ELMER GANTRY (Richard Brooks, 1960)

Elmer Gantry may not be a very good movie, but it’s enjoyable. It’s Sinclair Lewis’s 1927 novel given the Peyton Place-treatment, and although it’s trash it seems to know that it is and never misses a chance to entertain. It’s skillfully written by Richard Brooks (who won an Oscar), who also directed, and acted quite horribly by the lead (who also won an Oscar); but this bad acting of his is of that outrageously overblown stripe that creates such a spectacular surface that you’re engaged even in the absence of any exploration of the character. Elmer Gantry is a smart dumb show designed to hoodwink an audience—and isn’t that, after all, what the novel is about?

Pity, though, that box office jitters—translation: cowardice—dissuaded Brooks away from Lewis’s thematic target. In the movie, certain elements of evangelical “tent” ministries are questioned as to the motives of those involved; but Lewis wasn’t after such small fry. In the novel, Sister Sharon Falconer’s traveling circus of redemption represents the apotheosis of Christian worship showing, magnified, all the quirks and chinks of mainstay Christian churches and mainstream Christianity. The movie takes uncertain aim at the revivalist fringes of Christianity—uncertain, I say, because contrary traits of sincerity and insincerity are sometimes balanced out even within the same character. By contrast, the novel takes dead aim at the heart of American Christianity and organized religion. For Lewis, the “new” Christianity of established, respected churches was merely the veneer behind which lurked “that old time religion.” Good grief: In order to attempt to turn a profit with a faithful adaptation of Lewis’s Elmer Gantry, Brooks might have had to forsake color for black and white, and “actors” Burt Lancaster, Shirley Jones and Patti Page for actors who really could act. Jean Simmons, who plays Sister Sharon, probably would have come onboard anyhow, even for less money, since she had just divorced Stewart Granger and married Brooks. Soap opera offscreen; soap opera on-.

The film’s upholstery—sets, color cinematography and so forth—is colorful. Its richness announces this is a movie, not television. I suppose it would have been too much to ask that the film actually explore its ostensible theme of the role of faith in American life; but certainly the film provides a captivating canvas of certain aspects of American life and culture in post-World War I America. A far more perceptive and interesting film about U.S. evangelism, with its close affinity to nineteenth-century minstrel shows, though, is Frank Capra’s The Miracle Woman (1931), whose evangelist, brilliantly enacted by Barbara Stanwyck, is based on Aimee Semple McPherson, on whom Lewis based his Sister Sharon.

Aimee Semple wasn’t quite as adorable as Simmons, although Semple’s groupies and devotees certainly adored her. She was born Aimee Elizabeth Kennedy in 1890 in Ontario, Canada, to a Methodist farmer and a Salvation Army worker. At eighteen, she became Pentecostal to marry missionary Robert Semple, who died of malaria in China two years later, bringing his widow and baby to New York. Her grief was short-lived. Two years later she remarried, this time a grocer named Harold McPherson. This marriage ended quickly in divorce, as did a third. Aimee Semple McPherson was truly married only to her mission to save souls and spread the Word of God.

In 1918, McPherson moved to Los Angeles. In her Gospel Car she toured the nation on the revival circuit. Back home, she built a temple with a 5300-seat auditorium, and her celebrity increased when she became the first woman to operate her own radio station. She was now in her mid-thirties. In 1926, she disappeared, an apparent drowning victim in the Pacific Ocean, but she reappeared a month later claiming she had been kidnapped and had escaped her captors, who had bound and tortured her, in Mexico. She was acquitted of criminal charges for perpetrating a hoax, and her adherents discounted rumors that their idol had had a romantic rendezvous in the Arizona desert. By the 1930s, at the height of her celebrity as evangelist and faith-healer, McPherson oversaw 200 churches nationwide. An overdose of sleeping pills ended her life at 53.*

Sister Sharon’s death in Elmer Gantry equally blurs a line of possible suicide. Sister Sharon refuses to vacate her tabernacle as it’s consumed by fire. None of her followers try to help her as, panicked, they flee the flames. Her co-evangelist, salesman Elmer Gantry, assures the crowd the next day that Sister Sharon, looking down, forgives them.

Brooks’s glossy film probably is at its best when involved in the nuts-and-bolts of the traveling ministry, including the complicated arrangements involved in setting up shop, for instance, in Zenith, Ohio. (In a bit of cleverness, Lewis’s George F. Babbitt, Zenith businessman, appears in the movie.) Indeed, Dean Jagger, as William L. Morgan, Sister Sharon’s business partner, financial advisor and caring surrogate father, gives one of the film’s two good performances. The other is given by Arthur Kennedy as Jim Lefferts, an honest, doubting reporter for the Zenith Times Dispatch who is cut along the lines of H. L. Mencken. (In the novel, but not here, Lefferts is Gantry’s roommate at Terwillinger College. Lewis, incidentally, dedicated the book “with profound admiration” to Mencken.) Simmons is adequate (and lovely), and quite spirited whenever Sister Sharon is sermonizing. Shirley Jones plays Lulu Bains, a deacon’s daughter and, eventually, a prostitute—a major character in the novel but not in the film, whose action begins only relatively late in Gantry’s life. Jones is flamboyant, but there’s hardly anything to her Lulu; she won an Oscar as best supporting actress purely for the stunt of a musical-romantic star’s “going dramatic.” However, Jones would be somewhat better, directed by John Ford, the following year in Two Rode Together (1961), a western starring Jimmy Stewart and Richard Widmark.

Lancaster’s Gantry is a completely superficial performance. Fourteen years after his (as Pauline Kael justly called it) “falsely promising debut” in Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1946), Lancaster proved himself again a shallow, mediocre actor best suited to kids’ matinee period actioners. (Athletically, Lancaster always has a commanding presence.) He perfectly captures the salesman that Gantry is, but nothing else; with Lancaster, Gantry is always on stage, always performing. (Incidentally, this is pretty much the same performance he gave four years earlier, opposite a radiant Katharine Hepburn, in The Rainmaker.) Lancaster searches out nothing behind the mannerisms of a man who “never said anything important, and . . . always said it sonorously.” There’s no dimension to Lancaster’s Gantry, and while there may be a grain of truth to this (American salesmen tend to allow themselves to become reduced to the dimensions of their huckstering), there is also no reflection here on the limits of the man or on the social implications of those limits. There is no discovery of the loneliness of such American figures that compels them to sell themselves and their products, in this case, God, to make desperate contact with others, to cope with the void they find in themselves and outside themselves in an American landscape where poverty continuously threatens to yawn open underneath them and swallow them up. Instead, Lancaster simply smiles, gladhands and performs with gusto. This is among the very worst performances ever to win a best actor Oscar. Three years hence, however, Lancaster—dubbed into Italian by an actor with much greater vocal gifts than his—would be memorable as Prince Don Fabrizio Salina in Luchino Visconti’s tremendous Il Gattopardo (1963), from Lampedusa.

* Anthony Harvey, who directed The Lion in Winter (1968), eight years later directed for television The Disappearance of Aimee, with Faye Dunaway playing Aimee Semple McPherson and Bette Davis playing McPherson’s mother.

OUR DAILY BREAD (King Vidor, 1934)

OUR DAILY BREAD. “There’s nothing for people to worry about when they’ve got the earth!”
     In response to the Hoovervilles that cropped up across America during the Depression, King Vidor made Our Daily Bread. Risking financial ruin, he bankrolled the film himself.
     An unemployed city couple, defaulting on their rent, start a cooperative in Arcadia, a rural community. Hope turns to despair, though, when drought jeopardizes the farming operation’s existence. An irrigation project saves the crops.
     Vidor’s silent work, including The Big Parade (1925) and The Crowd (1928), is far less interesting than its reputation suggests, but sound sparked something in Vidor. Hallelujah (1929), Street Scene (1931), from Elmer Rice’s play, and especially Our Daily Bread constitute rich Americana. Vidor also superbly directed the Kansas scenes in The Wizard of Oz (1939), including the one in which Judy Garland sings “Over the Rainbow”—a film, regrettably, that Victor Fleming makes leaden in the Land of Oz.
     Influenced by Soviet cinema, Our Daily Bread’s passage showing men at work in an effort to irrigate the land, in which their naturally synchronized labor exudes their common purpose and shared destiny, astounds. Vidor’s film lacks the brilliance, certainly, of Joris Ivens’s Dutch documentary The New Earth, released the same year, but its finale is sweeping.
     One thing more enriches the film: a gloriously perverse subplot in which a stray blonde bombshell entices the leader away from both his marriage and his commitment to the cooperative. This Jean Harlow lookalike suggests the embodiment of commercial filmmaking and its temptations. Our Daily Bread is also an allegory, then, on the struggle by progressive American artists to assert and sustain their commitment to socially worthwhile expression.

THE RIVER (Jean Renoir, 1951)

The world’s greatest filmmaker in the first decade of sound, France’s Jean Renoir was stranded in Hollywood during the war and a bit after (the marvelous 1945 The Southerner is one result of his U.S. stay), and during the fifties, although no longer the bohemian Communist and cutting-edge artist of younger days, he made a few outstanding films, among them French Can-Can (1954) and Eléna et les hommes (1956). Above all, The River is a tremendous achievement. Rumer Godden, who had written the novel, thought the world of it and of Renoir (the two of them collaborated on the script), and this calmed her outrage over Black Narcissus (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1947), a vastly inferior work based on another of her novels. With The River, Renoir and his cousin, cinematographer Claude Renoir, made an exceptionally beautiful color film.

The setting is Bengal, in postwar India. (Godden herself grew up in Bengal.) The focus is on a British family, whose father (Esmond Knight) manages a jute factory. The eldest daughter, Harriet, is the protagonist, and the film, structured as a reminiscence, is narrated by this character (June Hillman, wonderful) some time in the future. Throughout, there is contrast between the maturity of the Harriet we hear in the voiceover and the rawly emotional teenager we see in flashback. Theirs, as her father puts it, is a “house of women,” for Harriet’s four sisters (including twins), mother (Nora Swinburne), and a native nursemaid, Nan, also live there. The children aren’t really “women” but are “girls”; however, the father’s indulgent description betrays the repressed extent to which he feels overpowered by females, and, beyond this, helps reinforce the subtle elasticity of time, encompassing voiceover and flashback, that is at the heart of this film about time, time suspended and time passing. The one male child is Bogey, who, ever inquisitive in the woods in his backyard, is usually off on his own or with a native friend, playing with turtles and lizards. Bogey is as vulnerable in his extreme youth as the elderly Sikh, the gateman and a former soldier, is vulnerable in his old age. This is a film about female emotional vulnerability and male physical vulnerability: Harriet’s father has one eye, the American boy with whom Harriet falls in love, Captain John (Thomas E. Breen), one leg, the maiming in both cases the result of combat experience. In the course of the film, love asserts itself for the first time in three different girls’ lives, Bogey dies, and Harriet’s mother gives birth to another child: the round of life—the round of life.

The symbol of life in the film is a maternal one: the wide river on whose banks Harriet and her family live, and which appears either at the fore or in the background of many of the shots in the film. Fishermen fish in the river; people bathe in it. It is life-giving and eternal (it comes, the voiceover says, from the “eternal snows” of the Himalayas), and, symbolically at least, it also carries people away, to their ends (and new beginnings), in its flow. Subtly, Renoir and Godden imply a connection between this mighty river and Kali, the Hindu embodiment of creation and destruction, for, without destruction, we are told, there can be no creation, every end being also a beginning. This paradox finds cosmic principle rather than literary irony conjoining the death of one child and the birth of another, but, again implying the film’s elasticity of time, it also conjoins the birth of the child with Harriet’s falling in love for the first time, an event that implicitly connects to the future occasion when Harriet (with someone other than Captain John) gives birth to a child (by now, the point in time of the voiceover, this likely has happened in the past), as her mother once did many times. And each sweet birth will be bittersweet, because each will refresh the mortal awareness in Bogey’s survivors that has become attached to memories of his death, and to the loss of other loved ones over time. Time, time suspended, time passing.

If, on different symbolical levels, the river resonates as both temporal life and eternity, on another it resonates as memory. The River is, above all, a film about memory—not about first love, as the voiceover claims, but about the memory of first love. In effect, the adult Harriet is telling a story about her life, but she is indeed telling a story. This includes filling in details about other characters’ lives—memories that belong to others. Godden and Renoir have lit upon a sly way to alert us to the fact that the woman whose voice we hear is telling a story, not disclosing (as though she even could) events as they unfolded in time. At the outset, this voiceover, before it has begun to tell the story, introduces us to the film. This precedes the opening credits, along with an activity that is completed after the credits: the painting of exquisite designs on the floor of a home, using rice flour and water—an Indian custom, the voiceover explains, for welcoming honored guests. We the audience are the “honored guests” here. It is only with the story that she has to tell that Harriet (Patricia Walters) becomes a character in the film, and this takes time to happen. First, the voiceover addresses us (in its time and ours, however different the two may be); second, it enters the realm of memory—the realm of the river, with a gorgeous shot of a fisherman in his boat on the river, accompanied by a rower and a young boy, as he prepares his net for a day’s work, and as another, much larger vessel passes behind his small one; third, we see countless others at work, docking with bales of jute; fourth, the father is introduced, walking home from work—a collapse of time hinting the film’s elasticity of time; fifth, Bogey and his friend are introduced, followed by Nan and Harriet’s sisters; and then we see Harriet as she was as a teenaged girl, but not solo, but, rather, in a two-shot also introducing another sister. The voiceover has insisted that it is about to tell its story as the story actually happened, but everything we have thus far seen and heard ties Harriet’s reality to memory. In a film noir, this might signal the distorted perception of the narrator who is also a character; here, there is something of that, as we shall see, but, broadly, its intent is very different. From the outset, we appreciate what depth each element of the story will have—the depth and breadth of the river. Every element will be invested with the grown Harriet’s, that is to say, with Godden’s and especially Renoir’s, feelings about life, about the value of life, about the richness of life, as experience—way beyond that of the girl at the time in which the story is set—has, incrementally and cumulatively, brought these feelings to them. This process, which the film, as it were, has accumulated, will continue beyond the boundaries of the film, as the lives of its makers go on, as they learn more, understand more, live more—and as we go on, learning, understanding and living more, and bringing the fruits of all this to fresh viewings of the film. This also is “the river” of the title.

Besides Harriet, there are two other girls in the film who are roughly the same age. One is her closest friend, Valerie (Adrienne Corri, by turns lovely and cruel—excellent), who becomes her rival for the attentions of handsome Captain John. The other is Melanie, the daughter of Harriet’s next-door neighbor, Mr. John, Captain John’s cousin. Mr. John (Arthur Shields, Barry Fitzgerald’s brother, in a great performance) is English, but his daughter, whose deceased mother was Hindu, is Anglo-Indian—hence, without caste in a nation structured by its categories of social and (presumably) spiritual ranking. Melanie has just returned from an English school; more and more she is being drawn into her Indian identity, bringing her closer to her father, who has fully embraced Indian culture, but deepening, ironically, her sense of not quite fitting in at home. In this, she is rather like Captain John, who, “uprooted by the war,” has left America, where he feels something of a stranger among his own countryfolk, out of pride in the face of being greeted with such pity over his war injury. In a telling moment, Melanie says that she doesn’t understand Americans; yet she understands Captain John. The principal sources of the film’s immense warmth are Renoir’s great love of children, even the incessant chatter and noise of children (Renoir is not one to believe that children should be seen but not heard), and the warmly open, generously loving relationship between Mr. John and Melanie, in distinct contrast to the more restrained relationships in Harriet’s family.

The River contains a great set-piece. It portrays Diwali, for five consecutive days in autumn the Hindu Festival of Lights. In this celebration of “the eternal war between good and evil,” a candle is lit for each life that has been lost, turning each night, especially, into a great and grave spectacle. Good is born, we are told, through the destruction of elements of evil, and it’s impossible to believe that Renoir did not have Adolf Hitler in mind at this juncture. Indeed, on one level The River resonates as a film about temporal wars that image forth the “eternal one,” but Renoir balances any implicit endorsement of war with the cost of war, the human suffering that Captain John’s and Harriet’s father’s injuries signify. Some time later, by the strange river of associations that this film lets loose, out of time and out of logic Bogey comes to seem a delayed casualty of war. He is killed by a snake, a cobra that he coaxed out of its wooded milieu with a flute. Without doubt, Renoir, whatever Godden’s different associations, had war in mind here. The world is a dangerous place, and war feeds and embodies this pitiless danger. The precariousness for Bogey is ironically stressed; he remains crouched on the seeming safety of his family’s garden, while the cobra appears deeply entangled in the roots of an ancient tree, in another realm entirely, yet poised to attack Bogey in an instant. Nothing else in cinema surpasses this scene as a metaphor for the constantly imperiled nature of peace in the world. Lest we miss the connection between Bogey and war’s victimization of humanity, not to mention humanity’s ultimate responsibility for wars, after Bogey’s funeral Mr. John, in one of the film’s most trenchant moments, laments that the world isn’t made safe for children, as it should be. “We catch them in our wars,” he declares, “. . . and we kill them.” La grande illusion (1937) is Renoir’s masterpiece about the First World War; The River is, in however indirect a way, his film about the more recently concluded world war.

The festival also launches Harriet’s and Valerie’s rivalry for Captain John’s attentions—the girls’ mini-war or play-war, if you will. It’s another kind of border that they occupy from the one imperiling Bogey at the edge of the garden; we watch these girls go back and forth in an instant between burgeoning grownup feelings and silly, childish quarrels. Here is adolescence, betwixt childhood and maturity, where every feeling is keen beyond measure. One of the things that Harriet does to counter the advantage that prettiness confers on Valerie is to write a story that she hopes will impress Captain John, who has already praised her poems. It is based on India’s premier legend of love, that is to say, the love between Krishna, the human embodiment of Vishnu, a Hindu deity, and Radha, a cow-herding maiden. It is about, then, the reconciliation between high caste and low. We see Harriet’s story as a stylized event as she speaks, thus encasing young Harriet’s voiceover in the maturer Harriet’s voiceover (think of it as Chinese boxes of narration), and therefore wobbling the distinction of either, making it impossible for us to know from what vantage this story-within-the-story gained each of its features and details. In any case, Harriet casts Melanie in the role of Radha by noting their resemblance to one another. Furthermore, she casts as the boy whom Radha/Melanie loves Anil, a high-caste suitor who, expecting since childhood to marry Melanie, is “anxious to give this girl without caste his name and nobility.” Harriet is mistaken; Melanie will never marry Anil. Moreover, in her story Harriet creates some other male character as the unwanted suitor and has Radha/Melanie fall instantly in love with another boy, whose path hers suddenly crosses one day. When she tells her father, however, he imposes his paternal prerogative, insisting that she marry the boy of his choosing. On her wedding day, when the groom’s veil is lifted and Radha/Melanie lifts the mango leaves from her eyes to behold him, startled, she quickly moves backwards in wide steps: the groom is none other than the boy she loves! It is at that point that she is transformed into Radha (as distinct from Radha/Melanie) and he is transformed, in her eyes, into the Lord Krishna whereupon, in celebration of her love for him, she breaks into a highly expressive ritualistic dance. Art sublimates life sublimating art as the dance transcends Harriet’s contrived tale to reveal genuine grand passions, the heartrending bounds and limits of love. Once the dance is finished, the bride and groom become themselves and the marriage commences.

The credits to the film throw in a tantalizing wrinkle to all this; the intensely beautiful young woman who plays Melanie, Radha/Melanie and Radha, giving, I might add, a soul-burning performance, is billed as Radha!* (Nothing else: just Radha.) This refreshes the film’s sense of time’s elasticity, but an even greater visual and dramatic coup awaits—a thing of genius on Renoir’s part. The rivalry between Harriet and Valerie that this tale of Harriet’s only intensifies reaches a new peak soon after—it may be the next day—when Valerie steals Harriet’s diary and embarrasses her friend by reading entries of adoration of Captain John aloud to him. Harriet exits, furious, and, after he chides her for her insensitivity, Valerie baits the captain into a kind of pre-frisbee frisbee toss that results in his humiliated collapse to the ground. “Don’t touch me!” Captain John yells at her before the Sikh helps carry him off. Captain John’s collapse (which may have inspired the image of the collapsing bicycle in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1953 I Confess) is a startling moment witheringly and powerfully resolving Radha’s dance, the other instance of great human movement in the film—only here, it is anguished, not joyous, unwilled, not creative, one soul’s inability to direct and control his body, not the dancer’s exquisite control of her body. In an instant, Harriet’s earlier story deconstructs, to reveal the envy and spite at its root; it collapses into darkness. Captain John’s fall to the ground is the delayed last step of Radha’s dance, as much delayed as Bogey’s death will be in relation to the Second World War, and, again by dint of the way this film almost subliminally associates things, it is a revelation also that, despite the fact that the other two hover about him so, it is Melanie who has fallen most deeply in love with Captain John.

Melanie’s closeted love for the captain, which Radha’s acting makes searingly unmistakable, is one of the film’s great human dimensions. It is a poignant gesture when she places blossoms on his lunch tray before it is handed to him, and the conversation that he inaugurates with her in response to this is trenchant. Melanie chides the captain for spending most of his time at Harriet’s house with Harriet and Valerie. He wonders aloud, blindly, if Melanie doesn’t like him. “It’s not you I dislike,” she explains; when he presses the matter, she adds, “The one I dislike is myself.” The situation is complex. What with the adolescent antics of the other girls’ infatuation for him, Melanie could find no way to approach Captain John with her love for him without seeming to lower herself to Harriet’s and Valerie’s (where love is concerned) immature, adolescent level. Moreover, there is something else. Melanie’s identity crisis, underscored by her being without caste in a society and culture of castes, is consuming her; she doesn’t want to be who she is because she has yet to determine just who she is. How, in this embryonic state, can she enter an adult love relationship? What can she give to a partner when she doesn’t feel whole herself? She has declared herself “Indian” but is unable to bring herself together in a way that allows her to feel Indian; she still feels that she is straddling a fence each side of which is a different culture—a self-division that her declaration was intended to resolve. Captain John makes his own declaration, that he won’t let his war injury crush him, that he is a complete man in any country, even with only one leg. Melanie counters, “Where are you going to find a country of one-legged men?” To this she adds another pointed question: “Why do we always quarrel with things?” When Captain John counters that his was a rebellion (against the pity that others gave him), not a quarrel, Melanie counters again, with the film’s finest line: “I thought mine also was a rebellion, but then I discovered it was only a quarrel.” It is these oddly parallel circumstances of theirs that has prompted Melanie’s deep feelings for Captain John, but it is the unresolved nature of these circumstances on both sides that make neither of the two individuals ready for love.

The River is a remarkable visual experience; human faces and Nature—trees, as well as the river—are equally rendered with convincing naturalism. There is a moment when Captain John unexpectedly joins Harriet as she is flying a kite, and the shot of the kite, as it skips about in the sky, is correlative to the “mingled emotions” that the mature narrator recalls having felt as the childish play is confounded by the captain’s physical closeness as he helps young Harriet guide the kite. There is Bogey’s funeral procession. At first, one may think, “Ah, the scene is taking its visual cue from the flow of the river,” but, as the procession continues, the human limitations involved, both emotionally and physically, become more and more apparent. What we see, if you will, is a labored and somewhat staccato movement, a jerking flow whose difficulty, encapsulating everything that the participants are feeling, becomes startlingly apparent when the soul at the head of the coffin, Mr. John, facing forward, finds the coffin suddenly colliding with a pole behind him. Near the end, each of the three girls—Harriet, Valerie, Melanie—receives a letter from Captain John, who has returned to the U.S. At first they seem almost to treat the letters as talismans, but as soon as they hear the sound of the cry indicating the baby’s birth—another girl (thankfully, not a boy—a touch that would have diminished Bogey’s death by too conveniently replacing Bogey)—each drops her letter and rushes indoors to attend to new life rather than love’s memory. Time, time suspended, time passing.

There is another whole dimension to the film: the stirring up of political currents that suggests the Renoir of the thirties. We do not much like the older Harriet, who remains superficial in her placing such importance on her mother’s physical beauty. Moreover, her mother, subservient, all but says that a woman’s job is to show her love for her husband by giving him babies, and this indeed must have rankled Renoir’s egalitarian spirit. Even more pointedly, Renoir’s irony borders on disgust regarding all the talk about how impoverished Indian life has gone on the same for centuries in the face of little or nothing being done to alleviate the poverty. In this context, Harriet’s father’s remark that he enjoys just watching the men toting bales of jute into his factory is callous and grotesque. In this context, too, we realize that the nursemaid is too young not to have a life of her own, to be merely an appendage to Harriet’s family. It’s good to see glimmers of the old Renoirian radicalism.

Jean Renoir is, of course, the son of Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and his cousin, Claude, is Pierre-Auguste’s nephew. Assisting on the film, uncredited, is India’s greatest filmmaker yet-to-be: Satyajit Ray, who drew imagery and the elastic representation of time from Renoir’s film for his Apu trilogy, especially the first installment, Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road, 1955). Already Ray had much the same humanistic spirit as Renoir.

The River, from the U.S., France and India, took the International Prize at Venice.

* Some years ago, when I wrote this essay, dance critic Mindy Aloff wrote me the following: “Melanie was played by one of the leading Bharata Natyam dancers in India at the time. . . . [H]er name is Radha Burnier (b.1923). She’s still beautiful, as you’ll see in the picture here, and she holds a master’s in Sanskrit and honorary doctorates. She’s also the president of the International Theosophical Society—a very bigwig in India, still.”

UNE PARTIE DE CAMPAGNE (Jean Renoir, 1936)

Not until Antonioni and Godard in the ’60s would another filmmaker claim so remarkable a decade’s run as did Jean Renoir in the 1930s. One of his masterworks is Une partie de campagne (A Day in the Country), based on a Maupassant story. Perhaps the film isn’t as richly detailed or as humanistic as The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1935) or La grande illusion (1937), or as pathbreaking as La vie est à nous (1936) or La règle du jeu (1939). Nevertheless, Une partie de campagne remains Renoir’s most exquisite piece of irony. It’s light, tragic, unshakable.

Townsfolk on a country outing, a Parisian shopowner and his employee look down at the river from their rented rowboat. Carnivorous fish are below, the shopowner notes. Both men proceed to speak of Nature as something distinct from themselves; as they do, the camera lithely dips down to catch their watery reflections, thus visually implicating them in the rapacious aspect of Nature—“Nature red in tooth and claw”—that they claim no part of. To human beings, they agree, Nature stays a “closed book”; and, with gentle mockery, the camera slips back up—a book-closing gesture—to rejoin their combined portrait of mutual congratulation and complacency. The precision and irony of this scene are typical of Renoir’s expressive technique throughout the film.

Others participating in this 1860 Sunday excursion are the shopowner’s wife, their daughter—the employee is her fiancé, the height of bourgeois arrangements—and either the shopowner’s or his wife’s mother. (It doesn’t matter which. Hard of hearing, she isn’t loved more by one or the other; rather, she is tolerated equally by both.) Exactly following the Nature-is-a-closed-book male exchange, a more intimate conversation takes place between mother and daughter. Madame Dufour (Jane Marken, marvelous) and Henriette are themselves sitting on the grass—so, in visual terms, it is immediately clear that these two don’t deny their complicity in (a more benign) Nature as do their male counterparts. Indeed, Nature not only provides their ravishing setting and is the subject they discuss; it’s also something still accessible to them. But to what degree? Madame Dufour, coyly, says Nature is still partly accessible to her; for her daughter, though, Nature is achingly open, engaging fully all of the girl’s most tender sympathy. Henriette confesses such brimming feelings as are inexplicable to her. She can’t resist asking her mother if she ever felt the same way. Smiling bittersweetly for all that has been lost and what little remains, her mother warmly responds, “Sometimes I still do.” Briefly, then, Madame Dufour’s foolish mask, hiding marital disappointment, gives way to her humanity, called forth naturally by the untutored emotional honesty and openness of the now grown child of her womb. The moment is irresistible.

Another party of guests from town is visiting the country inn: two working-class young men. One bold, the other shy, they pair off with mother and daughter Dufour while Monsieur Dufour and his doltish future son-in-law fish and (mostly) nap. Off alone in the woods, Henriette and Henri, the shy boy,—even the congruence of their names suggests how much they are meant for each other,—make tremulous love; both in fact have fallen deeply in love. Nature has enboldened the two, inspired them; but, losing her virginity, Henriette is ambivalent—all the more understandably, given her mother’s revelation of only having, as an adult, a qualified relationship with Nature. Darting feverishly, Henriette’s face is trebly constrained: by Henri’s firm, determined grip; by her well-schooled will’s initial reluctance to yield to the promptings of Nature and of her own soul; and—the visual correlative to the other two—by the limits of the frames. (Pauline Kael, whose love of this film rivaled my own, compared Henriette’s face within these frames to a caged bird.) Nature adores this new, young couple. It sparkles before, on a breeze, turning dark and stomy; for the preexistent marital arrangements, bound by class considerations and family-sanctified, cannot budge. In a one-year-later coda, both their lives shattered, the boy and girl chance upon one another while each separately haunts the scene of their moment together. A scattering of words passes between them. Again they part, now for the last time.

Renoir is one with Nature here; he, too, adores Henriette (Sylvie Bataille, glorious). In the earlier images of Nature surrounding her, such as (recalling Shelley) the fluctuating weather and a chirping solitary tree bird she lifts her hand to, Renoir expresses his enormous lament over the hold of those bourgeois imperatives, of propriety and class, that (like her mother) Henriette lacks the means to contest—imperatives allowing her heart no claim in determining the course of her life. Renoir’s images “speak” his powerful emotions.

One surely must note that, framed by the most liberating air that Nature can conjure, Henriette’s early-on playing on a swing, breathtaking and exhilarating, suggests (in retrospect most poignantly) the potential for joy of hers that eventually collapses—what Nature offers and what human rules reject, deny.

Few films have had a more curious history than Une partie de campagne. Shot in 1936, the material remained unedited until after the war. For whatever reasons, although the film in fact exhausts Maupassant’s story, Renoir let stand the notion that the film’s shooting was never completed. Who knows? Perhaps in 1936 Renoir worried over the commercial prospects of a 41-minute tragicomedy. Perhaps he felt the film wasn’t sufficiently political, since that same year he was heavily at work campaigning for the election of Communist candidates. Perhaps he feared that the film failed to do adequate justice to the memory of his father, Pierre-Auguste, the great Impressionist painter to whom in its philosophy and visual aspect the film clearly is meant as an hommage. Perhaps it was some of all of these. Regardless, what he released as a “fragment” in 1946 couldn’t in fact be more complete. In the U.S. the film waited another four years for release; it appeared in the omnibus package entitled Ways of Love, which the New York Film Critics adjudged the best foreign-language film of 1950. Renoir’s Maupassant film is indeed a beauteous gem.

Along with the cast (including Renoir himself as the innkeeper), three of Renoir’s collaborators merit hosannas: his cousin Claude Renoir, for the film’s lyrical, light-sensitive black-and-white lensing; Marguerite Renoir, his companion, for her fine editing; and Joseph Kosma, for the enchanting, wistful, heart-piercing music.

PARIS QUI DORT (René Clair, 1923)

René Clair had acted, in films by Louis Feuillade in fact, but the first film he wrote and directed, launching a long and estimable career, is Paris qui dort (Paris, Which Sleeps), also known as The Crazy Ray, and first released in the United States as At 3:25. It’s the sort of thing that seems lightly tossed off, as a lark almost, but actually the film, a short (and, alas, shorter still in the U.S.), is a meditation on our sense of place and time, that is to say, concepts allowing us to “get our bearings” and navigate reality. Clair was twenty-five years old when he made it; Paris qui dort is a young man’s attempt to grapple with the burden of mortal awareness. It is an auspicious piece of work.

The protagonist, Albert, is a Parisian, like Clair, who is the same age as Clair. In a sublimely comical yet utterly natural moment, the comedy of which we have yet to learn, the boy begins the day by stepping out from his work post onto a kind of terrace, yawning. He is still half-asleep. But where, though? At the highest point in Paris. Albert is the night watchman on the highest level of the Eiffel Tower. Albert looks down below—a position of command fitting the strength, the seeming indomitability, of youth. But his life is about to turn upside-down and inside-out by what he sees and hears: silence; peoplelessness; a vacant city. The absence of life. Here, the silence of the silent film wittily and startlingly contributes to our sense of what the boy is all of a sudden experiencing.

The resilience and resourcefulness of youth: Albert wanders the deserted city, adapting to its features, rationalizing his ability to contain it, coping pluckily with its challenges. He finally encounters a person frozen in time, a man hunched over a public garbage receptacle; Albert pokes and laughs, and the comedy is great. What we see (beneath the play, beneath the bravado) is Albert’s anxiety in two dimensions, the existential and the social. His existence, as he knows it, has been challenged; his play at being superior to this frozen-in-time man he encounters, who wears a working-class cap that draws his close connection to Albert, discloses Albert’s uncertainty in the new reality in which he finds himself. From the jacket pocket of a subsequent “frozen” figure, Albert pulls a handkerchief that he mockingly whips up and down in front of the owner’s face. He plays at mocking the man, but he is really mocking death, which suddenly terrifies him.

Our awareness of the economically depressed post-World War I conditions in Europe translates Albert’s uncertainty, his discomforting bewilderment, into desperation. The scavenger at the trash can becomes a kind of mental image: a projection of the precariousness of Albert’s own economic state. But for his fortuitous (although marginal) job, for which he likely qualified because of his youth, Albert could be this stranger. And more: the “frozen” condition of the man enables Albert himself to take all this in—a psychological fact we deduce from the adolescent display of his defensive coping mechanisms. In normal reality, given the callowness of his youth, Albert would not even notice such a person on the street, let alone identify with him. In a powerful way that has to do with his thematic interests here, Clair is making three points: one, that young people normally live in their own minds, in their own worlds, perhaps because they feel alienated from those older than themselves who seem to have the power in the world; two, that the most marginal members of the working class, however diligently they attempt to survive, are in constant danger of landing without income onto the streets; and three, in a society, disparate people are connected in ways normally they themselves might never realize. What Clair embraces here is more than a postwar concern; it has to do with the course of France, post-1789 Revolution the promise of France.

Much of the film is a mediation between public and private, between the sociopolitical and the (psychological) individual. (Thus we may say that the film is Freudian.) Albert, the working-class boy who has heretofore been an individual in Paris—to widen the reference, substitute for Paris any other specific locale—is no longer able to think of Paris, solipsistically, as merely where he happens to be; now it has a separate reality, and yet one intimately connected to him. For the first time, Albert is able to comprehend how place locates and helps identify him; and, of course, time does no less. Albert is no longer just being; despite his youth and his daily input of activity aimed at survival, he is now in a position to consider better such things as his position in Paris, and the widest reference of this consideration, which perhaps for the first time in his life he is now able to take in, is both his existential and socioeconomic and political fragility—the sum of his mortal condition. Young people, after all, don’t normally think about death (except as a poetical abstraction) or about the end of their productivity, hence, the end of their socioeconomic viability, except insofar as they implement strategies for day-to-day survival. Albert has a job; therefore, it doesn’t occur to him that the contrary might come to be the case. One can always get a job, at least in one’s mind; so what’s the problem? Young Clair confronts his young protagonist (and himself) with the truth: Life is uncertain, shifting, unreliable. Circumstances change, and for the worse, despite attempts to “manage” reality by trying to affect those circumstances to one’s own advantage.

In order to stabilize his new, foundationless life, Albert, settled on a public bench, imagines the Paris he otherwise knows: a bustling metropolis. Cars in motion become the visual key to this fantasy, given the current reality. This waking dream, however disconcertingly, establishes the tawdry movement of automobiles as an indicator of normally active reality. (This is done wonderfully well, too, in Mark Sandrich’s 1934 The Gay Divorcée starring the pair who epitomize modernity, Astaire and Rogers.) Alice Liddell (obviously a nom de plume) brilliantly essays the relationship between Clair’s film and the Surrealist movement and aesthetic (see the Internet Movie Database), but in tandem with this person’s reading, however greatly it surpasses mine, I press for another understanding of this film. Albert’s attempt to reinstall his grounding sense of the reality of Paris reveals for us, by indirection, the inability of his particular circumstance prior to the current one afflicting Paris to locate him in a way that made him “safe” in his own cultural, economic, social and political skin. When we prevail even to a limited and immediate extent, in certain sociopolitical contexts we remain at risk. For me, this is the most trenchant aspect of Clair’s extraordinary film.

Shoving the “frozen” driver over, Albert takes someone else’s car; one implication is that his daily labor is insufficient for providing him with a car of his own. A very funny moment occurs when others who have flown in from Marseilles check out the usurped driver’s heartbeat. Life-and-death: what could be more important? Here, it is simply the thing to do. The privately airborne group includes a Scotland Yard detective, as yet unaware he has an unexpected “case” on his hands, and a dairy merchant. Albert and these other “investigators” determine that all clocks in the city stopped at 3:25 a.m.; Albert’s and the plane passengers’ altitude left them unaffected.

Now part of an exploratory and exploitative group, Albert enters a restaurant and relieves a “frozen” patron of her gold necklace in order to buttress his sexual selfconsciousness with the luscious female member of the group. Taking something of value that isn’t yours, that ordinarily you wouldn’t have taken: this encapsulates the film’s theme, disclosing the mortal awareness and widened consciousness pressuring young Albert. Underscoring the wider frame of reference is a Marseilles flight member’s jovial invitation, even to Albert, to attend the day’s opening of the Bank of France and the department stores nearby. Yes, this is more bravado and compensatory good spirits, for it isn’t apparent at this time that any such opening will ever again occur. It’s a good moment, therefore, to treat as equals those whom as a capitalist you disdain.

Indeed, given their shared predicament of being alive in a dead world, the group accepts Albert into their fold. At his invitation, and to preserve their “alive” status by maintaing a lofty elevation, they all mount the Eiffel Tower. By doing so, they are also fortifying their sense of importance by identifying themselves with the nation of France (which the Eiffel Tower represents) that seems somehow to have slipped out of their hands. With the city below, the trick shots of their ascent constitute an amazing aspect of the film; after all, the higher-ups are pursuing an actual position higher up, in defense against the social standing they feel has slipped away. This is both irony and sociopolitical commentary.

In this new setting, the men hover around the one young woman in the group “like moths around a flame.” Clair and his cinematographers, Maurice Desfassiaux and Paul Guichard, capture her image as one of perfect, almost diaphanous beauty, while at the same time establishing the subjective basis for the men’s subsequent jealous quarrels over her and, worse, their general boredom. Sexual titillation counts, but it’s no match for the Paris they expected to find. This is more than humorous; what grounds you in reality is more significant than what fills your reality with fleeting pleasure. The circumstance of this film tests postwar hedonism to the limit.

We summarily discover the reason for the change in Paris: a scientist has sent out the ray that thus affected reality. Our (now) unhappy group has petitioned him to undo the damage he caused, and he complies with sufficient endeavor to deduce mathematically the needed antidote to render the petitioners “asleep” in their boredom awaiting the results. Unlike Caligari, to which he undoubtedly refers, the troublemaker here proceeds by science, not spirit, by (Freud again) guilt, not presumptuous prerogative. The presence of his helpful daughter humanizes the scientist and helps move the film’s premising predicament from God’s hands (symbolically) to our own. This in turn helps draw forth the theme of mortal awareness.

The world resumes. The scientist reverses the earlier stasis his experiments imposed, and the resumption of normal movement accounts for wondrous images the idea of which François Truffaut would call upon for Le nuit américaine (1973), where the shifted context is the miracle of film action. (Weeks after writing a piece disparaging Truffaut’s film, I find myself now reconsidering it.) Indeed, Clair’s little debut—I have seen none of the earlier animated short films by Emile Cohl from which some say Clair’s first film derives—looks ahead to subsequent French cinema; Marcel Carné’s Les visitors du soir (1942) and Jean Cocteau’s postwar work come immediately to mind. However, these other films don’t necessarily engage the predicament in which Albert finds himself in the same way.

Albert, the invincible boy who leads everyone up the Eiffel Tower: what irony here. Albert, the night watchman, is surviving the onslaught of reality by the skin of his teeth, and Clair employs fantasy to underscore the point. Like so many his age, Albert knows exactly where he is; the time stoppage reveals to him, and to us, that he really doesn’t know what he thinks he knows. The painful disclosure of Clair’s rollicking comedy is how vulnerable we may be when we think otherwise—when in fact we even think nothing on the score. Compare Paris qui dort to the sentimental It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) by Hollywood’s Frank Capra, and you realize what a gem it is.

All the changes in his circumstance—all the changes in his Paris as he used to know it—underscore Albert’s shift from careless, unmindful experience to mortal awareness and, in so doing, disclose, in retrospect, the psychological basis for wartime and postwar French existentialism. In any case, Albert’s mortal awareness is inflamed by the magical circumstance that this wonderful film posits.

Germany’s Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel more than a hundred years earlier might have had Clair’s first film in his prescient mind: “Appearance is the process of arising into being and passing away again, a process that itself does not arise and does not pass away, but is per se, and constitutes the life-movement of truth. . . . [T]he particular shapes which mind assumes do not indeed subsist any more than do determinate thoughts or ideas . . . [T]hat which obtains distinctiveness in the course of its process and secures specific existence is preserved in the form of a self-recollection, in which existence is self-knowledge, and self-knowledge, again, is immediate existence.”

More generally, and again presciently, Hegel might have had something else in mind. Cinema.