The Rake's Progress (Des Moines Opera)

 The Des Moines Opera presents a Summer Festival of four operas at the Blank Center for the Performing Arts in Indianola, a remote suburb about 30 miles south of the Iowa capitol.  Indianola is a quiet place; the Blank Center is ten blocks or so west of the main drag -- to reach the campus of Simpson College where the auditorium is located you drive through an old residential neighborhood along lanes shaded by old trees and big 19th century houses with wraparound porches and lawns punctuated by flower beds.  There are about four stop signs at two-block intervals in this neighborhood before you reach the peaceful enclave of the campus -- all the buildings seem to date from the sixties, modest brick and concrete edifices among sidewalks and parking lots on low terraces.  Somewhere, I suppose, there are some old administrative buildings with a vaguely ecclesiastical mien, the campus' "Old Main" as it were, but, despite several visits to this place, I have never found that structure or anything resembling a center point in the collection of buildings flanked on all sides by residential neighborhoods. Across from the Blank Center, there's a pinched-looking stadium and field house, more narrow parking lots, more shadowy lawns.  (Simpson was founded as a Methodist seminary in 1860; it presently has about 1100 students -- one of its most famous alumni is George Washington Carver.)  I attended a performance of Igor Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress (1951) on a sultry night in July 2025.  As I drove from Ames, Iowa, where I was staying for the night, to Indianola, I saw vast processions of thunderheads lining up along a front to the east, enormous wind-sculpted towers of cloud with green-blue canyons between the sun-tipped cumulo-nimbus.  The sun stays lit for a long time in July in south-central Iowa and the colossal clouds were so far away that I couldn't hear them growling with thunder as I drove through the cornfields and big river valleys full of brown floodwaters.

The Rake's Progress is a "numbers" opera -- that means, it is comprised of a series of set piece compositions written in various musical forms and arranged as illustrations to a narrative that is largely implied but not dramatized.  (This kind of opera is the opposite of Wagner's "Gesamtkunst Music Dramas" featuring continuous exposition made coherent by melodic leit motifs; the "numbers opera" is built from independent arias, duets, trios and choruses, often composed in dance measure, with an integument of continuo harpsichord underlying recitative between the numbers.)  Stravinsky's opera has one of the finest books ever devised for musical theater -- the libretto, written in the diction and style of Dryden or Alexander Pope, is by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman and the text is a poetic triumph in itself.  The plot is episodic but brilliantly shaped and the music is vivid and intricate, the singers often performing in counterpoint against a backdrop of mathematically precise music that sounds like a modernist pastiche of Mozart.  There are only a few memorable melodies, but this is true, also to some extent of some of Rossini's operas and other examples of bel canto opera (these works are too well-bred to have showy stand-out tunes) -- the texture of the music is rigorous and intriguing, and the numbers have a tonal delicacy propelled by rhythmic pulse that rhymes with Mozart and Rossini, but not so closely as to seem imitative or parodic; some critics call the opera a pastiche of classical forms, such as Handel's operas and some of Mozart's works, particularly Cosi Fan Tutti with strong elements (mostly supernatural in character) from Don Giovanni.  An example of this pastiche composition is the opera's epilogue in which the character's strip off their costumes, rub away make-up, and appear in contemporary clothes to sing the moral of the piece -- something about idle hands being the devil's workshop.  (Many of Mozart's operas conclude with this sort of sunny direct address to the audience).  But Stravinsky varies from his model -- the moral stated as underlying the piece is obviously completely irrelevant to what we have seen; in other words, the ostensible moral sung by the performers in chorus isn't even arguably the actual moral of the work which is, in fact, far more complex and problematic -- something about desire and the intrinsic fallibility of human endeavor in a world made corrupt by celebrity, greed, and ubiquitous temptation.  My point is that, unlike morals expressed in the concluding choruses of classical works, this moral is self-evidently not what the opera was about and seems to be fig leaf concealing something more shameful and perverse in what we have seen.  I don't know enough about Auden and Kallman's relationship to be precise about my supposition that the text seems to dramatize a mesalliance between someone who is beautiful, fickle, and unfaithful and a lover who is plain, prudent, and loyal to the point of masochism -- accounts of the tempestuous lifelong liaison between the young, fabulous-looking Kallman and the older poet seem to mirror the relationship between the rather tediously faithful Ann Truelove and the libertine, Thomas Rakewell.  The episode involving Rakewell's marriage to a bearded lady, Baba the Turk, also seems to be some sort of campy homosexual joke -- although the libretto is so brilliantly constructed and densely meaningful that these scenes, which were borderline offensive in 1951 (and remain au courant with today's LGBT+ sexual identity politics) can be construed in a variety of ways -- Auden and Kallman's text is overdetermined and, if anything, so crowded with significance that everything can be read literally or figuratively or as satire, but, also, as a sort of crooked and subversive morality play.  (In one production that I saw, Baba the Turk seems to be played as a transvestite -- although the role has to be sung by a woman since it is pitched as mezzo-soprano part.  Baba's entourage, in that production, consisted of various exotic figures in BDSM gear who continuously finger their cell-phones and take selfies all the time.)  

The Rake's Progress adapts (in oblique fashion) Hogarth's series of engravings bearing the same title.  The libretto styles itself a "fable".  Tom Rakewell professes love for his sweetheart Ann Trulove.  Rakewell is selfish, handsome, and ambitious.  When he says that he wishes for wealth, a sinister figure, Nick Shadow appears and seems to offer a Faustian bargain to the young man.  Shadow will grant his wishes but demands his salary at the end of one year and day.  (In some ways, Shadow is the star of the play -- the devil always gets the best lines -- and he sings in a booming basso profundo).  Shadow tells Tom that an uncle, unknown to him, has died and left him a fortune.  Tom goes to London from his rural estate where he has courted Ann and, promptly, descends into debauchery.  We see him at a brothel amid a double chorus of whores and "roaring boys" -- that is, bar- and street-fighting thugs.  The madam of the brothel, Mother Goose, chooses Tom as her prize and lover.  Later, Tom is bored with his life of idle pleasure, having forgotten all about the loyal Ann.  (Ann keeps annoyingly intruding on the action -- she's a drag and, whenever she appears, the opera flags and becomes vaguely maudlin; you can only stand so much of her histrionic masochism).  Shadow appears with a suggestion designed to address Tom's ennui -- he encourages him to marry a famous side-show attraction, the bearded lady Baba the Turk.  At first, Tom is repelled by the freak, but, after a sung soliloquy that cites Nietzsche, he decides to court and marry Baba as an example of an acte gratuit, an absurdist gesture intended to prove his freedom by choosing an arbitrary fate and accepting it as his destiny.  The marriage to Baba becomes dull as well -- she is obsessed with collecting curios and seems to live in a giant Wunderkabinett or "cabinet of curiosities."  Ann shows up to whine to Tom about how she has proven to be unworthy.  (This is typical of Auden's masochistic approach to this irritating character -- instead of decrying Tom's disloyalty, betrayal, and indolence, she melodramatically says that she is somehow responsible for him mistreating her.)  Unable to bear Baba's perpetual bitching (and Ann's passive-aggressive hectoring), Tom puts a cage over his wife's bearded visage, thereby, surrealistically silencing her, and, then, falls asleep.  Nick Shadow plucks a marvelous machine out of Tom's dreams -- a device for converting stones to bread (it's a transparent fraud).  Tom invests everything in the stone-to-bread apparatus, altruistically proclaiming that this will restore the world to a sort of paradise.  In the next scene, Tom is bankrupt and all of his assets are being sold by a glitzy showman of an auctioneer -- this includes Baba's vast collection of curios, things like mummies and stuffed auks.  Baba's cage headgear is lifted from her shoulders and she sings an impressively stormy aria about returning to the stage as a freak and performer -- this part of the opera seems to be about the cult of celebrity. Nick comes to collect on his debt -- the term on the contract has ended.  For some reason, Nick agrees to a card game, offering Tom an escape from the agreement which now threatens the damnation of his soul.  Mourning his loss of Ann, Tom has become sufficiently virtuous now to beat the devil at his own game -- Nick drops howling through the floor, descending to hell.  (This part of the opera is influenced by the last scenes in Don Giovanni).  Nick can't seize Tom's soul, but he has sufficient power to cloud his mind.  Tom becomes insane and is confined in an asylum.  Ann visits Tom who imagines himself as a Adonis (he thinks Ann is his queen, Venus).  Ann sings a lullaby and Tom falls asleep once more, dying as a crowd of ragged, ghostly madmen wander around the stage singing morosely.  Then, things brighten and the company gathers to sing the epilogue chorus stating the opera's moral which is obviously not its moral at all.

At the production that I saw, the singing was superb.  The actor playing Nick Shadow, (Sam Carl) in particular, was fantastically accomplished -- his voice was deep, resonant, and menacing.  The acoustics in the steep-sided oubliette of the Blank Performing Arts auditorium are excellent and, because the theater is small and intimate, it seems as if the singers are immediately and almost frighteningly present.  The stage is a Tyrone Guthrie-style thrust, without a curtain.  This presents problems for opera which often requires elaborate stage-craft with varied and elaborate scenery.  In his production, the changes in setting are accomplished largely by costume -- the show was elaborately costumed with even the supernumeraries who have to haul furniture on and off-stage dressed in period livery.  The rural environs of the opening scene are suggested by a car-sized mock-up of a Tudor farmhouse that hangs between two chandelier above the actors -- the farmhouse has windows that can be lit and a chimney that leaks actual smoke.  In a later scene, when Tom is rich, a similarly sized Palladian villa hangs from the roof and its lighting panels.  Some flats simulating a Wunderkabinett appear in the auction scene. The mad-scene with Tom and Ann is primarily defined by clinical white floodlights on the actors who are garbed in ragged white --Tom lies an a patch of straw strewn on the floor.  At the center of the stage, the floorboards are split to reveal the orchestra below the action -- this imparts a sense of danger to the proceedings; you are always conscious that if someone loses their way, they could stray and fall through this hole dropping right off the stage into the orchestra under them.  Baba the Turk is carried on-stage in brightly painted sedan. She has a little boy with her, a servant dressed as Turk and wearing a big turban -- this character doesn't appear in the libretto but, I think, derives from images of a similar figure in the Hogarth engravings.  The production was excellent in all respects and the opera is thought-provoking and highly intelligent --I heard people speculating as to its meaning at the intermission and after the show when I walked through shadowy campus to the parking lot.  Somehow, the colossal line of thunderstorms passed overhead without so much as a drop of rain falling in Indianola.  The night remained, humid and sultry with scarcely any breeze at all.

The Blank Center for the Performing Arts has 457 seats.  The seats literally hang over the stage which is at the bottom of an extremely steep-sided auditorium.  You look down onto the singers and the people in the front row seats on the three sides of the thrust stage have their feet on the stage itself.  The place isn't handicapped accessible by any stretch of the imagination, all rows of seats are stacked on top of one another and there are no level aisles anywhere in the house.  The people who attend opera are long in the tooth and, often, frail and many of the patrons were using canes or walkers, and I must say I was very fearful as I watched these elderly people scale or descend the Maya-Pyramid stairways in the house.  

The Fool Killer

 The book was always in my family, a two-volume set of the works of Stephen Vincent Benet.  One of the books contained Benet's poetry including the epic "John Brown's Body" that I read eagerly as a child.  The other volume collected short stories by Benet, including one called "Johnny Pye and the Foolkiller".  The story was published in 1938 and I also read it several times when I was little.  I was surprised, therefore, when TCM showed a 1965 film called The Fool Killer as part of a double feature programmed by the horror movie director, Joe Dante (this was on July 5, 2025).  I had never heard of the film and supposed that it was based on Benet's story.  But, in fact, film's credits indicate that it derives from a 1954 novel by Helen Eustis.  The plot has some similarities with Benet's short story -- both involve an abused orphan who encounters the "fool killer" in his picaresque wanderings. These similarities, most likely, derive from the common source in folklore for the story -- children once were intimidated by their parents by being told that there is a sinister "fool killer" who lies in ambush with a sharp knife or axe to punish those who behave stupidly.  

Dante, an estimable director in his own right (most famous for Gremlins) was anxious to promote the 1965 film as an unsung masterpiece.  In fact, the picture is not wholly successful and seems strangely muted.  The Fool Killer contains some outstanding sequences but the movie doesn't cohere as a whole.  It is characterized by audacious, experimental camerawork, that is, also, in most instances, too fancy by half.  The acting is fine, but the disorganized and rather disheveled plot doesn't go anywhere and there's an aura of futility about the movie.  In his conversation with Joe Mankiewicz on TCM, Dante pointed out that in the last shot, the camera is under a locomotive, filming the wheels from below -- then, the camera moves beneath the train, emerging on the opposite side of the tracks to, then, tilt up to show the railroad cars departing down the track.  Dante admits that this is a pointlessly elaborate shot, requiring track beneath the tracks and a tunnel to be excavated through the railroad embankment, clearly a massive amount of effort to secure a fifteen second shot that most viewers will scarcely notice.  Dante asserts that this laborious final shot demonstrates in general the care lavished upon the movie.  I'm not so sure of that proposition.  Some contemporary reviewers (and there were few, almost no one saw the movie) criticized the picture as a compendium of flashy camera techniques that don't really contribute to the narrative.  

An orphan named George Mellish is working on his foster parent's farm.  He knocks over a butter churn and gets a whipping from his stepmom.  More humiliated than harmed, George runs away from the farm.  He rides on the undercarriage of a passing train to a nearby town.  When he hops off the train to obey the call of nature, the locomotive speeds away stranding him in a hilly wooded landscape bisected by big, slow-moving rivers.  He comes upon a ramshackle cottage on the river bank.  This turns out to be the homestead of an old drunk called "Dirty James."  The old man is filthy but kind.  The 12-year runaway, George, and the old man ramble around the empty countryside -- they fish and play in a mud puddle and the drunk tells George about how he was stalked by the Fool Killer when he was a young man; the Fool Killer scared him into the arms of his wife, the "cleanest woman alive" and she tormented her with her hygienic ways until her death.  The old man and boy go into town where George collapses with some kind of sickness.  For a while, he lives with a kindly couple in town.  A little girl tries to get the feverish George to give her a kiss.  (Her name is Blessing Angelina and she has a "boil" on her butt, expressing, she says, "either bad blood or the meanness in (her) coming out."  In any event, it keeps her parents from spanking her.)  Blessing Angelina is a strange apparition -- she has a bonnet like white bunny ears and wears thick round spectacles.  Concerned that Blessing Angelina may want him as her boyfriend, George flees into the forest and where he wanders in a "day for night" twilight, affrighted by various dead trees.  In the darkness, he encounters a campfire where a very strange young man is squatting by the flames.  This is Milo Bogardus (although he later admits he stole the name from someone killed in the Civil War).  Milo seems to be a menacing version of the Fool Killer.  He carries a blade and a hatchet.  Milo and George become friends.  They go swimming together in an odd spring full of submerged rocks.  Milo seems to be have been damaged in the Civil War -- he's a sort of mystical hermit-- there is talk about having seen the face of God in a halo of glory.  In one scene, some kind of nameless panic seizes Milo and runs wildly through the woods, finally clutching a hold of two saplings as if to keep himself from spinning off into space.  Milo says that George "could be his brother."  A religious revival camp meeting is setting up in the valley.  George wants to attend but Milo discourages him.  Nonetheless, they go to the revival meeting where a menacing preacher delivers a terrifying hellfire and brimstone sermon.  George wants to be saved and answers the altar call, summoned to the front of the tent by the preacher's scary-looking factotum, a man playing a trumpet.  The next morning, the camp is in disarray and George is sleeping under a wagon.  People are distraught:  someone has murdered the preacher, presumably, the Fool Killer.  Milo is missing.  George goes into town where he is given a bedroom in which to sleep by a friendly older couple.  In the middle of the night, Milo appears brandishing an axe.  Then, he vanishes.  An hour or so later, at dawn, he appears on the roof of the family's house.  For some reason, he jumps from the roof and dies from the fall.  Wanderlust again summons George to the open road.  A train appears.  George watches the train departing and says that he has a "restless feeling."  The train goes down the track and, at last, vanishes.

This peculiar film is shot in very expressive black and white.  The night scenes, however, are marred by poor "day for night" effects.  There are some sequences simulating illness by using blurry, wobbly camera tricks -- these are also not successful.  Many interiors feature very high-angle shots, as if filming through the roof of the set.  Anthony Perkins plays the enigmatic Milo Bogardus.  He's performing a variant on his schizophrenic in Hitchcock's Psycho.  A boy named Eddie Albert, Jr. plays the part of George -- he has an odd squinty and pinched face, but is very good.  (The boy is the son of the movie star Eddie Albert who played as second-banana to Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday; of course, Eddie Albert was most famous for performing with Eva Gabor in the TV series Green Acres.)  The picture was shot around Knoxville, Kentucky where it had its premiere (and apparently only theatrical showing); something went wrong, the movie wasn't marketed at all, and, after a few years, went straight to TV and from TV into the abyss where it seems to have been completely forgotten.  With its eerie vistas and strange reticent plot, the movie resembles Herk Harvey's "one and done" picture Carnival of Souls. The picture was directed by a Mexican filmmaker named Servando Gonzalez.  The picture obviously imitates Charles Laughton's 1955 Night of the Hunter and it was programmed as a double feature with that movie.  The comparison is highly invidious to The Fool Killer, a stylish picture but one that is weirdly inconsequential.  

Down Terrace

 There aren't any movie stars in Down Terrace (2010).  The criminals in this film look like people you might see on a trip to bowling alley -- they're greyish, overweight, and lumpy.  The movie shows them in their natural habitat -- a claustrophobic set of rooms in a small middle-class home somewhere near England.  The film is casual, understated, and observes its nondescript characters in a documentary style.  The violence that occurs in this film is effective because it arises without any hint of melodrama or, even, suspense -- it's just a logical extension of the way these small-time hoodlums interact.

Something has gone wrong in a crime family.  Bill and Maggie's 33-year old son, Karl, has just been discharged from court.  With a family fixer (and, possibly, lawyer) named Dave, Karl comes home.  It's not entirely clear why he was in jail -- possibly it has something to do with his bad temper.  But there is a pervasive, ill-defined suspicion that the criminal enterprise (it has something to do with a club apparently in London) is under attack on the basis of someone collaborating with law enforcement.  An overweight dumpling of a man named Garvey is under some suspicion -- but this may be simply because everyone bullies poor, ineffectual Garvey.  Bill presides over the family and the thugs affiliated with the business -- these include the fixer Dave, a psycho-killer named Pringle (he comes to a murder-for-hire event with his two-year old son whom he is babysitting), Garvey, Erik, another jolly fat criminal associated with the family (he's Maggie's sister), and an enforcer from the mob named Jonny.  At first, the film details domestic squabbles in the family:  Bill pontificates on various subjects -- he talks about how he was an admirer of Timothy Leary -- and persistently abuses his son Karl about his pregnant girlfiend, Valda, a woman who Karl met when he became his penpal when he was in jail.  Bill says that the child that Valda is carrying is most likely not Karl's.  There's a lot of bickering between Karl and his overbearing father, Bill, and everyone picks on poor Garvey.  Bill's long-suffering wife is a vague presence in the background, who retreats from controversy by going to bed early.  (Later, we will come to understand that Maggie is, in some ways, the brains of the entire operation and that her retiring demeanor masks her utter ruthlessness.)  Bill is under pressure to root out the police informant in his circle.  Suspicion falls on Garvey but Bill believes the fat man is too ineffectual to be the snitch.  Nonetheless, Karl calls up the psycho Pringle, whom everyone fears, and has him come over to the house to kill Garvey.  Pringle is babysitting and brings his two-year-old, a child whom Pringle is teaching to be an eye-gouging street fighter.  Garvey senses he's in trouble and locks himself in a room, refusing to come out while Pringle is menacing him.  Pringle goes home and, after he leaves, Garvey, who trusts his friend, Karl comes out of his hiding place -- Karl immediately kills him with a hammer.  (These murderers hang clear plastic to keep blood from spattering -- when we see the plastic on the walls or furniture, we know someone is about to be killed.)  With his friend, and uncle Eric, Karl buries the body of Garvey.  Pringle, of course, was commissioned to kill Garvey, although he failed at this task.  But he's aware that Karl had Garvey killed.  So Eric takes Pringle out in the country to see a car for sale and guns him down.  A little later, when Eric encounters Pringle's wife, pushing a perambulator, he chats with her a cheerful manner before hurling her directly into the path of an oncoming vehicle.  Jonny from London threatens Bill, saying that the boss wants the snitch uncovered.  Bill now thinks that Eric might be the weak link.  So Maggie poisons her brother to death.  Having to dispose of Eric's corpse, Maggie says:  "All I ever have to do is clean up after these bloody men."  She also makes the sinister remark that "if you (Eric) weren't part of the family this would never have happened."  Bill and Maggie keep attempting to persuade Karl to abandon his pregnant girlfriend Valda.  Dave, the fixer, has a heart attack.  On his deathbed, he tells Karl that Eric's corpse has been found (Eric was a close friend) and that Bill and Maggie are conspiring to have him killed since the mob now thinks he's the informer.  While walking through a tunnel, a hoodlum tries to stab Karl to death; Karl gets the upper hand and kills the hoodlum with his own knife.  Maggie and Valda go for a walk.  The viewer expects the ruthless Maggie to murder Valda.  Instead, Valda kills Maggie by stabbing her to death, again against a backdrop of clear plastic.  ("What is all this plastic for?" Maggie plaintively asks just before the pregnant Valda guts her. At home, Kar. shoots his father, Bill, and, then, carefully wraps the corpse in duct-taped plastic.  Valda comes to the house and nonchalantly asks Karl:  "How'd it go?"  Bill is a mummy wrapped up in plastic propped up against the wall.  "Not too bad," Kirk says, "he knew he had it coming and accepted it as the best thing for him."  

This is a dirty-looking, kitchen sink picture full of low-grade domestic squabbles -- the bickering cast reminds me of some of the lower-crust people in films by Kira Muratova, also whinging at one another, cuffing and punching, and making threats.  But, then, suddenly, people start getting assassinated -- this is very shocking and disorienting. The film's tone is that of a black comedy.  The thugs are musical and there are interludes in which they play guitar and sing old, sad, folksongs, also about reckless love and murder.  Bill and his cohort talk in florid, eloquent language -- they sound like people in an old-time novel. This is an utterly unpretentious picture -- it has the look of Mike Leigh's domestic dramas and seems partly improvised as well.   

The film is ugly, made with no budget to speak of, and seems fantastically realistic and authentic.  Ben Wheatley wrote the script with a mate and directed it.  Wheatley shot the picture in 8 days.  It's probably his best film, although he has made several other movies that have received some critical attention -- notably Kill List and A Field in England.  Recently, Wheatley, who physically looks like the ne-er-do-wells in Down Terrace, has been making big-budget pictures about giant sharks that haven't been successful.     

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

 When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

1.

Absence of evidence doesn’t necessarily establish evidence of absence.  Or: plenty of things exist that we don’t know about.  No conclusions can be drawn from ignorance.

The film director Mikio Naruse is almost entirely unknown in Europe and the English-speaking world.  Although a famous and influential director in his native Japan, his films haven’t been widely distributed and are mostly unavailable.  In the 56 years since his death, there have been two USA retrospectives in which some of his many films were screened – one was at the Museum of Modern Art; the other was hosted by the Harvard Film Archive.  In this country, only one of his almost 90 feature films can be seen on DVD, the Criterion When a Woman Ascends the Stairs.  David Thomson admitted that Naruse was terra incognito – “here there be dragons,” he wrote in his famous New Biographical Dictionary of Films.  (In a later edition, Thomson acknowledged that he had seen only one of Naruse’s pictures Floating Clouds, observing that it was an extraordinarily accomplished and intelligent story about thwarted love that made most Hollywood and European treatments of that topic seem juvenile and, even, irresponsible.  Thomson went on to say that he doubted that any of his readers would be able to see that picture – and, in fact, his doubt has proven to be a realistic assessment of the situation; I certainly haven’t been able to get my hands on the movie.)

There is always an impulse to simplify.  When I was young, Japanese cinema consisted of a handful of pictures by Akira Kurosawa, two or three movies by Mizoguchi, and Ozu’s Tokyo Story.  Of course, Japan has an immense, thriving film industry and has produced hundreds of interesting films in all genres including many classics about which we have little or no information.  A similar situation used to prevail with respect to Indian cinema – there was Satjayit Ray and no one else at all.  Critics regarded movies in India according to a bizarre mind-set – Ray was the only director worth following; seemingly, he had emerged from nothing, established no school, had no influence, no serious competitors, and was the only filmmaker of any merit on the entire subcontinent.  People actually believed this to be true for decades.  But, Ray is only one of many important filmmakers in India – there were great directors before him, great contemporaries, and great directors after him as well.  (India is a particularly complicated case because the country is a Babel of languages – Bollywood makes movies in Hindi; this was Ray’s language.  But the largest market share in the Indian film industry is devoted to Telugu-speaking films and the world’s largest studio, Ramoji and Hyderabad primarily produces pictures in that language.  There are regional film industries making movies in Malayalam, Tamil, Kanada, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi, and Gujarti.  Anyone characterizing Indian cinema, accordingly, as primarily Hindi under the influence of Ray, who was well-known in Europe and America, is grossly misrepresenting the actual state of affairs.)

In Japan, the three most important directors emerging from the silent era are said to be Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Naruse.  (Kurosawa, who was heavily influenced by John Ford, is renowned in the West, but considered to be less significant than these other film directors in his home country.)  All three men are products of the pre- and post-war Japanese studio system.  In Japan, directors were considered specialists in certain genres and their work was ordinarily limited to the films within their specialty.  Directors typically worked with the same screenwriters (in Naruse’s case, the scenarist, Ryuzu Kikushima) and used a repertory company of actors who cycle through a number of pictures by the director – for instance, Hideko Takemine, who appears in 17 of Naruse’s movies in the fifties and sixties).  Ozu specialized in bitter-sweet, low-key family dramas with comedy elements; Mizoguchi was regarded as a “woman’s director” and made melodramas (as well as period pictures) featuring traduced, betrayed, and suffering women.  Naruse began with slapstick silent comedy, later working as a director of women’s pictures set in contemporary times, more or less consistently focusing on working heroines and the socio-economic conditions that affect their well-being.  Unlike Mizoguchi, Naruse is said to entirely eschew melodrama: his pictures are said to embody “naturalistic pessimism” and feature female protagonists described as “persevering, dedicated, and intelligent.”  Critics claim that his films demonstrate “despair” that is “bleaker” than that existing in the more melodramatic films of directors like Mizoguchi – the films “are bleaker because (they) have no melodramatic finality.”  

2.

Mikio Naruse was born in old Tokyo City, an enclave in the larger urban area, in 1905.  His parents died when he was young and he was raised by a brother.  Unlike most of the other famous directors in Japanese cinema, Naruse came from a working class background.  There was no money for any education after he was fifteen and, at that time, went to work to support himself.    As a teenager, he began working at the Shochiku Studios where he labored for ten years as a grip, lighting assistant, and prop man.  Taciturn and very unassuming, Naruse was ignored until a friend suggested him for directing a silent slapstick-style comedy – this was in 1930.  This was the beginning of Naruse’s career as a director – he ultimately made 89 pictures.  After a couple of years, Naruse specialized in the so-called shoshimin-eiga (“common-people films”) genre and, by and large, was confined to those types of movies for the rest of his professional life.  He learned to make pictures of this kind very efficiently and was able to work with relatively low budgets.  

Naruse became famous to a comedy-drama Wife be like a Rose, a 1935 picture that returned huge profits to Shochiku Studios – the picture won a Kinema Junpo award, the equivalent of the Oscar, and was extremely influential and much imitated.  Naruse, who is not a reliable historian, claims that he suffered the cinematic equivalent of “writer’s block” between 1935 and 1951 and was completely unable to make any decent pictures during that eleven year period.  Naruse attributed this failing to personal turmoil – he had married the star of Wife Be Like a Rose and suffered serious marital discord during his “lost” decade.  (I suspect that Naruse was involved in several war-time propaganda movies and his assertion that he made nothing of any value during the war years was defensive.  In fact, critics who have seen some of his pictures made in the late forties regard those movies as highly accomplished.)  Between 1951 and 1960, the release date of When a Woman Ascends a Stair, Naruse made a series of pictures regarded as classics in Japan.  After 1960, his health declined and he died (a victim of colon cancer) when he was 63 in 1969.

Naruse didn’t develop a characteristic camera-style (unlike Ozu and Mizoguchi); he is not an auteur.  In his films, Naruse avoids flourishes that might distract the audience from the performances and the narrative.  He is supremely intelligent and the intricacy and depth of his narratives have been compared with the realism identified with writers like Henry James.  

Naruse was disliked by most actors with whom he worked.  He never gave any notes and provided no direction at all to his performers.  He told them where to stand and established eye-lines but, beyond that instruction, he was silent.  Naruse is said to have spoken in a very soft voice; people who worked for him say that he was silent, enigmatic, and never explained what he wanted in terms of the performance.  He was a perfectionist and would do many takes to get a scene exactly right.  The reason actors both disliked and feared him was that he coupled a highly disciplined and precise approach to filmmaking with a refusal to explain in any way the effect that he was seeking – he did twenty or more takes without ever telling anyone why he rejected earlier versions of the shot.  Naruse seems to have regarded his actors as props – he was like Hitchcock in that he told them where to stand and cued them to speak but didn’t make any effort to explain what he was trying to accomplish.  Hideko Takemine, who admired Naruse for his artistry, called him a “mean old man.”

Naruse had a curious way of filming a scene.  He used only one camera and made every shot necessary for the sequence seriatim, that is, in order but without the other images necessary to complete the scene.  For instance, in a dialogue sequence (Naruse’s films are almost entirely dialogue), he would position the camera and set up lighting and, then, film each line spoken by the actor in the order in which it was required on screen but without any interpolation of speeches (or reaction shots) by the other party or parties to the conversation.  In effect, he would film one side of the conversation in a continuous series of shots, all made in order, and, then, film the other side of the conversation with a new camera set up and lighting.  In this way, Naruse could use only one camera, could control the shot with the utmost precision, and, then, splice the dialogue together in the editing suite. (This technique which is highly efficient but exceptionally demanding on the actors who must present their lines without dialogue by the other interlocutor(s) in the scene is called nakanuki – that is “cutting out the middle.”) Hideko Takamine recalls that once a lighting technician drew an eye on the set to establish an eyeline – that is, to cue her as to where she was supposed to look at the imaginary interlocutor in the scene.  Naruse was angry about this, erased the eye from the set, and threw the lighting technician off the shoot.  Needless to say, it takes enormous concentration and focus to make a movie in this way – Naruse had to maintain the order of shots in his head without letting the scene play out naturally; that is, he had to analyze the shot in terms of camera set ups and, then, make the scene in this highly unnatural if, extremely, efficient manner.  Akira Kurosawa, who has been called the “world’s greatest film editor”, has said that he regards Naruse’s skill in the cutting room as preeminent; Kurosawa noted that some Japanese reviewers criticized Naruse as making films “with no ups or downs” claiming that the “tone is too flat” but that by dint of his editing Naruse’s style “is like a great river with a calm surface and a raging current in its depths.” 

Naruse was cold and seemingly indifferent to the people with whom he worked.  He never discussed personal issues on the set and didn’t seem to have any interest in what his actors did when they weren’t on the job. His diagnosis of cancer seemingly thawed him a little.  Hideko Takemine recalled that the only real conversations that she ever had with Naruse (with whom she had worked for almost thirty years) were during the weeks in which he was dying.  Then, he opened up a little to her and spoke volubly about his upbringing and memories.  

In his last year, Naruse told Hideko Takemine (whom he called Hide-chan)  about what he thought was important in cinema: “I would like to make a film shot with only a white curtain backdrop, no real sets, no exteriors, all concentration on the nuances of human behavior, expressing feeling carved down to the quick.”  A few months after this conversation, Takemine saw Naruse for the last time.  He was debilitated and dying, confined to a wheelchair.  Takemine encouraged Naruse by saying that she believed he would rally and they would be able to make another movie together again.  Naruse expressed skepticism about this prospect.  As Takemine left the room and began opening the door to the outside, Naruse called out to her: Hide-chan.  When she returned to him, Naruse said that he would return to making films if they could shoot “that”.  Takemine knew that he was referring to the film shot against a bare white backdrop without sets or exteriors, showing only human feelings and gestures “carved down the quick.”  The actress said that Naruse’s return to this subject was unnerving to her.  He died a few weeks later, never expressing any pain, making no complaints, perishing as silently as he had lived.  

3.

Naruse summarized his views as to the misfortunes that his female characters experience in his films: “If they move even a little bit, they quickly hit the wall.  From my earliest years, I have thought that the world betray us – this thought stills remains with me.

4.

The stream of consciousness narrative (voice-over by the protagonist) tells us that there were 70 hostess bars on the Ginza in 1960.  (Ginza is an entertainment district in old Edo, a separate city center that is now part of Tokyo.)   At that time, the Ginza was a center of the so-called Mizu-shobei or “water-trade”.  Mizu-shobei refers generally to entertainers who are not paid a fixed salary but receive compensation as honorariums from patrons – workers of this kind range from actors and actresses, people in show business, geishas, bar girls and, even, prostitutes.  (The name for this sort of enterprise comes from the phrase shobu wa mizumono da – that is, “it’s all a matter of chance” or “depends upon the water”; so-called “muddy” Mizu-shobei is an euphemism for outright prostitution – this name derives from the hot springs where prostitutes plied their trade.)  Mama, Naruse’s protagonist, works in the “water-trade” at a “hostess bar” – “The Carton Bar.”  As long as we are considering this watery subject, it is worth noting that the lifestyle of bar girls in the Ginza (and their more elite sisters, the Geisha) is part of the ukiyo - e (that is, “the floating world”, a name for the Japanese demi-monde in its urban entertainment districts).  The denizens of the ukiyo-e are famously portrayed in souvenir Japanese woodcuts by such artists as Hiroshige and Hokusai.

Japanese society in the fifties (and to some extent today) is regarded as a “homo-social” culture.  Business and social ties are forged between men who interact in stylized ways at drinking parties.  The all-male “stag” drinking party is a mainstay of Japanese corporate culture.  Men get together to drink and become inebriated.  During these sessions, business alliances are forged.  Drinking parties are financed by the corporations for which these so-called “salary men” are employed.  In other words, drinks and female companionship are purchased on company credit, generally on expense accounts.  In 1960, it was thought to be uncivilized to make patrons pay for drinks and girls at the point of sale.  Therefore, the bars and their hostesses kept tabs as to what was owed and, then, on a monthly basis invoiced the companies by whom the men were employed.  Enterprises that didn’t promptly pay might receive visits from polite collection agents first, then, muscle, and, if necessary, yakuza (gangsters).  

(This is not too different from the way business was done in Europe and the United States in the fifties and early sixties.  When I was in Hamburg, I toured the harbor entertainment districts with an elderly man that I had met on the train from Frankfurt.  The old man had been employed in the shipping industry for many years and he showed us places where there had once been expensive restaurants where he took business prospects, many of them from India and southeast Asia.  He boasted that he had an unlimited expense account for wining and dining these customers.  On our tour, we ran into a couple of old bar maids that the elderly man knew from his glory days.  Obviously, he had a close relationship with these women and stood in the alley with them for a while (I was drinking a beer) smoking cigarettes.) 

The role of the bar hostess was to flirt with the customers and compliment them.  The women were thought to be the necessary lubrication required to get productive business done.  Bar hostesses were not prostitutes but, of course, might be sexually available depending on circumstances.  In the Ginza pecking order, bar girls occupied a position in the “water-trade” between prostitutes and geishas.  Geishas were highly accomplished entertainers, trained to sing and play stringed instruments; they could dance, recite poetry, and had a vast repertory of off-color jokes and childish party games and their services were extremely expensive.  Geishas looked down their middle-class competition, the Ginza bar girls.  Of course, the bar girls disdained the prostitutes.  In most cases, the women in the Ginza survived on the basis of sexual relationships with selected patrons with whom they maintained long-term contact.  (Married women understood that their husbands’ business success was tied to their social contacts and relationships fostered in the “water-trade” – as a consequence, most married women didn’t disapprove of the bar hostesses with whom their spouses consorted, regarding these women as “professionals” who could be trusted to maintain appropriate detachment from their customers.  This sort of understanding is evident in the scene in which Keiko returns Fujisaki’s money and bids him farewell at the train station.)

The Ginza still exists, centered around the famous Wako Department Store.  It is now an upscale neighborhood characterized by expensive wine bars, coffee places, and cabarets embedded among elite boutiques and shopping areas.  The hostess bars that once lined its streets are extinct; they have gone the way of the dinosaurs.  Geishas still exist but are primarily patronized by tourists.   

5.

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs depicts thewalls closing in around its protagonist, Keiko (called “Mama”), a thirty-year old widow working in the Mizu-shobei business.  (As the business’ “mama-san” or manager, Keiko doesn’t own the Carton Bar but is responsible for its day-to-day operation.)  In a circumstantial manner, without a whiff of melodrama, Naruse shows how Keiko’s options are eliminated one-by-one, confining her, at last, to a single dimension or latitude of movement – she must “ascend the stairs” to the bar where she works as a hostess with no hope for a better life.  Hopes are illusory. Keiko’s free will turns out to be a fiction.

At the film’s outset, Keiko has three avenues for escape.  She can open her own bar with the help of the bouncer and enforcer, Komatsu, who secretly loves her.  She can marry one of her customers and retire from the water-business.  Or, she can acquire a wealthy patron, willing to support her as his mistress.  Keiko’s self-esteem is based on her intelligence, grit, and the image that she preserves of herself as faithful to her dead husband to the bitter end – she has vowed that she will never marry or love another to honor the dead man.  Her choices are also limited, as is the case with many women, by the obligations she has assumed for others – she must provide for her mother, has to hire a lawyer for her dead-beat brother, and, finally, pays for surgery for her nephew’s polio.  From the film’s opening scenes, Keiko is not a free agent – she is encumbered by too many costly obligations including the emotional debt to her dead husband.  

As the film progresses, Keiko’s opportunities are exhausted.  She doesn’t have enough money to become the proprietor of her own bar and has to abandon that ambition.  (This is probably fortunate; the film shows an apparently successful competitor who does open her own business but ends up committing suicide because of unpaid debts – specifically charges for five elaborate kimonos that she has purchased for her girls.)  The chubby and gregarious Sekine offers to marry her and, after agonizing over what will be a marriage of convenience for her (she doesn’t love the unsightly Sekine), she accepts.  But this escape route is closed when Keiko learns that Sekine is already married and, apparently, a pathological liar.  Keiko loves one of her patrons, the wealthy and successful businessman, Fujisaki.  He implies that Keiko can become his mistress.  (We know that Fujisaki has money – in one scene, he enters the Carton Bar with a sulky geisha, obviously an expensive “bought and paid for” companion.)  Keiko seems on the verge of completing the transaction with Fujisaki when he tells her in a post-coital conversation that he has been assigned to Osaka and will be leaving Tokyo. He pays her but Keiko’s pride prevents her from accepting his money and she returns it to him at the train station when he is departing.  Throughout the film, Komatsu, Keiko’s bouncer and bill collector, has been in love with his boss.  But he is disgusted when Keiko gets drunk and throws herself at Fujisaki.  So Komatsu, who has worked for Keiko for a number of years, says he can no longer work for her and quits his job.  Keiko’s self-image as a virtuous and chaste widow has been shattered – after all, she is willing to marry Sekine and sleep with Fujisaki.  Only one dimension is available to her – she ascends the stairs to the Carton Bar where she will presumably be trapped until too old to entertain the drunken men who spend their time pawing her in the bar.  Her clock is ticking and, by the end of the film, the end seems to be in sight.

6. 

The work with which we are familiar that is most similar to When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (as well as the Terence Davies’ film based on that novel).  Like Keiko, the protagonist of The House of Mirth, Lily Bart, is running out of options.  Without any money to her name, Lily is approaching 30 – she must secure her position in society by either making a good marriage or resigning herself to becoming a courtesan, the mistress of a wealthy man.  Lily Bart, like Keiko, is admired by a young man who is without substantial wealth and must work for a living – that is, she has her own Komatsu whom she rejects until it is too late.  Lily hesitates with respect to her suitors, deferring her decision as to marriage for too long.  In the end, her suitors abandon her and marry other women.  Too late, Lily realizes that her only option is to become the mistress of a wealthy Jewish businessman.  But she rejects his advances and, later, he closes this door on her – he hoped to use Lily, who begins the story well-connected, to buy his way into polite society.  But his own success paves the way for alliances that will make a way for him among the elites in New York and he no longer needs Lily to gain access to the fashionable old money families with whom he has been doing business.  In the end, Lily is penniless and commits suicide (or dies by accidental overdose).  This is a melodramatic climax to Wharton’s novel – Lily’s dead body is discovered by the man who has loved her in vain through throughout the book.  As we have seen, Naruse rejects melodrama; Keiko can’t escape the rigors of her life by dying.  (Correlations to Wharton’s House of Mirth abound in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, although I think it is highly unlikely that Naruse knew anything at all about Wharton’s “gilded age” novel; similarities arise from the compromised position of the single female protagonist in mid-century Japan and early 20th century New York – it’s interesting to observe that Lily goes into debt over lavish spending on her wardrobe, the “uniform” required by her social status; Yuri, Keiko’s competitor, commits suicide over debts arising from purchase of her wardrobe required for the “water trade” in her bar.  In both cases, there is an intimation that the suicides are inadvertent, the result of accidental overdose.)

7.

In House of Mirth, Lily Bart temporizes and delays, rejecting each suitor in the hope that she can make a better match.  Lily’s fatal flaw is that she is too intelligent and proud to compromise – she understands her own value, grasps the exact parameters of her situation, and, then, isn’t willing to engage in a transaction that she finds demeaning to her.  Lily’s problem is that she is too intelligent to let herself be defined by her social status and erotic options.  But the world defines her precisely in those terms.  

Similarly, Keiko is highly intelligent and, understands with precision, the choices with which she is presented.  She’s too smart to let herself be defined by the constrained options with which she is presented.  The result is that she deliberates too long to be successful – before she can take action, her choices have been eliminated.  

I have identified Keiko’s failing as too much intelligence, combined with a high self-esteem resulting from her self-serving assumption of the role of the virtuous, chaste widow – when, in fact, she is neither conventionally virtuous nor chaste.  Clearly, Naruse, the Toho studio salary-man, single and probably an alcoholic, limited to working in a single narrow genre, identifies with the plight of his heroine.  He has no options either.  As we watch When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, we are struck, I think, by the film’s lucid discipline – it’s too intelligent and controlled to be interesting.  Critics like Pauline Kael have educated us to understand the movies as tawdry, lurid, even trashy.  But there’s nothing about Naruse that is even remotely tawdry, he eschews drama, avoids lurid imagery, and provides no cheap or trashy thrills.  The film is less a movie than a serene and pessimistic argument.  There are some directors who are simply too intelligent and too rigorous to produce films that appeal to those instincts for spectacle and garish emotion that underlie most movie-going.  (I am thinking here of Roberto Rossellini and the great French director Bertrand Tavernier, both filmmakers also characterized by their penetrating intelligence).  Is When a Woman Ascends the Stairs simply too smart for us?

8.

My brother, Christopher, managed luxury hotels.  For many years, he was the General Manager of an Embassy Suites at Burlingame, a few miles south of San Francisco.  Many Japanese business travelers stayed at his hotel and he, often, hosted expense account parties for them in his bar on the site.  Of course, my brother had no access to geishas and didn’t employ bar girls as hostesses.  So the poor Japanese salary-men had no one to tease or play silly games with – simply put, there was no one to pour their sake for them, one of the charming tasks of a bar hostess in Japan.  Without female companionship, the businessmen got morbidly drunk, became maudlin, and engaged in weird competitive drinking.  One of the things that they particularly enjoyed was competitive flatulence, that is, farting contests.  During one of these games, the Japanese boss said to Christopher in English: “Talk about the divine wind!”  “Divine wind” in Japanese is Kamikaze.

9.

In an essay on Naruse in Senses of Cinema, an Australian on-line film journal: “It is the honesty with which Naruse treats his theme that commands our respect; it is the faithfulness to this theme which creates his style, and, it is our suspicion that painful though it be, he is telling the truth – this makes him great.”

10.

In 2007, Criterion issued a disk of When a Woman Ascends the Stairs.  Donald Ritchie, America’s foremost expert on Japanese film, provided commentary on the disk.  Ritchie believed that the time had come for Naruse’s recognition as a master filmmaker in the West.  The great Japanese directors Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi became famous in the fifties and sixties; the French discovered Mizoguchi first and Kurosawa became renowned for films like The Seven Samurai and Rashomon in America in the late fifties and early sixties.  Yasujiro Ozu, a more ascetic director, was discovered in the seventies – I recall attending a lecture by David Bordwell about Ozu’s film-style  (University of Wisconsin at Madison) around 1980.  On the disk commentary, Ritchie asserts that recent retrospectives of Naruse’s work would surely influence film students in America and Europe to take interest in the director’s movies.  Ritchie was wrong.  In 2025, American viewers can see only one Naruse film on DVD  – that is, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs.  

Roman Holiday

 One pleasure delivered by classic Hollywood films is the magnificent, luminous close-up of a beautiful face.  Back when there was a "silver screen" and movies were shown in palaces projecting images bigger than the houses of most of the audience, these kinds of close-ups were the equivalent of special effects in contemporary movies -- they were like big fiery explosions, expensive, and to be judiciously employed.  William Wyler's Roman Holiday serves its viewers glamorous close-ups of its stars, a very young Audrey Hepburn (she was 23) and Gregory Peck.  The screen seems to vibrate, to become tremulous when these images appear.  In Hollywood's golden era, it was these privileged images that people paid to see.  Roman Holiday is full of impressive vistas of palaces, churches, the Trevi Fountain in full spate, the Roman forum with its mighty columns, the glacial expanse of the Spanish Steps but it is the close-ups of the stars that carry the picture's meaning and allure.

The Italian producer, Dino de Laurentiis had the template of Roman Holiday (1953) in mind when he commenced negotiations with Federico Fellini, five years after the picture' release, for what would become (under a different production company) La Dolce Vita.  Of course, Fellini wasn't interested in delivering the witty romantic comedy that Wyler (with a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo among others) made.  But there are common elements to both pictures.  La Dolce Vita presents images of glamorous celebrities most famously the voluptuous Anita Ekberg; Roman Holiday is about another kind of celebrity, a lonely and exhausted princess from some unnamed Ruritania, who flees into the Roman cityscape to avoid her ennervating royal schedule.  In both films, the urban landscape of Rome is central to the picture's imagery.  Most importantly, Gregory Peck's character, Joe Butler, is a gossip journalist employed by some sort of American-run tabloid; of course, Marcello Mastroianni plays a world-weary tabloid-sheet scandalmonger (who yearns to be a literati) in Fellini's 1960 film.  Joe has a sidekick who is a professional photographer specializing in candid and embarrassing shots of celebrities -- he is a paparazzi before the term was coined after photographer character, Paparazzo, in La Dolce Vita.  On a fundamental level, both pictures deal with moral and ethical issues arising around the cult of celebrity and the journalists and photographers who are parasitic on them.

Audrey Hepburn's princess has reached the end of her tether at the start of Roman Holiday.  She's exhausted by a schedule of obligatory appearances at various charity functions and embassies -- we see her at the tail end of a whirlwind European tour.  The film's opening scenes establish the brutal monotony of her existence when we see her greeting a long procession of dignitaries with complicated pedigrees and ludicrous names -- she loses a shoe and, then, has to dance with a succession of short, bald and old men.  The countess, who is her lady-in-waiting, suggests that she be freed briefly from her schedule and allowed to do what she wants.  When the princess begins to weep and resist, suffering a minor nervous break-down, a doctor is called to inject her with sedative.  The drug is slow to act and the Princess escapes the palace (running along a surreally grandiose upper corridor overlooked by huge plaster giants and innumerable frescos).  Wandering through the nighttime city, the princess feels the drugs kick in and she falls into a stupor on a bench overlooking the Roman forum.  This is where the hero, Joe, finds her as he returns from a poker game with his cronies.  Joe rescues the Princess taking her home to his small apartment where there is the standard Hollywood sexual tension about where the principals are going to sleep, heightened in this case by the fact that the drowsy Princess seems particularly vulnerable.  In the morning, Joe hustles to his newspaper office and, in effect, peddles the story of his encounter with the princess to the press.  Joe, then, enlists his buddy, Irving Radovich, played by a rambunctious and bearded Eddie Albert to surreptitiously take photographs of the Princess -- he has a tiny camera in a cigarette-lighter.  The Princess is excited to have escaped the tedious bondage of her official duties.  She tries to disguise herself by getting her hair barbered into a pixie hair-cut.  (The royal family, in a panic, have dispatched an army of secret service officers all clad in black suits to scour Rome to find her.)  With Joe as her squire, the Princess tours the famous sites of Rome -- the Spanish steps, the Trevi fountain, the coliseum -- and, of course, she and Joe fall in love.  Their adventure ends in a big slapstick brawl, a bit like a Western barfight, on a dance-barge on the Tiber under the looming fortification of the Castello San Angelo.  The platoon of secret service men catch up with the princess who is defended by Joe and his buddy.  The paparazzo gets a picture of the feisty Princess clobbering a secret service man over the head with a guitar.  Both of the romantic leads get tossed into the Tiber.  Shivering in the cold, in wet clothing, they kiss but, then, the Princess asks to be taken home.  The next day there is a press conference conducted in the vast and ornate palace.  Joe and the photographer attend and the Princess now realizes that, perhaps, Joe had ulterior motives in attending to her.  But the Princess' secrets are safe with Joe and the paparazzo hands her the portfolio of embarrassing pictures describing them as souvenir images of  Rome.  It's obvious that the sad Princess now must return to her royal duties and that she will never see Joe again.

Roman Holiday is a very popular movie in Japan.  I think the picture's melancholy ending accounts for this in large part.  Mono no aware is the Japanese sense of the ineffable sadness of things.  I was surprised at how solemn and sad the ending of Roman Holiday is.  Mostly, this is star vehicle for Peck and Hepburn and light, frothy romantic comedy.  But the Princess' steely self-discipline and icy regal manner in the final scene, masking her heartbreak, is exceptionally affecting and imparts a seriousness to the movie that I didn't see coming.  

B Movies: The Town and Red Eye

 Both The Town (2010) and Red Eye (2005) are B movies.  Red Eye knows it; The Town does not.  

Red Eye is a fast, efficient, and dim-witted thriller.  (Credits will tell you that the movie is 85 minutes long -- but it has a crazily extended list of performers and crew at the end and, according to my assessment, the actual narrative is about 70 minutes in length.  Wes Craven, the famous horror director (Last House on the Left, Nightmare on Elm Street, the Scream franchise) made Red Eye and there's no question that he knows what he's doing.  Craven is like Clint Eastwood in that he conceives of the picture in terms of editing and acting and makes no effort to provide pretty pictures or directorial flourishes.  The camera is always where it needs to be.  Lighting is crisp, direct, and bright -- you can see everything and where people and objects are located in space.  (It's the sort of camera-work used in comedies to effectively deliver gags -- and, it should be observed that many of Craven's movies skirt the line between horror and comedy, particularly, the Scream slasher movies.)  The film's premise is that a plucky young woman who manages a Miami luxury hotel is flying back home from Dallas where she has attended a funeral.  She meets a friendly, alluring young man in an airport bar when her flight, a "red-eye" route to Miami, is delayed.  On the plane, the young woman (Lisa) finds herself seated next to the young man.  It's an omen of things to come when Lisa learns that the young man's name is Jack Rippner.  Once the plane is airborne, Rippner tells her that he is some sort of professional terrorist and killer.  He is scheming to murder a politician who will be checking into Lisa's lavish waterfront hotel in Miami in only a few hours.  Rippner tells Lisa that his confederates will murder her father if she doesn't cooperate with the scheme, a plot to put the politician in a suite of rooms known to the terrorists where he can be assassinated through the use of a rocket-propelled grenade.  Lisa is no easy target and not readily intimidated.  From the very outset, she fights back against Rippner, endeavoring to get messages to the cabin crew and others as to the villain's evil plans.  There are some startling moments of violence, alarming because not telegraphed to the audience -- Rippner head butts Lisa to knock her out, a favor she later returns, and Lisa manages to stick the tip of a ballpoint pen through the bad guy's esophagus, an injury that makes him more menacing because, undeterred, he hustles around wheezing and gasping.  The opening scenes in the film are ultra-realistic and the irritable passengers and haughty imperious stewardesses and gate agents will be familiar to most viewers.  The verisimilitude of these opening scenes and the claustrophobic sequences on board the plane are devised to lull the viewer into accepting a plot that becomes increasingly idiotic as the movie progresses.  Indeed, the final twenty minutes of the picture is, although thrilling, completely implausible and unmotivated.  After several chases through the airport, Lisa manages to steal an SUV, drives to her father's home, where she and the villain fight it out.  Lisa's lieutenant, an assistant manager at the luxury hotel, is enlisted to defeat the heinous plot.  In the last sequence, Lisa plays a version of the "final girl", a kind of protagonist largely invented by Craven -- this is a comely young woman who witnesses the slaughter of all of her friends at the hands of a mad killer; as sole survivor ("the final girl"), the young woman battles the villain, often in some sort of haunted house, and, generally, dispatches him.  Rachel McAdams, acting the role of Lisa, is a feisty "final girl" in Red Eye and she batters the villain so effectively that, in the end, the audience is almost tempted to sympathize with him. As soon as the mayhem is complete and the murderous plot foiled, the heroine makes a quip and the movie is done -- it ends as swiftly and efficiently as it began.

I call Red Eye a B-movie.  By this I mean that the picture is relatively short, without any ambitions other than to deliver thrills and suspense.  The actors in the film are relatively unknown:  Rachel McAdams as Lisa, Brian Cox (later to be famous for Succession) as Lisa's father, and Cillian Murphy playing the frightening, nonchalant, and vicious villain.  (Murphy is handsome to the point of being androgynous and creepy -- he's like a young Christopher Walken and he uses his eccentric appearance to good effect.  The plot in the film is devised to reliably deliver certain suspense and horror set-pieces; otherwise, the narrative isn't really carefully imagined or plausible.  Everything is cheaply done:  exterior shots of the plane, which are unnecessary in any event, are poorly made -- seemingly some kind of low-grade CGI.  There's an explosion but it's also probably generated by a computer.  Most importantly, the movie relies upon cliches and stereotypes: the plucky young woman who fights the villain as "the final girl", the ice-cold murderer with just a hint of savoir faire, the doting father and the snotty gate agents and stewardesses and, of course, the stock company of irritated passengers who seem to have come right out of some version of the old movie Airport.  There's not a single memorable shot in this movie -- and I mean this as a high compliment.  The heroine is given a scar on her collar-bone and she even has some kind of backstory as a rape victim -- but this is just window-dressing; it's like the flashes of lightning that appear through the plane's windows, just some seasoning to an otherwise stale plot.   

The Town (Ben Affleck) is B-movie with expensive actors and impressive production values.  It's a little bit sad when compared with Red Eye -- at least, Red Eye knows what it is; The Town has fancy affectations on which it can't deliver.  

Everything in The Town is a cliche or caricature.  The movie doesn't have an ounce of originality.  (This defines a B-movie in which variations played on a familiar theme are part of the fun.)  The problem is that everything in The Town has been done better in other films.  A good example is the setting, Charlestown, an embattled suburb to Boston -- it's right across the river, the place where the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought.  The movie involves professional criminals who are said to be ubiquitous in Charlestown.  (The film is so scathing as to its portrayal of Charlestown that a closing credit has to   remind the viewers that most people in the suburb are not criminals and merely upstanding citizens.)  We've been in this terrain involving Irish-American mobsters before.  The middle-class crooks and cops are the same people that we met in Mystic River, a much better film.  Similar, the mob milieu in Boston has been explored in various movies, most notably Martin Scorsese's The Departed and The Irishman.  Ben Affleck plays a righteous, stand-up bank robber -- another cliche deployed by the film.  His mob contains various blue-collar crooks including his close friend, a hair-trigger half-crazed thug of the kind played by Joe Pesci in Scorsese crime pictures.  There is a promiscous, if warm-hearted, girl from neighborhood who finds herself the rival of a luscious "toonie", the local argot for "yuppie."  These people are not particularly ambitious -- they are lower-middle-class folks who aspire to a berth in the middle-middle-class or, at best, the upper middle-class.  The "toonie"is a bank worker who gets swept up as a hostage in a bank robbery.  After the heist, the hero played by Affleck is assigned the task of tailing the former hostage to verify that she doesn't know the identity of the crooks who robbed the bank.  Of course, Affleck's character falls in love with the striving "toonie" girl.  Although Affleck wants to go straight, he gets coerced in a final job that turns into an apocalyptic shoot-out at Fenway Park -- the hoods are robbing concession money at the baseball stadium during a game.  The plot, which is extremely formulaic, is just a scaffold on which to hang three spectacular set pieces -- the first robbery, a second heist involving a chase through the alleys and narrow streets around Boston's Old North Church and, finally, the big firefight at Fenway Park which plays as a mash-up between Kubrick's The Killling (a heist at a race-track) and the big gun battle in Heat.  Affleck's character has a dad who is serving a life turn and who imposes on the hero his code of "fucked-up Irish Omerta" as one of the characters says -- Dad is played by a squint-eyed Chris Cooper in a gratuitous role that is somewhat similar to the part played by Willie Nelson as the elderly convict in Michael Mann's Thief.  There are no surprises anywhere in this film -- it follows very strictly ancient genre conventions, including the conceit of the relentless adversary lawman (here played by a ruthless Jon Hamm).  The movie is entertaining, well-made, and mindless.  There are some sweaty, tasteful sex-scenes with attractive actors.  The script is pungent with classic film noir lines and wise-guy talk:  the promiscuous local girl who is in love with Affleck's characters says:  "If you want to get the tail, you gotta chase the rabbit.  My mother told me that."  There's a pointless subplot in which the thugs punish a guy who threw a bottle at the "toonie" who is the hero's girlfriend -- they beat him up and, then, knee-cap him.  (This seems wildly disproportionate).  In this kind of movie, only two outcomes are possible:  crime doesn't pay and all the hoodlums end up dead or in prison; or crime does pay and the hoodlum hero gets away to hide, implausibly, off-the-grid in some sort of tropical paradise.  If you want to know how The Town turns out you'll have to watch the movie; it's entertaining and well-made but incredibly derivative.  If you have to make a choice opt for Red Eye, it's equally entertaining and three-quarters of an hour shorter.    

The Substance

 Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a formerly famous movie star, who is now working as the host and exercise leader on a calisthenics show called Sparkle Your Life.  She has just turned fifty and, when she uses the men's restroom (the women's is occupied), she hears the producer of the show, a vicious and grotesque TV executive, planning to replace her with a younger woman.  Brooding about this injustice, she's involved in a bad motor vehicle crash -- windows exploding and her vehicle rolling side over side -- from which she mysteriously walks away unscathed.  At the ER, a doctor checks her out and, then, an odd-looking young paramedic inspects her back, says that it is perfect, and slips a message wrapped in paper into her pocket.  The uncanny-looking paraprofessional has a sarcoma on the back of his hand.  

Sparkle lives alone is a picturesquely modernist and empty house cantilevered out over a canyon in the mountains.  (The house has eerie works of art and strange corridors filmed with lenses that make them seem to stretch out to infinity.)  The message she finds in her pocket encourages her to perfect herself by using a treatment involving something called "The Substance" -- a sort of Bo-Tox from Hell that she picks up in an alcove behind a graffiti-smeared metal door in a noisome alley.  "The Substance" works for seven days, restoring its user to her youthful perfected self -- it's a sort of "fountain of youth" drug that involves various injections (shown in gruesome close-ups), tube-feeding, and blood transfusions.  The stuff comes with strict instructions -- it's a Jekyll and Hyde formula:  you can only be young and beautiful for seven days without having to return to the decrepit shell of your aged body.  Of course, this being a horror movie, there are ghastly consequences for not playing according to the rules.

Horror films invariably evoke precursors.  In the case of the lavishly produced The Substance, the movie alludes to David Cronenberg's The Fly (as in that movie, at one point the protagonist's ear falls off) as well as Brian de Palma's Carrie with respect to the firehose of gore unleashed in the movie's last minutes.  The picture, as I have noted, also channels Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in that the fifty-year old Elisabeth Sparkle finds herself competing with her amoral younger avatar, a beautiful and profoundly selfish starlet called Sue.  Of course, the two women are one person whose appearance changes between the two personae.  There is also an aspect of The Picture of Dorian Gray in the film; as Sue prospers and becomes famous and universally desired, poor Elisabeth, reduced to a cadaverous shell lying on the bathroom floor, begins to spectacularly decompose,,literally falling apart.  The film's premise is ingenious but, of course, since this is a genre movie, the outcome is predictable, although things become so exuberantly horrific that the climax must be interpreted as a kind of black-comedy spectacle that is far funnier than it is frightening.  

Pictures involving this sort of Faustian bargain inevitably end in tears (or far worse).  Sue resents having to revert to Elisabeth every seven days and begins stealing Elisabeth's time, keeping herself young and beautiful, having sex with handsome men, and becoming famous on TV while her poor alter ego literally goes to pieces. This is a very glossy movie, with fashion magazine vibes -- it features immense, disturbing close-ups, vast amounts of nudity, and bizarre, surreal sets that seemed to have crawled into the present from German expressionist cinema.  The picture is full of outre effects:  an egg yolk injected with the substance immediately begins to clone itself into bright yellow embryonic cells.  Pustulant, necrotic wounds are injected with long needles in micro-close-ups.  At one point, while Sue is twerking, her buttock pops open and the gory abscess gives birth to a chicken drumstick that Elisabeth ingested before turning back into the glamorous sex-pot starlet.  The movie is entertaining enough in its gruesome way, but much too long -- there's just too many horrors particularly in the hyper-violent last quarter of the movie.  Furthermore, the picture cheats -- it establishes certain rules that are slavishly demonstrated and followed for the first two-thirds of the picture.  But, when the really spectacular grand guignol begins, the rules fall by the wayside and everything yields to the picture's excessively gruesome finalethat proceeds according to a certain pictorial logic, but violates the plot points earlier (and rather tediously) established.    

Someone once said that women's magazines show massive cognitive dissonance -- the periodicals feature mortifying diets and advice as to painful exercise regimens next to recipes for lavish and calory-rich desserts.  The Substance has this aspect; it features beauty advice of the nastiest sort:  reduce yourself to a living corpse while cooking tripe-soup and other incredibly rich recipes -- the film has its cake and eats it too, suggesting that the path to perfect beauty embodies deadly anorexia somehow yoked to insane amounts of consumption of ultra-rich (disgustingly rich) foods.  There are huge closeups of lips and mouths masticating gobbets of food, shrimp and pastry, shot with the comic delectation of a Monty Python picture.  At the climax, Sue and Elisabeth get somehow fused together in a single monstrous entity covered in tumors with a stray eye peeping out here and there and Sue's perfect face embedded in a web of scar tissue on the back of the hunchbacked, suppurating figure -- it's like the appearance of the Brindlefly in Cronenberg's movie The Fly, a hideous combination of both women, full of ugly sac-like fistulas, one of which gives birth by expelling a perfectly globular breast dangling on a sinew of gory tissue.  The critter shoots blood as if from a fire hose on the audience.  None of this makes any sense at all -- the last twenty minutes is completely bonkers, off-the-rails and implausible.  But the movie has the courage of its convictions -- when the Sueelismonstre, as it is called, takes the stage at a New Year's Eve celebration, the fawning audience and technical crew somehow don't notice that it's a hideous creature that has arrived on stage and not the beautiful Sue (the monster is hiding behind a cut-out of Sue's face but, of course, the creature is elephantine, hunch-backed with oozing naked legs like tree-trunks).  You ask yourself how can they not know that this is a monster clambering up onto the stage with the bare-breasted showgirls standing all in neat rows for the camera.  But, I suppose, one could argue that celebrity blinds people to the reality of those who become celebrities and that this explains, at least symbolically, why no one seems to notice that the leading lady has become a horrible lump of tumors and abscesses with, at least, two heads.  This is a very stylish movie.  In the opening scenes, we see workmen installing an inlaid star on a sort of Walk of Fame, presumably in Hollywood.  This is Elisabeth Sparkle's star.  The star endures on the pavement, gets tread upon, and, at last, in this opening sequence, someone drops pizza sauce or ketchup all over it.  At the end of the movie, in a scene that is a direct steal from John Carpenter's The Thing, Sue's face grimacing out of the back of the monster, gets detached and creeps on tentacle feet along the sidewalk to sit in the midst of gory polyps on the star in the Walk of Fame.  

People have saluted this movie as feminist.  I suppose it has lines and scenes that could be interpreted in that light but really this is just a very long, elaborately made, special effects movie.  It's stylish but this doesn't change the fact that the esthetic is that of a slasher movie combined with a Vogue or Cosmopolitan fashion-shoot.  If a half-hour were cut out of this thing and some of the more excessive scenes eliminated (I really didn't need to see Sue fight it out with the decomposing Elisabeth and, ultimately, beat her to death in big grisly close-ups), the movie might be a classic.  For what it is, The Substance is pretty good.  (The picture was made in France it seems, with French personnel; the director is Carolie Fargeat, a French filmmaker -- this is her second feature.)