The Black Cat

Ineffably silly and serenely surreal, Edgar Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934) is one of my favorite horror films, a film so strange and densely packed that it can not be reliably deciphered.. The movie is dream apparition that seems to carry a powerful, even, profound message -- the problem is that when the dream evaporates, in the clear light of day, the message is no longer legible.  The film's premise is similar to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)or that movie's precursor, James Whale's witty and perverse The Old Dark House (1932).  A naive young couple on their honeymoon finds themselves trapped in a scary, haunted mansion.  The inhabitants of the mansion are sexually perverse and probably criminally insane:  the question posed by these films is whether the young couple will survive their stay at this bread-and-breakfast from Hell -- or, at least, make it through the night with their virtue intact.  Intrinsic to this genre is the implication that either the bride or groom (or both) may well desire rape, or, at least, seduction by the denizens of the haunted mansion.  In The Black Cat, the young couple embarks on an ill-fated honeymoon to a spa in Mitteleuropa, a place a few hundred kilometers from Vienna where they have been married.  They are merrily chatting about eating, an obvious double entendre for the delayed consummation of their marriage and, indeed, about to embrace when who should enter their railroad compartment but Bela Lugosi himself.  Lugosi exudes perverse, world-weary Angst and, of course, his demeanor is that of a vastly fatigued, but still lethal, continental seducer.  Lugosi has just been released from some kind of horrific prisoner of war camp, a place "where the soul is murdered day by day" as he says in his heavily accented, but velvety voice.  The trio, now threatening to become some sort of menage a trois, depart from a railway station with a comically talkative Ruritanian taxi-driver, an incompetent fellow who chats with the couple while looking away from the muddy, narrow road winding through the sinister Carpathian mountains.  Of course, he manages to crash the taxi, kill himself (a death that is ludicrously ignored by everyone), and strand the newly weds at the very threshold of the insane Herr Poelzig's mansion.  Poelzig has erected a starkly modernist chateau atop a bunker left over from the Great War and we are told that the site overlooks a cemetery and a ravine where the war-dead were stacked twelve deep while the "river overflowed with blood."  Poelzig is played by an emaciated Boris Karloff, a sort of walking corpse all the more alarming because he is not made-up and plays the part with no special effects other than the ferocious growl in his voice and his deep-set glaring eyes.  It turns out that Poelzig is a necrophiliac Satan worshiper, a version of the Great Beast, Aleistair Crowley at his most lurid and melodramatic and, in the bunker cellars of his house, he has dead maidens embalmed and displayed on the walls, white columns of luminous gown and alabaster skin wreathed in cascades of platinum hair -- the girls are undeniably beautiful, undeniably dead, some of them suspended by the locks of their hair, and they are like Greek kore figures, mythic presences who enlarge the scope of the film to another dimension:  is Karloff's Herr Poelzig, the embodiment of war, a kind of amalgam of Ares and Hades, the ruler of a dark and sinister underworld to which virgins must be sacrificed in sadistic rites?  It turns out that Lugosi's character, a psychiatrist named Dr. Vitus Wendegast, was betrayed by his commanding officer Poelzig in the Great War, given up to the enemy, so that the devil-worshiper could snatch (and murder) his wife: she's one of the luminous trophies displayed in the World War One bunker.  The women in the film are either inanimate or comatose, sleeping beauties:  we see Karloff in bed with a young woman who may well be a corpse -- she never moves for most of the film, a blonde, lush beauty, we learn that she is Lugosi's daughter by his dead wife, now Poelzig's slave and concubine.  The film's heroine, the newly wed bride is knocked unconscious in the car crash and spends half the film in a swoon.  When she briefly emerges from unconsciousness, medicated by Wendegast, the young woman is overtly lustful, pawing at her husband with unambiguous intent in front of Lugosi and Karloff, a display that only inflames the mad Poelzig's desires.  (The film is pre-code and filled with intensely erotic imagery -- the bride has a wound on her upper breast from the car crash, an injury inspected with great intensity by Lugosi as her physician and, then, groped by the woman's feckless husband.)  Although named after Poe's morbid short story, the movie has nothing to do with that tale and, indeed, very little connection with black cats in general -- at one point, Lugosi, who has a fear of the beasts, hurls a scalpel at a black cat and, apparently kills it (the beast yowls off-camera);Karloff, whose pet has been slaughtered, responds with nothing more than a feline grin.  The film is bizarre and surprising on all levels:  Poelzig's mansion seems built in the best Vienna secessionist style:  it is austere, angular, and appears to be a machine for living something like the famous house designed by Wittgenstein in Vienna, more an icy philosophical theorem than a home.  The bunker contains a towering spiral stairway and a movable turret that forms a kind of nightmare labyrinth -- as it rotates it's door exposes either openings in the massive concrete wall or impenetrable wall depending on the degree to which the metal chamber is turned.  Although the film clocks in at a brisk 65 minutes, people are continuously marching in slow sepulchral processions across the huge sets and there is a bizarre comic interlude with a couple of local gendarmes, one of them a grotesque stage Italian, a vaudeville comedian.  Ulmer was one of the directors of a remarkable German silent film, Menschen am Sonntag (1930), a quasi-documentary about the lives of a cross-section of Berlin young people on an enchanted, summery Sunday.  The Black Cat has much of same tangible, documentary-like emphasis on light and space and people's relationship to their environment:  curiously enough, the photography has an improvised aspect in some sequences, an element that contrasts powerfully with the Expressionist angles and lighting in the horror scenes, particularly the Fritz Lang-style diagonals and shadows in the Black Mass:  the imagery looks like the scene in which Maria preaches to the workers in a catacomb chapel in Metropolis (1927).  But much of the film seems casually realistic -- indeed, a scene in which a bedraggled Bela Lugosi stands among deadly machinery, including the fateful "red lever" that will blow the whole place to smithereens, is curiously understated and prosaic:  briefly, Lugosi looks like the father of the bride at  a Serbian wedding, half-drunk, smiling mysteriously, even a little bit cheerful.  The clash between these two camera styles, something notable even in the stylized Black Mass scenes in which the virgin victim is filmed out-of-focus, gives the movie some of its nightmarish dream quality.  At the climax of the movie, Lugosi takes a paring knife and begins to skin the fettered Boris Karloff alive:  Karloff's stripped torso is shot as if it has already been flayed:  his skin is a death-like alabaster white that reveals in the clinical lighting the precise contours of his muscles and bones.  The image has all sorts of visual overtones and echoes:  it's like the flaying of Marsyas and, even today, the scene packs a powerful, horrific force.  At the end of the film, of course, the honeymoon couple are saved.  The bunker and mansion explode in a quick shot of explosions that looks exactly like night footage of a World War One (or prophetically WWII) barrage.  European culture, it seems, rests on a substrate of massacre, perversion, and evil that can not be repressed -- the nightmare battle between Lugosi and Karloff seems to presage the eruption of ancient hatreds that must inevitably convulse the world again and again.  (The bridegroom is comically unequal to the horrors that he must face:  it's like Andy Hardy thrown into the middle of a Greek tragedy or Hugh Grant forced into a cage-match with Richard III and Macbeth.)  On the train departing the scene of these horrors, the newlyweds comment on the utter absurdity and implausibility of the adventure that they have just survived.  For an instant, we glimpse the bride's weird, crooked and asymmetric smile -- evidence of something hidden in her that may have triggered this whole strange vision.      

Artists under the Big Top, Perplexed

Alexander Kluge's 1968 film, Artists under the Big Top, Perplexed is neatly summarized on the Facets DVD box:  "Lena Peichert inherits her father's circus when he is killed in an accident, tries to run the show as a kind of politically engaged "reform" circus, and goes bankrupt (twice)."  The summary is succinct and accurate so far as it goes, but doesn't begin to characterize this peculiar, discursive film.  Kluge begins the movie with a few minutes of footage of Nazi rallies, including a parade in which huge statues, ineptly mimicking Greek sculpture, are hauled through the street in the midst of adoring crowds.  On the soundtrack, we hear McCartney and Lennon's "Yesterday" crooned in a language that I couldn't recognize to the accompaniment of a Muzak band that sounds like something you might hear in the lounge of an airport.  Without further ado, Kluge abandons the Nazi footage for beautiful color shots of circus acts.  Then, we get close-ups of fantastically homely circus performers who speak directly to the camera in a strangely inflected, curiously bombastic form of German that seems to have been invented for the film.  Kluge cuts in historical images of circuses, panned and zoomed in the best Ken Burns style, documentary shots of circus animals, and strangely desolate and empty landscapes -- the autobahn at night, a big top tent slowly being deflated for removal from a dark and empty vacant lot.  From time to time, we see the ostensible heroine, Lena Peichert, engaged in transactions that the film's Marxist-materialist orientation renders in pedantic detail.  Peichert buys a hapless-looking elephant for 12,000 DM -- the beast obligingly stands on its head for her.  She has a boyfriend named Dr. Horst, who belabors her with abstract statements of principle that seemed derived from Adorno.  Dr. Horst is completely self-absorbed.  Lena washes his back as he sits in a tub, eating from a tray that discretely conceals his genitals, reading a book with an English title, and, at the same time, watching a show like Bonanza or Gunsmoke on a TV mounted at the foot of his regal tub.  Lena has driven many miles to see him.  Kluge cuts to a shot of the Bahnhof and, then, Lena, whose little car won't start, pushing the vehicle along a deserted and muddy country lane.  The soundtrack is a collage of political statements, speeches, commercials, and florid music that stops and starts apparently randomly, a formal tic that the film has appropriated from Godard's films of the same vintage.  Kluge's movie seems less narrative than a sort of encyclopedic essay, something similar to movies by Chris Marker.  The problem for the audience is discerning the thematic or stylistic principles that motivate the inclusion of material in the movie -- why, for instance, does the movie begin with images of Hitler's festival of culture? (I think Kluge is suggesting that Hitler's politics of spectacle was circus-like and bears a resemblance to the antics presented in the Peichert family circus -- although the comparison is strained, and, possibly, suggested only for the purpose of being refuted; I have the sense that some of the comparisons and metaphors suggested by the film's montage are experimental or hypothetical -- they are advanced only to be rejected.  I come to Kluge through two of his books that I have recently read, both of them about World War Two, and am an admirer of his literary work.  Kluge's writing embodies the montage-techniques of his films:  he splices together apparently discordant and unrelated materials and asks the readers to draw connections -- a project that I think is more readily accomplished in the format of his prose than in the breathless, throw-in-everything-and-the kitchen-sink style of his filmmaking.  The movie is exhausting in its difficulty:  too much too quickly and, in this effect, resembles Godard.  I have the sense that Kluge's film is like Godard's pictures with Anna Karenina -- Kluge seems to be infatuated by his leading lady, Hannelore Hogar, and the camera shamelessly admires her. The film is crammed with huge close-ups of the actress' intelligent, if somewhat angular, face and Kluge contrives pointless episodes to feature Leni Peickert fully nude. (The actress has a nice, trim girl-next-door figure and she is lit to highlight her very slight moustache.)  The movie is a kind of love letter to his hapless heroine, a woman who thinks that she can reconfigure the circus to feature clowns pursuing dolphins through tanks of water and animal acts in which tigers and lions chase "fifty mice wearing yellow stars."  Kluge foregrounds his movie-making technique, shifting between different types of film stock, shooting episodes in fast-motion, and using a variety of narrators to tell the story such as it is.  (Leni fails with her post-modern circus and ends up working in television exactly as her pompous boyfriend, Dr. Horst, predicted.)  There are some lyrical passages showing circuses at night in deserted and poor parts of town, but the film is primarily about the words that are spoken and they are so numerous and difficult that the movie's thematic content is mostly impenetrable.  The film ends unexpectedly and abruptly with one of Leni Peichert's colleagues wondering aloud whether the microphone is operating and, then, struggling to tell the plot of Verdi's Il Trovatore -- why this totally arbitrary scen concludes the film is mysterious to me.  The disc comes with an addition forty minute addendum, even more of a love letter to the leading lady -- The Indomitable Leni Peichert (the German is "unzaehmbar" --meaning "untamed").  This is more of the same and chronicles Leni's work in television -- she gets fired for running an unauthorized film in prime-time and schemes to return to the circus industry.  This is just more of the feature film -- and, one must say, there's quite enough of that to go around without adding another forty minutes of additional material to that narrative. Also on the disc is a really extraordinary and disturbing ten minute short, Electrocuting an Elephant, a movie about the 1903 Edison silent picture with that title -- this little movie is very interesting and intellectually rigorous, although, also, curiously playful.     

Fury

In The Sands of Iwo Jima, John Wayne plays a gruff, battle-hardened sergeant who must toughen his young soldiers for combat.  He makes his boys into men and, then, dies heroically in the film's climactic battle.  David Ayer's Fury is curiously retrograde:  it is nothing more than a tank-based version of The Sands of Iwo Jima with foul language, spectacular and gory special effects, and a similar climax:  imitating Leonidas at Thermopylae, Brad Pitt stages a last stand against hordes of German SS men, troops who, apparently, desire nothing more than to die in large quantities assaulting his disabled tank, the titular Fury.  Whether lots of obscenity and better special effects yields a better result is debatable, but, in any event, Fury is nothing more than a standard WW II war film slowed to a crawl, lacking the snappy wise-cracking dialogue of the forties pictures, and tediously morose, solemn, self-important and earnest.  Within the first few moments, an alert viewer realizes that Fury is completely unrealistic.  Brad Pitt's comic-book hero stabs a weary-looking German on horseback through the eye.  (Why is their a horseman on the battlefield?) Then, Pitt called War-Daddy by his admiring tank crew strikes a heroic pose atop his tank.  Of course, in real life, no soldier in his right mind would present such an inviting target to the foe -- indeed, actual combat soldiers tend to scuttle close to the ground like cockroaches or rats.  Fortunately for War-Daddy, there is no one around to shoot him down as he poses dramatically against the smoky horizon.  A few moments later, someone starts a desultory shelling of the battlefield, a few acres strewn with wrecked Sherman tanks.  Pitt orders his men to drive the tank forward, thus, signaling to the nearby enemy that his tank is not wrecked and, therefore, a viable target.  Of course, you want to shout to him:  "Don't move the tank! They think your dead!" But drive forward he does. Survivors of tank warfare always comment on the terror induced by heavy armored vehicles, the roar of their engines and the stink of diesel, the clatter of treads tearing up the soil and the way that the earth trembles as the huge machines advance.  Oddly enough, Ayer gets none of this into his movie.  The tank itself is poorly defined and never filmed in a way that makes any spatial sense of the vehicle's interior.  We don't have any idea how the tank works or where its occupants are located within the machine -- we don't know the roles of the tank crew or how they are supposed to interact in combat.  Ayer wants us to feel that his tankers are always vulnerable, about to be killed in their fragile metal shell, and so he doesn't provide any sense of the fearsome nature of heavy armored vehicles -- by contrast, the big semi-trucks that George Miller deployed in The Road Warrior were frightening vehicles, studded with dangerous sharp edges and spinning parts, equipment invested with real weight and speed; in Miller's film, the trucks had a tangible, menacing presence and were characters in the movie in their own right.  Ayer's tank, which must be vulnerable so that his murderers can be construed as underdogs, seems completely abstract -- an idea and not a vehicle.  (Only one shot in the whole film carries any physical force:  this is the image of the badly wounded War-Daddy withdrawing into the womblike darkness of the tank, clawing shut the heavy hatch of the turret as he drops into the gloom of the vehicle that he calls his home.)  The movie is pointless and, after a fairly exciting duel with a German Tiger tank, the combat scenes have nowhere to go.  There is a long sequence in which War Daddy and his men interact with two German women -- that scene is well-acted, has an undercurrent of dread, and seems fairly poignant, although indulging in every possible war-time romance cliché.  But the sequence ends with the prettier of the two German girls dead and half-buried in rubble, our heroes mourning the horror of it all, and, then, returning to the front and their last stand and so the scene seems, ultimately, completely inconsequential.  The final battle scene is as unrealistic as Mimi's death in La Boheme and lasts as long -- every time one of our valiant tank warriors is gravely wounded, the swarm of German soldiers desists from their assault, withdrawing to a decent distance and ceasing fire so that our protagonists can say their last goodbyes in relative calm and silence.  Logistically, this climactic combat scene is totally ludicrous and makes no sense.  We have seen the Germans advancing in huge numbers about four-hundred yards from the stranded tank -- and, yet, improbably it takes them ten minutes to get within range of our heroes, thus, allowing for some incredibly stupid and implausible tough-guy dialogue.  Then, the bad guys, who are equipped with many Panzerfaust (tank-killing) weapons decide to mount an infantry attack on the immobile but heavily armed Sherman tank -- thereby, allowing themselves to be slaughtered in windrows.  Finally, someone fires a bazooka round into the tank.  The metal shell of the armored vehicle is pierced, a hit that would instantly kill everyone in the tank in a swarm of whirling shrapnel -- armor-piercing projectiles scale off the inside of the tank and rip the crew members to death with metal fragments.  But, in this case, the armor-piercing round merely plows into one of the crew members, blowing him up but resulting otherwise in no damage to anyone else in the vehicle.  And so the battle goes on for a half-hour with long cease-fires so that each of our heroes can die with appropriate and melodramatic histrionics.  The moral of the movie seems to be this:  "Ideals are peaceful," as War Daddy says, "but history is violent."  And this is fully as stupid as it sounds.  War films succeed either by being entertaining adventures or realistic accounts of horror:  Fury fails by both standards. 

Christ Stopped at Eboli

Many of Francesco Rosi's films study the Italian Mafia.  On first viewing, the understated, anthropological Christ Stopped at Eboli seems an exception:  the film adapts a memoir by Carlo Levi.  In 1935, Levi was sent as a political prisoner to a remote and impoverished hill-town in southern Italy.  The region is badlands, severely eroded mountain slopes, a place so abject that local people said that when Jesus visited Italy, he "stopped at Eboli" -- that is, refused to venture into miserable territory where Levi is exiled.  Trained as a doctor, Levi was an aesthete, a painter, poet, and man of sensibility.  The villagers are friendly to Levi, instinctively insurgent, an enemies of Rome -- we have always been oppressed, the villagers say, first by Aeneas and his Trojans, then, by the Romans, and, now, by the Fascist government under Il Duce, a regime that the people call "the Piedmontese."  Levi is importuned to treat the sick and dying in the village and, despite his hesitancy, he becomes beloved as a local doctor.  History is remote from the picturesque but ruinous village -- people listen to broadcasts of Mussolini's speeches and we see one boy departing for war in Abyssinia, but, otherwise, life is governed by ancient rhythms of religion and labor.  The radio tells the people that the Italian army is triumphant and has entered Addis Ababa and Rosi marks the occasion with a rapturous extended tracking motion, the camera gliding over the denuded hills and badlands, past black-clad peasants who stand like statues immobile in their small, desolate fields.  Levi is pardoned for whatever offense resulted in house arrest and exile.  (Several sorrowful-looking communists are not pardoned and must remain in exile.)  He says goodbye to the villagers and returns to the North, leaving town on a day when rain and sunshine battle one another, departing in the single vehicle operating in the region.  The narrative is presented as a flashback, as Levi's memories many years later, after the end of World War II, thoughts triggered by the old man looking at paintings that he made of children in the village.  Rosi borrows many techniques from spaghetti Westerns -- the flashback structure creates a nostalgic effect that is similar to the mood in some of Sergio Leone's movies and there are ancient trains chugging across eroded landscapes, huge close-ups of handsome men or eccentrics (particularly noteworthy is a bearded giant -- "the sow doctor") and vast barren landscapes:  Rosi uses shock cuts to flocks of birds suddenly disturbed or flags being unfurled.  The film often is composed, shot and edited like Once upon a Time in the West and this impression is heightened by the lead actor, the remarkably handsome and charismatic Gian Maria Volonte, a leading man who is also featured in many Italian-made Westerns.  Christ Stopped at Eboli is sentimental -- there is a stray dog who accompanies the hero -- and episodic.  There is no overriding theme and the film is constructed from observations as to village life.  The villagers are superstitious -- they believe in mischievous spirits (unbaptized babies) and treat illness with a variety of folk remedies, for instance, a woman manages pain by lying in bed with a coin on her forehead.  The town's mayor is the only other educated fellow in the region and he is a Fascist -- there are long polemical exchanges between the two men that slow the film to a standstill.  The villagers regard New York as the great city of the world and many of them have lived there, praising America as the place where they all would live if possible -- most of the town's men of marriageable age have emigrated to New York and the villagers are mostly elderly men, widows in austere black, and babies.  (Despite their praise for New York, the peasants despise the cold porcelain toilets in America and recall with ecstatic joy an excursion into the countryside where they were able to let down their trousers to defecate in the open air.)  Rosi's film is very gentle -- there is no violence and even conflicts between the Fascists and their opponents are muted, collegial, and non-confrontational.  At one point, the Mayor threatens to have carabinieri shoot down some protestors in the town's wretched piazza, but the conflict is quickly defused by Levi who wants to avoid a massacre.  The town priest, who is a drunk maimed by isolation in the remote village, bravely preaches against the war in Abyssinia -- the Fascists march out of the church enraged, but there are no further consequences; after all, the priest is regarded as a person of ill-repute in any event.  The film is long, elegant, beautifully acted and spectacularly filmed:  it seems inconsequential and exceptionally subtle -- most of what is happening is hidden beneath the surface.  At the heart of the film is a consideration of the local institution of "brigandage" -- that is, banditry -- and it is this theme that links the movie to Rosi's great films about the Mafia.  In this village, improbably studding a high, barren ridge, the only meaningful resistance to oppression is petty criminality -- theft and highway robbery apparently encouraged by the Church.  At the edge of the village, there are three high stakes on which the heads of brigands were once impaled.  The village is like the impoverished landscape where the mafia-bandit Salvatore Giuliano operates in Rosi's masterpiece of that name set in Sicily -- the culture seems to be the same.  Rosi is a great, if baffling filmmaker -- his movies seem universal in their footage of sky and field and peasants marching in the dawn to their work, but they are so intimately rooted in the history and culture of Italy as to be a bit inscrutable to an outsider.    

La Fanciulla del West

Minnie, the protagonist of Puccini's 1910 extravaganza, La Fanciulla del West, makes one of the most dramatic entrances of any operatic heroine.  She is the proprietress of a rough saloon in the California Sierra and the loutish miners are arguing about which of them will enjoy her favors.  Insults are exchanged and guns are drawn.  At this moment, Minnie storms into the scene, dressed like Annie Oakley, and adorned with a big six-shooter displayed in a holster strategically placed directly over her crotch.  She pulls the gun, cocks it, and the saloon goes silent.  Even Rance, the lanky, villainous sheriff, dressed all in black like Jack Palance in Shane, looks alarmed.  A few minutes later, Minnie is leading a bible study in which all the men are docile participants.  Puccini's opera follows the outline of David Belasco's hit play The Girl of the Golden West and involves much card-playing, gunfights and lynchings, even a loyal Indian woman who serves as Minnie's servant.  "Fanciulla" is Italian for "maiden" and the word is often used in connection with the Virgin Mary; but the term is also an archaic word for "wench".  Probably, "Fanciulla" means something like "damsel" and, certainly, Puccini's heroine is a virgin militant, an armed and dangerous wench.  In 25 years of attending opera, I have never seen La Fanciulla del West -- it is a rarity in the repertoire and I have always wondered why the show is not more frequently mounted.  It may be that the opera features an inordinately large male cast -- deputies, posses, and crowds of miners are always noisily entering and leaving the set. (The sole woman is Minnie played creditably in this show by the Welsh soprano, Claire Rutter.)  In productions in New York, the show featured horses, mercifully absent from the Minnesota Opera Company's performance that I saw in St. Paul on September 27, 2014 -- the production did have a wonderful drop-curtain, showing about forty horseman, a mounted posse, standing in two rows across the stage; on one horse, a dead man is slumped, apparently the outcome of their endeavors, and the image, which is painted in delicate sepia, looks like an enlargement of a period postcard.  I didn't have much interest in the show:  summaries of the plot make it seem preachy and implausible -- hokey third-rate Bret Harte.  But, in fact, the opera is extremely impressive and an audience-pleaser.  The show is crammed with action and the principal characters are fascinating.  The music accumulates enormous force as the show proceeds and there are plenty of showy arias, duets, and choruses.  I was surprised at the opera's primordial power -- there's something going on in this show that's far beyond anything Bret Harte was capable of imagining.  Minnie is called a "girl" by the miners, but she's more like a spinster, middle-aged, obscurely withholding herself from the blandishments of Sheriff Rance.  (Rance played by the Wagnerian specialist with the wonderful name Greer Grimsley -- he plays Wotan at the Met -- was made-up and costumed to mimic the vile sheriff in the HBO series Deadwood:  with a scraggly pony tail and a vested black suit, he sits in a wooden chair to the side of the stage and kicks back, balancing like Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine.)  Rance wants to force himself upon Minnie but she rejects him, and has, apparently, been rejecting him for years.  A bandit named Rammerez hopes to rob the miners of their gold that they store in a barrel in Minnie's Polka saloon.  The bandit comes to the bar to scout out the place, calling himself Dick Johnson.  He and Minnie have met before and she is in love with him.  When the posse empties the bar to hunt for Remmerez -- they are led by a Wells-Fargo man in a buffalo-skin coat (he is like the assassin in McCabe and Mrs. Miller) -- the bandit tries to rob the place, but desists when he encounters Minnie.  She invites him to her cabin where they are snow-bound and, in a peculiarly realistic scene, attempts to seduce the bandit, while at the same time appearing to virtuously reject him.  They embrace and Rammerez reveals his identity to her.  She repels him, then, in earnest, and as he flees heartbroken into the blizzard, Rance and the Wells Fargo man shoot him.  He staggers back to the cabin, collapses, and, then, Rance and Minnie play poker to decide who will seize the wounded man.  She cheats and wins.  But to no avail; in a puzzling elision, in Act 3, we see that the posse is closing in on Rammerez; they seize him and Rance beats his victim before preparing to lynch him.  (Puccini can always be counted on for gratuitous nastiness, even sadism).  Just as the posse is about to hang the bandit, Minnie appears again, gun drawn.  There is a stand-off, but, in the end, she persuades the miners, to whom she has shown repeated instances of sisterly love, to spare the bandit.  The two lovers depart as dawn breaks over the jagged peaks of the Sierra.  In Puccini's operas, erotic love is symphonic, a kind of thunderous, prolonged calamity, something like an earthquake.  In La Fanciulla, the love scene in the snowbound cottage has an elemental force -- the score is like Siegfried and Brunnhilde's immense duet in Wagner's Siegfried, two behemoths bellowing melodiously at one another.  Indeed, Puccini's music feels Wagnerian; the opera's love theme is an austere eight or nine note motif, subdued and glacial, like the theme from Parsifal.  When Minnie plays poker for possession of the outlaw's unconscious body, the scene has a primal impact -- she shrieks her triumph to the sky.  Later, when Rammerez is about to be hanged, Minnie appears with unearthly yowling, exactly like a Valkyrie, brandishing her phallic revolver -- if they don't free him from the gallows, Minnie promise to shoot first Rammerez and, then, herself and everyone has no doubt that this is not an idle threat.  The scene in which Minnie persuades the miners to defy Rance and forgive the bandit is persuasive and moving because the enormous flood of music makes it plausible, even sacramental.  In general, Puccini's libretti make sense and his operas all have a stark, emotionally compelling thrust.  The Minnesota Opera Company's staging was cheerfully retrograde -- the detailed saloon interior, the cabin in the woods with snow gently falling on its eaves, and the final act, set in the ruins of a mine with a big head-shaft, a hanging tree, and Gothic-looking steeples and minarets of mountain peaks were all Victorian fantasies with considerable allure:  the staging was melodramatic in keeping with the material, probably not remote from the way the opera was premiered in 1910.   In the final moment of the opera, Rance lifts his Winchester and draws a bead on the off-stage lovers.  We know that Rance is a great gunfighter (he looks like Wyatt Earp gone to seed) and that he is incapable of missing.  But as the sun rises over the Sierra peaks and Puccini's music swells to a titanic climax, he is incapable of pulling the trigger.     

Night Moves

Kelly Reichardt's Night Moves (2013) is a minimalist thriller that is surprisingly suspenseful and effective.  A young man and woman have joined with a Marine Corps bomb expert to build a nitrogen fertilizer bomb.  For reasons that are never clearly defined, the trio intend to destroy a dam located in the mountains of Oregon.  Working together they build the bomb, load the explosives into a boat, and, at night, moor it near the dam.  After some complications, the bomb is detonated.  The surge of water from the ruptured dam kills a camper downstream.  Then, as happens in all heist movies, the three conspirators begin  to suspect one another:  paranoia ensues with the result that one of them is murdered by the others.  The film ends ambiguously and in media res -- however, it is clear that this misadventure has been disastrous:  if the survivors escape arrest, they will be condemned to a life of fear and hiding.  Reichardt works with long takes and avoids dialogue; her mantra seems to be "never explain" -- as a result the audience has the pleasure (or the frustration depending upon your point of view) of working out the plot and its implications from hints and clues distributed parsimoniously throughout the film.  Her previous movie, Meekers Cutoff, was a punishing trek through austere desert, an abstract trip to nowhere that I found intensely disturbing -- everyone was always dying slowly of exhaustion and thirst.  The movie, a minimalist Western, was often dull and seemingly pointless, but it has stayed with me and left powerful impressions despite several ensuing years.  Night Moves has the same effect -- the movie is ultimately terrifying.  Using the most simple means, Reichardt forces our identification with the disaffected Josh, a kid living and working for a sustainable foods coop.  We don't know Josh's motivations for engaging in the act of eco-terrorism -- the idea is obviously half-baked and Josh doesn't seem the zealous type.  He is a loner, a cipher, and, as the film progresses, we come to share his overwhelming paranoia, his fear of detection -- by the end of the movie, every shot carries an aura of subtle, but fearsome, menace.  The film's final image, Josh looking up at a big convex mirror installed for security purposes in a camping-gear store, embodies the sense of omnipresent surveillance and threat that has become the core of the protagonist's life.  Reichardt's movie is ultra-realistic in its details and aggressively undramatic:  the Marine Corps bomb expert and the rich girl who is bankrolling the project, and who seems to be Josh's closest friend, apparently have sex.  (Movie reviews and plot descriptions describe them as having "a sexual relationship" -- but this overstates the liaison; there is no "relationship").  We know about the encounter by some moans and sighs half-heard on the soundtrack -- nothing more is depicted and the two characters give no sign that they have ever touched one another let alone had sex.  This is typical of way Reichardt constructs her movie.  Like Meeks Cutoff, the film invokes Samuel Beckett -- it's principal theme seems to be the futility of any kind of action.  And this is also characteristic of the movie:  Reichardt is good with landscapes and goofy random encounters; she doesn't like to stage violence -- a scene involving a murder is shot in a sauna so that the director doesn't really have to show you anything.  (Similarly, the explosion and destruction of the dam is just a loud boom off-screen -- Reichardt's ethic seems to be that to present showy images of violence and destruction is to defeat the moral and ethical purpose of a film like this, a cool dramatization that crime doesn't pay.)  In structure, the movie resembles many heist pictures -- films like The Asphalt Jungle or Kubrick's The Killing:  some criminals conspire to commit a crime, successfully engineer the heist, and, then, destroy one another.  Night Moves is produced by horror film director Larry Fessenden and Todd Haynes,  the director of another alarming movie with horror film atmosphere, Safe with Julianne Moore.  As Hitchcock was fond of saying, show the audience a bomb with a timer, set the timer ticking, and you have suspense whether you like it or not.  Night Moves is extremely compelling and tremendously suspenseful -- one has the sense that Reichardt was, perhaps, hoping for something more profound, but her almost silent characters and their enigmatic actions can't support much in the way of meaning.  Nonetheless, this is an excellent crime picture.  (The lead characters, Josh played by Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning playing Dena, and Peter Sarsgaard, as ex-marine, are excellent.  In one scene, Josh stops to yank a doe that has been hit by a passing vehicle off the highway.  The doe is pregnant and Josh says that the animal has a baby deer inside of it that is still alive -- this is metaphoric for the characters, who seem doomed before they have really been properly born.)

The Deep

The simile is as apt as it is banal and predictable, the Icelandic director, Baltasar Kormakur's 2012 film, The Deep, is as pitiless and objective an episode from a saga.  Iceland's sagas present hard-bitten, laconic protagonists battling inexorable forces -- often, the stories have the mysterious presence of a parable, except that it is very difficult to ascertain what, if anything, the parable means.  In The Deep, Gulle, a chubby, chain-smoking sailor, parties on the night before going to sea on a fishing boat.  Icelanders drink heavily and people pass out or vomit in alleys; Gulle wanders the streets of the fishing village in a short-sleeved shirt, mysteriously not suffering from the cold that everyone else feels. (Presumably, the alcohol has anesthetized him against the wind and falling snow).  The village is on one of the Westmann Islands, formidable black chunks of obsidian sticking out of the arctic North Atlantic.  The village is a grid of white lights and bare white buildings, all of them new, in a cleft in the volcanic rock -- the place had to be rebuilt when a volcano erupted nearby, destroyed the city, and forced the evacuation of the whole island, an event that Gulle later recalls vividly in flashbacks.  The next morning, before the sun rises, Gulle boards a fishing vessel.  The boat sails three miles from the harbor and casts nets into the churning sea.  One of the nets gets entangled in a spike of subterranean basalt extruded by one of the recent eruptions.  The men can't shut off the machine winch and the boat is pulled upside down.  Except for Gulle, all of the fishermen drown.  Gulle swims to shore, somehow avoids being battered to pieces in the mountainous surf crashing against the island's sheer escarpments, and, then, climbs up the cliff onto the plateau.  The interior of the island is a desert of razor-sharp obsidian glass.  Gulle is barefoot but he walks over the jagged shards of obsidian four or five miles, staggers down from the meadows where there are tiny, shaggy Icelandic ponies, and, leaving a trail of bloody footprints, reaches safety.  No one can understand how Gulle survived:  the water temperature was between 41 and 37 degrees and, yet, he managed to swim three miles in those conditions -- this feat is physiologically impossible.  (We see hypothermia killing the other sailors within a matter of minutes, but Gulle was in the water for six hours.)  The dead seamen are never recovered:  an old man says:  "Drowned fishermen are best to stay in their watery graves."  Gulle's survival baffles the scientists and he is flown first to Rekjavik and, then, London to be studied.  "Are you in good shape?" one doctor asks the fat, chainsmoking Gulle.  "What do you think?" he says.  In London, Gulle is put in a vat of ice-water with four Navy Seals, all buff with ripped abdomens and wearing tight little speedos -- Gulle, who is ashamed of his physique, wears a tee-shirt and underpants for the experiment.  The Seals are pulled out of the ice-water in a few minutes, while Gulle just sits there, churning his legs, apparently indifferent to the cold.  Gulle returns to home and visits the widow of one of his buddies who died in the shipwreck.  One of the dead man's children asks him:  "Are you a seal?  Are you a troll?  Are you some kind of sea monster?"  Gulle says:  "I'm just a man.  A very lucky man."  The film is shot efficiently and without any dramatic emphasis -- it's just one thing following another and the movie's tone is documentary.  The Icelanders are stoic in the extreme -- no one weeps except one child (and, then, it's just a single tear); the widows and mothers are all dry-eyed.  The pastor also chain smokes and he has no homily to explain the shipwreck or Gulle's miraculous survival.  At sea, Gulle talks to a seagull, look up to see the northern lights flickering overhead, and hallucinates memories of the volcanic eruption.  There is a slight suggestion that the volcanic fire has somehow tempered Gulle -- his memories focus on the eruption of the mountain nearby and the flows of magma destroying the fishing village.  But this idea isn't developed in any systematic way.  Gulle feels bad for drinking milk straight out of the bottle and owes money on his motorcycle --in the icy Atlantic, he says that he wants to apologize to his aging mother for the way he drinks milk and pay off his motorcycle; there's a girl that he would also like to see, although she lives in a house with a curtain always drawn over her window and we never see her.  These seem to be his motivations for surviving.  In the water, he swims the way that you and I might keep our head above the waves if we were castaways-- there's no Australian crawl, no discernible stroke at all, he just bobs there dog-paddling.  In the end, someone says that Gulle probably survived because he was fat.  Kormakur doesn't even accept this suggestion -- Gulle was lucky and as the old Icelanders say a man's life is only as good as his luck:  so long as he is lucky, he survives; when he is unlucky, he dies.  That's all there is.  The film is based on a celebrated true story and, during the closing titles, we see the real Gulle, a plump, laconic man with curly hair in his white hospital bed:  he also has no explanation for his survival.  You make up your mind what, if anything, this means.