I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE
(Jacques Tourneur, 1943).
Tourneur's second effort in collaboration with RKO's low-budget producer
Val Lewton achieves something like greatness despite mediocre writing
and acting. It's the movie's atmosphere, its eerie, ineffable visual
style, that makes it live in one's memory.
The story concerns Betsy (Frances Dee) a nurse who is hired to go to
a West Indies island and take care of a woman who has fallen into a
mute, trance-like state after a fever. This woman is the wife of a dignified
plantation owner named Paul (Tom Conway), with whom Betsy falls in love.
As it turns out, Paul's half-brother Wesley (James Ellison) was in love
with the wife - and when the husband discovered the affair there was
an angry scene, after which the wife fell into her strange condition.
While the nurse, out of her love for Paul, tries to find ways to cure
his wife, the men's headstrong mother (Edith Barrett) takes her under
her wing.
All of this seems, like the film's title, rather silly. The dialogue
is generally flat-footed, and most of the acting is second-rate. (An
example of B-movie nonsense is that Conway has an English accent and
Ellison an American one - the script has Wesley explaining that he was
sent to school in the States.) However, Frances Dee, who plays the point-of-view
character, is quite good - conveying Betsy's mixture of solicitude,
determination and fear in a subtle, believable way.
Surrounding this domestic melodrama is the culture of voodoo practiced
by the island's native inhabitants. Although the film occupies the European
stance towards the black "other" that was always assumed in commercial
films at that time, Tourneur is much more sensitive in this regard than
one might expect. The movie avoids caricature in portraying the servants
and natives - their speech is articulate and their emotions genuine.
Mention is made more than once of the legacy of slavery, which helps
establish the picture's feeling of social and psychological imbalance.
There is much that is felt in this film without being spoken. The tension
between white civilization and the culture of voodoo echoes a struggle
between rationality and unconscious forces, just as the mystery of the
zombie wife calls every character's motivation into question. Tourneur
has created a world of shadows, in which hints of the unseen and unspoken
evoke hidden fears more powerfully than any explicit shock effects could
ever do. Visually he goes far beyond the previous year's Cat People
in creating a feeling of strangeness. The film's central sequence, its
highlight, has Betsy leading the somnambulist wife through the high
reeds of the island on a moonlit night towards the village where the
voodoo rites are being held. The camera's placement and gliding movement,
the lighting, editing, and discreet use of music, culminating in the
hypnotic dancing (remarkably faithful to actual African forms) in the
village - adds up to a brilliant tour de force, spooky, breathtaking,
unforgettably beautiful.
TRIBULATION 99:
ALIEN ANOMALIES UNDER AMERICA
(Craig Baldwin, 1992).
Baldwin makes films from found and "appropriated" materials - visual
collages that present an anti- establishment point of view through parody
of low budget commercial genres, especially 1950s sci-fi films.
Tribulation 99 was his first feature, and it's gained some notoriety
on the margins of "cult" film fandom. It consists of an astounding number
of clips from cheesie sci-fi and monster flicks, along with old "educational"
and news shorts, documentaries, B-movie thrillers, old Mexican crime
films, and who knows what else, spliced together to illustrate a voice-over
narration about a conspiracy by outer space aliens to subvert the United
States and thereby conquer the planet Earth.
Escaping their dying planet in the year 1000, the aliens hide under
the earth's surface in what is now known as Latin America. Disturbed
by underground atomic testing, they emerge to take revenge on the U.S.
through a series of elaborate plots that can only be defeated by the
efforts of the CIA.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what Baldwin is up
to here. The crackpot conspiracy scenario is actually a history, in
parodistic form, of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, with the enemy
aliens standing for those, such as Cuba, Nicaragua, and Allende's Chile,
who have resisted American hegemony, while the "good guys" fighting
the aliens are people like Kissinger, George Bush Sr. and Howard Hunt,
who are engaged in military and covert actions against Latin American
"subversion." By depicting the Communist threat in terms of a wacko
outer space alien attack, Baldwin ridicules the self-justifying scenarios
of Cold War politicians and spooks. The little island of Grenada, for
instance, is taken over by a rogue government of psychic vampires, and
Salvador Allende plots to shift the Earth from its axis.
The narrative is convoluted, and sometimes hard to understand, a problem
compounded by the sub-standard sound. Of course, we're talking about
a minuscule budget here. Nevertheless your jaw will drop at the sheer
number of bizarre clips - it must have taken a massive effort to put
all this stuff together. Baldwin is trying to alter the traditionally
humorless, didactic nature of leftist documentary. For the most part
he succeeds here - Tribulation 99 is not only provocative, but
quite funny.
1900 (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1976).
A massive epic depicting the struggle of peasants versus landowners
in Italy, from the beginning of the century through the end of World
War II, tells the story of two young men born on the same day in 1900
- a farm worker named Olmo (Gérard Depardieu) who becomes an
activist and freedom fighter, and his friend Alfredo (Robert De Niro),
the son of the farm's owner, who has sympathy for the peasants but can't
seem to break away from the attitudes and privileges of his class.
The sprawling tale begins with the wary relationship of the friends'
grandfathers, the farm's wealthy patriarch (Burt Lancaster) and the
head of the extended peasant family that works his land (an almost unrecognizable
Sterling Hayden). After the transition from the two main characters
as boys to men, the film chronicles the rise of Fascism and its horrifying
consequences, exemplified by the farm's vicious overseer Attila (Donald
Sutherland) and his wife Regina (Laura Betti), Alfredo's vengeful cousin.
Bertolucci sought to make an Italian national epic with a socialist
point of view. Considering the sheer magnitude of the project, it's
remarkable how far he succeeded. The uncut version, which was the one
I saw, runs to almost five and a half hours. After a bitter struggle
with distributors, the director cut the original theatrical release
to about four hours. The film is gigantic in its feel as well as its
length. Although at times it's terribly uneven, it manages to use a
wide canvas to great effect - more stirring by far than most long family
sagas or epic-style films. This is because Bertolucci understands how
to create the appearance of awesome spatial dimensions.
Whether we're watching fields and meadows stretching out to the horizon,
or the streets of the town of Parma filled with crowds of people, or
the halls and stairways of Alfredo's ancestral home, 1900 makes
you see the spatial depth, and the movement within the frame,
in ways that seem incredibly vivid and real. The film makes heavy use
of elaborate tracking and overhead shots, and the camera always seems
placed to emphasize the sense of space of a particular setting or room
to maximum effect. Thus, the film seems inhabited in a way that is truly
epic - like the narrative landscapes of The Iliad, or War
and Peace, in which the human beings and their environment are united
as one character. This mastery of technique, this creation of visual
awe as accompaniment to epic form, alone makes 1900 worth seeing,
and constitutes a high point in Bertolucci's art.
When we consider the storyline itself, however, and the characterization,
all comparisons with Homer or Tolstoy must cease. It's to be expected,
of course, that in a film of this length and ambition there will be
missteps and longueurs. Bertolucci sometimes misses the dramatic potential
of a scene by cutting too abruptly. At other times a scene will continue
too long without a point. The international cast is something of a liability
(although it probably was necessary for the film to be funded) because
the non-Italian actors are apparently dubbed, and therefore their voices
don't match their physical presences. Donald Sutherland overdoes his
villainous role - with his maniacal grin and the other stock mannerisms
he uses whenever he plays a bad guy, he's too over the top. Even though
he's playing a murderous Fascist, a little more subtlety would have
been helpful.
But the main problem is that Bertolucci idealizes the peasants and
the socialist cause, turning the film into a melodramatic conflict between
romantic concepts of good and evil, instead of a drama about the real
good and evil in people and in history. The young Depardieu, for instance,
is handsome and energetic, but his character is so perfectly noble that
I had a hard time believing in him. The same goes for all the peasants
in this film. De Niro, with his brooding thoughtfulness and fine shadings
of facial expression, is much more successful. He seems like a real
person, with the inner struggles and contradictions that a man in that
situation might have. Dominique Sanda does a striking turn as Alfredo's
strong-willed, eccentric wife. In the story she's mostly a foil for
the two men, but she manages to make the character compelling in her
own right.
The Alfredo-Ulmo duality, the film's symbolic axis, is obviously a
mythic device - the old theme of the two brothers, who both love and
hate each other, and represent different aspects of human nature and
society. There's nothing wrong with such devices - it's just that a
story begins to lose some of its power when the mythic element begins
to predominate over the actual individuals as characters. In the film's
finale, Bertolucci pulls the attention away from De Niro and Depardieu,
and has the peasants themselves take center stage in a sequence that
is symbolic of revolutionary celebration and hope after the end of the
war. Although it has the same simplistic idealism as the rest of the
film, the scene is magnificent for its orchestration of people's movement
in groups, and for its summing up of the film's political themes and
concerns. It is characteristic of the unevenness of this movie that
this wonderful long scene, which should have been the last scene of
the picture, is followed by a brief, totally misguided sequence that
ends 1900 on a ludicrous note, instead of the note of triumph
it needed.
In terms of consistency, then, and of the higher standards of judgment
that such an attempt at the epic form evokes, 1900 is a mixed
bag indeed. But if one of the measures of greatness in a film is that
its images embed themselves in your memory - the power of cinematic
style and mastery - then Bertolucci's film should be included among
the great.
HÄXAN (Benjamin Christensen, 1922).
In 1919, When the Swedish film company Svensk Filmindustri invited
Danish director Christensen to make a documentary on witchcraft, they
probably didn't expect him to take three years - unheard of at the time
- to finish the project. What they got was a meticulously fashioned
film about medieval superstition and persecution, so daring in style
and content that it caused a scandal.
The picture starts with a series of illustrations taken from medieval
sources, with intertitles highlighting different aspects of the European
witch craze. Then we are shown various scenes in which actors impersonate
the supposed creation of charms and spells by witches, as well as the
secret ceremonies, rituals, and orgiastic gatherings centering around
the Devil and his minions - all based on the "confessions" and other
accounts from witch trials. In the longest sequence, a man's death is
attributed by his wife to the spells of an old beggar woman, who is
then tortured by the Inquisition into confessing her pact with Satan.
She goes on to accuse the dead man's household, including the wife,
with complicity in her crimes, and they are in turn arrested and forced
to confess, until almost no one is left in the deceased man's family.
Then the priests move on to another town to continue their crusade against
witches.
In the final section, the film focuses on the modern phenomenon of
"hysteria" in women, a psychiatric term that was coming into vogue at
the time, and makes connections between this mental illness and what
was being called "witchcraft" in the Middle Ages. By skillful use of
flashbacks and flash-forwards, Christensen draws parallels between the
symptoms and behavior of neurotic women in the present and those of
women we have already seen in previous sections of the film, clearly
inferring that the so-called witches were just unfortunate women who
were persecuted for their neuroses.
The sensational aspects of Häxan are, of course, the scenes
depicting the Devil and his orgiastic rituals. With spectacular costumes
and makeup, and an unerring feel for lighting and composition, Christensen
creates a startling nightmare world of bizarre imagery that is highly
reminiscent of medieval fabulists such as Bosch. Some of the scenes
include semi-nudity, and that - along with scenes of witches kissing
the Devil's buttocks - got the film into trouble with censors. The special
effects, as marvelous as they are (and still with the power to frighten),
have unfortunately gained such notoriety that they tend to obscure Christensen's
method and intent - these scenes are based on what accusers were claiming
the witches were doing, not on real events, and they were meant to expose
the superstitious nature of medieval belief to a modern audience that
would automatically dismiss such images as imaginary. In this, the director
perhaps underestimated the perennial power of superstition to fascinate.
Although it originally failed at the box office - distributors were
wary and audiences put off by the film's gloominess - its revival in
the 50s and since has made it something of a cult film, probably, in
most cases, for the wrong reasons. This is a film of righteous indignation
- an attack on the use of religion by priests to delude and oppress
ordinary people, and a plea for scientific rationality as a remedy for
outmoded forms of knowledge.
In formal terms, Häxan was amazingly ahead of its time.
Christensen employed all the technical effects he could muster - double
printing, reverse photography, back projection, and more - to create
sinister moods and fantasy images the likes of which had never been
seen before. More importantly, it is a film carefully constructed and
edited for maximum cinematic effect. Most films of the time were still
hampered by a sense of theatrical blocking of scenes into linear sequences.
Even Griffith's movies seem awkwardly composed compared to the fluid
structure of Häxan, with the images presented according
to the personal vision of the director - his thought process - rather
than to a conventional narrative scheme. If there is a flaw to the film,
it can be attributed to the documentary approach - I could almost sense
the artist yearning for a fictional form where he can really let loose.
Perhaps this narrowness of conception prevents Häxan from
being considered a "classic," but there's no question that every filmmaker
who has since sought to transfer the fantastic to film owes a debt to
the underappreciated Christensen.
Marketed in the English speaking world as Witchcraft Through the
Ages, the film is best viewed via the Criterion DVD, which features
a great restored print and a reproduction of the original tinting. Try
to avoid the old VHS version that has an inappropriate jazz score and
a deadly dull narration by William Burroughs.
LITTLE FUGITIVE
(Ray Ashley, Morris Engel & Ruth Orkin, 1953).
The independent fiction film was indeed a rarity in the heyday of the
studio system. Made on a shoestring by a group of still photographers
who wanted to try a location shoot at Coney Island, Little Fugitive
was an unexpected success that influenced future independents, including
the directors of the French New Wave.
Seven-year-old Joey (Richie Andrusco) lives in Brooklyn with his single
mom and his twelve-year-old brother Lennie (Ricky Brewster) who hates
having to baby-sit him all the time. When an unexpected emergency forces
Mom to leave on a weekend, Lennie's planned trip to Coney Island with
his friends is spoiled because he has to take care of Joey. Lennie and
his friends then play a malicious trick. They tell Joey - who loves
cowboys, horses, and guns - that he can try shooting a real gun, and
then they make it seem as if he's accidentally killed Lenny. Terrorized,
and thinking that the police are after him, Joey runs away, taking the
train to Coney Island, where he wanders around having various adventures
while his panicked older brother tries to find him before Mom comes
home.
At first, with the low budget, labored premise, and amateurish acting,
I was prepared to be disappointed. Fortunately the film has one perfect
actor - little Richie Andrusco, who plays Joey. The kid is a complete
natural, with none of the coy or saccharine qualities that often afflict
child actors. Once the action shifts to Coney Island, the picture becomes
more and more wonderful, until I found myself laughing out loud in delight.
Most of the movie has an offhand, slice-of-life style, following Joey
as he rides on the carousel, eats cotton candy, and takes a turn in
the batting cage. When he runs out of money, he starts collecting bottles
from the beach, refunding them for cash so he can go on the pony ride
over and over again. Besides being humorous, the film's kid's-eye view
can also be wistful and sad. It's always fun and watchable, because
of the marvelous Andrusco and the filmmakers' sense of composition and
detail. Engel and company used a little 35mm handheld camera to make
the movie. Their method was unobtrusive - the crowds of people at Coney
Island don't seem to notice that they're being filmed, which gives the
movie a realistic texture. Little Fugitive is also a loving tribute
to New York at a certain time in history. A sequence during a rain storm,
for instance, allows us to glimpse residents picking their way through
the puddles in the street while those big 1950s automobiles pass by.
It's a tribute to the artistic instincts of the directors that they
paused to record such moments.
Once Lennie finds out where Joey is, and comes to Coney Island to find
him, the picture becomes even funnier. This is the laughter of appreciation
and affection rather than mockery. The movie becomes touching and beautiful
in the best, most unassuming way. Little Fugitive is the kind
of film that will cheer you up if you need it, reminding you of all
the good things in life.
©2002 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
