I"ve written elsewhere, and at length, about my brief crazy time of having Gone Hollywood. Much of that lunacy centered around The Daisy.
*In the September 1966 issue of Los Angeles magazine, appeared a 5200 word article t.i.tled "Nightmare Nights at The Daisy." I wrote that article. Apart from a minor reprinting in a men"s magazine exactly one year later, that piece has never been collected in one of my books of essays. It forms an interesting Hollywood footnote to this introduction. If you turn to Appendix B (page 423) you will find it as it was written at that moment in my life when I came to my senses and foreswore involvement with the social scene in the movie colony. Upon rereading, I find it verbose, purple, overstated and wincingly melodramatic. But in its way, I guess, it is historical doc.u.ment at its silliest. Like the view of a former Flat-Earther after having taken his first s.p.a.ce-ride.
But if it had not been for the cattle call, for Richard Newton, for my awakening awareness that I did not want to grow up to be Aaron Spelling and needed to one-up the Great Man; had it not been for having been twisted and bent by Hoppity and the need to a.s.sert the know-it-all in me who now writes pontificating film criticism; had it not been for Curtis Lee Hanson, my friend and one-time editor, and Cinema magazine, now long-gone but fondly remembered; had it not been for that odd congeries of circ.u.mstances, this book of more than twenty-five years" worth of film comment would not exist.
Having thus explained how I was corrupted, warped, driven to this unseemly stretch of writing, I know that those among you who paused in hammering together the gibbet to listen to this interminable screed, will now understand that I am innocent, that never has a cruel thought pa.s.sed through my head, and that if justice is to be visited on anyone, it should properly fall on the ghosts of Max and Dave Fleischer and my Grandmother, on Aaron Spelling and Richard Newton, and certainly on Curtis Lee Hanson, all of whom ruined that sweet little Ellison kid.
For myself, I"ve never cried, "Fire!" in a crowded theater.
DARKNESS IN MAGIC CAVERNS:.
A nostalgic appreciation of moviegoing
Chill beneath a cadaverously-gray autumn sky, the tiny New Mexico town. That slate moment in the seasons when everything begins to grow dark. The epileptic scratching of fallen leaves hurled along sidewalks. Mad sounds from the hills. Cold. And something else: A leopard, escaped, is loose in the town.
Chill beneath a crawling terror of spotted death in the night, the tiny New Mexico town. That thick red moment in the fears of small people when everything explodes in the black flow of blood. A deep-throated growl from a filthy alley. Cold.
A mother, preoccupied with her cooking, tells her small daughter to go down the street to the market, get a sack of flour to make bread for the father, coming home from work soon. The child shows a moment of fear . . . the animal they haven"t found yet . . .
The mother insists, it"s only a few blocks and across the bridge to the market. Put on a shawl and go get that flour, your father will be home soon. The child goes. Hurrying back up the street, the small sack held close to her, the street empty and rilling with darkness, ink presses down the sky, the child looks around, and hurries. A cough in the blackness behind her. A cough, deep in a throat that never formed human sounds.
The child"s eyes widen in panic. She begins to hurry. Her footsteps quicken. The sound of padding behind her. Feet begin to run. Focus on darkness and the sound of rapid movement. The child. The rushing.
To the wooden door of the house. The door is locked. The child pinned against the night, with the furred sound of agony rushing toward her on the wind.
Inside, the mother, still kitchened, waiting. The sound of the child outside, panic and bubbles of hysteria in the voice, Mommy open the door the leopard is after me!
The mother"s face a.s.sumes the ages-old expression of hara.s.sed parenthood. Hands on hips, she turns to the door, you"re always lying, telling fibs, making up stories, how many times have I told you lying will- Mommy! Open the door!
You"ll stay out there till you learn to stop lying!
Mommy! Mom- Something gigantic hits the door with a crash. The door bows inward, and a fine spray of flour sifts between the cracks into the room. The mother"s eyes grow huge, she stares at the door. A thick black stream, moving very slowly, seeps under the door.
Let me tell you something straight: when I draw my last breath, and finally buy it, and should Cecil B. DeMille have been dealing me straight all those years and there is The Big Hiring Hall In The Sky (though I tend to distrust a man who would have Moses marry Yvonne De Carlo), I"m going to pa.s.s up meeting Hemingway and Shakespeare and W. C. Fields and Bogart and Marta Toren first thing on my arrival, and ask to be directed to the alabaster palace in which Val Lewton is spending a happy eternity.
Oh, yeah. He"ll be in a palace. Got to be.
n.o.body who produced films like The Leopard Man, from which came that scene I described at the outset, could be treated less respectfully by a benevolent G.o.d. And I"ll walk up there to the palace and find Lewton on the back veranda, telling half a dozen lesser talents how to put together some celestial cinema. And one of the archangels in charge of casting will come up with the old one about, "Yeah, sure, Val, but G.o.d"s got this chick, see . . . "
And I"ll interrupt them and say, "Mr. Lewton, sir, excuse me, but my name is Harlan Ellison and I"ve got you to thank for me not wasting my life, and for writing all kinds of stories people dug when I was alive, and for making my childhood bearable and . . . well, uh, er . . . "
And I"ll lapse into an awkward silence, because he"ll smile, knowing all the shadows and mirages behind those inadequate words. He knew what he was all about when he was making those B shudderflicks in the Forties.
But he could not have known, like pebbles tossed into a pool to produce ever-widening circles of impact, how important he was to me. But I know, and I"ll tell you; and when you"ve been told, you"ll know why all those martinet pedants of the New York Literary Establishment who still put down moviegoing live zombie lives of half-light. And you"ll even understand why auteurs like Bogdanovich can"t smell the flowers because they"re too busy dissecting them.
You see, I was the only Jewish kid in Painesville, Ohio, about thirty miles east of Cleveland, and you wouldn"t think that in Ohio-the Buckeye state, the center of the Great Amurrican Heartland-one would encounter much bigotry. You"d be wrong. They used to beat the s.h.i.t out of me. Regularly. I was a little loudmouth of a kid, quick as a whippet and ten times smarter than anybody else in town, but that humble greatness wasn"t what made them hate me, naturally. It was this Jewish business. They actually believed Jews ground up Seventh Day Adventist babies to make matzohs at Channukah. They called me a kike. I didn"t know what it was, but I didn"t care for the tone of voice. So I was the green monkey, the pariah. And I had no friends. Not just a few friends, or one good friend, or grudging acceptance by other misfits and outcasts. I was alone. All stinking alone, without even an imaginary playmate.
So I made my own worlds.
Worlds cobbled up from the dreams and visions to be found in comic books with Plastic Man and Airboy and the Heap and Hawkman and the Boy Commandos and the Spirit; worlds found in the radio programs I devoured so avidly my ears grew mouths: I Love a Mystery, The Shadow, Lux . . . presents Hollywood, Quiet, Please, The Land of the Lost, Grand Central Station, Let"s Pretend. Worlds in the pulp magazines: Startling Stories, Doc Savage, G-8 and his Battle Aces, The Spider, Black Mask.
But most of all . . . the movies.
Oh, G.o.d, the movies. For four hours every Sat.u.r.day afternoon I was taken away from that miserable lonely charnel house of childhood and was permitted to ride beside Don "Red" Barry, swashbuckle beside Jon Hall, sleuth beside Sidney Toler, drool over Ann Rutherford and June Preisser, know fear as Kent Smith knew it and shudder helplessly as Rondo Hatton stalked the streets as The Creeper.
I was a child of the Forties. In a time before the word "alienation" slipped from everyone"s lips as easily as a rolling stone gathers no moss, I was a thoroughly, hopelessly, totally alienated kid who could not exist in the real world. And though the studio money-grubbers who churned out those wonderfully awful potboilers could never have known what succor they were bringing to my parched soul, they provided me the only world to which I cared to belong. The world of dreams, of celluloid escapes, of glorious moviegoing.
(You know one reason I hate my sister, Beverly? She is eight years older than I am, see. And when my Mom and Dad would be at the store, downtown, working on Sat.u.r.day, I was entrusted to her care. She had to get me downtown on the bus, to see the movie. Then she could go off and do whatever dull dumb things girls did in Painesville on Sat.u.r.day afternoons. Had to be dumb, didn"t it? She wasn"t at the movie, fer chrissakes! But she used to torment me. She"d dawdle, and chivvy me, and tell me she wasn"t going to take me, and then she"d put her dress up in back so her slip showed, and say, come on, let"s go. And I"d say, we can"t go with you like that, and she"d torment me with, sure we can, come on. And I"d sit down on my bed and start to cry, because I knew d.a.m.ned well we couldn"t walk up Harmon Drive to Mentor Avenue and get on that bus and go downtown with her dress up in back so her slip showed. And she"d do that to me for an hour before we left. We always did, of course, but by the time we got downtown I was a nervous wreck. That"s one of the reasons I hate Beverly. But that"s another story.) The Lake Theater on State Street in Painesville was the Taj Mahal to me. It was dark and filled with endless magics. Sounds no mortal ever heard: the choking gurgle of a thuggee victim being strangled for the love of Kali; the special whimpering bark as La.s.sie told some halfwit nit of a child actor that the baby was in a burning building; the insidious laugh of Victor Jory as The Shadow; the thunk of crossbow arrows plonking into the drawbridge of evil King John. Sights no mortal ever beheld: Sabu changed into a dog by Conrad Veidt; Wild Bill Elliott as Red Ryder, beating the s.h.i.t out of a gang of bullies somehow vaguely reminiscent of the thugs that played in the schoolyard of Lathrop Grade School; Kirk Alyn leaping off a building shouting, "Up, up, and awayyyy!" There was no end to the magic to be found in that dark cavern.
For four hours-with Bingo and two features and three cartoons and a TravelTalk and a singalong-I was in Heaven. A special dark Heaven even more private than the bathroom, which is the only place a little kid can go to, to be alone.
And I knew some day I would have adventures like that. Some day I would walk streets paved with gold, and all the bullies would step off into the gutter when I pa.s.sed, and my Mother and Father would say, "The kid really knows how to live," because I"d be in business for myself, and even if my partner Miles Archer had been murdered and I didn"t know whether the fat man or Joel Cairo had the black bird, even so . . . I"d be competent and tough, and I"d win out.
That was how it was when I was a kid.
Is there n.o.bility in the moviegoing experience? Don"t ask me, friend. I don"t know from n.o.bility; all I know from is survival and dreams.
And thank you, Val Lewton.
CINEMA [196568]
THE TRAIN.
Melville once ventured, "No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it." Even when the flea is photographed in Technicolor and CinemaScope, its volume is a flashy but transitory offering. Melville dealt with whales, consequently.
Unlike most of the flea-marketeers of Hollywood, director John Frankenheimer is a man who would deal with whales, had he his choice. It is the choice of the louse as opposed to the air-breather. And in so doing, his sphere of attention becomes more cerebral, the purview of his cinematic doc.u.ments ceases to be merely entertainment (which is that matter lightly dropped on the viewer, like tapioca pudding, e.g., Doris Day flicks) and becomes "art" (which entails active partic.i.p.ation and, like a steak, mastication).
The Train is art, and as a result, many things can be said of it, not the least of which is that it is a good picture. In fact, it may be too good for the people who will eventually decide whether or not it is successful, at the box office. This is, I feel, a sin not of the producer, but of the culture, of the motion picture-goer. In the main, he has been surfeited with such an endless glut of pap films-usually because these were the ones he patronized most in the past, thus by his attentions demanding more of the same, and getting no better than he deserved-that a film of some depth and contrast leaves him confused and disgruntled; and rather than acknowledging that his imaginative faculties have atrophied, as with Lord Jim, Dr. Strangelove and half a hundred other superlative films, he will condemn the work set before him. It is a hideous conceit.
And I fear The Train will be another victim.
Behind and beside me in the theater, during the special screening, safe in the dark to express remarks of denseness and silliness that a lighted room would either force them to rationalize as "opinions" or keep unspoken, I heard typical moviegoers ask each other what the h.e.l.l was going on up there, at points in the film any relatively cogent and informed person should have found self-explanatory. Again, I a.s.sert, this is not the fault of Frankenheimer & Co. but of The Great Unwashed (a term of surpa.s.sing arrogance and disdain I have hesitated to use before, but which seems frighteningly applicable here). And the answer to the problem is beyond me: the filmmaker can either pander to this Howdy Doody mentality, and bring forth an endless stream of f.a.n.n.y Hurst/Gidget/Tammy/Ross Hunter charades, or go his way as has Frankenheimer or Kubrick or Richardson and woo his own Muse, letting the stock options fall where they may.
The latter course is one of courage, for it entails risk, loss of financing, and the roar of corporation executives. It is to Frankenheimer"s eternal credit that he did not take the easy way out for, to repeat, The Train is a work of brilliance, perceptivity, depth and meaning. It approaches questions of morality and conscience that demand grappling. In short, this film, unlike much of what makes money these seasons, does not pa.s.s through the viewer like beets through a baby"s backside.
Set in Paris, 1944, with the Allies always just "a few days away from liberation" of the open city, a small group of French Resistance operatives set themselves the task of rescuing a trainload of art treasures, masterpieces, "the heritage of France," from being shipped to Germany by the n.a.z.i Colonel who has, for four years, pathologically kept the paintings from being damaged, ostensibly because they are convertible to gold needed for the war effort, but in reality because he is a man possessed of taste and discrimination, a man awed by the genius unleashed on those canvases by Matisse, Braque, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Monet, Manet, Pica.s.so. His one single driving thought is to get those irreplaceable treasures away. He is a dedicated man, a man with lofty motives, serving a beast master, and himself part-beast.
He is a man doing the wrong thing-for the right reason.
His opposite number is a man of controlled brutishness, a Parisian railroadman named Labiche, who counts the cost of sabotage in human lives. X number of lives to stop this train, X number for that train. Only the most valuable trains-munitions, troops, etc.-are worth expending the lives of his fellow saboteurs. He rejects the plea of the drab little Frenchwoman (sensitively played by Suzanne Flon, who will be best remembered, perhaps, as Lautrec"s mannequin love in Moulin Rouge) who has been Colonel Von Waldheim"s a.s.sistant, to stop the Colonel from ferreting away with the golden heart of French culture. Paintings mean nothing to him; there"s a war on; what has art to do with it? Not until Von Waldheim executes old Papa Boule, the engineer Labiche has a.s.signed to the train, for trying to sabotage the locomotive pulling that fabulous cargo, does Labiche swear to stop the train. But still, the paintings mean nothing to him. Crated in their boxcars-7 Van Gogh, they are stenciled, or 4 Roualt, like herring, like machine parts, like piece goods-they are merely a symbol of frenzy to Labiche.
He will stop the train, he will defeat the n.a.z.i, Von Waldheim. And therein lies the beautiful dichotomy of the story.
Because he is doing the right thing-for the wrong reason!
In essence, this 133-minute film is a t.i.tanic duel between the personalities of Von Waldheim: dedicated, brutal, ascetic, implacable yet sensitive, determined . . . and Labiche: physical, vengeful, cunning, artless yet graceful, equally determined. And while the paintings mean nothing to Labiche, they mean everything to Von Waldheim, they are his obsession.
In the final moments of the film, after a staggering loss of life over the inanimate cargo, when the battle has been won, Von Waldheim, even then, is able to tell Labiche that the paintings are his, will always be his, will always belong to him or a man like him, to men with the eyes to see beauty. He tells Labiche that he has won, but without even knowing why, or what he was doing, that the paintings mean as much to Labiche as a string of pearls to an ape.
And Labiche looks at the jumbled jackstraw tumble of French hostages Von Waldheim has had machine-gunned off the train, and kills the n.a.z.i. The camera spastically intercuts between the jumbled crates of great paintings half-unloaded from the derailed train, and the dead Frenchmen. Cut and intercut, and only a dolt could fail to see the unspoken question: Were these paintings worth all these wasted lives?
It is a breathless visual posture of Frankenheimer as master of his craft, as symbolist, as preacher, as capturer of art for the ma.s.ses, that does not demean the intellectual"s praise. It sums up one of the basic questions of man in conflict with himself to preserve culture and civilization: Is the life of a man greater or lesser than the art he produces in his most n.o.ble moments? Is it possible to equate the continued value of history and cultural heritage his finest work represents, weighed against common flesh, mortal clay? It is a question to which philosophers have only imperfect answers, and in restating the question in modern, cinematic, bold terms, Frankenheimer (and I would presume scenarists Franklin Coen and Frank Davis) has rendered a service. For more than entertainment has been provided, for those who would care to exercise their wit and intelligence.
Even serendipitously, this film provides marginal treasures, unexpected, and easy to love: a visual paean to the "high iron" of steam locomotion, a reverence for the filth and sweat and bravery of men who pushed the steam horses; a sensation of grandeur the diesel engineers of today cannot possibly feel about their semisilent zip-machines. It is a final hurrah voiced in closeups of sooty engines, long shots down on marshaling yards, pans and zooms to and away from specific bits of iron that speak of the majesty of the whistle-screeching, thunder-making days of railroading, now almost entirely pa.s.sed into history.
And more: England"s incomparable Paul Scofield as the many-faceted n.a.z.i Colonel, rendering a portrayal of complexity and even-impossibly-compa.s.sion, with a minimum of arm-waving, with a reserve of style that bespeaks great talent. His every moment on the screen is a gesture of possession; he strides across this film as palpably impressive as the train itself, and in time, the train dwindles in import, and the man trying to rule it becomes the central figure of the drama, despite the plotting of script which offers us Burt Lancaster as Labiche. Correction. It offers us Burt Lancaster as Captain Marvel.
When I was a child, and read the Capt. Marvel comics, I never really thought any harm would come to that great red cheese. He could always pull off something, after all, he was superhuman, wasn"t he? My feeling was paralleled with Lancaster as I watched this film. He can act, certainly, but on what level above that of swashbuckling, I cannot conceive. The usual Lancasterite mannerisms-the clenched teeth, the balled fist swung across the body, the spread-legged stance and the furiously shaken arm, the tossed curls, all so d.a.m.nably typical and cliche, so useless and needless here, in a setting of purest gold-the same mannerisms of Elmer Gantry, once again, for the millionth time restated.
The intrusive personality of Lancaster the acrobat, doing his special parlor tricks down ladders, over garden walls, superbly muscled and annoying as h.e.l.l when they tell us over and over, "I"m not really Labiche, I"m Lancaster."
It is to Frankenheimer"s credit that he has been able to direct around this more-than-minuscule handicap. His direction (blessedly done in black and white, precisely what the production demanded) is ma.s.sive, great blocks of shadow and light, a study in chiaroscuro; dark, jagged, dense, swung with great authority, like the railroad crane needed to lift the wrecked locomotive off the tracks. Purposely ponderous at times, quicksilver here and gone at other times. He has filmed it with what might be termed "affectionate realism," a sense of proportion and piety that transcends mere naturalism, that lingers on the proper things for the proper amount of time.
Scofield, Jeanne Moreau, the Falstaffian Michel Simon as Papa Boule, Wolfgang Preiss adding another memorable characterization to his already-ill.u.s.trious career with his portrayal of the n.a.z.i railroad specialist Major Herren, m.u.f.fin-shaped Albert Remy as the fellow-saboteur of Labiche, striking to the heart of the film"s meaning with his gentle, skillful rendering of a simple peasant patriot . . . all of them lend tone and dignity and artistry to a film of notable proportions.
The Train is a success. It succeeds not only on its own terms, but on the greater, more stringent, terms of strictest art criticism. It is a film of purity, it is even a loftier breed of "entertainment," and it deserves all the praise and attention we can give it.
Simply, it is a film not to be missed.
It is the whale, and not the flea.
Cinema / JulyAugust 1965 VON RYAN"S EXPRESS.
There is a grand tradition of the adventure film. In many ways it is a dichotomy: some of the worst films of all time have been the most memorable adventures; conversely, some of the best-made adventure films die hideous box-office deaths, and live even shorter lives in memory. King Kong, Korda"s Four Feathers and The Thief of Bagdad leap instantly to mind, and in more recent times The Magnificent Seven, Lawrence of Arabia and even as flawed an epic as The Vikings-all prove the latter point, while we may take as example of the former almost anything Samuel Bronston has released in the past ten years.
Because of this body of history to the larger-than-life film of derring-do, comparison intrudes itself. And in the case of 20th"s Von Ryan"s Express the comparison must inevitably be with The Great Escape, an adventure film of undeniable stature. The comparison is not altogether unwarranted, nor unrewarding. For if Von Ryan"s Express comes out short in some areas, it makes the points up in others.
Late 1943, an Italian prison camp, run about as slipshodly as the entire Italian war. A camp filled with almost a thousand English troops, into whose midst comes a downed American Air Force Colonel, Ryan. The English officer-in-command has died the night before, so Ryan automatically becomes the ranking officer in the compound. He immediately raises the ire of the limeys by exposing their tunnels and escape procedures in exchange for medicine, clothing, showers, razors, all the basics kept from them by the Commandant as retaliation for their continued escape attempts. Inevitably, Italy surrenders, the prisoners take to the land before the n.a.z.is move in, and are recaptured due to a humanitarian blunder on the part of Ryan. To make amends, he promptly steals the entire prison train, and runs it through Pauline peril after Pauline peril till they make it free to Switzerland. Ryan is killed in the process. But he does die a hero.
For the first third of the film, tedium is the keynote. About midway, the pace accelerates, due largely to the splendid performances of Edward Mulhare as the vicar impersonating a German officer, and Sergio Fantoni as the one-eyed Italian captain who helps the Ryan Express. As the denouement fast approaches, conjurings of The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Guns of Navarone swell, and never seem to be quite washed away, no matter how long the triggers of those German machine-pistols are held.
If the film is not a total success, blame lies, it seems to me, with director Mark Robson, who has once again demonstrated a pedestrian pace most clearly seen in his Nine Hours to Rama. The direction seems uninspired, matter-of-fact, strictly p.r.o.nunciatory, without verve or dash or any of the bravura techniques such bravura plotting would seem to demand. It is, in many ways, a tale of danger and excitement, told by a man with the soul of a ribbon clerk. It has the same teeth-gnashing effect of a good joke, badly told.
And yet, the film manages to hold the attention, at least during the last two-thirds. It is to be hoped that the producers will see fit to trim the opening to embolden the pace.
The values of Von Ryan"s Express, however, are serendipitous. The first is a conclusion about current war films, the second about the nature of the "star" system.
There seems to be a heartening-and totally inexplicable-trend toward films that point a shaft of rationality at the concept of "heroism" during wartime. Heartening, if one is to read the daily papers, and inexplicable in a time of Birching, pocket wars, and the concept of cleaning out Vietnamese foliage with low-yield atomics. We had Dr. Strangelove with its outright denunciation of the madness of overkill, The Americanization of Emily that boldly stated there is no n.o.bility in combat, only loftiness in cowardice, and, in recent memory, Paths of Glory, which showed the base drives of those who make our wars. Now, here, we have another, somewhat more enigmatic view of the problem. Trevor Howard"s (occasionally overplayed) Major Fincham would rather sacrifice his wounded men to the grim reaper than sacrifice the medicine secreted as "escape rations" by his breakout-happy POWs. Sinatra, as the downed Yankee airman, sees this as madness. "Even if one escapes, it"s a victory," Fincham tells him, but Ryan proclaims it lunacy. Break them all out, he maintains, all eight hundred of them.
For in his acceptance of another way to skin the n.a.z.i cat, Sinatra/Ryan says, in effect: "War must be made, under any circ.u.mstances, with sanity." Even when he dies, and Fincham"s words echo back to his fading spirit, we see the morality of what Ryan believed: There is no n.o.bility in war. While he does not quite go so far as to suggest that the most ignominious life is better than the best kind of death, still, he does not veer too far from this ethic.
As for point two, one of the more serious and blatant drawbacks of the "star" system a.s.serts itself here, as regards Sinatra. So typed has he become, so much a caricature of himself with the snap brim tilted over one eye, the trench coat slung over the shoulder, the fingers popping, Mr. Ring-a-ding alla way down the pike, that the character of Ryan, boldly a.s.sertive in David Westheimer"s novel, from which the motion picture has been adapted, never really seems to take hold. At any moment we expect Frankie to wink and pop a pinkie at us. We are constantly intruded upon by the Doppelganger, the Shade of Sinatra Past, and it is a shame: he acts, for the first time in many films, possibly for the first time since Angelo Maggio. He acts, and with elegant clarity of movement, conservation of style; he underplays, he strives for highs and lows, and in one well-turned moment-when he is compelled to shoot the Italian paramour of the train commandant-he captures us completely. It is too bad we must constantly be reminded this "star" is playing the part. To h.e.l.l with "star" images, let the bankers and backers give us acting; acting is the seldom fire that lights up the CinemaScope screen.
Cinema / JulyAugust 1965 MASQUERADE.
Make no mistake, this is a praise review. But if you detect a piercing note of bewilderment, a sense of the reviewer spinning about gyroscopically demanding to know which way they went, it all lies in the nature and thrust of a delightful, current trend in adventure films.
That Man from Rio and the Ian Fleming-James Bond operas typify the movement, with Topkapi and Charade as minor entries in the sweep-stakes. Lineally descended from Huston"s Beat the Devil and several of the Hitchc.o.c.kian posturings (notably The 39 Steps and North by Northwest), the keynote is handsomely-mounted spy or suspense thrillers, with just a touch of Professor Dodgson"s Alice and the sort of flair style the French call panache.
You start with an intricate "threat" (no mere Maltese Falcon will suffice in these times of seeded bubonic plague and Doomsday Machines that will turn us all into a smelly specie of cosmic pizza) and you select the right sort of secret agent to thwart it. Be he suave and cool a la James Bond or rugged and realistic like Donald Hamilton"s Matt Helm (as he is in the novels, not-I"m sure-as Dean Martin will portray him in the upcoming series from Columbia), he has to be ready to go anywhere, perform any task, and lay his life on the line from Beirut to Baton Rouge. He also has to be a little out of his gourd to sign up for c.o.c.kamamie work like that.
The villain has to be larger than life, snarl a whole lot (if possible, in one of the lesser dialects of Bantu) and have a seemingly inexhaustible supply of super-weapons and super-schemes. He has to, the poor debbil, he"s gonna lose in the last three minutes, anyhow.
It is a phylum of cinema nonsense we heartily endorse. After years of Odetsstyle social outrage, more years of Hollywood twin-bed unreality, and most recently a miasma of depravity films that set the adenoids to jangling and the teeth to sc.r.a.pe, a wave of movie madness is most welcome.
Add to the huzzahs an item called Masquerade, with Cliff Robertson as the world"s biggest patsy, standing around with a Mickey Mouse expression on his matinee idol"s face, as a conglomerate circus of super-and-lesser spies uses him for everything but the village basketball.
Is there a plot? Who the h.e.l.l knows! Very possible, but don"t expect any certainties. There"s a kidnapped thirteen-year-old who will shortly become the ruling rajah of a mythical Oil Monarchy, a wily Grand Vizier, some foofaraw about leased oil rights, a retired but hardly recalcitrant English Colonel (brilliantly pavane"d by Jack Hawkins, who only improves with each year and wrinkle), a group of smugglers who aren"t smugglers, a beautiful girl who keeps sucking on a bottle of c.o.ke as though she were determined to stay out of The Pepsi Generation . . . a midget, a knife-thrower, a private detective, a ramrodstiff British major-domo, and a cast of lesser estimables who pop in and out like the figurines on a cuckoo clock. The similarity does not end there.
Robertson is a delight, Hawkins runs close to amuck, the photography ranges from sharp and perceptive to pedestrian and drab, the script bears the unmistakable stamp of William (The Temple of Gold) Goldman"s special demented Muse, and director Basil Dearden should be awarded the W. C. Fields Annual Juggling Award for keeping all those cigar boxes and top hats and bra.s.s b.a.l.l.s skimming through the air. If we detect the crash of an implement or two in the b.g., there really isn"t time to worry about it because Robertson still has to get that bamboo pole away from the white-crested vulture, so he can escape from the animal cage with that guy"s wife, whom he has been balling throughout the picture, and catch up with the guy who records the Flamenco singers for BBC before he tries to steal the kid back from the double-crossing Home Office official with the donkey, attempting to cross that uncompleted dam in Spain . . . uh . . . try it: painless.
It might help if Cinema had a type font called Shrill Gothic.
Cinema / JulyAugust 1965 MICKEY ONE.
It takes a peculiarly slantwise mind to understand Kafka the first time out. It will take a similarly oriented mind to understand Mickey One the first time it is seen. For the similarities between Kafka"s writing and Arthur Penn"s personal vision of what film should be, and do, are greater than the dichotomies between the two forms.
It is this reviewer"s contention that Mickey One is the finest American film of the year, and possibly of many years. Despite the impending tragedy.
For the very obtuseness and existential disorientation of Penn"s approach, the very qualities that hoist this film onto a plateau of brilliance and directorial bravura, are the qualities that will most alienate unqualified audiences, and condemn Mickey One to box-office shakiness. Already the tragedy is taking form: the night I saw it, in preview, at the Writers Guild screening, ninety percent of the audience-men intimately knowledgeable with the film form, allegedly-wandered out of the theater as if they had been stunned by the hammer. When they could not fathom what was going on, they turned to ridicule. In New York, the film has already opened, and as a telephone conversation with a friend in Manhattan informs me, "The reviews are bombing it." The name of the game is tragedy.
The same specie of tragedy that bombed Kubrick"s Paths of Glory when it first was released; and again, the similarities are greater than the divergent themes of the two films might lead one to suspect. Only now are we coming to realize what a small masterpiece Paths of Glory has become; and I contend that while Mickey One will die an inglorious box-office death, years hence it will serve as a way-marker for avant-garde filmmakers, and be looked at with ever-growing respect.
(Which brings up the subject of the unworthiness of most American film audiences, a topic that desperately needs to be talked about. For without a concerted effort toward education of "the great unwashed," we will continue ad infinitum to be deluged with bad, sordid and inept films directed toward the slob mind; and experimental, daring films of this nature will continue to go unmade, because the economic loss will be built in. But that is a topic for another time.) The story of Mickey One is a simple, contemporary entertainment, on its primary level. Mickey, a stand-up comic, has gotten into the Mob for a substantial amount of money, through gambling. To work off the debt, they buy up his contract and he is forced to work in Mob-owned clubs. But the constant fear, the constant surveillance, finally weigh on him to a crushing point where he flees, knowing if they catch him, they will kill him for welshing.
He runs interminably, becomes paranoid in the process, for everywhere he turns the invisible eyes of the Mob seek him out. He can trust no one. He becomes an alley man, a derelict. Then he meets a girl, and for the first time in too long, he is able to relate to someone. He gets himself a booking in a small club, and inevitably, through the innocent machinations of his agent, he gets a crack at a posh room. But he is terrified. If he gets seen, they will find him. He tries to turn the job down, but the manager of the club recognizes him and lets the Mob know who he is, that he has found the comic they have been looking for. The booker of the club-initially-is only interested in furthering the career of this "talented youngster," and so becomes a dupe of the manager and the Mob to put Mickey before the spotlight, where they can get at him. Mickey panics, manages to escape again and is on the verge of resuming his blind flight, when he develops backbone, stands, and finds-in that Kafkaesque logic of human unpredictability-that they are done with him, he is off the hook, free.
That is the story; on the face of it, not particularly deep or meaningful in terms of psychology or social influences, but then Moby-d.i.c.k is only the story of a vengeful man after a big fish, if you want to make it a reductio ad absurdum.
It is the telling of the story that lends the colors and intricacies, the purport (as if pure entertainment were not sufficient). Penn uses symbolism in a manner that most brings to mind Kafka-hence the comparison. The Mob becomes the fear and death symbol. Mickey becomes the p.a.w.n symbol, the man manipulated by his Times and the pressures of a System he cannot even comprehend, much less fit into. (The parallel to K., the hapless protagonist of The Trial, is inescapable.) The girl becomes the symbol of rationality. The club manager, Fryer (played with some confusion in a shrieking key by the usually memorable Jeff Corey), becomes the element of consciencelessness in modern man, the att.i.tude that it is not the individual"s responsibility what horrors are perpetrated on his fellow man.
But even here, in the area of symbolism, an area usually so mystic and clouded by variant definitions, Penn supersedes the trite, and parallels the Kafka implementation of double-level representation. For instance: At oddly disjointed and seemingly irrelevant junctures of the fast-moving plot, a tiny j.a.panese junk-artist appears, motioning to Mickey One. The comic sees him everywhere: in an alley, beckoning with terrifying immediacy; riding on a junk wagon pulled by a blind white horse (the cla.s.sic death symbol as typified in Andrzej Wajda"s Ashes and Diamonds); on a lakefront staging-area in front of Chicago"s Marina Towers, displaying a whirling madcap construction of spare junk parts and fireworks; and finally, when Mickey is contemplating suicide, in an automobile destruction yard where cars are squashed into cubes a la Goldfinger.
Every time Mickey sees the little Oriental, he flees in panic, and throughout the picture we come to believe the j.a.panese is Penn"s handy pocket symbol of death and pursuing evil. Yet the construction is called YES! and in the end it is the little j.a.panese man, beckoning to Mickey, standing on the edge of that car-cubing destroyer, who saves Mickey from suicide. And in the final moments of the film we come to the realization that Penn has had us, that we have smoothly swallowed his red herring, that the j.a.panese artist is literally the manifestation of Yes! Yes to life, yes to courage, yes to continuing the fight, yes to fighting conformity and the System, all Systems that threaten to deaden and punch-file the individual in an era where the individual is subjected to the rigors of keeping the machinery functioning smoothly.
An example of consummate directorial artistry.
Further indicated in the use of camera and editing. Penn has employed many of the Richard Lester/Sidney Furie/John Schlesinger techniques, but has studiously-and laudably-avoided their excess, their silliness or their bizarre aspects. There are no shots through keyholes, no slantwise camera postures that force one to tilt in the theater seat, no camera obtrusiveness for the sheer sake of brio. In point of fact, the dissolve (a sadly-neglected technique) has been utilized much more than the smash-cut or the upside-down camerawork.
(In one shot, Mickey, large in the foreground, stares into a destruction tunnel at the car-squash yard, where a vehicle suddenly erupts in a bouquet of flame. As this shot fades, and the car, tunnel and flames vanish, leaving only Mickey corporeal in the foreground, the incoming shot superimposes, and we see Mickey in the background, walking toward himself, up a dark alley. It is a very poignant and subtle way of showing a man literally looking at himself, studying his past, contemplating his future.) Kafka"s habit of sketching-out the denouement of a story, resolving the problems through the use of absence of resolution, is employed here by Penn, and inherent in this tactic is the seed of the tragedy mentioned above, for it will only serve to confuse the filmgoer who expects everything spelled out for him like a Giant Golden Book. Mickey is on the verge of being murdered by the Mob, and then, suddenly, without warning, he is free, and we see him playing the piano on Chicago"s lakefront, the world stretching out all around him, open and free.