De Humani Corporis Fabrica

 De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the title of a 2022 documentary made by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, is based on 16th century anatomy treatise first released 1543 and, later,in a second edition in 1555.  The groundbreaking treatise written by the Brussels-educated Andreas Vesalius was written to correct the Greek anatomist, Galen's, mistakes -- Galen based his anatomy on animals; Vesalius had the benefit of human cadavers.  Vesalius' book is copiously, and beautifully illustrated with woodcuts that are either grotesque or noble, depending upon your perspective.  It is the pictorial aspect of Vesalius' book that informs Castaing-Taylor and Paravel's film -- the movie illustrates human physiology by depicting without narrative or commentary various procedures that invade the body, traverse its slimy tubes and tunnels, and display in massive close-up "the fabric" (fabrica) from which we are made.  Reviews of the film often emphasize its graphic, unstinting qualities -- some reviews suggest that more sensitive viewers will (or should) head to the exits.  I didn't find the picture particularly disturbing because the style of the documentary is dehumanizing and estranges the viewers.  We see dripping tunnels that we can't identify and watch procedures that are not described so that they are merely exercises, for the most part, in suctioning and snipping.  One of the film's tactics is to use such extreme close-ups that we can't figure out what we are seeing -- most notably, there's a scene in which a couple of pathologists are probing a football-sized mass of burnt-looking meat, studded with yellow fat globules.  A pathologist points out a ropy orangish tumor in the roast.  Then, incidentally, the gob of flesh is turned over and we see very briefly some skin with a nipple in the middle of it -- we have been looking at an amputated breast.  The people to whom these slick tunnels and sphincters belong are rarely shown -- there is a voice-over but it's not really informative, the chatter of the surgeons and assistants kvetching about their long hours or gruffly ordering nurses about.  In many scenes, this chatter is muted since our point of view is far within the body itself and we seem to be hearing the doctors' grousing about their work through layers of fat and flesh.  There are only a couple of scenes in which we see actual whole figures, as opposed to guts and gore, pools of blood, and doctors with their faces eerily masked.   Even in the opening shots, which show a mean-looking German shepherd patrolling the tunnels under the hospital with security guards, the camera is so close to the moving dog that we see the animal only in fragments.  The film is immersive but not in a way that is analytically useful -- the picture is the product of the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, undoubtedly shot by the anthropologists Castaing-Taylor and Paravel over many years, and the films made under the Lab's auspices usually feature photography from within inches of the subject, editing that doesn't use establishing shots of any kind at all and very jumpy, agitated handheld camera work.  With everything viewed from within a few inches (and the endoscopy shot on an almost microscopic level), the picture is very disorienting, an effect that mimics some of the sequences which feature doctors peering into screens connected to endoscopes or robotic probes and complaining that they aren't oriented and have no idea what they are seeing.

The film begins with security guards and a dog prowling around in a graffiti-smeared tunnel that, for some reason, connects directly into the vaults below the hospital.  The tunnels underground are rhymed with the  oozing tubes that we see in the endoscopy sequences and, so, from the outset, the film establishes the metaphor that the hospital itself is like a human body, a great pulsating hunk of flesh.  (The metaphor is expanded in a scene in which pathology assistants bottle up specimens of tumor and diseased flesh in the sort of canisters that banks use to transmit checks and cash; a canister is dropped into a tube and the camera follows it through the guts of the hospital on an implausibly long journey in the darkness that never really ends -- the movie just cuts away from the canister speeding through the tube.  I think the shot is intended as a joke.)  After the scene with dog in the tunnel, there is an extended overture, as it were to the film, an ICU nurse musing about her experiences -- she mentions a room that is cursed (everyone who is housed there dies) and various other patients who met grim fates in the hospital.  "What will be will be," she says with resignation.  A doctor is boring a hole in the skull of a patient who is alert but numbed by local anesthetic -- he's asked about his pain:  "It's between four and five," the poor guy says.  The hole drilled in the man's head is, then, intubated with a camera which probes around in the patient's brain -- it's covered by a fine filmy substance that is described (accurately) as looking like cotton candy.  Two old biddies from a psychiatric ward who can barely walk, try to escape confinement -- they shuffle along in slow motion, passing a locked room in which a man beckons to them through a sort of porthole.  A cry like a newborn baby sounds in the air.  A woman is having a baby while her husband stands in a spray of golden light through a window playing with his phone.  The woman is bleeding badly and needs a caesarean section.  The surgeon slices open her belly like a watermelon, rummage around in the bloody crater and, then, pull out a child covered in greyish-white caul.  The child screams with indignation.  We see an eye clipped open with clamps on its lids; a gloved finger drives a probe into the eye asking the victim if he can still see -- then, some sort of vacuum is poked into the cornea to hoover out debris floating in the orb.  A camera explores a meaty tunnel, looping around tight corners and duct-like strictures.  After a while, an outside shot shows us that the lens has been inserted into a penis through the urethra.  The urologist is bitching about his workload and seems very bitter.  He makes the peculiar comment that he "hasn't had an erection all day -- an odd thing to say but, after all, he is a Frenchman.  A  gush of blood belches out of the penis.  The doctor uses a probe that he calls a "machine-gun" or Kalishnakov apparatus to ream out the channel through the penis.  Then, he calls it a day and continues his complaints while the poor dink,neglected, sullenly oozes blood.  Next, we are inside someone's abdominal cavity trying to remove the prostate.  The assistant can't tell up from down and there's a big fight about the surgery -- "Are you playing legos?" the knife says; the other guy indignantly says he's not "playing legos."  The surgery seems to be going wrong -- it's conducted robotically by the doctor manipulating some stainless-steel handles which drive the scalpels and tweezers.  The enlarged prostate is too big to fit into a baggy that the surgeons have pushed into the man's guts.  There's excess bleeding and the surgeon and assistant blame one another to the point that they suspend the surgery -- we're left looking at a big hole full of blood.  "I don't know what I'm seeing," the assistant says.  The two old ladies have reached the locked door on the ward and they turn around, shuffling in ultra-slow motion back past the man confined in the room who beckons to them.  The baby keeps shrieking but now we see that the cries come from an old woman who is screaming in a sharp, high-pitched tone -- earlier we saw her slumbering in a chair.  Some surgeons are straightening a spine that is afflicted with severe scoliosis -- it looks like an operation committed on a large rack of well-sauced ribs.  The doctors chip out bone with chisels and hammer the bones as hard as they can and, then, call for power tools to drive screws through the meat and bone.  One of the surgeons has suffered a biceps injury and retains only 30% of his muscle tissue in that part of his body.  He also has hand problems.  "God preserve us from hand surgeons," one of the surgeons says, chuckling.  Histologists are studying slides of  breast tissue infiltrated with cancer -- "I can't use these images," one of the pathologists says, "they have big gaps; the tumor cells I'm looking for could be in the gap."  The other doctor blames the poor quality of the images on a gynecologist -- "this is typical gynecology for you," the doctor complains.  Some Haitian nursing assistants are in the morgue listening to jaunty Caribbean music on the radio -- they are briskly dressing a cadaver.  The camera moves a little and we see that there are, at least, a dozen other corpses on white tables waiting to be dressed.  Upstairs, in the Psych ward, the old woman is still screaming.  The two old biddies let out the guy in the locked room who has been signaling to them.  He makes his way through the Day-Room to the elevator, but it won't work.  Muttering frantically to himself he presses buttons but nothing happens.  It's as if he's trying to use his call-light to summon bedside-assistance.  Two orderlies gently escort him back to his room.  Someone is either retiring, or, perhaps, leaving this Paris Hospital for a job at a hospital in Montreal.  A woman reads a witty poem about the departing colleague.  Then, we are in a shadowy dance-hall.  People are frenetically jumping up and down to songs by Gloria Gaynor ("I will Survive") and New Order.  We can only see smidgens of figures, arms upraised or legs kicking at the air against splotches of yellowish light.  Then, the camera tours a bizarre fresco on the wall, a mural that shows detailed portraits of faces attached to bodies that are naked with huge phalluses or giant bellies.  Some the figures are copulating.  There are piles of bones under a mandorla-shaped vagina painted on the wall.  Little angels and corpulent women with wings fire cupid's arrows at couples who seem to be painted as caricatures of real people.  Skeletons are dancing on the wall.  The camera shows us only parts of this mural as the disco music pulsates.  Then, the camera pulls back to show a parody of Last Supper by DaVinci with an old Black man wearing a surgical mask sitting under it.  Above the Last Supper, there is an inscription De Profundis Beaulonie!  I have no idea what we are supposed to be looking at here or why the film ends in this way.  

As is the case with many highly conceptual projects (and the works of Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab are nothing if not rule-oriented and constructed according to strict theoretical principles), the film is self-defeating.  It's proposed as an alienating spectacle but the movie is about human beings, real suffering patients, and, in the end, our curiosity gets the better of us.  We want to know what is being done to these people, why? and how things turned out for them?  There's some faint, ineffectual social commentary -- the hospital is too busy, with only one nurse for every twenty patients, and the doctors are all seriously pissed-off about time constraints and overwork.  But there's no sketch as to why these conditions plague the hospital.  The film is certainly not a call to arms, nor even a call to any action at all.  It's a collection of striking images that imply all sorts of things, but don't really communicate anything except that modern medicine is a profoundly dehumanizing activity.  Notwithstanding these objections, the movie is well worth accessing and watching -- there isn't a minute of it that is not interesting in a morbid kind of way.  I just wish the presentation wasn't so self-indulgently claustrophobic -- rules for non-intervention in anthropology, of course, are made to be broken.  (After writing this note, I read some reviews on the movie.  Some writers surmise that the pornographic mural, caricaturing doctors in the hospital, is hidden in some corner of the place.  I was interested to learn that the scenes in the film were shot in a number of different hospitals, perhaps, as many as eight.  The mural is claimed to be a Carabin, or mocking mural featuring senior staff with faux Latin inscriptions.  The dance scene takes place in a Salle de Garde, or staff break room, in one of the hospitals.  I believe De Profundis Beaulonie is simply "Out of the depths! Bologny!")  

Everything for Sale -- film essay

 Wszystko Na Sprzedoz (Everything for Sale)

The director of Everything for Sale (1966) told this anecdote when he was an old man.  In an interview around 2015, Andrysz Wajda said that around the time that his friend, Zbigniew Cybulski died, the director was at the Warsaw train station.  There was a homeless man familiar to many commuters who frequented the station.  The old man, apparently, died on the concourse a few minutes before Wajda arrived.  He saw the corpse partly covered by a sheet.  Near the dead body, there were bits of clothing, some cans of food, a cane and a walking stick, a dog leash, and some tennis shoes and scarves.  A sign had been posted among these items, handwritten with the words WszystokoNa Sprzedoz – that is, “Everything For Sale.”  

****

Wajda had flown to London in the first week of January 1966.  He had spoken to the Polish movie star, Zbigniew (Zybyszek) Cybulski about making a film together.  In London, Wajda was meeting with the British dramatist David Mercer.  Mercer wrote teleplays primarily for the BBC.  Two of his filmscripts are celebrated – the script for Morgan - A Suitable Case for Treatment  (directed by Karel Reisz and which won a BAFTA in 1967) as well as Providence (with John Gielgud and directed by the French filmmaker Alain Resnais in 1970 – that film won a Cesar Award for Best Picture that year.)  Mercer was an up and coming screenwriter and Wajda wanted to commission a script for Cybulski, then, acclaimed as “the Polish James Dean.”  Shortly after reaching his hotel in London, Wajda received a call from Roman Polanski, another Polish director.  Polanski told Wajda that Cybulski had been killed in an accident – while running to catch a train, Cybulski fell between the cars and was mangled to death.  That was the end of the commission projected with Mercer.  Wajda immediately flew back to Poland to attend the actor’s funeral.  

Cybulski embodied the energies of the Polish cinema in the late fifties and sixties.  Although he had a starring role in only one of Wajda’s movies, 1958's Ashes and Diamonds, he had played supporting roles in another three films made by the director.  (Wajda had directed him twice in appearances on stage.) Furthermore, Cybulski was a close personal friend to Wajda.  Cybulski died on January 8, 1966 at the Glowny station in Wroclaw.  He was 39.

After Cybulski’s funeral, and a few weeks later, Wajda began working on a film about Cybulski, the picture that came to known as Everything for Sale.  At first, Wajda had no script and told his friends that the entire film would be improvised, supplemented as well by screen tests and other “odds and ends” that the director had lying around.  Wajda was acclaimed as Poland’s most important filmmaker at that time.  The studio Kamera produced the picture.  Because of his prestige, Wajda had a virtually unlimited budget and could afford a long shooting schedule.  It took several months to accumulate the footage that was later edited into the final cut – the editing took an unprecedented six months because of the difficulties of piecing together the disparate materials that Wajda had collected.  The movie was said to be about Cybulski but constructed so that the actor would never appear in the film.  “It was like making a film about the ghost of Hamlet’s father,” Wajda said, “except that the ghost would never appear on-screen.”

In the picture, someone says that the movie will be about the presence of an absence.  Another character sardonically says that such a film “will do great in Paris.”  “But how are we supposed to sell it in Poland?” the other person asks.

****

Everything for Sale is film about making a film.  The picture is a Moebius loop in which the two strands of the narrative – the film and the film within the film – turn out to be one and the same.  

****

Everything for Sale begins with ominous imagery in a train station.  We hear amplified footsteps like gun shots on the paving – the soundtrack is like the scene of Lee Marvin pacing through the airport in Point Blank, another important movie from the sixties.  In the darkness, a man is running.  He is running as if for his life.  The camera can scarcely keep up with him and the shots don’t display the features of the running man.  He races alongside a train that is pulling out of the station and, then, drops out of sight between the platform and the train’s wheels.  

From dialogue following this scene, which is revealed to be part of a movie under production, we learn that director and the film crew have a problem: the leading man has simply vanished.  He was supposed to be the figure chasing the train.  Instead, the director was his stand-in, racing along the train to catch it, but filmed so that his identity is not discerned.  The cast and crew speculate as to the whereabouts of the fickle leading man.  We learn that Ela, the divorced wife of the dead actor whom the picture celebrates, is playing herself in the film.  

Ela goes to her ex-husband’s home.  After their divorce, the dead actor (who is played by the actor who has vanished) remarried.  The buxom new wife has a child.  Ela and the woman talk.  They wonder where the actor has gone.  Why has he vanished?  He didn’t come home the preceding night and didn’t show up at the station where the shot involving the train was made.  Ela becomes increasingly distraught.  There is tension between the two women and Ela goes into the bathroom where she finds one of the missing man’s razors that she uses to slash her wrists.  She staggers out of the toilet into living room where we see cameras set up with a sound man to record the dialogue.  The scene between the two women is part of the film within a film as we now interpret this part of the movie.

Ela, then, goes to a party where the cast and crew involved in the movie, as well as fashion models, are dancing and drinking.  Ela dances frenetically.  A scriptwriter is hiding in a closet eavesdropping on the partygoers to that he can glean some good lines of dialogue from the drunken people talking to one another.  He tells the director that Ela has been proclaiming that no one loves her and think that this line can be used in the movie.  

The partygoers stagger out along the river (the broad Vistula lined with monumental buildings).  They happen on an amusement park and the drunk people climb onto a carousel that spins them in a wide arc around a central pillar.  Ela turns on the carousel and it begins to rotate.  The people on the carousel suffer from motion sickness and seem ill.  But Ela refuses to shut down the carousel or even reduce its speed.  The cast, director, and crew have thrown the party, it seems, in the hope that the missing leading man would appear – but he remains absent, nowhere to be seen.  

There is a question about replacing the missing actor with Daniel.  Daniel is handsome with a red-blonde beard.  But he says that he’s not well-suited to playing the role of an actor in the film within the film.  He says that he’s an athlete and does better with physical roles, like playing the part of a boxer.  Ela and the director are flirting in a car near the river.  Somehow, the director has cut his forehead.  Ela goes down to the river to wet a handkerchief to wash his wounds.  (The river is mostly frozen and the water in its shallows seems none-too-clean.)  The director takes a picture of the blood spilling out of the wound on his forehead.  This is supposed to be real blood but the image rhymes with the blood dripping out of Ela’s slashed wrists in the suicide scene.  The director uses a Kodak Land Camera to take polaroids of the cut on his head.  This references the fact that the movie was the first to be shot on Kodak Kodachrome, a film stock that allowed for better color saturation than the somewhat dowdy Soviet stock used for most Polish films at the time.

The wives of the missing actor (who is playing the dead actor in the film under production), both the ex (Ela) and the present wife embark on a hunt for the missing man.  It’s grey and snowy.  They go to a performance hall where poetry recitations take place.  There they encounter a taxi cab driver who says he brought the missing actor to the poetry performance hall.  He was apparently with a young woman (Mala or “the Little”), a member of a poetry recitation club.  The cab driver is bitter because the actor didn’t pay the fare.  Ela quotes her missing ex-husband to the effect that actors take on the sins of others or show us how to live.  The bearded guy who is athletic and plays boxers shows up on his motorcycle.  He buys one of the women a ice cream cone, a pretty cold thing to eat in this dreary icy weather.  The ex-wife is driving the present wife on their search for the missing man.  A scene of a herd of (apparently) wild horses is intercut with some of the material.

In a snowy woods, the two wives (ex- and current) come to “Y” in the road. (This “Y” signifies a pivot in the movie.) There they meet a young woman with a big beehive or bouffant hairdo.  This is Mala, the girl from the poetry recitation club.  She says that the missing man left the club late at night to catch the last train.  The girl was left behind at the edge of the woods where she stayed with a forester because it was too late to catch the last train into Warsaw.  The two wives are disgusted by the girl and abandon her – she’ll have to walk back to town.  But Ela thinks better of this and they back up to pick up the poetry-reciting girl.  Suddenly, they hear on the radio that Poland’s most famous actor was killed late the night before when he fell between the cars of a train that he was trying to catch.  

This is the pivot or hinge of the movie.  The two wives (ex- and current) seems briefly grief-stricken.  But life goes on.  

From the film’s first ten minutes, the viewers are intentionally confused by the movie as to what images are contained within the film-within-the-film (the death scene simulated by the director in the train station and Ela slashing her wrists) and what parts of the movie are part of the frame story of the production of the film within the film.  For instance, the scene of Ela powering the carrousel seems part of the frame story as does the scene at the party, but none of this is very clear and the two strata in the film (frame and film-within-film) seems to be melting into one another in strange and unpredictable ways.

****

There’s another shot of 20 or more running horses that seems unmotivated – neither part of the frame or film-within-the-film.  Then, the women go to the scene of the accident, along a snowy railroad track.  Some cops are taking measurements and the women look aghast at the spatter of blood where the actor has just died.  All three women are present: Mala, the ex-wife, and the current wife.  It is now apparent that the film about the actor who perished running for a train can not be completed; the death of the leading man, himself killed by a train, has made it impossible to proceed.  Someone says that film’s director will persevere in the effort to finish the movie because he habitually converts everything around him to a movie.  “We are hyenas” – and the plan emerges to continue with the movie but make it about the “absence of the leading man.”  Someone protests that you can’t make a movie about an “absence”.  The response is that they will love the picture in Paris.  But first, it is noted, the movie will have to sell tickets in Poland.  

We see people dressed in black.  They seem to following a casket into the cemetery, but, instead, we see they are walking alongside a cart carrying reels of the defunct picture.  (This is in black and white.) Grainy black and white newsreel footage of the dead actor’s funeral ensues.  The cast and crew are present and there is discussion abut the logistics of making a movie in which the leading man never appears.  The idea is floated that the film should be a movie about making a film.  This idea is discussed with Andrzej (the director who shares a surname with Wajda).  Daniel goes to a club with a dress code.  The doorman gives him a nice leather coat (similar to the coat worn by Cybulski in Ashes and Diamonds).  Apparently, wearing the leather coat, he is allowed into the bar.  There, as in Ashes and Diamonds, he lights a shot glass of vodka so that it flames in memory of the dead actor.  We learn that the leather jacket was kept in the coatroom so that the deceased actor, a celebrity, could always be admitted to the Club.  The leather coat is said to have been the “skin” of the deceased.  On the jackets, there is a little pin at the lapel saying: “I am a genius.”  Daniel has the legendary cup that appeared in Ashes and Diamonds – this is the cup that Cybulski keeps in his pocket and orders the barmaid to fill with vodka in that movie.  The battered cup is a souvenir of the Warsaw Uprising and, supposedly, was taken from the corpse of a German Cybulski (or his character in the 1958 film) killed.  At this point, the idea is discussed that the part of the dead actor will be played by Daniel.  Daniel is outraged at the notion that actors are fungible – that is, that one performer can be simply substituted for another who has died.  He punches the film’s producer.  (I recall this as happening in a toilet, again a reference to the rather noisome-looking lavatory in Ashes and Diamonds.)  At this point in the movie, there is mention of a film script that the decedent wrote, possibly in Paris. Someone who may know about that script is involved in the production of an epic film out on the frozen steppe.  After a brief shot of Daniel at the decedent’s graveside, the Everything for Sale cuts to the steppe where a huge crowd of mounted men wearing on their backs odd-looking wings are preparing to mount a cavalry charge.  The film that we see being produced is Jerzy Hoffman’s Pan Wolodyjowski based on the 1889 novel of that name written by Henryk Sienkiewiczka.  (The film was released in 1969 and was top-grossing picture in Poland.  “Pan” means something like “sir” or “colonel”.  The movie is about an invasion of Poland by janissaries of the Ottoman empire.  It is melodramatic stuff with attacks by wolves, huge pitched battles, and the heroines sold into the Turk’s harem.)  The man on the field of (filmed) battle tells a story about the decedent.  The story is about how the actor was in Paris and met a girl in a cabaret.  It is implied that this story became part of the script that the decedent wrote.  The cavalry charges and an assistant wearing wings himself, runs in circles around the camera simulating the winged appendages passing before the camera during the mounted attack.  We cut to woods where Daniel is being timed as to his ability to run.  The leading man in the film within the film (acting the part of Cybulski) will have to run swiftly, for instance, in the scene in which he tries to catch up with the train pulling out of the station.  The camera tracks Daniel running in snowy forest while another man times him.  Perhaps, we are seeing a rehearsal for a scene in the movie.  Daniel is told that his time isn’t that good, at least on this iteration of the run.  

Andrzej, the director is with Beata (the dead actor’s ex-wife).  They go to an art exhibit that apparently commemorates the Warsaw Uprising.  Beata doesn’t want to go into the exhibition – she thinks it is too brutal.  Andrzej looks at the art.  The paintings seem to depict the presence of the dead from the War still haunting Warsaw.  The dead are portrayed as eerie blue figures.  (This is part of the film’s theme that the dead haunt the living – both in the form of Cybulski but, also, as memories of the millions killed in the War.)  There is a monument to 40 Poles shot outside the art museum by the Nazis.  

Andrzej and Beata (the dead actor’s ex-wife) are driving on a road through a snowy forest.  They run over a corpse lying in the middle of the road.  At Beata’s urging, Andrysz puts the car in reverse and goes back to the body (it seems that he would be content to just drive away).  The body is a dummy and it turns out that local cops (and possibly traffic engineers)  are conducting some kind of study to determine to what extent citizens will stop for a body lying in the road.  As Beata and Andrzej drive off, another car drives by and ignores the dummy.  In post-war Poland, people tend to ignore the corpses with which the past has strewn the present

The film crew and actors discuss to what extent the legends that surround the decedent (now indistinguishable from Zybeszky Cybulski) are true.  Someone tells the story of Cybulski walking to Berlin in the middle of the war to get a bouquet of roses for his girlfriend – no roses were to be had anywhere in Poland.  The story is claimed to be true by the sister of the woman who received the roses.  The sister loved Cybulski but he didn’t pay any attention to her.

Andrzej talks about how he and Cybulski were representatives of a generation of Poles whose lives were destroyed by the War.  This is a sort of Polish “greatest generation” – the indomitable people who endured the war and prevailed.  Andrzej tells his wife that he is with the dead.  She asks him “Come be with me.”  Andrzej says that he is with her, but she understands that this is merely a statement of physical location – spiritually, he is remote from her.  Daniel is now playing the part of the decedent actor.  Andrzej lounges on his director’s chair in the middle of the railroad tracks with the train puffing in the background.  The train approaches and Daniel flings himself out of the moving car at the exact location where the actor’s body was found.  Andryzej says that the camera should focus on the cup, fallen next to the railroad tracks.  This is the battered cup that Cybulski carried, the talisman of the generation of Poles whose lives were uprooted by the War.  Technicians pour blood on the snow where the actor’s body was found.  

A herd of riderless horses is nearby.  The train hoots and the horses stampede.  Daniel runs among the horses as the camera tracks him.  Some horses pass between Daniel and the camera; this is similar to the effect with the wings in the cavalry charge sequence.  It now becomes apparent that the rehearsal in the wintry woods was, perhaps, testing Daniel for this scene in which he runs indefatigably with the stampeding horses.  The riderless horses symbolize Poland, the generation of dead Poles killed in the war, and Wajda’s own father who was a cavalry officer shot in the Katyn forest.  The only freedom for this generation of Poles is run wildly among the spirits of the dead, here materialized as riderless horses.  The lost cause of Polish freedom is also correlated to the doomed cavalry charges during World War Two, a subject of Wajda’s film Lotna made immediately after Ashes and Diamonds.  The cavalry charge against tanks and artillery correspond to the “lost cause” of the film that can not be successfully completed due to the death of its leading man.

Much of what I write above is hypothesis and conjecture.  The film is difficult because of the subject matter, the way that it is made, and the horrific problems of pronouncing Polish words and understanding their spelling.  The Germans and most other enlightened people have regularized their spelling and eliminated unsounded consonants – for instance, in German words like Thor (gate) and Thur (door) are now spelled Tor and Tur since the “h’s”, formerly (in medieval times and before) were aspirants that now are not sounded.  The Poles haven’t attempted this reform.  Studies show that most Polish children can’t spell their names correctly until they are in their teens.  Some never learn how to spell their names.  Even Poles are baffled by their orthography leading to wide-scale chaos and the perception that these people are dimwitted, stupid, typical “Polacks” – the term that they use for themselves and sanctified in English by Shakespeare.  In Hamlet, Horatio says that ambitious Norway “smote the sledded polacks on the ice.”  (Some argue that the word is intended to be “pole-ax” meaning that someone hit the ice with a “sledded poleax” – but why “sledded”?)  If one were to eliminate unsounded consonants from Polish names, many of those names would simply vanish, evaporate like the morning dew. 

****

Films about the making of films are surprisingly common.  The film within a film even has a picturesque technical term in French mise-en-abym.  “Abym”, I think, is a word similar to “abyss” in English.  The concept, so far as I understand it (which is questionable), is a film within a film presents a hall of mirrors – the frame film reflects the film embedded in it and vice-versa: interpretation, therefore, is abysmal, that is, without a bottom.  (A famous example of mise-en-abym is the play put on by the “rude mechanicals” in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Bottom has dreamed that he was transformed into ass – in the context of waiting for his cue in the play-within-a-play “Pyramus and Thisby”, he says: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was.  I shall get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream.  It shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’ because it hath no bottom.  I shall sing it at the latter end of a play before the duke.  Pereadventure, I shall sing it to make it more gracious at her death.”  This peculiar speech, one of the greatest in Shakespeare, with its weird synesthesias – hands that taste, eyes that hear, ears that see – and its odd intimations of death at the end of soliloquy is a perfect example of the unsettling aspects of mise-en-abym.  There is something dreamlike, something endless and unfathomable about the effect of films-within-films or films about making films.

Great examples from cinema include Close your Eyes (2024) recent masterpiece by the Spanish auteur Victor Erice about making a movie called “The Farewell Gaze”; as in Everything for Sale the subject of the movie is an uncompleted picture that was stalled 30 years earlier by the mysterious disappearance of its leading man.  Sullivan’s Travels (1941) by Preston Sturges concerns the making of a fictional film called “O Brother Where Art Thou” – an escape from chain-gang picture later actually made by the Coen Brothers.  In Godard’s La Mepris (1962, released in English as Contempt), characters are making a film version of Homer’s Odyssey – the picture is produced by Jack Palance and directed by Fritz Lang who plays himself in the film.  “The Dueling Caballero” is a film within the film Singin’ in the Rain (1952).  Truffaut’s movie picture, Day for Night (“The American Night” in French) is a 1973 film about making a movie with Jacqueline Bisset called “Meeting Pamela”.  John Travolta is enmeshed in a political conspiracy while trying to record a scream for a cheap slasher movie in Brian de Palma’s Blow Out – the film within the film is called “Coed Frenzy.”   Orson Welles’ last picture, The Other Side of the Wind (shot 1970 - 1976, edited 1980 to 1985, completed by Netflix in 2018) concerns a director played by John Huston making a movie in the style of Michelangelo Antonioni – the film shows a “wrap” party at which sequences from the film within the film are screened. This is just a sample of many different films within films.

Probably the most famous and highly regarded picture of this kind is Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963).  This movie seems to be the model on which Everything for Sale is based.  A director, played by Marcello Mastrioanni (Fellini’s surrogate) is making a science fiction film at a massive Cinecitta Studios set on which towering rocket ship has been erected.  The director has lost his way, seems creatively blocked, and, at every juncture, is pursued by predatory women who distract him from his project.  The strata of frame film and film-within-a-film become increasingly jumbled and confused and, at the end of the picture, we discover that the film being made turns out to be 8 ½ , the very picture that we have been watching – named because the movie was Fellini’s eighth feature film (with ½ referring to a short picture “Toby Dammit or Never bet the Devil Your Head” part of an omnibus Italian picture called Spirits of the Dead based on Poe short stories.) 

In broad terms, Everything for Sale follows the same narrative scaffolding.  The Polish film makers flounder when their (unnamed) leading man goes missing.  They have been working on a movie about Zbigniew Cybulski and his tragic death on January 9, 1967.  The layers of film and film-within-film get scrambled and the picture turns out to be Moebius strip in which the production of the movie and embedded movie are so intertwined as to be inextricable – it turns out that Everything for Sale is the picture that is being produced and this is the movie we see.  

****

The layers of artifice and reality are entangled even on the level of the film’s production.  The actors all use their own first names and are playing variants on themselves.  (All of them were friends or lovers of Cybulski.)  The performers improvise their lines for the most part.  Wajda encouraged them to use their own recollections of Cybulski in scenes in which we learn about the unnamed man’s adventures.  Cybulski was renowned in Poland as a fabulist and great liar.  The source of Cybulski’s battered cup, a talisman for the actor, was much contested – many didn’t believe that Cybulski took it from a German that he had killed.  In one scene, someone tells a story of Cybulski courting a woman by walking all the way to Berlin to get roses for her that were unavailable in Poland in 1945.  That tale seems highly unlikely.  (Cybulski would have been 13 when WWII began and seventeen when VE day arrived.)

Both of the leading ladies were rumored to have engaged in sexual affairs with Cybulski.  (The movie exhibits considerable anxiety about these rumors; in the opening title, both of the leading ladies expressly deny that there is any connection to reality between their personal lives and Cybulski or the romances shown in the movie.)  In fact, Beata Tyskiewicz was Wajda’s wife at the time that the movie was produced.  But she had also been involved in a love affair with Cybulski.

****

Everything for Sale engages directly with Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.  In the film, as in Welles’ picture, a movie crew is investigating an event – in Wajda’s case, the death of a celebrity actor whose demise has put their production in jeopardy.  In Kane, a documentary crew is engaged in interviews and detective work to understand the meaning of Kane’s enigmatic last utterance, “Rosebud.”  Borges famously characterized Citizen Kane as a “labyrinth without a center.”  And, although the audience is privileged to grasp the meaning of “Rosebud” in some sense, the documentary crew concludes no one will ever know what the word meant – it may have been a nickname for a girl that Kane once knew, or something that he prized, or something that he lost, or really anything at all.

Everything for Sale likewise seems to be a labyrinth without a center.  Cybulski is absent from the movie and we don’t know what his demise signifies nor is there any agreement about the dead man’s character or probity.  The viewer is left with puzzling images that don’t necessarily cohere.

In an important way, Everything for Sale, however, is a rehearsal for Wajda’s most significant later film and, probably, his masterpiece, Man of Marble (1977).  This picture is the most politically significant film in Polish history and has been viewed as a document of resistance leading proximately to the Solidarity Movement and the strikes at the Gdansk shipyard. 

Like Everything for Sale, Man of Marble is a movie about the making of a movie.  A young woman about to graduate from the Krakow Film School begins to assemble a documentary about the “man of marble” – that is, Mateusz Birkut.  Birkut, a brick layer, was celebrated in Polish propaganda as the mason who once laid 30,000 bricks in one shift.  He was a hero of the Communist party and worker’s movement.  But the man has vanished.  The young woman, Agniezska, tracks down the director of a propaganda film about Birkut and, then, follows leads to interview people who knew the bricklayer.  She discovers footage in old film libraries showing Birkut and finds out that he was denounced as a traitor and, possibly, sent to prison.  Near the end of the film, she discovers an archive of footage showing Birkut but is denied access to the images by the Polish State.  She speculates that there is something in the censored footage that will explain the mystery.  But she isn’t allowed to see the archived film.  She tracks down Birkut’s son who is laboring in the Gdansk shipyards.  The son tells her that his father died a few years earlier and that he doesn’t know why the film has been suppressed.  Like Citizen Kane, and like Everything for Sale, the movie is about a mystery that the protagonists in the picture never solve.  It is a labyrinth without a center.  

Man of Marble is a collage film made from snippets of old propaganda reels, political documentaries, interviews, and recollections that are often colored by emotion or bias and unreliable.  Everything for Sale can be similarly characterized and seems to be a dry run for the film technique and structure used in the much more famous and renowned Man of Marble.  

Everything for Sale is also important in film history as the first picture made in Poland to adopt the techniques of the French Nouvelle Vague.  The film’s chronology is scrambled, the film stock is a mix of black and white and color, and the camera is handheld roving through the locations with a freedom not observed in earlier Wajda movies.  We noted the rather ponderous compositional integrity of Ashes and Diamonds, that is, the conception of the film largely in terms of striking tableaux.  Everything for Sale is filmed much more differently, with rapid unsteady camera movements, and discordant editing.  Wajda’s 1960 The Innocent Sorcerers, a jazz-inflected story about Polish beatniks and bohemians has a script that reads like a French New Wave picture, but was filmed with studio methods used in conventional Polish cinema.  Everything for Sale is the first picture in Poland to marry an advanced film technique to a “new wave” sensibility in terms of the themes and events in the scenario.   

 

****

Imagery in Everything for Sale carries symbolic meaning.  

There are two symbols for history: the train and the carrousel.  History either proceeds according to Marxist dialectic along a straight track into the future or history repeats, cycles, moves in circles like the berserk carrousel near the Vistula that Ela sets into frantic motion.  

The train as a symbol for unstoppable historic processes derives largely from American Westerns.  John Ford’s first famous picture was The Iron Horse (1924), a silent movie in which American manifest destiny is embodied in the railroads taming the West.  This sort of symbolism reaches a climax in the films by the Italian Communists Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci.  In Leone’s magnum opus, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), the Old West is mythologized in the concluding landscape shot showing Indians in retreat before pioneers who cross the deserts in wagon trains while in the middle distance, the iron horse, puffing black smoke up into the line of the horizon, advances westward.  Bertolucci was assistant director on Once Upon a Time in the West.  In his grandiose epic, 1900 (1976) a train festooned with red flags symbolizes the inexorable advance of Communism and its ultimate triumph in the May Day festival, choreographed like a Busby Berkeley musical, in the picture’s last reel.  The movie is bookended by characters who lay lengthwise on the track, between the rails, so that trains can roar over them – an image of the individual pitted against history with an overtone of hope that the Communist utopia will also make room for dissidents and those for whom the dialectic of history does not seem inevitable.  

The train as a metaphor for the inevitability of Communism features in Soviet silent films and movies of the thirties.  In those pictures, we see armored trains advancing over the steppes.  In the civil war, Dziga Vertov, the great Soviet propagandist, showed movies to the peasants on white sheets draped over trains armored against attack.  The armored train also embodies the force and fatality of destiny in the Mexican Revolution.  Go to 1910 restaurant in Austin and look at the armored trains photographed on trestles over deep, dry canyons.  There is an armored train under attack in the Mexican Revolution in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969).  For Wajda, the train symbolizes the onward rush of history that mangles those who get into its way.

But in Poland, the more things change the more they stay the same.  The history of Poland is a history of partition, conquest, brief efflorescence of Polish culture, and, then, more conquest and oppression.  The Poles had the misfortune to be occupied by both the Germans and, then, Russians.  This historical cycle is materialized in the image of the carrousel on which the Polish film crew and actors ride after their drunken party.  The carrousel spins merrily, but nothing ever changes – the trajectory of history is a repeated oscillation between repression, liberty, and, then, more repression.

The herd of riderless horses is an image for Poland as a mob without a leader, running in one direction and, then, the other, The riderless horses, as I have earlier maintained, correlate to the imagery of Poland as a quixotic lost cause, beautifully mounted and caparisoned horses charging into artillery fire and falling before armored tanks.  (Wajda’s father, murdered at Katyn, was a cavalry officer.)  The horses are motivated by the film requiring large numbers of animals for a spectacular cavalry charge in the movie version of Pan Wolodyjowski.  This is meaning of the scene in Everything for Sale on the frozen steppe where a movie about a battle with the invading Ottomans is being made.  Poland is always invaded, always occupied.  The cavalry doesn’t come to the rescue.  

The film that Wajda made after Ashes and Diamonds is Lotna (1959).  That film is named after a beautiful mare that is the center of a rivalry and controversy among cavalry officers.  At the climax of the film, the mare Lotna, leads a charge of cavalry against German tanks – an event sacred in Polish mythology which, in fact, never happened.  Pope Frances during a visit from Polish religious authorities said that Lotna was one of his favorite movies and that he particularly loved the scene in which a Polish priest wins an equine competition.  Wajda, who was touched by this reference, said that he was glad that he had lived long enough to hear the Pope praise his picture.  

To be a Pole is to be fixated on historical injustice and to celebrate the martyrs who opposed this injustice – the people shot by the Nazis in the Warsaw Uprising, the death of the entire Polish intelligentsia in the Katyn Forest, the courage of those who opposed the Soviet repression at the Gdansk shipyards.  The Poles are always documenting their trauma.  (Hence, the exhibition of paintings by Andrzej Wroblewski that the film director attends.  Wroblewski was an important post-War artist in Poland.  Born in 1927, he died at age 29 in a mountain climbing accident in the high Tatra Mountains in Poland.  Wroblewski attended art school around the time Wajda studied in that institution.  At art school, Wroblewski founded the so-called “Self-Teaching Club” for art students, a group in which Wajda was a member.  Wroblewski is best known for his “Execution” series of paintings, shown in the exhibition that the director Andrzej attends – Beata refuses to go into the galleries.  The “Execution” series shows Poles who were killed in the Warsaw Ghetto in the 1944 uprising when the Nazis executed hostages.)   Polish history is one continuous trauma.  What are cameras for? To photograph wounds.  When Andrzej, the film director, suffers a gash to his forehead when his car jolts to a stop, his first impulse is to photograph the wound using a Kodak polaroid camera. 

In Everything for Sale, history seems to be stalled.  The carrousel spins in circles.  The train exists only to kill the best and the brightest.  The movie can’t be made.  We are in an interregnum in history.

Gramsci, an Italian Marxist wrote in 1931, in his Prison Notebooks, “the crisis consist precisely in the fact that the old is dying and new can not be born; in this interregnum a variety of morbid symptoms appear.” 

Film group essay -- Monsieur Verdoux

 Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux

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

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

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

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

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

At first, all Chaplin’s movies made money

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

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

Orson Welles writes a script

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

With Paulette Goddard

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

Joan Barry

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

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

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

Oona

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

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

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

“Let the Butchery begin –“

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

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

Chaplin the Red

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

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

Final Films

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

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

A riposte to a Method Actor

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

Henri Landru kills lovelorn war-widows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laurel and Hardy versus Charlie Chaplin and an embarrassing confession

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

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

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

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

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

In which Telegramss are sent

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

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

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

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

Inspector Ike

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

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

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

Night Moves

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

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

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

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

The Choral

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

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

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

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