Sacred Journeys (with Bruce Feiler) -- Mecca and Medina

All religions have disgusting features and rites that are affronts to human dignity.  Pilgrimage is an aspect of organized religion that shows piety at its most craven, bigoted, superstitious, and unpleasant.  It is manifestly unfair to judge the intricate structure of philosophy, narrative, and poetry comprising a major religion by its pilgrims and its pilgrimage sites.  So my comments about Bruce Feiler's Sacred Journeys (about which I previously written) focusing on the episode involving Muslim pilgrims making the Hajj, that is, a journey to the prophets Muhammed's tomb in Medina and, then, Mecca, and the sacred sites, apparently, suburban to Mecca must be read with this caveat in mind.  Nonetheless. the hour-long program about the pilgrimage to the deserts of Saudi Arabia is particularly horrific and casts an alarming light on institutional Islam.  It is a show that people hoping to understand the Muslim religion should see.  Since he is non-Muslim (indeed, some kind of Bill Moyers' style secular humanist), Bruce Feiler is excluded from this adventure.  Feiler is dismayingly enthusiastic, but irrelevant -- since he can't travel to Mecca or Medina, he has to limp around the Mojave desert, favoring his game leg, and cheerleading sententiously 'from the bench' as it were.  He utters a few comments about deserts and, then, sits by a  lonely campfire in the wasteland sulking a bit when he is not skyping with the American pilgrims in Mecca.  Since Feiler is one of the most irritating aspects of this PBS show, his exile from center-stage although manifestly unjust actually improves the program.  Like the other episodes that I have seen, the program follows a dramatic pattern:  the pilgrims have been selected for their relative diversity, a bit like a movie-platoon in a Hollywood W. W. II combat film:  there is a simple, unsophisticated true believer, a cradle-Catholic or -Jew or - Muslim, an enlightened poetic intellectual in the Bill Moyers' mold, a cynical skeptic, and, in the Mecca episode, even a handsome young horn-dog, an amorous fellow who has just been divorced and is sowing his wild-oats (such as they are) on the Hajj to Mecca -- the guy is a little like an Islamist Charley Sheen and he's looking to hook-up with the pious beauties converging the Holy City.  Predictably, everyone, even the skeptic, is deeply moved by their pilgrimage and, at the end of the show, all pronounce the experience to be profound and life-changing -- there's no dissenting voice, no lone rationalist who declares that the whole thing was a monumental waste of time, but, then, my friends, what did you expect from a cautious, life-affirming, beneficent PBS documentary series?  The pilgrimage sites in Saudi Arabia are, apparently, noteworthy because of their sheer, hideous ugliness and the spectacle of millions of people reduced to swarming insects in structures that seem to be modeled after the worst aspects of a modern airline terminal is ghastly to behold.  Islam is iconoclastic and mosques on the scale shown in this documentary -- one of them comprises 100 acres -- are simply too vast and impersonal to be decorated in any way.  The pilgrimage sites look brand-new, as if built in the last couple years, and they consist of gigantic white concourses clinically lit that lead to ramps circling holy places, for instance the Kaaba with its cornerstone of black meteorite.  Since Islamic custom requires that pilgrims circumnavigate the big black cube seven times, the shrine is surrounded by vast concrete ramps, at least three levels, permitting the pilgrims to perambulate around the Kaaba stacked on top of one another.  Viewed from above, the site looks something like a gigantic interstate cloverleaf, cheerless concrete pillars supporting vast viaducts something like colossal freeway overpasses.  A million people blacken the huge ramps, marked by signs like you  migh see on the LA freeway, inscriptions in Arabic and English pointing the way to the various levels of the ramps.  When one of our heroes makes the mistake of actually attempting to kiss the black meteorite at one of the corners of the towering Kaaba shrine, someone throws an elbow into his eye and he makes the rest of the pilgrimage with a swollen shiner.  The throng mangles the knee of one of the women and she has to be shoved from place-to-place in a wheelchair and, as the pilgrimage continues, from sacred place to place, the pilgrims become increasingly desperate -- it's a race against time since the throngs require enormous patience to navigate and, apparently, long hours are stuck in traffic jams comprised of hundreds of buses stalled in impasse in the moonscape of the Arabian desert, and during the ordeal the pilgrims all become increasingly irritable and debilitated.  The women, in particular, are emotionally unprepared for the level in patriarchal institutionalized sexism that they encounter -- one of them weeps and says that the separation of the sexes at Muhammed's tomb, and the fact that women, as second-class Muslims, are kept more remote from the sacred place makes her feel "very distant from the prophet, somehow more distant than when I came here."  It seems impossible to enter the holy places during the day because of the vast multitudes and so the American pilgrims tend to make their ritual observances at odd hours, two or three in the morning, and the lack of sleep takes a toll on them.  Several of the pilgrimage sites require camping in the desert, a bivouac accomplished by means of filling up barren valleys with thousands upon thousands of white plastic tents, a spectacle that looks a bit like the teepee-like profile of the Denver International airport combined with the world's largest egg container turned upside-down.  People have to stagger around the desert to pick up rocks to stone the devil, an exercise that apparently has to be done twice -- but there are so many people picking up pebbles in the wasteland that the American pilgrims are forced to fill their plastic baggies with tiny stones not much bigger than grains of sand.  (This is notwithstanding the fact that the Saudi Arabian government trucks in 8 million pounds of stones every season.)  Satan is a massive textured concrete wall set in the middle of a conical funnel that collects the stones cast against that structure -- presumably so they can be recycled to the adjacent desert.  The concrete wall sits in the center of a enormous plaza, something like the world's ugliest and largest shopping mall, a vast concourse, again with several ramps surrounding the towering wall that represents the devil.  At one point, a cynical pilgrim, a programmer or computer scientist from suburban Boston, says that the whole thing is upsetting to him and a little frightening:  "I wasn't prepared for the industrial aspects of this experience.  It's so industrial," he laments.  Viewed from the air, the Kaaba shrine sits in a crater surrounded by skyscrapers that look vaguely like the Stalinist monuments of Moscow, huge towers half hidden in an aerial labyrinth of orange and yellow construction cranes.  Vast queues of air-conditioned buses await entry to the gigantic traffic circles surrounding the central mosque, a flat-roofed structure with small, ugly-looking minarets screwed into its corners and a huge bureaucratic looking tower on one side, a building that looks like the old Metropolitan Life building in New York City crossed with the high-rise Moscow University in the Russian capitol.  Christians and Buddhists are apt to think of their religions as beautiful, even delicate, and viewing the tracery of Moorish columns and arches in the old mosques in Palermo now converted to Catholic uses, it's clear that Islam has a marvelously intricate aesthetic side as well.  But this is not on view in this disheartening episode of Sacred Journeys -- instead, we are confronted with the disheartening spectacle of religion as brute force, sheer power, a titanic colossus noteworthy for its ugliness and conformity. 

Getting On

Getting On is a six part HBO series aired in November and December 2014.  Designed as a sit-com, the half-hour programs take place in a hospital and, almost exclusively, confined to a ward devoted to the hospice care of terminally ill women.  Getting On is based on a British sit-com with a similar premise and it treads territory pioneered by Robert Altman's Mash:  the characters jest and engage in love affairs to keep up their spirits in the face of tragic chaos.  Patients die and there are too many of them to be provided adequate care and each episode presents a series of crises -- the power fails, the air-conditioning won't work, love affairs come unstrung, computerized records are unavailable, doctors and nurses make fatal, and near-fatal errors.  Everyone does their best to soldier through the on-going chaos and the mantra seems to be "Stay Calm and do your Duty."  Each show features one or more cringe-inducing and grisly medical procedures -- a naso-gastric tube is installed in a writhing cancer patient, a surgeon prepares to excise a squamous cell carcinoma wearing what looks like a welding face-mask, veins can't be located to insert IVs and so on.  All of this is vividly presented to the point that I had to look away from the screen from time to time.  The dialogue is suitably ribald and vulgar.  People familiar with the medical profession and large hospitals in general tells me that the show is highly realistic, if stylized:  the doctors are suitably pompous, callous, and they speak with the soft courtly (and completely fraudulent) manner that I have heard Mayo Clinic doctors often employ -- their soothing voices seethe with rage and they seem always on the verge of hysteria.  The nurses are harried, rude, and aggressive.  The hospital's accountants, lawyers, and administrators are suitably smarmy.  In one scene, a patient care conference is convened with about a half-dozen doctors.  The patient is clearly dying but not one of the physicians dares to speak the truth and each of them suggests increasingly surreal, and improbable, surgical interventions for their moribund patient.  The entire system shown in this series is devoted to death and dying and, yet, no one dares speak the word.  At various moments, the program betrays its U. K. origins -- the Brits seem to think doddering old women, particularly if played by men in drag, are intrinsically funny (cf. any episode of Monty Python); this is a taste not shared by most Americans.  There is lots of scatological humor, toilet comedy of the kind that English audiences enjoy -- one of the doctors specializes in a taxonomy of shit; she has defined "seven kinds of stool" and makes lengthy speeches about female fecal incontinence.  This physician is eccentric, operating her ever-expanding empire of hospice beds in order to finance with her fees an elaborate research program involving hundreds of lab mice.  The research with the lab mice is like something implemented on the island of Dr. Moreau and the characters obsessions fit within a broad mainstream of British comedy dating back to Uncle Toby in Sterne's Tristram Shandy and before.  The show is gripping and spectacularly well-acted and, of course, the subject matter has the kind of calamitous appeal of a gory car-crash -- you can't exactly look away although there is something indecent about watching as well.  The actors all look like real people but, curiously, also are familiar -- you have seen them before and they are englobed by a faint aura of star-charisma notwithstanding their dowdy appearance in this show.  The principal characters are played people that you recognize, but you don't know their names and can't quite identify where it was that you last saw them.  Alex Borstein and Laurie Metcalf are particularly effective as the head nurse, Dawn, and the eccentric, feces-obsessed physician, Dr. Jenna James.  Borstein in particular is a plain-Jane who seems highly intelligent; she gives the effect of always biting her tongue to avoid saying something recriminatory and insulting to the fools around her and this stubby, squat little actress is one of those rare performers who always seems to be thinking, plotting, intelligently contriving. even, designing the plot in which she is acting.  Laurie Metcalf is convincingly strange, obsessive, and her Dr. James is oddly capable, also, a persuasive portrait of a highly intelligent, if peculiar, woman.  The minor characters, including the intransigent and sometimes foul-mouthed, old women are similarly effective.  Getting On is available on HBO-to-go and on-demand for the next month or so.  It is a reminder of a truism -- the best film making today is on cable-TV.

Robinson Crusoe (1954)

Luis Bunuel's 1954 Technicolor adaptation of Robinson Crusoe contains one astounding image:  driven half-mad by isolation, Crusoe lights a torch and runs into the surf of the ocean crying out for help:  the sky is stormy and an eerie half-light burnishes the waves and the turbulent clouds to the color of old brass.  The torch goes out in dark, sinister waves and Crusoe, defeated, staggers back to shore.  Defoe's 1719 book has never seemed to me suitable material for a film -- it is too static, there is no dialogue for much of Crusoe's period of the island, and the story is too infected with Puritan moralizing, albeit, perhaps, delivered tongue-in-cheek.  (Irony is a rhetorical effect alien to the plain, matter-of-fact aspects of film -- particularly in the case of Bunuel's more or less flat affect.)  For the most part, Bunuel plays it straight -- the film is blunt and direct and uncompromising:  the picture begins with Crusoe clambering ashore on the desert island and ends "28 years 3 months and 19 days later" with the hero and Friday on a skiff being rowed to a larger ship at anchor a mile off-shore.  Dan O'Herlihy plays Crusoe effectively -- he was nominated for an Academy Award for the film made by a Mexican production company largely in the jungles of southern Mexico.  (The film is one of two that Bunuel made in English and his first color picture -- the movie's color design is fantastically beautiful:  warm amber sand and the light over the island always bronze with humidity and storm, everything infused with the tint of the yellowish doubloons that Friday wears as a necklace.)  The part of Friday was played by a young man from a fishing village who spoke no English.  As the film progresses, we watch him actually learn English in order to converse with Crusoe.  Bunuel's sober, detached, and almost indifferent film-style is an excellent counterpoint to O'Herlihy's scenes of desperate madness and hysteria -- this is particularly true in several sequences involving women's garments that Crusoe keeps in a chest in his cave:  he reacts with horror to the emotions stirred in him by a lady's frock and, then, gazes lovingly at a scarecrow that he has fitted with a woman's gown.  Later, when Friday prances about wearing a woman's dress, the look that Crusoe casts in his direction is sufficiently terrifying that both men are appropriately chastened and the clothing quickly hidden once more.  Bunuel's surrealist impulses are vividly displayed in a short dream sequence involving the apparition of Crusoe's father, thirst, delirium, and ending with the castaway taking an axe to murder the old man:  Bunuel stages the dream in a series of short shots, figures reclining or adopting peculiar poses, water ladled over everything since Crusoe is suffering from thirst, jump-cuts that jar the viewer; when he picks up a jug to drink there is a fat, hairy tarantula inside -- the effect is similar to the famous dream sequence in Los Olivados.  There is documentary-style shot of ant-lions devouring hapless ants while Crusoe chortles to them as if at a drawing room party and parts of the rugged coast look like the place where the priests celebrated their doomed Mass in L'Age d'Or.  A debate between Crusoe and Friday about theology ends with both men properly baffled; they seem to concede that they have been talking errant nonsense.  Before finding Friday, Crusoe goes to a deep valley lined with cliffs to shout the Lord's Prayer -- he is desperate to hear another human voice.  The death of Rex, Crusoe's faithful dog and only companion for his first ten years on the island is staged with startling verisimilitude and when the castaway departs from his prison he seems to hear the animal barking in the jungles of the impenetrable interior. 

The Trip to Italy

In Alejandro Inarittu's film Birdman, a character denounces a theater critic:  "All you have to offer is some adjectives and a few half-assed comparisons," the aggrieved artist shouts.  So far as it goes, this critique of critics applies to this note:  comparisons, "half-assed" or otherwise are integral to an assessment of Michael Winterbottom's comedy, The Italian Trip.  The movie, edited into a two-hour film from a much longer British TV series, concerns two British celebrities, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, who are dispatched to Italy to make a TV show about the exquisite local cuisine and lodgings.  Coogan and Brydon play variants of themselves, performing in the movie under their real names and they appear to have improvised all the dialogue.  Unlike American "reality" TV shows, or meta-reality "reality" shows (for instance HBO's The Come-Back), the machinery of filmmaker is not emphasized:  the two men travel alone, without a sound-crew or cameramen, begging the question as to how the television show in which they ostensibly star is being filmed -- in a way, The Italian Journey requires a breathtaking audience suspension of disbelief:  these men are supposed to be filmed at every stage of their travels, but there is no documentary crew anywhere in evidence, an omission that, curiously, the viewer doesn't really sense until thinking about the movie later.  The film is buddy-picture road movie featuring two mismatched travelers:  Coogan is vain, self-regarding, an established movie star but a little bit dim and no match for the mercurial wit that Brydon shows.  Brydon is a mimic of uncanny brilliance, wounded in some obscure way, and a man who retreats from his own emotions and sense of grievance behind a blinding mask of impressions:  in the film, he imitates Humphrey Bogart, then, imitates Coogan's imitation of Bogart, mimics Michael Caine, Al Pacino, Marlon Brando, Tom Hardy as Bane in the Batman films, Gore Vidal, and, of course, displays his alarmingly eerie voice of the "little man in the box" --  those strangled words, emanating as a wee whisper from somewhere within Brydon's soft palate, are employed in a dialogue between the actor and the cast of a Pompeiian corpse in a glass casket, a demonstration of heartless virtuosity that disgusts Coogan who walks away in dismay.  Ostensibly, the tour of Italy, proceeding through the most magnificent landscapes imaginable, involves retracing the steps of Lord Byron and Shelley down the peninsula.  The film reprises the two men's earlier series made with Winterbottom, The Trip, in which the mismatched couple traveled through the British lake country in the footsteps of Coleridge and Wordsworth.  The fact that the men are retracing the travels of great poets gives the film an imaginative density of reference and a faint burden of melancholy that increases as the picture proceeds.  The Trip to Italy is bleaker than the first film -- the men are older and the shadow of death falls heavily across them:  many of the scenes are shot in cemeteries and there is a sequence in the ossuary in Naples that directly cites a similar scene in Rossellini's Journey to Italy.  As in Rossellini's film, the Trip to Italy recounts the story of a couple always seething with resentment, prone to adultery, and, more or less, ignoring the gorgeous setting in favor of picking petty quarrels with one another.  In the course of the film, Brydon has a pointless affair and lands a job on a big American motion picture, Coogan reconnects with his estranged son -- the journey changes nothing:  the men don't learn anything -- they remain buffoons, quarreling sadly over whether any trace of them will remain in two-hundred years.  Despite its startling beauty, the film has a autumnal feeling, the sense of life slipping away, an effect enhanced by the repeated strains of Strauss' resplendent late song In Abendrot heard from time to time on the soundtrack,.  The film is a matter of taste:  I admire Byron and Shelley, have read Richard Holmes' book about Shelley, and, of course, have fond memories of trips to Italy.  For these reasons, I enjoyed the movie immensely.  But it's pointless in a particularly elegant way -- as pointless, I suppose as Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North -- and an audience expecting jokes and comedy will be puzzled by the film's depiction  of sad, fundamentally hollow and incomplete men, eating luscious dinners, concealing their animosity behind impressions of other more famous men and panicked by their own mortality.

Birdman

Riggan Thomson, the actor-protagonist of Alejandro Inarittu's Birdman is drowning in difficulties:  he has invested much of his personal wealth in a theatrical adaptation of several stories by Raymond Carver, a play that he has written, directs, and in which he stars with his girlfriend; New York's most prominent theater critic has vowed to ruin the play and Thomson's co-star, an actor named Michael Shiner, despises him -- from time to time, the two men brawl with one another backstage.  Thomson's ex-wife is worried about the actor's imprudent investment in the Broadway show; his daughter is a junkie and has been seduced by Shiner; his girlfriend has embarked on a Lesbian affair with the other actress in his play and a masked, caped super-hero, dubbed the Birdman is haunting him.  The Birdman is a character that made Thomson famous when he starred in that role in three films based on the comic book superhero -- the Birdman resents being shelved and demands that his alter-ego, the miserable and unstable Thomson, revive the cartoon superhero, angrily denouncing the pretentions of the actor's Broadway theatrical debut.  Thomson is cracking-up and Birdman is the record of his nervous breakdown -- as the actor becomes increasingly beset by worry and helpless in the face of his worries, he begins to develop super-human powers, specifically telekinesis and the ability to fly.  The Birdman eggs him on, urging that he become a superhero again.  But the viewer suspects that the telekinesis is merely a metaphor for Riggan Thomson's increasingly violent rages, episodes in which he breaks glass and trashes his dressing room, damage that the mentally ill hero blames on the specter of the sinister super-hero.   And the Birdman's insinuation that the actor should leap from the top of the old theater in which almost all of the action takes place seems to be an incitement to suicide.  Michael Keaton plays the part of Riggan Thomson and his performance is riveting and courageous -- of course, Keaton played Batman twenty years ago and the sinister superhero, the Birdman, seems modeled on that character.   Keaton is in almost every frame of the movie.  It would be a misnomer to say that he is in every shot -- Emmanuel Lubetzki's remarkable photography stages the entire movie as a continuous take; this has been done before:  the forties film noir, The Lady in the Lake used a continuous first-person take to dramatize the Chandler thriller and Hitchcock shot his Rope (about Leopold and Loeb)  in what appears to be a single, extended take.  (Of course, Sokurov's Russian Ark also consists of one continuous shot -- unlike Birdman and the other films mentioned, Sokurov didn't cheat and, in fact, made his 100 minute film in one continuous HD-video shot; Inarittu sutures his extended take together by tracking the camera into dark zones and, then, recommencing his shot on the other side of the blackness.  Sometimes, he rolls the camera skyward, records the Manhattan skyscraper, and, then, fastforwards from night to dawn or vice-versa).   In Antonioni's film, The Passenger, there is bravura sequence in which a camera moves across a sun-scorched courtyard and, then, through a barred window into a room in which someone has been murdered -- I vividly recall the sense of awe and shock that this extended camera movement induced in the audience.  Inarittu's Birdman involves a half dozen camera movements even more grandiose and spectacular -- in one sequence, the camera travels down a street between buildings and, then, enters a room through a window that is also covered with bars and grating; in another episode, completely unbroken by inserted shots, the hero observes monsters destroying the Manhattan skyscrapers, watches helicopters batted out of the sky by colossal beasts against a background of enormous explosions and, then, levitates a hundred feet to soar through the sky, flying through Time Square and over Grand Central Station in an effect that is completely plausible both emotionally and spatially.  The ancient theater in which almost all of the action takes place is a crumbling labyrinth of dark corridors, sepulchral dressing rooms, and a cavernous backstage, a maze through which the camera tracks, always, it seems, emerging on the stage where the play What we talk about when we talk about Love is either being rehearsed or performed in previews -- the scenes of the play double the action and emotional complications of the plot and are like a feverish recurrent nightmare.  Inarittu, who is from Mexico, echoes some of the themes of classic Spanish theater, particularly Calderon's Life is a Dream, and the vast, dismal theater seems to be a symbol for the protagonist's disordered and feverish imagination -- it is like the House of Usher in which it is impossible to distinguish between what is real, what is truthful, and what is merely playacting.  The distinction between truth and playacting is materialized in the figure of Michael Shiner (Edward Norton), Riggan Thomson's nemesis, a character who is the ultimate "method actor" -- in one sex scene, he embarrasses everyone by playing the part with an actual erection.  Shiner insists that Thomson deliver "the truth" in his play with catastrophic consequences.  In some respects, Inarittu's movie, which is completely extraordinary and fantastically literate (Shiner is reading Borges Labyrinths and the characters cite Roland Barthes and Flaubert), is almost too rich, too complex, and has too many ideas, some of which are not as effectively developed as others.  The film is Baroque in the Mexican style, Churrigueresque Baroque, symbol and metaphor heaped upon symbol and metaphor to create an incredibly densely textured film.  One example must suffice for many:  across from the James Theater where the Carver play directed by Thomson is being mounted, there are advertisements for The Phantom of the Opera; these huge ads, which show a mask with the words PHANTOM come to symbolize the plight of Inarittu's hero, a man shown on stage in the play with a gun to his head, committing suicide because he is "not real."  At the end of the movie, we see the hero wearing white mask, his eyes peering out through slits in the mask and his nose curved into a great white beak -- he has become the Birdman once more, but not in the way that anyone would have expected.  This is a great movie, one of the very best of the year -- if it has a defect, the film is almost too laden with ideas, almost too smart and clever for its own good.  (The film has an extraordinary soundtrack mostly improvised drum solos -- from time to time, in homage to Scorsese's Taxi Driver, we see a street musician playing a drum set in Times Square, and the drumming punctuates many of the crucial sequences in the movie.)

Tell it to the Marines!

"Trouble?  Tell it to the Marines!"  This is the intertitle in a 1926 silent film directed by George Hill and starring Lon Chaney from which the picture derives its name.  Although forgotten today, Tell it to the Marines! was an enormous success at the box-office when released and an excellent example of a superbly crafted and highly effective popular entertainment.  This was a movie that your grandparents or great-grandparents enjoyed and, unlike many silent films, the picture retains its appeal today.  All manner of things are packed into the film's 90 minute length:  there is raucous physical comedy, various romances, superb, if stylized, acting, and spectacular action sequences.  The picture features Lon Chaney's performance as O'Hara, a tough-as-nails Marine sergeant, a role that is the progenitor of all the other rough and tough Marine drill instructors in film and TV history:  O'Hara is palpably the source of Lee Ermey's ferocious performance in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket and, of course, the basis for Gunnery Sergeant Vince Carter on the TV show Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C.  Chaney plays the part without any of his trademark make-up effects and is enormously charismatic as mentor, and antagonist, to the rather doughy-looking and feckless hero, "Skeet" Burns,  the fresh recruit that Sergeant O'Hara has to "whip into shape."  Cheney's O'Hara has a hideous bulldog, a beast so ugly that it is beautiful in an awful sort of way, and he yearns for the love of a comely Navy nurse, Norma.  But Chaney's character knows that he is too homely, coarse, and professionally motivated -- wedded, as it were, to the Marine Corps -- to win the woman's love.  Instead, the film ends with her married to the soft-faced and pretty Skeet, a palpably disappointing outcome since Chaney, with his sinewy frame and bantam rooster strut and leathery face with a toothy jack-o-lantern grin is the more appealing character.  The most emotionally charged parts of the film are the love scenes between Chaney's O'Hara and Skeets: sequences shot in big close-ups in which O'Hara relinquishes his romantic interest in Norma, and, in effect, cedes her over to the more conventional lover, Skeets.  In the film's final shot, O'Hara is belaboring a new set of recruits -- he glances for a moment at the happy lovers, Norma and Skeets, feels a tear come into his eye which he bats away as if it were a pesky insect, and, then, without dropping a beat returns to hectoring the new recruits.  Skeets begins the film as an indolent, useless youth who has fled Kansas City with a railroad voucher to join the Marines in San Diego.  Instead of reporting to the Marine Corps base, he goes to "Tia Juana" to bet on the horses.  By the end of the film, of course, Skeets is a decorated veteran and combat hero.  The film is efficiently directed and the camerawork and editing is mostly unobtrusively effective -- the picture looks like a movie by Howard Hawks.  There are several astounding sequences:  we get a wild shot from a motorboat whirling around a destroyer plowing through heavy seas -- the image gives the viewer an palpable sense of sea-sickness and must have been fantastically effective on the big screen.  A boxing scene climaxes with Skeet on the ropes, half-unconscious, rolling his eyes at the camera, an alarming image of violence and despair.  We see the Marines landing at Hangchow and advancing up a beach.  As the camera shifts to a full-frontal shot of the Marines marching toward the lens, a perfectly shaped phalanx of bomber biplanes flies overhead.  The climax of the film involves thousands of extras attacking a rear-guard of Marines defending a little arched bridge that spans a gorge that seems to be about a thousand feet deep.  The battle scenes are chaotic and realistic; the Marines fire bolt-action carbines and seem to have great difficulty operating their rifles.  Werner Oland mugs as a wild-eyed Chinese bandit.  There is a savage riot scene involving tattooed Polynesians on Tondo Island, shot with what seems to be a handheld camera and, frequently, out-of-focus -- the fight involves a "Goo Goo girl" also called a "Floosie" in an intertitle.  Much of the movie is a mild-mannered service comedy:  Skeets becomes a toughened Marine with relatively little difficulty and most of the movie involves his mischievous behavior in violation of O'Hara's orders.  Probably, the most interesting aspect of the film for modern viewers is its documentary elements:  the movie shows us what it was like to go on a date with a Navy nurse in 1925 -- we see rural California, San Diego street cars, and, of course, the Marine Corps training facility at San Diego.  This film, available on Warner Brothers Archive DVD, is delightful and entertaining from start to finish.   

City Lights

Chaplin's 1931 silent film, City Lights, has a limpid and classical purity.  Although produced two years after the end of the silent era, Chaplin made the film as a "pantomime" -- that is, without any natural sound:  he uses a few surrealist sound effects -- a whistle that the tramp has swallowed peeps at inopportune times and politicians' voices are rendered as kind of high-pitched yammering -- but the picture is constructed like a silent film, the narrative conveyed by the action on screen with only a few, laconic intertitles.  (The film is so simple and lucid that it probably could be presented without any titles at all.)  Chaplin's signature character, the little tramp, awakes cradled in the lap of a grotesque, neo-Fascist sculpture, part of a public monument dedicated by the yammering politicians in the first scene, and he aimlessly wanders around the city, a metropolis that stands for all the cities in the world.  The tramp encounters a millionaire and a blind flower girl and, to the extent that the movie has a theme, the picture explores two different kinds of blindness, poised at the both ends of the socio-economic spectrum:  the millionaire is a playboy alcoholic -- when he is sober he can't recall (or pretends not to  recall) his generosity and suicidal impulses exhibited when he is drunk.  Since he is drunk in most of his scenes, he is metaphorically blind to the better, and more emotionally important, part of his life.  The flower girl lives with her grandmother in a tiny, meticulously clean apartment that operatically signifies extreme poverty.  The two women can't pay their rent, let alone finance an operation offered by a Viennese surgeon that "cures blindness."  Chaplin's tramp falls in love with the girl and embarks on efforts to make money to finance her surgery.  Ultimately, he steals from the millionaire, or accepts money that the man gives him when he is drunk, and goes to jail.  In the final scene, the ragged tramp meets the flower girl again -- she is now the proprietor of her own flower shop and can see.  This slender plot is the armature on which Chaplin supports a number of protracted gag sequences, all exquisitely choreographed -- the millionaire tries to kill himself by tying a rope connected to big rock around his waist and, then, diving into the river, the drunk millionaire and Chaplin carouse together, go dancing, and eat spaghetti, the little tramp gets into the ring with a prizefighter to try to finance the girl's surgery.  The boxing sequence, in particular, flows so naturally and has such a limpid precision to its staging that the sequence verges on a kind of poetic realism:  the faces of the boxers are strangely impassive, benumbed, it seems, and they aren't the savage, caricatured bruisers that you expect; the boxers move with feral grace and the scene is clinically lit to provide the sense that the footage is documentary in character.  Indeed, in many sequences, Chaplin's film seems to presage Italian neo-realist pictures such as Bicycle Thieves.  Chaplin is hard-sell for me -- I find the little tramp persona more irritating than ingratiating and, in close-up, the character's make-up, particularly his paitned eye-brows, is weirdly grotesque.  The little tramp is sexually amorphous and, in this film, flirts with the prizefighter in a strange, disconcerting way -- he also ends up in bed with the puzzled millionaire.  The bathos implicit in the plot requires that the film be made as a silent picture.  But the clarity of Chaplin's film making and its' extreme objectivity, economy, and precision are persuasive as to his genius.  In one scene, we see a cat wagging its tail on a window-sill; there's a flowerpot on the sill and we glimpse this detail as part of the long shot of a slum courtyard.  The viewer is tempted to interpret this detail as a mere punctum, a bit of local color, the sort of detail that Griffith might deploy to make the image, which is very stark, a little more picturesque.  But a couple shots later, the cat and the precariously perched flowerpot are the crux of a gag.  Everything fits together with geometric precision.