La Cigarette (and Mark Cousins' Women Make Film)

La Cigarette is an oddity, a rare film made in 1919 by Germaine Dulac.  The movie was broadcast as part of a series of movies by women directors adjunct to Mark Cousin's 14 hour documentary, Women make Film (shown on Turner Classic Movies).  It's hard to evaluate La Cigarette because the 52 minute movie is in ruinous condition.  About a third of the film is disfigured by whirling vortices of decay that are positioned in the center of the image.  (Many old celluloid films have zones of rot running down the outer frames of the pictures -- a flickering decomposition encircles the images but doesn't ravage their centers; this is how much of the footage found in Dawson featured in Bill Morrison's Dawson City: Frozen Time documentary looks.)  The viewer is beset by turbulent cameo-shaped storms of decay in La Cigarette that seem malevolently placed to impose maximum illegibility -- the damage is right in the center of the frame.  Adding to a viewer's frustration is the fact that the film's intertitles are in French and have not been translated.  This is particularly problematic since this movie has lengthy titles and, further, involves plot points that are conveyed by the main character writing letters and notes that are also unintelligible unless you can read the language.  The film is exhausting to watch and, ultimately, not worth the effort.  

La Cigarette has an utterly bizarre plot.  A Parisian Egyptologist welcomes the mummy of an Egyptian  princess into the collection of his museum.  (The mummy is a ghastly-looking thing with a strange leathery and impassive face in which slit-eyes glint.)  The Egyptologist, who seems to be some kind of scholar, brings home for his wife the mummy's necklace.  His wife thinks it's a gift, but, in fact, he has just brought the artifact for her to examine.  The professor's wife is much younger and wears diaphanous, classically modeled garments -- she flits about on the model of the Gish sisters, cuddling some turtledoves that live in the backyard next to a strange fountain with a single ejaculatory jet of water shooting up into the air.  The professor is anxious as to whether he still appeals to his young wife.  And, it doesn't help matters that he has brought the mummified corpse home and seems (in one shot at least) to install the thing in his bedroom.  (Long titles provide some kind of backstory for the mummy; I have no idea what they communicate except that it has something to do with a forbidden love affair, a slave, and poison.)  The professor's wife is current, a sort of Parisian flapper, and a bit frivolous.  She tries to get the staid scholar to dance with her but he declines.  A handsome young boulevardier seems to be flirting with young woman -- she's called Denise.  He turns out to be golf pro or something on that order and takes Denise out to the links.  Returning to the clubhouse (or some such place), the golf pro makes a pass at Denise; he nibbles on her wrist like Gomez in the old Addams Family shows.  The professor is lurking around and sees this happen.  This causes him to doubt his wife's fidelity.  The next day, she goes to a sort of housewarming party to which the golf pro is also invited.  The professor has tailed his wife in a horse-drawn hansom and sees the golf pro entering the party after his wife has gone into the apartment.  (In the apartment, the three women there lavishly attend to the golf pro who is apparently hot stuff -- they wait on him like handmaidens; this is a couple years after Verdun and men were in short supply in France.)  Enraged by jealousy, the husband contrives a weird sort of revenge -- he injects poison into a cigarette and, then, mixes it into a batch of about forty fags in a box.  He plans to commit suicide by some kind of  ciggie Russian Roulette..  One by one, he smokes the coffin-nails but without drawing the fatal fag.  (Throughout this part of the movie everyone is always smoking:  cigarettes, cigarillos, cigars, pipe tobacco, you name it.)  The jealous husband gets down to a last cigarette.  This must be the one charged with poison.  In the corner, the mummy eyes the professor and his wife maliciously -- a beam of light makes the dead princess' jewelry spangled and brilliant.  The professor lights up the cigarette and inhales deeply -- then, his wife snatches it from him and begins smoking herself.  A tedious flashback reveals that she somehow figured-out that her husband had engineered the death by poison cigarette plot.  She has removed the poison cigarette, but, amazingly, not discarded it -- she just put it with another thirty fags in another box.  The cigarette that they are smoking isn't toxic.  We get an insert of the turtledoves happily bathing in the fountain and, then, husband and wife hold hands by the strange spurting fountain, both of them merrily smoking their fags.  (Interestingly, the Russian roulette aspects of this plot, albeit with a real gun, are reprised in Dulac's much more well-known La Souriante Madame Beaudet ("The Smiling Madame Beaudet) made in 1923.

The plot is idiotic and the direction strangely noncommittal.  The movie reminds us that suspense has to be manufactured by close-ups, montage, and strategic withholding of information -- techniques of which the filmmaker seems to know nothing at all.  The smoking scenes are completely nondescript, shot without any kind of emphasis at all -- one can only imagine the mosaic of huge close-ups and delay tactics that someone like Hitchcock would have exploited in this context.  The attractive heroine is rim-lit and has a fine halo of luminous hair and the eerie mummy's jewelry glints (the thing gets sent in a crate back to the museum at the denouement)/.  In one scene, the heroine enters a bathroom and, in the gloom, the medicine cabinet (where they are storing poison for some inexplicable reason) glows with a weird and fatal sheen.  

La Cigarette is a minor work by an estimable woman director, Germaine Dulac (1882 - 1942) -- it's her first work to survive and she probably made far better movies than this thing.  (She is most famous for a erotic surrealist film, The Clergyman and the Seashell, based on a script by Antonin Artaud and released in 1928).  The film is part of a series of 100 movies directed by women shown on Turner Classic Movies as accessories to Mark Cousin's Women Make Films, a New Road Movie through Cinema (2019)  Cousins, although born in Coventry England, was raised in northern Ireland and makes documentaries about film history.  His most well-known picture, The Story of Film, an Odyssey is a 15 hour roughly chronological history of the movies that differs from most accounts of this sort by emphasizing little-known movies from Asia, Central Europe, and places like Australia, South American and Canada.  The 2011 film is a revelation and exposes viewers to literally hundreds of interesting movies by directors unknown in the United States.  Women make Films attempts the same feat with respect to under-appreciated female directors -- the idea is to introduce the viewer to moviemakers who have been unfairly ignored in the United States (and, perhaps, England as well).  The program is immensely long (14 hours) and features hundreds and hundreds of film clips, but it is perversely designed.  Cousins organizes the movies by themes -- such as "The Meaning of Life", "Conversations", "Endings", "Meet Cute", "POV", etc.  In total Cousins has about 40 subcategories into which he sorts his film clips, generally snippets of film one minute to three minutes long.  Between categories, the movie rather inscrutably shows us footage from the windshields of vehicles driving through various picturesque landscapes.  The programs are rather cloyingly narrated by women's voices, people like Jane Fonda, Tilda Swinton, who is a producer, and Debra Winger (as well as famous female directors from India, Asia and Africa.)  Cousins writes the narrative that is, generally, uninformative -- he identifies the director and, then, proceeds to praise her or, in the alternative, he simply narrates the scene that we are seeing, describing how it is shot and framed.  He has a literary tic:  he tends to add a phrase to his narration when you expect the sentence to have ended:  for instance, "Most of the movies in the world have been made by men.  But on all six film-making continents, women have made movies -- sometimes the very best movies."  The way that Cousins' sorts the film clips is confusing and baffling -- it's impossible to figure out why a given clip is part of "Staging" as opposed to "Editing", or "Sex," as opposed to "Bodies".  Ultimately, his organizing categories turn out to be completely arbitrary and, in almost all cases, the filing of film snippets under one heading as opposed to another makes no sense at all.  The series would have been far better if Cousins had simply focused on his favorite ten women filmmakers unknown to Turner Classic Movies' audiences and educated us about them.  (We know that Cousins is a fanatical admirer of the great Russian filmmaker Kira Muratova to the point of having her name tattooed on his arm -- I would like to know more about this director and her films and not waste time trying to unravel how Cousins' selections of films illustrating "Conversations" is different from from "Life Inside" or "Reveal.")  I  faithfully7 watched every episode principally to learn the names of female directors hitherto unknown to me and because many of the clips were fascinating in themselves, although presented in such a way as to make the content more or less meaningless..  Edith Carlmar, for instance, was an ingenious and brilliant Swedish director in the forties and fifties, now unknown except in her homeland.  The Russians produced lots of women who seem to have shot impressively pictorial rural epics -- I knew about Larisa Shepitko (whose movies are almost unwatchably morose) but was unaware of the redoubtable Yuliya Solnitseva, Dovhenko's wife, and obviously a major lyrical voice in cinema.  So the series has value, but, ultimately, is too confusing in its structure and weirdly capricious to be of interest to anyone but cinephiles.  The movie also demonstrates something that should be obvious by now -- there is no such thing as a distinctively female film sensibility and, certainly, no "female gaze" that is counterpart to the equally illusory "male gaze."  Cousins also has an irritating habit of praising films made by Communist directors, full of noxiously overt ideology, while denouncing poor Leni Riefenstahl, certainly one of the greatest of all female directors, but, alas, a Nazi (or Nazi sympathizer).  Cousins is so enamored by Communist filmmakers that he fails to point out that one of the pictures, made by an Albanian director, Tompto and his Friends, features children recruited into terrorist attacks on occupying German soldiers and is a particularly virulent form of Stalinist propaganda -- it takes critics from the former Soviet bloc to comment on this; TCM host, Alicia Malone brings up this criticism in her interview with Cousins who seems a  little embarrassed but not too much.  (TCM showed the series in hour-long installments with interviews with Cousins. He has hair dyed bright blonde and speaks with a beautiful accent and wears colorful ties with his sleeves open to show the mass of tattoos disfiguring his arms; he's an engaging guy and a true film enthusiast).  TCM's movies broadcast as exhibits to the documentary are generally disappointing -- heavy on pictures by Ida Lupino, Dorothy Arznour, and the dismal Katherine Bigelow.  For some reasons, the most important films mentioned by Cousins are inaccessible -- for instance, although Cousins speaks reverently of Kira Muratova, none of her pictures are broadcast.  Nonetheless, a number of films shown with the series are of great interest and, even, a lousy picture like La Cigarette  is sufficiently rare and unusual to be worth glancing at.  

 

Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb

 Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb is a two-hour 2020 documentary available on Netflix.  It provides an interesting glimpse into Egyptian archaeology and highlights interesting finds made in the shadow of Zoser's famous step-pyramid, the first pyramidal structure erected in ancient Egypt.  The movie is beautifully shot with many huge, luminous close-ups.  (In a way, the film's big close-ups and image-selection, featuring several scenes in which artifacts are discovered on-screen, brushed off and, then, carefully lifted from the immemorial sands while workers chatter excitedly in Arabic and applaud resembles the experimental works of the Harvard Sensory Ethnology Lab -- particularly, the films Sweetwater and Leviathan.).  The location of the dig has real presence, a hillside with complex tiers of stone half-buried in golden sand  -- the excavations are dark sockets cut into the rock and there are always tiny avalanches of honey-amber sand slithering down the sides of the hill.  The demarcation between the desert necropolis and the nearby city is stark -- Saqqara is lush with fields of brilliantly green reeds and enormous date palms; the desert is histrionically barren, treeless, without a shred of grass or weed.  The remarkable feature of the landscape is that you can stroll from the absolutely barren sand and stone quarries of the necropolis into the verdant green oasis in the course of a walk of about 100 yards.  The large crew of "diggers", a profession passed down from grandfather to father to son, come from the nearby village, some of them driving up to the site on motorbikes.  Unlike almost every other archaeological film that I have seen, this dig is led by Egyptians and entirely staffed by Egyptian workers.  In Egypt, it seems that professional archaeology is a decidedly blue collar task -- there's none of the elaborate grids and laser-equipped geographic-locating devises that characterize European and American archaeology.  In fact, the people working on the site don't even seem to use sifting technology -- they just hack out buckets and wicker baskets of pebbles and sand from the site, haul it to a dump and, then, repeat the process.  It's all very low-tech and to my eyes looks a lot like looting, although the Egyptians, I suppose, are free to treat their archaeological sites in any way they want.  In any event, it looks fabulous on-screen, like out-takes from an Indiana Jones movie - hordes of extras in turbans and pale tunics digging on a terraced hillside under the looming shadow of the great step-pyramid while in the distance muezzins in the village call the faithful to prayer.  The Egyptian scholars have a funky, down-to-earth appearance and seem to be poorly dressed.  The women all wear modest headscarves and everyone praises God all the time.  The osteology expert, a middle-aged woman, sorts through bones seated on a small stool in the tomb where they were found -- she seems fantastically accomplished.  She introduces herself to the skeletons and gives them a cheery greeting "as if the person were right across from me."  

The film advertises itself as about a particular well-preserved tomb, the grave of a priest named Wayte.  But there are three other strands of narrative woven into the film.  Somewhere else in the necropolis, there's huge cemetery of mummified animals, that dig curated by an enthusiastic and attractive middle-aged lady.  From time to time, graves from the so-called Rammesid period (between Rameses and Cheops) are found -- these graves feature elaborate wooden coffins, some of which are cautiously opened on-screen.  A third additional element in the narrative is the need for the diggers to discover something important before the work shuts down for the season at the start of Ramadan -- thus, there's an element of suspense in the picture.  If an important find is not made before Ramadan, the government will likely curtail funds to the project, an outcome that will be devastating to the archaeologists on the team but also economically calamitous for the local economy -- it seems like half the population is employed in these digs.  Ultimately, the film's ending is cautiously happy -- another well-preserved tomb is found just before the work on the site has to cease for Ramadan.  A lion cub is found embalmed among the animal mummies, the first artifact of this kind discovered in Egypt.  (The discovery suggests that the Saqqqara priests who raised animals for sacrifice and mummification may have been "farming" lion cubs.)  

The film has an interesting emotional component.  Wayte's tomb is full of large life-size statues of the priest and shows the man happily entering paradise with his wife and four children.  There are four burial shafts sunk in the middle of the tomb's upper chambers, the walls of which are replete with beautiful carvings and hieroglyphs.  At first, the archaeologists interpret the tomb inscriptions and imagery as showing that Wayte was uniquely happy, well-respected, and had an exemplary family life -- the "ancient Egyptians loved life so much that they wanted it to continue just as it was in the afterlife."  But the tomb has various oddities -- the name of Wayte is mentioned much too often and some of the inscriptions and sculptures apparently are intentionally defaced.  It turns out that Wayte may have "stolen" the tomb from his brother, a shadowy figure mentioned in places in the inscriptions.  And, then, it appears that the burials in the place were made in panicked haste.  Three females are found jumbled together in one shaft, a grandmother, mother, and daughter.  In the other shaft all of Wayte's three sons are found, also poorly mummified and heaped up in a pile of bones.  Finally, Wayte himself is discovered, his skull fairly well preserved.  "He was a fine man who did fine work," the woman bone-anthropologist says.  (This is a mistranslation:  by "fine", she means "delicate.")  Wayte and his family seem to have been wiped out by malaria -- if this is true, this is the first recorded archaeological find showing death by malaria, a full thousand years before other examples of this sort of pathology.)  The anthropologist sadly says that Wayte's cheerful tomb with its optimistic, colorful images was not an accurate depiction of his life, an existence that seems to have involved fratricidal rivalry with his brother and mass death by disease.  "He created an image of a happy afterlife that was very different from what he experienced while alive,"  the woman tells us.  The encounter with dead priest causes the workers to reflect on their own lives.  One archaeologist takes his small daughter out for ice-cream noting that he wouldn't be able to bear the kind of tragedy that Wayte experienced.  

Archaeologists like the unusual.  The great Southwestern archaeologist Stephen Lekson once described a Chaco site as being as full of funky items as "a Santa Fe fleamarket."  Obviously, Saqqara has that characteristic.  Interestingly, World Archaeology featured an article on Saqqara also called "The Secrets of Saqqara" (Vol. 103 - October/November 2020).  This article reports on a Dutch dig and never mentions the sites central to the Netflix documentary -- obviously, the place is big and has many mansions.  

The B-side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait

 Errol Morris's documentary about the photographer, Elsa Dorfman, is a subdued and gentle tribute to a woman that the filmmaker seems to genuinely admire.  Dorfman must be in her late seventies now and spent most of her life using massive Polaroid cameras to produce large-format portraits.  Raised in the
Boston suburbs, she worked for a time at the Grove Press and, in fact, took many noteworthy black-and-white pictures of famous writers and intellectuals.  (She was a lifelong friend to Allen Ginsberg, a figure who features prominently in the documentary.)  Things got a little too wild for her the Grove Press -- she says twice in the film that she was a "good Jewish girl" (a charming mischaracterization) -- and, so, she ended up Cambridge peddling her black and white 35 mm pictures for two-dollars a pop on the street.  It was in Massachusetts that she became enamored with Polaroid technology and began working with large-scale cameras of that kind.  Because she is unorthodox and, even, seems slightly autistic, Dorfman was "never one of their pets."  Although arguably she did more to legitimize Polaroids as art than anyone else (except, perhaps David Hockney use of the the Land camera to make cubist-influenced photo-collages), the people at the company were suspicious of her and leery when she wanted to rent their large-format cameras.  Nonetheless, she flourished making portraits in a 20 x 24 inch format and, even, created some very notable works in the enormous 20 x.80 inch size.  Because the images are available to her within seconds of the exposure, many of her pictures show their subjects holding smaller sized polaroid pictures like tablets or books.  Her famous pictures of Ginsberg show him first nattily dressed and, then, stark naked with the life-size picture of him in suit and tie behind his nude body.  ("Nice Jewish girl" indeed.!)  The context of the film is elegiac -- Polaroid is bankrupt, it's factories are desolate, and the film required for Dorfman's work is no longer available.  Once the leading technology in photography, the Polaroid camera is now as defunct as travel agencies and rotary dial phones.  Morris films Dorfman in her blackroom now converted into a storage space in which her huge pictures are carefully stored in chronologically labeled filing cabinets.  When Dorfman made her portraits, she took two exposures -- the client selected the picture that they wanted, leaving her with the reject, an image that she calls the B-side.  (In her view, the B-sides, which often have something idiosyncratic about them -- someone blinks or makes a momentary sour face -- are better pictures than the more flattering images selected by her patrons.)  

The film is very simple and Morris' technique, although fantastically polished, is unobtrusive.  Dorfman describes events in her life and holds up pictures, sometimes seeming to hide behind the big images.  She knew everyone and there are pictures of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and many other famous people. (Jonathon Richman provides an affectionate song for the film's closing credits.)  Dorfman herself is completely unpretentious.  She's a homely woman with a sweet smile and has an odd clipped way of speaking -- she sometimes refers to herself in the third person:  "Why would Elsa do that?"  She seems a little eccentric and "on the spectrum" as they say.  She doesn't think photography reveals people''s souls:  "I'm really not interested in their souls.  I want to show how they seem."  The "camera" she says "is like a spoon, the instrument you eat with."  She is the epitome of "unthreatening" and one can see how she managed to take so many fine and memorable pictures -- people forgot about her, ignored her, and, therefore, revealed themselves in her presence.  She embodies something that fascinates Morris -- the notion of the perfect observer, someone who sees and records everything, and doesn't seem to intervene in the transmittal of the truth about what she sees.  (Morris appears to be friends with her and, I think, he sees her as a fellow traveler with respect to the documentary revelation of reality.)   Of course, she's fascinating and endearing.

Ultimately, photography and film, for that matter, are mortuary arts.  (This is a common-place and the theme of  critical works by Barthes and Susan Sontag.)  Images preserve the real presence of people who have died.  Dorfman thinks that a picture"has its ultimate meaning when the person has died."  There's a faintly melancholy aspect about the movie -- many of Dorfman's subjects are gone; we see her reacting with repressed emotion to images of Allen Ginsberg.  The paper on which her Polaroids were printed is very fragile and the colors are easily damaged by direct sunlight.  And, of course, she can no longer practice her profession, at least with Polaroid images, because the film is no longer available.  The movie ends with some depressing footage of abandoned Polaroid factories with leaking roofs and big puddles on the concrete floors. But the sadness is only temporary -- Dorfman seems to have had a wonderful life:  "I don't like to take pictures of people who are sad.  I won't photograph the broken-hearted.  I have the misguided notion that my role in the universe is to make people feel better."  This seems entirely admirable and the documentary, which seems devoted to the same objective, is brilliant in a very low-key and unostentatious way.  

(Dorfman died in May 2020 at 83).

My Psychedelic Love Story

 Joanne Harcourt-Smith was a promiscuous, ravishing party-girl before she met Timothy Leary in 1974.  Leary, the guru of the LSD human potential movement, was on the lam, hiding out at posh hotels in Switzerland.  Harcourt-Smith wanted to meet the fugitive -- some years earlier, when she was pregnant, she had heard the Moody Blues Song "Timothy Leary is Dead" and been fascinated by it. (She knew everything about sex but nothing about the "facts of life" -- her mother's only admonition to her when she was sexually active as a teenager was to "not get syphilis.") Leary offered her a Tarot card reading during their first encounter -- she drew the Destiny card first, then, Prudence ("I'll pass on that," she demurred) and, the Tower.  This array of cards persuaded her that she was destined to be "bonded" to Leary for all time -- this is her odd locution.  She was his girlfriend until 1977 when after a  "terrible fight", he absconded -- by that time, they were living together in an FBI Witness Protection program in Santa Fe. (To save himself, Leary had turned "snitch" and was acting as government informer against his former disciples.)  Joanne Harcourt-Smith (JHS) was distraught at losing Leary, but used her vast wealth to retreat to the Caribbean where she voyaged between islands for a few seasons until she had recovered sufficiently to begin the rest of her life, apparently as a sort of New Age celebrity back in Santa Fe.  She died on October 11, 2020 at 74 and Errol Morris' entertaining documentary about her love affair with Leary was, apparently, shot while she was in the final stages of her cancer.  Notwithstanding her obvious frailty, JHC dominates Morris with her witty, sometimes scabrous, anecdotes and his Interrogatron camera device is obviously in love with her.  She's fantastically articulate, speaking in a strangely mechanical voice with  almost computer-like pronunciation of words, flawless elocution that doesn't seem quite human -- it's not clear what she would regard as her first language or, even, whether that concept would have any meaning to her.  She was raised in Paris and the French Riviera, but obviously speaks perfect, grammatically impeccable English and, apparently, several other languages as well. (Newspaper accounts describe her as an English citizen; her stepfather was Hungarian, her mother, apparently a Polish Jew, and she lived for significant periods of her life in German-speaking countries..)  When she discloses that she had trouble adapting to the wide open spaces around Santa Fe, she notes: "I never went camping.  I'm a Parisian.")  About a third of the way through the interview -- and that's the entire format for My Psychedelic Love Story- -- Morris asks her when she first discovered that she could effortlessly manipulate men.  She pauses since there is, in fact, no point in her life that she can reliably recall when she wasn't able to get men to do exactly what she wanted -- she settles for a moment when she was about five when a tutor molested her, an experience, that she blithely says, was not "wholly disagreeable."  JHS has a toothy and perfect smile and is tremendously engaging -- she obviously has a mellowing impact of Morris.  A couple of times when she obviously lies, Morris contents himself with exclaiming "Oh come on, Joanne!" but he doesn't confront her and, presumably finds her as whimsically engaging and effortlessly charming as the film's viewers do.  

A lot of what JHS says is pretty questionable and, like everyone else on earth, she labors to present herself in the best possible light.  However, she's happy to admit to casual promiscuity and says that she was never pleased with herself unless she could count up to eight admirers at a time -- "Not that I was having sex with all of them," she says, but, of course, some of them were lucky enough to enjoy her favors and the others she kept on a short leash.  When Leary was imprisoned (in fact for most of their liaison) she kept up her busy sexual schedule, keeping her "husband", as she called him, closely apprised of her adventures.  She doesn't even bother to apologize for these peccadillos but seems to regard them as intrinsic to the mid seventies Jet Set of which she was a member -- she was a star of Lebanese TV when she was fifteen and notes that she "was having lots of sex then."  She parleyed  her beauty into encounters with the rich and famous -- with her sometimes boyfriend, Dennis Merino, she partied with the Rolling Stones and, then, tried to engineer a meeting between presidential candidate George McGovern and Keith Richards; the Stones offered to play free concerts to support McGovern run for the presidency.  There are shots of her with Andy Warhol, of course, and Mick Jagger and various other luminaries of the era.  When she and Leary were extradited from Kabul, they went first class from Frankfurt (they were planning to escape in Paris and so the plane was diverted) to San Francisco, guzzling champagne the whole time with the famous German playboy, Gunter Sachs, then the husband of Brigitte Bardot.  For the first third of her life, she enjoyed celebrity and vast wealth of a kind unimaginable to most people.  Then, she began her fateful relationship with Timothy Leary, the subject of most of the movie.  Her chronicle of wild days and nights with Leary takes on a disturbing aspect.  JHS has come to believe that she was manipulated into meeting Leary, seducing him, and, then, luring him into a trap in Afghanistan so that he could be captured and held hostage by "Nixon and Governor Reagan" until he could be coerced into appearing in public as representative of the federal government's  war on drugs.  Ultimately, JHS concludes that her erstwhile boyfriend, Dennis Merino, whom she describes as a kind of James Bond villain was, in fact, what he told her that he was -- a CIA operative and that he ultimately pulled the marionette strings on her life.  (Merino died, perhaps was assassinated, at a wild party thrown by the Turkish playboy, Adnan Kashoggi.)  Despite these dark averments, JHS, always quick to assert her agency and independence, says that she sought out Morris and asked him to make the documentary on the strength of his disturbing and horrific Wormwood, a long-form, half-dozen episode about  CIA experimentation with LSD in the fifties and the destructive effect that this had on a man who determined (or, perhaps, fantasied) that the government had, in fact, killed his father in the drug trials -- the drug, it is hypothesized in Wormwood, was tested by the CIA as a brain-washing agent.  My Psychedelic Love Story is frothier and far less dark than Wormwood -- it plays, in fact, like an Audrey Hepburn movie with the madcap JHS in the ingenue role as Acid Queen.  But there is a distinct conspiratorial edge to the movie and it surmises that Leary was, in fact, coopted by the Feds through what JHS says was her "Mata Hari sex spy" contrivances.  

Morris shoots the interview from, at least, four vantage points, uses vintage rock and roll, and intercuts the narrative with elaborate montage sequences featuring Tarot cards in giant close-ups, psychedelically manipulated landscapes, ominous images of hotel and city skylines, as well as dozens of shots from various versions of Alice in Wonderland, suggesting JHS, the Acid Queen, was like Alice fallen into a surreal world of drug-induced visions.  Leary is featured in old interviews and documentary footage including one scene shown repeatedly in which he is grinning maniacally while being dragged in handcuffs from a cop car to a jail entrance.  Leary thought of himself as the reincarnation of Aleistar Crowley and so there are many shots of the Great Beast himself in satanic regalia -- there also images from what appear to be underground films by Kenneth Anger and many shots of celebrities and movie stars cavorting with the fantastically beautiful waif-like JHS,  The big closeups of JHS are set against a mosaic of exotic footage, cut very quickly together, montages of esoteric imagery and manipulated colorized documentary footage.  The actual interview takes place in what seems to be a Western-style house, all timber and wood like a hunting lodge in which the tiny JHS sits alone in a huge gloomy room.  

There's a sort of revelation at the end.  It turns out that Leary recorded many hours of tape for JHS whom he seems to  have genuinely loved but been more than a little afraid of.  For a time the tapes were lost and JHS, for some inexplicable reason, never really listened to them when she received the recordings -- they were interviews between Leary and a shrink at the prison where he was confined. We see the old woman listening to this tape and grinning; the words trigger more memories in her.  Ultimately, she comes to believe that Leary's cooperation with the authorities was, in effect, the result of torture.  The Feds kept him in solitary confinement next to Charley Manson and seem to have threatened to dose him with so much acid that he would never be able to recover any semblance of sanity.  In his interview with the earnest G-Man on the evils of drugs, Leary seems not wholly enthusiastic and, in fact, appears to be playing some sort of sinister joke on the cop.  Of course, JHS has to justify Leary's complicity with the Feds because she was herself coopted as an informant and, in fact, used her famous sex appeal to lure a number of victims to their dooms.  There is one very poignant scene where she recounts how she was asked to lead the cops to a Weatherman safe-house in Oregon -- the place where Leary hid out when he was sprung from jail in 1974 and, then, a fugitive before ultimately making it to Switzerland.  For just one moment, JHS can't manipulate Morris and she shows genuine shame -- apparently, she showed the cops where the safe-house was located (and presumably aided in several arrests) although when asked about this, she merely puts her head down, and says that "(she) can't remember" if they found the hide-out.  

A subtext in the film is the sinister power of people with great wealth.  JHS says that her stepfather, who married both her grandmother and, then, later her mother, was a "bad guy" -- he persuaded harried Jews to put money into Swiss bank accounts during the Hitler years.  Then, he told the Nazis where to find his clients and appropriated the money for his own purposes.  Her grandfather described all "little girls as being Messalinas", referring to the famously dissolute Roman empress, apparently as an excuse for molesting them.  "These people commit the most abominable crimes," JHS tells us.  "They are absolutely horrible."  JHS says that her mother, an enthusiastic convert to Catholicism, treated "(her) like Hitler treated the Jews."  She claims that 77 of her  relatives died in concentration camps;. But, then, later, inconsistently, she describes her great love for her mother -- this doesn't ring false to me:  we can love those who hate us and have even harmed us.  When a chauffeur raped her when she was a child, she complained to her mother.  Her mother said:  "You're making it up."  When the child persisted in her accusation, JHS recalls her mother saying:  "Well, a good chauffeur is very hard to find" and, then, refusing to do anything about the event.  "Do you think she was jealous of your relationship with the man?" Leary asks.  "Maybe," she replies, "although she was interested in men who were ambassadors, presidents -- she was one of Mussolini's lovers."  Leary is very charismatic but he doesn't come close to JHS's cunning and wiles.  She would have swallowed him alive if he hadn't made his escape after three years of his relationship with her.  

         

Fargo (Kansas City - Series 4)

Fargo (4th series) is a 2020 Tv show broadcast on FX.  The program adapts the sensibility of the Coen brothers 1996 film, although, nodding, as well to other pictures made by those directors.  Joel and Ethan Coen are named as executive producers and their quirky perversity and stylistic tics are on display in the TV show.  The movie Fargo, of course, was not set in that place but rather Bemidji and Minneapolis.  Although the first three TV series, written by Joshua Hawley, were nominally set in Minnesota, although obviously filmed somewhere else -- for instance, the third series was shot mostly in the area around Calgary. -- the fourth iteration of the show abandons even the pretense of a Minnesota location.  Fargo (IV) takes place in Kansas City.  All of the episodes that I have seen in each of the four seasons involve sly references to Coen brothers' films, take place in snowy settings, and feature, at least, one character who speaks in the Scandinavian-influenced dialect that the Coen's imagine to be echt-Minnesotan -- this was the lingo spoken by the pregnant cop (and many others) in the original movie. The four series are all crime dramas involving various sorts of highly deviant families..  Plots are complex to the point of being sometimes unintelligible and the rationale for the shows is to highlight prestige actors playing flamboyantly eccentric characters and to stage periodic and showy massacres -- in keeping with series' inspiration, Fargo  (I - IV) episodes have been uniformly very violent, often to the point of absurdity.  An example is a machine gun battle at the Kansas City union terminal in Fargo (IV) -- two female bankrobbers have busted out of prison and stolen money from the one of the two gangs competing for control over the rackets in Kansas City.  The women, an African-American and Native American, are cornered -- we understand them to be lesbian lovers.  Seeing that they are trapped and doomed, the women blaze away at an army of cops swarming down the steps of the big Roman-imperial scaled train station  (The imagery comes wholesale from Brian de Palma's The Untouchables).  The show cuts away after the first fusillade.  A few minutes later, we rejoin the action with the camera panning over a battlefield of about forty bloody corpses, including a dozen of so civilians, most women and children, caught in the crossfire.  The whole thing defies probability and the scale of the carnage is ridiculously epic, particular for a show that faithfully recites an opening title from the original Coen brothers inspiration:  "This Story is True."

Although the movie Fargo is the TV show's titular source, the FX program is most closely related to another Coen brother's picture, the extremely complex and ultra-violent Miller's Crossing, a film that, itself, harkens back to the long tradition of gangster movies made in this country, flavored it should be noted with a little seasoning from Japanese samurai pictures  As with Miller's Crossing, the TV shows display a certain ostentatious pretense -- these shows are supposed to be about something deep, disturbing, and perdurable in the American psyche.  The tag-line for Fargo (IV) is a showy aphorism:  "The reason Americans like a crime story is that America is a crime story."  This assertion, although it sounds good, really doesn't mean anything at all -- it's interpretation is in the eyes of the beholder and, as with the opening title assuring the audience that "This Story is True", in fact, the statement isn't true at all.  To the extent that the aphorism suggests that important parts of American history involve greed, violence, and corruption, then, I suppose that the same could be said of every other country on earth.  

Fargo (IV), which I'll call KC henceforth, broadly pivots around the concept of "fostering".  In former times, peace was kept in certain violent societies, for instance, among Scandinavian and Germanic war lords, by exchanging children between feuding factions -- if the enemy is entrusted with raising a child from the enemy clan, then, a fragile sort of truce may hold between adversaries.  The idea of raising the heir of an enemy clan as a foster-son is a kind of clammy peace overture that partakes in equal parts of kidnapping and holding hostages.  In KC, this baroque tradition began with conflict between the local pioneer (Protestant) gangsters and Irish immigrants -- two children were exchanged to seal the peace.  Italian gangsters then infiltrated the city and more  turf wars arose -- by this time, the original pioneers had died out and the Irish controlled the crime in the City.  Accordingly, an Irish lad was exchanged for an Italian kid and, again, a truce was negotiated.  As of 1950 when  KC takes placed, the Irish have now become largely middle class and no longer victims of protection rackets and, so, their gangs have faded out of sight, only to be supplanted by African-American organized crime.  Once again, a Black boy is traded for an Italian kid -- the Black youth is raised in the home of the Capo of the Italian gangsters and an Italian lad goes to live with Black crime family.  It's this relationship between warring gangs that results, at least, to some degree in the mayhem in KC.  When the treaty collapses, both sides believe that the foster-children have been murdered.  And, this leads to an all-out gang war.

A number of subplots are strung on this narrative scaffolding.  A redheaded nurse from Minnesota works at a local hospital.  She's a frightening psychopath and poisons a number of people in the show (she also smothers several of her patients).  This woman embodies "Minnesota Nice" in a particularly lethal way -- she's perky and talks with the exaggerated Scandihoovian accent that the Coen brothers highlighted in their 1996 film and she's bedding the boss of the Italian crime family:  she adds a little erotic asphyxiation to her sex games with the gangster.  The Italian crime family has been radically destabilized by the appearance of a beefy thug from the old Country, a former Black Shirt Fascist now fled to Kansas City -- like the red-headed Minnesota girl, this guy is an insane psychopath.  (This character, Gaetano, played lushly by Salvatore Esposito, rolls his eyes, directs unheard opera arias, and kills everyone he encounters, triggering a renewal of the war with Black gangsters -- Gaetano is extreme even by Coen brothers' standards, but he's also someone  you can't take your eyes off.)  Two female murderers who have escaped from prison are on the lam in KC -- they are pursued by a straight arrow Mormon detective (I can't recall why this fellow has been recruited from Utah) who also has psychopathic tendencies -- he's called "Deafy" because if someone curses around him or says something he doesn't like, he squinches up his face, cups a hand to his ear, and pretends not to have heard the offensive words spoken.  This character is paired with an obsessive compulsive local detective who exhibits a whole range of elaborate tics and twitches.  A local funeral parlor is operated by a biracial couple and they have perky highly intelligent daughter who spends her time dreaming in her room and listening to Edith Piaf records.  The funeral parlor folks have run into money problems and have borrowed money from the Black mob, a very bad business decision, indeed.  The undertaking establishment is called King 'o Tears, a formulation used in variants in each series and harkening back to the opening shot of Fargo (the movie) featuring an actual business in West Fargo, a bar called the King o' Clubs.  There are several other subplots, including a series of poisonings in the hospital where the deadly redhead works.  One of the people offed by the Minnesota nurse is the patriarch of the Italian crime family, a killing that initiates the cycle of violence.  

The two lead characters are both cast against type.  Jason Schwartzman, a small, unprepossessing man, plays the part of the Italian crime boss -- he accedes to power after the nurse kills his father who has been hospitalized under her care.  Schwartzman  is about half the size of Gaetano, his brother from the Old Country, and the bigger man beats him up periodically.  Schwartzman is engaged in an extra-marital affair with the redheaded nurse who, unbeknownst to him, killed his father.  His opposite number is Loy, played by Chris Rock.  In my view, Rock isn't very good and the casting against type, in his case, is really better described as simply miscasting.  Chris Rock's voice is too high and boyish to be menacing and he doesn't exude any of the manic energy that made him famous as a comedian -- he just seems weary.  However, his character is supported by a number of authentically scary African-American thugs and so his gang is reasonably frightening even though the boss isn't.  The show can be interestingly digressive and takes its time, a virtue, I think.  The background is populated by weird happenings, including a corpse that seems to be trying to get out of a casket, and there's an odd black-and-white episode in which Ben Whishaw playing Rabbi, the Irish hostage held by the Italian gangsters, although now grown-up, tries to save his counterpart, the Black foster-child, by fleeing from Kansas City into the country.  This episode parodies the Coen brothers's nightmare film Barton Fink involving a squalid hotel that may be the lobby to Hell, but also invokes the terrifying tornado in A Simple Man and with elements of The Wizard of Oz thrown in for a good measure.  After a characteristically violent shoot-out, Rabbi is sucked up into the tornado.

In the final two episodes, lots of people are killed, although the motives for the assassinations are murky.  Because various massacres and ambushes have left the forces of the original two gangs very thin on the ground, outsiders have been recruited to perpetuate the feue -- there's another group Black mobsters, somehow related to Loy, but working for the Italians.  When they are rubbed-out, the Italians are reinforced by some sophisticated Big City criminals from New York City led by a suave and menacing capo of all capos.  The perky teenager who lives in the imperiled mortuary figures out that the Minnesota nurse, Miss Mayflower, murdered the Italian crime boss, Jason Schwartman's father, the incident that has triggered the vendetta.  (Miss Mayflower keeps souvenirs of her depredations and the girl has stolen the dead patriarch's pinky ring from the nurse's morbid collection.)  The girl connives a meeting with Loy and exchanges the ring for the mortgage on her parent's undertaking business.  Loy, in turn, meets with the Godfather from New York and negotiates a truce, demonstrating that his African-American mob didn't in fact kill the old man.  By this time, Miss Mayflower  is in jail, accused of a poisoning that her victim survived (albeit not for long -- the pompous hospital administrator and some other guy who I couldn't identify are summarily executed by Schwartzman's character.)  The New York Godfather bails Miss Mayflower out of jail and she admits to killing the old man but at the behest of Schwartzman, his son -- she has interpreted his words "Take care of the Old Man," somewhat in the way that confederates of King Henry interpreted the ejaculation:  "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" referring to Thomas Beckett.  The New York mobsters take Miss Mayflower and Schwartzman's diminutive, if ruthless, gangster out in the country and kill them -- before she's shot, Miss Mayflower takes care to freshen-up her lipstick.  Loy finds that the New York mob, with whom he has made peace, intend to take away half of his criminal enterprises.  But he's resigned to that fact -- his son, thought to have been murdered while held as foster-child to the Italians, has returned home alive and there is rejoicing in his household.  Just as Loy accepts the fact that peace will mean a reduction of his empire, someone out of the past knifes him to death.  He dies as the son given up as a foster child watches.  In a brief coda, probably ten years later, we see a car speeding across a featureless plain.  The gangster's son is in the car -- at least, I think this is who we see -- playing with a loaded revolver.  (He seems to be zooming into a previous year's series in which, I think, the Black assassin played an important role.)  Along the way, one episode earlier,  Gaetano dies -- the film establishes that the burly Italian is not too good on ice and has slipped and fallen several times, usually with lethal consequences to those who have had the temerity to laugh at him.  Strutting back to his car from a murder (he has just killed the last lawman standing, the guy with the OCD), he again slips on the ice and, falling. his gun discharges, blowing off the top of his head and, therefore, justifying a big close up of his brains spilling out of his shattered skull.  

Much of this is not comprehensible as it occurs in real time.  I've suffered from insomnia and worked out a lot of this plot while staring sleeplessly into the dark -- at three a.m., when a man of my years should be saying his prayers.  Many elements of the story are baffling when they occur -- you can't figure out who is killing who or why.  The final murder (Loy) is committed by a character who has not been in the show for four episodes and was thought, at least as far I was concerned, to be long dead.  (Fargo episodes are broadcast back to back, the same show running twice per night -- therefore, the assiduous viewer can sometimes figure out events at the end of the episode by watching for clues in the first ten minutes of the broadcast.  In the case of Loy's murder, the final show begins with an elegiac sequence, a montage of all the cast members who have been butchered in the series appearing while Johnny Cash sings mournfully -- although you don't notice this on first viewing, the figure who kills Loy doesn't appear in the montage and, therefore, an ultra-alert viewer --the ideal viewer as it were -- would grasp that the assassin, contrary to what you recall, is somehow still alive.  Although I was able to figure out who killed Loy, the murderer's motives, which she helpfully states, don't make sense -- it's revenge for a killing in which Loy wasn't involved as far as I can recall.)  The show is too intricate and has too many characters to keep in mind  -- and the format doesn't help:  the show is broadcast in the old-fashioned way, one episode per week -- this time lapse is too long to keep events in mind between shows.  Furthermore, the program is shamelessly chopped up by commercials.  In the last episode, there seemed to be a long series of ads about every six minutes -- this also makes it difficult to retain what is supposed to be happening.  Unlike incoherent messes like Westworld, Fargo does make sense and, in fact, its narrative can be worked-out -- furthermore, the show is well-written in the sense that plot developments are often signaled several episodes before and figures in the show act in a way congruent to their characters.  The only part of the program that seemed hastily, and opportunistically, contrived is a subplot involving a demon slave-trader, a monstrous figure with a mutilated face who intervenes at one point to save a crucial character -- this ghostly apparition is visible from time to time in the background during scenes involving carnage but is not explained until a spooky story is told just before the specter has to recue someone from deadly peril.  This element of the story isn't effective and feels tacked on.

Although my guess is that the writer isn't familiar with these sources, Fargo -- KC is very similar to the old Icelandic sagas, most particularly Burnt Njal.  Icelandic sagas, at least, of the family history variety, involve clans with hair-trigger tempers always poised on the verge of murderous havoc.  In these fantastically intricate stories, something goes wrong and a blood feud results.  The problem with this kind of feud is that there is no way for the families involved to extricate themselves from the killing, the violence just continues for decades as a series of ambushes sometimes enlivened by large-scale skirmishes and massacres.  In Icelandic saga, the story and cast of murderous Vikings regenerates when a new generation takes up the vendetta on behalf of their parents.  Njal covers a genealogy of violence that spans, at least, four generations, with fathers passing vendetta obligations down to their sons and grandsons.  (In Icelandic saga, the women are equally murderous, enthusiastically spurring the men into killing one another.)  KC, fundamentally the saga-like chronicle of a blood feud, takes place in the scope of a single year -- therefore, the plot has to figure out a way to bring in new cannon fodder for the cycle of violence.  This is accomplished by the plot expanding the scope of the feud to involve outside alliances with other groups of gangsters imported to continue the killing-- in KC, the Black Oklahoma gangsters and their counterparts, the New York mob, join the fray about midway through the show to keep up the violence.  (In Burnt Njal, the hero is massacred with most of his family when his farmstead is attacked and set on fire -- this should be the end of the Saga, but, in fact, occurs at the mid-point in the story; the killing just continues, lovingly chronicled by the writer, for another couple of generations.)  As with Icelandic saga, the tone adopted by filmmakers is Olympian indifference -- the follies of the actors in the vendetta are observed with casual contempt and, even, a sort of macabre and sardonic humor.  In both Saga and Fargo, people die in all sorts of amusing ways, sometimes, by sheer accident or misidentification, and there is some supernatural intervention, although it is usually slight.  As in the Icelandic books, the logic of blood feud is clear, if savage, the killing continues until everyone is dead -- hence, all the gangsters active in the violence have to be wiped-out before the show can end.  Loy is the last man standing, but he's killed in the final five minutes of the show.  

Another source relevant to the show is Paul Wellman's A Dynasty of Western Outlaws, a popular history published in 1966 demonstrating that "crime is contagious."  Wellman traces the mobsters active in the 1930's back to the violence inflicted on the Middle Border (around Kansas City) by Quantrill's Raiders -- the point of the book is to show that killing begets more killing and that there is a direct lineage linking the attack on Lawrence, Kansas to Jesse James, the Dalton brothers, and ultimately killers like Pretty Boy Floyd. This theme, I think, explains the series' short coda, establishing that the murders in KC spill over into later generations of violence depicted in Fargo's earlier episodes.  

     

   

Marnie (and You Only Live Twice)

For its first 45 minutes, Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie threatens to be one of the greatest movies ever made.  It can't sustain the icy crystalline perfection of its first half and devolves into explanations that are wholly unnecessary to the movie's dream logic. Hitchcock is too much of a rationalist and feels he has to explain the frigid theorems that his movie poses.  In this regard, the director seems too tightly rooted in the cozy conventions of British crime fiction -- a riddle is posed to be solved.  His greatest films don't have solutions:  there is no accounting for what happens in The Birds and the solution in Vertigo, arriving in the very middle of the movie doesn't explain what happens in its second half and, furthermore, this ratiocinative account is comically delirious itself.   Marnie tries to resolve the problem that it poses -- but the enigma that he film presents is far deeper and more disturbing than the trite resolution featured in the film which pretends to solve all problems but merely shoves them aside for the consolation of a happy ending that is obviously specious.

The film's opening shot is instantly memorable -- some kind of bright yellow vulva is being carried under a woman's arm.  The vulva moves away from the camera as the stylishly dressed woman walks to the center of a eerily silent and still train platform.  This yellow form turns out to be a purse, with phallic keys one of the central visual leit motifs in the film.  The woman is Marnie, a role played with enormous bravery by Tippi Hedren.  She has just stolen a sum of about $10,000 from her employer.  Like Marian Crane in Psycho, she is on the run.  But as Hitchcock's narrative of nightmarish flight and pursuit show us -- ultimately, there's no place to hide:  she can't escape herself and her compulsions.  At the outset, the film shows us something that makes no sense.  At a train station, Marnie puts the purse in a locker and, then, takes the key and drops it onto a grating  in the floor, nudging the little steel phallus into the darkness between the bars with her spike heel.  Why would she do this? The suggestion is that money is not the motive for her crime.  After changing her hair color -- she's naturally blonde -- in a rapturous reveal (it's the first time we see her face), Marnie rides a big black horse in front of Hitchcock's typically dreamlike rear projection.  She bobs up and down as if having sex while a frieze of background unrelated to the lighting where she is moving is dragged along behind her.,  Then, she goes to Baltimore to visit her mother, a woman who lives on a street angling down toward a bizarre-looking harbor where a big ship is always pulled up next to the neighborhood, parked like one of the big cars of the era -- the film was made in 1964.  The scenes with Marnie's mother have a quality of utter clarity and complete horror, a hellish atmosphere of damnation and torment.  In Psycho, we imagine what Norman Bates' relationship was like with his mother -- here Hitchcock stages the thing outright and it's a ghastly spectacle to behold.  (Indeed, in one shot, the shadowy form of the dreadful mother, backlit, occupies a door frame, reiterating a scene in Psycho.)  Marnie's mother speaks with a faint Southern accent, has a bad limp, and alternates between demented denunciations of her daughter for trying to attract men and appeals for love which she, then, rebuffs.  The whole episode takes place with nightmarish intensity.  Marnie has used her sex appeal to seduce men into hiring her as a secretary or assistant -- but, then, she compulsively steals from them and changes her identity before proceeding to her next victim.

The killer returns to the scene of the crime and Marnie is driven by some kind of odd compulsion to seek a job with a man named Mark Rutland, one of Hitchcock's playboy businessmen, although with overtones in his speech of the sinister spy acted by James Mason in North by Northwest.  No less than Marnie, Rutland is a complete puzzle.  He has a Gothic family centered around his father, an old libertine.  (Rutland's family with its strange obsessive emotional crosscurrents seems to mirror in some ways the totally oppressive relationship between Marnie and her demanding, vicious mother.)   Rutland, played by Sean Connery, has previously met Marnie on the premises of her previous victim's business and so the woman's application for work at the family publishing business has a dream-logic -- she is putting herself into a situation where her criminal conduct will certainly be discovered and punished. And, indeed, when Marnie steals from Rutland, he recalls her from the place where she earlier worked and after she has opened his safe and taken another $10,000, he hunts her down, suddenly appearing out of nowhere (again like a nightmare force of retribution) when she is ecstatically riding her big black stallion.  It  is here where the movie slides into delirium too excessive even for Hitchcock.  Instead of having Marnie arrested, Rutland blackmails her into marriage.  He's become obsessed with her and like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo intends to spend the second half of the movie making her into his own creation.  In fact, Rutland's coerced marriage is the worst punishment that could be conceived for Marnie -- she's sexually frigid and can't abide being touched by men (except when seducing them for their money) and her honeymoon with her new husband will be a form of punishment, even torture.  Her husband will demand sex and she will resist until overcome.  Then, her disgust at the sexual act will drive her to suicide.  This seems to be the film's nightmare logic.  Rutland (the name tells us everything we need to know) takes her on a honeymoon voyage to Fiji.  Trapped on the ship, he ultimately rapes her.  She, then, flees the bedroom at dawn and flings herself into a swimming pool. floating face down when her husband rescues her -- but only to inflict further connubial torture on her.  There's an infernal dinner party at Rutland's family mansion in which Marnie has to confront an earlier victim of her crimes -- this is one of Hitchcock's set pieces involving sinister encounters among elegantly dressed people, something like the party in Notorious.  Marnie suffers from some sort of repressed memory that apparently involves the colors white and blood-red.  When she sees specks of red on a white background, the film-image flares into a scarlet haze and she slips into fearsome seizures.  At the house party, Marnie goes riding on a fox hunt, obsesses over the color red on a huntsman's tunic, and, then, rides away, fleeing desperately -- another extravaganza of wholly implausible and hallucinatory rear projection.  She misses a jump and her big black stallion is ruined, legs broken and screaming on the ground.  She pounds on a door of a house nearby, demanding a gun with which to kill the wounded animal.  All of this is observed by another of Hitchcock's strangely eccentric characters -- Rutland's sister-in-law.  This young woman plays the thankless role that was assigned Barbara Bel Geddes in Vertigo:  she's haplessly in love with Rutland who is, of course, forbidden to her and, so, to get closer to the object of her desires, forms an alliance with her brother-in-law to uncover Marnie's secrets.  "I can be anything you want," the young woman says:  "Guerrilla fighter, perjurer, intelligence agent."  Later, she suggests weirdly that she might share Rutland's obsession with Marnie:  "I'm queer for liars," she inexplicably says.  Rutland wants to cure Marnie, like all men thinking that his penis will be the remedy that she needs.  He confronts her in a bedroom encounter in which she derisively says:  "You Freud, me Jane."  And she plausibly argues that he is crazier than she -- after all, he has chosen a sexually unavailable criminal for his wife.  By this time, Rutland has figured out that Marnie's sexual aberration arises from some kind of repressed childhood trauma.  He forces her to travel with him to the eerie street in Baltimore where the old brownstones are backed up against the icy looking harbor.  There, Rutland triggers a final confrontation with Marnie's monstrous mother in which the source of his wife's derangement is revealed.  This part of the movie is equal measure Spellbound and Vertigo-- particularly, the final scenes in the latter film in which Jimmy Stewart drags the unwilling Kim Novak into the tower to confront her demons and guilt.  Everything is revealed -- sort of.  Marnie has an abreaction that is cautiously orgasmic.  Her mother's eyes are covered with a pale blue film.  Rutland ushers Marnie, who the film suggests might be "cured" to the car and the storm clouds over the nightmare harbor break apart so that bright sunlight can shine on the strange toy-like set.  Little girls jumping rope sing:  Call for the doctor, call for nurse, call for the woman with the alligator purse.   Alligator purse, of course, describes Marnie's sealed and predatory vagina.  Is this a happy ending?  It seems doubtful.

Parts of the film are inexplicable.  It's not at all clear why Marnie's sexual repression has metamorphosed into kleptomania.  We don't really see her getting a sexual charge from her crimes -- rather, the sexual climax associated with theft is transferred to scenes of her riding her stallion.  Money, it seems, goes into the sealed purse of her vagina instead of a man's penis.  Money in a film of this sort, in fact, is the phallus. Although the theme is not well developed, there is a hint that Marnie associates money with sex because, as it turns out, her equally repressed and sexually prudish mother was, of all things, a prostitute.  

Hitchcock's mise-en-scene in this film is extraordinary, far superior to the strangely explicit and implausible plot.  His characteristic effect is perfect clarity that, nonetheless, has something completely and eerily uncanny about it.  Many shots "read" as entirely logical but are, nonetheless, bafflingly strange.  One example must suffice for many:  Hitchcock favors overhead perspectives that are curiously inert and analytical -- the equivalent, it seems, of detached psychoanalytic scrutiny.  Marnie and Rutland have gone to a racetrack so that the woman can admire the horses.  She asks to go to the paddock.  The camera is mounted high over the location and we see an oval field where there are jockeys and horses next to a completely rectilinear grid of parked cars -- the juxtaposition of the round paddock with its chaotic action and the completely still and silent formation of cars is oddly compelling.  I don't know what it means but the lucidity of the shot and its analytical precision requires that it mean something.  Hitchcock dares to film Sean Connery as the movie's object of desire, it's ingenue -- he is shot to emphasize his full sensual lips and seems to be wearing long artificial eye-lashes and dark eyeliner in many close-ups.  Far from seeming powerfully masculine, he appears to be strangely feminine, soft and yielding.  By contrast, Hitchcock lavishes his full photographic scorn on Marnie -- she is shot in ways that make her seem hideous, an impermeable glacial mass of neurosis.  There's nothing attractive about her at all -- we can't even imagine her body under the shapeless flannel night gown that she wears or her androgynous business suits.  The exteriors of buildings have a sort of ominous expressivity in this film.  Throughout the film, Bernard Herrmann's ultra-melodramatic score yearns and sobs and throbs and quivers.  In one extraordinary scene, Rutland is dictating to Marnie on a Saturday afternoon when there is a thunderstorm that envelopes the peculiar barren-looking office building, an ancient warehouse it seems, where his publishing company is located.  Suddenly a wall collapse and a huge withered tree falls into the room, smashing a collection of pre-Columbian art objects that are all that remains of Rutland's deceased first wife.  The huge tree seems to have come from nowhere.  If the establishing shots of the building featured trees around the building's perimeter, the viewer has forgotten this.  The invading tree, black and gnarled, is like some hideous eruption of the unconscious.  Just as the death of the black stallion signifies the possibility that Marnie can be rescued from her madness, the black tree bough inexplicably invading the office represents the power of obsession triggering Rutland's quest to cure her.  There is a lot of bad stuff sloshing around in Hitch's head and it comes out in an uncontrolled gush in this film.

Marnie is shown in tribute to Sean Connery who died at ninety a few days before this note was written.  As part of this tribute, Turner Classic Movies showed several of the actor's James Bond films, one of which, You only live Twice was made around the time that Marnie was produced.  Like George Reeves, Connery fancied himself a serious actor and didn't want to be type-cast as the suave, if brutish, James Bond.  I watched about a forty minutes of You Only Live Twice -- the film is unpleasant and surprisingly bad.  (I wonder what erstwhile admires of these pictures think of them now.)  Bond has been sent to the Orient and cavorts with a small army of geishas in antiseptic white brassieres and panties who bathe him -- it's the exact opposite of erotic, a completely sterile fantasy with no pay-off.  The film is overlit and incredibly vulgar.  Bond's double entendres aren't funny; their just a series of aggressively misogynistic pussy jokes.  The action sequences are ineptly staged and completely unconvincing -- the film, that I expect was expensive, looks like it was made for about $29.95.  Everything is overlit and unpersuasively staged -- there's no suspense and the garish fight scenes are interrupted with inserted shots of explosions that seem to be taking place somewhere else entirely.  (The rear projection in this film makes Hitchcock's intentionally jarring use of that technique seem almost realistic.)  In one sequence, Bond flies an ultralite, a sort of aerial motorscooter equipped with flamethrowers and rockets.  He's chased by a bunch of helicopters over a low mountain range of volcanic cinder cones.  (If I remember correctly, the bad guy's lair is hidden under a lake in one of these craters.)  The weapons on the Ultralite aircraft don't work the way they are advertised to function -- how would you use a flame-thrower in an aerial dogfight anyway?  The sequence is totally unexciting since we know that Bond will simply destroy all of the helicopters in a series of inserted explosion shots.  The whole thing is a mix of sadism and sex with the sadism predominating.  A blonde female assassin has Bond chained to a chair in her boudoir.  She goes to her bedside armoire which, of course, is filled with instruments of torture.  In the drawer, there is a dermatome with which see proposes to skin our hero alive.  But she first has to kiss her victim, becomes entangled in his embrace, and Bond, taking the dermatome, uses its razor-sharp edge to cut the straps of her evening gown, before unzipping the seat of her pants.  One can see the why Connery wanted to escape from this crap.  It's like Ed Wood without the weirdly serious overtones that make his movies interesting.  

  

 

Hollywoodland

When I was a small boy, The Adventures of Superman, starring George Reeves, was broadcast as reruns on TV.  I remember the blurry grey low-budget appearance of the show -- it seemed archaic and ancient to me, like a faded parchment only partly legible, underlit and ill-focused.  In fact, the shows were only a few years old, but I didn't think much of them.  I've never had much affection for Superman, a hero with exorbitant powers that I always thought too excessive to be interesting -- if a super hero can do anything, then, he might as well do nothing.  I didn't like the show and found it vaguely disturbing, possibly because my father, who was very cynical at that time in his life, mentioned that George Reeves, the star of the show had killed himself out of despair at being type-cast in this ridiculous and cartoonish role.  I never knew if this account of the star's death was true or not -- on the basis of Hollywoodland, I guess that my Dad's version of events was, more or less, accurate.  

Hollywoodland, directed by Allen Coulter, is a 2006 film in which events all pivot around Superman's death, an event that occurred in 1959.  The movie is very well-made with superb acting and very ambitious, a sprawling novelistic work with many subplots and showy histrionic scenes -- the large cast gets to strut their stuff in this film; every major character gets an emotional outburst or a "big scene" of some kind.  The picture is shot in a subtle monochromatic beige and tan -- everything is bathed in a soft slightly greyish light that is curiously redolent of the grim black and white in which the Superman Tv show was initially shot.  The film's structure is very complex involving many flashbacks, at least two of which are intentionally misleading -- they stage as an accomplished fact what is actually merely a hypothesis.  David Bordwell has pointed out that this movie, a complicated neo-noir, in fact embodies many of the baroque narrative strategies that characterized American movie making between 1945 and 1955.  

The film begins with the central event that the narrative seeks to explicate:  George Reeves apparent death by suicide.  In flashbacks, we see Reeves playing guitar for his contemptuous girlfriend and a couple of sinister and louche looking Hollywood types.  Reeves (BenAffleck) is singing a sad Mexican song.  The other younger people in his living room, including his wife, are overtly bored.  She mocks him and puts on "The Girl Can't Help It', a rock and roll tune from a Jayne Mansfield movie and Reeves, making a courtly bow, goes upstairs to bed.  A few moments later, there is the sound of a gun being fired.  The police are quick to assess the death as a suicide.  The film, then, introduces us to Louis Simo (Adrian Brody), a smarmy cut-rate private eye specializing in sordid divorce investigations.  Simo operates out of a grisly-looking apartment building that is more like a motel, with a filthy pool and terrace, than a home.  Simo has a girlfriend with whom he lives.  She is studying acting and turns out to be sleeping with one of her fellow-students.  Simo is divorced and has a disdainful ex-wife and six year old son.  The little boy is distraught that Superman killed himself; he dangerously burns his Superman costume on the couch in his mother's home and says with appalled dismay:  "he (Superman) shot himself in the head with a Lugar -- that's a Nazi gun."  Simo used to work for a detective agency that fried bigger fish -- it tailed and blackmailed Hollywood stars.  One of his colleagues from that agency passes onto Simo a client, George Reeves' suspicious and vengeful mother.  She refuses to believe that her son has killed himself and wants Simo prove that Reeves was murdered.  Simo's modus operandi is to string his clients along, taking money from them at intervals to support himself while, really, delivering no actual results -- he decides to represent Reeve's mother according to this opportunistic paradigm.  (We know how Simo operates because we have seen his exploiting a half-mad man who thinks his younger wife is committing adulterym although there's no evidence of this.)  Simo begins his investigation by contacting the newspapers and telling the journalists that Reeves was murdered, although there is no evidence of this either.  He bribes a morgue attendant and goes through Reeves personal effects uncovering an inscribed watch that leads him to some clues about events leading up to the actor's death.  As these clues are discovered, the film effortlessly shifts into flashbacks dramatizing the circumstances uncovered by the gumshoe.

Reeves, we learn, had been an up-and-coming actor who had worked with Sinatra and Clark Gable.  He's handsome and intelligent although a drunk.  Reeves is picked-up by Toni Mannix, the disgruntled wife of the famous studio executive Eddie Mannix.  Eddie has a Japanese mistress (she speaks no English) and Toni, a beautiful if somewhat faded movie star type, seduces Reeves, initially it seems out of lust and a desire to  revenge herself on her overtly adulterous husband.  (Toni Mannix is expertly played by Diane Lane; Eddie Mannix is acted by Bob Hoskins.)  Toni falls in love with Reeves and sets him up in a nice house in Benedict Canyon.  She gives him expensive gifts and helps him out in various ways -- recommending him for parts at the Studio.  It's through Toni's efforts that Reeves gets the part of Superman, a role that he finds very demeaning.  The humiliating aspects of the part are demonstrated in a couple of memorable scenes -- because the show is shot in low-grade black and white, Reeves costume is not red and blue, but rather grey and brown (the contrasts are better for the murky Kinetoscope stock); in one scene, Reeves is flying but the apparatus fails and he thuds heavily to the floor of the studio.  Reeves tires of his older mistress, Toni Mannix, and, while trying to establish himself as a theatrical actor in New York, picks up a girl whom he later installs in his home in LA.  Toni Mannix is enraged and there is an implication that she may have killed Reeves -- in fact, we see a murder scene with her staged as an ostensible flashback.  Eddie Mannix, who cheats on Toni but still loves her, sees his wife sobbing inconsolably in her big luxury car.  He tells Toni that he will always protect her and,  maybe, hires someone to kill Reeves to punish the man for upsetting his wife.  Finally, we are shown a flashback hypothesizing that Reeve's selfish girlfriend from New York accidentally killed Reeves in a fight in his bedroom.  These various hypotheses as to how Reeves died are imagined by Louis Simo and arise from his investigation.  Simo has become increasingly obsessed with the investigation and is drinking heavily.  Ultimately, the studio buys off Reeves' mother by promising to build a statue of her son at the Grauman's Chinese Theater.  Simo, who now has no client, continues his investigation.  Mannix' henchmen beat him up and, with his face all battered and drunk as well, he goes to see his little son who is terrified of him.  Simo's girlfiend has now left and the PI sits around listlessly drinking.  Finally, he interviews Reeves' agent.  The agent shows him a Super 8 film showing Reeves' practicing to become a professional wrestler.  Superman has been canceled and the actor can't find work.  In the Super 8 footage, we see that Reeves is obviously injured and grimaces with pain as he postures, tucks and rolls rehearsing to be a professional wrestler.  This evidence implies that Reeves was pressed into a corner and desperate at the end of his life and, probably, committed suicide although the truth will never be known.  

The movie is notable for many small, if indelible, bits of business.  When Toni gets George Reeves a role in From Here to Eternity, the audience at the screening laughs at him, people whispering  derisively "It's Superman."  The studio boss gestures to cut the footage from the film. (This misrepresents the truth:  Reeves' part was not cut from the Oscar-winning movie.)  A disturbed little boy at a public appearance points a loaded revolver at Superman and threatens to shoot him.  Simo's client who distrusts his wife, finally, murders her brutally.  There's a scene of appalling emotional cruelty in which Toni, offended by Reeves' new girlfriend, insults him in the most vicious imaginable terms.  Later, we see the brutish Eddie Mannix gently caressing his wife's face and telling her how beautiful she is -- in fact, she has never looked worse in the movie.  All of the minor characters are fully realized and the bit parts are brilliantly acted -- there's a whole rogues' gallery of crooked publicists, minor henchmen and thugs, vicious studio executives and the like.  I can't find anything to fault in this movie.  The script is excellent full of Billy Wilder-style one-liners and superb tough-guy stuff -- at one point, for instance, a tough dame says to Simo:  "You couldn't nail me with roses and a trip to Vegas."  The very complex plot and structure is lucid throughout -- you're not confused unless you're supposed to be.  Something indefinable is lacking from this movie; perhaps, it's not wild enough and too cautiously directed.  But I don't know and there's no doubt that the picture is technically superb on all levels.    

(Toni Mannix supposedly confessed that her husband sent a mafia man to kill Reeves.  This was a deathbed confession and made when she had Alzheimer's disease and, therefore, questionable).