IN THIS OUR LIFE (John Huston, 1942)

After his astounding directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon (1941), John Huston made In This Our Life, based on Ellen Glasgow’s last published novel. (Warner Brothers had bought the rights before the book won Glasgow the Pulitzer Prize.) This is a bizarre film, almost completely melodramatic, and very unlike the fine, burrowing piece that Glasgow opened with a quotation from Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem “Obermann Once More”: “Your creeds are dead, your rites are dead,/ Your social order too!/ Where tarries he, the Power who said:/ See, I make all things new?” The film enters into the novel’s thematic territory essaying the “new” southern social order on just one point; as Huston proudly put it, “It was the first time [in an American film], I believe, that a black character was presented as anything other than a good and faithful servant or comic relief.” The film is momentous for that—really, it’s essential viewing; but the Hollywood production code and a certain amount of pandering to the anticipated preferences of white audiences conspired to dictate much of Howard Koch’s ridiculous adaptation, resulting in a film that scarcely resembles what Glasgow sincerely and intelligently wrote.

The main character of the film is Stanley Timberlake, who runs out on her fiancé, idealistic attorney Craig Fleming, and runs off with and marries her sister Roy’s husband, surgeon Peter Kingsmill, who, guilt-ridden and unappreciated by Stanley, commits suicide. Meanwhile, discovering that misery loves company, Roy and Craig have become an item, giving jealous Stanley, upon her return home, another breakup challenge. One night, Stanley, wild as usual behind the wheel of her car, is involved in a hit-and-run, her victim being a child. Rather than face the legal consequences of her act, she places the blame on a boy in her family’s employ. This African-American youth, Parry Clay, is also a clerk in Craig’s office, steadily working towards becoming a lawyer. Now he is in jail, his prospects canceled, as a result of Stanley’s lie, which Stanley sticks to even when Roy, figuring out what really happened, beseeches her sister to tell the truth. Once the truth comes out, Stanley runs for it and, pursued by the police, dies in an auto wreck.

The production code required Stanley’s death—not because her false statements jail an innocent, decent boy, not even for the hit-and-run, but because she busts up her sister’s marriage and couples with the spoil. At the end of the novel, Stanley is still very much alive—proof of how hard it will be for the New South to overcome the white prerogatives of the Old South. In the film, Roy and Stanley once were close but drifted apart; in the novel, they’ve always been at odds. In the film, the girls’ father, Asa Timberlake, is a kindly weakling; in the novel, he is exceptionally strong, but, in the interests of beefing up the part of the actress playing Roy, much of Asa’s strength has been transferred to Roy. For instance, in the novel it isn’t her sister who tries to pry the truth about the hit-and-run from Stanley, but her father. Much, then, is changed.

Two other differences between the two works, though, are of far more significance than these matters of plot detail. Rather than highstrung, slambang melodrama, the novel is largely disclosed through stream-of-consciousness manifesting the mindset of two families: the Timberlakes and the Clays. (Minerva Clay, Parry’s mother, works as a cook for the Timberlakes.) The other difference is what principally distinguishes the novel and accounts for its Pulitzer Prize: that the white and black families are given equal consideration. To be sure, Glasgow’s attempts to enter African-American minds rarely convince, and, no matter with what race she is dealing, Glasgow is indeed no virtuoso of the technique of stream-of-consciousness; but it’s the political and moral implications merely of her attempt to do this that count most heavily. Unlike, say, Margaret Mitchell’s fatuous and racist Gone with the Wind, which also won a Pulitzer, In This Our Life conveys throughout that the Clays and the Timberlakes are entitled to fair and equal treatment both by readers and by the law. Predictably, the film, however, “stars” the Timberlakes and relegates the Clays to the fringes of the action. Thus it became the ancestor of a long line of entertainments that diminish African-American experience by making it a footnote to the white experience with which these entertainments are preoccupied for the sake of the majority white audience they are attempting to corral.

Glasgow herself was incensed by the film. Nor was Bette Davis, who plays Stanley, any happier with it. Although Davis may have felt that the movie fell short of the book, the disapproval she voiced over the years was on four other grounds. One, during the shoot, Huston and her co-star, Olivia de Havilland, were romantically involved, and Davis felt that his filmmaking favored de Havilland. To offset this imbalance, Davis elected to portray Stanley in a showy way, generating startling electricity that nevertheless couldn’t keep the film from principally belonging to de Havilland, whose every nuance, as usual, is laboriously crafted and projected—an icky kind of loud, spectacular restraint. (De Havilland infected acting with streeptococcus long before there ever was a Meryl Streep onscreen.) In any case, Davis ended up feeling that the preferential treatment that de Havilland received prompted her, Davis, to push her own performance overboard, just to be noticed. (Whatever else, there’s no missing Davis.) Davis’s third objection derived from a directorial instruction that Huston insisted that Davis heed, to wit, that she should play the lying, manipulative Stanley as though Stanley were telling the truth, for instance, about the hit-and-run. Huston’s motive is clear; he wanted audiences to “see” Stanley’s lies as members of her race-rationalizing white community would—as “the truth,” because in a dispute between white and black, white must always prevail. Frankly, I think that Huston’s odd instruction constitutes brilliant direction, but Davis chafed under it for two reasons. One, in William Wyler’s The Letter (1940), she had perfected the technique of having a character lie so that the audience would know that she is lying while, at the same time, other characters in the film would believably believe her. She therefore wanted to show off again this ability of hers. Her other reason for objecting is more important, though, because unself-centered. Davis felt that, if she played Stanley’s lies as though they were truths, many audience members would not “get” that Stanley is a liar; even though the film shows the hit-and-run, they would believe Stanley. (I can validate Davis’s concern in the case regarding at least one audience member, an aunt of mine, who wouldn’t budge from her position that Parry was responsible for running down the child.) Indeed, Davis’s wish to counteract this wrong impression also contributed to her pushing the role a bit over the top. These were all but one of the reasons why Davis hated the film and her performance in it.

The remaining reason perhaps trumped the others. Davis’s exaggerated Stanley inspired impressionists—live performance artists who caricature celebrities—to “do” Davis as part of their routine. The impressionist would pop (usually) his eyes, rub the back of his neck, pretend with wide, circular hand and arm gestures to smoke a real or imaginary cigarette and shout, “Peter! I want to have fun, fun, fun!” Stanley never utters such a line in the film, any more than Charles Boyer, in Algiers (John Cromwell, 1938), ever says, “Come with me to the Casbah,” or anyone says “Play it again, Sam” in Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942). But the line encapsulates both Stanley’s selfishness and lust for life, and the “Peter” further identifies the source as In This Our Life. The film was a hit, and these impressionists, hardly flattering Davis sincerely or otherwise, modeled their Davis bit on a role and performance she detested. Thus she remained haunted by the performance she once gave, and thus her detestation grew and grew.

It’s a good performance—a far better one, in fact, than the one for which she was Oscar nominated that year instead: Charlotte Vance, in the inflated, staggeringly silly soap opera Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper), which came out closer to year’s end and was a bigger hit. Davis vividly conveys Stanley’s semi-conscious sense of white entitlement. In Davis’s best moments, Stanley’s brutal sociopolitical hand is encased in a silken glove.

Much of the rest of the cast is fine: George Brent as Craig, Frank Craven as financially strapped Asa, Billie Burke as Asa’s neurotic wife, Lavinia, and Charles Coburn as rich, dying William Fitzroy, whose incestuous feelings for his niece Stanley, which Stanley slyly manipulates, apparently didn’t faze the censors one bit. (One wonders whether playwright Tennessee Williams found in Fitzroy a rough sketch for his Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.) Others in the cast, though, are even better: Dennis Morgan gives the performance of his career as the moral weakling Peter Kingsmill, who loves not wisely but too well; although her part isn’t a patch on the richer, bigger one in the book, Hattie McDaniel is poignant as Minerva Clay; and, above all, young Ernest Anderson is superb as Minerva’s earnest, hardworking son, Parry, who wants to become a lawyer in order to defend other African Americans and help tip white justice, since it isn’t color blind, in the direction of fairness. This terrific role won Anderson a year-end accolade from the National Board of Review (the organization also cited Coburn and McDaniel), after which he faded into obscurity, whether because of war service, the blacklist—whatever; I can’t say. A factor in his disappearance may be his looks: short and homely, Anderson couldn’t compete with the big, muscular, glamorous likes of James Edwards and Sidney Poitier for the few roles that early postwar Hollywood afforded blacks. (Anderson has a walk-on, as a train porter, in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 North by Northwest.) Regardless, he is great.

Ernest Anderson as Parry Clay in John Huston’s In This Our Life: see this performance.

UNDERWORLD (Josef von Sternberg, 1927)

A powerful melodrama of primitive emotions, Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld evokes a world within the world, in this case, the urban American gangster underworld—a domain in defiance of the rule of law, seeking protection from the mortality that it identifies with the outer world, the ground world, but recklessly pursuing a course that invites mortal blows from within and without, like a soul so terrified by the specter of death that he or she ends by committing suicide. A gangster opens a secret door to show “the perfect getaway” from the gang’s warehouse to the next block, other doors along the way suggesting a cocooned world and the dangers, the risks, lying in wait outside. In effect, the “getaway” is an attempt to master fear of those dangers and risks, taken together, death, to assert at least the illusion of invincibility. In this sense, then, these criminals, speaking to our own fears, represent us.

Sternberg’s silent Underworld is the film that launched the cycle of Hollywood gangster films that accumulated (not evolved) into both an investigation of the American psyche during the Depression and an interesting leftist social critique. Moreover, as surely as Sternberg’s film drew on expressionistic German films of the 1920s (its dark human shadows seem to have a macabre life of their own), it also inspired and helped shape the most important movement in French cinema until the nouvelle vague in the fifties, the school of poetic realism identified with scenarist Jacques Prévert and filmmaker Marcel Carné. Underworld shimmers with haunting anticipations of the pair’s two outstanding collaborations of the thirties, Quai des brûmes (Port of Shadows, 1938) and Le jour se lève (1939). It’s a commonplace that American films imitate European films. Underworld shifted the direction of influence.

The story is simple and basic, but with a twist. Fatalistic Rolls Royce, a dissolute, alcoholic former lawyer taken into a gang by its leader, Bull Weed, falls in love with the latter’s girlfriend, Feathers McCoy, who reciprocates; but neither, out of decency and loyalty, will betray Weed, who in effect rescued each from the gutter. When a rival gang boss tries to rape Feathers, Bull kills him in the act, and the state condemns him for doing this. However, the judge’s speech before passing sentence makes plain that this (really, justifiable) crime is only the pretext for Bull’s death sentence, which the state is opportunistically imposing for the defiance of its laws that Bull represents. During the judge’s speech, shame for the first time settles into Weed’s face: this, the price for having been pulled out of his underworld, where he was king, and into this other world of respectability and order. A jail (why not prison?) escape is planned for the day of execution, but Bull wants only to die if first he can kill Rolls Royce, who he wrongly heard has taken Feathers as his own. Having escaped jail on his own, at the last, he sees how deeply Feathers and Rolls Royce are in love with each other, and he surrenders to the police. The twist is in fact a double-twist: unmarked by possessiveness, the idea that a woman is a man’s property, the tender love he sees in the couple shatters his grip on the possessive form of love to which he had subjected Feathers; the only reason he can now appreciate the difference derives from the collision of the underground and ground—inner and outer—worlds that has utterly transformed him. Bull Weed had always been generous and sentimental, like a child barely able to contain his oversized emotions; now his good impulses, freshly disciplined, can effect a clean, clear sacrificial act.

The story, brilliant, won Ben Hecht an Oscar; Jules’s brother Charles Furthman adapted it, and Robert N. Lee completed the script. (Howard Hawks, who contributed to the script, five years hence directed what remains the finest Hollywood gangster film of the sound era, Scarface.) But the lion’s share of credit for the film’s grave beauty and moving humanity belongs to Sternberg himself, a Viennese-born Jew whose eye here seems attached to his heart. (Whatever their many virtues, this would not be the case with the famous series of films Sternberg made in the Thirties with actress Marlene Dietrich.) It isn’t the generic originality that is most striking; after all, what is the gangster film but a contemporary urban western? Rather, his principal achievement lies in how perfectly realized Underworld visually is.

Perhaps it is Sternberg’s own background of poverty—his family, which emigrated from Austria when he was eight, struggled in New York tenements—that brings such conviction to the tawdry settings, like the Dreamland Café, where the characters of Underworld play out their makeshift lives, which none of the loot they steal seems capable of elevating. It’s a world of much bravado but no real happiness. It is a world, as I have said, shadowed by death to the same extent that it attempts to block out death—in this, like the high-born world of Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” Clocks establish the mortal pressure and presence. The film opens with an enormous clock; superimposed on the action, it sets the time at two in the morning: the 2 a.m. of criminals at work and of all lost souls, ever on the move and sleepless. (Although characters are shown passed out, no one is shown sleeping in this film—except for “the big sleep.”) Later, a jewelry store owner is shot to death during a daytime robbery as he attends to a clock in his shop. The moment is piercingly ironic. The man is gunned down from beyond the frame; the invisible phantom is Weed, out to steal a bauble for Feathers. Time has run out for the shopowner; but the headlong shot (with Weed excluded) is framed to make the victim appear as his assailant’s reflection, for time is also running out for Bull Weed.

Perhaps the film’s most captivating imagery derives from the mass of feathers in which McCoy is perpetually garbed, giving her her nickname. (This is a film of nicknames, not real names—symbolically, the cloaking of one’s identity yet another attempt to elude death and the fear of death.) It isn’t the gaudy feathers so much as their slight molting throughout the film that is expressive, for this shimmering loss marks the transience of human life. A feather floating downward in space is in fact our introduction to Feathers McCoy, whose youthful sensuality, tarnished and endangered by her surroundings, comes to embody human vulnerability—a point the attempted rape punctuates. This image of a feather’s descent anticipates Robert Bresson’s equally extraordinary one of an unhappy young woman’s suicide in Une femme douce (1968), from Dostoievski: nothing but her lagging shawl floating downwards to her body, the human drop itself beyond camera range.

Underworld is beautifully acted, with all three stars—Clive Brook as Rolls Royce (called so for his silence—his unwillingness to “squeal” and betray), Evelyn Brent as Feathers, and George Bancroft as Bull Weed—giving their finest performances.

Bert Glennon, whose credits include John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), again with Bancroft, and Young Mr. Lincoln, is the cinematographer. The soft-focus blur of the shadowy world he helps Sternberg to conjure contributes to the worn quality, the feeling of frailty, that pervades Sternberg’s silent masterpiece.

VISIONS OF LIGHT (Arnold Glassman, Todd McCarthy, Stuart Samuels, 1993); HOOP DREAMS (Steve James, 1994)

Two American documentaries, Visions of Light: The Art of Cinematography and Hoop Dreams, have been highly praised by reviewers—not critics, who analyze or contextualize films, but, steeped in consumerism, those journalists who promote or discourage patronage of this film or that. Neither of the documentaries possesses merit, but both are the sort of pabulum to please the palates of these faux critics.

A That’s Entertainment-sort of compilation, Visions brims with classy, mostly black-and-white quotations that are constantly being interrupted by a coterie of cinematographers pontificating on the importance of their craft. The result is an unbalanced view of the contribution that these technicians make. The ones interviewed here seem to feel that, because film is primarily a visual medium, and the cinematographer is mainly responsible for the technical rendering of its visual aspect, it then follows that the cinematographer is a kind of co-director. But the second premise is false. Unless the cinematographer is compensating for an unknowledgeable or insufficiently confident filmmaker, it is the filmmaker, not the cinematographer, who (sometimes following visual cues detailed in the script) devises the mise-en-scène, decides issues of camera placement and movement, plans the “look” of individual shots as well as the film’s overall “look” and, by overseeing (when not executing) the editing, helps determine the flow of images—in short, creates or, at least, orchestrates a film’s most vital visual elements, all with the purpose of expressing his or her ideas, emotions, temperament, attitude, view. Cinematographers provide the technical means for realizing what already exists in the filmmaker’s mind’s eye. To be sure, this presumes a visionary filmmaker, an artist not a hack; too often, especially in Hollywood, the practical reality falls short, requiring a loose collaboration to negotiate (often at a distant bank’s ultimate behest) what appears on screen. Still, contrary to the impression that Visions of Light is content to make, it is the filmmaker who rightfully supplies the what and why, the cinematographer the indispensable how. For instance, when told by the filmmaker how a particular shot should look, the cinematographer selects the appropriate lensing that may best achieve that “look.”

We readily understand, though, the falsehoods most of the interviewees promote in this ridiculous film. Exaggerating one’s own contribution is a rhetorical strategy for staking claim to some recognition; but what distortions this self-serving tack generates. Discussing the work of black-and-white cinematographer Gregg Toland in John Ford’s majesterial, poetic The Long Voyage Home (1940), for instance, one interviewee notes figures and objects that appear to emanate their own dispersions of light. But to what purpose does this effect occur? Addressing only the resultant beauty, Visions doesn’t say. How indeed could it, since the purpose, consciously or otherwise, resides with the artist, that is to say, the filmmaker, Ford, not with his director of cinematography. As it happens, Toland’s work prior to his working with Ford shows nothing of the same visual effect; on the other hand, similar manifestations of expressionistic dispersions of light in darkness appear earlier in Ford—for instance, in The Informer (1935; Joseph H. August, cinematographer), and in The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936) and Stagecoach (1939; Bert Glennon, cinematographer). True, Toland conjures much the same effect in Citizen Kane (1941); but this comes after his Voyage with Ford—and for Orson Welles, who himself credited multiple viewings of Stagecoach as his principal preparation for Kane. The point is this: Visions diverts credit from the artist to one of his technicians. The praised effect, in addition to others, Ford uses, in The Long Voyage Home and elsewhere, for a purpose, his purpose being, to imbue certain images with a dual sense of time, heightening the present into the realm of haunted myth by some visual “echo” of either individual memory or group history. Ford’s cinema—like Eugene O’Neill’s plays (The Long Voyage Home being based on four of them)—shimmers with ghosts; its emanations of diffuse light in darkness—shadows of light, really—evoke the imaginative junction of present and past, substance and memory, fact and legend, separate lives and, if you will, the “still, sad music of humanity.” The lighting effect thus contributes to a philosophic and emotional richness, a meaning and an elegiac tone that derive from the way Ford, not Toland, relates to time and experience. The very title Visions of Light therefore obscures just whose “visions” the documentary should be talking about.

Against the heft of its pleading and distortion, however, the film manages to cover its backside by retaining a smattering of eminently sane remarks. Ernest Dickerson proclaims, “Cinematography is the direction of light.” Exactly. Not thought, not meaning, not artistic intent. If only the film had used this succinct utterance as its springboard and organizing idea. Plainly, Dickerson is not deluded into thinking he is Spike Lee; nor, were he alive, would Toland be declaring himself John Ford. Visions should have kept itself accurate and honest, for what a great cinematographer does is extraordinary enough.

Visions, then, is a bad film; Hoop Dreams, however, is far worse—so hollow and formless a mess, in fact, that it could use an agenda such as Visions has.

Over a five-year span, Steve James kept his running camera close to two Chicago inner-city boys, Arthur Agee and William Gates, and their families and associates. Both children, poor, are rotten with greed; their pursuit of loot, validation and a sense of importance might have made for a film on the order of one of the two or three greatest American novels of the twentieth century, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (which, incidentally, had already inspired an African-American recasting, Richard Wright’s Native Son). But that would have required a purpose in James’s mind, or in the minds of his two collaborators, Frederick Marx and Peter Gilbert. The loathsome experience of watching Hoop Dreams, however, establishes that there was nothing in any of their minds.

The two boys in Hoop Dreams dream of becoming professional basketball players. Beyond loving the game, they covet wealth and celebrity, that is to say, power. Their “hoop dreams” disclose a near dementia that the culture accommodates, even encourages. The narrowness of their perceived range of possibilities comes from many sources: American racism, which imposes on these boys and their activities an actual and largely unbending limit; the unfocused or lazy parenting the boys have been given; the boys’ own arrogant (and terrifying) hostility to learning and to intellectual growth; the lack of successful role models in their midst and, related to this, the refusal of many African Americans with all sorts of successful careers to risk opening their own racial wounds to enter the boys’ lower-class domain and lend them encouragement and guidance. But James is disinclined to consider any of this. He considers nothing, in fact. Instead, he insists on being an uncritical observer, someone who watches above the fray without trying to comprehend any part of what he sees. (Even at the cutting stage he found no idea to his liking relative to the material he had shot.) Incredibly, James is so complacent that even the heartrending circumstance of the countless children that his two subjects exemplify—kids chasing after a dream that only a very, very few of them can attain—misses his consciousness by a continent. His material, potentially rich, cries out for some sort of sociological interpretation; but James and his cohorts have none to give. Instead, they have arbitrarily pasted together nearly three hours of this vast raw material of theirs, without even expending the thought or care necessary to devise some sort of strategy, some governing principle, for transitioning back and forth between the two families. As a result, the film is as clumsy as it is empty and pointless.

James and his Inken and Blinken want their material to speak for itself. That’s a heck of a lot easier than shaping their material so that it means something. Nor can James be defended as being reluctant to generalize on the basis of two individuals and their families. That’s silly. He is, after all, free to draw insights from other relevant sources; and, in any case, if he really believed that his two subjects share no points of commonality with other children in their own and in other neighborhoods, why did he embark on this project in the first place? (To get his face on Charlie Rose?) No; no generalization is an outrageous way to correct for (possible) overgeneralization. James’s failure to engage his material in a thoughtful, coherent way has only resulted in aimless, formless footage.

Consider one example of this failure. The father of one of the boys leaves home, only to return once he is brought back into the fold of the community church. James resists any and all inquiry into the church’s role in inner-city communities. It might have been otherwise. In interpreting this role, James might have stressed the sense of stability and continuity that the church provides to those communities beseiged by racism from without and disrupted from within by family breakdown. Or, because such “breakdown” usually involves (as it does here) the flight of fathers, James might have stressed the church’s (perhaps preemptive) tendency, when they have not abandoned their homes, to replace the authority of black men with its own authority, thereby helping to create the situation that, in conjunction with the sparse opportunities inner-city black men find to support their families (which the relatively wider work and social acceptance of black women further exacerbates), engenders African-American male anger, shame and despondency, all of which, in turn, precipitate more instances of male flight. In a context such as this, the boy’s father’s return in Hoop Dreams may be a sorely equivocal event, one encapsulating humiliation and presaging defeat. But the interpretations I have just given are but two of countless possibilities, and James might have perceived of the church’s role in some way neither I nor you can yet imagine. Instead, he offers no interpretation, no perspective, no analysis.

Why then the reviewers’ acclaim for so vacant a film? The Schindler’s List-syndrome has yet again jerked willing knees; this time, instead of Holocaust survivors, there are urban black kids struggling to succeed. Such a setup or premise, regardless of what is (or isn’t) made of it, impels some people to find merit even if (as here, as in Schindler’s List) none exists. I will go farther: the very fact that something like Hoop Dreams has nothing to say, nothing to show, nothing to reveal encourages a certain naïve form of filmgoer to read into it whatever he or she wants, allowing the person to rave a film which in fact doesn’t even exist. I am white; I surely appreciate the reluctance of a white person, like James, to tread critically through a black urban domain. He scores no points, though, for shirking his job; the responsibility of an artist is the responsibility of an artist. Hoop Dreams is wholly irresponsible. And what greater proof of its dismal impersonality can there be than the fact that those who profess to liking it rarely, if ever, mention the filmmaker or even remember his name?

FACING WINDOWS (Ferzan Ozpotek, 2003)

The dumbest movie in a decade having anything to do with the Holocaust, La finestra di fronte, punningly mistranslated in the States as Facing Windows, is a soap operatic confection with a ghastly footnote attached to it. In the film, Massimo Girotti, whom we remember as the sturdy star of Luchino Visconti’s 1942 Ossessione, plays a Jewish Holocaust survivor named Davide Veroli. Girotti died shortly after completing his role in this film, which as a result is dedicated to his memory. Instead of seeing this piece of crap, people would do better to (re)visit Ossessione.
     Giovanna and Filippo are a none-too-happily married couple who rescue the elderly, senile Davide from the streets and bring him into their home. The only thing that Davide can recall is the name Simone, but we soon learn that this isn’t his name but that of his homosexual lover during the war, a Resistance fighter who dedicated his efforts to saving Roman Jews. Meanwhile, Filippo is out of work, and Giovanna works as a secretary in a chicken slaughterhouse. Giovanna is also engaged in a flirtation with the young lawyer who lives across the way. His is the window opposite hers. Davide’s plight brings these neighbors together in a common cause.
     The plot takes a long time to unravel, but it’s of little consequence. The homoerotic flashbacks are smarmy and self-indulgent, and the Holocaust angle turns out to be window dressing. Indeed, the whole film is window dressing. It’s a silly and fatuous piece of work, ending Girotti’s long career on a depressing note.
     The authors of the endlessly contrived screenplay are Ferzan Ozpetek, who directed, and Gianni Romoli, who doubtless helped the Turk with his Italian. Together, they came up with a howler of a mystic connection over time. Simone, we learn, was a pastry chef. At the end of the film, Giovanna sets out to become a pastry chef herself. Isn’t life nutty?
     The current revival of anti-Semitism in Europe is being answered with a good many intelligent and probing films on the subject. Facing Windows isn’t one of them.
     Who could like this film? Well, it won the David di Donatello Award as best film, Ozpotek was named best director at Karlovy Vary, and he and Romoli were honored by the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists for their script.
     In addition, Giovanna Mezzogiorno, who plays Giovanna, won several best actress prizes, and Girotti won the David di Donatello Award as best actor. Girotti does give a discreet, disciplined performance.

DESERT WINDS (Michael A. Nickles, 1994)

There exist small films—even tiny ones—off the beaten path that merit notice for their small gifts and modest pleasures—works light years beyond inflated, empty things like Dances With Wolves (1990), Schindler’s List (1993), Titanic (1997). One of these is Desert Winds (1994; released 1995), written and directed by and starring Michael A. Nickles. Made on a quarter shoestring, it took the best film prize at the Phoenix International Film Festival.

Those who wouldn’t be caught dead at a Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) need not apply. For Nickles, a bit younger than even Peter Weir was when he made his achingly spiritual young man’s film, has fashioned one of those romances that won’t admit solution but warmly/chillingly tantalize with their mysterious possibilities out of time. To be sure, the American Nickles, not as savvy as the Australian Weir, fails to investigate issues of class and sexual repression; the boy from Syracuse hasn’t the depth of mind (or spirit) that the boy from Sydney had. Nickles, in fact, hardly does more than create a mood and investigate an instance of human intimacy correlating to (and populating) that mood. But that proves enough to generate sufficient charm to sustain his slight and lovely film.

The setting—and it’s an awesome one, gorgeously lensed by Denis Maloney—is the American Southwest. (Maloney has since cinematographed Rod Lurie’s The Contender, 2000.) A thirteen-year-old girl named Jackie lives in a nearly lost desert town in New Mexico; it’s a shifting place of motel transients passing through like the wind. Jackie’s mother takes in laundry, which Jackie, on her bicycle, picks up and delivers after school. One flat, ordinary day, on her way home from a motel customer, something inexplicable begins to happen to her; out of the pocket of an item of clothing Jackie is transporting a watch slips out unnoticed, opening up to her a pathway of timelessness. That evening, alone at the very edge of town beneath a spectacular moon, Jackie discovers a wind tunnel through which she briefly converses, before their connection is lost, with a nineteen-year-old boy named Eugene, who lives in Arizona. (If the Native American legend to which the film refers even exists, the film fails to identify its tribal source; a friend of mine says “Navajo.”) That very night the boy will be leaving home, to put behind him a father too full of dreams. Eugene will sink into despair and degradation in a Philadelphia akin to Gus Van Sant’s Portland, Oregon, in My Own Private Idaho (1991) while Jackie, unaware he has left, haunts the spot of their communion in search of another friendly gust. Seven years later, Eugene comes home for his father’s otherwise unnoted burial. Now Jackie is leaving home, to get away from a stepfather whose “step” has grown a bit too familiar. She and Eugene rediscover one another at night in their wind tunnel. They make love out of time, out of space. Her dreams shattered long ago, Jackie is certain that she and Eugene will never meet in reality. (What on earth does a twenty-year-old not know?) The next day Eugene collects his father’s legacy—a laundry sack of scavenged items. The contents include a pocket watch; another such watch—or is it the same one?—appears at his feet. A car drives by. Eugene looks at it, transfixed. Jackie is in the driver’s seat; the engine is destiny. Will the car stop? After one of the most suspenseful shots in all of cinema, the film ends exactly as it should; sentimentalists, I suppose, will disagree.

Nickles’ theme is human intimacy and the mystery inherent in that intimacy. Bottom line: Nickles enjoys sex. To express these matters may not qualify as much of a purpose, not much of a motive for creating art; but Nickles ’scapes harsh justice by remaining true to the (severe) limits of his experience. (Only the scenes in Philadelphia—Nickles’ one foray into reality—ring false; they derive from other movies, not from experience recollected in tranquility.) Moreover, Nickles employs the same techniques, to convey the intimate connection that the wind tunnel affords the two young “lovers,” over and over. One is the perfectly natural, unstrained sound of their voices—a sound that the wind facilitates but with which it in no way competes. The effect, a paradox, is this: whispers whose volume is in fact at the level of normal, close conversation. Nickles’ concept of the sound demonstrates his perfect pitch; his sound engineer did the rest. Together, they (with the help of the actors) have made a delightfully quiet film. The other technique is visual; it’s a pattern of editing. There will be a cut from one of the lovers to a beautiful landscape and skyscape; but the continuity of the shot reverses our expectation, placing the other person in proximity to this scene, thus creating the illusion that, despite the distance between them, Jackie and Eugene share the same space. Such is the engaging quality of Desert Winds that I found myself falling for this ruse—for, let’s be honest, that’s what it is—again and again.

In summary, Nickles totes an exceedingly small bag of tricks that is nevertheless adequate for a resonant rendering of the intimacy he wishes to convey. While watching this pleasant film, again and again I was transported to the mood of Wordsworth’s admonition when in a walking tour of the Scottish countryside he came upon the “solitary reaper,” a farm girl singing while working in a field: “Stop here, or gently pass!” When the two young people are commun(icat)ing, one happily holds one’s breath a little not to intrude on them lest their magical encounter instantly dissolve. It’s that kind of film—fragile; delicious.

A decisive contributor to the film’s success is the luminous performance that Heather Graham gives as the 20-year-old Jackie. Somehow this splendid actress (and beautiful young woman) has found a way to be lyrical and totally natural at the same time. I have never seen a bad Graham performance (I am told that everyone is bad in something called Lost in Space), but here she performs with her own kind of perfect pitch and she is extraordinary. Grace Zabriskie is, briefly, superb as Jackie’s mother, whom we catch in an exquisitely painful moment of letting go her only offspring. Nickles, who may have cast himself for budgetary reasons, plays Eugene. His acting—although acting is what chiefly maintains his career—isn’t on the same high level as Graham’s and Zabriskie’s. His untidy rebel, however likeable, is a cliché.

But he has made a good little film.