Directed by Seijun Suzuki
Screenplay by Kouhan (Yasunori) Kawauchi

Criterion #39.

Tōkyō nagaremono. The English title is Tokyo Drifter.

東京 = Tokyo
流れ者 = nagaremono = stranger, wanderer, tramp

So “Tokyo Drifter” is literal enough, though in English it sounds like someone who drifts around Tokyo. In fact it refers to a man from Tokyo who drifts elsewhere. I’m not sure how to solve that one.

I’ll start with the essay – Criterion always commissions an essay, and the lively one from the 2011 release, by Howard Hampton, is pretentious and insightful and overwritten and satisfying. It’s how I would have them all be — a definite something rather than a nothing. In his flashy, Lester Bangs-y way, Hampton makes the case that this is a valuable and exciting movie, both thrillingly inside and thrillingly outside of the essence of 60s-ness. It’s a fun thing to claim and it’s a fun essay because the claim comes to life before your eyes.

But this is the thing about that sort of cultural writing: the magic act is all Hampton’s, and it depends on his materials seeming banal at first. Luckily for him the materials ARE banal. Which is why his claims aren’t really justified after all. The movie just is what it is: a genial, wacky, flamboyant piece of confusing, confused junk. The rest, the value and the excitement, is just stuff that we can say about it. And that’s fine! I want culture to operate that way. It just is, and then we go out for dessert and drinks, and burn it as fuel for our enthusiastic talk. The enthusiastic talk is the thing. “Can you believe??” Hampton’s essay was just that, for me, and so I was glad to have seen the movie, because then it was converted into fuel for that kind of play. But the notion that the movie, inert, is itself great, is silly. No it’s not.

Also, who cares if it is?

Taste is a racket. I’ve been saying this for a while and it’s useful to me to repeat it. Taste is not how we operate. Thumbs up vs. thumbs down has nothing to do with aesthetic experience. Experience has no thumbs. Experiences that we value do not generally conform to our own ideas of what constitutes “good,” or “worthy,” or “quality.” We just don’t usually feel comfortable admitting it.

In an enlightened enough frame of mind, we might value all experiences that come our way. At my best, I do, in fact, like all these movies. And on the flip side of that, in a bad mood, I don’t like any movies. I don’t want to watch a movie. I’m especially mad at stupid jump ropes! I need a nap.

“Good” and “bad” really have nothing to do with this kind of experience, and this is the only kind there really is. “Good” and “bad” are a racket.

Which is why it’s so needless to say that a movie is “good” when it’s not, it’s actually just fuel. Fuel is what counts!

Well, I just looked back over Hampton’s essay and I see that he never quite claims that it’s good. He just gets very enthused about what he’s saying. So I guess I approve after all. He showed me some tricks for how to burn the fuel. Prior to reading the essay it felt kind of soggy and unburnable to me, but it turned out there was a little heat in it.

Here’s what I got out of the movie: splashy visual flair of the slickest, most commercial sort the 60s had to offer, combined with a surreal disregard for many other things, including, especially, narrative cohesion. Hampton counters by saying that Suzuki’s “insubordination is perfectly coherent as such” but I’m not so sure I detect anything intentionally provocative. As I said last time, I feel pretty comfortable attributing the gonzo detachment to something behind and beyond the auteur. He’s not thumbing his nose at anything as far as I can tell; he’s just genuinely detached.

The movie is intent on playing it cool, and it certainly does that. It’s also not wearing any pants. But it doesn’t seem to know. You murmur uncertainly to the person next to you “do you see what I’m seeing?” It’s the dissonance between the absurdity and the conviction of coolness that draws you in.

Quentin Tarantino has undoubtedly spent some time here. I think I saw some scenes from Kill Bill in there.

To dorks like Quentin I think this kind of movie can be very exciting, because it shows that “cool” is just an act, and it’s an act that doesn’t lose its power even if you are pantsless. In fact it might have more power. The fight scenes here are ridiculous, with a lot of flopping around and falling down and backing toward each other and spinning around. But does that mean they’re not “cool”? How could they not be “cool”? Look at how completely stylish and confident everything about this movie is asserting itself to be! To Tarantino and possibly to Hampton, this kind of “cool” is if anything more cool than the better-coordinated American kind. What could be cooler than wearing your “cool” shades and smoking a “cool” cigarette with a “cool” attitude while sauntering “coolly” through the fake studio snow singing your very own “cool” theme song?

I guess nothing?

The Emperor might as well pop on some shades to go with those new clothes! Ohhhhh yeahhhh!

This movie would be great to play in your hip restaurant where for some reason you feel the need to show a goddamn movie on the wall while people are eating. It looks like great style, it looks like retro, and it’s not really worth watching attentively. And of course it just oozes cultural cred. Cred cred cred! So go ahead, asshole, loop it in your hip hip restaurant, see if I care. I guess I’ll have the farm-to-table portobello-wasabi sliders for $17.50. Fuck you.

Music by Hajime Kaburagi. As Suzuki says in one of the bonus interviews, this is “a pop song movie.” Tetsuya Watari, the lead, sings verses of the theme song at the opening, the close, in the middle, and in character. I was on the verge of simply biting the bullet and putting a song in my mix, but no. A song is a different animal, and doesn’t belong in my zoo. You can hear the entire song here (this is an album version that doesn’t appear in the movie; compare the main titles). For our compilation album I’m offering the actual first cue in the movie, a short instrumental version of the tune. Track 39.

directed by Seijun Suzuki
written by “Hachiro Guryu”

Koroshi no rakuin. The English title is Branded to Kill. But what, exactly, does that mean?

殺し, koroshi = murder, killing
の, no = particle comparable to “of”
烙印, rakuin = mark, brand, stigma

I’m guessing that what this adds up to is something comparable to “The Mark of Cain,” e.g. “The Mark of Murder” or “The Mark of the Killer.” The plot involves a professional killer who after bungling a job becomes himself the target of a killer. Something concise and ambiguous like “Killer’s Mark” that points up the circularity would be a good translation. “Branded to Kill” is not.

Criterion #38.

A sign of our cultural times: artist interviews full of “No, [the thing you just asked about] doesn’t have any special meaning. I just kinda did it, who knows why” — but presented as though this is our enlightening glimpse behind the curtain. (“Huh, think of that! He just kinda did it and it didn’t have any special meaning! A fascinating insight into process!”)

This is a minor symptom of the movement to embrace “low” as “high.” Twenty-first-century man sez: Comic books are art too! Wow Mr. Lee, when you invented the rich and worthy cultural text of Spider-Man, what was the thinking behind giving him no mouth? “I just kinda did it, who knows why.” Wow! Now I know it’s great art because it’s full of mystery!

I don’t think that’s entirely wrong thinking. If there is any single “the thing about art” about art, it’s that an explanation is no match for it.

But I do think it’s entirely wrong thinking to embrace the low AS HIGH. The artist interview is itself an artifact of a Romantic attitude that can only confuse the essence of Spider-Man. Or more accurately: the belief that an inquiry into intentions is obviously relevant… is a Romantic artifact. There’s nothing wrong with a little knowledge, but there is something wrong with the assumption that knowledge is always important.

The Criterion Collection makes me think about the importance of curation, by which I really mean context. I feel a little sad that those words now mean the same thing for film, because I don’t think museums have done our understanding of the visual arts any great good. The sterility and snobbery of “curation” are a little chlorine in your water. Clean clean clean! and it also doesn’t taste good any more. When I look at things like this I can’t help but fixate on the question “did the twit with the stamp have no sense of shame?” Children should be seen and not heard; go to your room!

But that’s common practice. The twit with the stamp is higher than a king. The Grand Federal Doggie pees on each item submitted to the Library of Congress to mark it; you should be so lucky!

Criterion wants to offer you the full Steve Jobs package: the product looks sleek because it is sleek because rest assured it’s been good and curated by the Grand Cosmic Doggie. You are so lucky, consumer! And of course we all know that for movies on DVD, that means a great pageant of the inquiry into intentions: artist interviews, behind-the-scenes, historical context, archival ephemera, accredited experts, information, information, information! You think you knew water, but you haven’t REALLY had water until you’ve had CHLORINATED water. It’s cleaner than the real thing!

This movie — there we go — this movie is a Spider-Man with no mouth. There are several interviews on here wherein surprise surprise, they just kinda did it, who knows why.

It’s screwy. My feeling is that the screwiest art usually emerges out of some sort of folie à deux situation (but more than deux, e.g. a folie à Japon situation) – nobody has to try to be screwy because everyone present has already mutually embraced it. Sometimes with a grin, sometimes with a straight face. I think this movie was made in a spirit of fun, but a screwy one. The main thing is that the premises of this movie’s screwiness are well outside and beyond the movie. It is not authorial in the Romantic sense. For those of us watching it, the important thing is not how much we know about where it came from. Much more important to me is where I am and how it’s coming at me.

Criterion puts it in a numbered box and sells the box. But that’s exactly where it’s not coming from. And this is where “it’s kind of amazing!” comes in. If there is no natural order to culture and we have to depend on curators to keep things in view, there’s no longer any assurance that we will be exposed to things that don’t merit curation. And yet we want them around. High vs. low was never part of our emotional reality. So we rig up a bullshit case to convince the curators to stock regular old crap, because “it’s actually kind of amazing!”

This is why I disliked the ultimate message of Ratatouille. The soulless snooty critic is reminded of his soul, reminded of the emotional reality of food rather than the sterile context of pass/fail high/low pretension that has killed the joy of life. So then HOORAY he writes a positive rather than a negative review within the sterile, pretentious context and thus validates the hero within the sterile, pretentious context. Whew! Don’t worry, kids, your dad was wrong to yell at you that you’re wasting your life, because the reviews are in and it turns out your beloved Spider-Man belongs at MoMA after all! Videogames belong in the Smithsonian! It turns out that your authentic self isn’t embarrassing after all because it’s KIND OF AMAZING! You go girl! Let your freak flag fly, in the manner of e.g. Lady Gaga! She’s not afraid to be real!

The original Criterion essay on this movie is by John Zorn. It’s short, and the gist is, “I happened to see this on TV when I was in Japan and I had an experience with it.” That was the most genuinely useful, appreciation-deepening thing that was offered to me in the entire package. (And it’s not in the new package.)

The movie is a gangster movie, sort of, but it’s off its own rails. It’s brazenly incoherent. I could list the crazy details but that would feel like telling a lie, the lie being “it sure makes an impression when this crazy thing happens!” Not necessarily so. My actual experience was sort of furrowed-brow bemusement, and a shrugging acceptance. I have other things to worry about than why this contract killer in an old B-movie has a fetish for rice-cooker steam, or whether I think that’s interestingly weird. It was a little interesting; not that interesting. (Rice cooker product placement, one of the interviews implies, for what it’s worth.) If I had been in a hotel in Japan and this had come on TV I’m sure the experience would have been much, much more intense.

Criterion callbacks: The story here, such as it is, is a close relative to The Killer. The artistic value is a close relative to The Naked Kiss. My thoughts there basically apply here.

Best thing on the disc was the amusing contemporary interview with star Joe Shishido, who talks candidly about his unfortunate cheek implants. (They seem to have been removed at some point in the intervening years.) In the middle of answering a question — sort of — he suddenly pulls out a prop gun and shoots it, which is one of the greatest moments I’ve ever seen in an artist interview. Take that, curators!

One thing I can say unreservedly that I enjoyed is the 60s-cool score by Naozumi Yamamoto. Harpsichord and harmonica, baby.

The music that opens and closes the movie is a bluesy song about a killer. I’m not sure that vocals suit our purposes, especially what with the spoken interludes, so here instead is a cue from the middle of the movie, a hummed version of the same tune. Preceded by a sting for a dead body, natch. Track 38.

directed by Terry Gilliam
written by Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam

Criterion #37.

In E.T. (1982):

Elliott: You can’t tell. Not even Mom.
Gertie: Why not?
Elliott: Because, uh… grown-ups can’t see him. Only little kids can see him.
Gertie: Give me a break!

This would seem to be an early example of kid culture having knowingness and eating it too. But it — and E.T. as a whole — plays well because it feels what it preaches. E.T. is a classic because it does not condescend to the idea that the emotional life of a child is glorious; it simply plays it straight, makes a movie of it.

Elliott is trying on adult shoes here. He is constantly fed this kind of crap, and now with that dangerous principle of emotional logic (“do unto others as was done unto you” – this principle needs a name) is playing the adult role as he understands it. Garbage in, garbage out. But he’s still young enough that when she rolls her eyes he instinctively bows before the force of truth and changes tack. A real adult would angrily redouble the bullshit in the face of such purity. Adults feel subconscious shame that they are spewing garbage, which is why it’s so easy for kids to see through them.

The scene is rich because the very movie to which it belongs is feeding us something superficially quite similar (although it is essential to the emotional meaning of E.T. that adults can see and feel him, that he is simply there and real), but unlike Elliott’s lie, the movie earns our trust and belief, in no small part through exactly what this scene exhibits: unflinching ease with the fact that part of being a kid is knowing shit from Shinola. Gertie’s dismissal is not a cynical counterbalance to her innocence; it is an essential piece of it.

Yes, the emotional life of a child is glorious, and an important part of that emotional life is the sniffing out of pandering bullshit. In fact, I’m finding that open disdain for the absurdly obvious gap between feeling and pseudo-feeling is proving to be my surest Proustian hook back into that life. Right, that’s what childhood felt like! “Stop telling me lies about magic, because you’re distracting me from magic.”

And yet, like I said, here’s Elliott trying out bullshit, seeing what it’s worth. Another reason E.T. doesn’t feel like pandering is because it does not exempt the children from simultaneously being adults-in-training, with all the bluster and pettiness that entails. Even E.T. himself, the “thou” to Elliott’s “I,” is not exempt from playing at ugly adulthood, drinking all the beer he finds in the fridge and then watching John Wayne on TV, the patron saint of self-satisfied pig-in-a-poke grown-up-ness.

I bring this all up because E.T. seems to me the ideal archetype of the “kids know what adults don’t” movie. It has its head on straight, including about this potentially touchy issue, the fact that being a movie makes it a very adult artifact. It seems to me that the exchange above is not a lampshade; it’s artistic self-acceptance, the very opposite of self-consciousness. The E.T. screenplay alludes to Peter Pan but it is not Peter Pan; it does not dangle “never growing up” over our heads as a magic possibility to make us cry wussy grown-up tears of shame. Or rather it does, briefly, but in the end it does not endorse them: the part of E.T. that makes me cry is when Michael, feeling old, curls up to sleep in the toy closet as E.T. dies; he can’t figure out what to do other than make a futile, merely ceremonial gesture of love for his lost childhood. My tears, I am realizing now, were never for childhood/E.T./innocence — which are indeed resurrectable as per the movie — but for the feeling of impotence that has reduced Michael to nostalgia. Nostalgia exactly because he’s distorting the thing he’s nostalgic for; it is indeed something “only little kids can see.” What is there to do but cry in the closet? I know those feelings well, and feel for him, and I don’t resent the movie for making me tear up in this way, but the important thing is to recognize that to this the movie has already wisely said: Gimme a break!

Anyway, this is all my roundabout way of saying that the “kids know what adults don’t” trope is really about emotional honesty. The magic things that only kids encounter — be they aliens or talking animals or magic portals or mythical whatevers — represent things that are simply true and real and obvious. Such as feelings. Or details. Or the intensity of sensory impressions. Or the strange and mysterious mental phenomena that tangle the three together.

And, as in E.T., part of getting that childlike emotional honesty right is remembering what it’s like to know — immediately, tactlessly, comfortably — when adults get it wrong.

Time Bandits is Terry Gilliam “doing” childhood. Like Spielberg he is doing it uncynically (or at least like Spielberg prior to his 1989 divorce, which, quickie psychoanalysis, in recapitulating his parents’ divorce tarnished his sense of immunity to adult bullshit and opened the door to making the anti-E.T.: the rampantly self-pitying, calculated, impotent Hook. I suspect/project that the reason Hook sucked was because he was secretly distracted by self-fulfilling anxiety that he had suddenly grown up after all, and was faking his “eternal child” thing.)

Sorry, so, Time Bandits is adult Terry Gilliam’s take on what adults can’t see. They can’t see imagination, silliness, fantasy, play, cleverness, faraway lands, the joy of a big anarchic mess o’ stuff. Of everything. All the stuff on the floor in a boy’s bedroom, or in an illustration in a history book, or in a weird dream; why don’t parents care more about all that great stuff? This is to him the essential childhood question. Looking at his work it isn’t hard for me to imagine him as a child for whom this would be the essential question. And that truth comes through; this is very clearly a movie made from within this attitude and in the belief that the attitude is a pure and important one and in itself justification enough for a movie.

And yet my Gertie-meter went off a bit. But in the opposite direction from usual. Rather than playing the sad-wise adult who knows that childhood is a fairy’s tear that falls but once, boo-hoo, he plays the stubborn-angry teenager who knows all too well that adulthood is a big smarmy scam. In the middle of a celebration of the power of the unbridled imagination, satirical cynicism strikes a wrong note, one that a child knows only belongs to the curdled posturing of grown-ups. Imagination is great, so why are we hating on modern society? Or grown-ups? Who would waste their time hating grown-ups? Only a kind of grown-up.

At the end, rather shockingly, he has the protagonist boy’s house burn down and his inattentive, hopelessly materialistic parents actually explode when they encounter the dangerous vitality of the fantasy evil with which their son has been contending. The final beat is presented as a slyly melancholy one; uh-oh, now he’s got no home or family and has to contend with… life! Is that going to be the good kind of life, with dwarfs and derring-do and complete freedom of action? Or the bad kind where you watch idiocy on TV and cover all your furniture in plastic? It’s up to him!

Well, that’s all well and good for middle-aged Terry Gilliam, but for actual kids there is something off-key about the way that ending disturbs — specifically that it clearly knows it’s doing something wrong, something kids don’t deserve to have to see. Why? “Unto others as was done to you.” Yes, it’s human, but it’s not a good policy for art-making.

So that’s the problem; it’s a movie that doesn’t waste its time trying to “work” in any humdrum traditional way — it puts all its money on innocence and magic — and yet it hasn’t entirely washed out its soul. That said, there’s lots of fun stuff here. Gilliam stands almost alone in his willingness to bring a spirit of play to every aspect of movie-making, rather than reserving a few dimensions for ego (or anxious timidity). Imagery that seems to plug directly into the giddy freedom of making imagery is oddly rare in cinema. Even when his movies don’t work, I can’t help but feel that I am in the company of a vital creative attitude, and thus that I am somewhere worth being. Unlike most movies, his movies feel healthy, like you can breathe the air, feel aware of your body while you watch them. On the other hand there is that nugget of spite in all of them. Why didn’t they love me more, dammit?

A lot of it is on the table in this interview. Gilliam actually mentions E.T. He says he thinks the movie would have been better if the creature had been uglier, with narrow eyes, so that the kid had to learn to love it. “It should have been difficult to love E.T.” This is Gilliam’s prescription for everyone else, for all the Americans who lapped up the movie without reforming their hateful ways. He understood the movie fine, because he already loves his inner child — but to everyone else he’s apparently ugly. They could use a primer on loving him!

Time Bandits has a loving father figure in it — Sean Connery as Agamemnon! — but he is betrayed and left behind. At the end he reappears for a split second as a winking fireman, driving away from the rubble of the boy’s former home. Is all love and comfort a tease? Terry hasn’t worked that out yet, quite.

This is a pretty well stuffed homemade toy chest of a movie, but a scary one, and a lonely one. The former issue would have been a bigger deal for me as a child, but that’s because I was a well-adjusted child and could afford to be terrorized by ghouls. The latter is a more significant artistic failing.

I’m very glad to have seen it. There are several really wonderful moments in this movie, things completely pure of any resentment. When, in the middle of a desert, an invisible wall shatters and reveals a vast looming fantasy castle of evil, it is absolutely thrilling. There is, haphazardly, real imaginative joy on the screen. And then there’s other stuff too.

Score is by Mike Moran, the fantasy synths you might imagine for 1981. Main Title.

I watched this on Netflix, where it can be streamed in high quality. But of course the compulsion here is to watch the CRITERION version, and that meant waiting nearly a month for the single copy in the New York Public Library system to pass through three holds and finally reach me. By which point I had already written all of the above. And even this paragraph, because I got that impatient. So, do I have anything extra to say having heard the commentary track? (and the behind-the-scenes galleries??) :

Eh. It’s a pleasant, personable commentary, with an emphasis on how things were achieved on the cheap. But after all this wait it was bound to be underwhelming. I really just wanted permission to post. Permission granted.

Here’s what I do want to add, now that I’ve been forced to wait, and thus given the opportunity to read all the above through new eyes: art is a very personal business, for the makers and the viewers alike. I don’t think any of us have a choice about that. So let’s please try not to pretend that there’s any way of doing this that isn’t very personal. I don’t know if what I said was right; all I can do is swear that I meant it.

My concerns now (i.e. loneliness being a greater problem than scariness) are just my concerns now. My goal is to be a person to whom any attitude seems artistically viable because I am already fine, because I have other ways of getting what I really need from my fellow man. I want to get back in the mood for games.

directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
screenplay by Henri-Georges Clouzot and Jérôme Géronimi
based on the novel by Georges Arnaud (1950)

Criterion #36, The Wages of Fear.

Two trucks leave a made-up town somewhere in South America. Each is carrying a load of nitroglycerin that will explode if jostled. Each truck has two drivers. One pair of drivers has been established as more protagonist-y than the other. This is a gritty adventure movie from 1953. What happens?

1.
a) Both trucks eventually explode.
b) Neither truck explodes.
c) One truck explodes almost immediately.
d) One truck explodes near the end.
e) None of the above.

2.
a) All four men eventually die.
b) All four men live.
c) Only one man dies.
d) Only one man survives.
e) None of the above.

3. Under the constant threat of sudden death…
a) …the men devolve into petty, bestial conflicts with one another.
b) …the men find a camaraderie that allows them to transcend their differences.
c) …one man loses his mind, one becomes vicious, one becomes stoic, and one becomes heroic.
d) …nothing changes, because all men everywhere are under the constant threat of sudden death.
e) None of the above.

(This is a tough quiz, right?)

The point is, you really don’t know. The old narrative-necessity objection — that it’s not really suspenseful when James Bond is being held at gunpoint because the hero can’t get killed — doesn’t apply here. By the time the trucks set out, half the movie has already gone by, and it has become very clear that this is not a standard-practice action movie in pacing or attitude. A sense of cynicism pervades. And so even the most outrageous possibility — that both trucks will blow up right away and everyone will die — is feasible.

I think this must be why people love this movie. Because it’s that rare suspense movie that actually feels dangerous. At least for a little while, it holds a genuine threat over the audience’s heads, with no narrative or philosophical safety net. Yeah, maybe everything really will go terribly wrong. Maybe it does!

I’m not sure how charming I find that, though. Given its very high repute, I was surprised to find the movie as unwelcoming as it is. Sure, I got caught up in the rhythm of “uh-oh!” “uh-oh!” “uh-oh!” that it sets in motion, but was I really having fun?

This is stupid but I’m allowed: I thought several times of Jaws, because the movies have certain formal similarities. (Both are split down the middle into two halves, the first half taking place in and around a community and the second half on a manly expedition away from the community; the second half in both movies is focused on very mechanically-inclined action, i.e. the kind that plays out through a lot of logistical close-ups that clarify where a rope is tied, what’s moving in which direction, what’s pushing against what, etc. And this mechanical action functions as the “work” around which we get a study of the varieties of manhood and manliness.) This silly comparison really accentuated for me how ostentatiously grueling this movie was. The first half of Jaws gets us to enjoy the place we’re spending our time, despite the horror; the first half of The Wages of Fear just wants us to feel how slow, sweaty, and demoralizing it is to be there. The second half of Jaws sets the physical suspense to lively music and makes it implicitly joyful; the second half of The Wages of Fear just wants to use it to scrape our nerves.

I can recognize that this is very effective and influential mechanical action. Duel couldn’t exist without this, nor could Speed, nor could any number of movie sequences where the rope is tied to the thing and uh-oh. And I can always enjoy that — a child watches first and foremost for kinetics, after all, and Roadrunner cartoons remain near the core of what movies are made of. But ultimately I prefer my action more dancelike, more amusing, more Douglas Fairbanks. More gay. Why else make action? This was so clenched and testosteronal. After a certain amount of backstabbing, broken bottle fighting, woman-hating, and friend-killing, I could have sworn the message of the movie was “men are the worst!” but I fear that it’s actually “men are men, men are hard, life is hard, everything is the worst.” I don’t agree with that and I don’t need it. It’s one thing to flirt with it for kicks like Humphrey Bogart but then turn around and wink. It’s another thing to rub it in like a sweaty, angry, nihilist challenge.

Here, though, Humphrey Bogart is played by Yves Montand of all people, which seems like it would be the epitome of faux-manliness. And Clouzot himself wasn’t a war hero or anything, he was an aesthete who had spent four years in a sanitarium. But it doesn’t matter; the real ethos of the film is grim and violent. It’s not a game. (And Jean Gabin turned down one of the roles because the character was too cowardly! In this crowd, you gotta keep it manly.)

Of course — not to spoil anything — the ending, and the seemingly extraneous presence of Vera Clouzot as the pretty, hapless female, could suggest a different message: “These men are anti-heroes. Their testosteronal attitude is all wrong. They should have seen the beauty in the world, been kind to women and to each other.” But the action makes that hard to buy. Action is action! A rope tied to a truck is unambiguous. We live through it with these guys. When it goes well for them we are relieved; when it goes badly we are pained. The guy commenting on Diabolique talked about how the audience is gotten firmly “on side” to sympathize with the murderesses; it’s not real morality that matters so much as movie morality. This movie tries to be even more cynical than to play by those rules. Here, the first half is spent making sure we’re not too far on anyone’s side. Then suddenly the second half is spent contending with THREATENING ACTION that cannot be watched without sympathy. Then we wrap it all up with a bow of dismissal. The upshot is I didn’t know what to care about.

The movie absolutely has atmosphere though. Portraying oppressive heat on screen is always a challenge. I was impressed by the opening here, which does it very effectively without gimmickry. The first half is probably too long and static but it is undeniably strong scene-setting; it’s like every Hollywood “exotic hellhole full of expatriates” movie, except this time genuinely grim and despairing, and with a tad of sardonic anti-Americanism, something you didn’t get a lot of out of Hollywood in those days. Again, it’s a Humphrey Bogart movie, but in a world where everything is awful.

I’d probably watch it again if it were on TV. Now that I know what happens, I can just siphon off the atmosphere.

There’s no menu screen above because again I saw it on Blu-Ray, and they make it impossible to capture the menus off Blu-Rays. And by some fluke dvdbeaver fails to pick up the slack on this one. The menu screen looked like a menu screen. (I know it would probably be more interesting and make for a prettier layout for these Criterion entries if I put the cover art up there instead of the menu screens. But this is what I’ve been doing, so this is what I’m doing.)

Bonus features blah blah blah, fine.

Music is by Georges Auric again. Again, Clouzot’s not much for music; we basically have a main title and then a few bits of source music that may not be by Auric. This album reports that he did indeed arrange the final cue, but it’s not original. The main title is his only real compositional contribution. It’s good — a percussion landscape like hot sun and desperation. The middle section seems to confuse South America with Spain but no matter. Track 36.

directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot
screenplay by Henri-Georges Clouzot and Jérôme Géronimi, with René Masson and Frédéric Grendel
after the novel Celle qui n’était plus by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac (1952)

Criterion #35.

The title of course means basically “The Diabolicals” (assuming there to be such a noun). Clouzot stole it from a book by Barbey d’Aurevilly whose title is generally translated as “The She-Devils,” which can work for us too. Or just “The Devils.” (Google Translate interestingly gives “Evil.”) The novel upon which this was based was first published in English as “The Woman Who Was No More,” but then after the movie as “The Fiends.”

The English title of this movie has always been Diabolique, which is fascinating. A French title has been translated into a “French title” for American consumption, where part of the Frenchiness of the new title is that it is coyly adjectival — which the actual French title isn’t. Or perhaps that’s just a byproduct of a different logic: English has subsumed “-ique” as “French affect,” but not “Les.” “Les” would mean you were actually speaking a foreign language. But the title Diabolique is simply très chic — très Frenchique!

Apparently Les diaboliques was so popular on the arthouse circuit in the U.S. that it was subsequently picked up for mainstream distribution, which is obviously a rarity for foreign films. Had it gone to the mainstream first, it seems more likely that the title would have eschewed Frenchness altogether. (Maybe something like “Murder Is For Girls.”)

Is there a list of all the foreign films that have had full-scale U.S. distribution? e.g. in the past two decades, Life is Beautiful, Amélie, and The Artist? Etc.? I’d be interested to see such a list but I can’t find one online, which surprises me.

Here’s what I will venture to say about Diabolique: it is a suspense movie. For about half of it, I thought it was an unusually narrow and pure suspense movie, more like an episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” — pared-down, lacking in the particulars that would make it stand out as a full-fledged movie. But eventually I realized that it seemed that way only because it has been so tremendously influential. It’s actually very particular. It’s a bit like The Lord of the Rings: if you read it and go “yeah, so it’s just another one of these books with magical elves and stuff? Like World of Warcraft or something?” you’re reading it historically wrong, and thus aesthetically wrong. I got my head around the real Diabolique by the end. It’s obviously very important.

Even though I knew 1) it had been influential, and 2) it was “Hitchcockian,” I genuinely didn’t know what was going to happen. Is it one of these or one of those? Or one of those? The answer is, it’s Diabolique, and once you’ve seen it you’ll know which other movies you’ve seen have been ripping it off. Many.

That kind of “which plot am I watching?” uncertainty isn’t really very different from the “naive original audience” perspective. The important thing is that you don’t know. Suspense!

Wanting not to spoil a movie for my readership is at odds with my spiritual goal of writing with myself as audience, so I’m going to break away from this stuff.

* Difference between Clouzot and Hitchcock is the difference in attitude taken toward the gamesmanship, like the difference between the stage personas of two magicians (which alone can make the same trick feel like two fundamentally different kinds of magical phenomena). Hitchcock wants you to notice his control over you. Clouzot sometimes just wants to use it. Being manipulated without a wink can be a more ambiguous experience. This is probably just a question of social style, but I think I side with Hitchcock here. It might be more childish to be constantly winking but some things are meant to be childish. If we’re going to find depth in these kinds of stories, it’s going to be through their resonant qualities, not through any kind of reality in our experiences of them. As for example Vertigo, a movie that has thematic depth without refraining from operating like a machine. Plot, as I’ve said, has its own characteristic capacities and tendencies, and these are plot movies we’re talking about.

* But the distinction between the two directors is minor. The styles are certainly related. And a big part of the difference in tone may simply be the lack of music in Diabolique, which provides a lot of the deadpan affect (and thus the implied winking) in Hitchcock. See below.

* I watched the first half of this while I had a fever. It fit, but after a point I thought maybe it fit too well and this sort of movie was never meant to have such a bodily power. The second half I watched a little later when I felt somewhat better. “Murder can be fun,” as Hitchcock said, but only if you’re not dying. The same goes for suspense, and fever is a kind of suspense. Once when I was home sick as a kid and watching The Princess Bride for the Nth time, the scene with the life-sucking torture machine suddenly became overwhelmingly nauseating and I ended up throwing up. Just another tick to put on my new chart that proves that empathy is overrated as a mode of experience.

* Criterion reissued this one with improved everything in 2011. There were plenty of the old one but only one copy of the new version in the library system. I got that one brought across town for me and I think it was well worthwhile. Sound and picture are very good, and I genuinely enjoyed one of the bonus features, an interview/musing by this guy where he cheerfully hits on what felt to me like all the right points about the status of this movie. Interesting to juxtapose his mode of critical commentary with the typical “film scholar” voice in the actual commentary track (which is only 45 minutes long, to an abbreviated version of the movie). She says mostly reasonable and relevant things, but her manner and language are false and sad in all the ways that the nerdy guy’s obvious enthusiasm is true and happy. Isn’t this distinction I’m making a very simple thing that even “the academy” could find it in itself to respect and honor?

* There’s also an “introduction” speech by a guy who wrote a book about Clouzot or something. That has a genuineness to it also but he’s less engaging and rides the line between being objectively informative and venturing his own opinions much less comfortably than the guy I liked. Perhaps my distinction of truth and cheer vs. fakery and tension derives from a distinction in how the speaker rates the significance of his or her own thoughts. People who are confident that it’s their right to think and talk will not try to pass off their opinions as anything but what they are. People who are less confident will often try to phrase their thoughts in ways that remind them of facts, or slip them in between facts to show that they deserve to be said. Scholarship seems to consist in great part of people using learning and language as a defensive coat of armor for the battlefield rather than as a glorious ceremonial coat of armor for a coronation. If you see what I’m saying.

So for I think the first time since The Lady Vanishes (Hitchcock!) we have a bookend score, with a main title and a finale and no other music. It’s by Georges Van Parys, and to my ears at least is very Parisian, post-Honegger. It’s the sort of music that seems to want me to imagine what the score looks like. I can imagine it. (“Editions Choudens” it says, so I can even picture the type style.) It probably took him an hour to compose and an hour to orchestrate. If that. I don’t know how well it matches this movie (or to what degree a viewer perceives it as actually a part of the movie!) but it hardly matters: it’s very bold, unsettling stuff for opening titles and then it goes away. What else is it supposed to contribute?

Actually, let me correct that. When music emerges as we iris to black at the very end, there is a sense that the single big wink of the whole movie is descending. This is what I meant about the difference from Hitchcock and its relationship to the music — only when this music shows up do we hear unambiguously from the voice of the director, of the film itself. We go the whole length of the movie before he shows up to grin this weird “mwah-ha-ha” grin. So is this music what this movie is? I guess so. It’s playful in how dreadfully discordant it is. Here’s the whole score: Track 35.

directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
written by Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky and Andrei Tarkovsky

Criterion #34.

This is the movie you know as Andrei Rublev. Regarding the title, however:

The film was shot between 1964 and 1965. When Tarkovsky completed editing in 1966 he had given it the title seen in the frame above, which says “Strasti po Andreyu,” meaning “The Passion According to Andrei.” But this version was never shown. It was rejected by the Soviet authorities, who demanded cuts presumably relating to religious content, violence, nudity, and general un-Sovietness. Tarkovsky returned to editing and prepared a new version, 18 minutes shorter and altered throughout. In the process he retitled it simply Andrei Rublev. (Perhaps in response to Soviet discomfort with the explicitly Christian title.) This shorter version is the film that found its way into the 1969 Cannes film festival and was finally released a few years later.

Unlike every other release of this film, the Criterion DVD proudly offers the suppressed first version, reportedly sourced from a print that Martin Scorsese obtained on a visit to Russia. (The rumor online is that one of the editors had kept a copy of the suppressed version under her bed for 20 years and that Scorsese “smuggled” it out of the country.) Prior to the Criterion release of this material, it seems that this longer cut may never have been seen publicly.

So as titles go, the present film is pretty clearly called The Passion According to Andrei. But the packaging would have it that this is simply the preferred version of the film universally known as Andrei Rublev, which is accordingly what Criterion calls it. The back cover of the DVD makes clear that they are trying to have it both ways: it prints both titles as though the former were some sort of subtitle to the latter.

If you see this movie anywhere other than on this Criterion DVD, you will see a movie that is 18 minutes shorter, and which, significantly, omits or truncates some of the most shocking images seen here. (You will also see much sparser and less accurate subtitling, Criterion wants you to know.) That version, the standard version, is in fact viewable online for free, beautifully restored in very high quality, here + here, courtesy of Mosfilm, which is pretty cool of them. However, having just sampled a few minutes I will note that the sound mix is noticeably different and there seem to be all sorts of tiny editorial alterations throughout; so despite seemingly being 95% the same, it manages to have quite a different “feel.” And the feel counts for much of what I got out of this movie.

The image quality on the Criterion disc, taken as it was from that “smuggled” print of the long version (possibly the only surviving copy?), is decidedly suboptimal, especially compared to the crisp restoration linked above. There is a murky, low-contrast fadedness to the black & white tones, and a general ghosting/halo effect. When it started I was afraid that the whole thing was going to be distractingly milky and thin. But as it turned out, the spirit-photograph quality of the image was entirely suitable to the soft, dreamy flow of the movie. Or at least it made itself into a compelling whole for me.

This movie is long. The “short” version is 186 minutes. The version that I watched is 204 minutes. Yes, The Ten Commandments and some other Hollywood monstrosities are longer than that, but this is surely the longest “art film” I’ve ever seen. Knowing what I was in for, I adopted a soft, accepting frame of mind and let myself drift without judgment. This turned out wonderfully and I recommend it. It may well be that all movies respond well to being viewed in a trance state, but this one seemed particularly to welcome and reward it.

The film exudes such composure and purity that it isn’t clear how it could have been actually made, given all the business and complexity that goes into shooting a film, which usually leaves a clear mark. The staging, camerawork, and acting almost never have that telltale aspect of cleverness and contrivance that feels like the essence of direction (and thus of moviemaking); here things seem just to be happening as they will, and yet beautifully. That’s the aspiration of many a humanist art film, of course, and I’ve certainly seen some that manage to avoid any sense of being calculated, but it’s almost always at the expense of basic cinematic appeal; such movies tend to be loose, limp, and give the impression only of having traded one kind of phoniness for another much less useful kind. Not so here. I don’t really know how he achieves it (well, art, taste, and skill is how) but Tarkovsky’s style is exactly what arthouse film should be: the material is poetic and open, but the staging and photography are endlessly crafty and compelling. And not in some arid, schematic, intellectual sense, but in a real, engaging, cinematically viable sense. The camera is almost always in motion, and all of the camera-movement devices — pans, zooms, tracking shots — have that inevitable, intuitive quality that gives them each their particular magical meanings. The style has a wonderful sense of flow, like a river of imagery.

I don’t know how much all that is just a description of the peaceful frame of mind I assumed while watching. I think “only somewhat.” A quote from Ingmar Bergman is included in the DVD liner:

My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film was like a miracle. Suddenly I found myself standing at the door of a room, the keys to which, until then, had never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease. … Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.

That very much matches my sense of what I saw and encourages me that I didn’t simply zone out and then experience the movie as an aspect of that zone. But it is certainly in keeping with the zone: it is deeply unanxious filmmaking. It is “painterly” in the proper sense of the word, i.e. not meaning that it indulges in lavish decorative visuals, but rather that unlike most film, which draws primarily on the arts of the theater (and of the printed page), it genuinely draws on the visual and emotional language of painting. And incorporates the dimension of movement as an organic component of that language. There is movement in the frame so that there can be stillness in the mind. Or so.

This is all appropriate because the movie is ostensibly about a painter, though the action has very little to do with his painting, and often very little to do even with Andrei Rublev himself. The film is episodic and oblique and philosophical. It leaps around in time and place. It is broadly about life. I was reminded of Tree of Life, and of what else I’ve seen of Terence Malick. Obviously the influence goes the other way there. Whereas despite Bergman’s quote about Tarkovsky’s influence on him, The Seventh Seal, to which Andrei Rublev bears family resemblance in several aspects, precedes it by 9 years. Also, the emphasis on very long takes of the camera gliding dreamily through space reminded me, of all things, of Terry Gilliam. That uber-grandiose pullback shot from Baron Munchhausen that I’ve mentioned before is, I now see, the wacky comic-book descendant of several equally spectacular shots here. Unlike most philosophical arty films, the scale here is often very grand, with a horde of warriors on horseback, or shots that take in acres of landscape filled with hundreds of well-placed figures.

The movie ends with exactly the same gesture that I found affecting in the novel of Doctor Zhivago. For many reasons it’s even more affecting here, especially if you’ve been lulled into a state of dreamy receptivity and thus emotional openness, as I had been. After 3 hours you probably will be.

(The content of this movie, mind you, is not itself soothing. There is some really horrific medieval cruelty, culminating in a central long sequence of a town being sacked and people being tortured and slaughtered. There are also a couple of hard-to-watch shots of animal cruelty, some of which are apparently simulated, but one of which is most definitely the real suffering and death of a horse (confirmed on Wikipedia!). That’s hard, shocking stuff.)

Basically, this was high art and I welcomed it. It is made with a very deep intuition for the medium, luxurious to watch. It is tonal and the tone it sustains is a very worthy one. If it has a message, I would say the message is “Life is much bigger than good and evil, kindness and cruelty; so should art be. So do what you can do.” A good message. Also, understand that it does not have a message. It is a piece of art made to be reflected upon.

The film has a very fine score by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov, as sensitive and essentially cinematic as the camera style. The score is used sparsely and to excellent effect; whenever it is present it is lovely and well-judged. It only really breaks out at the end: the finale that I alluded to a moment ago is accompanied by a big extended piece for chorus and orchestra. It stands alone and is by far the most musically ambitious piece in the score, so I think it has to be my selection. I was a little reluctant about this choice because it’s almost a spoiler to hear this, the catharsis, without earning it over the course of the movie. But I don’t think spoilers can apply here; heard out of context I certainly don’t think anything is actually “spoiled.” This track is also longer than all our other selections, but that seems appropriate since this is the longest movie yet. (Oh no wait, Seven Samurai was longer. Well, that had a long musical selection too.)

So here is the Finale, our track 34. The transcendental 2001-like effect should be apparent. This is a movie that is about big things and this is the revelatory sound of big things. (As heard on this wobbly old print.) It is, I think, worth taking a moment to note how well this is achieved here and then to reflect on the dreadful ineptitude with which the “epic” effect is attempted in offensive caricature by every stupid comic-book movie score of the present day.

The disc has some intelligent quasi-scholarly commentary, but only on selected scenes, which is a little annoying to have to search and find. It also has some clips from interviews with Tarkovsky, which are very good.

I very much look forward to more Tarkovsky. Criterion’s not going to come through for me until #164, but on my own authority I might well resort to Mosfilm’s youtube selection, where several others are available.

Sorry this entry was long and dull. Sometimes they come out that way. And the work necessary to now make it short and dull does not appeal to me.

directed by Robert Flaherty

Criterion #33.

This is by far the best of the Nanook series, though Nanook Out West and Nanook Makes a Mistake are pretty good too. The plot is much as you’d imagine: Nanook gets up to his typical hijinks (walrus hunting, igloo building), with crotchety old Mr. Jenkins as the butt of most of the humor. This is the episode from which we get the expression “What a Nanook!”, nowadays used to describe anyone who spears a seal to death through a hole in the ice.

As usual, the songs are a bit corny.

There may or may not be a really stupid joke somewhere on this page. Sorry everybody, just trying to be like “Nyla — The Smiling One.”

My primary reaction during Nanook is a thought that will be hard for me to put into words. But here goes: The way things actually happened wasn’t necessarily the right way or the best way, but people want to believe it was. It probably sounds like I’m talking about the issue of documentary realism, but I’m talking about the status of this movie itself. This is the first documentary feature, very influential, fine. It is not unwatchable garbage. You get to see an Eskimo build an igloo, etc. It’s interesting for what it is. But in an alternate history, might the first documentary feature have been much, much better than this? Yes.

I guess I had this thought because with documentary material, the conflation of significance with distinction tends to be even more treacherous. How much of our boredom is appropriate to blame on Flaherty? After all, the only claim here is very basic: everything you’re seeing happened and was shot on film, in a faraway place you’re unlikely to visit. True, and valuable. (On the level on which this film works, the accusations that it was “staged” seem to me mostly irrelevant. We can see very well that the packaging is 20s newsreel exoticism, which as an authorial voice is a well-known huckster; we watch not for that voice of the intertitles but for the the voice of the film itself, which cannot tell a lie. This light actually reflected off these people and this snow, and passed into the camera.)

But the purity of “it happened and now you can watch it” is nothing new — it’s the foundation, the origin of the film medium. That’s what all the Edison films were. It’s still going strong. The thing Flaherty is getting credit for here is making film-as-reportage feature-length and giving it editorial heft and flair. Those are things this movie does only very clumsily. But the movie is celebrated because it’s the one, and because the essence of what we’re celebrating is basically beyond criticism. Well, I’m criticizing.

Nanook is interesting as such. The key words being AS SUCH. All things are as such but some things are more as such than others.

I had seen this movie once before, in fifth grade, when it was shown I guess as part of our school’s neverending “unit” on Native Americans. It turned out that I recognized a few images, but mostly my memory was that it seemed strange at the time that this obvious antique was being shown to us as though were still suitable classroom material — it still seems strange, in retrospect. And that the class had been utterly scandalized by the appearance of naked breasts — combined with the ancientness of the film, it seemed that something very obviously wrong had been inflicted on us; some kind of filter in the fabric of school had clearly broken. On this viewing I was surprised to find that the breasts in question are very hard to see and onscreen for less than two seconds. Not to a fifth grader!

Music here is original to this release (or to a recent prior Kino release), and is by Timothy Brock, performed by the Olympia Chamber Orchestra. I haven’t spent a lot of time in Olympia, but next time I’m there I know not to go hear the Chamber Orchestra. Brock’s composition itself is quite dull — I get that this movie is a thankless assignment but spinning out 75 minutes of obviousness to match is insufficiently bold, I think — but the real problem is the first violin, who simply cannot play in tune. (Not that the other players are that much better.) Since the entire score is effects-free, I could have chosen pretty much anything. I’m giving you the 30-second cue corresponding to the close-ups introducing Nanook and Nyla. This is the “Nanook theme.” For us, it’ll do. Track 33.

I went in search of the 1947 score by Rudolf Schramm, which is the one I must have heard in fifth grade, but I can’t find it online. However you can listen to an interesting 1976 score by Stanley Silverman here — in a Copland style, but not the one you’d think.

directed by David Lean
screenplay by David Lean and Stanley Haynes
after the novel by Charles Dickens (1838)

Criterion #32.

A movie like beautiful illustrations. Some of the richest black-and-white tone I’ve ever seen, like a charcoal sketch. Even in the title screen above you can see it. The opening storm sequence, with its few bold expressionist strokes, is as fantastical as anything off the Alexeieff/Parker pinscreen.

But of course, this sort of thing alternates through the film with the rather conventional dialogue scenes. That’s the David Lean way, it seems: like an old N.C. Wyeth edition, there are always a few wonderful “plates” but in between it’s no different from any other grown-up book without pictures. (That’s unfair to David Lean, grown-ups, books, and me, but you get the idea.)

If you aren’t aware, Oliver Twist is a beloved story about a meek little boy born into a horrible world of child abuse from which the only escape is deus ex machina. The plot basically consists of a small child suffering, and then getting away only to find himself suffering in some new way. I know this is a classic case of critic’s toothache syndrome, but on the day I watched this movie I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why that’s a story people enjoy. (I just coined “critic’s toothache syndrome” but surely the meaning is clear.) Dickens meant it as political propaganda; it’s not all that different from those magazine ads with a big third-world harelip. Come on guys, I was reading that!

Except with Oliver Twist Dickens isn’t just throwing it in your face; he’s drawing you in with his whole voluminous bag of manipulation tricks. The whole time, we’re compelled into heartily root-root-rooting for this poor little kid not to get abused any more. “Yeah, run away!” “Yeah, beat up that mean kid!” “Boo, adults!” “Boo, London!” “Boo, world!”

Toward the end I realized that my problem was mostly the result of failing in my quest to watch everything like a kid. It all would have gone down smoothly enough if I had only “empathized,” which is a pleasant form of playing along, rather than empathized, which is grueling and a waste of time.

But whether it was the movie or the toothache I don’t know. For all I know it might actually have been the movie. Beth watched it with me and she said she felt worn out for the same reasons. But of course that’s her way. It isn’t always mine, or at least so I thought.

Alec Guinness with a false nose is Fagin the horrible horrible Jew, though unlike the novel the script does not explicitly indicate that he is Jewish. I mention it only because there it is and it was apparently controversial on the original release (Criterion boasts that they are restoring 12 minutes of his performance that were excised for later releases). I certainly don’t take it personally nor do I think that a movie like this poses any real danger in the present day, which is not to say that this isn’t fine material for forming a nice ugly stereotype if shown to the right people at the right age. But what isn’t? Certainly everyone else in Dickens is. I feel like my current mildly enlightened, mildly bigoted perspective on the varieties of man is really just a heap of stereotypes that have been subjected to erosion. Isn’t that all anyone has to work with? I have Fagin in there just like everyone else.

Robert Newton as Bill Sykes oddly gets top billing. Apparently this is the role that “made” Alec Guinness, to some degree anyway, so his name wasn’t yet a selling point. In fact the preview introduces him by explicitly reminding you that you saw him in Great Expectations, and which one he was, saying something like “who could forget Alec Guinness?”. The kid in the title role does a fine job though it’s mostly one of looking pathetic. He is clearly the prototype for the casting of Chocolate Factory Charlie. Kay Walsh shrieks a little too hard, is a little too pretty and put together for the part, and is David Lean’s then-wife so it all fits together. Francis L. Sullivan continues to have the biggest face in movies. Speaking of which, this funny face was in there very briefly and I racked my brain trying to figure out where I’d seen it. Peter Bull, a quintessential “hey it’s that guy.” Having looked him up, I think Dr. Strangelove must be my answer.

The music is that rare thing: a movie score by a famous “serious” composer. Well, as famous as Sir Arnold Bax, anyway. It has the standard strengths and weaknesses of the species: it is significantly classier and more aesthetically refined on its own terms than most movie music, and it is also never entirely apt. Film scoring is a special skill and it’s not necessarily a very arty one. This isn’t an exceedingly arty score but it’s arty enough to miss the mark. Or rather, to stubbornly set a mark that isn’t quite the same as the film’s mark.

My music selection here is a little unorthodox SO BRACE YOURSELVES. I’ve chosen a cue from the middle of the movie that has a fair amount of foley throughout (doors shutting, crying, a rooster crowing, etc. etc.) even though this movie offers a standard Main Title with no such offending sound effects. The reason is that the Main Title music doesn’t give much of a sense of the distinct voice of this score, nor does it offer the main theme in a clear and direct way. Whereas this cue (known on the soundtrack as “Oliver’s sleepless night”) does. This cue also features the concertante piano that is a particularly distinctive occasional feature of the score (played by Harriet Cohen, with the Philharmonia Orchestra under Muir Matheson). Choosing this cue over the Main Title seemed inevitable to me after I saw that the short concert suite Bax put together from the score has this cue as its first movement and gives it the title “Theme.”

Without further ado: here it is.

These are the sounds of Oliver having been sent to his room in the undertaker’s house (where he sleeps under a coffin) closing the door, crying to himself, and then later, at dawn, sneaking out before anyone wakes up and running away to London. The piano concerto texture was reportedly suggested by Lean himself as a way of suggesting Oliver’s delicate soul against the whole cruel world. In absence of the picture it sort of does that. With the picture it starts just to seem like some odd classical music is playing. Occasionally to interesting effect, occasionally not.

directed by David Lean
written by Charles Dickens
adapted for the screen by David Lean, Ronald Neame, and Anthony Havelock-Allan, with Kay Walsh and Cecil McGivern

Criterion #31.

I sometimes have to crop out black borders on the frames that I grab; depending on the aspect ratio and the way the DVD was created, the movie image doesn’t always go all the way to the edge of the screen. Since title frames are often mostly black, which can make the edges hard to detect, I often also grab a frame from elsewhere in the movie just to determine the correct frame size, and then apply that to the title card. I say this because you’ll notice in the frame above there seems to be a black border that looks like ought to be cropped, certainly on the right and left and maybe on the top and bottom too. But when I went to compare to the rest of the DVD, to my surprise I found that apart from these opening credits, the movie completely fills the frame. You’ll also notice that the title looks kind of crooked, has terrible contrast, and is all ghosty. This is all to say that something is wrong with the titles on this disc, as though they couldn’t find a good source for them. Or else they just screwed up somehow and forgot to do their own crop.

Even the version at archive.org has cleaner titles. Of related interest: you can watch this movie at archive.org.

This is very cozy, trustworthy movie in the old tradition. I am pleased to report that I am still able to watch this sort of thing with no analytical impulses whatever. A lot of craft had to go into a movie like this and I am delighted to find myself in the luxurious position of simply being its beneficiary, rather than running some kind of surrogate production company in my head like an anxious understudy.

We, the audience, ought to be like Pip if we can, living on someone else’s dime and not having to know whether our benefactor is a crazy old lady or a filthy old man. I can say this because this disc had no commentary or extras. I say huzzah for that: it was just a movie!

Part of the reason I can retain the serenity not to “think” about a movie like this is because it’s the sort of movie that I’ve seen since I was a child and so its shortcomings are of the sort that I long ago learned to tolerate. Or rather that I learned to perceive as mysterious, part of an adult world of sense that wasn’t yet mine. Boredom in those days was neither my fault nor the movie’s; it was explained by my youth and unworldliness, so all was forgiven — of me and of the movie.

I daresay that when I was young I would have been much too bored by this movie to watch it all the way through. But that doesn’t mean I would have “disliked” it. One good image was a perfectly acceptable harvest in those days. This one has quite a few good sturdy images, starting with the graveyard scene at the very beginning. (I think I probably would have been spooked by that scene and also disappointed by the fact that the movie doesn’t make good on its implicit promise to be about spooky stuff. Books and movies were constantly pulling this sort of stunt when I was a kid. Where’s my portrait with moving eyes, dammit?)

Incidentally, I would have been bored because of what I might now say is a great strength: that it’s so true to the long-scroll/fine-brush quality of Dickens. Simultaneous commitment to the pleasures of intricate plot and to scene-painting — to the horizontal and the vertical, as they say in music — felt to me then like contradictory impulses. Delaying the answer to a mystery with a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with the mystery felt like abuse, or simply like an error, one that adult storytelling constantly made. I had no interest in pushing and popping while processing a plot. Adults are much more accustomed to stack management as a matter of course and like to feel that it enriches things. As to which attitude is correct, I’m ultimately agnostic — I’ve certainly learned very well how to savor the Dickensian method (the function of the “retarding element“), but straight-ahead no-background storytelling still feels pure to me — but I definitely prefer to be in a place where I can see both my possible attitudes equally. An old fashioned movie like this is the perfect way; images are by their nature straight-ahead even when the movie tries not to be.

This is how a Dickens movie should look and feel. The art direction was perfect. I see that I’m not the only one to feel this way about this movie. Another thing I am not the only one to feel is that the first half hour, with young Pip and Estella, is more satisfying than the rest, with grown Pip and Estella, because the adult actors aren’t as compelling. I didn’t mind so much that John Mills is clearly much much older than his character, but I did mind that Valerie Hobson is simply not a worthy successor to Jean Simmons in any department. (Valerie Hobson was, for what it’s worth, the producer’s wife, so who knows what David Lean might have thought. Probably everyone knew very well that she was the wrong choice. The movie is sort of designed not to rely very much on the adult Estella.)

Music, very comfortably done in the expected operetta/Hollywood style, is by Walter Goehr, better known as a conductor. Here’s the Main Title, your track 31 (disc 2 track 1!). This doesn’t really do the score justice; there’s quite a bit of music and some other cues are better and more original, but this is the title! It’s the big theme and that’s how it has to be. Sorry that the clarinets don’t keep it together in this take, but you know how rushed recording days can be.

More of the same to follow in #32.