THE LAST TIME I COMMITTED SUICIDE (Stephen Kay, 1997)

The inspiration for the legendary Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Neal Cassady was the avatar of the Beat Movement. Cassady, who died at 42 after an all-night drinking binge, is the main character of The Last Time I Committed Suicide, a series of incidents whose atmospheric lyricism suggests the influence of Gus Van Sant. Stephen Kay—the actor and T.V. director Stephen T. Kay—uses a zigzagging time structure, character-voiceover, lots of hand-held camera, a mixture of color and black and white. Cigarettes somersault through space; young people reek of potential to lose at life. Material of this sort has little trouble taking hold of my heart.

I couldn’t care less that this small independent Canadian film strikes me at least as being closer to O’Neill-1920s than to ’50s-Beat.

Based on a letter of Cassady’s, Kay’s film finds the future great one when he’s a kid in his twenties. Cassady’s life appears to be in a holding pattern around which circles a thoroughly conventional suburban dream—a cottage, with a white picket fence—that his fingers can’t quite reach for some wildness in him undercutting his will. Having abandoned the girl who would have helped make his dream a reality, Cassady writes a friend, “But, as you know, this wasn’t the last time I committed suicide.”

This is a piece about conflicted youth and their tangible-intangible dreams. And it’s a film about older characters, too—characters who have been abandoned by their dreams. Hence the downbeat mood and fragile charm, the feeling of frayed, loose, about-to-be-lost and already lost connections.

The female roles remain sketchy, perhaps because Cassady’s girls are an index of his projective needs. (Although omnipresent in the film, Cassady’s bisexuality is never made explicit.) However, three of the male roles have drawn full, wonderful work. Thomas Jane (the crazy thug of Boogie Nights) is excellent as Cassady; sweet and modest, his performance succeeds in holding the center of the film. (Footnote: Nick Nolte dazzles as a later Neal Cassady in John Byrum’s Heart Beat, 1980.) As Jerry, Neal’s co-worker on a Goodyear graveyard shift, Jim Haynie creates a thoughtful portrait of one whose life experience has cost him all his illusions. Skinny Adrien Brody delights as Cassady’s gay friend. And then there is Harry, the pool table-drawn barfly whose open though smarmy manner masks terrible loneliness and bitterness—an O’Neill role if ever there was one. Keanu Reeves is brilliant in the part—as brilliant as Olivier or Jason Robards might have been. Pitched between Jamie Tyrone and Shakespeare’s Iago, seesawing perilously between presumptuousness and god-awful embarrassment, Reeves’s Harry discloses misdirected intelligence, a core of despair, a wasting, selfish life. Driving to the heart of darkness of an emotional cripple who is likely consumed by repressed homosexual guilt, this is powerful, adventurous acting.

All the more credit to Kay and Reeves, then, for keeping it from unbalancing the whole. And all the more credit to Reeves for reminding us that he is one of the greatest actors on Earth.

THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE (John Huston, 1951)

Tubercular Stephen Crane died in 1900, falling short of his twenty-ninth birthday. Although it isn’t quite in the league of masterpieces by Herman Melville (Moby-Dick, The Confidence Man, Pierre) and Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Pudd’n’head Wilson), his Red Badge of Courage is a great American novel, easily the finest ever written about the American Civil War. Blending naturalism and impressionism, objective realism and psychological realism, it owes something to the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. Yet it is also startlingly original. British author H. G. Wells called Crane “the first expression of the opening mind of a new period.”

The son of a Methodist minister, Crane could not maintain religious faith in the face of the poverty that he witnessed—see his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, written in his teens—and (at the time of Red Badge) the horrors of war that he imagined. (Later, as a war correspondent, he covered the Spanish-American and Greco-Turkish Wars.) He took reality on the chin. He “was almost illusionless,” according to biographer and poet John Berryman.

American filmmaker John Huston wasn’t one to harbor illusions either. The Red Badge of Courage, which he hoped would be his masterpiece, concluded a two-picture deal with M-G-M, which had blithely butchered Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924) from 9½ to 2¼ hours in order to satisfy the studio’s own greed and its antagonism to art as distinct from commercial entertainment. Studio head Louis B. Mayer had been skeptical about Huston’s project from the get-go but acquiesced to the go-ahead given by Dore Schary, the new vice president in charge of production. Nevertheless, the project saw a succession of budget cuts, and when a preview audience populated by adolescents—a group for whom the film was never intended—derided the result, the studio slashed the film by thirty minutes, all but deleting a major character (the Tattered Soldier) and conflating two separate battles into a single, confusing event. However, M-G-M’s worst “improvement” came in a different form, and more than the other changes this one got to the heart of the studio’s disapproval of the project. A voiceover narration—to his eternal disgrace, spoken by James Whitmore—was added.* Its opening commentary stakes out what it wants audiences to embrace as the movie’s unifying theme: the passage of Henry Fielding, a Union recruit, from boyhood to manhood as he is tested by the experience of war.

Indeed, this is how the novel is commonly taught in American high schools in an effort to make it “relevant” in particular to adolescent boys. In truth, those teaching English at this level, trained in education rather than (to any degree of rigor) literature, probably think this is what the novel is about. Only, it isn’t. War doesn’t “make a man” of Henry, although he himself may think it does. War isn’t background in Crane’s book for a coming-of-age story; nor is the novel in any way endorsing war as a means for boys to feel their oats and get on to the meat of manhood. The Red Badge of Courage is a stinging indictment of war, which it sees as a false god that is, in fact, the other face of the Christian god to whom soldiers pray to steel themselves for killing and being killed. It is an exquisite and withering piece of irony, and Huston, who documented combat during the Second World War, wanted his film to match the author’s intentions. It is his allegiance to those intentions that had made him want to make the film in the first place. This made M-G-M very nervous. At the time, the United States itself was at war, in Korea, and at home a reactionary atmosphere had set in—McCarthyism—that equated the expression of certain sentiments, especially in Hollywood (because of its cultural influence) and government, with dangerous disloyalty. There might be grim repercussions for a studio that made an antiwar film at a time of war; it could be seen as giving aid and comfort to the Communist enemy and as undermining support for American combat troops. Charles Chaplin’s intended antiwar satire Shoulder Arms (1918) had also been unmercifully altered upon the U.S.’s belated engagement in the First World War.

M-G-M, then, was afraid of losing more than its shirt.

But why then is Huston’s film as good as it is?

Following the ridiculous opening comment, the narration draws verbatim from the book. While this practice may reduce somewhat the resonance of some of the film’s imagery, it corroborates Huston’s point of view. Without realizing it, probably because they misgauged Crane’s intent, the studio has assembled a film that is largely true to this intent! (“Scars faded like flowers,” at the last Whitmore reads from the book, missing the irony but in no way obstructing our more intelligent ability to restore it.) Meanwhile, Huston was off in Africa shooting The African Queen (1951) with Bogey and Kate.

The “plot” of the film adheres to the coming-of-age story that American schoolteachers routinely mistake the novel to be. Henry is fearful that he will prove a sissy in combat and even bolts at the first sign of battle; but shame emboldens his behavior once he has returned to his unit. The narrative counts for little, though. It is the way in which a story is told that is decisive to its meaning, for ten persons might tell the same story, more or less following the same or similar details of plot, and come up with ten different meanings—in effect, ten different stories. Crane’s treatment of Conklin’s—the Tall Soldier’s—sudden death from a battle wound is ripe with the pointed irony young Crane could beautifully muster. Jim Conklin’s death—note his initials—is a parody of the crucified Jesus. You need to listen closely as well as read closely; with literature, speedreading doesn’t work:

Suddenly, his form stiffened and straightened. Then it was shaken by a prolonged ague. He stared into
space. . . .
  He was invaded by a creeping strangeness that slowly enveloped him. For a moment the tremor of his legs caused him to dance a hideous hornpipe. . . .
  His tall figure stretched itself to its full height. There was a slight rending sound. Then it began to swing forward, slow and straight, in the manner of a falling tree. A swift muscular contortion made the left shoulder strike the ground first.
  The body seemed to bounce a little way from the earth. “God!” said the tattered soldier.
  The youth [Henry] had watched, spellbound, this ceremony at the place of meeting. His face had been twisted into an expression of every agony he had imagined for his friend.
  He now sprang to his feet and, going closer, gazed upon the pastelike face. The mouth was opened and the teeth showed in a laugh.
  . . . he could see that that the [corpse’s] side looked as if it had been chewed by wolves.
  The youth turned, with sudden, livid rage, toward the battle-field. He shook his fist. . . .
  “Hell—”
  The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.

Crane’s presentation of Conklin, to whom Henry looks up, as a mock-Christ figure is typical of his ironical strategies in the book. The accumulation of these composes a portrait of war, however sincerely fought, as a pseudo-religious event. To be blunt, Crane’s description of Conklin’s death is at once horrifying and hilarious, the latter principally due to the Christian symbolism that Crane turns on its ear. Ear is right. The attentive reader hears the explosion of wit in the final line of Chapter IX, “The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer,” wherein “pasted” picks up on Conklin’s death mask, his “pastelike face,” and the parody of his heavenward spiritual ascension, as the last image takes us to the sky, enjoins and pointedly confuses the blood-red god of Christian sacrifice and the blood-red god of war, the sun’s pastiness and wafer-likeness exposing the falseness of both in their mockery of sacrament.

Huston’s own atheism imparts to the corresponding scene in the film something of the same incongruous spirit. (This atheism of his also helped him make the most perceptive film ever about the role of religion in the American cultural landscape, Wise Blood, 1979, from Flannery O’Connor.) However, we are talking Hollywood here, and the boldest limit of sacrilege that Crane impishly pursued is pretty much off-limits to Huston and everyone else in Tinseltown. Huston’s Red Badge is a considerable achievement, but it falls considerably short of Crane’s. Still, Huston, assisted by black-and-white cinematographer Harold Rosson, devises a pair of shots that elsewhere intimates Crane’s courage. The first time that Henry feels he has proven himself in war, he looks up to see radiant sunlight from the sky showering down on him through branches and leaves of a tree. It is a beauteous spectacle—but one the dappled character of which suggests Henry’s religious misinterpretation of a purely natural phenomenon. Later, when he feels reconfirmed in this self-confidence, he looks up again, and sunlight and tree again provide the same visual effect, only this time less gorgeously, more mutedly. The second instance, then, ironically undercuts the first; but even on its own, the film’s first breathtakingly tranquil instance of the effect brilliantly mocks the whole idea that success in combat wins God’s approbation. To Huston, as with Crane, such an idea is egotistical and perhaps even solipsistic—rather than a spiritual revelation, an exposure of the human need to justify participation in killing people.

Commentators routinely note that Huston based the visual style of his film on Matthew Brady’s Civil War photographs. But it is what he does with this objective, realistic style that one needs to consider to grasp better Huston’s artistic intent. Huston has punctuated his film with closeups, especially of Fielding, that undercut the film’s pseudo-photographic realism, shifting its tenor to a largely subjective domain. Point-of-view shots, like the ones described in the previous paragraph, assist in this procedure. Finally, an hallucinatory quality to much of the film, in its portrayal of the impact of war on the war’s participants, completes the task of undercutting. Huston counters objectivity, then, with subjectivity, thus implying that warriors will make of their warfare what they will, assigning whatever meanings to it they must in order to stabilize themselves and redeem themselves from whatever shame or guilt might proceed from participation in murder.

Huston assembled a great cast. The most highly decorated soldier of World War II, diminutive, obstreperous Audie Murphy beautifully plays Henry Fielding, giving so transparent a rendering of the youth’s volatile and conflicted emotions as to render much of the voiceover narration unnecessary and all the more intrusive. (After first meeting Murphy, who had killed nearly 250 Germans during the war, Huston described him as a born killer!) Bill Mauldin, World War II’s American cartoon laureate, is vivid as Tom Wilson, the Loud Soldier, who hides fear of combat behind bravado but, after tasting combat, relaxes into honest, open reflection. Arthur Hunnicutt is a hoot as Bill Porter, another of the soldiers. And so on.

What with the studio’s meddling, the film did not turn out as Huston had hoped. It isn’t among his greatest works,** although the first movement—the entire film is now 69 minutes long—is amazing, and the summary shot of Fielding confusedly carrying two flags, his Union Jack and the flag of a fallen Confederate soldier, is exceptionally powerful.

* Lillian Ross’s book Picture (1952) famously chronicles the film’s troubled history.

** While it amazes me how much better Key Largo (1948) and The Misfits (1961) have become with the passage of time, here are my ten favorite Huston films in order of preference:

     1. San Pietro (1945)
     2. The Dead (1987)
     3. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
     4. Wise Blood (1979)
     5. Fat City (1972)
     6. Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
     7. The Red Badge of Courage (1951)
     8. Let There Be Light (1946)
     9. The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
     10. Beat the Devil (1953)

SABOTEUR (Alfred Hitchcock, 1942)

Few, if any, rank Saboteur among Alfred Hitchcock’s great works, but many find it an engaging thriller nevertheless, and it was an enormous popular success. Saboteur is indeed one of the most compulsively watchable films by cinema’s most compulsively watchable artist-entertainer. At three in the morning, popping Antonioni or Pudovkin into the machine is an unlikely strategy for coping with insomnia; Hitchcock’s the number-one choice. Moreover, there may be a little more to Saboteur than meets the eye, despite Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol’s casual dismissal of it as superficial programmer in their seminal work on Hitchcock. I find the World War II suspenser a gracious pause by which its maker looked back, around and ahead.

The protagonist is Barry Kane, whom authorities pursue cross-country after wrongly fingering him as the spy whose sabotage of the California aircraft plant at which he worked resulted in the death of his best friend. Kane is himself in pursuit of the actual saboteur, Frank Fry, whom he witnessed acting oddly at the plant; during this pursuit the boy meets various people, some of whom help him while others do not, including a girl, model Pat Martin, with whom he falls in love, and the ring of American Nazis to which Fry belongs, including its leader, a rich, respected businessman. Kane feigns membership in the ring to find out what he can. In New York City, where all pursuits converge, Kane attempts to sabotage the planned sabotage of the public launch of a U.S. battleship, bringing the melodrama full circle—at least, full oval. Young Kane, suspected of treason, becomes a saboteur in defense of his country; at the last it is thus revealed that the film’s title refers to Kane twice: as a suspected saboteur; as a real one.

Much of the film’s considerable fun is in the transport, across the southwestern desert to America’s premier metropolis. (In his masterpiece, Psycho, Hitchcock eighteen years hence would conflate desert and city, with the latter, to a thematic point, having been built on the shifting, isolating sands of the former.) Among those Kane meets are a sympathetic truck driver emblematic of proletarian America, a blind man, Pat’s uncle, who senses his innocence of crime and his decency, a character blatantly drawn from an earlier film released by the same studio, Universal, The Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935), and a caravan of circus performers, perhaps an allusion to Tod Browning’s wonderful Freaks (1932). These include a bearded lady, a dwarf, and Siamese twins. Most wish to help Barry and Pat, who are a contentious couple of sorts by this point, but two or three do not. A democratic vote—part of the film’s artillery of propaganda (in this instance, worrisome for those of us who oppose tyranny of the majority, especially since the circus dissenters are effectively silenced)—is decisive in the young couple’s favor. More than once Kane’s escape from the authorities chasing him, moreover, generates heart-pounding suspense.

What unifies the film and, I feel, elevates it above the level of mere diversion is the theme of indebtedness. The boy is indebted to all those who assist in his eluding police capture, allowing him the chance to find Fry and prove his own innocence. Is it a stretch to say that he is also indebted to the country, the United States, that has given him the values of decency and initiative that fuel this adventure?

Regardless, it isn’t Barry Kane’s indebtedness that alone is at the heart of Saboteur. It is Hitchcock’s as well. The film’s stunning opening movement at the aircraft factory expresses his indebtedness to cinema, specifically, the silent cinema of Germany’s Fritz Lang. Hitchcock overtly may have expressed more indebtedness to Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, but this opening passage of Saboteur, with its black-and-white architectural formalism and its slowly encroaching black smoke and flaming fire, pays homage most especially to Lang’s Spione (Spies, 1928). More generally, Hitchcock is expressing gratitude to the great new art form of the twentieth century for its redemption of a bullied, fear-ridden childhood. Hitchcock’s gratitude likewise goes in different directions across the Atlantic Ocean. Allusions in Saboteur to his British films, especially The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) and Sabotage (1936), express his indebtedness to England, his birth country. By the same token, his first American film with an American setting expresses Hitchcock’s indebtedness to his new country, the United States, to which Hitchcock came in 1939, lured by Hollywood and David O. Selznick. Lang, incidentally, had immigrated to the U.S. a few years earlier; a German Jew, he had fled Europe for his life—like Kane, from the State, in Saboteur, treason being a capital crime.

Obviously I am pleading for a view of Saboteur’s being a more personal film for Hitchcock, possibly subconsciously, than is usually allowed. (To stretch a bit: the heroine’s first name and nickname match those of Hitchcock’s own daughter.) But there’s one point on which everyone agrees: the encounter at the finale, between Kane and Fry on top of the Statue of Liberty, constitutes one of Hitchcock’s (or anybody else’s) most thrilling set-pieces. One’s heart stops (along with most of the film’s sound, as the Langian influence reasserts itself). The iconic image of the Statue of Liberty coalesces various strains of Hitchcock’s indebtedness. However, its participation in the film is generally regarded as an anticipation of the Mount Rushmore sequence in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), another chase/spy, romantic comedy and thriller/adventure with which Saboteur has indeed striking affinities. But the Lady Liberty passage doesn’t function at all as does the relevant passage in the later film. I have thus written about North by Northwest:

. . . the film assaults the kind of programmatic nationalism that leads to state paranoia at the expense of ordinary people in their ordinary lives. Hitchcock gives this heartfelt idea delightful form in one of his great set-pieces. Pursued by their enemies, Roger and Eve scramble for their lives on Mount Rushmore, their torsos and limbs jabbing, knocking, grabbing, sliding down sculpted national icons and symbols—the gigantic heads of revered U.S. presidents. (The film’s working title was “The Man on Lincoln’s Nose.”) Throughout this heartstopping passage we, the audience, care nothing about “America” as abstract entity or as springboard for patriotic emotion; rather, we care about the two Americans whose lives are at immediate risk. Whether one agrees, Hitchcock couldn’t be plainer: Nations don’t matter; people matter.

The later film reflects on the omnipresent crisis of the time, the Cold War that reduced both sides, according to North by Northwest, to inhuman mirror-images of one another. By contrast, the Second World War Saboteur uses its national icon actively, not passively. Lady Liberty embodies the value of freedom in which Kane, Hitchcock and his audience believe; properly understood, the passage shows the statue orchestrating Fry’s death as Kane struggles to rescue the dangling villain, who is barely holding on. The hero doesn’t kill Fry; it is Beauty that kills the beast.

Hitchcock orchestrates silence and sound in Saboteur masterfully, correlative to the film’s blend of dream and stark reality; indeed, this is his most Langian film. The script, from Hitchcock’s own story idea, is by Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison (Hitchcock’s secretary and writing surrogate) and Dorothy Parker. Joseph Valentine is the superlative cinematographer. Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane make charming leads (Lane is more gorgeous in Hitch’s eye than anywhere else), and a shockingly young Norman Lloyd makes a memorable slime as Fry.

SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959)

Cleopatra (1963) notwithstanding, writer-director (and producer) Joseph L. Mankiewicz made some incredibly entertaining films, chief among them his gloriously bickering Oscar-winning best picture All About Eve (1950), for which he won his third and fourth Oscars. (He had also won writing and directing Oscars for A Letter to Three Wives, 1949). If I had to choose my second-favorite Mankiewicz movie, after All About Eve, it would be Suddenly, Last Summer, which Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams expanded and adapted from Williams’s one-act play. Like Eve, this one crackles and electrifies.

Legend has it that Williams wrote the play in response to his psychiatrist’s advice that he should get a grip on his homosexuality. (Homosexuality at that time was considered a mental illness by the mental health profession.) Both play and film reek of symbolical evidence of Williams’s homosexual guilt and his sheer terror of his own sexual nature. It is the fascinating work of a tormented artist—absent the wit, not unlike a short story by Poe.

The film opens in a state hospital in New Orleans, where young Dr. Cukrowicz—the name sounds enough like cockroach to evoke Kafka—is performing his grisly specialty, a lobotomy, for an operation-room audience. It is 1937, and there is a thin line between enlightened medical practice and voodoo surgery. The presumption is that the mentally sick patient will be brought a measure of peace by the surgery; but a number of things point to the backwardness of the procedure and of the mindset that stamps it with medical and social approval. We never see the patient except for her skull as gruesome incisions are made into it. Therefore, what the camera shows us and what it does not show us conspire to suggest the dehumanizing nature of lobotomies. Later, we learn that another woman is a candidate for lobotomy only because one family member, her wealthy aunt who lives in the Garden District, wants to silence her truthfulness and another family member, her mother, greedily wants the money that the sister-in-law is promising if only she will sign the consent form for the operation. Finally, during the opening surgery, the principal lamp expires, casting a visual pall of darkness on the whole procedure. Indeed, the flickering then dead light projects the outcome for the patient’s brain. Visually this extraordinary impression is accentuated by the black and white of Jack Hildyard’s superlative cinematography.

As state hospitals are wont to be, this one is short of funds; hence, the bum operation-room lighting. Violet Venable, the wealthy widow, thus dangles the possibility of an enormous donation as incentive for the doctor to perform a lobotomy on her niece, Catherine Holly. It is all in an effort to shut Catherine up. Last summer, on holiday with Venable’s son, Sebastian, in a beach town called Cabeza de Lobo—the place is fictitious, either in Spain or Mexico (I’m not sure), and means Wolf’s Head—Catherine witnessed the lethal “sacrifice” of Sebastian, who was assaulted and devoured by a pack of wild boys. Apparently Sebastian used his mother and, when Venable no longer was young enough, Catherine to attract boys for his sexual uses. His cannibalistic death is the boys’ revenge—a projection of Sebastian’s homosexual guilt. All this must not come out. Violet Venable’s position is that her son wasn’t gay at all; rather, he was “chaste,” “celibate,” a beautiful poet—and her confidante and closest companion. They were, Mother says, “a couple.” Beneath her cold, imperious attitude, it is possible that Venable is afflicted with guilt of her own; perhaps she feels responsible for her son’s homosexuality. Perhaps she feels that his sexuality somehow derived from her own incestuous feelings for him. For Williams, the ancient tearing to pieces and digestive disposal of surrogate Sebastian possibly suggests, in addition to homosexual guilt, his fear of national rejection over his sexual orientation. Most agree that, with The Glass Menagerie, Suddenly, Last Summer is Williams’s most autobiographical play.

The piece is constructed so that Catherine’s memory of Sebastian’s awful public death (close to the mother sea) doesn’t kick in until the last, whereupon Catherine discloses everything with Cukrowicz’s encouragement and in her aunt’s and mother’s presence. A lobotomy becomes unnecessary when she empties her mind of all the horrors it had repressed—a process suggestively the opposite of eating and devouring. The film is dotted with references to devouring: Catherine’s cravings for cigarettes to smoke; the Venus Fly Trap in Violet’s luxuriant garden, formerly Sebastian’s sanctuary—a place recalling the garden in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” In a symbolical sense, Violet is constantly lunching on people as she manipulates and appropriates them toward her own ends.

Like the play, much of the film proceeds by what characters recollect and recount—an expressive way of suggesting the human mind, the horrible truths it suppresses and, in Violet Venable’s case, the lies with which it papers over the truth.

Suddenly, Last Summer is an exceptionally beautiful film to look at. Gorgeous Elizabeth Taylor plays Catherine. Oliver Messel’s production design, William Kellner’s art direction and Scott Slimon’s set decoration are starkly elegant at hospital and headily erotic at the Venable home. Jean Louis’s costumes for Catherine are the most striking ones that Taylor ever wore onscreen. I have already noted Hildyard’s black-and-white cinematography—a feast of shadows and light. The Gothic atmosphere that the film conjures just barely conceals that Suddenly, Last Summer is at heart a horror film.

Neither Taylor as Catherine (best actress Golden Globe) nor Katharine Hepburn as Violet is exact, but both give charismatic performances. (Five years hence, Olivia de Havilland would play a character remarkably similar to Violet, only nicer, in Walter Grauman’s Lady in a Cage.) In particular, Hepburn makes Violet’s slippage into insanity at the end sad and haunting. Mercedes McCambridge is good as Catherine’s mother, who would sell her daughter’s brain in an instant but maintains the fiction, for her own sake, that she is a loving, caring parent. Best of all, however, is Montgomery Clift as Cukrowicz. We all know that Clift was a mess on-set, alcoholic and beset with the shakes; but his acting is steady, calm, clear, perceptive and resonant. His is a fine, ironical portrait of a decent man doing his best to navigate the Dark Ages of the twentieth century. It is Clift and Mankiewicz who hold the film together.

Suddenly, Last Summer was a huge hit, justifying the Hollywood production code’s—the Breen Office’s—relaxation of certain rules to accommodate the film’s highly unusual and “adult” subject matter. This enabled the film to make sense, whereas the previous year’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks), also based on a Williams play (and also starring Taylor), could not, given its enforced silence on the issue of homosexuality on which the drama turns and turns.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING (Peter Jackson, 2003)

The final installment of Peter Jackson’s financially enormous J.R.R. Tolkien trilogy, which a friend of mine aptly described as “unmagical,” is an exhausting piece of work full of stress and fuss—a production rather than a film, to which—brace yourself—more than 400 technicians contributed. The credits list ten producers, co-producers and executive producers: ten. And for those foolish enough to think Jackson was deserving of his directorial Oscar, consider this: the credits also list ten second-unit and assistant directors. Given how much “action” is crammed into this monstrously long, tedious movie, we must conclude that Jackson really functioned more as a producer (another of his credits) than as a filmmaker—although associating Jackson’s name with any sort of functioning sounds like a bad joke.

Indeed, it’s the battle scenes, especially the final battle for Middle-Earth, that strike visual (if not dramatic) sparks—scenes to which Jackson may have contributed little or nothing, perhaps logistical oversight. What he certainly directed are all the closeups and two-shots of various conversations and interactions: cinema at the level of routine television. As in the first two parts of the trilogy, these exasperatingly unimaginative shots rob the Hobbits of their allegedly diminutive size, rendering them many times larger than life. Occasional long shots, in which these figures appear small next to human characters of normal size, are pathetic attempts to correct Jackson’s ineptitude. Throughout, the ratio between long shots, which are few, and close shots, which abound, is the exact opposite of what it ought to have been. Jackson must never have stumbled over Fritz Lang’s “Siegfried,” the first part of Die Nibelungen (1924), the film, had he any knowledge or sense of cinema, that probably should have guided him. Instead, his model might have been 1960s teenage beach musicals starring Tommy Sands and Annette Funicello, for all the clarity and expressiveness Jackson was able to muster.

There is an especial downside to Jackson’s overall incompetence in a film where the battle scenes are spectacular and sensational. One eagerly anticipates these scenes. This is not a good thing. While it certainly doesn’t turn us into warmongers, it does undo any suggestion that war is bad. A film cannot credibly argue against war or violence if it puts its weary audience into a state of high anticipation for each thunderous view of men on horses doing battle. Give the film at least this much credit, however: its battles lack the gorgeous grandeur that would have made the film pro-war by default. Welles’s or Welles-through-Branagh’s influence (Chimes at Midnight by way of the 1989 Henry V) imposed necessary sobriety.

I saw the first two installments only so that I could see this last one, and I have been slow in coming to it because of the deplorable nature of what I had already seen. Another friend’s opinion—while she hated the first installment, she was deeply moved by the last—encouraged me some until a televised clip exposed the film’s visual backwardness. Jackson creates decorative images; he is incapable of devising meaningful mise-en-scène. I haven’t read the Tolkien books, but I take film critic Margaret Rees at her word: “When measured against Tolkien’s artistry, Jackson’s efforts are rather pale conformist works, which denigrate the restless and complex artistry of the author’s original work.”

Is The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, then, the worst film ever to win a best picture Oscar? Hardly. Such brain-freezing, backside-numbing winners as Cimarron (Wesley Ruggles, 1931), Around the World in 80 Days (Michael Anderson, 1956), A Man for All Seasons (Fred Zinnemann, 1966), Dances With Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990), Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) and Chicago (Rob Marshall, 2002), to name but a few of the trophy-tagged clinkers, ensure that Jackson’s big one will never quite be at the bottom of the heap.