My Friend Totoro

Animation is labor-intensive and so, to avoid unnecessary expense, many cartoons employ generic backgrounds.  When the Roadrunner dashes cross-country, the buttes and cacti in the background just recycle in a loop of generic and abstract landscape.  In Hiyo Miyazaki's My Friend Totoro (1988), the teams of animators don't seem to imagine landscapes so much as they document, with photographic verisimilitude, real places.  In the 80 minute long film, characters sometimes amble or run along dirt paths and lanes.  Each of these thoroughfares is minutely particularized -- we see not just the yellowish dirt and gravel of the lane, but the incision of ruts in the dirt, the way that the rains have eroded the friable clay, constellations of gravel and pebbles as precise as the array of stars in the sky.  A tree is just not a green thing on a brown stick -- each of Miyazaki's trees is a exact replica of a living, breathing presence in the landscape.  I don't know any film so intensely committed to providing the experience of place:  landscapes, dwellings, weather, all of these aspects of the world are intensely imagined and expressed with intense quiddity --  there is an odd Heideggarian aspect to this film:  to dwell means to inhabit a place and exist in a particular relationship to it.  In My Friend Totoro displays to us artifacts of human existence in a lush, intensely green landscape:  the hills above the rice paddies which are painted in cells of luminous color like a canvas by Paul Klee, are full of ancient paths, strange weathered shrines, dense, mysterious thickets, and, breathing over the pastoral locus amoenus are winds just as precisely characterized as the sticks on the ground, the toad on the pebbled path, the enormous thunderheads billowing up over the humid hills and valleys.

These reflections on Miyazaki's film may obscure the fact that My Friend Totoro is a cartoon designed, it seems, for children with babbling pop tunes and titles showing dancing caterpillars and spiders among friezes of acorns.  The film's plot is like that of a bittersweet Ozu picture:  a young father with two daughters moves into an old farmhouse on a hillside overlooking a valley cultivated in rice paddies. The house has flocks of miniature goblins, furry black things called "soot sprites" -- these creatures are unsettling and scurry around like cockroaches but they are benign.  An elderly woman with the features of a witch (she's a neighbor) tells the two girls that she used to be able to see these spirits when she was a child -- apparently, adults can't perceive the presences that inhabit the landscape.  It is revealed that the family's mother is convalescing from some serious illness in a hospital about three-hours walk from the farmhouse.  The father is a professor and works in a nearby city (never shown in the film).  The pastoral landscape, as in Ozu, is contaminated by signs of urban civilization -- big powerlines on steel towers march across the countryside (and occasionally provide highways for spirits), buses stop at bus-stops, and there is a  little trolley-like train that we sometimes glimpse on ridges, profiled against the setting sun.  During the day, the father goes to work at the University and he, also, seems labor late into the night.  During the summer vacation, the two daughters, Sutsuki (who seems to be about ten) and the five-year-old Mai explore the landscape.  Near the house, there's a huge camphor tree immemorially old and towering, a world in itself with buttress roots, strange cavities and a  vast impenetrable crown of leaves looming over the landscape.  Mai keeps finding acorns strangely dropped to lead her into the thickets under the camphor tree.  In a glade, she sees a two peculiar and partially translucent spirits -- they are owl-shaped with tufted horns and walk on two legs.  Following the spirits, Mai falls (like Alice into Wonderland) down a sort of rabbit-hole that leads her to hidden alcove in the tree where a Totoro is sleeping.  A Totoro is an enlarged version of the little owl-shaped spirits, covered with yellowish fur and with a most featureless head -- the creature is big as an elephant, has slit eyes, a broad grin that emerges sometimes from beneath it's fur and no nose to speak of -- the Totoro is gentle and sluggish; Mai falls asleep pillowed on its belly.  The whole encounter seems like a dream and the next day when Mai tries to locate the creature to show it to Satsuki, she can't find the hidden alcove in the tree.  One evening, Mai and Satsuki go to wait for their father's return at a bus stop in the dark woods.  It rains and their father is not on the bus that appears in the storm.  (These sequence is a  virtuoso exercise in depicting how rain falls, trembles in droplets on trees overhead, and, then, falls again.)  The girls decide to wait for the next bus.  Suddenly, they discover that the big Totoro is standing beside them waiting for the bus.  But when the bus arrives it's a disturbing, surreal creature -- the Cheshire cat grafted to a monstrous caterpillar and hollowed out so that you can ride inside; the cat's eyes shine like headlights.  The Totoro gets on this grotesque bus and vanishes.  The next bus appearing in the rain holds their father to whom the girls excitedly describe their adventure.  He seems distracted -- the plan is that their ailing mother will return on the weekend.  A sinister telegram arrives suggesting that the mother has suffered a relapse.  Mai, then, sets off by herself to hike to the hospital but gets lost.  Oddly, she is carrying an ear of corn from the old woman's garden as a talisman and healing gift for her mother.  Mai gets lost and, even, is presumed drowned, but the Totoro and the bus-cat arrive to rescue her and take the two girls to a vantage where they can see their father and mother conversing in the hospital.  The adults can't see the girls or the supernatural critter but they do find the magical ear of corn inscribed as a gift for the mother on the windowsill of the room.  In the closing credits, we see the mother arriving in a taxi-cab and the family happily reunited and bathing together in the ancient bath-house next to the farm dwelling.  

The story is clear and reasonably compelling.  Much of it is mysterious to Western eyes.  The children are mostly happy although sometimes slightly concerned for their mother -- she is shown to be attractive but with an uncanny skull-shaped head.  In its mise-en-scene, the film resembles Ozu to some extent -- there are "empty frames" showing places that people have left or details in nature that don't advance the narrative.  (One image of a bicycle outside of a house in the rain seems a copy of pictures in Ozu's movies.)  The remarkable aspect of the film is the use of animated imagery to provide an intensely pantheistic vision of reality -- everything in the film is somehow alive and alert with spiritual energy.  Pools are full of dark tadpoles that look like soot sprites.  The humidity piles up cumulo-nimbus clouds on the horizon that thrust upward and glow from within with pinkish light.  Moths torch themselves around lights and we see snails on grass, toads on dirt pathways, a sinister-looking goat that tries to eat Mai's corn offering to her mother.  When it is thought that Mai has drowned, we see a tiny pink sandal in the pond, the water around it subtly disturbed by hovering dragonflies.  When the Totoro takes the children on an aerial ride over the nocturnal rice paddies, we see how the breeze created by the flying spirit shimmers in the moonlit water.  Miyazaki is capable of remarkable, expressionistic abstraction -- in an early scene, when a great wind blows, we see the vectors of energy as turbulent masses of shadowy black contending with green conical forms.  The film is extravagant with weather, fluxions in the air, and patterns of light and shadow. 

Miyazaki's later, and more ambitious films, are exhausting.  Spirited Away, a typhoon of monsters and ghosts, is very long and, although scene-by-scene fantastically brilliant, there's just too much of it -- the abundance of visual riches is more than what the audience can assimilate.  By contrast, My friend Totoro is perfectly proportioned.  The opening scenes in which the children explore the old farmhouse with its annexed bathing facility and encounter traces of supernatural presences is remarkably gripping and exquisitely designed.  (With its sense of wonder with ominous overtones, the opening scenes of this film are similar to the picnic at the abandoned amusement park that begins Spirited Away).  The impulse of Totoro is profoundly animistic -- the film is an animated exercise in Animism, as it turns out the film's Animist sensibility is perfectly wedded to the picture's design as a animated feature.  This is a very great movie, a fully realized masterpiece of animated film, and highly recommended.  

Da Five Bloods

Five African-American soldiers are helicoptered into the mountains of Vietnam.  Their mission is to recover a truck full of gold bars, payment, apparently, for Montagnard allies of United States.  The men find the gold but there is a savage firefight with the Viet Cong and the leader of the platoon, "Stormin' Norman, as he is nicknamed is killed.  Both the beloved platoon leader and the gold are left on the field of battle. Almost 50 years later, the surviving soldiers return to Vietnam, planning to recover both the gold and the remains of their comrade.  This is the premise of Spike Lee's Da Five Bloods (2020), now available streaming on Netflix.  

Da Five Bloods is a typical Spike Lee "joint" as he calls his films -- it's a combination of didactic material, much of it archival footage, intercut with a rabble-rousing genre film.  In this case, the movie combines plot elements from the Rambo pictures (the triumphant return of Americans to Vietnam) with elements of the heist movie.  There are echoes of many previous films in Da Five Bloods, including overt allusions to Apocalypse Now and  John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  The movie is long (about two hours and 35 minutes) and extremely ambitious -- it founders, unfortunately, on an implausible script.  Lee is caught between several genres -- elements of the film seem fantastic and, even, highly stylized:  the plot is driven by wild coincidences and fairy tale elements (for instance, the crate of gleaming gold bullion).  These genre elements clash with aspects of the movie that seem realistically conceived.  And Lee's attempt to fit the violent adventure story into a framework of mini-lectures about the Black contribution to American history is startling, but not wholly effective.  Lee seems embarrassed by the Rambo-style violence central to the story and wants to redeem the enterprise with "woke" political themes.  But preaching and murderous violence staged for thrills don't really cohere.  I assume the Lee believes most of the people who will watch this show need to be educated about African-American history -- the film i includes speeches by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King as well as references to notable figures in Black history (for instance Crispus Atticus).  Lee's influenced by Brechtian theater and doesn't attempt to conceal the teaching moments in the picture -- he just inserts this material into the story in the most overt and ham-handed manner possible.  You can admire his audacity but question whether there might not have been a better way to make the points without, in effect, lecturing the audience.  (Consider, for instance, Huston's The Man Who Would Be King, a film that makes powerful ideological points about the theory and practice of imperialist colonialism without ever making direct address to the audience.)  Lee's approach verges on insulting to the audience -- does he really think we're so dumb that we didn't know, as an example, that Black GI's formed a disproportionately large contingent of the combat forces in Vietnam?  The very weaknesses of the film though are what makes it interesting.  Lee isn't content with a violent heist movie and wants to make larger points about justice, history, and oppression.  Similarly, Lee isn't content with preaching to his audience -- he wants to entertain and will throw in everything but the kitchen sink to engage his viewers:  there are bloody shootouts, last minute heroics, a snake attack, as well as lots of very interesting quasi-documentary images of modern day Vietnam.  

Everything about the film's production is first-class:   the churning and, sometimes, soaring musical score by Terence Blanchard (jazz-inflected Aaron Copland) is wonderful, although as in many of Lee's best movies, the lush orchestral themes aren't correlated to what we see on screen and simply play on their own, providing a strange, disorienting flood of music under the images.  The photography is brilliant -- the picture is filled with burnished images of jungle, the luminous skyscrapers of Ho Chi Minh city and the vast, eerie mountains like something from a Chinese scroll where much of the action takes place.  (The cityscapes were shot in Ho Chi Minh City and the landscape scenes were filmed in Thailand).  The acting is brilliant and, indeed, the central protagonist in the film, Paul, as a MAGA-hat wearing, Trump-supporting, PTSD -tormented Black King Lear, provides an Oscar-worthy performance.  Raging against the Vietnamese, his buddies, and the racist establishment, Delroy Lindo, channels Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, and Shaft as well -- viewers might be ashamed to admit it, but everyone has encountered a raging Black man, apparently high on something, storming down a city street, bare-chested and screaming in indignation at everyone he passes; Paul exemplifies this kind of rage and he's armed with an automatic weapon for half of the movie so he's genuinely scary yet also strangely pathetic.  This is a tremendous piece of acting which compensates for the fact that the other "bloods' are underwritten -- we really don't get much sense for any of them other than the soft-spoken Otis, a sad old man who has left a beautiful prostitute whom he loved, pregnant with his daughter, in Vietnam.  All the other figures in the movie are, more or less, either caricatures or ciphers -- Lee and his scriptwriters haven't bothered to develop much of a backstory for any of them and they really don't have much to say or do on-screen.  

The picture roars off to a start with Muhammad Ali famously declaring that no "Vietnamese ever called me nigger."  There's a montage of images characterizing the racial and political chaos in the sixties and Lee is careful to identify the pictures since he assumes (maybe correctly) that many members in his  youthful audience won't know or understand the references -- for instance, he explains in a superimposed title the Kent State shootings and calls out the names of the victims in the text projected with the pictures.  The film proper starts in Ho Chi Minh City where the Bloods meet in an expensive-looking hotel, have some drinks, and plot their hike through the jungle to retrieve Norman's bones and the gold.  We see them in the infamous nightclub Apocalypse Now where there is a tense scene between Paul and some ex-Viet Cong veterans -- Paul is not about to forgive and forget the enmity in the conflict.  Paul's estranged son, David, turns up, much to the chagrin of his father.  (David wears a Morehouse College tee-shirt through most of the film and exemplifies a younger generation of Black men who have grown up skittish about race, but less enraged and angry than their fathers, something that Paul chooses to see as weakness.)  David is too young to party with the older men and so he goes off to a saloon with a younger crowd where he meets the members of the aptly named LAMB, an international organization working in the hinterlands to clear landmines left over from the conflicts in the country -- these kids are White:  a French girl who flirts with David, a fat American kid, and a cynical, even nihilistic Finn.  They talk about the landmines littering the landscape and, of course, this is an ominous conversation as far as future plot developments will be concerned.  There's a long sequence, some of it scored to Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" (in homage to the film Apocalypse Now) in which our heroes tour the canals of former Saigon city on a pontoon boat -- this is the best episode in the picture, shot documentary style and ending when Paul again seems triggered by encounters with the Vietnamese, slips into some kind of rage, and nearly causes a  riot.  By this time, the Bloods have acquired a Vietnamese guide and fixer (his father fought with the Americans) and the kindly Otis has gone to see his former girlfriend and met his half-Black half-Asian daughter.  Otis' girlfriend introduces the Bloods to a sinister figure, an old Frenchman played by Jean Reno.  Reno's character promises the help our heroes get the gold bullion out of the country, albeit for a significant cut.  One look at Reno's decaying features, filmed in a big profile close-up, should have warned the Bloods not to trust this guy -- he is shot like Caligula crossed with Edward G. Robinson's Little Caesar -- obviously not a White man with whom you should do business.  But, of course, our heroes, like most treasure-hunters, are more than a little dim-witted and blinded by greed, make a deal with Reno's smuggler.  The bloods with David in tow then ride be jeep into the boondocks and set off on a long cross-country hike -- this is where the implausibilities in Lee's slipshod and carelessly designed script start piling up.  These men are well into their seventies and they don't seem fit enough to walk ten blocks, let along many miles in the stifling mountainous rain-forest.  And, if they find the bullion, the viewer wonders:  how in the world are they going to carry it out of the jungle?  Trekking through the rain forest things begin to go bad.  Otis has been given a gun by his former girlfriend but, of course, it ends up in the hands of the paranoid Paul, now acting a bit like a combination of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny and Ahab in Moby Dick.  The bloods find both the gold and Norman's bones, but by this time they have wandered into a deadly minefield.  When the LAMB kids happen to show up, things go from bad to worse -- Paul beats them up (he thinks they are after his gold) and, then, ties them together with a rope.  Meantime the hapless expedition has been shadowed by sinister Vietnamese armed with machine guns.  There are several impressive fire-fights and lots of people get killed.  To provide further details might spoil the picture for some people and, so, I will simply say that the film is very violent, although there's an ending coded as happy -- although, it's more poignant, tragic and bitter-sweet.  Lee, then, does what no White film maker could get away with -- he ends the picture with Martin Luther King speaking about the promise of America.  This quotation doesn't really fit anything that we've seen, but it's intended to provide a moment of hopeful uplift to what has been a fairly grim last hour.  Throughout, the film, Lee shows us flashback images of combat in Vietnam that look something like the chaotic battle sequences in The Deer Hunter -- in these scenes, Lee doesn't "de-age" his protagonists:  the bloods interact with the preternaturally young and strong Norman as they appear in their seventies.  Lee's point is that these men have never grown beyond some of the savagery, fear and horror that they experienced in Vietnam -- they relive these scenes in a perpetual present.  This is a tricky conceit but it pays off brilliantly and makes a powerful point about memory and trauma.  Each one of us is still a child trembling before an angry father or a youth terrified on the battlefield or a hapless young lover -- you progress beyond these experiences but you don't really grow out of (or overcome) them.

The problems with the film are grounded in opportunism and plausibility.  Again, I am skeptical that a White director could get away with justifying the bloods blithe intent to steal millions of dollars from the United States government in the name of reparations.  Norman justifies the theft of the money, meant for U. S. allies, as "reparations" for slavery -- but I don't think the notion of "reparations" was really a matter of discussion in 1971 when the film is set.  Furthermore, Norman is presented as the pure, noble warrior -- stealing this money, which merely impoverishes another oppressed group, the Hmong and Laotian irregulars, seems to cut against everything that we are supposed to believe about this character and, so, diminishes the film and threatens to make it incoherent.  Reno's character is intended to keep the picture politically pristine -- Lee is unable to show Vietnamese criminals (this would undercut the themes of the film -- particularly the message of the unjust and immoral war) and so he needs a White ex-colonial fall-guy to blame for the carnage in the film's second half.  There are ludicrously stupid things in the movie, including a scene in which a rope is used to yank one of the protagonists off a landmine onto which he has stepped -- the sequence makes no sense and is risible, although no one will laugh because we've just seen in graphic imagery what one of these mines can do..  The entire climax filmed, in part, among the landmines is opportunistic in the sense that the bombs can be used to cull the cast and eliminate characters whose survival might be problematic in terms of the plot.  I remain a disbeliever in the notion that these old men could haul a thousand pounds of gold out of the wilderness on their backs.  The deep structure of the plot is actually Robert Stone's novel Dog Soldiers and the film version with Nick Nolte directed by Karel Reisz and called Who Will Stop the Raiin?  The final scenes in which Paul staggers through the deadly jungle ranting to the camera recall similar scenes (with less ranting) in which the wounded Nick Nolte hikes to his death on desert railroad deep in Mexico while a fire-fight is underway "back at the ranch" as they say.  (This sequence from Stone's novel in turn references the death of Neal Cassady, also in Mexico and Humphrey Bogart's solitary demise in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.)  Lee makes amusing use of a pro-Trump red MAGA hat that acquires considerable symbolic importance as the film progresses.  The film is simply too complex, ambitious, and poorly written, at least, in part to be wholly successful -- you have the sense that the movie would be better if it were a tightly focused heist drama (about ninety minutes long) or a full-blown epic three to four hours in length.  

 

Notwithstanding these cavils, which are not inconsiderable, the film is worth seeing and viewers will have to make up their own minds about whether Lee has succeeded in his twin goals -- that is, educating viewers about 'systemic' racism and creating an elaborate and gripping adventure film.  I'm skeptical but there are many, many things to admire in this film and everyone should see it.

(Most films end with a certification that no animals were harmed in the filming -- this is notably absent at the end of this picture.  If you have an affection for snakes, the film will be disturbing to you.  I will warrant that, at least, two snakes were harmed in the production of this movie.)

 

Destry Rides Again

Destry Rides Again, released in a beautifully restored Criteron version, is a product of 1939, the annus mirabilis of classic American cinema.  The film is a peculiar "urban" Western written as a vehicle for Marlene Dietrich -- this was her comeback film; the star had been in retirement in Europe for the preceding two years.  The script is by German and Viennese emigres, although writing under echt Americanized versions of their names, and the picture is ably directed by George Marshall. The film was James Stewart's first Western, although one can debate exactly how really "Western" the movie is -- it glances at genre conventions mostly to ignore and subvert them. In effect, the picture is a "problem Western" -- it's relationship to classics in the genre such as High Noon or Stagecoach is similar to the relationship of Measure by Measure in Shakespeare's canon to a tragedy like Othello.  The picture is designed to achieve certain effects inimical to the standard Western and, therefore, it's plot and structure are strangely deformed.  

The first odd element in Destry Rides Again is the picture's baffling setting.  Somewhere in the West, there is a town called Bottleneck (a term that is literal in that we see desperadoes shooting to pieces whiskey bottles in the first scene but, also, figurative in that the plot has to be run through the constricting structure of a genre, the Western, to which it isn't exactly suited.)  I have said that this is an "urban" Western -- the narrative revolves around an enormous saloon and gambling hall, a place consisting of two towering rooms rimmed by elevated walkways.  In one of the huge rooms, always filmed swarming with people, there is a stage on which Frenchy (Marlene Dietrich), the goddess fiercely presiding over this place, can sing and dance; on the opposite side of the room, there is a huge bar.  As is always the case in these places (cf. the gambling hall and saloon that Humphrey Bogart operates in Casablanca), management is ensconced in a suite of rooms up a long flight of steps above the hurly-burly of the casino and dance-hall floor -- so as to be able to better survey the action below.  What is particularly curious about the terrain of this vast saloon is the fact that there are two huge rooms, separated by a partition -- I have no idea why this is the case, but it signals an important thing about the movie:  Destry is characterized by a weird sense of the excessive;  there's too much on-screen, too many extras, too many cowboys, too many subplots for that matter.  The film insists upon its own excess:  the saloon set is introduced via two bravura tracking shots -- in one, at ground level, Frenchy tours the set, encounters various minor figures with whom she interacts (most of them try to embrace her and she knocks them down) -- the camera tracks with her and shows us the "lay of the land."  The other extraordinary tracking shot is aerial -- the camera glides along one of the upstairs balcony walkways and shows ud the two rooms full of revelers and the odd partition between them -- surely one huge saloon room would be enough.  Why are there two?  It's as if someone told the filmmaker to build an enormous set and make sure to get all the expense on-screen.  (The place resembles The Chuck-a-Luck saloon in Fritz Lang's 1952 equally bizarre urban Western, also featuring Dietrich, Rancho Notorious.)  Except for a few inserted shots, there's no Western scenery.  I counted only two shots of men riding horses through open terrain.  The saloon in this movie is a weird imaginary palace, plopped down in the middle of a town that seems to have no economy other than the huge dance-hall.

The plot and design of the film is equally strange.  James Stewart, the film's hero, doesn't appear until about fifteen minutes has lapsed setting up the situation.  He comes into town on a stagecoach with a blowhard tough-guy (his contribution to the plot makes no sense at all) and the tough-guy's comely sister.  When a rough patch on the roadway bounces Stewart (Destry) onto the young woman's lap, the film signals a "meet cute" and that there will be a romance between the girl and the hero.  But the film sketches this romance so briefly that if you blink you will miss it -- the movie is going to fish in deeper stranger waters.  In the first fifteen minutes of the film, we're introduced to the saloon and its owner, the aptly named Rank, a sinister gambler who cheats at cards.  Rank's squeeze is Frenchy, a  courtesan from New Orleans who comes complete with a sassy Black maid.  The action is driven by a bad act committed by Frenchy and shown at the start of the film.  After leading a rousing song-and-dance number Frenchy goes upstairs to the card room where Rank is pretending to lose to a sucker, Claggart.  (The name is odd -- Claggart, of course, is the villain in Melville's Billy Budd).  Claggart is dumb enough to bet his whole ranch on the outcome of the game.  Frenchy spills coffee on Claggart and in the ensuing confusion, switches cards on him so that he loses the game and everything he owns.  When Claggart complains to the sheriff, the law man confronts Rank and is murdered off-screen (we hear two shots).  The fact that the film contains a murder and later a macabre hunt for the dead man's corpse are elements in the picture that are hard to reconcile with its "comedy Western" genre elements.  After the death of the sheriff, the crooked Mayor and Rank appoint the town drunk as the new sheriff.  But the drunk (he's nicknamed Wash) miraculously gives up booze and recruits the son of a famous gunfighter to be his deputy.  For some reason, Destry agrees to serve in that role -- hence, the scene on the stagecoach.

Destry is a pacifist -- his gunfighter father was shot down in an ambush and he thinks gun-play is idiotic and immoral.  He doesn't wear guns and intends to tame the town without shooting anyone.  He's also law-abiding, and quite willing to enforce the gambling debts that Rank  holds on people in town, including the debt collateralized by the Claggart ranch.  When Rank and a posse of  his gangsters tries to seize the ranch, there's a gun-battle and Destry rides out to the "rescue" only to tell Claggart that he has to surrender the premises. (This is exceedingly peculiar). Destry's plan is to solve the murder of Sheriff Kehoe by finding the corpse and, then, making arrests of the perpetrators, chiefly Rank.  In this way, he thinks he can get the ranch back to Claggart.  At this point, the plot becomes strangely intricate.  The tough-guy on the stagecoach has 10,000 head of cattle (where did he get them?) and wants to drive them across the valley (why?).  Rank is collecting a toll of a quarter-dollar per head of cattle to cross the valley -- with Claggart's farm in his possession, he now owns the whole place.  The tough-guy cowboy pistol-whips one of Rank's gangsters and shoots dead another.  Destry is obliged to arrest him.  (But, for some reason, the cowboy who happens to be flush with money pays Rank 2500 dollars to allow his cattle to pass.)   By this time, Destry and Wash have found the dead sheriff's corpse and they arrest one of Rank's mobsters and put him in jail next to the tough-guy cowboy.  Destry has accomplished all of this without any gun-play, something that astonishes Wash.  Somehow or another, Rank's gunmen go to the jail and shoot down Wash -- he dies in Destry's arms.  This sets up the remarkable climax.  When Wash dies, Destry straps on his guns and leads an attack on the saloon in which Rank and his army are holed-up.  The attack includes dynamite thrown through the front window of the saloon and, then, a huge assault in which wagons are used as fortifications to attack the dance-hall.  The local good women (as is the case in most studio Westerns, females are divided into housewives/mothers opposed to saloon girls/prostitutes) take up hoes and rakes and march down the middle of the street.  They boldly parade between the two groups of men shooting at each other and, then, attack the saloon.  (It's a version of the Sabine women but immensely more elaborate that David's famous painting and the raison d'etre for the film.)  The gunmen in the saloon are unwilling to shoot the women although they are armed with clubs.  There's a huge battle in which the saloon is wrecked.  Frenchy, who has fallen in love with Destry, suffers the fate of all bad girls with hearts of gold in Western films -- just before Destry shoots him, Rank fires his gun aimed at the hero but misses and kills Frenchy.  In the last shot, peace is (sort of) restored in town and Destry seems to be romantically connected with the tough-guy cowboy's sister, one of the women who organized the assault on the Bar.  But this is so minimally suggested that the romance is basically invisible -- the real romantic magnetism is, of course, between Destry and Frenchy:  he has told her that if she scraped off most of her mask-like make-up, she would be a pretty woman.  We see her wiping off her lipstick as she gazes into a mirror after he has told her this and, later, as she dies, Frenchy again makes the gesture of wiping the rouge off her cheeks.  After showing a fearsome mob of women attacking the saloon, the movie makes a comical gesture toward restoring male dominance over the female sex.  A Russian cossack named Stavrogin is married to one of the woman-warriors, Lulu Belle.  Stavrogin literally loses his trousers in a card game at the saloon -- an event clearly figurative for the sexual influence of Frenchy and her dance-hall hostesses.  There is an huge knock-down drag-out cat fight between Lulu Belle and Frenchy over the affair of the pants.  This is also symbolic because Stavrogin "doesn't wear the pants" in the family -- Lulu Belle calls him "Callahan" after her beloved first husband who has died and whose picture she displays prominently in their home.  At the end of the film, Stavrogin smashes up the picture of the dear departed Callahan, asserts his rights as a husband, and demands that Lulu Belle call him by his proper name.  Thus, the film ends by back-pedaling away from its radical images of female empowerment -- images that were unexpected and, even, somewhat astonishing in a picture of this sort. (The Stavrogin-Callahan subplot, featuring Mischa Autry is like something that has wandered into the picture from a Lubitsch film. In fact, many scene in the film feature fast-talking dialogue that is similar to what one would expect in a "screwball comedy.") 

The film's extravagance is noteworthy.  Everything is bigger, louder, longer than we expect.  The catfight between Lulu Bell goes on and on and on and results in the destruction of much furniture and the two women half-naked, bruised, and soaking wet (Destry has poured a  jug of water on them to separate the combatants.)  In the next sequence, Frenchy assaults Destry aiming a gun at  him and, then, throwing bottles and crockery in his direction -- not just a few bottles and ceramics but dozens and dozens.  The image that seems to have inspired the film makers is the army of women intervening in the gunfight and, then, attacking the saloon.  Some of the shots in that battle are genuinely disturbing -- we see, for instance, the women backing minor villains up against the bar, beating them over the head into unconsciousness and, then, hauling their limp bodies up over the bar-rail to be hurled into the crowd of women, like enraged maenads tearing everything apart.  The savagery of the women's attack on the saloon is shocking.  It's fortunate that Frenchy is shot to death -- otherwise, it seems that the mob of enraged women would have torn her to pieces.  

The plot doesn't really work.  The subplot involving the tough-guy and his herd of 10,000 cattle that have miraculously materialized makes no sense and goes nowhere.  (I think the subplot is designed as a motivation for the tough cowboy's sister to join with Lulu Belle and form the monstrous regiment of women that destroy the bar, but this isn't clearly depicted.)  Destry's willingness to use the law to enforce Claggart's gambling debt to Rank is strange and not really resolved in the film -- we don't ever see Claggart back at his ranch.  Destry's pacifism, mirroring the sentiment of much of the country in 1939, turns out not to be real -- in the end, he straps on his guns and leads an attack on the saloon that is shockingly violent.  (American pacifism with respect to World War II also turned out to be fictional.)  The cynical lovelorn Frenchy dying in Destry's arms is the famous image that one takes away from this film, but their romance never really blossoms -- it remains a matter of glances and half-heard suggestions (Destry talks in a very soft voice for most of the picture.)   If  Destry were  really in love with Frenchy, the film's ending would be tragic and this won't work in a film advertised as a rock-em sock-em comedy Western.  The subject matter in the film is generally too dire for its own good and the implications of much of what we see have to be either ignored or avoided -- hence, the distractions of the intricate plot in the film's last half-hour.  Despite its utterly bizarre narrative and thematic features, the picture is a beautifully made example of studio classicism -- the movie withholds close-ups until its last scenes and, therefore, when the camera records Stewart or Dietrich in close shots, they have enormous impact.  The film restored Dietrich to fame and establishes Stewart as a competent, attractive Western hero.  And it contains Dietrich's signature number, See What the Boys in the Back Room will have, delivered in a throaty contralto as she prances back and forth across the stage in a cowboy hat and equestrian vest and trousers that are all tassels and glittering sequins scintillating in the luscious black and white.  The effect is that of a Berlin cabaret somehow transported to the wilds of Nevada.   

Strange Evidence

Sometimes, you need a TV show that you can berate, hurl insults at, and threaten.  Strange Evidence, a uniquely obtuse and dishonest reality TV show fits this bill for me.  Furthermore, I have to confess that the series, aired on Science TV (channel 61 on my Cable) is curiously addictive.  Although you despise yourself for watching this stuff, you keep coming back for more.

Strange Evidence features weird videos that purportedly depict uncanny and inexplicable events. Some of the video footage is pretty impressive and the images are relatively recent, generally depicting occurrences that haven't yet been flogged to death by the glut of shows featuring allegedly paranormal video.  Although broadcast on the Science Network, the show has nothing to do with science -- in fact, it's method of presentation is the precise opposite of anything that could be accounted "scientific".  The show is a variant on Ridiculousness, the wildly popular MTV show comprised of clips of idiots inflicting horrible injuries on themselves and others.  Ridiculousness features a Vanilla Ice-style White hoodlum with a panel consisting typically of a minor-league comedian, a Black rapper, and a blonde girl who sits with her bare knees together and giggles incessantly at the quips made by the other participants -- she is rarely allowed to say anything.  Ridiculousness consists of video clips strung together thematically -- the panel makes fun of the people being lit on fire or falling from great heights or suffering testicular rupture from being smashed in the groin.  (It seems that about every other clip involves potentially fatal injuries that are subject of hilarity by the thug-host and his panel.)  Strange Evidence involves clips that show weird things happening.  A group of talking heads comments on the images, although there is no panel assembled.  Rather, the model is that of a respectable documentary with pundits appointed to interpret the "strange evidence" on display.  The remarkable feature of this case is that the pundits are complete morons, many of them about 20 years old -- these supposed experts bear titles such as "Researcher", "Sociology Expert", "Archaeologist", "Military Consultant," "Pyrotechnics" and "Entomology".  The so-called entomologist is actually an exterminator -- he's a burly chap with sideburns and a fat face.  If he were opining on the NFL, I might listen to him, but he obviously knows nothing about bugs except how to swat them.  Even more curious is the fact that the so-called experts are called upon to comment on the video clips, more or less, at random --  in other words, the "entomologist" will be heard solemnly opining on images that show celestial events or hitherto-unknown beasts.  It's pretty clear that this group of people have been assembled from the producer's family and friends, more or less, at random -- they are no more qualified to comment than any other randomly assembled group of schlubs and dimwits might be.  In this respect, the show resembles some of the Slapped Ham videos on YouTube featuring ghosts and poltergeists -- Slapped Ham shows you something allegedly inexplicable and, then, invites you to "comment below".  But, of course, the viewer is never given enough information to make any sort of even partially intelligent comment.  Accordingly, the YouTube video simply invites idiots to speculate on footage that is often scarcely visible.  

Strange Evidence has pretty good videos, but the commentary on them is completely nonsensical.  Generally, a couple of the pundits will say something on the order of "wow!" or "I've never seen anything like that!" or "It's really strange" before venturing stray-seeming comments that often have nothing to do with what we've seen.  An example is a video taken in Siem Reap, a town in Cambodia.  The video shows a huge explosion that belches fire and debris onto a crowded roadway, knocking people to the ground.  We are given a date and place but no provenance for the video -- it seems to be a compilation from several surveillance cameras.  The "military expert" regales us with morbid tales about Pol Pot and we see images of corpses, stacked skeletons, and people being tortured -- it's all real documentary footage but it's only relationship to the explosion is that the blast and Pol Pot both were once in Cambodia.  Then, an "archaeologist" and a "science investigator" speculate that the explosion may have something to do with an alleged death ray hidden in the ruins Angor Watt -- we are shown some nice drone pictures of the impressive ruins which, of course, have nothing to do with the explosion.  Then, a "Social Historian" opines that the blast was probably terrorist.  The narrator notes that there is a thriving black market in gasoline in Cambodia.  Perhaps, the explosion involved gas.  The pyrotechnics expert, then, sets up an experiment in what looks like an abandoned car salvage yard.  He makes a hut of cellophane and skinny metal rods, puts a bucket of gasoline in the hut, and, then, triggers an explosion.  I think the purpose for the experiment is to discover whether gasoline fumes are flammable.  (They turn out to be.)  The narrator then suggests that "possibly" the blast occurred when someone illegally selling gasoline imprudently lit a match.  Then, we're off to the next oddity.  Featured on the show that I watched (a new series beginning on June 11, 2020) were the following:  a wiggly snake-shaped UFO, a man getting blown up in truck delivering packaging material in China, an alleged demon from a town near Leningrad (the Sosnovy Bor monster), strange aerial phenomena over Costa Rica, the explosion at Siem Reap, a odd-looking vertical beam of light seen over Edmonston (it looks like a star-gate about to open), poltergeists in an antique shop in Barnsley, England, a pygmy native threatening a Vespa rider somewhere in Sumatra, scarlet fog also filmed by a motor-biker in Sumatra (lots of strange events on that island), a disturbance in a river near a Chinese city, and most disturbingly, surveillance video showing a naked man who runs at top speed to hurl himself through the window of a van, falling back out in a spray of glass, and, then, hopping up to jump on the top of moving car, all of this mayhem occurring in a subterranean garage, then, flung from the top of the car, sliding across about forty feet of pavement, then, getting up again and sprinting out of the view of the camera.  This is genuinely scary footage because the frenzied naked man seems both incredibly deranged and oblivious to  pain.  The various "experts" speculate that he's possibly a time-traveler like the Terminator robot in the movie or, maybe, a zombie under the control of a sinister Master, or, perhaps, the victim of a "body hack" (a computer has seized control of him) or, even, maybe a "super soldier" created as a cyborg by the U.S. government who has run amok.  Most alarmingly, the show doesn't solve this riddle -- it just leaves us with the scary footage and a note that the young man, "under the influence" of drugs, was captured by the police.  This is useless information.  The show is beyond lurid.  When discussing the hostile "pygmy" on Sumatra, the pundits speculate that he is either an evil cannibal spirit (these  creatures eat infants), an member of an uncontacted tribe of Homo Florensiensis (the extinct hobbit hominids), or possibly a man-ape hybrid citing efforts by the Soviet Scientist "Ivanov" to create a chimp-human super soldier by inseminating pygmy women with chimpanzee semen.  (It's hard to figure out why an uncontacted tribe member would be hanging around a dirt-bike trail in Sumatra but who knows -- to me, the video looks doctored.)  Another good example of this show's amusing idiocy is the Sosnovy Bor demon -- this is a desiccated two-inch long relic that seems to be comprised of small turtle's head super-glued to a small snake's body that terminates in a rodent claw.  Is this the product of radiation dumped in the Russian river?  That is, some kind of mutant?  Or is it a hitherto unknown Russian animal or could we be looking at a chimera?  Of course, a chimera is a sort of hoax, something like P. T. Barnum's Fiji mermaid (a chimp's head on tuna body) or the so-called Jackalope (jack rabbit with antelope horns).  "Yes, it is a chimera" a zoologist declares, "but instead of citing taxidermy as a source for the creature, the expert launches into an illustrated lecture about Ligers (tiger-lions), mules, and the like.  Of course, the obvious explanation is never discussed, namely, that some warped taxidermist put this mess together with a few stitches and some glue.  "To date, the mystery of the demon has not been solved," the narrator solemnly tells us..  

The reason this show is maddening is that some of the footage is very interesting.  I certainly want to know what is behind the celestial light show (a huge cloud full of rainbow colors) in Costa Rica or the weird maelstrom in the river in China or the naked man hurling himself through windows in a grim-looking basement garage.  But we're never given any plausible explanation for these things. I find myself watching episode after episode of this show and the whole time cursing the TV with such vehemence that my gentle, old Labrador retriever slinks away and hides in hallway upstairs.

Post-script:  The naked man is Garrett Smith (21) a resident of Anaheim living at the El Mirador Apartments 3700 W. Mungal Drive.  The incident occurred on Saturday either March 10 or March 11, 2015.  Smith was apprehended one mile from the underground garage where this event took place.  He was seriously injured and treated at the U. S. Irvine Hospital in Orange County and, of course, charged with vandalism and other crimes.  Reports don't tell us what drugs were in this guy's system.    

TV series: Into the Night and Space Force

Both Into the Night and Space Force are Tv series available on Netflix.  Each is interesting and representative of important trends in television.  Into the Night is a state of the art thriller; Space Force is a an old fashioned genre comedy of the kind that once populated network TV, a throwback to forms familiar to me from my childhood.

Into the Night is a polyglot six-program series that seems to be from no particular place -- it exemplifies up-to-the-moment trends in production that make it extremely difficult to define where a film was made and its origins.  Many programs of this sort, particularly on Netflix, seem to come out of nowhere and have a vaguely internationalist ambience.  The caption for the show on Netflix says that the program is a Belgian TV-show -- in fact,the picture seems to be a Russian production, apparently shot in someplace called North Macedonia.  Except for the actors, the technical cast and crew all have Russian names.  But the show seems to have been written by an American or Englishman (John Gibson) and it is based on a novel called The Old Axolotl written by a Polish author. (The show is sort of dubbed, but many of the characters speak in languages are subtitled -- for instance, Russian is subtitled).   

The premise of the movie is simple and gripping.  A plane flying from Belgium to Moscow is hijacked (before all passengers can get on board) by a crazed Italian solider, Terenzio.  This man knows, as a result of attending a NATO conference, that something has gone badly wrong with the sun.  Rays of sunlight are lethal due to some sort of radiation.  This radiation microwaves people and, further, scrambles molecules so that food becomes tasteless and gasoline or jet fuel is no longer efficacious.  Terenzio forces the pilot of the Moscow-bound jet to fly westward with the night.  So long as the plane can avoid the dawn, it's passengers will survive.  Any exposure to sun beams is immediately lethal.  Into the Night uses a structure that David Bordwell has characterized as a "moving spotlight" -- each episode highlights one character, showing a little bit of that person's backstory before he or she entered the fatal jet.  The cast of characters is exotic:  there is a fierce Russian Roman with a sick child scheduled for surgery in Moscow, Rik, a man heading to Russia to meet his mail order bride (he's a pious Christian), an African, a Black hosptal nurse, a Turk who is part of a conspiracy to smuggle emeralds stolen previously from Turkey back to his homeland -- Matthieu, a Belgian is the pilot (he is involved in an affair with stewardess who is pregnant with his child).  A plucky woman soldier, grieving the sudden death of her fiancee (she's carrying an urn with his ashes) has skills as a  helicopter pilot and she can, with assistance, fly the jet if necessary.  (Terenzio, the highjacker, has shot Matthieu in the hand and injured him so that he can't fly the plane on his own.)  Each episode is about 40 minutes long and they are all structured by a "ticking clock" plot -- complicated tasks must be accomplished before the sun rises or everyone will die.  The film is very suspenseful, even to the extent that I thought that it was somewhat unpleasant and nerve-wracking to watch.  The acting is good and the characters are appropriately frenzied and desperate given the situation in which they find themselves -- normally, a show like this will pause for a romantic subplot, but the stakes here are too high and everyone is constantly engaged in frenetic action.  The plane has to be flown at a latitude sufficiently north to stay ahead of the sun -- at the equator, the earth rotation overwhelms the plane's speed and the sun would catch up to them.  The protagonists bicker incessantly, threaten one another, and are constantly fighting violently about strategy and tactics.  There are all sorts of complications:  Matthieu requires surgery (fortunately there's a Black nurse on board who can manage this), the little boy's health is fragile, Terenzio is capricious and violent, clashing repeatedly and violently with the Turkish smuggler -- they try to kill each other on various occasions.  It turns out that water filters out the deadly sunrays and so the last several episodes involve the characters flying around the world and, then, landing in Bulgaria (of all places) where there is a reservoir impounded above a bunker where NATO soldiers are holed-up.  The refugee's last encounter with troops on the ground wasn't promising -- they picked up three hitchhikers at some air base in Northern Scotland who turned out to be war criminals from Afghanistan and who tried to commandeer the plane until they were abandoned  to their doom(with the pregnant stewardess) in the town next to the air base.  (One of these bad guys got into the wheel-well of the jet, stowing away and causing a  host of problems before he was killed).  

The show is conspicuously low-budget, shot mostly in the set of the plane and its cockpit.  Images of the plane in the air are simply recycled, including an ominous image of the plane's shadow flying over a well-lit city that may be on fire.  The whole show takes place in oppressive darkness and the characters are, generally, about as dark and bleak as the corpse-strewn airports where the plane briefly lands to be refueled.  The show has a pounding, percussive soundtrack that embodies the time-pressure that is omnipresent.  For some tastes, the show may be claustrophobically bleak and I can't recommend it to everyone.  It's an odd reflection of the refugee crisis that convulsed Europe in the wake of the Syrian War -- here our refugees are middle-class Europeans, forced to flee for their lives and circumnavigating the globe again and again in an exodus that seems, more or less, doomed.  Once, European borders (at least in the EU) were all open and people moved freely -- now, the world has darkened; people are confined to a single airplane that orbits the earth in vain looking for a place to land but not stay.  

Space Force is a much sunnier show and a throwback to classic models in the genre of TV comedy.  The program is mildly satiric, taking potshots at Donald Trump's idea of a forming a "Space Force" -- POTUS has tweeted that there will be "boobs on the moon by 2024" -- this is interpreted as "boots on the moon."  Steve Carell plays four-star general Mark Naird, the leader of the Space Force operation that is hidden in a secret base at a place called Wild Horse, Colorado.  Naird's sidekick is Dr. Adrian Mallory, a brilliant scientist as well as a witty curmudgeon played by John Malkovich.  The casting of Carrell and Malkovich as an "odd couple" required to work cooperatively is brilliant and two actors have radically different performance styles that somehow mesh in an appealing fashion.  The show has elements of the family comedy -- Naird has a rebellious and lonely daughter who hates being trapped in the deserts of Colorado and his wife, played by Lisa Kudrow, is inexplicably imprisoned at a Maximum Security Jail doing a 40 year sentence for some crime that is never specified at all.  (In the show's first scene she is free, but, before Naird is assigned to the Space Force operation, something happens and she ends up in prison.)   Comedy of this kind requires a deep cast of supporting characters to keep things lively -- Space Force features a cynical PR man, "Fuck Tony" as they call him, who is like a character from Veep; there is a sexy and highly competent Black female helicopter pilot who yearss to be an astronaut, various nationalities of scientists working on the space program led by Chan, a Chinese-American, also a main and recurring character.  Naird, who isn't too smart but seems to be well-meaning, has an even dimmer witted adjutant and is pestered by an obsequious and conniving Russian "partner" who tries to gather information by dating the General's teenage daughter.  POTUS and FLOTUS are off-screen presences who sow chaos and discord through their tweets.  General Naird's daughter also has an Alabama suitor on the Base who is a bit like Gomer Pyle. Carter Burwell has composed an incongruously heroic and stirring score for the show which also features sixties hits like 'Kokomo" by the Beach Boys and "Daydream Believer" (is this by the Monkees?).  The show is sometimes quite funny but it's heart really lies in the relationships between the characters, some of which are poignant and, even, tragic.  One subplot involves Naird's attempt to have a conjugal visit with his wife at the penitentiary -- this keeps getting delayed and, at one point, POTUS refuses to authorize the encounter because he is unjustly angry with Naird over something.  When the conjugal visit occurs, it's not very satisfactory -- Naird's wife, who may be in a lesbian relationship in the prison, asks for an "open marriage" and the zipper on her orange jumpsuit doesn't work right.  Other characters struggle with loneliness -- when Naird's daughter invites her classmates over for a party, no one comes and she is stuck with twenty pizzas.  Although there is a broad story arc, each of the ten episodes (they are about thirty minutes long) poses some kind of problem or challenge, often importing a guest star for the individual show, that must be solved or resolved before the end of the program.

The film reminds me of the old Andy of Mayberry show -- the main character, here Naird, is unprepossessing and sometimes seems not too smart, but he has a good heart and is an attractive figure who tries to do his best in difficult circumstances.  Naird is surrounded by fools and opportunists but, even, they can sometimes be recruited to help him and, although some of these people are stupid, they are, at least, loyal.  (There are aspects of many different popular TV comedies in Space Force -- the blowhard generals and bureaucrats are a bit like Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.  The dry humor that is associated with Malkovich's character is similar to the way Kelsey Grammar played Frasier on that show, and, in fact, Frasier was a variant on the character that Bob Newhart developed in his old show.)  

The TV comedy that Space Force most explicitly does not resemble is Seinfeld.  Seinfeld established the pattern for cynical comedy in which the characters are generally self-absorbed, narcissistic and, even, casually vicious.  (Seinfeld morphed into the extreme, disheartening misanthropy of Veep, a show that was quite funny, but very nasty and sometimes tediously offensive.)  Space Force is a didactic comedy of the kind that ruled the airwaves in the early 60's.  All of these shows were derived from the Andy Griffith model and Dick van Dyk's show.  In each episode, a quandary arises that must be solved by the characters -- generally, the resolution to the problem involved cooperation, putting aside hostility, fair play, and, even, a kind of rough justice.  Characters who were cruel or vain were punished -- their bloated pretenses were punctured.  Each show taught a little lesson to its viewers in compassion or empathy or, even, justice.  Space Force follows this pattern -- the characters, although comically flawed, must work together cooperatively to achieve heroic ends that are signaled without irony by Burwell's soaring score.  Values of loyalty and teamwork are emphasized.  Furthermore, we see an ethnically diverse group of people laboring to achieve an important common objective.  Space Force can be cloying, but the presence of Malkovich as the cynical scientist, seems designed to keep the sentiment in check.  The show is familiar to me because its tropes date back to my childhood and before and, therefore, I like it.  Whether it will appeal to broader audiences is unclear to me.

Satan's Brew

Satan's Brew (1976) is a bizarre misanthropic comedy directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  The film is intentionally ugly and a provocation, an ungainly ham-handed assault on poetry and the esthetic of the beautiful.  It's nasty in all respects and, therefore, consistent with its derisive theme.  Unfortunately, the picture has nowhere to go once it establishes (in its first ten minutes) the situation:  a spoiled, vicious poet can't write and, therefore, has no money to support his fat, slatternly wife and his various extra-marital adventures.  After some sordid adventures, he composes a novel called "No Celebration for the Fuehrer's dead dog."  The book is a success and the writer is able to reconstitute his perverse family after  his wife dies, apparently from stomach cancer.  The film is populated by sexual perverts, corrupt bankers and publishers, and masochistic fan-boys and fan-girls.  There are no characters with any redeeming qualities and the picture leaves no one unscathed.  If the viewer stays with this stuff for the film's full 100 minutes, the movie poses the question of whether the spectators is just as debased as the people in the movie.  Fassbinder had the habit of tormenting his admirers and the film seems to be a gob of spit spewed in the face of those who had praised the director.  I can't recommend the movie although it has a couple of genuinely funny scenes -- the point that the movie makes, namely that the devotion to truth and art and beauty is just a screen for fascist exploitation and sexual perversion is questionable in the first place and Fassbinder's development of this theme is so gratuitously simple-minded that the viewer is not likely to learn anything whatsoever (except that the director was afflicted with a genuine and thoroughgoing hatred for his fellow Germans.)

Walter Kranz (Kurt Raab) is a poet renowned for verse on Leftist revolutionary themes.  But he suffers from writer's block.  When his publisher refuses to give him an advance, Kranz visits his aristocratic mistress Fraulein von Witz and, after some S & M action with her (she fellates a gun), he shoots her dead while she is writing him a check and having an orgasm induced by her thoughts of money.  Kranz goes home without a second thought and torments his fat, butch-looking wife who laments that she hasn't had sex with him for 17 days.  Kranz's household is completed by his idiot brother, a big malevolent-looking doofus with squinty eyes behind dirty glasses -- the brother is a fly-fetishist, he collects the carcasses of the little creatures and identifies them with characters in the movie; now and then, he shouts "Fick Fliegen" -- that is, "Fuck flies!", something that he attempts from time-to-time with no success.  Kranz' brother calls the protagonist's various mistresses  "Aunty" and he's a rapist when not attempting to sodomize flies.  Kranz has another masochistic girlfriend, a beautiful woman named Lisa (Ingrid Caven who had the misfortune of being married to Fassbinder)) who lives with her slovenly husband -- Kranz has to ask his permission to sleep with Lisa but permission is always given.  A moron police officer is pursuing Kranz with respect to the murder of Miss von Witz, although also sampling the charms of the various women involved with the poet.  For half the film, Kranz's chubby blonde wife belabors him with unrequited sexual demands.  Then, the poor woman (who is the best thing in the movie) spends the second half of the picture dying of stomach cancer while Kranz simply ignores her.  Midway through the film, one of Kranz' fans appears, desperate to have sex with her literary hero.  This is a mewling masochist with her eyes grotesquely enlarged (it seems) by the pop bottle bottom glasses that she wears. Kranz takes her money and, then, allows his brother to rape her.  He finally writes a poem about seamen capturing an albatross -- but it turns out that the little verse is wholly plagiarized from Stefan George, the homosexual proto-fascist poet active in Germany from the turn of the 20th century through 1934 when he died.  When Kranz learns that he has stolen the entire poem from George, he decides that he will become the poet, dons a fright wig and paints up his face to look like the old fellow as he appeared in the early thirties and, then, recruits five young men to serve as acolytes.  (George was gay and kept a squadron of young men around him to whom he declaimed his verse at candle-lit seances.)  Kranz imitates George even to the extent of trying to become homosexual himself.  He goes to a  public toilet and picks up some rough trade but flees in horror from the encounter when he figures out what is expected of him.  When Kranz fails to pay a prostitute for her services -- he's supposedly interviewing her for an article -- her pimps beat him up.  They also beat up his female fan who has been doggedly following him around and offering herself to him (without success) for sex.  Everyone in the film is profoundly masochistic and, when Kranz actually seems to enjoy the beating, his female disciple turns on him, says that he's not a strong man like Nietzsche (or Hitler for that matter) and leaves him.  Luise has died and Kranz goes to the hospital in the aftermath.  When he learns that his wife is dead, Kranz screams in horror and has to be dragged out of the hospital.  This display of grief dismays Kranz' last two fan-boys who claim that they have been betrayed:  "You preached to us that the object of life is death and decay," the lads say, appalled at his apparent grief.  Kranz claims that he is merely feigning grief but the lads don't believe him and depart.  Kranz goes to see Lisa but while he is bullying her, he turns his back and is shot.  He falls to the ground apparently dead -- but the gun was loaded with blanks only.  When water is poured on his supine body, he revives.  In the next scene, we see him paid an advance because he has completed his novel on the Fuehrer's dead dog.  Lisa's husband has run off with the masochistic woman in the pop-bottle goggles -- he's "strong enough for her," someone explain.  Lisa moves in with Kranz and his malign, imbecilic brother -- the little family group has been rebuilt.  The movie begins and ends with a complicated quote from Artaud that passes by too quickly to be deciphered, let alone understood.  

Some of the movie is fairly amusing -- particularly the scenes in which Kranz pretends to be Stefan George, intoning gibberish to his pretty (rent) boys in a darkened room lit only by candles.  There's a Marx brothers knock-off early in the film -- Kranz is at home trying to interview the prostitute while his wife caterwauls at him about his sexual failures; simultaneously, the cop is trying to interrogate Kranz while Kranz's brother periodically attempts to rape the prostitute all the while lasciviously eyeing his collection of dead flies.  Then, the repo-men appear and begin hauling out furniture.  It's all chaos and frenzy and Fassbinder knows how to shoot group scenes of this sort effectively.  There's lots of sex but it mostly consists of Kranz fully clad thrusting away between the thighs of skinny women wearing peek-a-boo bras and crotchless panties.  Everyone shrieks at everyone else and utters strange sounds and people are always spitting on one another.  It's an authentic enough vision of human life, and, although caricatured,  true I suppose on some level, but it's not really entertaining and the plot goes nowhere -- that's lots of sound and fury but... you know the rest of the quote.  Fassbinder moves the film along at lightning speed and its efficiently made (although somewhat lackluster in execution),but, even so, the hundred minute film feels as if it would be better with about forty-five minutes cut.   

The Woman in the Window

The Woman in the Window is a crime thriller made in 1944 by Fritz Lang and featuring Edgar G. Robinson as a middle-aged man whose impulsive flirtation with a femme fatale results in his doom.  The picture is a companion to Lang's 1945 Scarlet Street, an equally alarming film that shares the same general theme -- Scarlet Street, adapted from Jean Renoir's proto-noir La Chienne ("The Bitch") ,also stars the two principals in The Woman in the Window, Robinson and Joan Bennett.  There's no way of writing about The Woman in the Window without "spoilers" and, so, if these sorts of revelations bother you, see the movie first (it is often broadcast on TCM) and read these comments later.

Robinson plays a staid, middle-class college professor who teaches psychology at Gotham University.  After seeing his wife and two children off at the train station -- they are embarking on a summer holiday -- Robinson's character, Richard Wanley, goes to his club for dinner with two cronies, a doctor and the City's District Attorney.  The three men joke about being bachelors and accuse one another of various romantic misdemeanors.  Wanley falls asleep reading a translation of the Song of Solomon, a glass of cognac in his hand.  When the waiter at the club awakes him, Wanley goes outside pausing for a moment at a storefront to look at a painting of a beautiful woman.  As he gazes at the portrait, the woman herself, clad entirely in funereal black appears.  They talk and then go to a night club.  After the bar, the woman invites Wanley to her apartment.  One of the woman's other suitors (or customers -- she seems to be a call-girl) appears unexpectedly, attacks Wanley and there is a struggle.  Wanley stabs the man to death with a scissors, a homicide that is clearly self-defense.  But it's obvious that the circumstances of the killing, a brawl in a prostitute's apartment, will be ruinous to the professor.  Accordingly, he conspires with the woman to dispose of the body in a remote wooded area somewhere a few miles from the city.  Unfortunately, the man who was killed is an industrial magnate whose disappearance is immediately reported in the newspapers and whose body is discovered also within a day or two by an Eagle Scout.  Each evening, Wanley, increasingly agitated, dines with the District Attorney who fills him in on the investigation that seems to be inevitably leading to his identification as the killer.  Wanley even ends up at the place where he tried to dispose of the body, walking around in the woods with the DA (played suavely by Raymond Massey) and other cops; the femme fatale (Joan Bennett) is waiting in another squad car to tour the woods.  The film's plot is strangely overdetermined.  First, it's clear that Wanley will ultimately be apprehended by the DA and his sleuths.  But,.then, a new peril is introduced, a sleazy ex-cop who has been trailing the deceased businessman knows that the call-girl is his mistress.  The ex-cop goes to her apartment and blackmails her.  Wanley and the woman meet and plot to kill the blackmailer with poison.  But the scheme goes awry and, after the girl calls Wanley to tell him that she has failed, he takes the remainder of the poison himself and passes out, a clock ominously ticking on the soundtrack.  Someone nudges him awake and we discover that the whole macabre adventure was a dream.  Dorothy is now back in Kansas; the blackmailer is a doorman at the club; the captain of industry killed by Wanley is the hat-check man.  Out on the street, Wanley pauses to look at the picture of the femme fatale in the window.  When a tired-looking streetwalker asks  him for a light, he says "Heavens no!" and scurries away into the night.  

Lang's direction is mostly unobtrusive, but he provides subtle clues that the entire proceedings are a dream.  There are strangely designed sets:  the call-girl's apartment is accessed through two exterior glass doors and, then, an inside threshold where she often stands in silhouette posed against the light of her apartment.  People are always passing through doors and corridors.  Indeed, whole scenes are set in oddly liminal locations.  The discussion in which Wanley and the woman plan to poison the blackmailer takes place in a sepulchral elevator lobby where cars full of people are continually going up and down, stopping at the floor to be rejected by the two doomed protagonists -- everyone else is going either up or down, but they are staying resolutely in place in the marble mausoleum limbo of the elevator lobby.  When the woman invites Wanley into her apartment, she makes a slow dream-like transit of the room turning on three lights -- everything seems faintly balletic and sinister.  The woman's apartment is full of strange perforated partitions and carytid-figures, ceramic forms upholding lamps and other objects.  A labyrinth is inscribed around the maw of a big dark hearth in the apartment and the woman's double bed looks like a block of ice beyond open double-doors -- it is gleaming with white satin under a bedstead on which rococo terra-cotta putti  support an overhead canopy.  This bed is like no other bed on the face of the earth.  Wanley's club-mates immediately discuss the disappearance and, then, murder of the industrial titan and the hero repeatedly blurts out incriminating remarks, duly noted but not otherwise registered by the DA.  There are weird correspondences -- a pencil labeled with his initials "RW" mirrors a necklace with a pendant that is labeled "CM" (the dead man's name is Clyde Masard); the inversion of the "W"into an "M" reminds us of Lang's famous film "M" standing for "Murder".  In half the shots clocks are ominously ticking although time seems alternately compressed or dilated -- we see clock faces repeatedly and there are strange visual leit motifs, for instance, a panama hat that Masard is wearing when he comes into the apartment and without any words, or even provocation, attacks Robinson.  The hat recurs again and again worn by various characters even though Wanley has burned the item in his fireplace.  In the car that transports Wanley to the corpse-disposal site, there is a strange-looking oculus where the  rear window should be; this oculus recurs in the pharmacy where Wanley acquires the poison with which to kill the blackmailer.  The blackmailer wears a version of CM's panama hat as does a police investigator at the scene where the body was discovered. (We've seen the hat on the courtesan's bed -- a bad omen.)  In the strange elevator lobby, a man wearing this same hat bumps into the call-girl.  When rain pours down on the street outside the call-girl's apartment, a tracking shot shows us the cheerless surroundings, shaggy with falling water and looking like some kind of Mesopotamian ruin.  The film is dream-like even to the extent that it isn't like a dream -- in other words, it violates dream-logic.  There is a long sequence in which the call-girl tries to seduce the villainous blackmailer -- Wanley is absent from this sequence and it seems unlikely that he would dream a scene in which he isn't present.  

The film applies a scathing, ingenious nightmare logic to the situation.  Wanley is doomed not because he has acted badly but merely because of his momentary temptation to visit the call-girl's apartment.  Joan Bennet wears black with a mat of ebony feathers over  her hair and she's an odd apparition.  In the apartment scenes, she lounges around in clothing so sheer that she seems to be partly naked and her bosom is always heaving.  The moment that Wanley errs, he is doomed not only because of the police and his own inclination to admit to the murder (something he attempts several times -- he's cronies just ignore his confessions) but also because of the ex-cop doubling on destiny up to hunt him down.  A sense of mostly unmotivated guilt broods over every frame in the picture.  There's even a bizarre suggestion that Wanley is destroyed over an inadequate object of desire -- the DA remarks that the woman isn't even attractive and that Clyde Masard "could have done much better".  And the portrait in the window, against which we see faces reflected on the glass, is sinister-looking, a pale wraith with a long throat like pictures made by John Currin.  This is an unsettling picture, extremely suspenseful, an elaboration on the notion that all men, even before they act, are guilty.  Robinson is spooky -- he looks like a frightened iguana in his close-ups.