Ceddo

 Ceddo (Chee-doe) is an ambitious historical parable, an attempt by the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene to epitomize African history in 117 minutes.  In European medieval theater, for instance, so-called mystery plays, the world and its history are considered sub specie aeternitatis -- that is, as aspects of a universal or world-theater in which God's providence is dramatized as acting through history,  In this sort of dramaturgy, figures are stylized as types and historical developments reduced to clashes between these archetypal characters.  History appears as a system of coordinates on a path toward salvation (or, perhaps, apocalyptic destruction); figures who represent "everyman" or personify historical forces are shown in encounters with one another that allegorize these processes, presenting them as schematic "stations" in human affairs.  Ceddo (1976) has this aspect:  Sembene intends to dramatize the historical forces, as epitomized in violent encounters, that are foundational to modern Africa.  There's no doubt that Sembene, who frequently invokes "Pan-African" aspirations in his writings and interviews, intends Ceddo as an epic, an intensely dramatic and spectacularly colorful, account of the forces from which contemporary African society has emerged.  (Sembene's "Pan-African" project can be criticized as utopian and essentialist; it's not clear to me how pygmies living in the rain forests of the Congo are entangled in historical and social processes in Nigeria, for instance, or Mali.  It would be vain, I think, to suggest a Pan-European project of this kind, a universal history or world-theater, supposed to account equally for the dynamics of history in Denmark, for instance, and Croatia. However, one must accept an artist's ambitions in their own terms and though I doubt the efficacy of the Pan-African ideology -- the idea would be racist if advanced by a non-African -- Sembene obviously believes in this construction of history and advances this concept in allegorical form in Ceddo.)  Ceddo is one of three films issued as Criterion disks in a box-set that seems designed to commemorate the 2023 centenary of Sembene's birth in 1923.  The reader should consult my reviews and notes on the other two films, also presented in this Blog, the very funny and disturbing Emitai, no doubt the funniest picture about a massacre ever made, and the astonishing Xala.  

In Sembene's vision, African history in the early modern era, the time formative of colonialist interventions on the continent and the present post-colonial dispensation, results from the violent clash between several forces:  in Ceddo, Sembene dramatizes the Islamic mission  in Africa as a struggle between Muslim Imams and their faithful, the indigenous animist villagers organized under royal or kingly prerogatives, and the relatively ineffectual Roman Catholic Christians also competing to convert African villagers to their faith.  Complicating the interactions of these religious and political forces, each given symbolic representatives in the film, are Western (European) traders involved in the distribution of manufactured goods, in most cases guns and ammunition, in exchanges in which the currency is human flesh -- that is, the slave trade.  European trade in commodities such as cloth and weapons is shown to exploit the clash between religious cultures, a clash that yields conflict and, therefore, slaves which fuel historical change in a series of complicated feedback loops -- the more religious conflict, the more war and, therefore, the more slaves, a trade that fuels additional conflict by dumping weapons into the hands of the competing parties.  This sounds arid in theory and, in fact, parts of the film are somewhat dull -- there's a lot of speechifying, although in a peculiarly African rhetorical style involving huge and operatic gestures and the deployment of dozens of folk-wisdom apothegms (many of which are baffling).  But Sembene has devised a plot that is simple in outline, but complex in its presentation to dramatize his theses as to the historical forces at work.

In a rural area of Senegal, sometime between the 18th and 19th century (events are symbolic and not historical so Sembene keeps the time and location vague), a village of animist (idol-worshippers) farmers is under the rule of a lavishly dressed, unctuous, and, seemingly, dim-witted King.  The King has forged an alliance with a local Imam and wants his people to convert to Islam -- although his own religious status is left unclear.  The villagers are generally called "Ceddo" which means "outsiders" or "rebels" -- in this case, the term means "non-Muslims who worship fetish objects."  The villagers resist the increasing dominance of the Islamic brotherhood and, in fact, one of them has kidnapped the King's daughter, a beautiful princess.  He is holding the woman, who seems strangely compliant with the kidnapper's scheme, in the bush, near the village.  The woman lounges on a hammock, sometimes mostly naked, and doesn't make any effort to escape.  The kidnapper has dug a trench about 50 feet from the woman's hammock which is under a shade-tree.  A griot or herald of some kind keeps watch for rescuers sent by the king to recapture the princess.  The kidnapper, armed with a flimsy bow and arrow, crouches under a pile of earth in his trench, waiting to ambush the men sent to rescue the young woman.  (This young woman, as will be apparent at the film's climax, is an allegorical representation of "young Africa".)  The two knights who volunteer to succor the princess are readily dispatched one after the other in cartoonish duels -- Sembene stages these confrontations like Keystone Kops scenes.  (Each man returns to the village draped over his horse.)  The Ceddo decide to stage an uprising against their oppressors.  There is an implication that they sell some of their own family members into slavery to acquire muzzle-loaders, weapons that are hard to charge and inefficient against arrows and spears.  Sembene's Africans have the tendency to follow the line of least resistance -- in their uprising, they attack the Catholic priest who seems to have only one disciple, killing him and burning out his shack chapel with crossed sticks on its thatched roof.  Alarmed at these signs of aggression among the Ceddo, the Imam orders his gang to massacre some of the villages and burn their huts.  This is accomplished, the Ceddo are herded into two sex-segregated groups of people huddling together in the hot sun near the place where the Imam and his thugs are gathered under a shade tree.  Fumbling with his yellow prayer beads, the Imam baptizes the Ceddo providing each of them with new Islamic names.  The princess escapes from her notional captivity (she's always been free to do what she wants),  dresses herself in an elaborate and elegant cloak and gown, and goes into the village.  This sets up the climax, said by critics to be surprising, although, in my view, the outcome of things is pretty much obvious, at least, from the midpoint in the film.  Sembene has repeatedly said that the future of Africa lies in her women -- a thesis demonstrated by the film's climax.  (Here Sembene engages in wishful thinking, a fantasy that is similar, on a  reduced scale to the May Day and Red revolution that Bertolucci stages for his roughly contemporaneous, and similarly operatic, epic, 1900).  

In outline, Ceddo seems relatively clear.  In fact, the movie is willfully obscure and full of odd shifts in tone, dizzying flashbacks and flashforwards, and inexplicable events.  The picture is not easy to decipher and, even, some rudiments of its plot are unclear.  It's hard to understand why the Princess is being held hostage.  The King, an important figure in the film's first hour, more or less vanishes without a trace in the second half of the movie -- we learn he's been killed by the Imam and his gang.  This is offscreen and demonstrates the King's fundamentally marginal status to the historical proceedings shown in the movie -- African kings, Sembene seems to maintain, are impressive but wholly ineffectual at least during the era of  historical transition depicted in the movie.  The White priest and slave trader are caricature figures -- the slave trader, in particular, looks like a hillbilly as shown on an old bottle or can of Mountain Dew; the guy slouches around in a huge floppy hat and loose pajama-like clothes.  When one of the knightly rescuers is brought back to the village, we see someone measuring the earth for his grave, using a span from wrist to elbow, thus, requiring the figure to creep along the ground like an inchworm.  Two knights are killed and require burial but we see only one grave being prepared although the dialogue includes villages grousing about having to dig two holes.  The soundtrack shuttles back and forth between American Negro spirituals (as they used to be called), traditional music that sounds like it's played on a zither, and snappy up-tempo contemporary Jazz.  After the priest is inexplicably killed (he has no influence on anyone), the film engages  in a dizzying and audacious flash forward;  we see a trompe l'oeil ceiling with an African figure seeming to fall through the void surrounded by soaring choirs of disciples and, then, documentary-style shots of a modern Roman Catholic Mass complete with congregants receiving the Eucharist; the Mass seems to be associated with a funeral and, I think, we see the little hapless pre-colonial priest in the casket, buried, it seems, 250 years after his death.  (I can't exactly ascertain the meaning of this baffling prolepsis -- it seems to demonstrate the triumph of Christianity, but, of course, Senegal is overwhelmingly Muslim.  Sembene has a sympathy for Christians as shown in his novel Xala -- a couple of figures are Catholics -- but I don't know what he is trying to show here.)  For some reason, the disconsolate slaves, sitting in a semi-comatose state in one of the huts, are branded in a lurid scene with the French fleur-de-lys -- although the French are not yet anywhere in evidence.  (Sembene seems to be making a point about later French colonialist oppression, the subject of his Emitai).  Examples can be multiplied but the film is perplexingly full of stuff that doesn't exactly make sense.  However, none of these peculiarities are unintentional or lapses in Sembene's judgment -- he seems to intend any confusion that the film induces.  In larger term, Sembene's point is that African history is dream-like, full of sleepwalkers and figures who pretend to importance but are without any real agency.  The dominion of the Imams is symbolized by the Ceddo villagers bearing tribute to the midget Imam, bringing huge piles of twigs to the Muslim brotherhood -- the King says that the Muslim scholars can use fires made from the twigs to study their holy scriptures.  

The movie is spectacular in the way it marshals groups of people, staging various processions and confrontations in an impressive and stately manner.  The costumes are spectacular and the Sahel landscapes are sinister, dour, and have a malign beauty about them -- baked under the sun, we see baobab trees like grim monsters poised against the bare grey and brown horizons.  Ceddo is probably a masterpiece, but it is also very challenging for its viewers.

Armored Car Robbery

 I will let you have three guesses about the plot and subject of Armored Car Robbery (1950).  

Four crooks plot to rob an armored car outside of Wrigley Field in Los Angeles.  (This was a ballpark torn down in 1969, built in 1925 as the "million dollar palace" of William Wrigley, Jr., the chewing gum mogul).  A professional criminal named Purvis masterminds the operation which involves gas and gas masks.  Purvis has timed police response to an alarm at the stadium -- it's three minutes.  The heist is supposed to be complete in about ninety seconds allowing ample time for a getaway.  As it happens, two cops are near Wrigley Field patrolling in their car when the robbery is reported.  They reach the ballpark when the heist is underway.  There's an exchange of gunfire and one of the crooks is injured; one of the police officers is mortally wounded.  The police initiate a massive man-hunt for the crooks who are hiding in some warehouses between an oil field and docks on the Long Beach harbor.  During a raid on the hide-out, another crook is shot dead.  The wounded criminal has been ruthlessly killed by Purvis for demanding that a doctor be summoned to treat his wounds.  Purvis' moll is a burlesque 'cutie" as she called in the movie.  Purvis tries to escape with her, but their getaway is complicated by a rookie cop working with the officer whose partner was killed in the gun battle.  The rookie, who is repeated denigrated by the older cop (grieving his dead buddy), bravely pursues Purvis and the stripper.  He gets kidnapped by Purvis and the woman but has planted a bug in the escape vehicle.  The police are able to successfully pursue Purvis and the stripper to an airfield after the bad guy shoots the rookie cop.  At the airport, Purvis, who is cornered, tries to escape by running across a tarmac on which a plane lands and cuts him to pieces.  His body lies on the concrete among drifting billows of greenbacks taken from the armored car.  At the hospital, we see the older officer visiting the rookie who is recovering from his serious injuries.  (The rookie seems to sexually harassing a nurse from his wheelchair.)

The film is 67 minutes long and, about eight or nine minutes, are devoted to the stripper's routine -- she stands on stage fully dressed and shows off her legs and arms.  (This salacious stuff was featured on the posters advertising this RKO B picture, a modestly proportioned short feature shown with a more prestigious movie as the first part of a double feature.)  The movie's actors are good, particularly William Talman who plays Purvis, the ruthless boss in involved in engineering the heist.  In the movie, Purvis is having an affair with the burlesque cutie although she's married to one of the thugs recruited for the robbery.  This is the crook who gets wounded and, then, killed by Purvis when he pleads for a doctor treat his wound (and tries to enforce his demand by drawing a gun.)  Talman later became famous for playing the part of Hamilton Burger, the hapless D.A., trounced week after week by Perry Mason in the eponymous TV show.  Talman is ugly, has mean lip on him, and looks a bit like a pale snapping turtle or some kind of sturgeon or other toothy fish.  Before he became a prosecutor on Perry Mason, Talman was a character actor who specialized  in playing psychos.  (He is also famous for some indelible public service announcements that he produced when he was dying of lung cancer -- in those spots, he urges people to give up cigarette smoking. I recall seeing them and being a bit frightened when I was about 12.)  The movie is handsomely shot in typical noir black and white -- night streets glistening with reflections, weird unmotivated swirls of light illumining the slippery cave-like walls of alleys and narrow corridors in the warehouse district.  The robbery with shrouds of roiling gas is well-managed and the gun battles are terse and cruelly efficient, apartments full of showy knickknacks were the crooks live.  An example of the film's effective mise-en-scene is a car chase -- we see the bad guy's skidding around a corner framed by a pumping oil rig; it seems like an unnecessarily showy shot, but a minute later, the same exact camera angle is used to show the cops in their speeding sedan turning the same corner -- hence, the overly composed shot is necessary to establish the location of the turn and the fact that the cops are in hot pursuit.  There's a good suspense scene when the bad guys, with one of them dying from blood loss, have to navigate a road block in the oil field.  The climactic chase, with the wounded cop signaling desperately his location to the bug in the vehicle's upholstered ceiling is also clearly staged and exciting.  A scene in which the dead police officer's wife talks to the surviving partner in a hospital room is also poignant and affecting.  This sequence is also necessary because it serves as a bookend to the denouement in which it is revealed that the wounded rookie (in the same hospital) has survived and will recover.  

Richard Fleischer, the son of the great animator Max Fleischer, directed the movie and his work is unassuming, completely coherent as to action, time and space, and extremely brisk and efficient.  It's the sort of movies that studios seem to have made cheaply and without obvious effort -- nothing special but an exciting entertainment that respects its audience, a bit like an excellent TV show with a good, colorful cast and a lot of snappy wise-guy dialogue.    

Double feature on TCM: Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Day the Earth Stood Still

 I watched Stephen Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind  (1975) and the 1951 flying saucer picture The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise) as a double-feature. 

I first saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind in a movie-house on Hennepin Avenue when I was a college student.  I recall that the night was cold and white with falling snow.  I felt a little delirious emerging from the theater.  I think I had attended the movie alone.  Apparently, three versions of the movie exist:  the 1975 premiere cut, with its ending modified by studio demand (it's astonishing to think that someone would dare tinker with a Spielberg picture but the director was still a young prodigy in those days); a later version made when the picture was revived in the late 1990's in which a shot inside the "mother ship" to which Spielberg objected (but which was inserted in 1975) was omitted; and, at last, a restoration released as the "Director's Cut" in the first decade of the 21st century -- this latter version was shown on TCM and, apparently, incorporates footage retrieved from the studio and re-edited by Spielberg into the climactic "close encounter," a sequence apparently somewhat shortened in the first version.  

Spielberg, at least in the early seventies, was one of cinema's greatest practitioners of film shot in wide-screen aspect.  This is the most salient discovery that I made seeing the picture again after twenty or thirty years.  Spielberg is endlessly inventive in finding ways to energize the panorama-size images, suffusing them with a taut rippling intensity -- the screen seems to shimmer with the graphic compositional force that Spielberg deploys to enliven his images.  Some shots are composed in depth using deeply receding diagonals across the width of the screen -- Spielberg shifts the action back and forth along the diagonal axis.  In other scenes, he shows us a standard pictorial composition of a frieze of people, a crowd or traffic or a line of boxcars, a flat horizontal composition that he enlivens by having someone or something swoop into the picture from off-screen to the right or left.  In the climactic scenes of the alien encounter, Spielberg uses the wide-screen Panavision format as a measuring device -- the huge mother ship just exactly fits into the frame along its upper horizontal axis.  When the three scout ships appear, they hang in the sky perfectly spaced, at intervals to illumine with orbs and halos of light the upper half of the screen.  In some shots, an immobile figure, for instance the unmoving back of someone's head obstructs the center of the screen with the actors who are speaking or moving flanking the central figure, thereby, creating a strong sense of opposition and conflict in the picture.  Spielberg isn't afraid to have his characters sprawl across the huge screen, crucified as it were against the frame's unforgiving left to right axis.  In the scenes in which Richard Dreyfuss goes mad at his suburban home in Alabama -- terrifying his wife and children -- Spielberg composes in depth with the protagonist figures wrestling or battling one another in the foreground against choral groups of spectators ranged across the distance.  When Terri Gar and Richard Dreyfuss shriek at one another, we can see the kids in the background, through a half-open door reacting in a violent frenzy.  

Everyone recalls the flamboyant climax to the movie.  I didn't remember the intensely violent domestic scenes dramatizing the hero's destructive obsession -- this stuff is more akin to bourgeois tragedy in a film like Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, a movie roughly contemporary with Close Encounters.  Spielberg's movie was made before MTV editing and incessant, meaningless camera movement became fashionable in popular cinema -- he's quite willing to let scenes play out in lengthy single takes, a kind of moviemaking that would seem almost avant-garde today.  (In these long takes, Spielberg is revealed as a student, to some extent, of Stanley Kubrick, who often used similarly extended set-ups with a motionless camera, particularly in domestic scenes -- see, for instance, some of the sequences in Lolita).  The other factor that is now evident is Spielberg couldn't get the ending of the movie right.  Notwithstanding all his (nd the studio's) tinkering with final sequence, it's both beautiful and completely baffling.  In the first version of the film, the viewer had the impression that Melinda Dillon and Richard Dreyfuss were scaling Devil's Tower and that the climax somehow takes place on top of the monumental plug of congealed lava.  Later versions clarify that the climax occurs on the other side of the Tower, a place called the "Dark Side of the Moon" by the government soldiers and scientist's deployed to meet the aliens.  This makes the Dreyfuss-Dillon ascent of the rock field meaningless -- there's no need to climb, you could just walk in the woods around the base of the tower.  But, at this point, Spielberg's mise-en-scene is replicating Hitchcock's North by Northwest, an expression that actually occurs in the 1975 film.  Spielberg wants to duplicate the famous ending of North by Northwest in which Eva Marie Saint seems to fall off the face (literally) of Mount Rushmore before Cary Grant catches her by the hand and, in a startling cut, pulls her up into the upper bunk on a speeding to train to consummate their romance.  So Dreyfuss keeps falling down off the boulders as Melinda Dillon desperately reaches for his hand and, at last, catches it --this is totally gratuitous and, even, a little disconcerting since Dreyfuss is playing a married man and Dillon, soul-mate in obsession, isn't his wife.  A number of landscape shots rotating around the column of the magma tower pay homage to the shots of Mount Rushmore that organize the last fifteen minutes of North by Northwest (filmed only fifty miles away from Devil's Tower) and Spielberg repeats an image of an airfield at night, a shot that is central to the climactic scenes in the Hitchcock picture.  The actual climax of Close Encounters is largely incoherent:  in the final cut, Spielberg shows us a corps of astronauts in bright red suits praying together while a priest calls them "pilgrims" and blesses their journey -- they are apparently volunteers to be taken into outer space by the aliens.  There's an elaborate shot of these intrepid volunteers marching toward the Mother Ship but the aliens don't want them -- they are only interested in the invitees, chief of whom is Dreyfuss's character.  So after a big and dramatic set-up, the red-suited volunteers (about twenty of them) simply vanish -- they are no longer to be seen in the long shots at the climax.  Similarly, everyone puts on sunglasses due to the glare emitted by the enormous solar Mother Ship.  But, then, the movie forgets that we were shown, in ostentatious detail, people putting on their dark glasses.  The glasses are nowhere visible in a number of the following scenes.  Spielberg can't figure out whether his aliens should be tall spindly figures with ET features or little putti -- that is, the amiable 'little greys' who swarm around Dreyfuss in the final shots  The film's ending is such a magnificent spectacle of light and sound (the bursts of light, the camera flares, the tuba tones blasting from the mother ship) that audiences were overwhelmed and didn't really notice that the ending of the film is botched -- the shots don't match and the topography is impossible to "read" and the ending is replete with scenes that don't really go anywhere.

At the end of Close Encounters, the Mother Ship like some sort of vast garish flying wedding cake vanishes into outer space.  This is the end of the peculiar 1951 flying saucers picture The Day the Earth Stood Still.  For some reason, this movie enjoys a good reputation to the extent that it was even remade six or seven years ago.  But, the picture isn't very good; it has stiff acting, terrible special effects, and risible dialogue.  Furthermore, the movie's premise is a bit sinister.  The picture is mostly known for the phrase Klaatu barada Nicktoe, an expression that Patricia Neal (in a debutante role) is required to repeat to the faceless column of metal comprising the robot Gort.  (Gort who, like the flying saucer, looks ridiculous is a stolid weaponized mechanical man who fires a laser out of his cyclopean eye-slit to vaporize tanks and rifles in the hands of hostile soldiers.)  

Klaatu, the visitor from outers space is a handsome version of Frankenstein's monster: he has a perfectly square head.  His head is framed in black hair so heavily greased as to appear like an ebony mirror.  Klaatu speaks with a faint accent that you can't quite identify.  He's come from Outer Space in his flying saucer (with Gort) as a sort of benign super cop.  His message to the world is that you better shape up, stop fighting among yourselves, and renounce violence or the outer space federation will zap the earth into a sooty, charred cinder.  (This doesn't make any sense philosophically -- "I want you to forego violence or I will kick the ever-loving shit out of you.")  Klaatu gets shot upon embarking from the space ship which causes the uncommunicative Gort to use his laser to melt a bunch of weapons.  Klaatu has to be hospitalized after being wounded, although his injuries magically cure themselves within 24 hours.  He then escapes from the government hospital where he's being held (not too securely) and goes into DC to rent a room in a boarding house run by the staunchly anti-communist Aunt Bea (from The Andy Griffith Show).  There Klaatu encounters a comely widow played by Patricia Neal and her precocious, irritating teenage son, Bobbie.  Although Klaatu is supremely weird, Neal's war widow entrusts him to take care of her son for a whole day while she goes on a date with her pompous, overbearing boyfriend.  Bobbie takes Klaatu to the Lincoln Memorial where the alien is suitably impressed and says, after reading the Gettysburg Address (about a battle and war heroes, something that should be offensive to Klaatu who is a pacifist when his intergalactic space buddies aren't kicking ass),  "these are fine words and  "I would like to meet that man."  Lincoln, of course, is nowhere to be found, but Bobbie's mother is a secretary for the great astrophysicist Professor Barnhart who is played by Sam Jaffee.  Jaffee is ridiculously bad, wearing a fright wig to simulate the appearance of Albert Einstein -- in fact, he looks like an elderly Harpo Marx.  Klaatu explains his mission to Barnhart who then convenes a conclave of the world's most brilliant thinkers (all of them male and Caucasian with a few Asian Indians thrown in for a good measure) to receive his message of peace.  Meanwhile the dragnet is closing in on Klaatu -- jeeps and tanks and howitzers are deployed to chase him.  After some complications, Klaatu, who has  been killed but revived, reveals that he's a Deist (a worshipper of the "Almighty") and, then, tells the world's people to make nice or they will be blasted out of existence.  On this profoundly dispiriting note, the movie ends, raising the question of whether we, in the audience, will comply with Klaatu's pacifist commands or risk total annihilation.  (It's implied that the fractious people of Earth would rather fight among themselves than follow Klaatu's imperious demand.)   The idea that peace on earth has to be enforced from beyond the solar system is a bazaar thought-experiment.  The picture's strange politics seem to favor the Space-Fascist Klaatu over the humans with whom he interacts.  Although the movie has various aspects that connect it to the Red-Scare, it is nonetheless totalitarian in its implications -- an overwhelming exterior force must be applied to human affairs to bring them into compliance with intergalactic norms. This explains the film's Biblical-sounding title:  as a demonstration, Klaatu cuts off the electrical power to the whole-world for one-half hour, thereby stranding Patricia Neal in an elevator with the handsome alien for whom she clearly has the hots.  This is the sort of movie in which the inept screenwriter coming to the conclusion that the space-fascists should shut off our power as a demonstration of their might and authority, then has someone say:  "But the power has not been shut off to airplanes in flight and hospitals", thereby, limiting the disastrous consequences of their intervention in human affairs to the most obvious aspects that immediately come to the audience's mind.  

I can't detect any redeeming qualities in the movie -- it is dull:  dully written, dully performed, and dully staged.    

Xala

Ousmene Sembane's Xala (1979) is a savage allegory about post-colonial Africa.  In some descriptions, Sembane's picture sounds like a raunchy farce about an impotent kleptocrat.  The film is very funny, but also quite disturbing and it's far more challenging with respect to its themes and imagery than you might expect.  In some ways, the movie resembles pictures by Peter Greenaway that have amusing, and stylized, plot lines but that carry things to logical, but intolerable, extremes -- the parable's metaphors are realized in ways that make the viewer very uncomfortable.  For Sembane, the stakes in Xala are very high, matters of life or death, and there's a sharp edge to the comedy -- it carries a cruel and vicious bite.  Sembane's movies have not interested me over the fifty years that I've been aware of his work -- summaries of his films tend toward piety with respect to the director's socialist and feminist tendencies; in actuality, the pictures are far more interesting than most capsule reviews suggest.  Overlook the tired and trite discourse about Marxism and women's rights; as far as I can see, Sembane's films contain a lot more than what might seem to be mere Leftist and sophomoric social critique.  The texture of these pictures is a lot tougher, more disturbing, and radically uncompromising than you expect.  Xala is a good example:  Sembane uses the sexual impotence of Xala's hero as an allegory for the moral impotence of post-colonial Senegal, a place that the director sees as overrun by particularly loathsome grifters.  This seems to be a relatively simple (if ingenious) satirical conceit -- but the way that Sembane works out the implications of his allegory is uncompromising and disturbing; extreme imagery of mutilation and a particularly vivid and disgusting scene of humiliation seem to exceed the requirements of the allegory..  Film is spectacle and the greatest directors often indulge in imagery that is over-charged and excessive -- this seems to be an integral aspect of cinema, the temptation of going too far.  Sembane is a great visual director, notwithstanding the somewhat pedestrian camerawork and the nonchalant documentary style of his work -- in this respect, he resembles Bunuel:  for distressing imagery to be effective, it has be presented in matter of fact way.  Sniff the air -- you can smell Xala.

Xala opens at the Dakar Chamber of Commerce, an august assembly that apparently runs the country.  A bunch of native Africans march into the conference room (it's like a conference room in a rural or suburban bank) and force out the rather pallid and feckless Frenchmen on the council.  Their busts of famous French politicians and what look like boots (together with a bucket) are carried out and unceremoniously deposited on the front steps of the building.  The Africans, formerly colonial subjects swagger into the chamber and power is transferred to them by a wormy little Frenchman who hands each councilor a briefcase; we have previously seen the French officials departing comically burdened with briefcases -- one of them carries four of them.  Of course, the Africans are delighted to find the briefcases are packed with greenbacks.  A radio announcement playing over this scene tells us that the new regime has instituted, for the first time on the continent, pan-African socialism.  So, Senegal (and the movie) are off to a good start.

One of the kleptocrats on the ruling council is a mild-mannered and well-tailored middle-aged man, probably about fifty-five with a dignified demeanor and a fringe of greying hair.  This is El Hadji, a prominent businessman who runs what seems to be an import-export business (he sells Coca-Cola for instance) out of a nondescript warehouse in a poor part of town.  Muslim men are entitled to wed up to four wives.  El Hadji has two and is excited to marry a beautiful young woman as this third wife -- one of the women says the nubile girl could "arouse a dead man."  This picture shows in detail why polygamy is not a good idea.  El Hadji's first wife, like him, is middle-aged, a handsome woman whom we see chewing what looks like a cheroot; she is named Adjo Ada and has produced a daughter, Rama, who is a political radical.  Adjo Ada is resigned to her husband's third marriage, but seems somewhat embittered -- "(one) must be resilient," she says.  Possibly because, El Hadji had only one child, a daughter, the man has a second wife -- the two women live in separate luxury houses.  The second wife, Oumi, has, at least, three children, two of them boys it appears, and she is flamboyantly voluptuous and aggressive.  El Hadji fears her and she is enraged about the third marriage.  She openly declares that El Hadji is too old for a young third wife and that he is fat, useless man -- all the while, demanding large amounts of cash from him.  (Her sullen teenage son literally blocks the door to his mother's quarters demanding cash in exchange for access.)  Oumi doesn't get along with the first wife, Adjo Ada, but, then, she doesn't get along with anyone -- she's too demanding; "you have too many questions," Adjo tells her. By contrast with Adjo, who wears traditional African gowns, Oumi is clad in the most expensive Parisian fashion.  (Oumi is fearsome -- El Hadji's time with his wives is scheduled and, when its Oumi's turn, she says in a threatening voice that he had better get over to his house because "as you know, I can be very wild", suggesting, it seems, some scary sexual depredations.)  Rama, Adjo's daughter denounces poor El Hadji to his face saying that any man who would take more than one wife is a "liar and a hypocrite", an assertion which she repeats on her father's dare and, thereby, gets slapped down,  The wedding to the third wife is portrayed at length and it is grotesque.  All the parasites and sycophants attend, Senegal's president dances a little too closely with Oumi, suggesting that he may be having an affair with her.  A Citroen on a flat bed trailer is a wedding present and the cake is a weird towering assembly topped with a model of a Caucasian bride and groom.  The various members of the criminal regime swill champagne and make vulgar remarks about El Hadji's first night with his new, young bride, who is reputedly a virgin.  Several men offer El Hadji potency pills and the bride's aunt (she comes equipped with two frightening aunts) orders the groom to sit astride a mortar with the pestle protruding between his legs as a warrant of his sexual potency -- El Hadji who believe himself to be a modern European despises African superstition, at least, on the surface and refuses.  Needless to say the wedding night is a disaster.  The aunts don't find any blood on the sheets -one of them has brought a cock apparently to slaughter in the bed,  The women all mock El Hadji and he's disconsolate.

El Hadji is said to be suffering from xala ("temporary sexual impotence" in Wolof, the principal native language in Senegal).  This condition presages a general failure and collapse in all aspects of his life.  El Hadji's business is insolvent.  He has made some kind of deal in which he cornered the market on rice, the food staple in Dakar and Senegal, and failed to pay taxes on profits from the transaction, a purchase that also was covert and apparently illegal.  He can't pay his bills and comes under political scrutiny from his fellow corrupt henchmen.  El Hadji consults a marabout, some kind of sorcerer and magician, and is told to creep on all fours up to his bride in his bedroom holding a strange red and orange talisman in his teeth.  Needless to say, this fails.  His chauffeur transports him to a village in the country where he consults another marabout, also to no effect -- he doesn't get to try out the remedy because the bride has her period. These events are embedded in a larger narrative in which El Hadji's business, a sort of large garage full of crates of Coca-Cola and other European and American products, is besieged by a group of about twenty horribly maimed cripples, street beggars who are like figures from the old movie Freaks -- they creep around on all fours, some of them with their limbs on backwards it seems.  (This is pretty scary stuff because the crippled beggars, of course, are, obviously, all real -- there's no special effects or CGI with respect to their deformities.)  Out on the street, a couple of musicians perform a keening ballad to accompaniment of a sort of lute -- the song is about injustice and how it would be better for a man's son to die in infancy than to grow up to be corrupt.  El Haji's secretary, an attractive woman who flirts with his customers, is appalled by the street beggars and tells El Hadji to get rid of them.  El Hadji calls his buddy the president and the cops, an ominous militarized force, appear to arrest the cripples and the griots on the street singing their ballad (as well as a couple of other people who just get swept up in the arrests.)  But the cripples will not be deterred and, after being released, they have a sort of weird last supper in which they share drinks like milk shakes (made from cans of sugary condensed milk).  The cripples symbolize the vengeance about to befall the unjust and greedy El Hadji.  El Hadji meets again with Rama, but they remain estranged -- El Hadji is angry that Rama insists on speaking Wolof instead of French -- and we see a man selling copies of a periodical called Kaddu, a Wolof-language newspaper.  El Hadji says that he drinks two bottles of Evian water daily -- Rama says that she won't drink any imported water preferring Senegalese products. The kleptocrat even washes his Mercedes in Evian water.  A man has come to Dakar from the county to buy rice for his village -- there's a drought in that part of Senegal.  His pocket gets picked and he can't buy the rice, and, in any event, there seems to be no rice to purchase because El Hadji has cornered the market on the commodity.  The Chamber of Commerce learns of El Hadji's illegal rice transaction and boots him off the council -- he remarks that they are just as greedy and bad as he is.  (El Haji's replacement is the man who picked the pocket of the rube from the country -- he used the proceeds to buy a beautiful tailored suit and a cowboy hat, apparently all that's needed to become a member of the ruling class.)  El Haji loses everything; his xala is all-encompassing.  His second wife gets booted out of her luxury mansion and the third new wife's aunts return the wedding presents and spirit off the girl -- the wedding was never consummated and El Hadji no longer has any money and, therefore, has lost his usefulness to the young woman's family.  The beggars invade the house of El Hadji's first wife and his daughter.  El Hadji is revealed to have stolen his fortune from his own family members, one of whom has pronounced the xala on him as a curse.  (El Hadji initially thought the impotence stemmed from a curse put on him by one of his first two wives.)  Although he has lost everything, El Hadji may regain his "manhood," but, at the cost of participating in a disgusting ritual.  My wife wasn't able to watch this scene and I had to tell her when the movie was over.   

What are we to conclude from this series of events.  First, post-colonial Senegal is just as corrupt as colonial French West Africa, its predecessor regime.  In fact, the French masters seem to retain some sort of economic power -- we see one particularly unprepossessing Frenchman, a bald guy with nerdy glasses, hovering around the Africans and serving as their factotum; his role is ambiguous.  Second, French-educated and Francophone Africans are neither "fish nor fowl" -- they aren't really African and, certainly, not Europeans.  (Although one young man says he won't vacation any longer in Spain because there are "too many Negroes", to which someone replies that it's the result of creeping "Negritude.") Pan-African socialism is a fraud.  Well-meaning people like Rama are incompetent to change anything for the better.  The kleptocracy is reared on the backs of the poor who are not merely economically disenfranchised by the wealthy crooks but actually starved and horribly maimed by them.  But, in the end, the poor will have their revenge, something that is horrible in its own right.

El Hadji's attractive secretary opens his shop every day, that is, until the place and its wares are foreclosed upon.  She smells that something is amiss in the shop and keeps spraying air-freshener all over.  Out in the street, there's an open drain to which women come with big buckets of slops that they pour into the drain in the road.  This stuff stinks.  The woman takes a whole bottle of air-freshener and pours it down the drain.  But it doesn't seem to have any effect.  The sewer drain reminds me of the business with the sewer in Erich von Stroheim's 1919 Foolish Husbands.  In fact, von Stroheim's enraged social criticism, a mixture of grotesque comedy and savage satire, evinces a sensibility very similar to Sembene's remorseless dissection of the evils of post-colonial Senegal.  All great films are different, but great film makers, I think, often display strange affinities -- I have no reason to think that Sembene ever saw any films by von Stroheim, but the two men, by independent means, seem to have reached similar conclusions about the societies in  which they lived.  

American Movie

American Movie (1999) is a documentary that successfully navigates two perils associated with the genre. The movie presents us with a cast of eccentric figures, almost human oddities, and poses the question whether our fascination with these people is valid, authentic, and empathetic or, more on the order, of a trip to a zoo, or worse, a freak show.  The other question raised by this sort of movie is whether the film maker's stance toward his hapless protagonists is condescending, or, even, predatory.  With respect to both issues, American Movie and its director Chris Smith acquit themselves nobly --although the people in the film's lower middle class landscape are strange, afflicted by various addictions, and obsessions, nonetheless, we perceive them a plausible human beings, even, a bit endearing and, certainly, figures whose motivations (and dreams) are understandable to us.  Furthermore, the film maker's posture with respect to these characters is sympathetic; I didn't detect any admixture of condescension or irony (or sarcasm) with respect to the presentation of the people and situations in the movie -- the director observes his characters with equanimity and the picture doesn't seem exploitational.  I had no sense that the film maker was mocking the people  in this movie -- in fact, the picture suggests (and it is about movie-making) that "there but for the grace of God go I":  a person committed to making films might easily slip into the sort of folly shown on screen in American Movie.  

In American Movie, a man named Mark Borchardt, is assembling resources to make a movie called Northwestern.  This picture will be an autobiographical account of his struggles with alcoholism and other addictions in suburban Milwaukee.  Borchardt has shot a few reels of film, apparently mostly at a salvage yard -- he views the junked cars as symbols for wrecked dreams.  The movie will be in black-and-white "like Manhattan," he says, "or Night of the Living Dead" with stark leafless trees and empty roads."  The problem is that Borchardt is a 30 year-old High School drop-out. a fan of gore-fest horror movies, and has no money, no actors, no editing equipment, and lots and lots of unpaid debt.  After exploring financing options, none of which are viable, he borrows three-thousand dollar from an old man ("Uncle Bill"); this is insufficient for Northwestern, so Borchardt uses the funds to complete a 35 minute horror film called Coven (a project that also foundered for lack of resources.)  Borchardt is extremely bright, aggressive, and driven -- he's highly articulate and has attracted to his enterprises a core of loyal supporters, people who are willing to work (sometimes for long hours) for free.  These people are the supporting cast in the documentary:  they include the puzzled, inarticulate Uncle Bill, who seems on death's door, Borchardt's taciturn father and his handsome Swedish mother who speaks with a definite accent -- Borchardt's parents don't seem to have much to do with one another.  He has several actors, the sort of folks you see in small town community theater, including a runty but very eloquent thespian, a good-looking leading man except that the guy looks to be about four-and-a-half feet tall. Borchardt's best friend is burned-out case named Mike Schank, an endearing chubby little guy with angelic locks of long hair, a mild-mannered head-banger who is now straight and sober, but too late -- it seems like the damage to his brain has already been done.  Schank plays guitar and is reasonably accomplished -- at one point, we hear him playing a Bach fugue on his guitar and he contributes American Movie's soundtrack, mostly pensive variations on the song "Mr. Bojangles."  Borchardt has a loyal girlfriend and an ex-girlfriend who despises him as shiftless and threatens to take awat his parental rights with respect to Borchardt's three children.  (He amuses the children by taking them to Apocalypse Now and having them bed down in the editing studio at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee where he is trying to prepare a final cut of Coven.)  Borchardt's business model is that he will sell copies of Coven straight to the viewers for $14.95 a pop and, in that way, recoup Uncle Bill's investment.  We see various examples of Borchardt's work which doesn't seem half-bad -- he has a good eye for black and white composition and seems a pretty facile script-writer.  His pictures are carefully storyboarded and assembled with real and loving diligence.  But, of course, the entire enterprise is doomed.  Nonetheless, through enthusiasm and with the assistance of his loyal friends, Borchardt persists in his efforts, a heroic endeavor.  (We see startling scenes of Borchardt who stars in his films being dragged head-first through a mucky Wisconsin swamp in late Autumn, an ordeal that is the subject of take after take.  In another sequence, Borchardt tries to smash another actor's head through a cabinet, ramming the guy against the cabinet door again and again -- it's hilarious and, also, palpably disturbing.)  Borchardt is like Ed Wood -- he's an ambitious filmmaker and his pictures address serious questions of self-destructiveness and addiction, but his reach obviously greatly exceeds his grasp.  At the end of the movie, Borchardt finishes Coven and is able to show the short picture to a reasonably good crowd in a theater somewhere in Waukesha County in the west suburbs of Milwaukee.  It seems that Coven never made any money and that the successful completion of the film didn't really open any doors for Borchardt.  (Borchardt did become modestly famous, as did Mike Schank, as a result of American Movie -- he appeared a few times on the David Letterman show and has a pod-cast.  Schank died a few years ago of a rare form of cancer.)

The labors that we see in the movie remind me of the "rude mechanicals" rehearsing the "most tragical story of Pyramus and Thisbe" in A Midsummer Night's Dream.  Shakespeare also walks the tightrope between compassion and mockery.  Theseus, the ruler for whom the masque is being presented says about the blundering "mechanicals" that "for never anything can be amiss / where simpleness and duty tender it."  And, later, Theseus says about the poor acting in the little skit:  "The best in this kind are but shadows and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them."  There's clearly a kinship between Hollywood with its treasure and professionalism and Borchardt's desperate attempts to complete his movie.  "The best in this kind are but shadows..."  This movie is beautiful, inspiring in a way, and desperately sad -- you can see the picture on Amazon Prime and I highly recommend it.  

Emitai

Emitai is a 1971 film made by the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene (pronounced Ooz-mahn Sem-Benah).  I have known about this film-maker for most of my life -- he became prominent in the late sixties with his third feature, released in America as Black Girl (1966) and made about 12 films, ending his career with Moolade (2004) about female circumcision.  Summaries of the content of his movies have deterred me from seeing them -- he was reputedly a feminist, educated in movie-making in Moscow, and, on paper, his pictures sound like rather arid, didactic works, calculated, it seems, to either bore or offend viewers without a stake in the history of colonization and oppression in Sub-Saharan Africa.  This is a racist perspective, of course, and it is worth exploring Sembene's pictures to assess whether their merits equal the praise often lavished upon them -- indeed,  usually, a particularly fawning sort of laudation that suggests a bad conscience on the part of White critics tinged with a distinct aura of condescension.  A three-film collection issued by Criterion, unfortunately without much in the way of commentary or annotation (the history and customs presented in these films present a challenge), provides viewers with an opportunity to assess for themselves Sembene's work. (It's worth noting that Sembene is called "the Father of African cinema," although this characterization makes female critics a bit uneasy and that he was also a famous and estimable novelist who published his books in French.) 

Emitai is a 103 minute movie focused on a stand-off between French colonial troops and the Dioli (dee-joe-lee) villagers occurring in rural south Senegal during World War Two.  (Sembene is Wolof-speaking and not Dioli, although he obviously knows a great deal about these people.)  The situation is that the French need soldiers to die for them on the battlefields in Europe.  Accordingly, they have instituted a policy of forced conscription (they disingenuously characterize draftees as "volunteers" or "recruits").  In addition, the French need foodstuffs to supply their troops and, so, they demand that each family contribute several hundred pounds of rice to the war effort.  (A subtitle has someone saying that the village must produce 50 tons of rice for the French army -- this seems excessive to me, since the village, seems to have only two or three-hundred inhabitants; I suspect this statement is some kind of mistake.)  The villagers are defiant and resist.  (An opening title dedicates the movie "To all the Militants of the African Cause.")  The colonial regime in French West Africa (now Senegal) sends about forty African soldiers wearing elongated furry-looking red fez hats to enforce these levies.  The rather officious and baffled-looking native soldiers are under the command of two White men -- a hirsute fellow who says the villagers must be treated with an "iron fist" and, also, the captain, an ineffectual soldier who looks a bit like an anguished Donald Sutherland and who claims to be sympathetic to the villagers, but is, ultimately, just as bad as his sidekick.  This situation seems tailor-made to demonstrate the villainy of the French overlords and the virtue of the colonialized and oppressed Africans -- and, in summary, the film does have that aspect.  But the movie is actually very funny, a sort of black comedy, in which the Africans seem just ignorant and just as delusional as their French masters.  

In the first couple scenes, we see hapless male villagers accosted by bumbling red-hatted soldiers and hustled away to Dakar where they will be sent into the meat-grinder of World War Two, ostensibly to save the Free French and Marshal Petain.  The African "volunteers" are childishly cooperative once detained and forced to serve and they are quite willing to march around barefoot singing a tune that includes the lines "Marshal, we are coming!"  The women in the village are far fiercer and less compliant.  In Dioli villages, rice is said to be "a woman's wealth" and we have seen the females in the town engaged in backbreaking labor to plant and harvest rice from mucky fields that their men stir up with big paddle-shaped hoes.  The women are not about to donate their rice to the French cause and, at night (clumsy day-for-night footage), they load their provisions in huge baskets that they carry on their heads to some sort of refuge in the thorny-looking outback.  When the French blunder into the village, there is no rice to be found and the remaining men have taken to their heels and are hiding in the bush.  The men seem to be incompetent and vainglorious idiots.  A sort of tribal council of five elders sits around a spooky-looking dead baobab tree.  The tree is cleft and reputedly the home in our realm of about six or seven blood-thirsty deities including the titular Emitai.  So far as I can see, Sembene has contempt for this animist religious system -- and, in fact, the movie was perceived as sacrilegious and banned in Senegal, at least for a time. (Senegal is a 97% Muslim country).  The tribal elders guzzle palm wine from totally inefficient gourd cups, spilling half the stuff all over their face and on the ground as they imbibe the sacred intoxicant.  Now and then, they slaughter an unfortunate rooster or goat in hope that the deities will come to their rescue.  Sometimes, Sembene shows the gods as animated stacks of hay and straw capped with grotesque masks -- he shoots these scenes through a red filter as if to emphasize the gods' demands that their thirst be slaked with blood.  The gods dance around but offer no useful advice.  The village elders, then, conclude that the warriors should fight the French soldiers.  "A warrior must die with a spear in his hand," the elders announce.  The men attack the French troops in what must surely be the most pathetically ineffective assault ever filmed.  They chuck spears at the troops that fall ten yards short of the skirmish line, embedding themselves in the earth without harming anyone, and a couple of men fire flimsy arrows from equally flimsy-looking toy bows.  The French colonial troops fire a volley equally ineffective but, more or less, by accident mortally wound one of the elders, a guy named Djimeko.  The wounded man is hauled off the field of honor by his cronies and dragged to the grotesque dead tree where the hay-stack deities are consulted to no better effect.  Djimeko dies and is wrapped up in a red sarcophagus with an outline of his features displayed in pearly white beads.  But the French troops intervene, capturing the corpse and posting sentries next to the body in its red shroud with the horns of a bull attached to the cadaver.  Meanwhile, back in town, all of the women have been herded into the square or plaza where they are forced to sit in the hot sun.  (This is the punishment of choice in this equatorial country.)  The women used to laboring all day long with babies strapped to their backs don't really seem to suffer that much -- they mostly fall asleep when they are not singing their defiance in a monotonous sort of chant.  An afternoon and a night passes.  In the morning, the town elders at their tree (where is it? Sembene's geography is stylized -- it seems to be right in town somewhere but in a different dimension than that occupied by the Colonial troops) bicker, drink some more palm wine, smoke their pipes, and some of them decide to cooperate with the French.  (At least, one elder delivers his levy of rice to the French troops guarding the women.)  There's a riot and the women, who really can't be controlled in any way, bolt, knocking down some frail fences that demarcate the village into odd little sectors.  One of two boys, seemingly orphans, who have been hanging around the edges of the action, providing some aid and comfort to the village women, gets shot down.  The women become agitated and, ignoring the French troops, march with the corpse out to where Djimeko in his red mummy-case is rotting.  The men appear on the road carrying huge baskets of what appears to be rice on their heads.  But, instead the baskets are full of what may be raffia headdresses and not rice at all.  The women are enraged, dancing and singing by the corpses.  Out on road on the edge of town, the French troops take aim at the village men who are lined up by a ditch.  The screen goes black and there is a volley of gunfire.  

The movie is made with the utmost simplicity.  There are almost no moving shots.  Some of the acting, particularly of the two White soldiers, is absolutely (and comically) terrible.  Everything is lucidly presented and the camera is always positioned so as to provide us with a clear understanding as to what we are seeing.  Nonetheless, Sembene suggests that the men and women occupy wholly different locations -- they coexist in the same space but seem to be radically apart, on different planes of existence.  (The gods live in their red-filter zone; when the elders butcher animals for their benefit, they just casually toss the carcasses into a hollow in the sacred Baobab tree.) The movie is very funny.  Toward the end, the French have orders to substitute posters showing Charles De Gaulle, a mere brigadier general for the seven-star marshall, General Petain.  This is completely baffling to everyone except the two feckless White Frenchmen.  The troops and the villagers count only two stars on de Gaulle's lapels and, therefore, can't figure out why he is suddenly in command -- this almost causes a mutiny among the otherwise rather somnolent colonial troops.    

As they say, "one robin doesn't make s Spring," but on the evidence of this film, it seems apparent that Ousmane Sembane is a very funny, intelligent, master film-maker.  

The Locket

 The 1946 RKO picture, The Locket (John Brahm) is a notable example of a Hollywood picture involving an elaborate structure of flashbacks embedded in flashbacks, a complex narrative strategy that seems to mimic psychoanalysis -- layers of superimposed memories are excavated to reveal psychic trauma motivating the interaction between characters.  This sort of storytelling became prevalent in Hollywood in the 1940's and early fifties as demonstrated by David Bordwell, the great film critic (now deceased) in his penultimate book: Reinventing Hollywood:  How 1940s Filmmakers changed Storytelling (2017).  The Locket is one of the works cited by Bordwell exemplifying the intricate narrative techniques characterizing movies made in that era; he devotes a number of pages to the picture.  Bordwell's concerns were formalist and The Locket, although fascinating as specimen of complex storytelling, isn't particularly pleasurable.  The movie is a maze or a thicket through which the viewer must hack his or her way -- it's interesting and challenging, but not much fun; indeed, the picture is a glum and humorless little thriller, with some distinctive chiaroscuro sequences, but, like many movies based on psychoanalytical theory, the narrative is contrived and not really plausible -- theory, as Goethe, I think reminds us, is a grey reduction of the vibrancy of actual life, a simplification of human motives and actions that doesn't really ring true.

In Russian formalist film theory, a great influence on David Bordwell, a distinction is drawn between the plot (or fabula) and the manner in which the plot is presented -- that is the syuzhet.  In the 40's innovations in cinema, the story is frequently told in flashbacks, often in reverse order as to the chronology of events comprising the fabula.  (For instance, Sunset Boulevard begins at the end with the narrator floating dead in a Hollywood swimming pool; the syuzhet, then, backtracks to show the sequence of events leading to the protagonist's death.)  The Locket is a picture that demonstrates a yawning gulf between the narrative's confusing system of flashbacks and the relatively simple story or fabula that the film dramatizes.  A tired-looking middle-aged woman works as a servant in wealthy family's palatial house.  The middle-aged woman is the mother of a little girl, about seven years old.  The little girl is best friends with the daughter of the mistress of the house and, therefore, is invited by the rich woman's daughter to participate in a birthday party.  As it turns out, the rich woman is embarrassed by the presence of her servant's daughter at the birthday party and excludes the little girl.  Her friend has given her a locket which the rich woman takes from the child, requiring that it be returned to her daughter.  (Later the locket goes missing and the child's mother is dismissed from her employment, wrongfully as it happens since, in fact, she didn't steal back the jewelry.) The little girl, who will be the protagonist in the movie, is humiliated -- she prays to God that she be allowed to keep the gift, but the locket is taken from, enforcing her sense that she is inferior to her friend.  This psychological trauma scars the child and she grows up to be woman who uses her wiles to steal expensive jewelry -- this kleptomania is in compensation for the shame that she suffered when she was seven years old and had the locket given to her by her friend taken (and, then, was wrongfully accused of theft -- the same kinds of thefts that she now actually commits.)  The protagonist in The Locket seduces a number of men, but uses them primarily as instruments for her kleptomania, as vehicles affording her access to the necklaces and brooches that she covets.  Her thefts trigger homicide, suicide, and one man accused of theft is wrongfully imprisoned and apparently executed after being convicted of a murder actually committed by the vengeful and insane protagonist.  This femme fatale worms her way into the household of the rich woman who humiliated her twenty years earlier -- she becomes engaged to the rich woman's son (her little playmate has long since died).  On the day of the wedding, the protagonist, given the fatal locket by her future mother-in-law staggers down the aisle in the mansion where her mother worked as a servant long before -- the very carpet underfoot accuses her of all sorts of crimes, writhing with flashback images of thefts and other terrible things that she has done.  She swoons and the film ends with her, apparently, incarcerated in an insane asylum. The film is scrupulously ambiguous about whether the protagonist engineered the wedding to the wealthy man to revenge herself on his mother or, perhaps, is just the victim of a bizarre coincidence.

This story is told by flashbacks within flashbacks; the core of this Russian Doll structure of stories within storiesi a representation of the triggering trauma -- the moment when the heroine's mother is wrongfully accused of theft and fired from her job as the rich woman's servant.  The syuzhet starts on the day of the wedding.  A man appears and tells the groom that he knows his bride, psychoanalyzed her, and was once married to the woman.  The psychoanalyst's story triggers a flashback about how he met his bride-to-be; this flashback, in turn, contains a flashback narrated by the psychoanalyst about he discovered the woman's previous sexual relationship.  In that flashback, we learn that the heroine was once romantically involved with an artist (played by Robert Mitchum); the artist has painted an image of the heroine as Cassandra, a menacing, voluptuous female figure with blank, white eyes.  The artist's patron is a rich industrialist.  The heroine, attending a party at the industrialist's mansion, steals a diamond necklace from the rich man's paralyzed wife.  When the theft is discovered, the industrialist accuses the protagonist who shoots him dead, pinning the crime on another party-guest.  Thus man goes to prison and, in fact, is executed for capitol murder.  Mitchum's character (here he plays against type -- he acts the part of a sensitive artist) learns that his girlfriend has, in fact, framed a man resulting in his execution.  The artist can't reconcile his love for the insane heroine with her evil deeds and commits suicide by throwing himself out of the window of a skyscraper.  The heroine, then, goes to London where she works as a nurse during the blitz.  There, she steals another precious necklace, but is thought to have been killed by bombs during an air raid.  In fact, she hasn't died in the raid and ends up in New York with the psychoanalyst.  The psychoanalyst has a nervous breakdown and the heroine divorces him, changing her name in the process.  She, then, runs into the wealthy heir to an American fortune, apparently at some place like Key West -- she literally "runs into" the man; their bicycles collide.  She, then, seduces the man who turns out to be the brother of her little playmate and the daughter of the wealthy woman who humiliated her years before. So far as I can recall (and determine) the narrative is structure is this:  the psychoanalyst's appearance before the wedding triggers his flashback which, then, contains a flashback narrated by Mitchum's character, the doomed artist.  The woman confides in Mitchum's artist that she is haunted by an experience in her childhood which then triggers a flashback within the artist's flashback which, of course, is embedded in the psychoanalyst's flashback -- this is the core memory of trauma that engenders the film's plot.  After Mitchum's character plunges out of the window, we, then, return to the psychoanalyst's story which involves the moody scenes shot with flaring fires and wreckage during the blitz in London.  This part of the narrative ultimately returns us back to the initial situation -- the wedding in the mansion in which the heroine seems to go mad.  If this seems confusing, it is.  The best part of the film is the flashback inside the flashback involving the artist -- some aspects of this part of the movie are eerily imposing and the suicide scene in particular has a grim aura of inevitability about it which characterizes some examples of 40's film noir.  The heroine, played by the actress Larraine Day, is beautiful but seems somehow (and appropriately) stunted -- she's like a poor man's Elizabeth Taylor but with a head and gorgeous movie-star face that seems too large for her body.  (Day later married the hideous Leo Durocher).  The men trapped in this web of intrigue are mostly uninteresting stiffs; this was Mitchum's first major role and he's weirdly soft and quiet, a bit like Rock Hudson in some of his pictures made a decade later.  The picture is not worth the effort required to decipher it and, in fact, it's completely unconvincing -- the notion of compensatory kleptomania seems improbable and false.  (Hitchcock's Marnie, which has a similar plot and structure - it also relies on flashbacks - is a better movie because it equates the protagonist's mental illness to her sexual dysfunction.).