Great Day in the Morning

Great Day in the Morning  (1956) is an unusual film noir Western directed by Jacques Tourneur.  The film is so willfully perverse that, perhaps, some critics might find a masterpiece lurking in all of the picture's confused gloom.  I'm not sure myself whether the picture is some sort of idiosyncratic gem or, rather, a mess comprised of half-digested fragments from a once well-known novel -- often when novels are adapted to the screen, the filmmakers retain elements from the text that are striking, but that may not match the narrative distilled from the book in the process of translating it to the screen.  In fact, movies adapted from novels are often characterized by episodes and, even, shadowy figures that don't fit into the film's plot, necessarily much simplified from the novel, but that have been retained from the source to show fidelity to the book.  I have the sense that many of the curious, dead-end incidentals visible in this Western derive from motifs in the book that may have been meaningful in that context but not in the film as finally cut.  (Tourneur is reported to have said that Great Day was a failure because the script deleted too many scenes in the novel integral to understanding the action.)  As it stands, the movie is startling in many respects with a weirdly complex plot, although, ultimately, the picture is too diffuse to be entirely interesting -- the ending in particular is utterly bizarre in every respect and so unsatisfying that one suspects both irony and contempt for the audience in the film's last third.

The picture starts in a promising way with a odd vertical gunfight in a defile in the Colorado Rockies.  A lone gunman battles Indians who are almost directly above him, runs out of shells, and is saved only by the intervention of three riders on the adjacent ridge.  This sequence is effectively designed and packs a visceral punch.  The landscapes are high Rockies -- meadows and deep valleys with spiky snow-capped peaks looming overhead.  The film was shot in old Silverton and environs and the landscapes are splendid and, in fact, unusual for a Western -- we're used to deserts and high chaparral (because that landscape was endemic to southern California) and so it is refreshing to see a film that features real vistas of the great Rocky Mountains.  (The effect is similar to Tourneur's greatest film, the idiosyncratic Canyon Passage, a movie set in the dense forests of Oregon -- a  precursor to Altmans vision of the far west in McCabe and Mrs. Miller.)  Almost immediately after being saved by the three riders, the hero, improbably named Owen Pentecost (Robert Stack) comes close to being shot by a fanatical pro-Union man among the horseman.  The film is set in 1861 just before Fort Sumter and sectarian passions have reached a homicidal pitch. The film's rhetoric sometimes soars and the characters invective is equally inventive -- Southerners such as the hero (he's from South Carolina) are called "slave-beating, slave-dealing traitors" and throughout the film the issue of chattel slavery surfaces in a variety of odd, displaced subtexts:  there is discussion "owning people' as employees or as lovers and the hero is threatened with "whipping."  The hero's nemesis, Jumbo Means (played by an immense Falstaffian Raymond Burr) founds a tavern across from Pentecost's place, The Free State Saloon, featuring a big mural of an African slave being freed from his chains.  The film's climax involves a mini-Civil war in the mining town in which a ragtag Union militia faces off against southern miners who are attempting to get their wagon loads of ore out of Colorado and into a slave state.  (The sound track also features iterations of well-known Civil war songs.)   The plot is almost ridiculously complex for 92 minutes movie.  Pentecost is pursued by two women, a blonde "good girl" who has come to the mining camp to found a women's dress shop and a dark-haired "jezebel", the saloon-girl Boston.  There is surprisingly explicit erotic byplay and the two women exert their wiles to seduce the reluctant, strangely ambivalent hero -- he seems to like rape:  he kisses the women violently, overcoming their resistance, but when they begin to respond with real passion and affection, he stalks out of the room.  (In an early scene, the saloon girl takes Pentecost to her room and the scene is set for a romantic interlude -- but when she turns away from him the cowboy passes out dead-drunk on the bed.)  With Boston's collusion, Pentecost acquires the town's peculiar saloon, "The Circus" owned by the elephant fetishist, Jumbo Means -- the saloon girl who is Means' mistress has tired of the fat man and rigs a game of chance so that Pentecost wins the bar on a bet.  Pentecost distributes mining claims to miners (Jumbo won these by cheating in poker games) and tells them that he will stake their claim so long as he is paid 50% of any earnings.  When one of the miners defies Pentecost and refuses to pay his share, there is a gunfight and the hero guns the man down.  This causes a riot in town since the shooting is viewed as a sectarian killing based on the hero's pro-Confederate background and the dead man' vehement Union persuasion.  Several people get killed in the shooting which is about to escalate into an all out civil war in the town when the local priest, beloved by all, gets in between the warring factions and is shot to death -- this quashes the riot.  The dead miner's son appears in town and Pentecost takes it upon himself to raise the boy -- he tells one of his girlfriends:  "When he learns to shoot, he'll fill me full of lead and save me the trouble of committing suicide."  There's some more gunfights and Pentecost is wounded.  His adopted son learns that Pentecost killed his father but can't bring himself to shoot him.  When Boston calls Jumbo "fat", he knifes her to death.  (This summary leaves out lots of scenes about love, lust, and female erotic curiosity.)The confederate-sympathizers among the miners have filled the Circus Saloon's warehouse with gold.  Pentecost, now more or less recovered, agrees to help the men get the contraband ore out of the State -- he does this for payment of $100,000.  (Throughout the film, Pentecost is viewed as a pure mercenary -- he states that "I have undying loyalty to myself."  Pentecost's mercenary attitude is just a bolder, less hypocritical kind of war profiteering than Jumbo Means uses to line his pockets.  Characteristic of film noir, the hero suspects everyone's motive and the movie is brutally honest in its demonstration that war fever is generally just war profiteering -- Pentecost derisively says:  "A man's got to be sentimental about a war.")  The climax of the film involves Pentecost helping the miner's escape with their loot -- so that they can better finance the southern cause.  This part of the film, about the last quarter, is shot in very, very dark day-for-night and can't really be clearly seen.  (The denouement begins with dream-like gunfight obviously staged in a California studio --- this sets the tone of unreality for what follows.)  At one point, hand grenades are used to create a diversion and I hoped that the flash of the bombs would show me what was happening in the dark -- but the bombs create huge clouds of black smoke and almost no light at all.  Pentecost pilots a wagon as diversion and the Union militia pursues him until the wagon is destroyed.  He, then, hides in a cave and we await a final shoot-out.  But, instead, it turns out -- unbeknownst to us -- that there is another way into the cave and that one of Union sympathizers, in fact, an officer in the militia, gets the bead on Pentecost from behind. (Pentecost has been this man's rival for the hand of the blonde "good" girl).  The Union soldier spares Pentecost and, even, gives him a canteen to take on his hike to place where he can catch a coach from Santa Fe.  Pentecost promises to fight against the Union, but as a "private" and, thus, the film ends.  The film's effect is that of a series of exquisitely staged episodes that are only very remotely stitched together by the theme of ongoing civil war -- that is, enmity among brothers.  This theme seems so problematic that the film itself threatens to dissolve into a weird chaos of competing themes and issues.  The dialogue is exceedingly brilliant -- almost annoying so:  the film glories in the ultra-hardboiled rat-a-tat epigrams of a noir detective movie.  The movie was written by Lesser Samuels -- he wrote another great noir, Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole.  The dialogue is all a form of demotic poetry.  The darkness in the end signifies that Tourneur doesn't know what to do with this material and can't figure out a way to convincingly stage some of the confrontations -- so he just plunges everything into dense blue gloom.  This contrasts with the very clear design of the opening third of the film.  Jumbo's "Circus" saloon has yellow walls covered with hieroglyphic-like figures:  Tourneur achieves fascinating graphic effects by posing his characters against the hieroglyphs and glowing yellow field of the painted walls -- it's a proto-Godard effect that is very startling.  Until the descent of darkness, the gun battles are effectively staged and the town is full of vivid minor characters, including one man named "Cannibal" -- "just because you eat somethin' wrong once, doesn't mean you should have to live with it all your life," the big beefy guy says.  I assume "Cannibal" is based on the famous Alferd Packer, the Colorado cannibal who was condemned to hang because in the words of the Hinsdale County Judge, "there weren't but seven Dimmycrats in the county and Packer done ate five of 'em."  (Packer was later pardoned for his misdeeds.) 

It came from Outer Space

It came from Outer Space is a 1953 flying saucer picture, directed in a workmanlike manner by Jack Arnold and based on a story by Ray Bradbury.  `The picture enjoys a reasonably high status among critics -- it's supposedly one of the best of the genre.  I don't like the picture much and, indeed, must admit I'm not really a fan of Jack Arnold's films.  (He also made Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Incredible Shrinking Man.)

It came from Outer Space was produced by Universal Studios, renowned for its horror films in the thirties.  The German expressionist designs that made Universal pictures remarkable in that era are gone without a trace by 1953.  The shadowy, womblike grottoes in the Frankenstein and Dracula films have been replaced with well-lit cubicles, crisply designed sets that seem to be film adaptations of some kind of abstract owner's or operator's manual -- everything seems enclosed, even the outdoor shots and there are no shadows to speak of:  rather everything is bathed in a clear, anonymous and clinically bright light.  Even shots in an underground mine or purporting to be outside at night (shot in unconvincing "day for night") are executed with a weird administrative efficiency -- the shots never seem to be "realistic" but they aren't expressionistic or atmospheric either:  rather, the images present us with a series of transparent signs:  the desert set stands for the desert even though it is obviously shot indoors on a soundstage, a fireplace stands as a sign for a house, a small town, in this film Sand Rock inArizona, stands for an America besieged by alien (Communist) forces.  The signs are not only uninteresting and schematic in themselves; generally, the things they stand for are also obvious and banal. 

A science writer named Joe Putnam and his girl, Ellen, a beautiful brunette, see a meteor crash into the desert near the remote town of Sand Rock, Arizona.  The meteor has gouged out a big crater in the desert, somewhat similar to the meteor crater near Winslow, Arizona.  Joe goes into the crater, finds a space ship, and sees an alien, before a landslide covers up the UFO.  A monster, or several monsters, hustle around the desert.  When people see them -- the shots are POV from the monster's perspective (to avoid having to show the critters) -- the folk scream hysterically and collapse in puffs of white fog.  No one believes Joe's claims that the aliens are among us. The monsters are benign -- they are just borrowing people's bodies in order to collect hardware to repair their space ship.  (The people who have been borrowed for this task are affectless, talk in a monotone, and walk stiffly in tandem -- they are assembling copper wire and "metallic parts" to fix their UFO:  this aspect of the plot was later made a part of Spielberg's ET, the construction of the device improvised from hardware with which to "phone home.")  Conveniently, the monster's space-ship has fallen into the rear galleries of an abandoned mine and so the cave where the repairs are underway can be accessed through the mine adits.   This allows the protagonist to spy on the monsters from within the mine.  After about half the town is taken hostage, including Ellen, the hero's girlfriend, there is a confrontation -- by this time the monsters, who look just like zombie townspeople have constructed a very cheesy-looking death ray.  There are some tense negotiations but all is well -- the space monsters are just trying to escape and they jet away from earth leaving the hero to sententiously remarks that "someday they will return."   Many elements of this film were later incorporated into Don Siegel's 1956 sci-fi noir The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a much better film.  It came from Outer Space is based on an plot premise that is ubiquitous in fifties sci-fi and horror films -- the idea is that we will never be able to interact cooperatively with space aliens because the damned things are just too hideously ugly. (For instance, Howard Hawks' film about a space monster found frozen in an Antarctic glacier, The Thing.)   It's probably tasteless to make this reference and unhistorical to boot, but I see this motif in terms of the struggles in this country at that time involving Civil Rights -- race is about a kind of human being who doesn't look like us, but that, nonetheless, has all our rights and responsibilities.  Films like It came from Outer Space and The Thing (among a hundred others) posit that we can't get along with aliens because they look different from us and we find them esthetically unappealing.  It's interesting to note that this motif has vanished from recent films -- no one has any problem with the octopus-monsters in Denis Villeneuve's Arrival because they are ugly.  The problem with the theory that ugliness necessarily breeds conflict is that we live in a world full of things like centipedes and tarantulas and scorpions and the mere existence of the genre of the giant insect movie demonstrates that people are very, very fascinated with what seems ugly and alien to them.  The monstrous and ugly exercise a strong appeal -- otherwise, why would be there such things as freak shows?  Accordingly, the whole premise for many 1950's horror and science fiction films seems fundamentally flawed.  One is reminded of Marlene Dietrich's exclamation after the Beast has turned into the Prince in Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast:  "Give me back my beautiful beast."  In Arnold's film, the space critters are disembodied large foreheads with a single small eye and, perhaps, some ivy-like tentacles dangling from their Easter Island-sized jumbo brow -- the creatures aren't even frightening; they just look ridiculous.  Originally made in 3D, the picture has the UFO fly straight into the lens to explode, features some impressive rock falls with boulders lurching at the audience, and, finally, not one but two helicopter landings in which the helicopter seems to land right in your lap. 

The Spanish Trip

For a few months, this summer I passed a theater near Lake and Hennepin that seemed to be always screening The Spanish Trip, Michael Winterbottom's new installment in a series of films featuring the British comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. I drove by, saw some other films, but never went to this comedy.   (Coogan is familiar to American audiences -- he has played a British villain a few times and wrote the sentimental, if very good, Philomena, the story of an Irish woman cruelly separated from her baby at birth who, in her old age, searches for the lost child and is reunited with him.  Judy Dench starred in the movie.  Brydon is not well-known to Americans; he is something like an even more maniacal Jim Carrey, not conventionally handsome but irresistibly engaging with sad puppy-dog eyes and an ingratiating manner.)  These "trip" films, no less than the "Road to ---" series starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, are highly formulaic squabbling "buddy" pictures.  In London, Coogan and Brydon, who play grotesque versions of themselves, are assigned a trip -- the two men go somewhere, rent a car, and drive through picturesque landscapes that are lovingly photographed.  They stay at atmospheric country inns and eat world-class, high-tech meals.  The men quarrel with one another and amuse themselves by doing pitch-perfect impressions of celebrities -- these scenes seem to be improvised with the actors striving to one-up each other.  In The Spanish Trip, for instance, Coogan imitates Mick Jagger doing an impression of Michael Caine in Zulu; later, Brydon imitates Marlon Brando playing the role of Torquemada, the grand inquisitor.  Some of the impressions are dizzying -- three layers deep:  Mick Jagger imitating Anthony Hopkins who is doing an impression of James Dean.  These sequences, which involve much braying and strutting and shouting, invariably take place while the men are eating at fantastically elite and expensive restaurants -- one of the film's curious aspects is that wild gesticulations of the two stars are intercut with images of the other patrons who seem to be completely oblivious to the weird antics occurring only a few feet from them.  There is some aspect of My Dinner with Andrei in these films -- typically, Coogan plays himself as a searcher, someone on the prowl for erotic adventures, a man unhappy unless he is moving through strange and exotic landscapes; by contrast, Brydon plays hedgehog to Coogan's fox: he is down-to-earth, married with two children and a devoted wife, and the film contrasts his happy, if seemingly dull, home life with Coogan's perpetual, Faustian anhedonia -- his inability to be happy or to find any kind of lasting satisfaction in the places he visits.  In The Trip to Spain, Coogan becomes increasingly distressed as the film progresses -- his American agents aren't making any headway in finding him roles in the USA (this is a constant theme in these films), his girlfriend is pregnant with another man's child, and his own son, who is supposed to meet him in Mallorca can't come because he has caused the pregnancy of his 19 year old girl friend; worst of all he can't get a film project "green-lighted."  The final scenes in the film embody the contrast between the two men -- Brydon goes home to have sex with his wife, interrupted by a crying baby; then, we see him taking his older child to school; Coogan goes to Morocco, gets lost, and is last seen standing alone in the Sahara desert without water and with a stalled Land Rover -- a bus is approaching, a vision almost like a mirage, but it is unclear whether the people on the bus are friendly or, perhaps, something more problematic. 

I never went to see The Spanish Trip when it was in the theaters.  It seemed to me too inconsequential.  But the show is worth watching on DVD or streaming on Netflix.  The picture is pleasant enough and, in fact, the Spanish Trip is very carefully devised -- the imagery circles around Don Quixote (Coogan plays Quixote and Brydon plays Sancho Panza) in a photographic shoot at La Mancha; Coogan says that Don Quixote, in his delusion, thought country inns were castles.  Brydon points out that the two men are staying in actual castles now repurposed to be country inns.  The song "The Windmills of your Mind" re-occurs at various times and there is also some discussion of the tragedies in the Spanish Civil War.  Brydon and Coogan don't seem to like one another all that much and the film doesn't make any effort to soften their jousting -- they seem to want to inflict actual harm on one another and a lot of their banter is very harsh.  This is a buddy film in which the protagonist aren't buddies at all.  Brydon's impressions get on everyone's nerves and the film doesn't shy away from this unpleasantness either -- in one extended scene in Granada, there is conversation about the "Moor's last sigh" (the expulsion of the Moor's from Spain):  Brydon interprets Moor as Roger Moore and does an extended and very irritating imitation of Moore as James Bond.  (Both men are obsessed with impressions of the various actors playing James Bond -- there are also innumerable impressions of Sean Connery.)  Brydon won't give up on the impression and runs it into the ground and, then, some -- everyone is obviously very upset with his showing off in this way and it's not really funny and, even seems culturally insensitive, a way to not talk about the mistreatment of the Muslims in Spain or the Alhambra or something possible relevant and meaningful -- so the whole scene plays as more (Moor or Moore) than a little bit cringe-worthy.  (The next morning, Coogan goes to the Alhambra before dawn to avoid the tourists, drags himself through its various wonders, and doesn't have much to say about the experience which is shown to be strangely disheartening.  The places where the men eat seem to serve tiny plates with elaborate constructed foods on them -- the film is designed in a similar way.  You get just enough beautiful landscape and gorgeous architecture to keep you hungry.  Winterbottom cuts away from the fantastically picturesque mountains and canyons and old castles before you are satiated -- he leaves you always wanting a little more than you are given.  As the movie progresses, the self-assured and insouciant Coogan becomes more and more beat down -- at the end of the movie, he looks old and very weary.  Brydon, by contrast, seems revived by his family.  The film begins with a beautiful song, Louis Armstrong singing about the fog in old London town and, at the end of the movie, the golden mist rolls into Gibralter from Africa seducing Coogan into taking a car-ferry across the strait into Morocco. The film isn't really narrative and its not documentary -- it's comical in parts but not really funny and there is a tinge of melancholy about the whole enterprise.  The best way to describe the picture is that it is a species of film poetry -- variations on a theme that involves vague impressions of Spain, Don Quixote, the Spanish Civil War, mist and rain, all suffused in a rich atmosphere of middle-aged disenchantment.  The movie is too slight for a theater but works fine, indeed, more than fine, in fact, on TV.
   

Wormwood (final episodes)

Errol Morris' Wormwood doesn't exactly develop and the documentary remains both literally and figuratively stalled.  (The room in which the protagonist, Eric Olson, harangues Errol Morris has a big clock on the wall always set to about 2:35 -- the time when Eric's father jumped, or was flung, from a 10th story window in a downtown New York hotel in 1953.)  In the last three episodes, nothing really new is revealed and the malaise merely deepens; the Stygian gloom gets gloomier and the ambiguities get more ambiguous. 

Proceedings reach their utmost delirium in the 4th episode when Eric Olson has his father's corpse exhumed so that the body can be examined by a forensic scientist for signs of wrongdoing.  Olson is a great talker and he dramatizes an awful dilemma -- he is trapped in a narrative that he is creating through his investigation but which is, ultimately, completely destructive to him.  The body is dug up (in 1993) after being interred for 40 years and examined and, of course, exactly as everyone expected, the corpse shows signs of violence unrelated to the fall from the window -- there is a big contusion above the mummy's eye, an indication that Olson was knocked unconscious before being shoveled out the window to his death on the pavement 10 stories below.  An important element of the film is Freudian -- the documentary demands that we regard Eric Olson as Hamlet, an unwilling, but obsessed son summoned by his father's ghost to work out the details of Frank Olson's demise.  (Eric Olson remarks that the corpse was well-preserved and that he touched his father's skull and looked at his penis -- this latter detail in furtherance of the film's oedipal theme.)  Later, Olson reviews CIA assassination manuals -- he notes that there are dozens of them extant -- and learns that the agency suggested that killing be accomplished by knocking the victim unconscious by a blow to the temple and, then, throwing the body out a window "75 or more feet above the ground."  Olson confronts William Colby, the CIA director, and persists in misguided and ruinous lawsuits.  (Colby apparently kills himself, although this is ambiguous).  His lawsuit is ultimately dismissed under the Federal Tort Claims act because the Judge concludes that Frank Olson was intentionally murdered -- paradoxically, the law affords relief only if the government's actions were negligent; intentional acts, such as murder, are protected by sovereign immunity.  At the outset, Frank Olson's family discussed the matter with the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh -- Hersch, who broke the My Lai massacre story, has sources in the CIA and he is able to immediately uncover the CIA

Under an Arctic Sky

Under an Arctic Sky is a 2017 documentary about surfing on the northwest fjords in Iceland.  If you are a fan of blowing snow, white-outs, ice, and dangerous driving, you'll be enthused about this forty-minute film.  There are about seven or 8 minutes of surfing footage that also looks so bone-chilling and unpleasant that it's hard to enjoy.  The protagonists repeatedly tell the camera that their hands and feet are numb.  They have  to knock icicles off their surf boards before bounding into the deadly-looking green water.  Although I am sure that the young men featured in the film are fantastically strong, they look like southern California girls with long, blonde hair and somewhat equine features -- they scamper about daintily on their frozen feet on the lava shores of the Icelandic fjords.  (Everyone looks Hitler-youth Nordic, androgynous, and epicene.)The kids fly to Iceland in February when the sun rises at 9:45 at Rekjavik (and sets at about 3:30 pm).  They run into a blizzard, but undeterred, drive 11 hours over ice-covered highways (encountering white-outs created by speeding trucks) to reach someplace on the coast of northwest Iceland.  The highway scenes probably don't look like much to someone from California or Hawaii, but they are sufficiently harrowing to a Minnesotan to make this prosaic aspect of the film, in some ways, the most thrilling -- I can readily recognize the dangers the boys are facing.  (This is not so much true during the surfing scenes).  The lads go out on a schooner looking for "gnarly" waves, but just when they find some nice "point breaks" off the headlands of a fjord, another blizzard blows down upon them and they have to retreat to shore.  They drive some more in awful conditions, having to dig one another out of snow drifts when the caravan slides off the road.  Then, the Northern Lights shimmer over the Arctic landscape and the boys go surfing under that display of green and yellow and pink flares.  The whole point of the scene is to capture images of surfers skimming along monster waves under the pillars and rays of the aurora borealis.  The director, Chris Bukhard, gets those shots but they seem strangely unreal -- the waves are lit with some sort of incandescent phosphorescence, as if there were huge spotlights under the water and the surfers are far from shore, tiny figures coasting along the flanks of the big, glassy swells.  It's the sort of thing that makes you cry out:  "Awesome!" -- which is the sole response that the film seeks to elicit. 

Wormwood (and American Vandal)

Wormwood is a chilly immersion in a river of Stygian gloom.  I've now watched three episodes of the six program series available this month on Netflix.  Directed by Errol Morris, the program has an eerie, disembodied aspect -- voices, ghostly faces, documents, and grim-looking corridors and hotel rooms appear in the murk and, at first, the entire enterprise is off-putting, abstract, and perilously close to self-parody.  (See, in that regard, the series American Vandal, another plunge into the river Styx, but this venture a parody of extended, immensely detailed-oriented true crime shows such as Making a Murderer.  In American Vandal, someone has spray-painted penises on twenty cars owned by faculty at a Midwestern high school -- the vandalism has been pinned on one of the usual suspects, a stoner reprobate named Dylan.  But Dylan protests that he is innocent and the show evokes the entire mechanism of film-maker-manufactured indignation at injustice, ritualistic forensic science, and talking-head witnesses inadvertently exposing a culture of ignorance, poverty, and abject victimization existing at the lower fringes of the criminal justice system.  Vandal is intended as satiric parody, but the show's appropriation of the standard tropes of this kind of programming is so pitch-perfect that the audience loses track of the fact that the whole thing is intended as a larky joke -- you actually yearn to know who really spray-painted the "dicks on the cars" and the show engenders considerable and authentic suspense.)  Wormwood involves a scientist complicit in the Department of Defense secret biological and chemical weapons program.  A couple days after Thanksgiving in November 1953, the scientist, Frank Olson, committed suicide by flinging himself out of a 11th floor window at the Statler Hotel in New York -- a purgatorial property that looks somewhat like the nightmarish corridors in the hotel figuring in the Coen Bros. Barton Fink.  Olson was under CIA custody at the time of his death.  Beginning in 1973, DOD documents revealed that Olson was part of a study as to the effects of LSD and that he may have died while under the influence of that drug.  Wormwood is about paranoia and obsession and it shows how the extended Olson family was fundamentally destroyed by uncertainties relating to how Frank Olson died.  The program is structured around an extended interview between Frank's son, Eric Olson and the film maker Errol Morris.  Morris doesn't use his celebrated Interrogatron in this movie -- instead, we see him interviewing the fantastically intelligent and loquacious Eric Olson in some kind of institutional setting. There is a sense that Eric Olson, himself, may be clinically insane -- and this notion is enhanced by the grim room where he tells his story to the inert, almost entirely silent, Morris.  Olson is tall and extremely pale and has an unearthly look about him and Morris is heavy-set with a shaved head that makes him look like a survivor of a Russian penal colony.  None of the people in the film are conventionally attractive and so they all seem, at first at least, garishly ogre-ish, almost monstrous in the film's huge close-ups -- faces half-drowned in deep mahogany-shadow; everyone is lit as if sitting for a Rembrandt portrait.  Encircling the interview sequences are reconstructions of the events leading to Olson's death.  These reconstructions involve baroque camera-angles, strange obstructions of some or most of the image field, and are very extensive -- they comprise a saturnine film within a film:  Peter Sarsgaard plays Frank Olson as morose to the point of being comatose; a rogue's gallery of CIA operatives, some of them quite famous, accompany the hero on his via dolorosa.  (Participating in Olson's demise was Sidney Gottlieb, a CIA assassin who later killed Patrice Lumumba in the Congo.) These parts are also played by plain-looking actors -- including Tim Blake Nelson and Bob Balaban (playing the sinister Dr. Abrahamson, an allergist, who treats Sarsgaard's paranoia with doses of Jack Daniels apparently laced with LSD.)  The film is filled with bizarre interludes -- the CIA takes Frank Olson to a Broadway musical, a Rodgers and Hammerstein production featuring an aria called "No other Love"; this song is repetitive visual leit motif that alternates with images from Hamlet (in the Lawrence Olivier film), documentary shots of the war in Korea, where the US is accused of using "germ bombs" and where American POWs are "brainwashed", possibly through the use of LSD or other psycho-active drugs.  At one point, Sarsgaard is said to have danced to the song "Hound Dog" and, then, stood on his head in the corner of his room -- although Eric Olson thinks this is probably a lie.  Sarsgaard was surreptitiously  administered LSD in a snifter of Cointreau at a place named Deep Creek Lake -- he was at a fishing lodge with other CIA and DOD scientists.  He's convinced that he "failed the acid test" and that the CIA now wants him to "disappear".  The filmed re-enactments collide with interviews which detail years of litigation and government cover-up.  If the story seems familiar its because Seymour Hersh reported on it in the mid-seventies.  Although Olson and his family members, now all dead except for Eric, seem modest, middle-of-the-road bourgeoisie this is a misapprehension.  At one point Eric, who is psychologist himself working on a "collage" mode of therapy at Harvard, notes that a couple friends joined him for a "sort of séance" in Room 1018A (the place from which his father jumped or was pushed):  the friends are Betty Lifton (the wife of the famous Harvard psychologist and political activist, Robert Jay Lifton) and the son of Marshall McLuhan.  So there's more going on here than meets the eye.  The show is intentionally slow-moving and repetitive -- it's also obsessive and eerie:  the program seeks to recreate in the viewers the general paranoiac malaise that led to the hero's death and is reasonably successful in that venture.  Morris directs from a screenplay written by others and so the film has a curious hybrid aspect -- it's not entirely Morris' work although recognizably a product of his style of film-making. 
 

Singin' in the Rain (some reflections)

Popular art pretends spontaneity.  (This truism applies, in fact, to most art).  Singin' in the Rain (1952, Donen and Kelly) operates according to odd schisms, divisions, disarticulations.  The film offers us a contrast between the popular, spontaneous cantabile of the movie musical and the highly artificial affectations of the Broadway ballet exemplified by the 17 minute-long "Broadway Melody" sequence providing the first of the film's two climaxes.  Kelly's elaborate and allegorical "Broadway Melody" is supposed to provide the emotional and esthetic climax for the film.  This climax is followed by the movie's narrative denouement, a sequence that is the opposite of the intensely theatrical and expressionistic "Broadway Melody".  "Broadway Melody" is an overt contrivance; the film's narrative climax, following fast on the heels of the dance-ballet represents the unmasking of a contrivance, the demystification, as it were, of the machinery of film -- an intensely analytical and schematic behind-the-scenes shot shows Lina Lamont, the silent film star cursed with a terrible voice, lip-synching the show-tune "Singin' in the Rain" while the petite Debbie Reynolds provides the actual singign from behind the stage's curtains.  It's no accident that the song selected for the narrative climax -- a scene that results in the unmasking of the carefully contrived artifice that Lina Lamont is a great singer -- is a number that previously was defined by its "spontaneity".  The happy lover, Don Lockwood (played by Gene Kelly) walks home in the rain and "spontaneously" expresses his jubilation by dancing through puddles and bathing in the fountains of downspouts.  The sequence is staged to represent a spontaneous, flood of exuberant emotion and Kelly foregoes his more balletic choreography (with the exception of the iconic image of the dancer posed on the streetlight) for almost childish gestures involving play in the rain -- in one shot, he stomps like a four-year old through deep puddles.  The film's climax accordingly embodies the division between artifice and spontaneity that is central to almost all (with the exception of "Broadway Melody") of the film's dance sequences.


Consider "Moses Supposes", a song-and-dance sequence in which Dennis O'Connor as Cosmo and Kelly's Lockwood riff on the rhythmic tongue-twisters that an elocution coach is using to train silent actors to speak like British thespians in their new sound film productions.  The song and the accompanying dance, which is virtuosic in many respects, is supposed to spontaneously originate in the high spirits and satiric sensibility of Don and Cosmo, two rebels who see the elocution classes as high-brow hokum and can't resist mocking the pretense that cinema actors should speak like John  Gielgud or Lawrence Olivier -- again note that the premise of the sequence is the contrast between the ordinary demotic spoken in "realistic" moving pictures and the highfalutin' oratory characteristic of the stage.  But the point is that the elaborate song-and-dance number just emerges spontaneously, as a reaction of the characters to the situation in which they find themselves.  Other notable, and extraordinarily complex and intricate song and dance numbers in the film have the same character -- most notably the song "Good Mornin'" in which the trio comprised of Debbie Reynolds, O'Connor, and Gene Kelly dance with the camera climaxing the sequence by a jazz-dance run that charges toward the lens which retreats precipitously as the actors move up and over furniture that obliging flips onto its side as they approach.  Viewing these sequences, the audience is put into a divided mode of perception, consistent with the other innumerable divisions that drive the film by invoking a kind of "compare and contrast" sensibility in the spectator.  These dance sequences are, obviously, fantastically contrived and the result of the most intricate and tiresome preparation -- everything has been rehearsed to within an inch of its life and there is no room for improvisation:  the dances are literally matters in which a half foot too far in one direction or another would be calamitous, even, perhaps, life-threatening.  And, yet, at the same time the viewer is led to a fictional "suspension of belief" in which one part of our mind obligingly interprets the songs and dances as the spontaneous, improvised, wholly natural expression of strong emotion.  Thus, we find ourselves viewing the dance scenes with a double perception -- they are, at once, intensely prepared and artificial constructions involving elaborate camera motion correlating with the supposedly spontaneous motions of the actors (dozens of feet of rail on which the camera glides and vertiginous swooping crane shots) while at the same time wholly spontaneous, sudden, improvised eruptions of music and gesture that embody the emotions of the characters.  Twice in the film, the direct clash between spontaneity and elaborate preparation is made manifest -- of course, this is theme of the film's cruel, but necessary, climax and, also, the first overt love duet between Don Lockwood and the aspiring chorine played by Debbie Reynolds:  in the latter scene, Lockwood leads the ingénue (obviously much younger than him) into an empty soundstage, contrives an elaborate set with a sunset, purple skies, and wind blowing the fabric of Reynold's diaphanous dress (he sets up a wind machine); it seems that it is only after these elaborate preparations that Lockwood can announce his supposedly "spontaneous" love for Reynold's character.  Thus, the proclamation of love itself, supposedly the outgrown of a spontaneous feeling is disclosed, as being a complex and densely staged artifice.  (It's fascinating that this vast empty sound-stage and the wind machine blowing a diaphanous veil re-appears in the jazz ballet "Broadway Melody"; Cyd Charisse playing a gangster's moll dances a duet with Kelly that features the same metaphysically empty but bright soundstage, a vast abyss like the sky in the earlier love scene, through which the characters spin and whirl while a hidden wind machine makes voluptuous patterns in the woman's 60 foot long, lace veil.  How are we supposed to view the replication of imagery, although somewhat disguised, that we saw in the film's narrative in the climactic ballet?  Is Lockwood drawing upon his experiences on the soundstage with Debbie Reynold's as a basis for this ballet?  Or, are we supposed to view the experience of falling in love as being poetically expressed by certain archetypes -- the empty but vast field of light containing the lovers, the rapturous wind  (think of Dante's Paolo and Francesca) of passion?  Or is there an implication that all love is based on some kind of mutual and obsessive self-delusion -- the obvious contrivance manufactured by the lover in the sound stage is parodied and exposed, as it were, by being repeated in the ecstatic, but essentially ridiculous dance in the "Broadway Melody" sequence.  And if this latter interpretation is a correct one, then, what does this presage for Lockwood's romance with Debbie Reynold's plucky ingénue -- the scene with the gangster's moll ends in disappointment:  the woman is a vacuous illusion and she fades away.  Is this the fate of the love between Lockwood and Reynold's little chorus-girl?)



Viewed in the era of Harvey Weinstein, Singin' in the Rain embodies all sorts of queasy forms of sexism and, in fact, viewed in the light of Hollywood's sexual exploitation of women, the film's narrative climax seems wrong-headed and, even, a little bit nasty.  First, the film establishes an ambience of what we would regard as general and pervasive sexual exploitation.  Lockwood assumes that Debbie Reynolds will immediately grant him access to her bedroom -- these leads to their initial spat.  Dance sequences show crowds of willing women spinning around a single elegantly dressed and powerfully accoutered male (top hats, cane and tails).  Lockwood, like Donald Trump, blithely invades a dressing room full of half-naked chorus girls searching for Reynold's character (do you suppose it is indicative that I can't recall her name in the film?)  In the dressing room, a world-weary chorus girl bluntly propositions Lockwood.  When Reynold's dancer encounters Lockwood a second time, she is part of a sexist display of Betty-Boop-type chorines; she herself bursts from inside of a cake in a classic trope signifying female availability and male dominion -- she's provided as a delectable morsel for the powerful studio bosses at the party.  Lina Lamont (played as big, dumb blonde by Jean Hagen) is subjected to elocution exercises in which she repeatedly struggles with pronouncing the word "can't" -- of course, by the end of the lesson, she has elongated her vowels to be saying something that sounds very much like "cunt."  Later, the word "bush" is repeatedly used in a leering sequence in which a recording device is concealed in potted plant -- "I can't make love to a bush!" Lina Lamont loudly wails.   The next shot shows a close-up of her bosom with a hand groping her breasts -- the hand turns out to belong to a female costume attendant who is putting a microphone into Lamont's bodice.  In this world, all relationships are deemed to be instrumental.  Lina Lamont has no time for the impoverished, if devilishly handsome, Don Lockwood until she learns that he is being groomed as a star -- then, she works desperately to seduce him. 



Lina Lamont is clearly no novice and has been around the studio long enough to understand what men want and how to deliver the goods.  And there is a way in which she can be seen to be a kind of feminist (or post-feminist) heroine in this film.  Lamont precipitates the narrative climax by standing on her rights.  She has a contract, she declares, and she is going to sue unless she is accorded the right to control her own image.  At this point in the film, the image includes the notion that she has a beautiful speaking voice and can sing like a nightingale (these attributes courtesy of Debbie  Reynolds).  Nonetheless, it is Lamont who is empowered, if only briefly by the film's climax.  She is insists that she controls her publicity and will not be silenced.  One of the film's central themes relates to the contrast between image as a kind of speech (and publicity) and silence.  Lamont thinks her voice, which is an angular, nasal horror, is beautiful and wants to speak in her own voice -- indeed, she delivers her final defense to an audience in her own crass, sharp, and vulgar diction.  By contrast, the mousy and subordinate Debbie Reynolds, who becomes more and more a thrall to Gene Kelly's debonair Lockwood (exactly as he plotted in the opening scenes) is content to stand behind the curtain, out of the lime-light and, in effect, be silenced.  The film's narrative conclusion is, therefore, profoundly ambivalent -- the powerful woman, seen at a party surrounded by a crowd of well-dressed gents, is a "cunt"; she's reduced to a bad joke at the end of the film and dashes off-screen never to be seen again.  But, there's a distinctly uncomfortable aspect to this climax:  the woman protected by a contract is humiliated, stripped of her power, and, as it were, exposed.  A feminist reading of the film posits Lina Lockwood, who is willing to destroy another woman to maintain her power, as a kind of problematic heroine. 



(In Singin' in the Rain every movement and every gesture reveals the capacity to turn into dance.  This is evident in the final sequence in which a trio of men -- the studio boss, Lockwood, and Cosmo -- set out to expose Lina Lamont's inability to sing.  The men fall into a rhythmic walk and, literally, dance to the ropes controlling the stage's curtain.  They then hoist it with rhythmic and balletic pulling -- the whole thing is a mini-ballet and a kind of barbaric yawp of male dominance.  I say this because hoisting the curtains is a sort of "lynching" designed to punish Lina Lamont for her presumptuousness in maintaining that she has rights worthy of being enforced.)



I've been reading Virgil's Georgics particularly the fourth and some of that study has leaked into this essay.   The Fourth Georgic involves beekeeping and the poem imparts a lot of technical lore to the reader -- we learn how to make hives, what types of plants bees require, and, even, what to do when a colony of bees takes ill.  But a remarkable feature of this text is its so-called epylline -- that is, miniature "epic" -- the story of Aristaeus and his sick bees, a myth that manages to encompass both a duel with the shape-changing sea god Proteus and the sad tale of Orpheus and Eurydice.  The structure of Singin' in the Rain, accidentally of course, bears some resemblance to the narrative and mythological trappings of Virgil's Georgic.  Probably about half the film is an account of the technology and trade of movie-making --  we get all sorts of "inside dope" about how pictures are produced and how their effects are achieved.  (In one sequence, the film shows the hero on a sound stage where, at least, three or four movies are being simultaneously produced -- the sets are adjacent with their cameras and crews producing a period picture, a western, and a musical all elbow to elbow.)  The film also proposes two myths -- a broader mythology about the transition from silent to sound films and a more narrow, focused myth establishing the etiology of post-synchronized sound or dubbing.  Finally, the film, like Virgil's poem, digresses radically from its ostensible subject to present its epylline (or mini-epic) -- in this case, the "Broadway Melody" ballet, a 17 minute interruption in the narrative that seems to have only the most tangential connection to the story that supports it.  The interpretative problem for the viewer is to work out the connection between this miniature epic, the digression into an immense and complex ballet, and the rather prosaic technical details of the story presented by the main narrative.  In the case of Singin' in the Rain, the ballet seems to present in a fabulous, allegorical mode the career of Don Lockwood, and, in fact, possibly presages, in a melancholy way, the future of his relationship with Debbie Reynolds' character.  In the film's opening, we are shown a resume of Lockwood's ascent to Hollywood fame, a story that he narrates under the specious motto "Dignity, always dignity", on the red carpet while attending (with Lina) one of their films' premieres.  In images that are a counterpoint to Lockwood's pompous narrative, we see the hoofer and his buddy, Cosmo, playing some very rough gigs in vaudeville, then, migrating to Hollywood where the hero becomes a stunt man famous for his willingness to risk life and limb to get the shot.  The "Broadway melody" sequence similarly shows the young dancer, this time alone, appearing as a neophyte in the Babylon of Times Square, connecting with a raunchy agent, and, then, working his way up through performances in speakeasy saloons, then, in small vaudeville venues, and at last, appearing as a headliner in the Ziegfield follies.  (The ascent is similar to that shown in the prologue where Lockwood dances for nickels in pool hall as a little boy and is then shown with Cosmo performing in what seems to be a brothel.  Furthermore, the diction in the song repeated in the different venues where the hoofer performs becomes increasingly gentrified, the vowels becoming more and more elongated as the hero ascends in status -- this is precisely the point of the elocution scenes in the main narrative.)  After achieving professional success, the hero is seduced into the pursuit of the gangster's moll.  This is Cyd Charisse who certainly has one of the most startling first appearances in film history -- the hero's hat is knocked off and lands on the toes of her outstretched leg and she, then, draws the hoofer's attention from her feet up her fantastically long calves and thighs to her crotch (the camera makes this transit with the hero's eyes).  Charisse isn't exactly pretty or beautiful in his film -- her face is locked into expressionless Kabuki mask, a sort of bruised pouting, and she uses her body like a viper.  (She represents everything that Debbie Reynolds is not.)  The hero pursues the girl through various dreamlike sequences -- including one redolent of his courtship of the heroine in the principle narrative -- but she always eludes him.  At last, the hero abandons his pursuit of this Ewig Weibliche apparition and seems to be disconsolate.  But, then, he sees another young hoofer, dressed like a rube as he was a few years before -- the young man optimistically marches down Broadway and the hero understands that the cycle is beginning again with another new aspirant to show business fame.  The story implies two things -- that with hard work and persistence (and, of course, native talent), a good-looking tenacious kid can become a star; and that stardom doesn't bring happiness -- the hero remains romantically thwarted:  he can't seize the woman that he loves.  Finally, the story shows us that its lineaments are eternal -- the desire for show business fame, the pursuit of the loved woman and her loss at the very height of the hero's success are elements that mythically occur and re-occur.  People are fungible to the archetypes that they represent -- we fill various roles on this stage that is the world.  The effect of the ballet, therefore, is to recapitulate elements of the story's plot and to impart a sort of "dying fall" of melancholy to the proceedings -- it is desire that drives show-business and the nature of desire is that it can never be fully achieved.  (A final point:  the balletic "Broadway Melody" with its somewhat specious "beauty" and gravitas is the very opposite of the slogan that animates O'Connor's great set piece, his antic performance of "Make 'em Laugh" in which he hurls himself about with such reckless violence that he ends up knocked-out and presumably comatose when the number is over.  Throughout the film O'Connor mugs demoniacally and his eyes glitter and face seems completely malleable, rubber features that can be twisted in any way you want -- he represents the exact opposite of Don Lockwood's mantra:  "Dignity always Dignity.")


A key aspect of the "epylline" in Singin' in the Rain is to show a different aspect of the female as archet ype than those depicted in the narrative.  Debbie Reynolds is naïve, helpful, resourceful, and courageous, a good friend -- but she seems to belong to an entirely different species than the serpentine Cyd Charisse.  (She's also is very different from the grasping, vulgar, but, apparently, powerful Lina Lamont -- Reynolds has mousy brown hair compared to the Harlow blonde that Lamont sports and she seems to be about half her size; compared to Cyd Charisse, Debbie Reynolds looks squat and seems to have short troll-like legs.)  Throughout the film, there is an insistence that women are intrinsically fragmentary -- that is, no woman embodies in her own person all attractive qualities.  Debbie Reynolds is the sweet girl next door, but she isn't as beautiful or seductive as the terrifying Cyd Charisse, nor is she as ring-wise, savvy and conventionally beautiful as Lina Lamont.  Reynolds can sing but is too mousy to be a conventional movie star; Charisse is silent, a sinuous body that seeks to enfold the hero in her coils; Lina Lamont has beauty but can't speak without grating on the ear.  The female characters are all incomplete in some sense.  Their fragmentary nature contrasts with the Man in Full -- Gene Kelly who not only can sing and dance, but acts effectively, can effortlessly master the new diction required of sound pictures, and is so complete that he can even dance successfully entirely with himself (as in the "Singin' in the Rain" number.)  It's not accidental that the "Singin' in the Rain" sequence includes shots of the hero dancing in front of a window full of severed female heads -- it's a hat shop but the point, nonetheless, is made that all the women in the film are essentially fragmentary and incomplete.  Kelly's dominion over the film and all its aspects is dramatized by his close relationship with the Studio Boss and depicted in the credits for the movie -- the dances are all designed and choreographed by Gene Kelly and he shares a directorial credit with Stanley Donen.


Finally, the film is significant culturally for establishing in the minds of viewers a vast historical distance between silent movies and the talkies.  (The other film instrumental in exiling silent films to an obscure and grotesque past is 1950's Sunset Blvd.)  This movie was made less that 25 years after the silent era -- but the movie posits the silent films as existing in a sort of "fabulous, formless," and ancient darkness, as being antique ruins of a mysterious and outlandish previous world.  But the distance that separated those films from Singin' in the Rain is the considerably less than the time intervening between the first Star Wars film and this present day.