HAMLET (Grigori Kozintsev, 1963)

In one of the weirdest developments in DVD-land, Grigori Kozintsev’s powerful, black-and-white Hamlet is now available for us to visit—sort-of: in place of Boris Pasternak’s translation to the Russian vernacular, the English subtitles instead show Shakespeare’s text! Consistency with a vengeance: at least in the English-translated credits, Pasternak’s name has been erased! Perhaps he never existed; perhaps he was a phantom of the mind, like the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father.
     This dark, spare, elemental vision—literally, the whole of it seems to churn and flare up in Hamlet’s own turbulent mind—begins with crashing waves. In some ways it is a naive misreading of the play, but certainly this Hamlet is a riveting, soul-shaking experience. Perhaps the clearest index of its simplification of an ambiguous and complex text is its reduction of Claudius to pure villainy. Human nature is no longer what is rotten in the medieval state.
     Instead, the dim, inhospitable castle, which Kozintsev’s camera roams as though through catacombs, projects the evil of deranged political power, treachery. At the center of this maelstrom is the film’s ace-in-a-hole: the legendary performance of the melancholy Dane by Innokenti Smoktunovsky. It expresses the convolutions of the suspicious Prince’s mind that requires a straightening-out so that Hamlet may commit himself to murderous revenge, which, once done, busts loose all hell, swallowing him up; it shows that this man struggles every minute to retain his humanity.
     Then there is Smoktunovsky himself: Polish and Jewish as well as Russian, he seems the perpetual outsider trying to break through to a dead father’s love. A death camp was Smoktunovsky’s destiny when he became a German POW during the Second World War; but he escaped. His reward from Stalin: Siberia.
     But Smoktunovsky came back from the dead. He came back to play Hamlet.

GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT (Elia Kazan, 1947)

In its day Gentleman’s Agreement was a highly regarded movie. Based on the popular novel exposing American anti-Semitism by former Time journalist Laura Z. Hobson, it won the Oscar, the Golden Globe, and the prize of the New York Film Critics Circle as the best English-language film of 1947.

Gentleman’s Agreement is a “message movie”—a film whose principal aim is to spotlight a social condition that demands attention. However, its intellectual basis is more probing and sophisticated than this suggests. While the movie, today, strikes many as preachy, largely due to speechifying dialogue in Moss Hart’s script, it is an accomplished piece of work that selects an interesting target: not those who are overt bigots, who spew hate, but those who, quiet or timid or possibly ambivalent, help bigots along by not confronting and countering the bigots’ jokes, remarks, acts of cruelty, and unfair social, public and business practices. Usually, such films (for instance, those by Stanley Kramer) preach to the choir; but, far more intriguingly, Gentleman’s Agreement urges us all to look within and ask ourselves, “Have we done and are we doing enough to combat anti-Semitism?—or, without realizing it, are we ceding or assenting to it, and helping it along, by not doing enough?” Variably written, glossily produced and, in the principal role, horribly acted, the movie nevertheless retains considerable power.

Although anti-Semitism still exists in the United States, the Nazi-like vehemence against Jews has subsided. Christian leaders and reactionary radio and television commentators have other fish to fry nowadays than Jews. (For instance, liberals—a term once more or less synonymous with Jews.) Today, the American public would no longer assert in a poll, as they did in 1942, that Jews constitute a menace to the U.S. (Jews came in third, following the Germans and the Japanese, with whom at the time we were at war.) We now know that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as president, refused to act to halt the mass murder of European Jews because he feared a backlash by American Gentiles against American Jews! However, the more submerged and elusive strains of anti-Semitism that infect American society, which periodically flare up into outright sickness, underscore the persistent relevance of the specific tack taken by Gentleman’s Agreement.

The film’s protagonist is Philip Schuyler Green, a crusading journalist who masquerades as a Jew for two months for a series he is writing. He is new to the magazine and to New York City, to which he has just arrived from Los Angeles. In short, those he tells he is Jewish have no reason to doubt his word. At a party that first night at his publisher’s home, he meets Kathy Lacey; sparks strike. She is a schoolteacher and a divorcée; Green is a widower with an eleven-year-old son. It is Kathy who first suggested the series on anti-Semitism to the publisher after a fellow teacher, who is Jewish, was discharged at the school where Kathy works. Kathy and Phil become lovers; yet when he clumsily tells her, in explaining his “angle” in the series, “I am going to tell everyone I’m Jewish,” her reaction gets to the heart of the film: “But you’re not—are you? Not that there would be anything wrong if you were. . . .” Kathy’s tongue keeps twisting; when it is finally straight, she voices distress at the angle, that it will mix people up, that people won’t know what Phil is. Kathy is concerned about her friends and family; a sister is part of the Darien, Connecticut, crowd. Darien is “restricted”; there is a “gentleman’s agreement” in force that residents will not sell property there to anyone who is Jewish. Phil may be the lead character, but I may have been wrong to identify him as the protagonist. In reality, Kathy is the central character because it is her pilgrim’s progress that the film charts; it is she who must look within and unravel her conflicted attitudes regarding Jews and being Christian and being a life partner for Phil. It is she who owns property in Darien by which she eventually shreds the “gentleman’s agreement,” electing to live nearby during the summer, at her sister’s, so she can face down anyone who might try to cause a flap. It is Kathy whose transformation testifies to the message that Gentleman’s Agreement succeeds in articulating with force, intelligence and sensitivity.

Meanwhile, as Kathy proceeds resistantly on the road to a fuller level of humanity, Phil, as “Phil Greenburg,” gets his nose rubbed into his being Jewish, including at a restricted hotel and regarding his son, Tommy, who comes home bloodied from school after having been assaulted by peers who called him a “dirty kike.” The words kike, yid, sheeny, nigger and coon are all used here, and the film even risked lawsuits by referring by name to three infamous American bigots of the day, including two U.S. congressmen. In 2004, while watching it, one still feels how brave Gentleman’s Agreement is. Darryl F. Zanuck produced the film for 20th Century-Fox, whose name (signifying the merger of two studios) has lost its hyphen in the twenty-first century.

Gregory Peck stars; Peck is a humorless actor who gives a typically wooden, smug, sanctimonious performance as Green. The “unctuous nobility” that critic Andrew Sarris condemned in Peck’s dreadful acting fifteen years later in To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962) is, here, already in evidence. Peck is a drag on the film—a dead weight at the center, like Johnny Depp or Brad Pitt in almost anything today.

Fortunately, the other most important part is played by Dorothy McGuire, who gives the film’s most complex and intriguing performance—and has to, really, because Kathy begins at such a point of blindness and complacency that human growth very nearly seems out of the question. What a superb actress McGuire is!

But the film’s most wonderful performance is given by John Garfield, who plays Dave Goldman, a Jewish man who has been Phil’s best friend since childhood. The pivotal passage between Dave and Kathy where Dave acts as the catalyst for Kathy’s attainment of clear moral vision is as beautifully acted as anything I can imagine, especially when one considers the rigged dialogue that Hart’s script imposes. Celeste Holm, although she won an Oscar as best supporting actress, has less luck as Anne Dettrey, the brittle, prattling fashion writer at the magazine who has designs on Phil, I guess because he looks like Gregory Peck. Anne Revere is vivid and moving as Phil’s progressive mother, and Dean Stockwell, who won a Golden Globe, is marvelous as Tommy. Albert Dekker is efficient as Phil’s publisher, June Havoc is dead-on as Phil’s secretary, a Jewish person passing for Christian who confronts Phil with the complex issue of Jewish anti-Semitism, and Sam Jaffe is scene-stealing—he has but one scene—as Professor Fred Lieberman, who explains to Phil and Kathy at a party about the secularization of Jews, how Jews who are no longer religious nonetheless cling to their Jewish identity in specific defiance of hatred of Jews. Oddly, the Holocaust—the elephant in the room and in every room of the film—is never mentioned.

Of this cast, Garfield ran afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which hounded him to a youthful fatal heart attack, and Revere, Dekker and Jaffe were all blacklisted. (Had he lived, Garfield also would have been blacklisted.) Jane Wyatt, who plays Kathy’s sister, also was blacklisted but moved on to television, where she won three best actress Emmys for Father Knows Best.

I have saved the most bitter irony for last. Rather than have his career interrupted, the director of Gentleman’s Agreement, Elia Kazan, named names for HUAC and persisted to his death in his (at least public) complacency on the matter. Kazan won an Oscar for directing Gentleman’s Agreement. That same year, though, he also made a better film—his best film, in fact: Boomerang!

LOVE ON THE DOLE (John Baxter, 1941)

For the longest time, the British government did not want a film made of Walter Greenwood’s 1936 novel of the 1930s Depression, Love on the Dole. (Between book and film, a stage version appeared, by Ronald Gow, starring Gow’s wife, Wendy Hiller.) The British Board of Film Censors didn’t wish this portrait of unemployment and poverty to represent the nation either at home or abroad; it was seen as despondent and demoralizing. Once the war effort had beaten the problem of unemployment, however, the film was made (isn’t war grand?), but now as a recent “period piece,” a popular curiosity, not as a trenchant examination of the roots and causes of a socioeconomic disaster. The film that John Baxter made is the oddest nut to crack; it’s absolutely authentic, almost documentary, in its black-and-white images, but dreary, humorless, and at times (owing to the plot) wildly improbable. It somewhat resembles a socially committed Charles Dickens novel from which all the wit has been expunged.

It’s a manipulative piece of work, in which a boy in a strapped Lancashire industrial town wins a lottery that allows him and his girlfriend to have a charming, upholstered holiday—this, a brutish set-up so that the poverty to which he returns gives him (and us) all the more heartache. I can’t stand this sort of sentimentality; I prefer films that just let me be, in my own head, in my own space. I don’t need a film that’s needy—one that keeps grabbing at me.

Perhaps the film is at its best in portraying a community in hardship, with the center of life having shifted from the cotton mill and factories, where work has all but come to a halt, to the pawnshop and the ladies’ gossipy sewing circle. The film is certainly not at its best in portraying the Hardcastle family, to which the boy, Harry, belongs. Harry is exquisitely—perhaps a bit too exquisitely—played by Geoffrey Hibbert, whose proud appearance in his first suit of clothes, for which his scrimping mother has paid on account, skirts lugubriousness; but neither Hibbert, nor George Carney nor Mary Merrall, who play Harry’s parents, pose an especial problem to our acceptance of the film. Carney is particularly effective once Mr. Hardcastle has lost his job.

The lead character is Sally Hardcastle, Harry’s older sister and, as Deborah Kerr irritatingly plays her, she is so much in tune with the most melodramatic aspects of the narrative that she comes to represent the film’s unappealing nature. For, in the main, the film charts Sally’s downward course, directed by poverty and dwindling family employment, from pluck to cynicism: a contrived trajectory that has her, at the last, sacrificing her virtue, by becoming a kept woman, in order to help ensure her family’s survival. Of course, the man to whom she gives herself is the seediest gent in town and loathsome in the extreme. This is the sort of film that wouldn’t have it any other way.

For a time, Sally has a most respectable and endearing boyfriend. This is Larry, a factory worker who doubles as a labor agitator. Their romance, though, is cut short when Larry, attempting to control a street mob, ends up being killed. Clifford Evans gives a good performance, which is all the more reason to regret the fact that his character quits the picture. Some days at the cinema, nothing goes right.

Kerr’s performance, which made her a star, is celebrated, and at first I was intrigued and encouraged. A pushy, declamatory actress, Kerr is very hushed here—at first, it seems, a model of effective restraint. But that’s the nutty thing about her crude de Havillandish or Streepish performance; Kerr is excrutiatingly loud in the way that she strenuously elects to project Sally’s quietude. She makes Sally’s nuances of voice and manner oversized. It’s an obnoxious, rigged performance from start to finish; it never seems to rest—to live in the moment. (For the record, I like Kerr very much in Alexander Korda’s Perfect Strangers, a.k.a. A Vacation from Marriage, 1945, Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity, 1953, and Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, 1961, based on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.)

Baxter’s direction is derivative of all sorts of better film artists, including Georg Wilhelm Pabst, whose Joyless Street (1925) hovers about, René Clair and Alfred Hitchcock. It’s worse than derivative, though; Baxter’s filmmaking, for the most part, is listless and enervating beyond belief. I really struggled to get through watching this one—this, after so looking forward to seeing it finally.

Love on the Dole reminds us yet again that not all the old movies, “the classics,” merit their reputations.

I understand that the novel has some humor to it. The film, alas, is very grim, grinding and dull. And silly.

HIGH NOON (Fred Zinnemann, 1952)

One of the most hotly debated American films of the 1950s, High Noon is widely regarded as scenarist Carl Foreman’s subversive assault on McCarthyism. (His script is based on John W. Cunningham’s story “The Tin Star.”) But there are problems with this interpretation of the film as a “morality play” with contemporary relevance. Indeed, the problem stems from a situation not at all uncommon with “texts,” including films. It has to do with the imposition of an interpretation onto a text that eliminates the difference between the text and the interpretation. The two become inseparable, and as a result the viewer or (in the case of a literary text) reader mistakes the interpretation for the thing that has thus been interpreted. The Bible is such a text, for many, probably most, of its readers “see” it as meaning at very many points what they have been told it means or have been taught to “find” there. When this occurs, the text is no longer something that many can “see” for themselves; it arrives already interpreted for them, and nothing in their experience may be encouraging them to step back, as it were, to see the text in any other light. This generates dogma: the “fixed” text rather than the fluid one that achieves the stability of “meaning” in the imaginative space where the text itself and the interpreter’s own experience—her or his history—intersect and interact.

Another issue compounds the problem: the fact that the author’s or artist’s intentions may be no sure help or guide insofar as the finished work may fall short of realizing those intentions. In the case of a film, there is the additional possibility that the director’s intentions may not perfectly coincide with the scenarist’s. This certainly happens when someone other than the scenarist directs, but it may even happen when the two are one and the same person, because different aspects of the creative process may impose different imperatives on a creative person. Art, like life, is never simple; process can muddy waters even when simplicity is an explicit aim.

High Noon is an example of a work that arrives with a conspicuous burden of interpretation imposed on it. The origin of a part of it is the fact that soon after the release of the film Foreman himself was targeted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, resulting in his flight to England so that his career might survive his being “blacklisted.” Born in Chicago, Foreman was in his late forties when all this occurred. Five years hence the Oscar for writing David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai should have gone to him since he in fact (along with Michael Wilson, also blacklisted) co-authored the screenplay. Instead, it went to the author of the novel on which the film was based—a Frenchman who couldn’t read, let alone write in, English. At the time, the by-laws of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences prohibited awarding an Oscar to anyone whose name appeared on the blacklist. (Two other prominent participants in High Noon were summarily blacklisted: cinematographer Floyd Crosby and actor Lloyd Bridges.)

Into the mix of the hysteria surrounding the artistic outcome of High Noon we must throw at least two other factors. One is the quarrel between Foreman and his producer, the reactionary “liberal” Stanley Kramer. They had collaborated before (The Men, 1950, introduced movie audiences to Marlon Brando), and Kramer, perhaps guilt-ridden, summarily hired blacklisted author Nedrick Young under the pseudonym Nathan E. Douglas (The Defiant Ones, 1958)—a common protective practice. A decade younger than Foreman, Kramer played fast and loose, meaning, he tried to have things every which way, pro-McCarthy, anti-McCarthy, ultra-conservative, moderately progressive. Insofar as he apparently had no core beliefs whatsoever, Kramer has become synonymous with a certain kind of opportunism in Hollywood. But his ghost rests uneasy because he may have always felt, despite his political track record, that he was “liberal”—whatever that means. Because he adamantly refused to stand up and be counted regarding the political grenade that the U.S. tossed at Foreman, Kramer has (rightly or wrongly) been vilified, and it’s doubful that his reputation in some quarters will ever recover. He always felt that the blacklist was something he could work around. When the mechanism of the blacklist ended, the principal fact about Kramer that survived is that he was a monster; but many reports had also surfaced that Foreman was no angel either. In 1961, by which time the blacklist had ended (in substantial measure due to the hiring practices of Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Otto Preminger, but mostly, perhaps, because America was “starting over,” having set its rejuvenated sights on JFK’s New Frontier), in a truly historical Oscar competition The Guns of Navarone, written and produced by Foreman, and Judgment at Nuremberg, produced and directed by Kramer, were pitted against one another. (Both lost to an equally lousy film, where the producer had fired the director and finished directing the film himself: West Side Story.)

There is a trump, however, to High Noon. Whatever Foreman’s intentions, Fred Zinnemann directed it superbly. Zinnemann may have been a hack (A Man for All Seasons, 1966, certainly suggests that he was this), but the Viennese-born filmmaker applied to this one Hollywood project of his a degree of expert craftsmanship that would remain unique in his career. An awesome, rigorous beauty, orchestrated by Zinnemann, helps to conceal the film’s muddled quality. In reality a work at significant cross-purposes, High Noon cannot support the interpretations that have been imposed on it. It cannot support the analogy with McCarthyism. Neither can the film support the theme, most often identified with it, that Garbicz and Klinowski have succinctly summarized: “one must resist Evil with all available means.”

The setting is a dusty western town in the 1870s. Fought over the West (in addition to federalism vs. states’ rights, an important issue had been whether to extend slavery to the territories that had recently opened and were opening up), the American Civil War, recently ended, had left this region untouched; neither Puritanism nor Jeffersonianism informed the advent of civilization in the West. A makeshift event grounded in the hardship of the nation’s western expansion, “order” here was essentially the reward of roots for those marked by memory of a condition of uprootedness and rootlessness. Distance from the federal government in Washington, D.C., had helped nurture a wilder disposition that found order, if at all, often imposed by a mightier gun wielded by those, well nurtured by a condition of rootlessness, who sought to take over towns to their own advantage. These local terrorists, as it were, often took aim at the symbol of the federal government that maintained an uneasy toehold in the community: the U.S. marshal. Male inhabitants of the town were divided and self-divided; fearful of disorder (especially for the sake of their wives and the children they were raising) but also resentful of a federal government they identified with the East, not with themselves, they harbored an emotional connection with the worst elements in their midst that sought in fact to destroy the increasingly settled nature of their lives. The law that the marshal thus represented could be tolerated, even admired, without being wholeheartedly embraced.

High Noon centers on U.S. Marshal Will Kane on the day of his wedding to Amy, a girl who has rejected violence, becoming a Quaker, as a result of the shooting deaths of both her father and brother. Kane is about to leave town with his bride, which would leave the town unattended for a day until the new federal marshal arrives, when word arrives that Frank Miller, whom Kane helped put away, is due on the noon train, having been released from prison. (The film is big on all that blather about how judges keep releasing criminals from prison, endangering ordinary citizens.) Miller is coming back intent on revenge. Smelling the gunfire on the wall, the judge who originally sentenced him wraps up his American flag and prepares to take flight. Miller, though, has a double motive for revenge against Kane, the man who arrested him and therefore brought him to trial. Three years ago, during Miller’s incarceration, Kane had an affair with Miller’s mistress, Helen Ramirez, who runs and co-owns the town’s hotel and brothel. She, too, is leaving town, not so much out of fear of Miller but out of a sense that the town’s fortunes will falter once Miller returns and takes over the town again. Meanwhile, Ramirez’s current lover is Harvey Pell, Kane’s deputy, a boy eager to prove himself Kane’s equal in different quarters. Pell feels passed over now that Kane will be replaced as marshal by an outsider. He has been deprived, he feels, of his entitlement, the succession he has tried to foster all along.

The clock repeatedly ticks in closeup as the noon train carrying Miller approaches. Already his cohorts in crime are in town awaiting Miller’s arrival. Their plan is to kill Kane. All that Kane has to do to prevent the confrontation in this particular place on this particular day is follow through with his original plan of leaving town with Amy. At church, Jonas Henderson, Kane’s friend, says as much; if Kane just leaves, he doubts that the town will have much to fear from Miller. But Kane feels duty-bound to stay and face his nemesis. He tells Amy, besides, that there is no avoiding the confrontation, only a possibility of postponing it, for Miller will follow them if they leave. It was Amy’s dream that her spouse would leave his violent life behind and open a store with her elsewhere; now she plans to leave him, on this their wedding day, because Kane seems hell-bent on one last shoot-out. Amy readies herself to leave on the same train on which Miller is arriving.

Most of the film’s action revolves around Kane’s attempt to muster deputies for the noon showdown with Miller and his comrades. This attempt fails, mostly as the result of fear of Miller, but also as the result of residual admiration for the man whom Kane helped put away in prison. Only a teenaged boy makes a sincere offer to join Kane in his killing quest, but Kane refuses his help. (Regrettably, once he does so, a disastrous reaction shot shows Kane smiling after the boy paternally.) Some others offer help, but insincerely, and they don’t follow through; Harvey, for instance, will assist Kane only if Kane makes him his successor as U.S. marshal. In the end Kane faces Miller and Miller’s gang of three alone—except for an unexpected ally: Amy, who stays behind to betray her principles by shooting one of Miller’s men in the back. The psychological assist to her doing this, whipped up on a sensational dime, is the symbolic transcendence of those limitations of hers that had left her powerless to protect her loved ones—both father and brother.

High Noon inspired at least two other films in rebuke. One of these received the top prize at Cannes: William Wyler’s Quaker chronicle Friendly Persuasion (1956), which, lest people miss the connection, stars the same actor as played Kane. In Wyler’s fine if sentimental film, Quakers either adhere to their principles or grapple hard with the conflict between those principles and other imperatives, such as, for a teenaged boy, the possibility of soldiering in the Civil War. The other film is Howard Hawks’s staggering Western Rio Bravo (1959), in which a sheriff and his comrades face down the gang of hoodlums that are cornering them. Unlike Kane, they do not plead with townsfolk to join them and help them out; they take full responsibility for their appointed jobs in protecting the town. It really does seem a wasted effort on Kane’s part in High Noon to try to recruit one reluctant soul after another since, when the dust has settled, Kane is forced to rely only on himself.

What has any of this to do with McCarthyism? According to the “McCarthy” interpretation of the film, McCarthyism thrived due to two things: evil people; good people who did nothing to stop the evil. This is as excrutiatingly simplistic as McCarthyism itself. It certainly fails to take into account the fear of Soviet Communism ironically unleashed by the the way that the U.S. had ended World War II in the Asian theater. The United States was terrified that its Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, would unleash on it even worse bombs than the United States had already unleashed on Japan. Moreover, it worried that the infiltration of Communists and Communist ideas would weaken America from within and help move it in the direction of this holocaustic event. To be sure, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy was an opportunist who manipulated such national anxieties for the sake of his own political fame and fortunes; but, even so, how was he like Frank Miller in High Noon? McCarthy rode a crest of national hysteria, all the while convincing himself (as “evil” people are apt to do) that he wasn’t an opportunist but someone on a serious and necessary mission. Miller is a figure of vengeance; he seeks revenge for his incarceration, and sexual revenge as well—the latter in particular a point that muddies the waters of Kane’s position. Kane is sincere in wishing to maintain the order and integrity of the town, but catch it at a particular angle and his quarrel with Miller seems spectacularly personal, not social. Also, while the townsfolk may appear to be “giving in to” Miller, the fact is that a U.S. marshal is scheduled to arrive the very next day. In a representative democracy, of course it’s every citizen’s duty to remain vigilant against a social phenomenon like McCarthyism, where amidst terrible fears individual liberties are confiscated and trampled; but at the same time (call me Hawksian, whatever), it really is the specific job of the law to deal with somebody like Miller. Ordinary citizens have a right to such qualms as distinguishes between becoming sworn deputies to augment Kane and his regular deputies, as was the case years ago when Miller was first arrested, and joining Kane now, when there is only Kane for them to join. Fearful and cowardly aren’t quite the same thing; people have a right to factor in the level of risk involved to their own lives when in fact others are paid and may even have been trained to protect the community. High Noon moralistically paints with a very wide brush, and it seems to me the wider the brushstroke the less likely the analogy with McCarthyism can hold. Registering your dissatisfaction with your democratic nation’s social or political course through various means, including voting, petitioning, organized protests, and so forth, though not always without serious risk, is not at all the same thing as facing down a killer. In one case doing so is indisputably the citizen’s right and duty; in the other, it really is somebody else’s job. People should feel free not to confront a gun-toting killer without Foreman and company condemning them as cowards.

Nor do I really believe that Miller, a common enough example of a hooligan, constitutes a figure of “evil.” He and his cohorts are portrayed blankly in the film—they are as featureless, if you will, as the film’s filtered, cloudless skies. Miller, after all, doesn’t interfere with Helen’s attempt to leave town when she boards the train he has just gotten off of. He is focused on Kane, not her; his isn’t an indiscriminate campaign of violence, such as New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s brutal quelling of a prison riot that earned him the nickname “the Butcher of Attica”—a truly evil act. Frankly, I feel little loyalty for either Kane or Miller. Each is reprehensible in his own way, but the town probably won’t be any the worse for wear for having endured them both on Kane’s wedding day.

If the film is to be redeemed from an interpretation that won’t hold, the analogy with McCarthyism, we must begin to see it shorn of this interpretation. When we do this, however, we may discover how thin the film is; at least that’s how it seems to me. Along with George Stevens’s affected, schematic Shane (1953), High Noon is one of the weaker Westerns of the 1950s; it falls far short of the level of achievement, say, of John Ford’s Wagon Master (1950) or The Searchers (1956), or Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns (1957) or Hawks’s Rio Bravo.

That said, Zinnemann has applied to it the widest possible variety of shots, including a withdrawing dolly shot that memorably shows Kane standing alone in the street from the vantage of God and heaven; it’s a great shot! Floyd Crosby’s black-and-white cinematography is eloquent and poetic, now dusky, now riveting with its ravishing contrasts. Few westerns as a result are more beautiful to the eye than this one. The Oscar-winning editing by Elmo Williams and Harry Gerstad is brilliant, at times electrifying. The Oscar-winning music by Dimitri Tiomkin, including the Oscar-winning “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’” sung unforgettably by Tex Ritter, astutely counters Kane’s isolation with his need for love and family. And, above all, Gary Cooper is tremendous in the role of Will Kane. One feels fortunate that Kramer’s first choice, Gregory Peck, didn’t enter into the picture; Cooper’s worn appearance, equidistant between Stoicism and anxiety, is perfect, and the degree of craft Cooper effortlessly applies to his famous personality helps give the film a humane, appealing center despite Foreman’s and Kramer’s icily redundant self-righteousness. Cooper deserved the Oscar he won for this role—the second of his three gold-plated trophies. Superb, too, is Katy Jurado as Helen Ramirez (Golden Globe, best supporting actress). Lloyd Bridges is good as Harvey Pell. The one weak performance—but, of course, the role is an impossible one—is Grace Kelly’s as Amy. Kelly would require John Ford, who drew from her a good performance the next year in Mogambo.

Bill Clinton has declared High Noon his favorite film, and he has perplexingly added that “Kane does everything right.” Clinton would think so. I doubt that any of the rest of us agrees.

THE INHERITORS (Walter Bannert, 1982)

William Bannert’s Die Erben, from Austria and West Germany, addresses the resurgence of fascist organizations in those countries at about the time the film was made. It focuses in particular on a German neo-Nazi organization that targets teenaged boys for recruitment. These impressionable, disaffected youths find the rebelliousness towards parents and identity crisis that are typical of their adolescence coinciding with the organization’s proffer of both a quasi-military substitute model of authority and a fierce identification with discredited Germanic history. This appeal to the boys’ capacity for self-pity, given here an especially grandiose application, is fortified by its incitement of their idealism, its revival, in effect, of the Hitler Youth movement. The cruel, violent and socially deleterious activities in which the teenagers are encouraged to participate, which include vandalism, beatings, even killings, provide a vent for their frustrations vis-à-vis the world, which, like much else in their current experience, taunts them by being out of their control at a time when they very much need to feel both other than powerless and in control. The organization provides a means for them to strike out at a world that seems, and largely is, indifferent to their enormous needs.

The film originated in an actual event that found Bannert the victim of such an assault as the boys perpetrate in the film. (Bannert co-authored the film’s script with Erich A. Richter.) In the mid-1970s he was among patrons in a Viennese café who were beaten up by a beseiging pack of young neo-Nazis. The incident, like numerous others at the time, was modeled on Kristallnacht, the Nazi rampage on two consecutive days in Germany in November 1938 that resulted in the trashing of stores and restaurants, the violation and burning of synagogues, the beating deaths of Jews, and the shipment of 30,000 Jews to concentration camps. Convincing its leadership that he was preparing an objective documentary about the movement, Bannert infiltrated one of the organizations, studying it from the inside for three years. Thus Die Erben is able to raise a general alarm on the basis of highly specific details.

Yet these details are not always convincing—this, despite the fact that Bannert had actually worked earlier as a documentarian. For example, there is a passage showing the boys at the organization’s youth training camp. One of their members, representing a Jew whom they may kidnap and murder, has been stripped and had his hands tied and a Star of David painted on his back. The other boys are instructed in the perfect way of executing the victim by point blank range pistol shot. One of the boys mock-shoots the pretend-victim, who, falling to the ground, mock-dies. Bannert succeeds in capturing the playful, slightly embarrassed mood of the boys, but this mood is made insufficiently comprehensible because he picks up on the scene too late. (Bannert, incidentally, edited the film himself.) To grasp fully this lighthearted scene, and to extract from it the requisite chill that should accompany its portrayal of such hateful, vicious preparations, we would really have to see the mock-victim’s undressing, the tying of his hands behind his back, and the painting of the Star of David on him. Without this introduction, the angled overhead shot of the naked boy being jabbed forward to his mock-doom is faintly ridiculous, and even irrelevant. It becomes just one of the film’s too many moments when the camera dawdles on a naked boy or a naked girl, apparently to satisfy the filmmaker’s prurient interest. To feel the weight of the evil that is being presented, we ought to have been given a fuller, more organic view of the process by which these boys progressively shed elements of their humanity (including their innocence) as they are trained by adults to become killer Nazis.

The film is even less convincing in its explanation as to why its 16-year-old protagonist, Thomas Feigl, is the way that he is. Mother, you know, is a witch. Tommy’s father, a self-made business owner whose status-conscious wife calls an “industrialist,” is ineffectual, interacting as little as possible with his two teenaged sons, except to beg his wife off the elder’s back. He seems oblivious to the existence of Ernst, the younger boy. Quiet Ernst, a loner, gets low grades, for which his mother castigates him, threatening to beat him unless he instantly raises them. When he proudly brings home a good grade from school, Mother isn’t impressed; she castigates him now for his pride, reminding him of all his previous low grades. But the woman’s principal target is Thomas, whom she appears to like even less, finding fault with everything about him from his disrespectful attitude to his unchanged clothes. (She wants him to dress cleanly not for the sake of his pride but so he won’t make a bad impression—one that might reflect poorly on her—at the “elite” school he attends.) It is the younger boy, though, who commits suicide. Mother is to blame; she made Ernst’s life hopeless.

All this is ridiculous. Adolescent suicide is an overdetermined act; the overwhelming sense of hopelessness that prompts it isn’t caused by Mom, or this or that, but by a complex of factors, each acting directly upon the vulnerable adolescent, and each interacting with the other factors, with the result of these interactions likewise acting upon the adolescent. Bannert tries too hard to make Mother the villain here, what with her never once praising Ernst for anything, including his earnest struggles inside the music practice room. This isn’t fair; Bannert makes the woman the way she is and then blames her for it! It is Thomas who discovers Ernst’s hanged body, and for a moment he seems human, devastated, screaming and crying, “Mommy!” But later he assaults his mother with her responsibility for her son’s death. The scene, well written, is an edgy, raw confrontation; but Bannert’s tone is false. Instead of showing that Thomas is striking out at his mother because of his own overwhelming sense of responsibility for Ernst’s death that he (wrongly) feels somehow he could have prevented, Bannert blatantly sides with Thomas in the verbal assault. This gross oversimplification is heartrending when one considers what a genuine family tragedy such a suicide would be. Worse, because Thomas has his neo-Nazi commitment, which wasn’t the case with his brother, the grotesque suggestion arises that such a commitment might have kept Ernst alive. Failing to think things through, Bannert thus backs into an outcome contrary to his own political intent, to wit, the possibility that neo-Nazism is a positive program for unhappy adolescents. (It gives them connection—to a group, to a cause.) Clearly, a more complex grasp of his material might have yielded a more coherent result.

Charly, whose background is working-class, is Thomas’s best friend in the organization. Bannert oversimplifies Charly’s family life as well. His abusive, alcoholic father rapes Charly’s sister, forcing a horrific confrontation in a bar between father and son, with Thomas tossed in lethally besides. I suppose that there is some sort of equity in Bannert’s slandering both the middle class and the working class, and I suppose there is a germ of truth in the idea that such disaffected youth are at least partly the products of miserable, convoluted, including sexually convoluted, home lives; but, coupled with Bannert’s availing himself of every opportunity to strip Thomas and Charly naked and to fix his camera on them in this state, the bug-eyed melodrama inherent in these family situations is too over-the-top to be edifying. Still, if one perseveres and wades through the material, one finds a shaft or two that could illuminate the school killings by U.S. teens in the 1990s and 2000s.

Certainly the hostility that classmates and teachers direct towards Thomas is a familiar element. But there are a number of even more pressing strengths to Bannert’s film. One is the stunning performance given by 15-year-old Nikolas Vogel as Thomas, one of four collaborations between him and the director. At age 24, Vogel was killed as a photojournalist on assignment in the Slovenian War. Since Thomas in the film, by some awful coincidence, is a budding photographer, Die Erben, on this score crashing the barrier between fiction and reality, has peculiarly absorbed the tragedy of Vogel’s fate, adding to the film an element of unending sadness and regret. On such an occasion an actor’s own circumstance becomes part of the film’s extended text. River Phoenix’s tragic outcome two years later has similarly become part of Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991), where the street hustler he plays also uses illegal drugs, and Vladimir Garin’s drowning death shortly after he played 15-year-old Andrei in Andrei Zvyagintsev’s The Return (2003) all the more haunts a film that revolves around the motif of drowning. At times, God seems the most caustic and brutal ironist imaginable.

Another one of the film’s strengths is Bannert’s use of fictional interviews to lend the film notes of compelling reality. The sit-down press interview of a national leader of the neo-Nazi organization—as it were, its political public face denying the group’s neo-Nazism (he exhorts instead family values)—establishes the technique while casting a savvy glance at the disparity between public profession and private agenda. But even more intriguing is the street interview of Thomas, whose outspoken opinions on behalf of the organization, once broadcast, lead to his dropping out of school. Thomas prefers the organization, explaining: “In school only the strong prevail. There is no real comradery.” Bannert uses these simulated interviews as a way of nudging fiction in the direction of documentary. Indeed, the documentary echo that attaches itself to these passages aims for a spillover effect. Bannert hopes it will help validate other scenes in the film as well.

There is an instance of another strategy that aims to stamp a fictional scene as “real.” The film opens with a brutal beating. On a vacant path, a solitary jogger is assaulted by a group of boys and men after he is forced to identify himself in a photograph the others put up into his face. At this point we scarcely know how to respond to what we are being shown. It turns out, we learn later in the film, that this opening is a flashforward. The victim is shown kicking over a placard advertising the neo-Nazi organization and being photographed by Thomas as a means of identifying the man for the sake of future retribution. The street scene is intercut with glimpses of the future assault, during which Thomas’s photograph is revealed to be the operative one and we learn for the first time that Thomas himself is among the thugs. The double presentation of this material—actually, the occurences partially overlap—has the peculiar effect of being self-validating, moving the highly fictional event into the realm of possibility. Moreover, the participation of the photograph—if you will, a faux-document—assists in generating this outcome.

Bannert’s film claims yet another strength—for me, its greatest strength. In the course of the film, it is made clear that the reunification of Germany is one of the goals of such neo-Nazi organizations. In the United States, at least, this reunification of East and West Germany, which came to pass after the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, was widely processed and promoted purely from a bourgeois standpoint, because families would be reunited, and a political one, due to the anti-Communist stance of the U.S. in the Cold War. Voices raised in protest that such a reunification would abet the cause of nostalgic German nationalism, unleashing a new tide of anti-Semitism, weren’t listened to. The fall of the Berlin Wall was widely greeted, in the United States as well as the two Germanies, as a signal event, a cause for celebration. Now we know how dreadfully accurate, though, the warnings against reunification turned out to be. It is beyond calculation the enormous suffering that reunification has wrought, and one would indeed have to be an anti-Semite not to rue that the two Germanies were ever put back together again. While the anti-Semitic license that has swept much of the world in the 1990s and 2000s was overdetermined, that is to say, caused by a number of factors, the contribution made to it by German reunification is incontrovertible. (It reached even Portland, Oregon, where I live, where synagogues were vandalized and violated.) Bannert’s Die Erben, therefore, deserves credit for being the rare prominent movie to ring the alarm in this regard, to place the sought-after event in a truer, prophetic light, and to do so in such a restrained, backdoor, non-hysterical way. The greatest cinematic work about the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jürgen Böttcher’s documentary Die Mauer (The Wall, 1990), would take an entirely different tack, contemplating in the event Germany’s failure to embrace its own history by retaining the monumental artifact, and wondering about the fearsome frenzy that accompanied the dismantling; but looking beyond the fall to what would follow, Bannert’s film, even with its relatively meager artistry and almost nonexistent beauty, is hardly worthless.

Die Erben is mediocre at best, exploitative and nearly sensational; but it has its points. One of these, now, is the reminder it provides that German reunification was one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies.