THE WAR GAME (Peter Watkins, 1965).
Watkins started his career at the BBC, where he was commissioned to
make television documentaries. This was his second film, a study of
the probable results of a small-scale nuclear attack on England which
mixes newsreel and fictional methods in a provocative way. The overall
tone of the piece is of the standard informational type, with a narrator
providing facts about nuclear weapons and their effects when detonated,
along with information culled from research on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
At the same time, we are shown scenes of suffering and devastation—a
child being blinded by the official blast several miles away, people
running from an urban firestorm and succumbing to the asphyxiation,
rescue workers vainly trying to aid severe burn victims, and so forth.
The narration will sometimes switch to the present tense in these scenes,
as if they were actually happening.
The real consequences would certainly be far more horrific than Watkins
had the means to depict here, but considering the film’s minimal
budget, the effects are remarkable. With a shaky hand-held camera, a
few small sets standing in for an entire cityscape, the deft use of
makeup, and excellent work by the nonprofessional actors, the picture
evokes the terror of mass panic and death.
In addition, Watkins includes small clips of interviews with citizens
displaying their ignorance about nuclear war, along with recreated interviews
and quotes from political and religious figures, demonstrating official
callousness and denial. Fictional interviews with survivors of the attack
aren’t as effective—here the scripted talk clashes with
Watkins’ attempt at immediacy. The film as a whole plays havoc
with the conventional sense of time presented on TV news—with
past, present, and future all mixed together, the aesthetic uncertainty
matches the queasiness and fear of watching the unthinkable.
For a 1965 television show, it is amazingly subversive. Nowadays, however,
it looks quaint and old-fashioned, overtaken by slicker media news strategies.
The War Game may be of more interest historically than aesthetically,
but its frankly biased assault on the complacency around nuclear war
is still bracing.
The BBC never aired the program. It was banned, and only given a limited
theatrical run (although it did end up winning the documentary Oscar).
The official reason for the ban was that the violence was too disturbing.
We wouldn’t want to be disturbed, would we?
BIG DEAL ON MADONNA STREET
(Mario Monicelli, 1958).
A jailed ex-boxer (Vittorio Gassman) catches wind of a perfect opportunity
for a heist—a safe in a pawnshop with an empty apartment next
door. When he gets out of jail, he organizes a gang of misfits to pull
off a job, including a photographer (Marcello Mastrioanni) who has to
bring his baby along to planning meetings because his wife is in jail,
a womanizer (Renato Salvatori) who falls for the sister of a crazy Sicilian
thief, and an aging crook (Carlo Pisacane) who is obsessed with food.
This is a parody of the heist film genre (especially Jules Dassin’s
Rififi)
and it avoids the over-exaggeration or self-satisfied winking at the
audience that have plagued so many parodies, including later heist comedies
that have tried to improve on this one. Monicelli portrays the seedy
underworld of the Italian slums with a realism and attention to detail
that makes the ridiculous behavior of the characters all the more amusing.
Three writers teamed up on the screenplay, which mixes dry wit with
farce in inventive ways. Gassman is splendid in the role of the lead
crook. It broadened his appeal as an actor—up until then he had
been confined to serious roles. The great comic actor Totò shows
up as an old safecracker who instructs the gang on the fine points of
his art, but wisely refuses to participate in the heist itself. Of course,
when the time comes for the gang to go into action, everything that
could possibly go wrong, does.
If you’ve seen a lot of crime spoofs, this one may seem too
familiar, but you need to remember that it was practically the first
of its kind. The humor ranges from character-driven absurdity to clever
gags—my favorite is when a crook points a gun at a shop owner
and says, “You know what this is?” and the proprietor takes
the gun from his hand and says, “A Beretta in poor condition,”
offering him twenty lire for it. The ending may be on the broad side,
but overall the combination of parody against a realistic urban background
is unique, and priceless.
THE GENERAL DIED AT DAWN
(Lewis Milestone, 1936).
O’Hara (Gary Cooper), an idealistic American adventurer in China,
agrees to smuggle some gold that will help the peasantry buy weapons
to resist the tyrannical warlord General Yang (Akim Tamiroff). But a
penurious schemer in Yang’s employ (Porter Hall) persuades his
beautiful daughter (Madeleine Carroll) to trap and betray O’Hara
before he can deliver the goods.
The convoluted plot, full of narrow escapes and double-crosses, is pure
enjoyable pulp. At the same time, the dialogue is by Clifford Odets
(his first screenplay), and so the drama is sprinkled with leftist comments
on the exploitation of ordinary people by greedy military and financial
elements, all performed in an offhand, tough working-guy style that
makes it go down easy. There’s a sense of danger and menace throughout
which gives the adventure some weight, and the picture is beautifully
shot by Victor Milner, with some particularly fine effects in the earlier
scenes.
Gary Cooper tends to be associated with a simple, stolid persona because
of his work with Capra and in his later career, but at Paramount he
often played a dashing, dangerous leading man with a ready wit, as he
does here. Carroll usually seemed like just a pretty face, but Milestone
got something special from her here. She plays a woman with a divided
conscience, well acquainted with grief, and it’s probably the
best performance of her career. Her chemistry with Cooper is good too.
Tamiroff got some deserved attention for his warlord role, combining
cunning with bluntness, and mostly taking it easy with the ham. There
are several interesting character actors strutting their stuff, including
a brief, amusing turn by William Frawley as a drunken, blustering arms
dealer.
On the downside, the Hollywood practice of having western actors play
Orientals can misfire—it’s impossible to believe in British-born
Dudley Digges as a Chinaman. And the big ending tries much too hard
to achieve hair-raising suspense, only managing to seem ludicrous instead.
Nevertheless, this film is juicy, atmospheric, and fun.
YOLANDA AND THE THIEF
(Vincente Minnelli, 1945).
Here’s a film produced by the legendary Arthur Freed, directed
by his top talent Minnelli, and starring the one and only Fred Astaire.
It should be good, right? Oops. It just goes to show—nothing is
foolproof.
The number one problem is the story. It takes place in a fantasy country
called Patria, ruled by a princess named Yolanda (Lucille Bremer) who
has been shielded all her life from any knowledge of men, romance, or
guile. Along come two visiting American con men (Astaire and Frank Morgan)
who want to cash in somehow on Yolanda’s naïvete. By chance
overhearing the princess praying to her guardian angel, the Astaire
character decides to pretend that he is the angel who has come to earth
to guide her. The foolish girl believes him, but of course the "angel"
finds himself falling in love.
Whenever a script calls for a fantasy country, you’re in trouble—unless
the movie has a light touch and is capable of some real wit and playfulness.
But with the sole exception of a scene or two involving Mildred Natwick
as an eccentric aunt, the humor in this film is of the lead-footed variety.
In addition, Bremer, although a fine dancer, is a middling actress.
To be fair, her role would probably test the talent of even a great
performer—the character is so stupid and gullible, so shallow,
that it’s impossible to care what happens to her or believe that
anyone could fall in love with her. The heavy-handed nonsense just drags
on and on, getting progressively worse until the horrible ending.
I must admit that the picture has a remarkable visual style. The art
direction and production design are so colorful as to seem over-the-top.
A spectacular dream dance sequence borrows freely from Salvador Dali.
Another number, “Coffeetime,” (the film’s highlight),
with its weird time signatures, bizarre costumes, and swirling lights
and floor patterns, is borderline psychedelic. But the Harry Warren
songs are nothing special. If there had been more dancing—maybe,
just maybe, the film could have been something. There are, in fact,
Minnelli cultists who swear this is a masterpiece, but the way I see
it, colorful frosting can’t save a rotten cake.
ANTHOLOGY OF SURREAL CINEMA, VOL. 1
Motion pictures, offering myriad possibilities for the manipulation
of images, were arguably the ideal art form for the surrealist movement.
This DVD collection offers four early surrealist shorts from four famous
artists.
Entr'acte (René Clair, 1924) starts out with the intercutting
of seemingly random, provocative images: a ballerina leaping in the
air as seen from directly below; people moving in slow motion or reverse;
an egg floating over a fountain that is shot by a gun, etc. The pace
gradually speeds up until we see a coffin escape from a camel-drawn
hearse and scoot along the road on its own with all the mourners in
pursuit. The editing become more and more frantic and ingenious, until
the coffin eventually stops and the dead man steps out, making his pursuers
disappear by magic.
As the title indicates, the picture was designed to be shown between
the acts of a performance—in this case, a ballet by Erik Satie,
who also composed a score for the film. The brilliant synchronization
of the editing with the score makes the film especially entertaining
and accessible.
The Seashell and the Clergyman (Germaine
Dulac, 1928) is the most purely surrealist of the four shorts here,
because of its interest in the workings of the subconscious. Dulac was
one of the few women directors in early film, and an important artist.
Here she broke with the conventions of narrative film to present a portrait
of a sexually repressed clergyman’s dream life. The titular seashell
is a symbolic object containing some kind of magical liquid, but an
officer destroys it, only to be pursued by the clergyman, who strangles
him in a rage when he finds him with a beautiful woman in a confessional.
Scenes and characters melt into one another or shatter in two, while
Dulac uses superimpositions, stop-motion, and bizarre Freudian imagery
to convey meaning intuitively. The film hints at a link between the
clergyman’s denied sexuality and his expressions of rage and power—at
one point he rips the bodice off the woman to reveal her breasts. There
is a distinct feminist sensibility at work here, and it caused a minor
riot when it was first screened at an avant-garde theater. Very interesting
and advanced for its time.
Ballet Mécanique (Fernand Léger, 1924) is a good
example of the fascination with abstract movement that was shared by
many early experimentalists. Mechanical objects move rhythmically, intercut
with shots of humans moving mechanically. The effect is rather spoiled
on this DVD by the lack of an adequate musical score, but one can still
observe the precision of the editing and the hypnotic effect of the
moving shapes and objects.
Anemic Cinema (Marcel Duchamp, 1926) is a very brief film featuring
rotating spiral designs and discs, with little messages in French written
on the discs. This is pure abstraction combined with a bit of impish
wordplay, but without knowing French, it was hard for me to appreciate.
The films are important and revelatory, but the DVD itself gets a D
minus for quality. The prints are awful, and in some places the films
appear to have been cropped around the edges. The first movie appears
in a much better print as an extra on the Criterion DVD of Clair’s
À Nous la Liberté. The last three films appear
on Kino’s “Avant-Garde” collection.
©2007 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
