ONE FALSE MOVE (Carl Franklin, 1992)

California, Texas, Arkansas, from inner city to the rural South: written by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom Epperson, and stunningly directed by Carl Franklin, One False Move is both a road picture and a film noir that unclosets crisscrossing racial entanglements. It is a lament over the U.S.’s racial agony; it is also the rare U.S. crime film whose violence—and be forewarned: there’s a good deal of it—appals because of the resultant damage to human lives.
     Beautifully sculpted in light and rich color, with a crisp, moody camera angling the shots, and harmonica blues uncoiling like a lethal snake, One False Move is a tragic fable where the missed relationship between a white father and his young black child expresses a whole nation’s missed chance to achieve a sense of family and fulfillment.
     The title is ironic; for so conflicted with racial impasse is the United States of America that each “move” is “false” and fraught with peril; make any move at all and you could be dead.
     Only the poor acting by co-scenarist Thornton, who cannot keep pace with the others in a fine cast, detracts from one of the essential and most powerful American films of the 1990s.

ELEPHANT (Gus Van Sant, 2003)

Shot at a Portland, Oregon, high school and populated by actual Portland highschoolers playing characters most of whom have the actors’ own first names, Elephant is a documentary-style fiction about a day at a typical American high school. The day isn’t typical, however; today, the school falls seige to a Columbine-type rampage by two disaffected, gun-toting pupils. This American masterpiece, one of the most powerful films ever made, won the world’s most prestigious film prize, the Palme d’Or at Cannes, where the rules were relaxed so that the jury could award a second prize, for direction, to the filmmaker, Gus Van Sant, who also wrote the script and edited the film. Without doubt, Van Sant is back from the dead, the wasteland of commercial, sentimental sell-outs (Good Will Hunting; Finding Forrester). Last year’s stunning Gerry made the resurrection crystal clear; Elephant makes it permanent.

The film begins in the middle of a school day. But we haven’t landed in an epic; there aren’t heroes in this film—or, indeed, villains. John, the first of the students introduced to us, is returning to school, late from lunch with his father, who is drunk and who’s driving. The camera is facing the backs of the father’s and son’s heads in the front seat, establishing what will be its signature position throughout much of the film. It’s perhaps a forlorn day by what we hear: strains of Beethoven’s “Moonight” Sonata. The soundtrack is steeped in plaintive, non-rousing Beethoven; Elephant may be intended as a gentler, more melancholy version of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971). (Or is it a subtle rebuke to that cold, bloodless film?) Here, too, the music is linked to young criminals; we later see and hear one of them, a musician, rehearse Für Elise and the “Moonlight” Sonata on his home piano. Thus, at the outset, John, one of the other boys at the school, is shown “being shadowed,” through the associative music, by Alex, the more gifted of the two killers (he is also a sketch artist), whom we haven’t met yet. (Alex, incidentally, plays Beethoven haltingly, with technical ineptitude and suppressed, inconsolable emotion: exactly right.) Indeed, the film’s opening movement involving John and his father is exquisitely suspenseful, for we don’t know yet whether John will prove to be one of the killers or one of the victims.

Is Van Sant justified in toying with us in this way? He is. There are at least two bases—one thematic, one emotional—for his adopting this approach. One is simple: it doesn’t matter, in the sense that any of the boys at the school, and perhaps even some of the girls, might have turned into the unhappy killers that Alex and Eric have turned into. We glimpse the harassment and humiliation that Alex and Eric are subjected to in class, by fellow students, as the teacher either misses what’s going on or turns a blind eye, and we wonder: just when will anybody, especially a largely defenseless adolescent, snap? John is a sweet, gentle, good-natured boy, but he also has his hands full, not with peers who taunt him but with his father, whom he has to father, exchanging his passenger seat for the driver’s seat so that his father’s drunkenness doesn’t doom them both. This switch, reluctant on the father’s part because embarrassing, conveys a sense of shifted circumstance—fortune—that will later reflect on Alex and Eric’s having become killers. This is Van Sant working, perhaps as intuitively as David Lynch, at an exceptionally high level; his associative, patient, cumulative work has just begun to weave its rich, breathing fabric. Our uncertainty at the outset as to which camp John will prove to belong also has an emotional basis: Van Sant’s compassionate grasp of the hardships that adolescence inflicts on all kinds of children.

Acting the fool, the vice principal chastises John for his tardy return to school after lunching with his father; this man is oblivious to the boy’s circumstance, about which he chooses ignorance in favor of asserting control and, ironically, playing father to John (another exchange, from Van Sant’s perspective). The moment is rendered comical by the fact that the vice principal’s well-practiced “chastisement” is largely silent: a chiding, unctuous look. Later, before shooting this man to death, Eric will stand over the vice principal’s fallen, cringing face and body and chastise him for having been inattentive to his needs and unresponsive to his pleas for help. The didacticism contributes to the moment, to be sure; but, again, what is so extraordinary here are the switches, the exchanges: by chastising the vice principal, Eric is in effect reversing their roles in the school hierarchy, and, in turn, by association, this is also, however inadvertently, John’s revenge against the vice principal for the man’s having been obtuse and unsympathetic to him earlier. Again, the all-embracing idea, associatively executed, is the interchangeability of the killers and John; and, since John is likely the nicest kid in the entire school (it’s inconceivable that anyone on this planet could be nicer), this associatively argues for the interchangeability of the killers and any of the other kids at the school, many of whom are not nearly as kind-hearted as John.

Having been targeted for harassment and humiliation by their peers, Alex and Eric target them to soothe their shame and hurt and redress the injustice. Despite what you may have heard, this film is highly analytical of the causes of the school tragedy; but this isn’t the film’s focus. Van Sant sketches motives quickly, deftly, lightly, portraying the horrific event of the boys’ rampage of murder as being overdetermined, not caused by this or that, but the outcome of a myriad of contributory factors, each interacting with the others. Too, he wisely portrays as confused the distinction among causes, symptoms and effects. This is a complicated and complex portrait. The film aims to draw us into this complexity, to test our predetermined and packaged conclusions; we get to observe the tragedy, at one and the same time, from the outside and from the inside out.

The agency of this approach is the film’s generous embrace of all the kids—and the adults, too, although the absence of parental guidance is omnipresent. It’s daytime; Alex’s parents, for instance, may very well be “absent” because they’re at work. However, Alex’s empty house, which enables him to cut school and be home to sign for the delivery of the assault weapons that he ordered, expands this parental absence into a symbol of parental indifference, inattentiveness, unresponsiveness. John’s father, probably out of work, provides a deeply touching instance of a loving parent (it’s Timothy Bottoms’s finest performance), but his involvement with his own problems reduces his capacity to respond to his son’s sensitivities. If one could turn over the fabric of this film, one would see all these connecting threads among John and the school’s other kids, including the two killers, one of whom warns John away from school (John has exited to check on his father, supposedly parked out front), in effect sparing the life of the one kid to greet him kindly, treat him decently. This is a heart-piercing gesture—the disclosure of a killer’s lingering hope that simple humanity is still possible in a world that has turned sour and desperate for him. Once the shooting starts, John scarcely has emotional space to worry about anyone but his father, who has disappeared from the car and may have entered the building. Here, also, John is “protected” from the bloodbath unfolding indoors. The camera catches him smiling; John has found his father, and the moment of their reunion on the school grounds—his father has been shocked into sobriety—defines parental and filial care and concern, and love, like nothing I have encountered in any other film. The scene is executed without sentimentality, without rhetoric—and with another, and most heartening, switch: the father is the father now, and the son, the son.

The killers’ pact (which, like much else in this elusive film, we must intuit or infer) is the principal piece of plot to draw the connection between the killers and the peers who are their victims. Alex suddenly shoots Eric to death, but the film ends before Alex can commit suicide. Indeed, in a brilliant conclusion that sums up the appalling nature of the school massacre, Alex is distracted from the grim task of ending his own life by the discovery of two students, a girlfriend and boyfriend (the school football team’s star), hiding in the school cafeteria’s refrigerated chamber. They plead for their lives; Alex points a gun. “The End.”

This chilly lockup is one of several enclosed spaces in the film that projects the security for which adolescence hankers while, paradoxically, pursuing new adventures, new conquests. Another is the school darkroom where Eli develops photographs, including one of John, for which, leaning against a hallway window and sticking out his backside, John has endearingly posed. The killers-John connection is later fiercely drawn when Eli, during the massacre, takes his last photograph—that of the boy who is about to shoot him dead. Three thin girls who hardly have anything at lunch nevertheless force up whatever they did eat, each into a toilet bowl in a separate stall, behind locked doors, in the girls’ restroom. Another enclosed space, in Alex’s home, is the glass-doored bathroom stall where Alex and Eric share a shower and a kiss before heading to school and the mayhem they will unleash. Given the context that the film provides, the boys are performing a rite of preparation for battle (at least that’s how they probably see what they’re doing), and theirs is a farewell kiss in anticipation of their own ends later that day. Whether there is anything homosexual in what we see—Van Sant is himself gay—remains an open question, but the enclosed space of the stall that briefly protects the boys as they steel themselves for their hideous mission, a kind of womb giving birth to their newly powerful and retaliatory selves, underscores the partnership between them that the (implicitly) ongoing abuse they have endured at school has helped strengthen. At the verge of the utmost uncertainty, Eric and Alex feel they have nothing left to do but forge ahead.

Alex and Eric aren’t the only “outsiders” at the school. Another is Michelle, a plump, homely, bespectacled girl whose place of agony is the school gym and whose refuge is the school library, where she works. She also is the butt of jokes; she also is either treated derisively or ignored. Painfully unhappy with her body, she, too, is portrayed by Van Sant without the sentimentality that usually accompanies such portraits on American television and in American movies, the sort of sentimentality that begs pity and holds out hope of a Cinderella-type transformation in time for the prom. Alex and Eric at least have each other; Michelle is despairingly, alarmingly on her own, most of the time fidgetingly tucked away somewhere inside her head. The gym instructor—one more figure of authority without sympathy or understanding—nags Michelle about her long gym pants. Why doesn’t she wear gym shorts like the other girls? Too fit to be human, the instructor can’t imagine how a kid’s bodily self-image can generate low self-esteem. Indeed, we may go so far as to speculate, besides, that Michelle’s long pants are also hiding signs of the abuse that she may be receiving at home. One of the film’s most withering moments occurs when, out of the blue, Michelle is shot to death in the library. To our distress, it strikes us nearly as a mercy; but the moment is also ironic and convulsing because it’s impossible to believe that this girl, as miserable as the shooters, ever did them a moment’s injury. All we have seen her do is survive as best she can. The other teenagers either abused Eric and Alex or turned a blind eye to the abuse; Michelle, though, doggedly kept to herself while pursuing the chore of getting through each school day. An index of Van Sant’s compassion is that in this instance “Michelle” isn’t the name of the student, Kristen Hicks, who is playing her.

Part of the film’s staggering achievement is its precise sense of loss as kids are coldly shot down, one after the other. Van Sant doesn’t greatly detail the lives of the teenagers; and this choice of approach proves exactly right. Van Sant tells us just enough about each of the handful of characters whom he follows so that we want to know more about them; when their deaths come, canceling this possibility, we are left with an awful sense of the incompletion of their lives to which our own incomplete knowledge about them somehow has become correlative.

As in the case of Gerry, two of the influences on Elephant are Alfred Hitchcock and Béla Tarr. The hypnotic opening movement, as the camera follows John and his father in an automobile, recalls Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and smooths the path to the idea of switched identities. Tarr’s influence is even more decisive. There are the long tracking shots here, following students in and out of the school and down its long hallways. The pace of the camera, provocatively slow so that it can catch all sorts of behavioral nuances in the characters, as well as immerse us in the autumnal landscapes outdoors and, overall, create a sad, haunting, bewitching mood, derives not only from Tarr but perhaps also from Theodoros Angelopoulos, Andrei Tarkovsky and Alexander Sokurov. But Tarr’s astounding Sátántangó (1994) provided Van Sant with yet more specific guidance. In that film, actions are repeated so that we see them from different perspectives, some of which are keyed to the perceptions of different characters. So it is in Elephant, where an unbroken tracking shot that records a seemingly simple action is complicated when, bending chronology around, the film seamlessly comes across the same action, this time shown from a different perspective. Very often the film surprises us because, while we thought that the narrative had been moving forward, this is not the case. As with the desert in Gerry, the high school in Elephant is no place to get one’s bearings easily, and this convoluted narrative method beautifully correlates to the fomenting violence that will shatter the innocence of a seemingly safe, placid, glass-encased world.

Van Sant’s visual signature punctuates Elephant: time-lapsed skies, here rendered by Van Sant and his color cinematographer, Harris Savides, in rich blues that make the heart ache. These moments bring the eternal note of sadness in that Matthew Arnold mentioned, and evoked, in his 1867 poem “Dover Beach.” Like Arnold, Van Sant doesn’t indulge lyricism; his film is cool, even cold at times, and sharply observant of human nature. Besides ominously reflecting the twisted hearts below that will plunge the school into their misery and madness, these upwardly tilted shots of quickly moving heavens lend the film a poetic touch of timelessness. This film is really one for the ages.

The title, Elephant, comes from an 1989 BBC film by Alan Clarke about the violent turmoil in Northern Ireland. It refers to two things. One is the elephant in the room that no one notices. In Van Sant’s film, this may be the violence waiting to erupt, the unkindness to which kids subject other kids, more generally, the neediness of adolescents, or (who knows?) something else entirely. Different viewers will interpret the unseen elephant differently. The other reference is the Hindu fable in which different blind men, grabbing hold of and feeling different parts of an elephant, variously identify the elephant; for instance, the one who feels a leg identifies this as a tree trunk, while the one who feels the tail concludes that it’s a rope. Blind, they cannot see the whole, just as many of the students portrayed in the film, including the shooters, cannot “see” their lives beyond the current experience of high school, and adults, such as teachers and administrators, cannot “see,” appreciate or understand the kids who are under their guidance. Instead, these grownups “see” only the reflection of the power that they themselves assert vis-à-vis the children. Again, these two interpretations come nowhere near to exhausting all the possibilities. Throughout the film, Van Sant aims to have us watch and reflect; the title gives us more to think about, as it relates to the issues of the film. However, the sketch of an elephant that a panning camera glimpses on Alex’s bedroom wall is annoyingly cryptic. Like Lynch, Van Sant can succumb at times to a tonal lapse or a sophomoric visual joke.

The cast is pitch perfect. I have not mentioned yet John Robinson, who plays John, the soul of sweetness and innocence, who is highly reminiscent of a number of characters played by the young Keanu Reeves, and Alex Frost as Alex, who plays with his piano as pal Eric plays violent video games and watches footage of Nazis. All these characters need a lot of hugging, but only John would allow this to happen. The elephant didn’t wake up one day to discover itself a fully grown elephant. It became itself by degrees. The hurting, hateful boys whom Eric and Alex now are became so only by degrees, as sighted men, women and children turned a blind eye to the pair’s deepening despair and worsening situation. That doesn’t make all these other people responsible for what Eric and Alex did. But the whole silly question of “who’s responsible?” is irrelevant. One has to ask oneself this: Do you want someone to blame, or would you rather behave in such a way as to respond to the needs of children, helping to keep them from the point of despair where nihilistic murder becomes a viable path for them to travel? Unfortunately, playing the blame game generally leads to society’s doing little or nothing to solve a problem, and the toll of corpses that this film shows renders that problem enormous. As in Drugstore Cowboy (1989), Van Sant is nonjudgmental; he is this way here, in Elephant, because he dreams of sparing each and every kid, including the killers, from the sway and discharge of the gun.

One more thing: the violence in Elephant is harrowing and horrifying. Like Hitchcock, Van Sant abhors violence, which he doesn’t exploit or sentimentalize, as Clint Eastwood does in Mystic River (2003), as unconscionable a film as Elephant is noble, refreshingly humane, and perhaps even necessary.

Elephant occupies the middle position in a trilogy by Van Sant. Essays on the other two films, Gerry and Last Days, appear elsewhere on this site, in the category “film reviews.”

FOOTLOOSE (Herbert Ross, 1984)

(G)litter, Herbert Ross’s career consisted of one worthless project after another. But Footloose is worth considering for its sociopathology—its participation in the Hollywood trend of catering to the ignorance and the insolence of the young.

Along with his mother, Ren, a Chicago teenager, moves in with relations in a small rural town after his father has deserted them. Ren loves to dance; but the town hasn’t permitted public dancing since an extraordinary event: evolving from the rock scene, an auto accident that claimed the life of the minister’s son. After a series of mishaps and conflicts with townsfolk, Ren persuades the minister, a member of the town council, to sanction a high school prom.

Footloose recalls Saturday Night Fever (John Badham, 1977), where a boy sacrifices his delight in dancing in order to atone for an aimless lifestyle and the self-centeredness of his that led to a friend’s suicide. There, giving up dancing means, simply, growing up. Ross’s film is the negative of this. By focusing on children who wish to remain so at all costs, Footloose preserves the pleasure without the inevitable price to pay. It captures and glorifies an irresponsible moment in the lives of youngsters for whom the city boy, a rock-’n’-roll Pan, acts as a catalyst to free expression.

It does this without truth or zest. There are three reasons for saying this: one, the protagonist is unappealing in his vicious arrogance; two, the film casually dismisses adult responsibility for providing the young with moral and cultural guidance; three, the music is cursory.

Ren sports punk hair and an attitude problem. An example of the latter occurs when he and his mother have just arrived in town. Adults discuss whether Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five should be permitted to remain on the high school library shelf. (The rest of the book title, recall, is The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death.) The boy, without being asked for his opinion, intrudes, pronouncing the novel a “classic.” Quick to qualify this remark, Ren’s mother explains, “In some towns it’s a classic,” to which the boy replies (blissfully ignorant, and mistaking his own opinion for a judgment on merit that distant future generations must decide), “In any town.” Ren thus embarrasses a consistently supportive mother whose qualifying remark here was in fact intended to smooth her own and her son’s transition into the life of the town. Yet Ren, incorrigible, never apologizes to her or, for that matter, anyone else—not even to his uncle, whom he treats with stupefying rudeness and disrespect, presumably because of the traumatic uprooting of his teenaged life, with which his uncle had nothing at all to do.

Nevertheless, the film throughout remains uncritical of Ren. With a calculated eye on box-office, in fact, it approves too readily anything identifiable with contemporary youth, including the deleterious rock music that the town elders oppose for reasons that the film, conveniently, never explores. That the relevant town law bans all public dancing, regardless of the kind of music involved, seems a further attempt to obscure the real issue. However misguidedly the townsfolk may have elected to express it (banning dancing is throwing the baby out with the bath water), their agonized concern for the welfare of their young shouldn’t be ridiculed or so cavalierly dismissed. Equally misguided, if indeed not more so, after all, is the film’s implicit agreement with Ren that he has nothing to learn from any grown-up, including his patient, loving mother. By contrast, about the same time, WarGames (Badham, 1983) shows a teenage computer enthusiast and his surrogate father, a computer scientist, participating in each other’s moral and humane education. But Footloose is all one way—Ren’s way.

Curiously, the film contains little music and dance—too little to justify the importance that the script gives these. (The problem with Saturday Night Fever is just the opposite; Fever pronounces dancing expendable, even necessarily so, after showing at length how vital, how much fun, it can be.) Still, the one good sequence in Footloose, a montage in long-shot, humorously records Ren’s attempts to teach a friend to dance. However, Ren’s own big solo, in a warehouse, consists of disjointed acrobatic movements—choreographer Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s projection of nothing more than the boy’s desire to “bust loose.”

Kevin Bacon and Lori Singer give graceless performances as Ren and his sluttish girlfriend, the minister’s daughter, Ariel. Bacon, heaven knows, hasn’t improved since; Singer has—for Alan Rudolph and Robert Altman.

Please read my essay on WarGames in the category “Hollywood Film Reviews,” elsewhere on this site.

LOVING COUPLES (Mai Zetterling, 1964)

For years I have heard what a dull film Mai Zetterling’s Loving Couples is, and I always knew it was an opinion worth flushing down the toilet because it came from the sort who think that Coppola and Kubrick made good movies. (Such persons exist.) Loving Couples, it turns out, is utterly fascinating, amazingly empathetic towards its female characters in a maternity ward that doubles (metaphorically speaking) as an insane asylum, and just wonderful in its seamless interweaving of present and reverie. The Swedish film is highly Bergmanesque, what with Sven Nykvist’s black-and-white cinematography (stencil gray indoors, beauteous outdoors in Nature), and with Harriet Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom, Gunnar Björnstrand, Eva Dahlbeck, Anita Björk, Jan Malmsjö, Ake Grönberg and others onboard. But that coldness of Bergman’s is absent, and Zetterling’s use of the camera is far more relaxed, given to sustained pans, for example, not chiseled, sculptured. Zetterling’s shots are claustrophobic only when she wants them to be.
     One may rue the compromise that a false ending applies to the material, but the film’s sensitivity to homosexuality and lesbianism refreshes. Bergman, too, essays the theme of the conventional straightjacket that society readies for girls and women, but Zetterling, unlike Bergman, balances this with another motive: female solidarity. I was unsentimentally moved to tears by passages of this film; this has never happened to me while watching a Bergman film.
     Please do not misrepresent my opinion. Bergman has made masterpieces; Zetterling’s film is hardly a masterpiece. But it’s very fine, highly intelligent, and more humane than Bergman, who, after all, is misogynistic behind the curtain of that curiosity and clinical interest of his in women.
     Two asides: one, Loving Couples—Älskande par—shows Bergman’s influence less than it reveals how much both Bergman and Zetterling owe to Alf Sjöberg (Miss Julie, 1950), for whom Bergman began as a screenwriter and whom he has acknowledged as a mentor; two, you know the double-take that we all make whenever we see Sandra Bullock onscreen? Think Gunnel Lindblom.

THE WITCHES OF SALEM (Raymond Rouleau, 1956)

Raymond Rouleau’s Witches of Salem is an oddity: a French film based on a topical American play, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which on political grounds couldn’t be made into a film at the time in the United States. (Forty years later, such a film, from Miller’s own script, could be and was made. This Crucible is dreadful, but it stars no less than Daniel Day-Lewis.) Miller wrote The Crucible to condemn the denunciatory political hysteria of the 1950s, which he compares to the trying and hanging of witches in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1600s. The analogy holds; moreover, the scenarist, Jean-Paul Sartre, was able to compose a script that appreciates issues of social responsibility and individual psychology far beyond Miller’s capacity. Indeed, while Miller wrote a self-serving play, to exonerate himself on a number of fronts, Sartre had no scores to settle, no witch hunters in mind to hang; and, beginning with this script by Sartre, Rouleau was able to make an honest and interesting film.

Salem: The marriage of Elizabeth and John Proctor has been dormant for months. Elizabeth, more puritanical, has withdrawn into the comfort of pride that this denial of pleasure affords. As a result, though it is great, finding himself unsure of his wife’s love for him, John has taken up with a teenaged child in their household—a transgression he has confessed to Elizabeth. When she therefore turns Abigail out, the girl vengefully denounces Elizabeth as a witch, in accord with the communal panic that in fact Abigail has helped orchestrate. Hoping to expose his mistress’s motive and to save his wife’s life, John admits his adultery in open court. Unwittingly thwarting her husband’s aim, Elizabeth, to protect him, lies in court by saying he is not an adulterer. Thus is John also branded a witch. In order to save his life, John prepares to “confess” his “sin.” However, when he realizes that his death can have real meaning by provoking a citizen uprising sufficient to end all the nonsensical trials and executions, John chooses the selfless course, even as an official begs him to choose life. Now secure in their love, John and Elizabeth embrace prior to his death. Elizabeth is spared, however, because she is pregnant with John’s child.

Sartre’s interests here, quite apart from Miller’s, are unmistakable. Persuaded by Abigail to say he is a witch so that he might live, John asks the clerk overseeing his confession, “What do I write?” The reply: “The choice is yours.” This is a signal moment, although initially it seems a passing irony. With what choice have circumstances left him? Who wouldn’t choose to live? But the irony compounds by the counsel it inadvertently provides. For John takes control of his life by choosing death; and, in turn, this choice of his co-opts those who have conspired to take away his freedom of choice. By forcing the witch hunting to conclusion, moreover, John’s self-sacrifice will save many more innocent lives than his own. Thus his choice to die weds his fate as individual to the greater communal good, in some measure stilling his fear of death through the self-determination that his bold exercise of choice provides. Miller’s admirers see here the play with the emphases redistributed. Exactly. Whereas Miller rhetorically bemoans John’s fate, Sartre reflects more deeply on Proctor’s moral and philosophical stand. Whereas Miller indulges in a projective exercise of self-pity, Sartre’s Proctor directs the fate of his community for which he forfeits his life. Sartre thus achieves a crowning irony unavailable to Miller: it is John Proctor, not the religionists, who dispossesses the possessed.

In (rightly) condemning those who compel individuals to condemn others, Miller claims a topical perspective; Sartre takes a broader, more universal view. He better understands who are responsible for the madness that has taken over the community. It isn’t this person or that; it isn’t even Abigail, whom Elizabeth absolves after John’s execution, noting that she herself is as much to blame. Nor is the Puritan church the culprit. The excess of its fervor, and the mad denunciations (under a guise of rational trials and verdicts) to which it leads, is not a revelation of madness or meanness at its core; rather, the church itself is in the grip of a frenzy of much more than its own making. Miller points fingers, lays blame; but Sartre identifies the responsibility as human and universal—not proportionately parceled out but shared equally. For Sartre, Original Sin is, simply, human culpability. He is complicit; Miller is (in his own eyes) superior, guiltless, above the fray.

Sartre’s script is better than the play, and a whole lot better than the one Sartre wrote for Yves Allégret’s The Proud Ones (The Proud and the Beautiful, 1953). But no amount of good writing ensures a positive result in cinema. Here, fortunately, the filmmaker, Rouleau, in collaboration with his extraordinary cinematographer, Claude Renoir, has created a finely expressive black-and-white film. For one thing, the film’s nuanced complexion suits the fairness of Sartre’s concept; it, too, resists finding heroes or villains. For another, Nature outdoors exerts a suggestion of freedom while remaining suitably restrained; Nature’s beauty, which would be irrelevant here, isn’t allowed to rush in, overwhelming us. Finally, to suggest the “possession” of village children whose initial play-acting enforces on them real frenzy, Rouleau and Renoir use camera movement sparingly, so that we the viewer, properly distanced from the frenzy, are able to consider and analyze it. Here is material ripe for exploitation; audiences could easily be manipulated emotionally. Instead, Rouleau and Renoir, along with the film’s peerless cutter, Marguerite Renoir, stay true to the script’s thoughtful spirit.

The film excels in another area as well: its description of the Proctors’ marriage. We watch Elizabeth and John each negotiate their insecurities, fears and desires with the exigencies of their marital union, and we watch them negotiate these exigencies with their individual insecurities, fears and desires. Rarely in a film is a marriage portrayed as dynamically as the one here is. The sum of its participants, the Proctors’ union is also more than that sum. Their marriage comprises both their lives but also has a complex, breathing life of its own.

The lead acting is triumphant: her sensuality appropriately corseted, Simone Signoret as Elizabeth; equally unglamorous, Yves Montand as John; and, as Abigail, Mylène Demongeot, whose reasonable yet vivid acting is a far cry from Patty McCormack’s ostentatious turn in The Bad Seed (Mervyn LeRoy, 1956). All three actors were honored at the Karlóvy Váry International Film Festival, and Signoret, the most complex and intriguing of the players, additionally won the British Academy Award.