THE SCARLET LETTER (Victor Sjöström, 1926).
Irving Thalberg made an inspired choice when he picked the great Swedish
director Sjöström to adapt Hawthorne's novel of Puritan intolerance
to the screen. Sjöström's talent for finding beauty in austere
spatial compositions was a perfect fit for the material. Less is definitely
more when it comes to dramatizing Hawthorne, and the film is suitably
spare and lean, both in style and characterization. Some of the exterior
shots attain a kind of haunting poetry, and Sjöström almost
always frames the characters to maximum dramatic effect.
Lillian Gish plays Hester Prynne. This was her project, and she had
to do some persuading before Metro would give the green light. (Hawthorne's
critique of religious hypocrisy was apparently a bit suspect in the
eyes of Louis B. Mayer.) Gish's performance is remarkably natural --
intense and moving, without being too melodramatic. Frances Marion cut
the story down to manageable length - it's a sturdy script, not a masterpiece,
but the plot developments are clear and believable. It's too bad Sjöström
didn't restrain the leading man, though. Lars Hanson plays Dimmesdale,
and his overacting is painful to behold now, although much more acceptable
to audiences at the time, who were used to that style of performance.
The picture took a year and a half to shoot, some of it on location
in New England. It shows in the final product: this is a carefully crafted,
sensitive piece of work, with a fine performance by one of the screen's
greatest actresses, and marred only by Hanson's scenery chewing. The
picture doesn't really touch the depths of the Hawthorne novel (a familiar
problem when adapting classics to the screen), being content to show
the bold outlines of the story, with Gish's delicate expressiveness
providing the color. She was very impressed by Sjöström, and
did another (and greater) film with him the following year, called The
Wind.
COLONEL REDL (István Szabó, 1985).
At the turn of the century, young Alfred Redl (Klaus Maria Brandauer),
of humble Ukrainian background, rises through the ranks of the Austro-Hungarian
army through his unfailing devotion and gratitude to the monarchy. But
the more power he gains, the more difficult it is to reconcile his good
nature with the demands made on him, while his ambivalence about his
ethnic origins, and his sexuality, threatens to undermine everything
he's worked for.
Based on an actual army scandal that happened prior to the Great War,
and on a John Osborne play about the incident called A Patriot For
Me, this is one of the more cogent dramas about political power
ever filmed. Szabó's evocation of the waning years of the Hapsburg
empire is both visually lush and psychologically acute. With a few well-placed
details of speech, manner, and dress, he is able to communicate volumes
about the power of class and custom in the Old World. More importantly,
the film shows how a political system based on force becomes a law of
its own, sucking even those with the best intentions into its vortex
against their will, and favoring ruthlessness and cunning over values
and ideals.
Redl is a complex, elusive character. While he is willing to sacrifice
old friendships in order to advance himself, he retains an emotional
attachment to his childhood friend Kubinyi (Jan Niklas), a Hungarian
aristocrat (who fails to return the honor) and ends up having an affair
with Kubinyi's married sister (Gudrun Langrebe), while agreeing to a
loveless marriage of convenience in order to stave off rumors of homosexuality.
His intense ambition, combined with a tendency towards sentiment, and
a secret shame about his origins (it's never quite clear whether he
is part Jewish or not), makes his position untenable once he enters
the orbit of the archduke Ferdinand (Armin Mueller-Stahl), a world-class
schemer looking for a scapegoat.
Brandauer's quietly controlled performance, with its appealing mixture
of vigor and naivete, carries the film. He takes the screenplay's difficult
truth -- that an essentially good man can also be corrupt, simply by
giving his self-interested assent to power -- and he makes it alive
for us, with his gestures, his movements, and the curious and conflicting
glances of his eyes. It's an extremely intelligent, focused piece of
work, and it lends the screenplay, which presupposes a certain degree
of historical knowledge on the part of the viewer, a greater depth and
poignancy than its period-piece aesthetics would have warranted otherwise.
Indeed, the combination of Szabo's keen historical sense with Brandauer's
feeling for his character allows us a rare glimpse into the tragic effects
of despotic power on the human soul.
THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VÉRONIQUE
(Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991).
In the first part of the film we meet Veronika (Irène Jacob),
a young Polish woman, who has always had a strange and indefinable feeling
that she is "not alone." Her ambition to be a pianist was ruined when
one of her hands was injured in an accident, but she has a fine singing
voice, despite having no voice training, and wins a competition to join
a musical company and sing solo in the debut of a haunting new choral
work.
In the second part of the film we meet Véronique (also played
by Jacob), a young French woman who suddenly feels that she is "alone"
for the first time. After giving up her singing career because of a
subtle intuition that it is wrong for her, she becomes obsessed by a
handsome puppeteer whom she happens to see perform. When she starts
receiving cryptic messages by mail and phone, she is convinced that
the puppeteer is behind them, and begins to follow the clues in order
to find out where he is.
The themes of meaningful coincidence, doubling, and hidden patterns
of life and relationship, held great significance for Kieslowski. Here
he explores the correspondences between two sensitive people who live
in different countries, look exactly alike, and are in some way psychically
or mystically linked. His concern is not realist or scientific -- he
spends no time trying to make the subject plausible in an objective
way, or to argue for the existence of such links. Instead he uses the
fictional device of the two identical women to explore the emotional
and spiritual atmosphere of his theme. His purpose was to portray, through
his art, the hidden web of meaning that connects human beings. Thus
the style of the film is elusive, poetic, and open-ended.
The luminous Jacob turns in a marvelous performance -- or perhaps it
would be better to say, performances. She makes the two women alike
enough to convey the essential link between them, but provides shadings
of difference that establishes each as a person with her own special
character. Veronica's manner is dreamy; she seems attuned to a higher
sphere, while vulnerable to the painful and grotesque aspects of life.
Véronique is more intellectual, and at the same time more grounded
in her body. Her willingness to follow the strange trail of clues left
by the puppeteer reveals her as curious and open to adventure. This
is a marvelous double portrait.
Kieslowski brilliantly illuminates the beauty of the moment, with a
soft, almost pastel visual style (the gorgeous cinematography is by
Slawomir Idziak). In a sense, the picture is about moments -- how particular
moments carry the entire meaning of lives. The score, by Zbigniew Preisner,
suffuses the film with mournfulness, especially the vocal theme that
is to be sung by Veronica at her fateful concert. Some may wish for
a tidier structure, for an explanation of the story's ambiguous twists
and turns, but I think it is just Kieslowski's point, as well as the
rationale behind his method, that life is not tidy or easily explained,
but conceals its deepest truths on the edges, as it were, of our lives.
HALLELUJAH! (King Vidor, 1929).
A family of black cotton farmers struggles to get by. When the eldest
son Zeke (Daniel L. Haynes) goes to town to sell the crop, his seduction
by a loose woman named Chick (Nina Mae McKinney) leads to tragedy. He
then becomes a charismatic preacher with a large following, and gets
engaged to a family friend, but can't escape his attraction to the tempting
Chick.
Vidor's first sound film is a musical drama with an all-black cast,
a bit of a gamble for Metro. They agreed to make the film because the
director (who also wrote the story and produced), had proven himself
as a moneymaker with his silent films. The sound for the exterior scenes
had to be dubbed in later, a process that took months, due to the primitive
state of sound technology at the time. It's clearly a labor of love,
and quite stirring at times, but its narrative limitations, and the
racial stereotypes it conveys, make its flaws all too evident today.
The music is the best thing about the film, which includes spirituals,
work songs, a lullaby, and a great sequence in a saloon with honky-tonk
jazz. Haynes has a rich, smooth singing voice with good range. The film
achieves a moving sense of its characters' humanity in the music scenes,
but the contrived plot, with its tired idea of country goodness versus
city evil, weighs the picture down. The actors exaggerate their speech
and their gestures too much (partly due, no doubt, to the need for dubbing),
and most dispiriting of all, the movie falls prey to its era's concept
of Negroes as childlike simpletons. The chance to portray blacks as
fully conscious adults was missed, although it's questionable whether
such a portrayal would ever have been attempted by a major studio.
Vidor got an Academy Award nomination for directing, but the picture
lost money. In ran into trouble in small town theaters, where white
exhibitors objected to a film about Negroes, and black audiences laughed
at the old-fashioned depiction of country mores. MGM didn't even try
to get it distributed in the South. In fact, it was something of a miracle
that the film got made at all, and despite its limitations, it is far
superior in its attitudes to other mainstream films of the time that
depicted blacks. Hallelujah is a noble experiment, wildly uneven,
but still worth seeing. There's also a chase scene in a swamp, towards
the end of the film, that is a minor masterpiece of sound, camerawork,
and atmosphere.
THIS GUN FOR HIRE (Frank Tuttle, 1942).
An impassive hit man (Alan Ladd), known only as Raven, kills a blackmailer
on the orders of a mysterious tycoon (Tully Marshall), but is set up
by being given marked bills in payment. Escaping the trap, he sets out
to get revenge, with a cop (Robert Preston) on his trail. Meanwhile,
the cop's girlfriend (Virginia Lake), a nightclub singer, is asked to
spy on the tycoon's right-hand man (Laird Cregar), who is suspected
of selling poison gas to the Japanese.
If the plot sounds weird and implausible, believe me -- it is. And
the bizarre events and coincidences pile up more and more as the story
proceeds. Nevertheless, the picture is remarkable for its unusually
somber mood, and for the performance of Ladd in the role that broke
him out of obscurity. Raven is a brutal killer, but he shows tenderness
towards kittens and little children. Ladd is gripping and intense in
this part -- you can't take your eyes off him. In a later scene with
Lake, his character's anguish breaks through, and it's a powerful moment
that Ladd, who never was a great actor, pulls off flawlessly.
Lake and Preston actually receive top credit, with Ladd only getting
one of those "and introducing" credits at the end of the list. But it's
his movie all the way. Lake is rather good too, mixing her hard-edged
charm with a touch of sadness, and her chemistry with Ladd is fine.
(Preston is the nominal love interest, but her scenes with Ladd are
more interesting, and the director and writers seem to have planned
it that way.) She also sings a couple of oddball Jacques Press-Frank
Loesser numbers, and there are engaging turns by the supporting players,
especially the querulous, lumbering Cregar, and Marc Lawrence as his
wiseguy bodyguard. All in all, a decidedly mixed bag, based on a Graham
Greene book, but with little of his subtlety in evidence. The film is
almost never dull, however, and there are enough genuinely creepy noir
moments to make it worth a look.
©2004 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
