MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (Frank Capra, 1939)

A comedy both shiny and monstrous, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington uncritically blurs the line between populism and fascism, inadvertently exposing the dangers to democracy during the Great Depression. Written by Sidney Buchman from a motion-picture story by Lewis R. Foster (who won an Oscar), and produced and directed by Frank Capra, the film was originally intended as a sequel to Capra’s marvelous Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), with Gary Cooper reprising his celebrated role as Longfellow Deeds. (One would never guess this from the misleading commentary that Capra’s son provides for the film’s DVD.) Regrettably, the later film has little of the charm of Mr. Deeds, for which Capra won the second of three directorial Oscars. (He also won for It Happened One Night, 1934, and You Can’t Take It with You, 1938, both of which also won the best picture Oscar.) Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is, additionally, a structural and a formal mess. It reaches no conclusion; it just stops, exhausted. It’s a bad, shallow, mean-spirited entertainment.

Yet few do not like it. It is the kind of film whose uncritical nature invites an uncritical response. One easily buys into its preposterous message that political corruption is the worst evil facing American democracy. Indeed, corruption in one form or another would remain a familiar, convenient target in American films, reaching its zenith of thematic absurdity in the criminally heartless Serpico (Sidney Lumet, 1973), which advances the notion that the thing that should most worry us about big city police is their appetite to arrange financially for their children’s college education. How dare them break the law to do this! Focusing on such relatively trivial matters, and, in the case of Serpico, on a matter grounded in the humanity, not inhumanity, of the police thus condemned, is a foolish way of turning a blind eye to much worse and more pressing matters. Capra’s Mr. Smith fiddles with nonsense while America burns.

The plot is precious and farfetched. The junior U.S. senator from an anonymous state—let’s say Montana, since Foster’s story was originally titled “The Man from Montana”—ups and dies, requiring the state’s governor to name a successor. This fictional Montana is “owned” by boss Jim Taylor, whose selection the governor sidesteps in order to preserve the viability of his own political career. Governor Hubert Hopper chooses Jefferson Smith, a youth leader, as the perfect man to win popular support while offering no resistance to Taylor’s domination through the state’s senior U.S. senator, Joseph Harrison Paine, once a friend of Smith’s deceased father, when they were both young and idealistic, as Smith is now, believing that the only causes worth fighting for are “lost causes.” (Commentators note that Jefferson Smith bears an Everyman-name, but so does Taylor, while Paine’s name suggests a potential president, and Hubert “Happy” Hopper’s anticipates a future mayor of Minneapolis, Minnesota.) For Taylor and Paine, much is at stake. Paine and the deceased junior senator, at Taylor’s behest, were pushing through the Senate a bill that would provide them all, especially Taylor, with a windfall. An unnecessary dam would be built on a creek the land around which, using dummy names, Taylor has been buying up in order to sell to the government. To distract Smith from his and Taylor’s shenanigans, Paine encourages Smith to prepare a bill on some pet project of his own. This is a rural boys’ camp, and the trees hit the fan when Smith innocently proposes as its site the same area that Taylor and Paine’s machinations have sewn up. The problem, apparently, is that the corrupt officials fear that Smith’s inquisitiveness will expose their scheme, although it is just as likely that they might have finessed the matter. (What difference does it make what project they need to sell the land to the government for?) Anyhow, Paine accuses Smith of owning the land in question in the Senate, prompting Smith’s filibuster to get the truth out. Eventually, Smith collapses, and Paine, guilt-ridden, attempts suicide and reveals the truth about himself, Taylor, and Taylor’s crooked machine.

I am leaving out the richest aspect of the film: the growing romance between Smith and Saunders, the secretary assigned to him. Saunders, who is given the film’s best line (referring to Smith’s mother: “She called me Clarissa!”), is as savvy about Washington as Smith is naïve, and his idealism penetrates her cynical veneer, much as it reconnects Paine, despite his resistance, to the idealism of his younger days.

Throughout the film, there is no hint of the economic crisis that, even toward the end of the decade, persisted in the United States. No one is poor; no one is out of work. Nor is there any hint of the march of Nazism and Fascism in Europe. Therefore, there is no need to relate one to the other to suggest the vulnerable nature of the country and its institutions. All America has to worry about is Jim Taylor. Good grief!

There are cute bits, such as when one of Taylor’s operatives, a portly man, gets stuck in a phone booth; but there are also agonizingly cornball bits, such as when Jeff fumbles with the inside rim of his hat while talking to a girl, Senator Paine’s daughter, for what seems like the first time in his life. There is a patriotic montage, including Smith’s visit to the Lincoln Memorial, that is something of a howler, especially when a little boy recites the Gettysburg Address while a black visitor’s eyes fill up with tears. It is for such moments that the word Capracorn was coined.

But it’s the insularity of the whole thing that is most distressing. For this aspect of the film lends a frightening edge to the hero’s parochial nature, suggesting a fascist-in-the-making. His legion of supportive Boy Rangers, alarmingly, come to resemble Hitler youth. It takes one’s breath away that Capra resists applying any sort of analysis or critical distancing. Compare, the same year, John Ford’s beautiful Young Mr. Lincoln, which sounds out the potential for demagoguery in American democracy. Beginning with the film’s bucolic first movement, Ford premises Lincoln’s exemplariness in order to suggest that Lincoln’s susceptibility to being demagogic—the film relates his need for crowd adulation to the deaths of both his mother and Ann Rutledge—reveals something besides individual defect; for, using the past to comment on current hard times, and mindful of Germany’s example, Ford worries where a frightened people may let leaders lead them and where these leaders may be willing to go. Not so Capra, whose Mr. Smith, at the very least, courts fascism by endorsing a U.S. senator’s strident populism.

Jean Arthur as Saunders, Claude Rains as Paine, and Harry Carey as the president of the Senate (the nation’s vice president, that is) are all marvelous. There are, in fact, only two bad adult performances in the film: Edward Arnold is bloated and unconvincing as Taylor, and Astrid Allwyn is unfeeling as Paine’s daughter. It is appalling how thinly Capra conceives of Susan Paine.

James Stewart became a star by playing Jefferson Smith, winning the best actor prize from the New York Film Critics Circle. (He would win again, for Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, 1959.) He is very good. However, the parochial nature of the role keeps his performance from becoming anything substantial or worthwhile.

BUBBLE (Steven Soderbergh, 2005)

The one-two sock of sex, lies & videotape (1989) and especially Kafka (1991) gave us all a lot of hope for (then) young Steven Soderbergh; but the sentimental so-so-ness of King of the Hill (1993) signaled a downward turn in his aspirations. Clearly, the financial failure of this Depression melodrama based on A.E. Hotchner’s memoirs could not disguise the film’s commercial intent. After teasing us with one very good film and one very, very good film, Soderbergh sold his soul to the commercial devil, every now and then tossing in a half-baked independent piece into his filmography, amidst more bloated major projects, to tease himself (and us) into falsely believing he hadn’t. The kid from Atlanta had become a purveyor of trash and inanities. This worthless output included The Underneath (1995), Out of Sight (1998), Erin Brockovich (2000), Traffic (2000), for which he won an Oscar, Ocean’s Eleven (2001) and Solaris (2002), a clownishly facile remake whose selling point was George Clooney’s bare behind. Andrei Tarkovsky’s complex original (1972) remains gloriously intact.

While he was preparing the sequel to a vacuous mega-hit of his, however, one night the Unnameable confronted Soderbergh and his partner, the commercial devil, and executed an intervention. After all, the kid was in his forties now; wasn’t it time for him to take stock of himself? Soderbergh responded modestly, with “Equilibrium,” his first piece of decent work in more than a dozen years. Beautifully acted by Alan Arkin and Robert Downey Jr., the short film was released as part of the composite work Eros (2004), which was highlighted by Michelangelo Antonioni’s wonderful contribution, “The Dangerous Thread of Things.” Now Soderbergh has made a beautiful film—and one, clocking in at 72 minutes, that’s even a bit longer than “Equilibrium.” True enough, Soderbergh is also preparing yet a third swim with Danny Ocean; but never mind that. Right now, no one can burst my Bubble.

Bubble garnered publicity for the fact that Soderbergh released it nearly simultaneously to theaters, where it quickly died, cable television, and DVD shelves, drawing anger from the greediest, most corrupt (and corrupting) theater owners. These men and women—well, mostly men—celebrated the film’s scant box-office returns, happy that an alternative outcome hadn’t started a trend. Bubble is so good, though, that I can’t believe that many, if any, of them believed that it would attract droves of paying customers. Clooney isn’t even in this one.

Nor is anyone else that filmgoers have ever heard of. Not only is Bubble nonprofessionally cast; catching a wave of the future, it is shot in high definition video. (Cinematographer Peter Andrews has contributed elegantly gorgeous work.) But best of all, Bubble concerns itself with characters and a milieu bereft of glamor and highly reflective of social realities in the United States that U.S. filmmakers are generally pleased to avoid. Soderbergh is no intellectual giant, and he isn’t even all that sharply observant; but for the first time in a long time, his work has connected with some segment of reality. At least he doesn’t sensationalize the material at hand the way he did the material—puny to begin with—in Traffic.

The three main characters all work in an Ohio doll factory—a small operation that involves only one or two other employees. Everyone is working hard, and nobody is getting ahead anytime soon. Martha is middle-aged or close to, and overweight; a churchgoer, she lives with her infirm, elderly father, whose principal caregiver she is. She is the only one of the three who owns a car, and the other two prevail upon her for rides to their second jobs. Kyle is considerably younger than she—a boy, or scarcely more than a boy, really. He lives with his mother and doesn’t have a bank account. Tall and lanky, he appears too big for the child’s bedroom he still occupies. Although he doesn’t have a clue, we know that Martha is infatuated with him. Kyle is handsome, and we know, somehow, that Martha fantasizes about him. When he asks for a ride, she sweetly reminds him that she has already told him that she will do anything anytime for him. Rose, who is much the same age as Kyle, is a single mother who previously worked as a caregiver in a nursing home. When she asks Martha for a ride, Martha’s syntax is exquisitely hostile: “I don’t know why I shouldn’t be able to do that.” It is as though she really wants to say, “I don’t know why I should do that.” The script from which Soderbergh worked is by Coleman Hough, whose ear for dialogue is that precise throughout.

Martha and Kyle have worked at the factory for a while; Rose has just begun working there. Rose asks Martha to babysit for her so that she can go out on a Friday night date. Martha is caught off-guard when Kyle shows up at Rose’s apartment to pick up Rose. Rose hadn’t mentioned that her date is with Kyle. We have already noted Martha’s incipient jealousy at work when she spies on Rose and Kyle during their breaks together in the smoking lounge. Martha doesn’t smoke.

Stuff happens, and one of the three ends up strangled by someone that very night. The killing occurs off-screen, and it is clear to us—or it should be—that each of the remaining two doll factory employees honestly has no idea who committed the crime. However, we know that Rose has stolen money from both Kyle and the father of her baby, who angrily intrudes into her apartment that night to confront her. The latter’s profession of innocence is also convincing. Soderbergh is working expressively here, for the off-screen commission of the killing, as well as the killer’s absolutely honest denials of having committed the killing, is correlative to his or her dissociative state pertaining to its commission. One is compelled to think about two things: how easily one can commit an unpremeditated murder; how one’s mind may cope with one’s having committed such an act.

This dissociation is related to the factory work, the dehumanizing nature of which recalls other films in which this is portrayed, such as Josef von Sternberg’s An American Tragedy (1931), based on Theodore Dreiser’s stupendous novel, and Jean-Luc Godard’s British Sounds and Pravda (both 1969). In Bubble, each of the workers sits in her or his own space repetitively making the same contribution to the production of each doll. It all constitutes a kind of assembly line, although in this instance there isn’t an automated assembly line. There are many shots that blur the line between doll and worker in either direction; Soderbergh is eerily good at making the dolls seem at least as human as the workers, but a bit more selfconscious, perhaps, at making the humans seem no more human than the dolls. A closeup of the killer’s face that likens the face to that of a doll feels obligatory.

Bubble is marvelously underlit, as correlative to how these characters do not see their way clearly in and around their dead-end lives. The acting is mostly perfect. Debbie Doebereiner as Martha and Misty Dawn Wilkins as Rose could not be improved upon. Dustin Ashley is less interesting and effective, but at least he makes Kyle likeable.

Bubble is Soderbergh’s best film. Its 2006 appearance confounds the otherwise operative description of this artist as defunct.

MAURICE (James Ivory, 1987)

I have not read Maurice (pronounced Morris), the novel that Britain’s E.M. Forster wrote after his first major success, Howards End, but arranged to withhold from publication until a year after his death in 1970. Presumably, the reason for this arrangement is the homosexual content of the plot. (Forster himself was homosexual.) James Ivory, who earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Oregon, had already enjoyed a huge worldwide success with his film based on another Forster novel, the rollicking romantic comedy A Room with a View (1986), a gorgeous, exhilarating film that Ivory misguidedly angled to suggest that the source material had been written by D. H. Lawrence. In this case, I have read the novel, and I can only wonder whether Ivory understands that his film endorses a romantic couple that Forster’s novel pointedly finds incomplete. Regardless, the film is enchanting, so long as one doesn’t take it too seriously. On the other hand, Ivory’s Maurice begs to be taken seriously—deadly seriously. It is painfully affected, mawkish and, so unlike its predecessor, frightfully humorless.

It is also exceedingly long, its length, as is Ivory’s wont, taken up by plot—the perpetual bugaboo of commercial cinema. After a pre-credit sequence, this plot is launched at Cambridge University (Forster himself had been a student in King’s College at Cambridge), where two posh boys, before the Great War, become homosexual lovers, I guess. (Drearily chaste, the film doesn’t show much, just one stroking the other’s cheek, or one using the other’s chest as a pillow.) All this is done on the agile sly, dictated by the boys’ embarrassment and possible exposure by fellow students; for some reason, Ivory doesn’t stress the other reason for the care that the boys take, the fact that homosexuality was illegal at the time in their country. He and his co-scenarist, Kit Hesketh-Harvey, may or may not be drawing from the novel when they signal the gayness of one of the boys by the fact that he listens to Tchaikovsky! This exemplifies the absurd level at which this film operates.

Ducking parents and servants, the ardent pair have a go at eternal love even after graduation, but the Wilde-like trial and conviction of a fellow student for his homosexuality, and thus the ruination of that boy’s potential career, throws a monkey wrench into their passion, especially since one of them, Clive Durham, fancies a go at politics. Clive marries, leaving his former partner, Maurice Hall, to suffer the slings and arrows of self-doubt and sexual identity crisis. A hypnotist tells Maurice flatly that he should move to another country, where homosexuality is legal, because England “is disinclined to accept human nature”—the film’s best line, crisply delivered by Ben Kingsley in a rare good performance. But Maurice stays put, sighing over the sights in the shower room of the gym where he (although absent any discernible musculature) coaches pugilism. Not to worry; Maurice is about to get a pair of bulbous British buttocks to call his own. They belong to Alec Scudder, the young gamekeeper at the Durham estate (Rupert Graves, his normally straight hair profusely curled for the occasion). But Maurice must cross the barrier of his class prejudice if he is to nab this shot at bliss. Will he, or won’t he?

The story is made even more preposterous by Clive’s stolen squeezes and kisses of Maurice’s hand, a reflex of their college days. However, two elements of the film make certain amends. One is the organizing attachment of calendar dates that constantly reminds us that the Great War is coming and that it will likely sweep all the young men whom we see, regardless of their social station, to their deaths. The other—well, here I spill the beans—is the finale in which Alec and Maurice passionately embrace and kiss. This element, of course, is rendered all the more poignant by the first.

Too little too late. This is a painstakingly crafted film, and the viewer feels all the pain. If there is some message here for social or sexual tolerance, it is too vague and indistinct to register. Ivory and his color cinematographer, Pierre Lhomme, are too adept at fashioning one pretty picture after another. One wonders what madness convinced Ivory that color was indeed suitable for this material in the first place.

James Wilby and Hugh Grant play Maurice and Clive—and badly, I think, although the judgment at Venice was different: both shared the best actor prize. Graves, on the other hand, is compelling as Scudder, and Phoebe Nicholls is a little bit of heaven as Anne, Clive’s sweet, sparkling, clueless wife.

OTHELLO (Orson Welles, 1951)

Filmed in Italy and Morocco, Orson Welles’s Othello took the top prize at Cannes, in 1952, under the Moroccan banner. Three years later it had a very limited distribution in the United States, where, some perhaps felt, the spectacle of a dark-skinned man killing his fair-skinned wife not even the esteemed name of Shakespeare would spare an assortment of reprisals. As usual, Welles had had to struggle to finance the film; all his pay for acting in The Third Man, Prince of Foxes (both 1949) and The Black Rose (1950) went into keeping the project afloat. All funds at his disposal, though, proved insufficient to achieve a smooth, proficient result, and Othello’s sometimes dizzying multiplicity of shots ingeniously masks a multitude of problems that money normally solves in the making of Hollywood movies. The technician in him (along with the film’s commercial prospects) thus defeated, Welles the artist pressed on.

His victory at Cannes speaks for itself. Although flawed, the film towers over the Othello (1995) that, more recently, Oliver Parker dimly directed and Laurence Fishburne cluelessly performed. Nevertheless, Welles’s film lacks the highly imaginative imagery of his Macbeth (1948), and it’s even further below the level of his massively moving Chimes at Midnight (Falstaff, 1966), taken largely from Henry IV, Parts I & II. Indeed, Shakespeare’s Othello is only fleetingly discernible in Welles’s, which, radically shortened and visually baroque, invites an accusation that it relegates the text to a spare role of abstract verbal accompaniment. Othello’s humanity, which fills the center of the play, is twice reduced, first, by the film’s fragmentation and, too, by Welles’s own tentative enactment of the Moor. No longer is there a fall from the composure of a noble nature; nor, as a result, can there be an awesome rebound through the hero’s acceptance of mortally heavy responsibility. From the start Welles’s Othello is more mild than magnificent, self-uncertain even to the public eye, and, later, more defeatist than disproportionately jealous. No tranquil mind precedes “Farewell the tranquil mind.” Moreover, his murder of Desdemona, whom Othello misperceives as unfaithful, now seems more sorry ritual than agony; self-pity lies perilously close. Nor does realization of his costly error turn on this Othello his own embodiment of justice and honor. Rather, this Othello ends up a mere suicide—the neurotic modern interpretation of the man’s gracious finish.

Purists, then, will find plenty to carp about. Still, the film fascinates as Welles’s half-baked attempt to reimagine the play as film noir, the genre that had Welles in its grip. Instead of finding the play in its own tragic space, Welles encountered it in some parallel noir universe. Othello, there, is Welles’s size, our size—not an immense tragic figure but a duped schlemiel. No longer a malicious instigator, Iago now embodies a malicious fate; and, conjured by her husband’s feelings of inadequacy, Desdemona is the femme fatale, fate’s alluring mask, a blonde betrayer who’ll take Othello to his end unless he destroys her first—only, once he has done this, fate reveals that this is the very course by which it has tricked Othello to the very end he hoped to avert. Othello no longer is the lead character of Othello; now it is the cunning, conniving, almost visibly rotting Iago, brilliantly played by Micheál MacLiammóir, who occupies the dead center of the film’s oppressive Venetian atmosphere. Perched above him, the sly camera often shows him elevated, like a god surveying humans below, or, at ground level and angled upwards at Iago, the camera implies a gaping trap below, which in turn implies that God and the Devil, and heaven and hell, in this universe are one and the same fate. No wonder, then, that this Othello is an uncoiling thing of dark and shadow, its somber, dreamlike black-and-white imagery restlessly, anxiously mixing French poetic realism and German and late Eisensteinian expressionism, along with near pseudodocumentary reportage—all of which suggests an Othello gone noir. These stylistic elements and others—the low voices, especially Othello’s, suggesting the unconscious; the much reduced speech, allowing an influx of suspenseful silence; sudden actions, seemingly out of nowhere—combine to evoke a shifting, fluid nightmare. Now the whole universe is how the play’s Othello sees Desdemona: “[F]alse as water.”

At the film’s opening and closing Welles adds a bold framing device: Othello and Desdemona’s double funeral procession. This recalls the bookending of Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet (1930), where a collapsing chimney opens the film, and the completion of the collapse closes it, all to suggest the poetic depth in between of an instant of time. Now the action inside Welles’s funereal frame likewise implies a dreamlike depth, as though the frame were holding, suspended, the whole drama, the funeral having absorbed all circumstances leading up to it. This is an example of form analyzing content; for the film now becomes, like Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947), about the end—in effect the burial—of a marriage, where funeral completes wedding ritual, thus making, once the narrative frame is complete, the marriage, because it comes to a deadly conclusion, the substance that the vessel of the funeral contains. For Welles, and even perhaps for Shakespeare, the end of a marriage best reveals the course and content of the marriage.

What, then, is the “marital content” here? It is two-fold: Othello’s self-doubts, which his suspicion regarding Desdemona’s faithlessness projects onto the marriage; and Desdemona’s own contribution to her husband’s suspiciousness, by her choosing Cassio over him, not sexually of course, but by pleading for Cassio’s military reinstatement after Othello dismisses him. In the play, even apart from the issue of the handkerchief, Othello finds evidence of his wife’s disloyalty to him in her pressing Cassio’s suit. Desdemona doesn’t anticipate this response, because it is precisely her contentment, her absolute confidence in the marital choice she made, that allows her to be so open with her spouse in a matter pertaining to his military domain. Still, the kinship of class that she feels with Cassio necessarily must exclude her spouse, whose status derives from military accomplishment, not birth; and aggravating this sore point additionally for Othello is the fact that Cassio and his wife are both young, and he is older, thus excluding him from their charmed circle on another front. Now if we add the racial identity both Desdemona and Cassio share, but which, a blackamoor, Othello does not, we confront a situation that, potentially volatile, invites misunderstandings back and forth. Curiously, none of these factors, integral to the play, fully pertain to the film. The compression of the play’s first act now has Othello and Desdemona’s union seeming to appear out of nowhere; unless we lean on familiarity with the play, therefore, we never have much sense of the two as a couple. Also, Welles takes little note here of class differences; and his Othello, while older than Susanne Cloutier’s Desdemona, isn’t old enough to be her father, which he is in the play. Finally, Welles’s complexion isn’t sufficiently darkened to make it the salient point in the film that some feel it is in the play. The film’s relaxation of all these elements, and Desdemona’s now truncated appearance besides, have the odd effect of dehumanizing Desdemona and of making her pleadings on Cassio’s behalf, therefore, less a function of her own gracious personality than a projection of Othello’s (now) largely impenetrable being—the affect of his insecurities in the absence of much basis for these insecurities. Thus the film’s morbid action seems wholly contained by Othello’s own mind, which not even his death has put to rest; for, disembodied, a creeping, guilty thing, like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, now it comes to us to disclose the film.

Moving it closer to Hamlet, this Othello indeed finds its tenor in guilt; useless, motiveless guilt has replaced Iago’s “motiveless malignity.” (The phrase is Coleridge’s.) Overwhelming guilt may help explain this Othello’s peculiar passivity and may help justify Welles’s muted enactment of Shakespeare’s gloriously robust man of action. But what guilt? Humanity’s—not in the sense of Original Sin, Welles being a secular humanist, but in the sense of human responsibility for a teeming list of failures, including, in Welles’s own time, the twentieth century’s two world wars. Projected back in time, Welles’s burden of complicity for humanity’s self-inflicted inhumanity finds an unexpected repository in his Othello. (Eleven years later this will bear the dark fruit of brilliant art in Welles’s greatest masterpiece: from Kafka, The Trial, in whose unending sorrow—it is Welles’s addition—tosses and twists an elusive thread: Western memory of the Holocaust.) Moreover, this Othello resonates, for Welles, with especial, personal interest; for Othello’s guilt now somehow also relates to Welles’s own failure to prevail in his career (except, of course, artistically). Add to this the residue of guilt from at least one failed marriage and Welles’s identification with his Othello becomes clearer.

What Welles above all has taken from the play—and, by isolating and stressing it, has allowed to change the play—is the sense of inadequacy that Othello brings to his marriage, and his subsequent (and largely consequent) guilt, which he allows to destroy the marriage. The aspect of noirishness further seems to take the matter out of Othello’s hands, as though Othello were more a helpless witness to his marriage than a participant—as surely Welles had sometimes felt in his own doomed marriage to the world’s most celebrated woman, Rita Hayworth. Nothing on earth can keep this marriage of Othello’s whole; Welles knew this, from experience. The various forces that conspired to give his film its fractured, fragmented character, then, reveal what may be the fate of all marriage in Welles’s nightmare universe—and, even without film noir, come to think of it, in Shakespeare’s universe, too.

THE LOST PATROL (John Ford, 1934)

Based on a story by Philip MacDonald titled “Patrol,” John Ford’s The Lost Patrol is remarkable both for reasons often given and for others rarely, if ever, given—reasons that point to a far more intriguing piece that has been generally acknowledged. One doesn’t need to argue in order to change minds here about the film’s high worth. No one who loves cinema has been able to resist the stark war adventure that Ford brilliantly devised; few American films are as secure in the canon of recognized great works. Nevertheless, most have been beguiled for so long by the film’s splendid superficial aspects that they may have missed what in fact makes this a Ford film, a penetrating and highly suggestive work of art. Indeed, The Lost Patrol yields the summit of fictional American war films only to Ford’s own elegiac and poetic The Long Voyage Home (1940) and, if (not unreasonably) we identify these westerns as “war films,” Fort Apache (1948) and The Searchers (1956).

The story is too familiar to require extended synopsizing. During the First World War a British battalion, lost in the Mesopotamian desert, are being picked off one by one by the unseen enemy. “Where is your regiment?” the brigade commander, coming across the sole survivor, asks as this sergeant, overcome by unspeakable loss, points to a row of graves, each marked with a combatant’s saber: an image Akira Kurosawa would famously borrow for the conclusion of his Seven Samurai (1954).

Ford’s film mines two major themes: an identification of each side with the other; the religious basis of even such a “secular” war as World War I. One doesn’t need to speak of the terrific suspense that the film generates; everyone—Fordians, non-Fordians, anti-Fordians—all agree on the film’s high value as thrilling entertainment. Yet it is the film’s analytical nature that draws attention here; for it is this that gives The Lost Patrol the depth and interest of Erich Maria Remarque’s great novel about the same war, All Quiet on the Western Front—a depth and interest, I am sorry to say, that the largely sentimental Oscar-winning film version by Lewis Milestone (1930) lacks.

One of the combatants notes—the script is by Garrett Fort and Dudley Nichols—that there is no real reason for the Arabs who are killing them to be taking up arms against them. This is Fordian irony, for the soldier who utters this astoundingly casual remark fails to grasp what we readily do: that the truth of it cuts both ways. Ford’s imagery couldn’t be plainer: in a strange and provocative instant, another one of the soldiers, delirious from the heat and a protracted sense of danger, shoots at his own shadow in the sands only seconds before being shot by an Arab. This tragic mistake—it is the sound of the first shot that clarifies the target for the second and fatal shot—identifies each side with the other. In another incident, two soldiers are sent out to try to find the brigade that can rescue them while the battalion remains cornered at an oasis from which, at night while they fatefully tarried from war’s exhaustion, all their horses have been stolen by the enemy, which has also killed the sentry. When the two return from their failed mission, they are shot dead by their comrades who fatally mistake them—and, by extension, themselves—for the enemy. In effect, by killing two of their own, in what today is called “friendly fire,” the warriors have inadvertently consigned the distinction of opposing sides to the shifting sands of the desert. This hallucinatory environment consumes and obliterates such distinctions.

Psychologically, of course, the identification has this basis: the Arabs killing the British are a projection of the British soldiers’ fear of death. This possesses merit on its own as an idea for two reasons: it is this immediate fear of death, not ideology or patriotic principles, that in a war arena fuels the continuation of mutual combat; and it is the dehumanization of the enemy that this mortal dread excites and encourages that provides a compelling rational basis for the ongoing warfare, releasing it from the taint of what might otherwise be regarded as “unmanly,” cowardly emotions. Thus in the context of identification that Ford provides, the invisible nature of the enemy becomes a Brechtian device for commenting on this process of dehumanization. Two additional strategies lead to this complex outcome: Ford refrains from any jingoistic generation of hatred targeting the Arabs, refusing to see in its pursuit a necessary means for engaging his audience by manipulating its basest emotions; and the film, principally through the agency of the battalion chaplain who notes the religious significance of the region (“This very spot is the Garden of Eden”), underscores that it is the British who are geographically the intruders. Indeed, the “invisibility” of the Arabs is possible only because of their familiarity with the desert, which the film continually stresses is alien territory for the British, who succumb to their detriment to its hypnotic monotony. All this in effect flips the film’s perspective by providing a basis for our understanding the Arabs’ dehumanization of the British. Something else contributes to this outcome, which an artist of less integrity than Ford would have regarded as unthinkable: the film’s impartial tone and brisk style, both of which conspire to withhold any sentimental grieving over the serial deaths of the British combatants. Instead, it is their combinate death, at the end, that terribly and powerfully moves us (its index for us is the mute grief of the one shell-shocked survivor), by which point the emotion underscores rather than undercuts Ford’s thematic intent.

Ford the New Englander takes up with issue the British class system that enforces itself even in a strange land far removed geographically from the British Isles. I remember as a child being totally baffled by the plot’s point of departure: the lieutenant’s refusal to share with the regiment, even his next in command, their specific orders, their mission and their itinerary. But this refusal, Ford suggests, is second nature to the lieutenant, a commissioned officer who thus holds rank of class in addition to military rank over the company’s noncommissioned sergeant. He will, of course, share the orders on his own schedule, when he feels sufficient time has passed to remind the sergeant of his superiority and the sergeant’s own inferiority; only, he is the first to be shot dead, leaving these orders undisclosed and consigning the regiment to abandonment and utter bafflement as to where they are and where they should be for whatever reason. (The sergeant, assuming command, makes the correct decision to keep due north in hopes of rejoining the British brigade.) There are two aspects to the lieutenant’s arrogance: besides, obviously, his inbred feelings of superiority vis-à-vis the sergeant, the utter stupidity of assuming that his death isn’t even a possibility for which the regiment must be prepared. Since the other deaths follow his, it is quite possible to find in The Lost Patrol a parable, a morality play if you will, in which all the other members of the regiment pay the consequences for their commanding officer’s arrogance—this, one more working-out of Ford’s refusal to make the Arabs the “villains” of the piece.

The soldiers are a various group, with at least one of its members, besides the (by now dead) lieutenant, seemingly belonging to the upper class: George Brown, played indelibly by Reginald Denny (Of Human Bondage, 1934; Rebecca, 1940), one of the finest character actors of the day. The chaplain refers to Brown as “a man of breeding,” lest we miss the point, and Brown’s own demeanor and personal stories seem to corroborate the fact. Upon his death, however, we learn that “George Brown” was not his real name but “the best he could come up with” when he enlisted: a note of ambiguity that re-establishes Brown’s identity as either a member of the lower class or, more likely, a tainted member of the upper class who signed on for military duty, as many routinely joined the French Foreign Legion, in order to flee some aspect of their former lives. Thus Brown becomes a touchstone in the film for considerations of class; the soldiers themselves reveal themselves to be less stamped by military discipline—they are repeatedly shown, and chided by their sergeant for, coming up short in this area—than by the reflexes of class that account for their military obedience.

The oasis the regiment stumbles across, giving them the chance to rest and refresh themselves and their horses, promises to obliterate the class references, much as the equalizing sands promise to do this. But the opposite occurs, as Brown and the chaplain’s remark about Brown leave the impression that, wherever they find themselves, these British soldiers tote the baggage of the class system to which they are accustomed. The Irishman Quincannon Billy Bevan and the Anglo-Italian Morelli (lest we miss the point of identification, played by Irishman Wallace Ford) represent the “untouchables” of British society, the socioeconomic dregs. Ironically, the oasis is, by the chaplain’s reckoning, the once Garden of Eden, the scene of humanity’s original state of equality. The men’s being trapped there suggests their failure to transcend the mindset of classism.

Ford suggests the contribution that classism makes to the generation of wars. It is with bitter irony that he passingly allows the realization to arise that these soldiers, fighting in the immediate to preserve their lives, are fighting in the larger scheme of things to preserve the British class system. Another theme, related to this, however, draws his greater interest: the religious nature of and basis for war—even a secular war such as the First World War. To me, his pursuit and development of this theme is the film’s most remarkable achievement. Let us begin with a reminder of what we all know: among American filmmakers, Ford was the great atheist, a man steeped in the culture of Irish Catholicism who nevertheless never found a need to believe in God. Now let us admit at the outset that nothing in the demeanor of the soldiers or of their combat suggests in the slightest a holy war. Yet the film is saturated with religious overtones: the location, to be sure, and the chaplain’s numerous attempts to impose a religious cast to the proceedings. This chaplain, Sanders, is generally described as a religious fanatic, but the film leaves open the possibility that his fanaticism is the result of the secular conduct of the war and of the men’s refusal to bend to his religious leadership, both of which may conspire to enlarge his religious defensiveness. On the surface, then, the war that Ford shows us could not seem more secular, especially in contrast to the figure of Sanders. Indeed, for safety’s sake the sergeant cuts short one of Sanders’ services for the dead—or so the sergeant says, for we perceive, also, a certain distaste the sergeant feels for the religious intrusion that the chaplain’s biblical reading represents. Ford stresses the point; when the young sentry is buried, someone suggests marking his grave with a cross made of twigs, but it is the sergeant who contrarily suggests the secular saber as a marker. “I think he would have liked that,” the sergeant says. This may be so; it is no less true, however, that the avoidance of the religious marker likewise reflects the sergeant’s own preference. The secular marker then becomes the standard for the subsequent graves of fallen soldiers—a marker honoring the soldier’s life on earth, not Christ or the soldier’s delivery to an afterlife.

The avoidance of the religious: isn’t this what we see throughout the film, and isn’t Ford’s means for underscoring it the presence of Sanders, in whom religious feeling seems to reside in excess, as though the religious feelings of the others, whatever they may be, have been projected onto him so that they, the combatants, might better focus on their secular military duties? Yet the presence of Sanders continually reminds us of the opposite as well: that these soldiers are Christian, that the nation they represent and for which they are fighting is Christian, and that theirs is a Christian incursion into a non-Christian place. (Militarily, Sanders’ whole reason for being included in the mission is so that he can attend to the combatants’ specifically Christian needs.) The implication is clear: what we are observing is a “holy war,” like the Crusades, only one given the trappings of modern secularism. What Ford reveals throughout is the sublimation of the religious in modern secular war, which in turn implies the religious basis of modern war, which the British deny (are in denial over) because it threatens to expose the connection between the current war and the barbarous wars of the past likewise fought in the name of civilization. “Civilization,” after all, always means Christian civilization. Ford’s is a breathtakingly ironical approach; it’s the absence of the religious from view that ultimately points to the religious basis of war for which the film argues. How I love the complexity of Ford’s cinema!

Boris Karloff, in what is without doubt his greatest role, plays Sanders. (Since 1934 saw also the release of Edgar G. Ulmer’s stunning The Black Cat, both of Karloff’s best performances surfaced in the same year.) The extravagant old-world style of his playing, especially in contrast to the restraint with which the role of the sergeant is enacted, helps Ford immensely in conveying what he believes to be the case: simultaneously, the piteous beauty and poetry of religious feeling and the vast danger that the irrationality of religious faith poses. But Ford is not done with Sanders, who contributes in another important way to his film’s intellectual motive and design. For Sanders, the misfit too wrapped up in the rituals of death to embrace life fully, is an expressionistic reminder of another character: the lieutenant, so much in denial about the possibility of his own death that irony insists he must be the first to get killed. (The appearance of the Arabs at the last, when they are machine-gunned down by the sergeant, is another expressionistic touch, for Ford’s image of them on top of a dune suggests the possibility that they are a mirage, a figment of the sergeant’s heat-battered and company death-battered mind.) The identification of Sanders with the lieutenant is a master stroke underscoring how each is somehow apart from the group—the lieutenant, above; the chaplain, because the others to his frustration ignore him, below. It is Sanders’ remark about Brown’s “breeding” that prompts the identification, but it’s the sheer lunacy that Karloff’s acting conveys which forges it. Both these characters live perhaps only in their own heads. Alas, by implication, the class-structured Britain that the lieutenant represents may also be living, Ford implies, in a region of national ether and noxious gas. The larger point of the identification between the two disparate characters is that the nation’s political class structure derives its authority from the nation’s religious
foundation and the hierarchic nature of that foundation.

Ford’s film is exceptionally beautiful visually. Shot in the California desert on a shoestring budget, Ford and his black-and-white cinematographer, Harold Wenstrom, nevertheless are better able to conjure a (menacingly) bewitching landscape than David Lean and his color cinematographer, Fred Young, could manage with a humongous budget for the tepid Lawrence of Arabia (1962). (Some people can shoot film; others don’t know how to.) The film is also superbly cut by Paul Weatherwax, who would win an Oscar for editing Jules Dassin’s wonderful police thriller The Naked City (1948). Max Steiner’s score, especially alert to Karloff’s flourishes in portraying Sanders’ insanity, is among his best.

Victor McLaglen appears in the lead role of the sergeant. His tremendous performance already deserves the Oscar he would win one year later for a completely different role for Ford: Gypo Nolan, in The Informer (1935). Indeed, McLaglen, the father of director Andrew V. McLaglen, would remain such an acting resource for Ford that he belongs with Henry Fonda and John Wayne in the pantheon of Ford’s players. His detailing of the sergeant’s trajectory from competent commander to broken man is utterly convincing and heartrending, and it is The Lost Patrol’s principal means for conveying Ford’s abhorrence of war.