhabits.  (Morricone scored everything from Hollywood art films like Days of Heaven to giallo such as Bird with the Crystal Plumage and soft-core porn.)  Highlights in the documentary include the Verdi-inflected score for Bertolucci's Communist epic 1900, the score for Leone's last movie, the gangster picture Once Upon a Time in America, and, of course, the tremendous and thunderous music for Roland Joffe's The Mission, reputedly a composition that dwarfs the film in which it appears.  The music is superb and it activates the images and makes them swoon and throb with emotion.  There are a few interesting anecdotes but not many because Morricone is his music and really nothing more:  We learn he composed "like a person writing a letter" -- that is, at lightning speed; he could play chess while conducting a large orchestra -- while recording the music ("the fire symphony") for Terence Malick's Days of Heaven, Malick shouted out chess moves to him and Morricone responded with his own moves, playing chess without a board in his head even as he directed the orchestra.  The film has a couple narrative arcs but they are insubstantial -- there's Morricone's desire to win an Oscar (he lost to the horror of most critics to Round Midnight in the year that he wrote the music for The Mission; Ennio says that the music in the jazz film was good and the piano playing competent but none of the tunes were composed for the movie; they were jazz standards.)  We know that Oscars are generally not awarded for merit and, so, Morricone's reputed yearning to win such an award seems a little childish.  (He was ultimately awarded two Oscars, one for lifetime achievement when he was in his early eighties and expected to fade away, and, then, for his score for Tarantino's The Hateful Eight far and away the best thing in that rather abhorrent movie.)  The film's other theme is the gradual understanding by Morricone's teachers and peers in the classical music world that the movie composer outstripped them all in invention and innovation in his film scores.  This also seems contrived and a false narrative -- Morricone always knew he was better than the stuffed-shirts in the classical music ghetto and, so, his happiness at the acclamation of these types rings a little hollow.

Tornatore, who worked with Ennio on Cinema Paradiso, is a sentimental and unskilled documentarian.  We could do with less commentary by swooning "talking heads" and more film clips scored by Morricone.  But the movie is a labor of love and Morricone's work is amazing and powerful and so carries the film despite its obvious defects.  

Wolf Lowry and two short Westerns

 
Wolf Lowry is a 1917 Western directed by William S. Hart and starring the Western leading man as well. It's not bad and demonstrates that by 1917 (and probably before) all the imagery characterizing the Western was well-established and could be effectively, even poetically, deployed.  Hart rides his pinto across barren ridges, silhouetted against the sky, wild animals lurk in desert terrain, and great dappled herds of cattle surge like tidal waves over the empty range.  The story is vestigial, but compelling.  Hart plays Tom "Wolf" Lowry, a tough hombre who runs a cattle ranch.  He's got a half-dozen cowpokes who work for him and a long-suffering Chinese cook, the subject of some brutal racist jokes -- at one point, the cowboy's mimic hanging the man for the theft, as they see it, of a chicken.  A squatter is living in a remote shack and Lowry pays him a "neighborly visit" to roust the man from his property.  The squatter has acquired fake title to the property from a shady realtor (and "land agent") with a pencil-thin moustache and villainous demeanor.  The land agent, confronted with the trembling prospector to whom he sold the fake claim, unloads the property on Lowry's ranch to a young woman named Mary -- in a title we learn that she's more courageous than wise.  Mary sets up house alone in the shack.  Lowry confronts her, but, beneath his tough exterior, is too kind to throw her off his land.  Mary is waiting for a handsome bloke, her fiancee, a man named Owen Thorpe.  One night, the realtor comes to the premises and tries to rape Mary.  Of course, Lowry comes to her rescue and, in the ensuing fight, gets shot through the collar bone.  He almost dies, but Mary nurses him back to health.  By this time, Tom is in love with Mary and proposes to her.  Thinking that her betrothed, Owen Thorpe is dead, she accepts.  (At the time of the movie, Hart was 53; the young woman seems about twenty -- the implicit age diffential is not highlighted but central to the later action.)  Then, Thorpe shows up unannounced.  On the morning of the wedding planned with Lowry, Mary elopes with Thorpe, leaving the hero at the altar.  Lowry rides in pursuit of the couple, but gets dry-gulched by the evil realtor.  In a gun battle, the land agent is shot.  Thorpe who is wandering around in the night nearby has a fistfight with Lowry who beats him up and, then, ties him to a tree, expecting the wolves to eat the dead realtor and the live rival.  A title simply declares "Wolf Lowry."  Back at the ranch, Mary pleads for her fiancee's life and agrees to marry Wolf if he will spare her boyfriend.  Lowry goes out in the wilderness and saves Thorpe.  The wedding ensues in which Wolf is too noble to marry a woman under this sort of duress.  He gives his wedding ring to Thorpe who is duly married to Mary.  Wolfe goes to Alaska where he has gold claims.  He writes to Mary claiming with false bravado that he's struck it rich.  But we see him shivering in an empty cabin in the high mountains.  He thinks of Mary and, outside, a wolf howls forlornly.  

The story is told efficiently.  Hart's trademark effect is to glower impassively straight into the camera.  Hart, born in New York, had been a Shakespearean actor of some note before coming to Hollywood.  He had traveled widely in the West and knew how to stage scenes with guns and saloons and  horses in a plausibly accurate manner.  Hart has porcelain skin that seems eerily smooth and pale.  He's astonishingly handsome but in a very remote way -- his face is a bland mask.  (He resembles Buster Keaton to some degree and, indeed, the men were enemies; Keaton made a movie parodying the straight-laced Hart who had, in turn, denounced Keaton's comedian friend 'Fatty' Arbuckle for rape.  I assume that Keaton's famous 'stone face' was too offensively similar to Hart's stoic and immobile features.)  Hart also resembles Clint Eastman and, like all great movie stars, has an indefinable charisma -- when he is on-screen, you really can't see anyone else and he is far prettier than his leading ladies.  Hart has a gift for landscapes, a quality necessary to Westerns, and he looks beautiful on horseback. Several scenes in Wolf Lowry are staged in near total darkness and they don't really work, at least, in this otherwise superb restoration -- you can't tell what's going on.  In the scene in which a wolf menaces Thorpe, we see a German shepherd peeping curiously out of a bush.  The rest of this sequence is also shot in total darkness so Hart doesn't have to figure out how to show the animal being shot down.  The scenes showing cabins are always shot from an aerial perspective -- the little structures are below in dry ravines and none of the eye-lines even remotely match the vantage that we're shown on the shacks.  

Bad Buck of Santa Inez is robust two-reeler also directed by, and starring Hart.  It was made in 1915 and is also effectively directed.  Bad Buck is a troublemaker who keeps getting into ludicrous stand-offs with the feckless local sheriff -- he and the man eye one another suspiciously and pour each other drinks at gunpoint.  Out in the desert mountains, a wagon is plowing through a river bed, using the stream as a roadway.  In the wagon, driven by a woman, a man is dying of fever.  Intercut with the scenes of Bad Buck threatening the sheriff, we see the man die.  He leaves his wife and a very expressive and cute little girl alone in the mountainous wilderness.  Bad Buck has to get out of town after winging the sheriff in a gunfight and he happens upon the woman kneeling by her dead husband and the child.  Bad Buck, although hotly pursued, pauses to bury the dead man.  He escorts the woman to his cabin and lets her stay there.  The child goes out to gather flowers by the stream and is menaced by a rattler.  The snake bites the child who begins to die.  Enter Bad Buck, who dispatches the rattlesnake, and rides hell-for-leather to town to get the doctor who specializes in "Snake bites and Delirium Tremens."  On the ride out of town, Bad Buck gets shot.  The doctor and outlaw reach the cabin and save the child.  Bad Buck drops dead from his wound.  This film is noteworthy for featuring another staple of Westerns, beautiful horses crossing a ford and kicking up water with their hooves.  Bad Bucks' cabin is next to a river and the only way to reach the place is by riding straight through the stream.  The same stream, next to a picturesque dead tree, leads into town and so it has to be forded in this film several times, both coming and going.  This short movie, also illustrates, Hart's skill photographing dramatic landscapes.

D. W. Griffith directed the extremely violent 1913 two-reeler The Sheriff's Baby.  This movie is a precursor to John Ford's Three Godfathers, another film involving the desert, bad men, and a highly photogenic baby.  The Sheriff's Baby isn't too good -- it's too frenetic and implausibly bloody.  The sheriff's wife has died, apparently, and, for some unknown reason, he sends his baby with a couple of settlers across the desert.  The settlers and baby travele in an enormous Conestoga wagon that is, in many ways, the chief protagonist in this film -- the wagon is vast, white, with a cavernous interior and huge wheels; it's a splendid-looking thing.  The settlers are idiots and immediately get lost in the waterless desert.  Both man and wife die, leaving the baby on a boulder to be menaced by a cougar and a bear (although the editing is bad and we can't really tell where the bear is located vis a vis the foolish pioneers.  No such problem with the cougar who gets to sniff the live baby up close and personal -- there are no CGI effects here and the baby seems exposed to actual peril.)  A group of outlaws led by Harry Carey and his sidekick played by William S. Hart, attack the Wells Fargo stagecoach station and there's a bloody shootout; it results in five casualties.  The three surviving bad men flee into the desert with the sheriff's posse hot in pursuit.  They come upon the pioneers dead from inanition and the squirming baby who has previously been menaced by the bear and the cougar.  The outlaws plan to shoot the baby and stick the muzzle of the gun in the infant's face.  But they can't bear to pull the trigger.  Then, they plan to brain the poor kid.  But this is also too heartless and, so, with the infant in tow, they set out across the desert.  Five Indians scheme to steal their horses.  There's another gunbattle in which all the Indians are killed and the other two outlaws gunned down as well. The sheriff comes upon the battle scene, takes the mewling baby from the bad man's hands (the sole survivor is Hart) and, then, gives the outlaw a canteen so he doesn't perish on the desert and departs with his posse and the child.  There are about 15 casualties in this short film and, certainly, no one would accuse the movie of being anything other than action-packed.  Billy Bitzer photographed the picture -- he would later lens Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. The action is legible and crisply edited but there's too much gunplay and murder in the short movie for my taste.