Category Archives: The Criterion Collection

March 27, 2017

87. Александр Невский (1938)

2001: 087 box 1

directed by Sergei Eisenstein
with the collaboration of Dimitri Vasilyev
screenplay by Sergei Eisenstein and Pyotr Pavlenko

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[Aleksandr Nevskiy] = Alexander Nevsky, Criterion #87.
= disc 1 of 3 in Criterion #86, “Eisenstein: The Sound Years.”

(Sorry, guys: no trailer available.)


Like many people, I had known this title principally for its music. Now I’ve seen it. Too bad about the movie.

I found Alexander Nevsky unengaging in the extreme; I’m a fairly limber cultural masochist and this still managed to befuddle me. I procrastinated the DVD all the way to the library’s 10-renewal limit. That’s happened only once before, with The Last Temptation of Christ. Not a coincidence, I think. Both films have the same underlying flaw: they’re essentially dutiful, made to placate a threatening authority rather than achieve anything in itself. They feel like homework. Scorsese’s threatening authority was the Catholic church in his psyche; Eisenstein’s was Stalin. In both cases the artist set aside his authentic enthusiasms to make a show of eating his vegetables. There’s nothing worse.

Unlike Scorsese, Eisenstein didn’t fall into this trap for psychological reasons; he was pushed in. He did it because the alternative was to be shot. I can’t blame him. But there are heaps of Soviet propaganda that nobody watches today, exactly because it was all produced in bad faith under duress and is accordingly unrewarding. This movie survives in film studies and in the Criterion Collection because Eisenstein’s craftsmanship purportedly elevates it above the heap. But craft is in service of art. If the art is manifestly void, what can the craft really be worth?

My beef here is not political. Propaganda can be legitimate art, and I’m not inclined to hold ideological grudges against movies while I’m watching them. If this had been aesthetically digestible I would have eaten it up regardless of the politics. The problem is that it’s not good propaganda. It doesn’t have any heart in it, just mind. And propaganda has to be all heart; that’s the point. Xenophobia is supposed to be a thrilling adventure! If you’re making a shameless appeal to fear, pride, and anger, and it comes out stolid and monotonous, something’s gone very wrong.

The fact that Eisenstein made it this way and then the Stalinists applauded it this way proves that the whole Soviet ideological operation was a merry-go-round of insincerity. Everyone involved was surely perfectly capable of noticing that this movie contains no actual characters or emotions. Or they would have been, if they hadn’t been so committed to self-delusion. It’s hard to believe anyone has ever been truly patriotically stirred by Alexander Nevsky; it’s more like a billboard than a movie. I guess the Soviets were pretty into billboards, too.

Yes, I know, the movie was terrifically popular in its time. I believe those audiences went to see images and hear sounds. There are several good ones here. I just don’t believe that they were feeling the patriotic feelings that are the whole point of the project. Or rather I don’t believe that this movie drew out those feelings. It might have given people a convenient excuse to indulge feelings that already existed. Not well-adjusted feelings of simple patriotism, mind you! Something more akin to Frank Sinatra’s immortal “I just wish someone would try to hurt you so I could kill them for you.” If you were already champing at the bit for some enemies, there are indeed pictures of some enemies in this movie. Good enough for government work!


Even from this limp film, one can tell that Sergei Eisenstein (file photo) had a genuine talent, but a formal one rather than a fluid one. His conception of cinema seems to have been something like a photo gallery, or a comic book: a series of framed images, each one attempting an iconic quality. That’s all well and good on paper, but on film and in motion, absent any sense of organic emotional momentum, it just plays like an exercise.

His knack for concocting iconography ought to have been just the thing for propaganda. How to show that the crusaders are evil? Show one tossing an infant into a fire! Done. This is certainly some species of genius. But in practice, even that shocking image slots into the thudding editorial rhythm as just another problem solved, another concept executed. It’s juice-less.

In fact it’s funny to me that “formalism” was what the Stalinist regime claimed to revile, since that’s the perfect word for what goes on in a piece of insincere craftsmanship like this. Formalism is the shell left over when the heart is denied; it’s what artists have to fall back on when they’re assigned to churn out propaganda. Only art produced in bad faith deserves to be called “formalist.”

I guess all criticism is projection.

Every work of art stems from some underlying worldview, and thus embodies it. So whenever the Soviets denounced a work as “formalist,” they were evading the work’s actual point of view by denying that it had one. This shows a remarkable lack of faith in their own ideology; otherwise they would have confronted competing ideologies head-on. (Deriding a work as “capitalist” is at least a genuine attempt to assess its outlook.)

From an audience perspective, “formalism” is really a measure of pacing: does the mind have time to kill, in which there is nothing better to do than be concerned with form? While watching Alexander Nevsky, I idly imagined re-editing the action down to its intrinsic dramatic rhythm, eliminating all the deadly moments of “art appreciation.” That movie would be much shorter.


Superficial comparison to Dreyer’s Joan of Arc occurs to me; both films are heavily stylized medievalism made with a photographer’s eye. They share certain textural qualities. But Joan of Arc moved me, seemed like an obvious success. The stylization and artifice there always seemed to surround and serve intensely human, emotional concerns. So maybe the real problem with Alexander Nevsky is simply that there’s no Falconetti here; there’s no living face to turn on my human sense, my sense of meaning. Nikolai Cherkasov as Alexander Nevsky looks to me like a middling substitute teacher, the kind who keeps coming back but whose name you never take the time to learn.


I understand that pageantry works on a different level than normal narrative, and that Alexander Nevsky is trying to be a pageant. When the spiritual component feels so incredibly thin, that can also mean that the true spiritual component lies very deep. All spectacle is spiritual at a pre-propagandistic level, a subconscious level.

But watched that way, as pure apolitical image-glorification, the movie gives the constant feeling that the things in front of the camera are failing to be as transcendently epic as the vision demands. When Nevsky shakes his locks free of his helmet in glorious low angle, victorious atop his steed, it looks completely silly and insufficient. Nice try. That’s okay, Sergei; we get what you were going for.

This movie needs to be about a hundred feet tall to work. That’s why Prokofiev’s cantata, the music separated from the film, is a far superior piece of art. Music is born a hundred feet tall.


Alexander Nevsky is so profoundly dusty and limited that it can actually be hard to remember that the people making it weren’t themselves dusty and limited, but modern men and women of 1938, with fully modern psychologies. Yes, even in the Soviet Union! I think that’s important to keep clearly in mind, if we’re to understand what the achievements and the failures are. In this case the unrelenting artificiality is both the achievement and the failure.

(I was planning to embed a Getty image here like I did last time, something like this, but I guess the license to embed doesn’t apply to all their images.)


I watched the movie on Filmstruck, which offers a much superior restoration and is all-around more authentic. The copy of the movie included on the DVD is a 1986 Soviet clean-up job that does not use the original soundtrack recording overseen by Prokofiev. That original recording is frequently cited as having shamefully poor audio quality, but to my ear it’s not so much worse than any number of other crackly 30s soundtracks. The DVD version replaces the music with a later re-recording (apparently conducted by one Emin Khachaturian, Aram’s nephew) that, once noticed, feels conspicuously anachronistic. (I think it also uses the expanded orchestration Prokofiev created later for the concert version.) Also the title cards are all reset in typefaces that would never have been used in 1938. I’m sensitive to such things.

However I still got the DVD out from the library because it has lots of bonus features that aren’t on Filmstruck. Setting aside the movie itself, the disc is a pretty good package. There’s a competent commentary by David Bordwell of the sort that I normally scoff at for being hopelessly academic in outlook, but in this case it seems like just the thing. What else is there to do with this movie other than rattle off observations about the shot compositions? That paradigm, the one I criticize as so stilted and fuddy-duddy and beside the point, is Eisenstein’s home turf. He laid the groundwork for that kind of talk and it fits his work like a glove sticking out of a helmet.

(Bordwell describing Eisenstein’s technique: “… never using one shot where two or three will do.”)

There’s also very well done 20-minute “video essay” by Russell Merritt on Sergei Prokofiev’s music, and his collaborative process with Eisenstein, with extended emphasis on Walt Disney as an influence. I found this far more rewarding viewing than the film itself. If it were on YouTube I’d link to it.

Merritt: “Eisenstein later wrote that working with Prokofiev’s music, and working with Prokofiev to develop new theories of film music, were for him the only enriching aspects of Nevsky.” That’s about how the movie feels.


Plus there’s a whole other movie on the disc, too. Sort of. Bezhin Meadow (which borrows its title but not its content from Turgenev’s story of the same name, which as you all surely remember was already addressed on an earlier episode of this program) was Eisenstein’s previous project (1935–37), but was canceled before release, suppressed, and ultimately destroyed. However, Eisenstein apparently had the habit of keeping a private copy of the first and last frames from each shot of his movies, and these survived. In 1965, a director and a film historian found them and put them together into a kind of 25-minute filmstrip version of the entire movie, with intertitles taken from the original script. That assemblage is all that remains of Bezhin Meadow, and so to give a little extra dimension to the boxset, Criterion has included it. It’s not a movie, and it can’t really be watched as a movie… but as a record of a lost movie it’s extremely generous. There’s so much here — you can see what every single shot looked like, clear as day! — that your instincts tell you surely the rest of the movie isn’t really lost. But it is.

Here are the two things I’ll say about Bezhin Meadow:

1) I can’t tell whether I would have enjoyed the movie — as with so many Soviet works about everyday heroes living on communes, the dramatic arc seems awfully suspect — but I can easily tell that this was a more interesting and soulful piece of work than Alexander Nevsky. The faces are better. The sense of humanity is stronger.

2) Since Eisenstein already treated film essentially as a moving slideshow, the filmstrip format actually flatters him. The fact that he had the inclination to keep a souvenir frame from every shot is, I think, pretty indicative of where his personal satisfactions lay; in that sense, it’s not aesthetically arbitrary that this is what happens to survive. It feels like he was at some level a baseball card collector and this is a complete set. His projects were conceived as sequential photography, and the photography is certainly quite good. He would have been a natural for those old Richard J. Anobile books. (Remember when I said I fantasized about editing Alexander Nevsky down to its natural internal rhythm? I think this might be actually it: a series of still images, a few seconds apiece, about 20 minutes total.)

Bezhin Meadow was going to have music by Gavriil Popov; in its absence, Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 6 (and Zdravitsa) has been slathered over the proceedings. Good music, but not very well matched to what’s going on; generally it only serves to confuse the drama, which is already fairly confusing.

Luckily I don’t feel obligated to try to puzzle it all out. As far as I’m concerned, this is just a bonus feature, and by watching it at all, I gave it its due.

Criterion includes some on-set photography and a bunch of related articles to page through onscreen, including Eisenstein’s groveling official mea culpa. Fine. Can’t say I read every word of it all but I sure did page through!


If you read books about film music, you’ll often come across this silly diagram that Eisenstein made of a sequence in Alexander Nevsky, showing how blips in the music supposedly correspond to blips in the image — the premise apparently being that the viewer is in some sense always “reading” the image from left to right, as though it were a written document. This is an obvious absurdity, and is indicative of Eisenstein’s eccentric, anti-intuitive way of relating to the medium. It certainly has nothing to do with the way most directors use music. But the diagram is so compelling qua diagram that people have a hard time resisting the urge to reprint it. It’s a classic.

Having finally seen the film, I realize that because Eisenstein’s technique is so utterly formalist, this stupid diagram actually makes a certain sense after all. Incidental music generally seems to apply itself to whatever is most emotionally salient about the drama in a given moment. Within the deadened formalist outlook, a pure visual arrangement of e.g. individual figures interrupting a flat landscape does indeed start to seem like it’s probably the most significant thing going, and the music accordingly starts to seem like it’s probably commenting on the shot composition… because what else is there?


I’m a big Prokofiev fan — he’s right up there on my shortlist of favorite composers — and I must say that Alexander Nevsky has always seemed to me rather overrated among his works. The majority of the score is in his Soviet monumentalist mode, glutinously expansive. Prokofiev injected himself with some kind of Stalinist novocaine to produce works for the state, of which there are many in his late-career output. They’re certainly not worthless, but it helps to be in a stupor. And yet Alexander Nevsky often gets packaged alongside things like Lieutenant Kijé and the Scythian Suite, which are to my ear much more immediately and consistently rewarding.

The reason it stands out in popularity above Prokofiev’s many other Soviet-era works is surely the long “Battle on the Ice” movement, which paved the way for all manner of Hollywood excitement. The first section, when the crusaders emerge from over the empty horizon and then charge all the way to the waiting Russians, is the clear standout and by far the high point of both the film and the score. In fact I think many people would say this is one of the high points for film music as a whole. The bumping two-note ostinato of the charge, which creates an ever-expanding anticipatory tension, is a perfect musical conception. John Williams stole it outright for Jaws, and who can blame him.

So that’s of course our selection (despite a couple of brief spoken interruptions). Apparently in Prokofiev’s original score this cue was called Свинья, “The Swine,” which refers to the wedge-shaped attack formation. You can hear this same material recorded in rich symphonic stereo in a hundred concert recordings. Here, for a change, enjoy the original crackly, noisy, sloppy, small orchestra recording from the film.


You know, it might just have been the worst possible timing for me personally with this movie. Right now I’m in a moment where I’d really prefer to be transported than be asked to contemplate something dispassionately, so this felt like a singularly unfortunate choice. Every now and then, while I was trying to get through it a second time with the commentary, I would notice the image out of the corner of my eye and suddenly think, “Hey, this is kind of cool to look at. I see how at a technical level this is an interesting piece of work. Maybe it isn’t actually as bad as all that.” It was just never able to sustain that impression under direct attention. And I accept that maybe that was simply a question of where my head happened to be.

But that’s what I’ve got to work with.


Let’s get this over with already! I just want to be watching other movies.

Oh right, oops, next is just more Eisenstein. I hear they’re gonna be better, though. Let’s see.


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January 12, 2017

86. Eisenstein: The Sound Years

2001: 086 box 1

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contains:
Alexander Nevsky (1938)
Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1944) & Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1945, released 1958)


Criterion #86. Once again, this number corresponds to a cardboard box rather than a movie.

It contains two plastic cases, numbered 87 and 88; the former contains one DVD and the latter two. None of this material is sold separately. Thus 86 applies exclusively to the cardboard box.


I do not actually have access to this cardboard box. I cannot directly review this cardboard box. The best I can do is look at pictures of this cardboard box, reconstruct a virtual cardboard box in my mental laboratory, and then review that.

It seems like a pretty nice cardboard box. I imagine it as pretty sturdy.


Our musical selection is once again, as it must be, the Criterion logo jingle:


The next time this will happen is #124. Thank you.


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January 6, 2017

85. Pygmalion (1938)

2000: 085-box-1 [OOP 9/2009]
(replaced by equivalent “Essential Art House” edition)

directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard
screenplay and dialogue by Bernard Shaw
scenario by W.P. Lipscomb and Cecil Lewis

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Criterion #85.


Streamed from FilmStruck‘s Criterion Channel.


My mode at repertory musicals: trying my skill against theirs with the familiar material; asking “have they aced it?” rather than just watching. Like catty operagoers have done for centuries. I can’t help it. This is what comes of spending too much time with scripts and scores: everything starts to look like scheme and execution instead of pure phenomenon.

Even in that petty light this comes off very well, besting My Fair Lady at its own game.

Bursting into song actually suppresses dramatic pathos; it prematurely resolves all dissonances of sentiment. There is something truly poignant, not just structurally poignant, in this straight version. A full human being has too many feelings for any one song, and the question of what constitutes a full human being is at issue in this story. Pygmalion may be a sort of fable but it is not a fairy-tale.

A 20-second scene in Eliza’s home at the start pays dividends later that the musical misses: we understand that she has always been her own person; she is not Higgins’s creation. Galatea was a stone given soul; Eliza is already a soul, given a new stone setting, one among many possible. Her awakening is not her transformation itself; it is simply learning that she has the ability to transform.

The musical insinuates a Cinderella lust-for-glamour, a priori materialism, which ruins the play’s truly radical message: that all people are already equal and the trappings of class are arbitrary. Fancy dress does not actualize Eliza. Why would it? It is significant that she could not have danced all night; after all, whoever said she wanted to? Her uncertainty about what she wants is at the heart of the play and not to be plugged up for convenience.

The work montage here is far superior: Eliza has no clueless, tone-deaf phase; she’s immediately capable and industrious; the regimen of exercises seems coherent and believable; Higgins’s confidence seems to jibe with his abilities. We see her will and his; the only reason either of them has to sweat is the time pressure. There’s no vague, mysterious block to overcome first. That is to say: the Broadway contrivance of an impasse to precede a “eureka” markedly weakens the message that all that stands between Covent Garden and Buckingham Palace is weightless fuzz. The mysterious block, the sword that must be pulled from the stone, is none other than our projected prejudice: that an ordinary flower girl could obviously never pull this off, but a Chosen One could. (i.e. Audrey Hepburn.) This is not good faith.


Spry, younger-seeming Higgins is much preferable to the standard tweed. Personality comes into sharper psychological relief the less it’s telegraphed by physique and costume; we have to contend with the ways his outlook is available to us, too. Higgins’s attitude, its virtues and sins, becomes the focus of this script. This is the richest vein in the material and surely Shaw’s point of fascination.

His contempt is for the highs as well as the lows, and none of it is felt; in his abstracted way he loves all, he just doesn’t know it. He cavalierly tosses Eliza money that changes her life, because he enjoys the British forms and they include charity. But as he smirks, we hear uplifting church music all the same because the form delivers its substance no matter the spirit. Who’s to say this isn’t truest love?

It is only Henry’s lack of conventional empathy that allows him to genuinely help Eliza’s inner self. By his complete failure to feel her as an individual, he grants her uniquely unconstrained potential to be an individual. Being felt can be repressive. And yet we need it from one another; being a “consort battleship” is nobody’s heart’s desire. His problem is not that he cannot give but that he cannot receive. And everyone needs to be received, to be found. A moving portrait of the true nature of sympathy, and of empathy: each is the price of the other’s power.


Eliza’s Turing Test is the same for all of us; all of society is a Turing Test. If the difference can’t be told, there is no difference.

Consider the handling of Wendy Hiller’s physiognomy. Is it regal beauty or mask-like grotesque? Don’t worry: the movie will decide for you, scene for scene. When she emerges for tea dressed like Pinkie it’s parody, but her climactic presentation as the belle of the ball is quite serious. If the audience is drawn in — and we are — then we are part of the social conditions under critique. I felt a slap being administered to every “taking off her glasses to reveal her beauty” scene in cinema. Who says? The male gaze is just one of a thousand arbitrary frameworks. There’s also the Queen-of-Transylvanian gaze, etc. We can’t stop gazing but we can at least try to remember that everyone is protean.

Hiller is completely excellent. Shaw’s personal choice for the role and no wonder. She gives much more than one is accustomed to seeing given. In the ostensibly comic bathing scene she lets in genuine horror and indignity. This encapsulates the meaning of the whole story.


Apparently Getty allows you to embed images for free.


From the above it should be clear that as regards the ending my sympathies are 100% with Shaw, who disapproved vociferously. Henry thinks “tower of strength” is the highest possible approval; Eliza realizes that to the contrary she is in fact a person and says “goodbye.” That is rightly the culmination of the action and should suffice as its terminus. The sugary tag — invented for this movie and then carried over into posterity by Lerner and Loewe — is just commercial timidity.


In musing on the movie I came across many interesting side channels relating to Shaw, his work on the screenplay, the play’s past and future, etc. etc. etc. Originally I thought to discuss such things here. But the material was so plentiful exactly because it’s all such well-covered ground. Why strain to add to that when I’ve already said my piece?


First Criterion appearance of Koenig’s manometric flame apparatus. And probably last but one never knows.


The image is pretty bad. The transfer isn’t great and the film needs restoration. The streaming and DVD versions are the same.

The DVD offers no supplements. FilmStruck has a 3-minute TCM-style interview-cum-promo, “David Staller on Pygmalion (1938),” which is fine enough for one of those. I certainly admire the craft of the TCM montage team; they can make any old movie look superficially lively and promising. But that’s also the problem: their house style is homogenizing and ultimately condescending to the material. Especially their music. It all tends to feel a bit like in-elevator entertainment at a mid-range hotel. Still, simply as 3-minute propaganda pieces I can’t really fault them.

Now that streaming has entered the building as a viewing option, the supplement situation is likely to become quite complex and potentially sticky. Some of the original disc supplements are available at FilmStruck — but not all. Some supplements have been newly produced for FilmStruck and do not exist on disc. Some films are available to stream in new transfers not yet released on disc (see the title cards in the previous entry for an example). At present I can make no promises about what my policy will be — that is, what will count as having watched a given Criterion release and what won’t — but rest assured we at broomlet take such matters very, very seriously and we have top men looking into it right now.


Arthur Honegger of all people! The Criterion site database includes two other films with music by Honegger but neither of them is part of the main numbered series, so this is it.

I had no idea he had it in him. I knew he did pictorial music but not such genial commercial stuff as this. Though he does sneak in some quirky modern corners and angles. (The striking little oscilloscope cue early on.)

The idea of “My Fair Lady as composed by Arthur Honegger” is amusing to me. Some of the work has already been done:

Not to mention:


Official selection is the main title and introduction:

The tune in the strings starting at 0:45 functions as Eliza’s theme and gets several treatments over the course of the movie. Not that I noticed on first viewing.

The score overall is quite good. Never released or rerecorded. According to a Honegger biography I found, the manuscript is mostly lost. Then again the same biographer wrongly asserts that most of Honegger’s music was replaced in the film — which at first I thought must account for why it didn’t sound like Honegger, but which actually just seems to be a bit of confusion on the writer’s part. MGM made their own American cut of the movie that did indeed replace most of the music with stuff by house composer William Axt, and also re-edited a couple of scenes, but nobody ever watches that version these days, for obvious reasons. Seems like the biographer came across a copy of that and mistook it for the original.

Or else I’m being duped and the music you just heard is really by Louis Levy or someone. But I doubt it.


For my untenanted location still, I had to chase the editor all around; he didn’t seem to want to let me have one. Last time I was so stymied was Brief Encounter, and lo and behold, the editor of Pygmalion was David Lean. I guess he must have made it a real point of principle that there should be human activity in absolutely every frame.

Almost settled for a frame with a sliver of person in it but then finally found this one. Whew.


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December 29, 2016

84. お早よう (1959)

2000: 084-box-1

directed by Yasujirō Ozu
written by Kōgo Noda and Yasujirō Ozu

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(Image on the left is from the Criterion DVD that I watched. Image on the right is from Criterion’s present-day streaming service with a restored copy of the film, which I have only discovered after the fact. Subtitles are burned right into the image but otherwise far superior, as you can see.)

Criterion #84: Good Morning.

お早よう = Ohayō = “Good morning.”
(Ohayō gozaimasu, literally “it’s early,” is the customary morning greeting; Ohayō is the more informal abbreviated version, essentially a specialized form of the word meaning “early.” This root word, “haya,” is the single red character 早 in the title card, so I’m guessing that its emphasis is natural, has no particular significance, and is just for visual effect.)



My first Ozu, though I already had a sense.

Composition, precision, control. Perpendiculars, rectilinear blocks of content. Mondrian. Technicolor palette: brown, white, black, light blue, small areas of strong red. High 1959.

The quadrilaterals make comfort possible. Frame as prerequisite for safety, feeling, humor, beauty. Marie Kondo / Ikea / Wes Anderson. Packaging as Pieter de Hooch. Quest object of the movie is a TV in a cubic cardboard box: comfort and joy, and beyond that, meditation and trance. “ASMR unboxing.”

Objects at the edge of the foreground; people at the center of the distant background. Space is framed along all 3 axes. Nested perspectives: sets within sets; boxes within boxes. My fantasies staring into Escher prints as a child.

Art that “teaches us how to look,” my misquote from John Armstrong. A vision of what domesticity is. Takes its place for me alongside other works of heartfelt suburbiana: Edward Scissorhands, A Christmas Story.

Great warmth and beauty for me in the charades scene. Comedy as a shared serenity. Resonates with my own wishes for how life should be, has been, is. “Cute kids” is too often something else substituted for the transcendent thing itself. Here for a moment is the thing itself. The same goes for “humor.”

The camera low to the floor, unmoving, direct, trustworthy, loving. A child watching raptly from the next room, taking in all, the purest possible gaze.

“I love you” / “Good morning” / 👌. The message of the movie: speech vs. truth. Silentium! Small talk vs. love / English lessons vs. the musical fruit itself. (“Did you call me?”)

Word vs. texture. Look at even the woven surface behind the title card. All the busy talk of the neighborhood gossips is no match for a tactile Ikea paradise. The sensory order reigns supreme; its spirit is unbreakable. As long as you can reach down and touch the carpet, all is well. I believe it.

The encroachment of the West as a flowering of innocence. Dire warnings about the boob tube are just so much “good morning,” the refuge of nervous grownups; they sing a different tune when they’re in a better mood. “Look at his face; I can see he doesn’t mean it.”

No need to fear the pajama-wearing hipsters and their TV set; jazz and English and hula hoops are just more sounds and colors to fill our cabinet of curiosities. Hedonism is not incompatible with order; childish things are not spiritually void. All of this new sensual absurdity is safe; Japan is ready to bear it in its heart. “I love you!”

The movie itself — simple, gentle, immediate, human — is what the meticulous construction has allowed. Elegant and quietly nourishing. A friendly film above all; for which, in a lonely moment, I was profoundly grateful.


There, that was a hundred times easier than usual! It’s the connective tissue that costs. That and the verbs.


Music by Toshiro Mayuzumi. A flashy concert composer and skilled orchestrator who perfectly understood what was called for. I wish I could have grabbed the main theme, the one that recurs many times throughout, because it’s the heart of the movie. Unfortunately it’s always interrupted by dialogue.

Here then is the splendid Main Title, with suggestions of Haydn, Rossini et al. but treated with sweet zaniness. (I don’t think it alludes to any specific classical work, but I’m not certain.)


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December 25, 2016

83. The Harder They Come (1972)

2000: 083-box-1 (OOP 9/2005)

directed by Perry Henzell
written by Perry Henzell and Trevor D. Rhone

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Criterion #83.


(This trailer has been transferred 5% too fast. The same song is posted below at its proper pitch.)


On Criterion’s site, one of the user comments about The Harder They Come says that it “feels more like folklore than film.” That’s aptly put, and the phrase lingered in my mind during my time with the movie. The distinction it makes is real, but it’s also relative; you can feel the shift by degrees as you walk through an art museum from, say, the “19th century European” galleries to the “medieval European” to the “ancient Egyptian” to the “Pacific Islander” galleries. Things start to seem more essentially sociological than aesthetic, “more folklore than film,” as they become more culturally distant from you.

Art is made by and for communities, and I only belong to a few communities. That puts limits on how much art is accessible to me. When I’m at the museum looking at ancient Chinese sculpture or Greek pottery or Polynesian idols, I understand very well that I’m only a tourist, peering in on someone else’s business from far, far away. I can speculate about what it was to them, or I can let it be whatever it happens to be to me. But I can’t “just get it,” which is the truest form of artistic experience. That’s a privilege exclusive to those for whom it was made.

The Harder They Come is a movie for Jamaicans of 1972. It is for me about as much as Seinfeld is for them.


1. I can speculate about what it was to them.

There had never been an indigenous Jamaican movie before. Suddenly they got to see themselves. They got to see that the inherent glamour of cinematic space and time was accessible to them, was applicable to their lives, their language, their world. I’m generally pretty cynical about “identity politics,” but there’s no denying that at its core is something real and important: everyone sees themselves in a cultural mirror, and everyone’s sense of self-worth is affected by what they see there. Film is intrinsically a mirror of glory: I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me. It’s one of the greatest affirmations a community can give itself.

From the commentary track, here’s director Perry Henzell (a white Jamaican, born into and then disowned from an old plantation-owning family) talking about the movie’s premiere. He’s referring to the very first shots of the movie, in which a bus — see the title screen above — travels down a narrow seaside road and gets blocked by oncoming traffic:

The audience came to the theater and then at this point, where the bus [has to brake], they went mad. … Right at the start, this whole thing is so familiar to Jamaicans. This business of two trucks coming together and one won’t move, you know. The opening night was in Kingston at this big old theater that we had there, 1500 seats, called the Carib Theater. It was just, you know, crowd as far as you could see. And they beat the doors in and rushed the theater. And invited guests… I mean, the prime minister’s wife was sharing a seat with the prime minister’s mother, that kind of thing — she’s in the film, actually — three people to every seat. And they just started screaming. And I never — tell you the truth — never heard another word of dialogue that night.

There is no thrill in moviedom like people seeing themselves on the screen for the first time. Jamaicans had never ever seen themselves on the screen, their lives represented on the screen. The first time that it happens it produces this unbelievable audience reaction, like nothing else ever could.

This is not to imply that The Harder They Come is a simplistic film catering solely to the most primitive needs; taken as a societal self-portrait it’s actually pretty worldly and layered.

Based roughly on the career of a real-life celebrity criminal, it’s a film that follows the standard “antihero” formula: letting the audience vent their resentments and “know better” at the same time.

Jimmy Cliff’s “Ivan” is a ne’er-do-well wannabe singer whose ambitions are so frustrated by the exploitative music industry and the everyday realities of Jamaican poverty that he eventually drifts into becoming a murderous outlaw, vaguely entangled in the “ganja” trade. His infamy turns him into a folk hero and his song becomes a hit. He embarrasses all the petty authorities by the swagger with which he outruns and outguns them; the harder they come, the harder they fall — at least in the fantasy he’s trying to live out. The mass audience within the film, as outside it, roots for his rebellious violence against the whole corrupt system, roots for his single-minded commitment to the poor man’s dream of being someone who counts, a celebrity, a big shot. Then he gets inevitably gunned down, like Butch Cassidy or Bonnie and Clyde; this, too, is what he and the audience expect and want.

The final shootout is actually intercut with shots of raucous, delighted Jamaican moviegoers. In one sense, these are the admirers in Ivan’s head, the imaginary audience for whom his whole spree has been a performance. In another sense they are the actual society within the movie, living vicariously through his criminal exuberance. And at another level they are a nod to the actual audience actually watching this actual movie: the mirror of art brought to an absolute head, a depiction of the viewer in the moment of viewing. It’s like the movie ends by cheering for itself; the whole thing has been a cheer, simultaneously cynical and heartfelt.

But I, here in the USA in 2016, am way, way on the outside of that cheer. Trying to imagine that I am on the inside is just an exercise. It will never be an aesthetic immediacy, for me.


2. I can let it be whatever it happens to be to me.

Unfortunately that’s not very much. I can appreciate that the Jamaican accent and speech patterns and attitude are warm and melodious, but the whole manner makes me disengage; it feels somehow like nobody thinks anything they’re saying or doing really matters. I know that’s not the case, but I can’t deny that it’s how my American ears process it.

It’s not a film by or for primitive minds, but it is a primitive film by any normal technical standards, performed by unskilled non-actors and with all the hallmarks of a very low budget. These kinds of factors are significant not because expensive sets and lights and performers have cachet in themselves, but because the more advanced the execution, the more universal the product. Just as money is a universal standard for value, the things money can buy tend to enable communication in more universal terms. A cheap little third-world movie like this has to rely fundamentally on the existing human value-exchange systems of its particular culture. That’s not at all a bad thing, but it is a boundary.

Both literally and figuratively, I have a hard time understanding these people, and the movie isn’t speaking in any voice other than the voice of these people. It can’t afford to and it doesn’t want to anyway.

In the commentary, Henzell talks about his interest in capturing real things on film as they are, and not constructing sets or hiring trained actors. He says proudly that a scene in a Kingston arcade was shot simply by walking in and filming whatever was really going on there that night. That kind of access is of value to me, and it’s true that this film is built out of such footage; it lets me experience places and people that I would never otherwise experience. When I saw the arcade scene the second time, while listening to the commentary, I thought, “yeah, he’s right, it’s fascinating to get to take a virtual stroll into this place and check out what’s going on.” And yet in the course of watching the movie I hadn’t been able to appreciate that, because it had told me it was a story, and I was trying to watch it that way.

Had the same footage been presented as a documentary I would have been able to get so much more out of it. Every film is, in an esoteric sense, a documentary about what was really going on in certain places at certain moments. The question is whether the film indicates, by its body language, that this way of watching is intended, is desired. Black Orpheus, which has a lot in common with The Harder They Come, made very clear to the audience that it was offering a poetic form of virtual tourism at least as much as it was offering fiction. The Harder They Come seems in retrospect to have had some of the same intentions, but it didn’t make the gestures. Or if it did I didn’t pick up on them.

I found this movie extraordinarily difficult to get through. It took four or five false starts over the course of a full year before I finally managed to see it through to the end, and even then I was in something of a stupor. There’s something stupefying about it, exactly as there is something stupefying to me about the anthropological rooms at the art museum; I can only look at Polynesian idols and Greek pottery for so long before I exhaust the spontaneous artistic response they provoke in me and become aware of myself standing in a room alone with some “interesting” objects. They are not mine and I am not theirs; that’s okay. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. We can’t all be one another’s.

I have borne this “interesting” film with me for a year and have now finally fulfilled it.


I wrote everything above before finishing the commentary. Here’s something Perry Henzell says at the very end:

It’s two movies, Harder They Come, two totally different movies. In Europe and America and Japan, it’s a movie for college audiences who are sophisticated enough to want a glimpse into another world. In the other world that they’re glimpsing into, like Brazil, Africa, Caribbean, and so on, it plays to people who, you know, are poor people living in slums, living in the conditions that the movie represents, and it plays like Kung Fu.

I guess I will try to hold it as a point of pride (?) that despite falling squarely in the first demographic, I nonetheless instinctively tried to watch the second movie. And failed.


In America, the most lasting mark left by this movie is that its soundtrack was decisive in introducing reggae to the masses, much like what the soundtrack of Black Orpheus had done for bossa nova.

There’s no instrumental underscore, just songs. The obvious choice for our selection is the title song, which we get to watch sung live in the studio, in its entirety. From the commentary we learn that this was the first time the song had ever been performed.


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October 22, 2015

82. Hamlet (1948)

directed by Laurence Olivier
written by William Shakespeare
text edited by Alan Dent

2000: 082 box 1

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Criterion #82.


Trailers can be kind of funny sometimes.


This “Hamlet” is a good and rewarding play. Though it’s not always clear why things are happening.

It was during a high school English discussion on the subject of “Why is Hamlet acting this way?” that I realized that I took issue with the premises of English Class. It seemed to me that asking why fictional characters did what they did, and answering with speculation about their inner lives, was not really the study of literature at all — it was the make-believe study of make-believe psychology. And this was an odd thing to find happening at school, because the subject of human emotions was one in which we were not openly being educated, and about which I frankly doubted most of my teachers, my English teacher among them, to be very comfortable or perceptive.

In any case it was certainly absurd that the person chosen as the subject for an inquiry into the interior life would be Hamlet Prince of Denmark, who was no more than a series of speeches, a piece of a puppet show, a fiction, a being in the same existential category as Tweety Bird.

There is no ultimate assurance that Hamlet’s words and actions are psychologically coherent. They cohere only insofar as they are all in “Hamlet.” Arguing about him as a person seemed to me the same kind of geeky retrofitting as when people concoct technical justifications for stuff that happened yesterday, in willful disregard of the fact that the one and only correct answer is staring them in the face: it happened because the authors thought that it would make for a good show. There is no “why;” the only real question is whether the show worked for you. If it worked, the “why” has already been resolved; if it didn’t work, a “why” won’t help.

(In the years since high school, my attitude about these issues has complicated a fair bit, but I still feel the anti-psychological point of view as an important one.)

From this point of view, I dare say that “Hamlet” has been buoyed to the status of “the world’s most famous play” (per the lisping trailer above) by virtue of the fact that it does not completely work. It is built in a way that feels deeply intelligent but still confusing, thus seeming to invite endless vital argument:

After 400 years it’s time to really figure this stuff out, right? What really is Hamlet’s deal? Why is he being like this? For that matter, what’s Gertrude’s deal? What’s the ghost’s deal? Why is nobody around Hamlet capable of understanding him at least as well as the audience does? What does it all mean?

These are not questions about people, but about the workings of a play. The fact that this play has been produced tens of thousands of times and always with an eye to discovering and revealing “new insights” is a sure sign that the play itself does not fully function in any particular way and that there are no right answers to the confusion that it elicits.

William Shakespeare has definitely put some really marvelous stuff on the page — barring a few boring bits. But it’s marvelous principally as a kind of ritual, a garment that we are free to put on. “To be, or not to be, that is the question!” WOOOOOO YOU GO!

The difference between live theater and movies is that in live theater, the physical fact of a ritual being enacted is itself the reward. It’s right and good for such rituals to be full of mystery; we go to be a part of them, and we are mysteries to ourselves. But in a movie there is no such participation, and no ritual. As an audience member I cannot readily access any sense of occasion in the goings-on. The movie was made at various points in the past and now exists outside of time and outside of human tradition. There’s just a communique, which comes in a discrete block with no gaps: I, the movie, proclaim myself thus. So this Hamlet on film is does not embody any necessary ancient formal protocol, full of human mysteries. It’s just a movie, this movie. Its gaps read to me as gaps.

Why is he saying that? What’s that supposed to mean? Why are we still paying attention to this guy? Who really cares about Ophelia? Why is she even in this?

I think Olivier understood that this burden was upon him, and tried very hard to keep alive the sense of theatrical occasion by conveying a sense of ceremony, of supernatural order, through the visual. It’s shot in etched German-expressionist black-and-white, with heavy emphasis on several recurring architectural forms, spiral staircases and Romanesque arches (see below), meant to give a sense of the tragedy looming toward, and suspended within, abstraction. Fine. But at the center of the picture there’s still these pesky people and their dialogue.

The performances are boldly delineated, but never truly formalistic — these do still seem to be human beings, dealing in human affairs. And so when they don’t quite act like human beings, I naturally wondered: huh? That “huh” came honestly from the only place I know how to sit as an audience member.

Insofar as this is a good movie of a good play, it’s not an institution, it’s a distinct dramatic creation unto itself. Whenever the production seemed to make appeals to the audience’s admiration for the grand institution of “Hamlet,” I felt the point was being missed. In movies, any value and significance has to become apparent through the drama, and not vice versa. I like that about movies; I like that those are the terms. They’re just surprisingly unforgiving terms for the hallowed works of William Shakespeare.


That said, I was only in a position to think these things at all because the movie is in fact quite well done. It’s attractive, well acted, intelligent. It is not bland; it has verve, and pockets of real depth. I much preferred it to Henry V, which felt to me like a completely superfluous movie, despite all the technicolor razzmatazz. This is a good Hamlet. And maybe the upshot of all my musing above is that there is no such thing as a perfect Hamlet.

But it’s very much just A Hamlet. Whereas Back to the Future II is THE Back to the Future II. Yes, that may be an insurmountable obstacle, but all the same, there it is, weighing this thing down as a movie — and what is it if not a movie?

And hey, maybe it’s not an insurmountable obstacle. Why prejudge? Perhaps some director will come along some day and render this play into THE Hamlet as surely and irrevocably as Disney rendered Snow White into Snow White. Presuming that such a thing is impossible does nobody any favors, including Shakespeare. Shakespeare is doing just fine without our pre-emptive deference. Or oops, rather, he’s dead. He’s doing terribly. He’s dead no matter what we do. So go to town, boys. (Except you, Baz Luhrmann, you should sit this one out.)


This is our second Best Picture Academy Award winner from Criterion, out of only six in the whole Collection. That’s fine with me; nobody actually loves the Best Picture winners. Hamlet slots comfortably into that category.


Music is again by William Walton; the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Muir Mathieson. The main title doesn’t end properly — Laurence starts talking before it’s over — so our selection is the funeral march with which the movie ends. (Spoiler!) It’s basically the same material as the main title, and is all in the clear except for some walking sounds and five cannon blasts, which I think we can all handle.

Once again Walton turns out something of high taste and quality but a bit too staid.


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October 19, 2015

81. Luci del varietà (1950)

directed by Alberto Lattuada and Federico Fellini
story by Federico Fellini
screenplay by Federico Fellini, Alberto Lattuada, and Tullio Pinelli

2000: 081 box 1 (OOP as of 11/07)
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Criterion #81: Variety Lights. Accurate translation, of course, but awkward in English. Maybe they should have just kept it in Italian. They let La dolce vita stand; I think we could all handle Luci del varietà.

I mean, what does “variety lights” mean, exactly? My guess is: not just any one thing. The phrase only occurs in a song, which you’re about to see performed. According to the subtitles:

Variety lights, shining like stars
Because I love you so
The magic of love is in the heart
Variety lights, may you have love and happiness
This is happiness…

So you tell me what it means. Are the performers touting themselves as being “lights” of the variety stage? I think so. Or maybe they’re referring to actual stage lights and singing about the magic of the theater. Or just lights in the soul. Whatever — the sentiment is certainly clear enough.

Anyway, I’ve been referring to this movie as Luci del varietà and you should too.


Seems like everyone agrees I should be putting trailers in these entries, and I’m game. But this movie doesn’t have an extant trailer as far as I can tell; not on the disc, not on Youtube. (Mind you, the entire movie is on Youtube! But no trailer.)

Still, I want to try to get this ball rolling, so in lieu of an official trailer, here’s a 2-minute makeshift sampler assembled from bits of the opening scene by some Youtube user. Good enough to serve for present purposes.


Right from this first scene, I was touched by how knowingly and humanely this movie depicts theater as something profoundly pathetic, in the richest sense of the word. In the theater, the homely and mediocre is somehow magical, and what purports to be magical is irredeemably homely and mediocre.

I’ve done a lot of, shall we say, pathetic things in my time, and I very well recognized that stage, that orchestra pit, that audience — and the camera’s eye was with me. I had the wonderful sense that the cinematic attention was doing exactly the “looking around” that I would be doing if I were there. When a film is working perfectly, it feels like the camera is responding to my every subconscious impulse, and at least for the first few minutes of Luci del varietà, it did. It’s a beautiful sequence. The chopped-up version above doesn’t do it full justice.

When Waiting for Guffman came out I was utterly delighted to be seeing the familiar world of amateur theater lovingly parodied on the big screen. This is obviously a different sort of movie about a different sort of show, but it covers some of the same territory of pathos and was similarly gratifying to me. I feel like it’s one of the best “show business” movies I’ve seen: it is resolutely neither glamorous nor cynical. Show business might be a little happy, a little sad, but it isn’t good or bad. It’s just this way.

It makes sense that the world of the theater is the nexus where the two characteristic streams of Italian art cinema meet — neo-realism and carnival fantasy. In the theater the earthbound and the fantastic are embodied one in the other. And also, this world of showbiz is the real-life world of the filmmakers; it’s the world in which their reality and their fantasies coexist. I’m sure everyone working on this movie had lived it to some degree.

It had a strangely melancholic effect on me.

I was surprised at how affected I was by the implicit poignancy of a plot which, at heart, is all about fact that the very beautiful woman has a different status and fate from everyone around her. Something about the quasi-realist style made her movie-star looks feel imbued with almost unfair power and significance, as they would be in real life. Most movies just fill the screen with the prettiest people they can find, and the audience gets to comfortably rest their eyes on a blemishlessness that subconsciously relieves them of their own beauty anxieties. But here it was just the opposite; it was somehow painful that she had one of those perfect faces. Everyone in the movie is portrayed as ordinary-looking except for this one rather dippy person who is undeniably magnetic to look at — intoxicating to our protagonist Checco — and as a result seems to float untouchably through their lives toward a higher destiny. Yes, that destiny may turn out to be made of tinsel, but there’s still a sting in it for the rest of this world of clowns — to which we, the audience, belong.

By the way: I’m not talking about Giulietta Masina, whom the Criterion packaging claims as “starring.” I’m talking about Carla Del Poggio — the rapturous audience member in the clip — who is the actual female lead. Giulietta Masina is in the smaller role of the protagonist’s longtime girlfriend and dramatically-correct partner, from whom he strays as he becomes increasingly tantalized by Del Poggio’s charmed status. I get that Masina is beloved from her later Fellini roles, but trying to sell the movie by claiming that she’s the star is disingenuous. The star of the movie is in fact Peppino De Filippo. (Seen singing above.)

Similarly, the claim on the Criterion site that this is “Federico Fellini’s stunning debut film (directed in collaboration with neorealist filmmaker Alberto Lattuada)” is unfair. I gather from the Italian Wikipedia page that in fact this is very much a Lattuada movie, with Fellini’s primary contribution being as writer.

For what it’s worth, these two complaints are linked: Masina was Fellini’s wife, Del Poggio was Lattuada’s.

Tell ’em, Google translate:

“I do not understand – said Lattuada – because later Fellini has ridden the idea that Variety Lights was one more thing that’s mine, stealing somehow the authorship of the film; with all the masterpieces that made ​​does not need to Variety Lights to prop up his reputation.” Even two of the performers, and Silvio Dante Maggio Bagolini, confirmed this view, albeit with different accents.

Fellini intervened in connection with conflicting statements: “My first film was Variety Lights; directed and the subject were mine,” he said, while on another occasion he said that “the truth did all Lattuada, I only observe.”

They intervened on the subject finally the details of the White Lattuada which explained that the scenes from Fellini were only three: the melancholy of the company away from the lawyer’s house at dawn, meeting with black trumpet player in the night Roman and the awakening of the poor to the hotel. In defining the making of the film “seven tough weeks and unforgettable,” the Lattuada remembered that “the presence of Fellini on the set was quite humble, never went into the editing room and left the set a few days before the end of the shoot.”

(“White Lattuada” is the director’s sister Bianca, who served as production manager.)

Alberto Lattuada seems to be little known outside of Italy but that’s no reason for Criterion to downplay him. They of all people should know better. (They did eventually include another Lattuada film in the collection.)


This is at heart a very traditional kind of story built on very traditional material, but with just the right touch of modern humanistic nuance, I thought. Or at least very nearly just the right touch — there is still perhaps a bit of slack here and there, and some corn. But it has that splendid opening scene, a similarly warmly-observed party sequence in the middle, and a wonderfully unredemptive glimpse of “big time” showbiz near the end. Those three bits by themselves make it admirable to me. And there’s other good stuff in there. But most of all there’s the sweet melancholy of theater, the most absurd of the arts.

Theater is too absurd ever to fully succeed, too absurd ever to fully fail. The movie knew that, and reminded me that I knew it too.


Music by Felice Lattuada, the director’s father, in a competent operetta style, a bit old-fashioned. Conducted by Franco Ferrara. Here’s the main title.


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September 28, 2015

80. The Element of Crime (1984)

directed by Lars Von Trier
written by Lars von Trier and Niels Vørsel

2000: 080 box 1

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Criterion #80.


Prolegomenon
to this particular entry
after a minor hiatus

I was just looking at one of those sites that sells a bazillion indie computer games that nobody’s ever heard of, and I thought: “Man, there are a bazillion of these things. I’ve been trying to make a point of playing them and writing about them like there aren’t, like the one I’m writing about is in some way important. But I think that might be making me crazy. It’s good to acknowledge that there are a bazillion of things that there are a bazillion of.”

If I declared that here on my B-Log I was going to write a separate entry about each and every M&M I eat — that’s a fine project with a book deal built into it — it would be right and good for me to always keep in mind that M&Ms are plentiful. And let my writing reflect that.

That is, to remember that an individual M&M has only one “m” on it. So too does any given book, movie or game have only one “m” on it.

That goes for those horrid ones with arms and legs, too.

Speaking of which, here’s an apparently true sentence that made me laugh when I read it a few hours ago:

“On September 24, 1982, the Care Bears franchise was launched in New York City before members of the area’s Society of Security Analysts.”

I’m picturing something like The Witches.

Now on to our scheduled programming.



On the disc, there’s a documentary of Lars Von Trier being quite relatable, personable, not at all the smug provocateur I had been taught to be wary of. I’ve never seen any of his other movies (except for The Five Obstructions, which doesn’t really count). Here I saw him being nervous, nervy, but basically humane and well-intentioned and sensitive, and felt comfortable, retroactively, with the movie I had just watched.

It’s a high-fangled film-schooler moonshot, Von Trier’s first movie, something made by some very young guys with big big artistic ambitions. They mostly succeed. Yeah, there are some problems with proportion, and maybe also problems with funness, but I admire the moxie and the love of craft and the basic, undeniable level of aesthetic achievement. Willfully unappetizing though it may all be.

Actually I can’t even complain that the aesthetics are of no value to me, because that’s not true. I’m interested in trance and hypnosis and states of consciousness between waking and sleep, and so is the movie. That’s the explicit justification for the high-MTV bad-dream stylings — the protagonist gets put under hypnosis at the very beginning, to explore his repressed memories. But I think it’s also the actual rationale for all the artsy choices, and I respect that.

The whole thing is a sopping yellow nightmare, the slow dripping sickly kind of nightmare that never makes quite enough sense or reaches quite enough of a crisis to wake you up. It’s all shot in Piss Christ underwater sepia and its attention oozes around nauseously like your mind when you’ve got the flu. That’s the project and that’s basically the achievement. Hooray, you did it!

You might read that The Element of Crime is a “take” on detective-movie conventions, but I came to it expecting post-modern gamesmanship (or some kind of Alphaville gaseousness) when in fact it’s not at all like that. It’s really just that its subconscious has been fed some movies and is using them to give form to its uneasy arthouse dream, which is another sort of beast entirely. If you’re here for “neo-noir,” you’re outta luck. Sure, there’s a crime and an investigation and a solution and a twist and all that, but they only function the way those things do in my real-life dreams: as borrowed bodies for my churning emotions. I admire how conscientiously it’s been done, in fact. In the abstract.

In the actual viewing, though — when I don’t “admire,” I just watch — all it could be was, at best, simply like having one of those dreams. Except not half so intense, because it’s just a movie. I respect the effort but maybe Von Trier aimed a little high for his first film (“hey look at me everybody!”) — it’s like he deliberately addressed himself to the most incommunicable experiential state he could, the feverish sub-dream. Something of it comes across, but of course it’s not the thing itself, just a careful evocation of it. Given how bodily overwhelming the thing itself is — and how that’s the point — a mere evocation feels a bit pale and conceptual.

Having seen the interviews on the disc, I’m sure Von Trier was getting at stuff that was true for him, that he pulled up from an honest place inside. The psychology of the plot is, I see in retrospect, fairly astute. I’ve sent a lot of people to the video of Fritz Perls telling a woman to say “I” about each of the elements of her dream, to recognize them each as a facet of herself. She’s recounting a hopeful dream. This is basically the nightmare version of same: The world is horrifying, eh? Now say “I,” “I am horrifying.”

I believe in that. But this is not in the least a therapeutic movie. Like I said about Autumn Sonata: the writer’s psychological insight hits its limit, and then we’re left with the authoritative assertion of the inevitability of whatever scares him. That said, it was relatable. I found the very final moments of The Element of Crime effective and unnerving.

I can relate to what scares Lars Von Trier. Let’s call it “I.”

This is all meant to be enthusiastic faint praise, and not more. I admired it, with some condescension, and only very slightly enjoyed it. It was, to be honest, a bit tedious. It’s a mega-artsy first film about being in a nauseating monochromatic trance. Do the math.

Basically, it’s no Mary Poppins. But it has its virtues.

You know, like Bedknobs and Broomsticks.


Music is by Bo Holten. It’s all trudging, ominous lugubriousness, exactly in keeping with the visuals and as such does its assignment very well. Hooray for you, too!

There are some much longer, more hair-raising cues than the following, but not a single piece of music is entirely in the clear — every musical moment has been layered with either muttering or sound effects. In fact even this selection is just the exposed tail end of a cue that had been running under a scene of dialogue. And even this has some sfx. But it’s what there is; everything else was even less usable. Anyway it’s all very much in the same vein.

This is the music from the “dead horse hanging from a crane” scene. Which I’m just now reading is a visual quote from Eisenstein. I wasn’t aware. But I was aware that opening shot of a struggling horse was a direct quote from Andrei Rublev.

Film-schoolers, like I said.


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July 8, 2015

79. W.C. Fields: 6 Short Films (1915, 1930, 1932–1933)

2000: 079 box 1 (OOP 4/2013)

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Criterion #79.


This is a DVD transfer of a Voyager laserdisc not initially published under the Criterion banner. The very last such, in fact; copyright 1995 but reportedly not released until 1998, after the Voyager Company proper had already been dissolved. I went and looked at the catalog of Voyager non-Criterion laserdiscs and there’s all sorts of odd stuff in there. (The Best of TED 2 (1990)?!)

The DVD, like its laserdisc predecessor, has no bonus features, and the essay is uninspired.


1) Pool Sharks (1915)

directed by Edwin Middleton
[written by W.C. Fields]

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I watched it and immediately wrote:

Mean-spirited, asinine, and lazily put together. See young W.C. Fields as a normal-looking guy who wasn’t predestined to be a piggish alcoholic creep — he just made himself turn out that way. All the pointless knockabout finger-in-the-eye crap seen here is leading him in that direction.

He just seems like a jerk. You want to believe that jerks will get their comeuppance and I tend to feel he did, by turning into a cartoon snowman.

But comedy is a strange beast and, I suppose, so am I. There’s more than one way to plug in to a farce, more than one place to stand in relation to the laugh. I don’t mind laughing at the petty brutality of men as long as I believe that I’m laughing along with the clowns. So: am I? Was W.C. Fields a sad and angry man with an unreflective belief in showbiz, or a hopeful man who wanted to poke fun at sadness and anger? Are those necessarily different things?

The more comfortable I get with myself, the more I understand that all my responses to anything are fleeting and eccentric. And so are everyone else’s, so criticism as a discipline doesn’t really exist. When I looped back to the beginning to grab frames after having watched the whole disc, the soul of this first outing seemed to have moved in the right direction. Maybe all the knockabout is just like kids playing, and maybe that’s fine.

The Raymond Rohauer-ized sloppy organ music and tacky intertitles, added much later, don’t help it at all. The music sets the tone in silents, and this music sets a tone of distracted, uninterested insensitivity. Maybe W.C. deserved better. Or at least I did.


2) The Golf Specialist (1930)

directed by Monte Brice
[written by W.C. Fields]

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15 years later, still wearing a bad Charlie Chaplin moustache. The man liked golf, had a golf stage routine, and here it is, past its prime, being somewhat clumsily put to film after having been perfected (and exhausted) by decades of vaudeville use.

That’ll be a good description of all of the remaining films. This is like seeing some dinosaur band from the 70s that’s still touring, still singing their one big hit. One one hand, the routines have the benefit of years of familiarity and confidence; on the other hand, by the time he got around to filming this stuff, Fields’ relationship to the material has gotten so professional and removed that the clear eye of the camera is unflattering. Practiced vaudevillians — and one can still observe this at circuses and in magicians, party clowns, and all the street and amusement-park performers who do their act every hour on the hour — develop a kind of well-oiled superhuman efficiency that defies psychological viewing. They are not unicycling or juggling or clowning as a person, quite, but more as a kind of person-shaped ritualistic being with no interior. This has the virtue of seeming magical, but the price is that it is completely dependent on that magic. Pop the balloon and the show is suddenly very hollow, very sad. The cold scrutiny of film can be destructive in that regard. In close-up there’s not a lot of magic to be seen here, just a jowly man who used to do this stuff every hour on the hour.

The movie has a circus seediness that stands apart from the seediness of the persona and actually detracts from it. Or at least it did for me.

Of course, maybe that magic has to be brought and I just wasn’t bringing it. I know that when I was a kid I loved the anti-psychological ritualism of comedy, loved it as arbitrary rhythmic stuff to memorize that stood in absurdly for people. And surely W.C. Fields did too; that’s what all the peculiar non sequiturs and silly names are for. In this film, “J. Effingham Bellweather” is a wanted man, with a Woody Allen list of crimes:

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Exactly that kind of stuff would be funny to me if a) it were funnier, and b) I weren’t already on the defensive against all these damn carnies.


3) The Dentist (1932)

directed by Leslie Pearce
[written by W.C. Fields]

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The remaining four films were produced right in a row by Mack Sennett — the very last things he did before his career ended in bankruptcy — and distributed by Paramount. These all star the iconic, cranky, moustacheless Fields.

The routine here is “An Episode at the Dentist’s,” as performed in “Earl Carroll’s Vanities,” a Ziegfeld knockoff show from 1928. (This is the skit for which Mr. William C. Fields was taken to court for cruelty to a canary. That’s the kind of thing that a commentary track could talk about, if there were one.)

As you might imagine, W.C. Fields is a rather insensitive dentist. Some golf has also been stuck in there.

This film can be summarized by the immortal line of dialogue:


4) The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933)

directed by Clyde Bruckman
[written by W.C. Fields]

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Suddenly this. Here’s where my response started to shift.

This was a centerpiece of the “W.C. Fields as counterculture icon” phenomenon in the 60s. At one level it’s a straightforward parody of sentimental melodramas and morality plays, but the target is so soft and the delivery so slow and deadpan that most of it feels like a pure surrealism.

The underlying soul in this case can be imagined, if you’re so inclined, to be knowing and weary and philosophical in its absurdism. Poor W.C. Fields, having to live on Earth among the tawdry things of man. So the 60s wanted to believe. But I think it’s actually just the same old performer-as-marionette act described above, caught on a different day.

It’s a pretty good day. I particularly liked the bit when Fields is filling his mouth to the brim with two different kinds of bread while his son emotes.

The routine was called “The Stolen Bonds” and comes from the same 1928 revue as the preceding, though one wonders if the basic material might well have been floating around a lot longer. The archetype of which this is a parody is surely from 1890 or earlier.

I’d never seen this before but somewhere I’m certain I’d seen the famous running gag reenacted. (“And it ain’t a fit night out for man or beast.” [: snow in the face]) Where was that? Does Woody Allen do it in Love and Death? Is it in Airplane? It certainly informed them both.

“Fine, fine,” I thought, “I guess W.C. Fields did some good in the world after all.”


5) The Pharmacist (1933)

directed by Arthur Ripley
story by W.C. Fields

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This was my favorite one. Based on a 1925 Ziegfeld routine.

I was tickled not just by the performance but the mere fact of the bit where the inevitable “thing that bothers him” is having to listen to his daughter on the phone with “Cuthbert.” (“No, Cuthbert! Really, Cuthbert? Well who told you that, Cuthbert? Oh, Cuthbert… oh, Cuthbert, that’s very very funny!”)

Most of all I laughed out loud at the sight gag about the free giveaway. I won’t spoil it.

I think this one worked best for me because even the character of the protagonist is up for grabs. Is he in the wrong? In the right? Surrounded by morons? A moron himself? Whatever works; it’s just nonsense time. “And now for something completely different.” I feel immeasurably more at home in that environment than I do in the lair of a jerk.


6) The Barber Shop (1933)

directed by Arthur Ripley
story by W.C. Fields

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Retreads a lot of the same ground as The Pharmacist and The Dentist. (Not to mention The Bank Dick.) I like the zaniness spectrum that extends all the way from the sweet hominess of him delighting in his son’s terrible cat jokes to the Daliesque surrealism of the reproducing doublebass… but the centerpiece is torture with a dull razor and, as with the dentist’s drill, I don’t quite get the joke. Is it supposed to be the gratuitousness of the whole schtick? Maybe my nerves have been too dulled by the harsher stuff of later generations for me to giggle at the perversity of my torment, as I’m supposed to? I don’t know. I’m stretching.

The needless recurrences in comedy seem strangely telling, though I couldn’t say quite what they’re telling. Here is a partial catalogue of William Claude Dukenfield’s dream consciousness:

• A figure of benevolent authority is actually not competent or worthy of trust.
• A bank robber is miraculously foiled.
• A daughter is seeing a doofus against her father’s wishes. The father eventually gives up.
• Golf.


I’m not really going anywhere with this because I don’t feel it. As I’ve done before, I’ll just type up the list of topics I’m not pursuing and that’ll do the job for me.

• The “implicit sympathies” of a particular cultural moment, and the differences in implicit sympathies between then and now.
• The legacy of vaudeville / the extremely protracted death and transfiguration of vaudeville.
• The mimetic status of the “skit.” The mimetic status of the “short.” The mimetic status of a single joke.
• The trope lexicon of middlebrow humor; the in-itself significance of recruiting things from outside the standard lexicon (e.g. the existential “meaning” of a cockatoo or a doublebass appearing in this context; or see the absurdist list of crimes above).
• The condition of all humor as stemming from the subconscious of the purveyor, and thus the purity of Fields’s “noncommittal” approach. / But: the burden on the audience to share the subconscious of the comedian or else see the humor simply as a symptom.
•• The destructive effect to society as a whole created by the application of broader and broader communication technologies to non-overlapping psychologies. In god’s eyes there are no jokes, nothing to snicker at; from the god’s-eye-view of the global internet era we have boxed ourselves out of our own senses of humor, which is nothing less than our own smallness.

Aren’t you glad I didn’t go there? Orange you glad I didn’t say “mimetic status”?


Main title from The Fatal Glass of Beer, composer/musicians unknown. (Head of the music department at Mack Sennett’s production company was apparently one Bernie Grossman but I don’t think that means he necessarily did much of the composing.)

There are cute “comedy” band cues at the start and finish of all the sound films, but I like to pick original music whenever possible and I doubt any of that music was original — it sounds like roughly spliced library music, probably from earlier Sennett productions, or perhaps even bought from other studios. Who knows. Whereas the present bit of parody “old-time” music has clearly been made special to order for the throwback parody melodrama of The Fatal Glass of Beer. The sound of the Mack Sennett logo dog barking at the top there confirms that this music isn’t the result of later meddling by the distributors (as reportedly some of it is).

Sounds like this was done as cheaply as possible: two musicians making it up on the spot.


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June 30, 2015

78. The Bank Dick (1940)

directed by Edward Cline
written by “Mahatma Kane Jeeves” (W.C. Fields)

2000: 078 box 1 (out of print September 2004)
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Criterion #78.


After decades of fake W.C. Fieldses, I finally saw the real thing. And sure enough, it’s a thing that cries out to be imitated. This is a man who deliberately rendered himself impression-worthy. Insofar as his caginess and cruelty and melodious drawling is a vaudeville act, I’m all for it. There’s something inspired and almost hypnotic about the way the “W.C. Fields” schtick is glum and gritty yet at the same time, in its elocutional filigree, airy and unreal. It feels to me like a holdover from a 19th-century sense of humor; it has something of the Mark Twain school about it. I enjoy getting that kind of Rosetta Stone access to the entertainment culture of a more distant past, since pre-20th-century humor can often seem like an uncrackable nut.

However, in this particular movie — Fields’s second-to-last — I couldn’t find any real mirth. Even when in theory I liked the material and endorsed the idea of “W.C. Fields” doing it, I was still saddened and oppressed by the fact that the man onscreen was so obviously a genuine depressive alcoholic, doing his murky best to stay on the ball and give the people what they came for, even though by this point in life his drinking had mostly consumed him. All his physical comedy is artifical and inexpert; all the verbal play comes across as slack and distracted. His performance is generally labored and sloppy.

But mostly the problem is his eyes. You can barely see them; they’ve been swallowed up by the heavy mask of impassive meat that his face has become. How can there be comedy without eyes, without openness? He’s presented as some kind of protagonist, an antihero or a clown or something, but all I can see is the deadening sadness that’s turned him into an inexpressive pigface. He can’t even rate “buffoon”; he’s too far away. This is someone who has fled almost completely into his interior, out of sight. Look: even the cartoon Fields in the title card above has no eyes, or soul, to speak of. He’s just an outline with a big nose. The movie shuttles this expressionless caricature back and forth like a paper doll, in apparent attempt to generate Laffs by static electricity.


Shemp Howard is in the movie, playing the bartender (and occasionally whistling the Three Stooges theme): another face like a slab of beef, always depressing to me for the same reasons. The eyes of the Three Stooges are spiritually drained, inexpressive, even when they’re pulling “wacky” faces. There’s no disguising that they are utterly walled-off inside, even from their own comedy. The very fact that there is a wide audience of people who chortle and cheer at their dead-eyed simulacrum of zaniness — or for that matter at The Bank Dick, which is in fact quite beloved — saddens me in itself. Why can’t people see what I can see, that this is all a grim charade by a bunch of guys who aren’t fully present? I get scared that it’s because my fellow audience members are dead inside too, and so can’t afford to distinguish between a person and a “person.” I don’t want to go among such people.

This movie had that heavy working-class feeling of rough, narrow laughter emanating from a resentful worldview. The most famous line from the movie is, apparently, this one, where Fields asks the bartender:


I can hear that it’s a well-formed vaudeville joke in the classic style, that it’s pleased with itself and confident as such… but I’ve been over this many times in my head and I just don’t think it’s actually as funny as the delivery (and fame) seems to imply. At a Chico and Groucho pace, rattled off in 6 seconds, I could get behind this as a cute twist punchline, but drawn out to 15 seconds as it is, it feels like the emphasis is on the real substance, on the psychology and character of this man for whom a memory-erasing $20 bender ($20 1940 = $335.44 2015) is a matter of course. I stop wanting to laugh, and I start getting uncomfortable with the people who do, who want to spend 15 seconds in this self-destructive space.

Try saying “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I don’t know” — but take 10 seconds to do it. The joke disappears and the line becomes sort of ominous, doesn’t it? What’s wrong with this man? What is he getting at?

(I just had the impulse to check the two deliveries against a metronome. Groucho’s pacing is, to my ear, very clearly at 80 bpm. W.C. is doing 48 bpm.)


W.C. Fields in this movie feels to me very close to the line of personhood throughout, but usually on the wrong side of it. I was always rooting for him to really show up and spit poison, or honey — or deadpan pointedly — but it never quite happened. His eyes never sparkle and back up the persona. He just sort of drifts around like an alcoholic. An actual alcoholic.

Of course, all these kinds of fears and sadnesses are just my own personal burden and may not have to do with anything real. It’s possible that The Bank Dick will seem inoffensive and amusing somewhere down the line when I’m in a different state of mind. But I don’t think I’m wrong in being aware that this is W.C. Fields past his prime and trying to hold it together. Probably it would have been better to start with his earlier work and develop a sense of trust in him as a performer before getting into this late stuff. On the other hand, perhaps it was good to start here — now everything else will seem lively and vigorous by comparison. Maybe.

We’ll see very shortly!


To be fair, there’s some lightly funny stuff. I liked the “hearty handclasp” and the “paisley shawl” and the silly names. I liked when Una Merkel comes in at the beginning and nasals “hello” to everyone. She seems to be amusing herself. (The maid from The Parent Trap! Boy, I would never have been able to come up with that.)

It could have been worse. Maybe someday I’ll be sleepier and it will come on TV and all seem hilarious.


Connection to the preceding: gosh, this is hard. I just barely retained the preceding movie.

They each star a screen icon much better known for being “a screen icon” than for any actual work he/she did.

That’s lame but it’s what there is.


The Criterion disc has no bonus features whatsoever. Furthermore it’s been OOP since 2004 and is unavailable from any of my sources. Given these two facts I have allowed myself absolutely unprecedented license and watched this movie on the currently available non-Criterion edition. Insert as many exclamation points here as you feel are merited, and then please do compare closely and see if you don’t agree that in this case the substitution was indeed harmless.

Except of course for the harm done to my integrity, my reputation, my trust. From here on down the slippery slope, you’ll no longer be able to believe me when I post about Criterion movies. For all you know I may not even have watched them.

But heck, maybe I haven’t actually watched any of them thus far, either, and have been making up all these “responses” out of whole cloth! That would be quite a twist.


The only music credit is Charles Previn as “musical director.” Charles Previn (André’s great uncle) was head of the music department at Universal, with a stable of staff composers working under him. The word online seems to be that most of the music in The Bank Dick is actually by Frank Skinner (1897–1968), and that some, or maybe all of it, is tracked from other movies.

As far as I can ascertain, the following Main Title is unique to this movie and is probably by Skinner, but these things aren’t well documented. From the sound of it, this piece could just as easily be “Comedy Loop #34” from the Universal library — it sounds a lot like newsreel music. It certainly does not sound like the The Bank Dick, which neither hustles nor bustles.

That all said, I do generally enjoy that old Hollywood newsreel library music — an endless cavalcade of Allegro moderato — and wish there were albums of it. It’s the American spiritual state of the era encapsulated: “well now!” Its vagueness, the way it combines complacency with excitability, is intriguing to me. So I’m quite happy to be adding this track to my Criterion master playlist.


As you’ll hear, I’ve broken another of my protocols, and allowed dialogue into this one. Mostly it’s because I didn’t have a choice, but it was easy for me to rationalize it; for the real vaudeville atmosphere I think a little spoken-word is quite in order. Here we hear two passersby observing our hero’s name on the mailbox.

The “accent grave,” which is a running gag throughout the film, is a big (sic); it’s of course actually an accent aigu on “Egbert Sousé.” Did Fields know? He may have and just not cared. Certainly he was right that “accent grave” is a very W.C. Fieldsy thing to say over and over. Go ahead and try it.


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