JULIUS CAESAR (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1953).
Hollywood has had a rather dismal record adapting Shakespeare to the
screen, but this film is one of the happy exceptions. A large part of
its success is due to the brilliant casting. James Mason is a splendid
Brutus, with his rich and measured demeanor and his distinctive voice,
bringing the nobility and impractical idealism of Shakespeare’s
conception to life. It’s a performance that continues to build
as the film progresses, climaxing with the extremely moving scenes on
the eve of the battle of Philippi. This all may not have been enough,
however, without the great balancing effect of John Gielgud as Cassius,
a figure who might seem merely sinister at first glance but is rounded
out and given full scope through that great English actor’s energy
and passion. Choosing Marlon Brando to play Marc Antony was controversial
at the time because critics associated him with a different sort of
drama, but as it turns out, he’s wonderful in the part and couldn’t
have posed a sharper contrast to Mason’s and Gielgud’s characters,
which is just what is needed from an Antony. Even Edmond O’Brien
seems right at home in the role of Casca. If there is a weak point,
it is Louis Calhern as Caesar: at times he seems too much the smooth
American type to be credited as the conqueror of Gaul, but this is a
minor point—the performance never grates. Mankiewicz has kept
all his actors within the bounds of wise restraint (although there’s
more than bit of ham in Greer Garson’s Calpurnia).
Those who don’t bother to delve below the surface of the tragedy
may be forgiven for thinking that Julius Caesar is its hero, when the
fact the play might better have been titled “Marcus Brutus.”
I suppose that was politically impossible, but there’s no doubt
that this is Brutus’s tragedy. In addition, this film might give
the unfamiliar viewer the idea that Marc Antony is the main character,
since Brando gets top billing over Mason. Such are the confusions of
screen credits—Brando was simply a bigger star. But none of this
matters once the film gets on its way, because Mankiewicz displays both
understanding and respect for the material. He knows that Shakespeare’s
scenery and action must always play a strictly subservient role to the
main attraction: Shakespeare’s words. The art direction and the
sets are simple and almost abstract, convincing enough to be ancient
Rome, but never distracting. The words are spoken so that we can comprehend
them—this seems a simple enough requirement, but it’s startling
how often it’s not fulfilled on stage or screen. The picture manages
to convey a sense of foreboding and doom with quiet conviction, a few
minimal visual effects, and the judicious use of Miklos Rozsa’s
musical score.
The tragedy of Brutus is that of a man who loves his country so much
that he’s willing to assassinate a friend in order to prevent
dictatorship. Where someone without scruples, like Antony, might have
succeeded in this enterprise, Brutus’s integrity and generous
spirit prove to be his undoing. In my view, this is one of Shakespeare’s
deepest ideas, and it’s a tribute to the great intelligence and
skill of Joe Mankiewicz that this is realized clearly on screen.
MAN ON THE TRACKS (Andrzej Munk, 1957).
A man (Kazimierz Opalinski) is run over by a train. It turns out that
he was a former engineer named Orzechowski, who had been forced to retire
because of hostile attitudes towards new state policies and the younger
station master (Zygmunt Maciejewski) who enforced them. A committee
of inquiry is convened to find out what really happened—was the
dead man a saboteur? Or was there some other reason he was on the tracks
that night? In flashback, the film traces the engineer’s story.
Munk had made his reputation as a director of ambitious and well-constructed
documentaries. In this, his first fiction film, he gives expression
to a questioning mood that was rising in Poland, and in eastern Europe
in general, in the wake of the abortive Hungarian uprising of ’56.
It’s not a protest film, but a fair-minded look at conflicts between
traditional values and the methods and ideas promulgated by the Communist
Party.
Orzechowski is a petulant older man who is harsh on his subordinates
and inflexible in his methods. He is nostalgic for the old days and
looks with contempt on the new breed of railroad men. Munk and his screenwriter
(Jerzy Stefan Stawinski) cleverly establish their main character as
unlikable, thus making the gradual revelation of another side to the
man more interesting. The film treats each character—the station
master, the officer in charge of the inquiry, Orzechowski’s assistant
engineer—with the same impartiality. There are no good or bad
men; everyone is a mixture.
Of all the filmmakers in the first wave of postwar Polish cinema, Munk
was the least romantic. The style of Man on the Tracks is one
of extreme naturalism, with a lot of attention to the physical details
of trains and train yards (Munk was a railroad enthusiast). The picture
is very much of its time, with a much greater relevance for a Polish
audience in ’57, when critical thinking about the state of things
was a novelty in Polish film, than it would be for a viewer today. Nevertheless,
the film has an admirable “no nonsense” quality and a keen
sense for the subtleties of human character that still make it distinctive.
MISS JULIE (Alf Sjöberg, 1951).
Julie (Anita Björk), the arrogant and unhappy daughter of a country
nobleman, attends a midsummer eve peasant dance on her estate and becomes
emotionally entangled with her father’s groom Jean (Ulf Palme),
who switches between an attraction to Julie and a class-based resentment
of her.
This is of course an adaptation of August Strindberg’s famous
play of the same name. I had read the play in translation several times,
and could never grasp why it was considered important or good, a problem
that I attributed to the language barrier. But watching the film version
provided me with a rare experience—for the first time I was able
to understand and appreciate the work.
It’s customary for a filmmaker to try to “open up”
a play by moving the action outdoors or between rooms—Miss
Julie is a one-act drama that takes place in a single room, so
this would be the obvious way to go—yet this method is often little
more than an artificial attempt at extension. But not in this case.
Sjöberg’s fluid movement between scenes is coupled with a
strong feeling for space and depth—things have really opened up
so that we can see Julie and the servants in the context of their environment.
Later in the film, Sjöberg expands time as he did space, bringing
the story of her past visibly into the room as she tells Jean about
her childhood. In addition, the two leads are excellent—especially
Björk, who makes you see the complex, self-lacerating passion of
her character in three dimensions. It’s a remarkable performance.
On the page, Jean always seemed to me a mere manipulator, but Palme,
with a peculiar mix of charm and disdain, gives him life and makes Julie’s
attraction to him believable. Most importantly, the climax, which always
seemed improbable to me, is arrived at with a feeling of complete conviction
and inevitability.
When all is said and done, I still have trouble accepting the back story
Strindberg contrived for his heroine. The fault is laid at the door
of her proud mother, a stereotype of feminist resentment, who raised
Julie to be a kind of weapon of revenge against men. Strindberg clothed
his misogyny in modern psychological garb, and it detracts against the
powerful artistry that is evident when he portrays the emotional warfare
between Julie and Jean. Sjöberg, however, pulls off a miracle,
taking a very knotty one-act play and turning it into a compelling film
with an almost flawless rhythm and visual flair.
TWELVE O’CLOCK HIGH (Henry King, 1949).
In the early days of the European bombing campaign of World War II,
an American bomber group in England begins to lose its morale after
a series of bad breaks resulting in heavy casualties. Frank Savage (Gregory
Peck), an HQ general, believes that the squad’s commanding officer
(Gary Merrill) has become too attached to his men, and when he expresses
this view to his superior (Millard Mitchell), he ends up being ordered
to take over the unit. Savage assumes the role of strict disciplinarian,
deliberately making everyone hate his guts in order to toughen the group
and make them excel at what they do.
Contrary to what you might expect, this is not a combat picture. There’s
only one extended bombing sequence, toward the end, which skillfully
uses actual footage shot by American and German pilots during the war.
The rest of the film is all about the relationships of the men and officers
on the air base, and how issues of cowardice, discipline, and determination
are worked out in the midst of adjusting to the general’s new
regime. The script (Sy Bartlett and Beirne Lay, Jr.) is unusually frank
about what it takes to fight a war. The truth is that the bombing campaign
is extremely risky, with planes flying very low, vulnerable to the antiaircraft
guns; and young men are dying all the time. The picture doesn’t
use heroics to conceal the agony of this fact. The story grapples directly
with it, by having Peck’s strict general attempt to renounce the
emotional concern that a commander would have for his men’s lives,
thereby toughening them up and presumably improving their chances of
survival. The strategy is a success, but the emotional disconnection,
as it turns out, is not really possible, not forever. And there’s
something very wise and humane about the way the film comes to this
conclusion.
Dean Jagger plays the general’s bookish executive officer, and
the film opens with him revisiting the air base after the war, now an
empty lot in the English countryside. This patient sequence, from which
we eventually shift to the flashback which constitutes the body of the
film, is very affecting, and obviously influenced by a similar effect
in Wyler’s The
Best Years of Our Lives. Jagger won an Oscar, and Hugh
Marlowe is good as an officer who is punished and disgraced by Savage.
Twelve O’Clock High is a modest film with occasional
awkward spots, but it’s very successful in evoking the feelings
between men serving together in a war. Tensions and emotions are communicated
through silences and the fleeting expressions on a face. Peck is superb
here—it’s his most expressive work, arguably his best. The
veteran King and his cinematographer (Leon Shamroy) perform wonders
with deep-focus and wide-angle shots. A very fine effort all around.
DISHONORED (Josef von Sternberg, 1931).
An Austrian widow (Marlene Dietrich), reduced to working as a prosititute
(although this is, of course, never clearly spelled out), is recruited
by her country’s secret service to spy on the Russians during
World War I. She succeeds in exposing a traitor, then becomes involved
in a cat-and-mouse game with a suave Russian spy (Victor McLaglen).
This film is something of a lost child among the Sternberg-Dietrich
collaborations. The screenplay (from a short story by Sternberg) tries
to be witty but is often leaden instead, and the picture as a whole
seems cramped and stodgy compared to the phenomenally successful Morocco
of the previous year. Nonetheless, it’s entertaining on its own
limited terms. Dietrich plays a mysterious and unflappable beauty with
nerves of steel—treating every mediocre male character she encounters
(and she’s practically the only woman in the film) with undisguised
contempt. McLaglen is not the loud, ungainly character actor he would
soon become, but a virile young leading man with a great voice. His
scenes with Dietrich are fun, although the chemistry between them never
quite takes off.
Two memorable Sternberg set-pieces—a marvelous masked ball through
which Lee Garmes moves his camera with sinuous ease, and the finale,
which I won’t spoil by describing—raise the picture a bit
above the average. The director also displays an odd stylistic quirk
throughout—the use of very long fade-outs between scenes. I would
guess that this was an experiment in pacing or the setting of moods,
but it doesn’t really work. For a Sternberg die-hard (and I am
one), Dishonored is a pleasure. For those less inclined, it
can be safely skipped.
©2007 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
