FIGHTING FATHER DUNNE (Ted Tetzlaff, 1948)

We can’t go back in time, but it probably doesn’t hurt to look back now and then. A perfectly terrible film, Fighting Father Dunne was nevertheless a favorite of mine when I was a boy, and it profoundly affected me. It prompted emotional stirrings that launched the process that culminated in my conviction that capital punishment is wrong, horribly wrong. The state should be helping people, not killing them.
     Like Boys Town (Norman Taurog, 1938), about Father Flanagan, Fighting Father Dunne is about a real parish priest, one who took in newsboys off the street and gave them a home. This was in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1905. (The film has a contemporary narrative frame.) One boy, Matt Davis, shoots and kills a police officer whose approach triggers an image in the boy’s mind of his father coming after him to beat him. Father Dunne fights for the boy’s life, but with Raymond Burr, no less, prosecuting him (a trial run for his 1951 appearance in George Stevens’s A Place in the Sun), the kid doesn’t stand a chance. Matt is put to death.
     The film is lugubrious; my cousin Dale and I wept copiously through one afternoon television viewing of this studio exercise in maudlin melodrama. Our young age made the thing irresistible to us. Watching it again years later, I could only wonder at the shoddiness and the manipulativeness of it all. This is a bad film to go home to.
     The script, from a story by William Rankin, is by Frank Davis and Martin Rackin. The director is Ted Tetzlaff, the cinematographer of George Stevens’s Talk of the Town (1942) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946). Tetzlaff isn’t such a great cinematographer either.
     Pat O’Brien plays the priest. (He also played a priest ten years earlier in Michael Curtiz’s Angels with Dirty Faces.) Darryl Hickman, who had been in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and George Cukor’s Keeper of the Flame (1943), plays Matt. Hickman is the more gifted older brother of Dwayne Hickman, who on TV would be heavenly as the skinny fatherless boy who idolizes his uncle on Love That Bob, and then smarmy and kickable-in-the-ass as a pudgier Dobie Gillis. The latter spawned Matthew Broderick’s worst screen incarnation, even taking into account the scientist in Godzilla (Roland Emmerich, 1998), in a trash teen comedy set in Chicago whose title I’ve blissfully forgotten.

BIRTH (Jonathan Glazer, 2004)

Fine from start to finish, Jonathan Glazer’s Birth is an entrancing film, a mystery of sorts, but only as a springboard or catalyst for a meditative inquiry into the extent to which someone’s profound feelings can help keep her tied to the past. Anna’s husband, Sean, died ten years ago; she has been mourning this loss ever since. Now when she is finally ready to rebegin her life by marrying Joseph, a ten-year-old boy appears, telling her that he is Sean, her dead husband, and that (naturally enough) he does not wish her to marry Joseph. The film’s prologue shows Sean’s death, followed by the current Sean’s birth. And keep in mind that the film is set ten years hence in New York City, where, Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) proved, anything is possible.
     Working from a splendid script by himself, Jean-Claude Carrière (who co-authored Luis Buñuel’s scripts for Belle de Jour, The Milky Way, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty and That Obscure Object of Desire), and Milo Addica, Glazer has wrought an enchanting tangle of suggestions and possibilities, rendered all the spookier by stealthily slow camera movements and exquisite shots of Central Park, some at night, where once upon a time Sean met a fatal heart attack, in a dark tunnel, while jogging in snow-clad winter. Glazer’s collaborator-in-chief is the endlessly gifted Harry Savides, who cinematographed Gus Van Sant’s Gerry (2002) and Elephant (2003).
     Most of the praise the film has garnered has gone to Nicole Kidman, who plays Anna. Her charm, wit and sensitivity (not to mention heartstopping beauty) all suggest that Kidman is the reincarnation of Vivien Leigh. It is especially interesting to watch Anna’s face as a battleground of subtly ambivalent emotions as she initially discounts young Sean’s assertions, all the while wanting to believe them, and gradually comes to accept them, all the while not wanting to. Kidman is the right star for this challenging part.
     However, two performances in the film better hers. Danny Huston, John’s son, is excellent as Joseph, who bears the outrage of young Sean’s intrusion into their lives as long as he can, and Anne Heche is brilliant as Clara, a friend of Anna’s who has a secret not to tell but which provides the key to determining whether the two Seans are in any sense one. Or does it? Beneath the film’s layers of ambiguity lurks a final sting, and we can never quite free ourselves from it.
     Lauren Bacall plays Anna’s no-nonsense mother, who is appalled at the possibility of pedophilia that the situation with young Sean presents her daughter. (As for her deceased son-in-law, Eleanor finally admits, “I never liked Sean.”) I regret to say Bacall is out of her league here and no longer has her legendary beauty to fall back on. Kidman had best take note.

RETURN TO ME (Bonnie Hunt, 2000)

Chicago native Bonnie Hunt generally plays the same part as an actress, herself, and that’s OK with me; Hunt has a fine comic presence, warm, attractive and funny, and more than once she has given the best performance in a bad show. She did just that, for example, in Jerry Maguire (Cameron Crowe, 1996). I have enjoyed Hunt’s TV sitcoms and her numerous Letterman appearances. In addition, there is a film that Hunt co-wrote (with Don Lake) and directed—this was her directorial debut—and acted in, in a supporting role. The star of Return to Me is David Duchovny, vain weatherman Johnny Volcano from Hunt’s TV show Life with Bonnie (2002). It’s a modest film, a feel-good romantic comedy about two lonely, decent souls.

Its launching pad is a woman’s unselfishness. Elizabeth is an organ donor who dies off-screen in (likely) a road accident and whose heart saves the life of Grace. The transplant brings Elizabeth’s widower a measure of Grace. In time, he and Grace date and fall in love with one another. (“Don’t I know you?” Grace asks Bob when they first meet.) Bob has no idea that it is Elizabeth’s heart that is beating inside Grace; Grace has no idea that Bob is the widower whose deceased spouse gave her (twice) this new lease on life.

The premise threatens yukkiness. It isn’t a good sign that the marriage of Elizabeth and Bob Rueland is portrayed as an idyllic partnership, dehumanizingly bereft of reality’s rich colors. This quick sketch of unmodulated bliss is, regrettably, mere setup for Elizabeth’s tragic death. Elizabeth had worked at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, in which capacity she had trained a gorilla in sign language—the language of the heart. It isn’t a good sign, either, that Bob, an architectural engineer, is remaining faithful to his departed beloved by overseeing the construction of the gorilla’s larger quarters that he has designed; it is an even worse sign that the gorilla seems to recognize Grace, as does Elizabeth and Bob’s dog. But the unsentimental tone of the film helps some, tempering these contrivances, and Grace and Bob’s mutual ignorance of the history they share, Elizabeth’s heart, is sufficient to skirt all the creepiness lying like explosive mines in the film’s emotional landscape. It certainly helps that both Bob and Grace are slow and reluctant to come out of their shells, he because of his devotion to the deceased’s memory, she because of her disfiguring surgical scar. Something else weighs on Grace. She is (like Hunt) Roman Catholic. While Pope John Paul II made personal peace with the concept of organ donation and transplantation, the institutional Church has not; it is a topic of continuing debate among Catholic dogmatists. Grace (irrationally) feels that her life has come at the expense of somebody else’s.

The deep fog of mutual ignorance in which Bob and Grace’s embryonic relationship must sensitively grow requires that Bob not know about Grace’s medical past. This also requires that he not see Grace’s chest. This in turn requires that they not have sex. These requirements allow Hunt to fashion an old-fashioned comic romance. Grace’s fear of discovery has nothing to do with Bob’s “finding her out” in relation to Elizabeth; it is restricted to her self-image, which the life-giving surgery has (very lightly now, a year later) mutilated, and her worry that her scar is somehow a mark of Cain. Half Irish-, half-Italian Roman Catholic, Grace is never shown—at least in the trimmed version I saw on ABC television—in church. She is shown instead in the family’s restaurant (O’Reilly’s Italian Restaurant!), where she works as a waitress, and in her own quarters upstairs. The only “priest” who appears throughout is an ex-priest, a blind date for Grace who, unused to his new status, arrives wearing a priest’s collar! Except for the one point of dogmatic difficulty afflicting Grace, Catholicism is portrayed in this film in terms of culture and family atmosphere, not religion. Its embodiment is Grace’s grandfather, who raised Grace from childhood after the early death (from heart disease) of his daughter, Grace’s mother, and her abandonment by her father. (At least I am assuming that he is Grace’s maternal grandfather; I suppose if he is, instead, paternal, that different situation imposed its own burden of guilt.)

It is refreshing to be immersed in all the film’s Catholic aura and banter, for instance, the after-hours debates among Grandfather and his peers, including his brother-in-law cook, as to whether Bing Crosby or Dean Martin is the better crooner—quarrels, the film implies, that are regularly repeated because they can never be objectively resolved. (Some things are beyond dispute: everyone in Grandfather’s group agrees that Ella Fitzgerald is the all-time best female American singer.) When the truth comes out, because Grace reveals it, Grace’s grandfather is the one who helps Bob through this “overwhelming” revelation by explaining that he prayed and prayed for a heart for his granddaughter throughout the ordeal of her grave illness and he knew, if it came, it would be from “a special person.”

Return to Me is highly enjoyable, a celebration of Catholic family, vulnerability, humanity. It may be a bit much that Bob and Grace’s reconciliation takes place in Rome (God will hear better her prayers there, she is told); but only someone without a soul could resist such sweetness and light. Duchovny is effortlessly charming as Bob; beauteous Minnie Driver is luminous as Grace; Hunt, as Grace’s gal pal, does well what she has always done, although her part is a bit too conveniently tolerant and wise for my taste; and, above all, in his final appearance, Carroll O’Connor delights as Grace’s grandfather. O’Connor, TV’s Archie Bunker, doesn’t give a sitcom performance here; rather, he suggests a tested life moving towards a gracious close: the man’s belief that Grace will be blessed in her partnership with Bob. This may prove the final reward of Grace’s grandfather’s constant faith.

CHRONICLE OF ANNA MAGDALENA BACH (Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, 1967)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

A woman recalls how she met the man she married and their sad life together, including the deaths of numerous children and his own illness and death. Her voiceover is our guide into the past, and the images she recovers have a formality that befits the film’s subject. We are listening to the second wife of Johan Sebastian Bach.
     From West Germany and Italy, written and directed by the marital team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach had its funding withdrawn at the last moment, but an angel, Jean-Luc Godard, stepped in and saved the project. Since the film consists mostly of performances of Bach’s music (with Bach—that is, harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt—conducting), some viewers are stymied. Why isn’t there domestic or other melodrama here, as in Hollywood biographical films? In truth, there is sufficient “drama” to illuminate the music’s sublime nature, and Bach’s music was central to his life. By contesting the convention of pushing an artist’s art to the periphery of his existence in portraying his life, Straub and Huillet achieve a measure of truth and purpose. They aren’t interested in “humanizing” Bach by reducing him to a facsimile of ordinary viewers whom they hope will identify with him. They represent Bach’s genius and its musical accomplishment honestly—and effortlessly. In the process, they suggest how this music expressed Bach’s emotions by heroic containment and concealment, and created astonishing rigor and harmonious complexity in the midst of a tragic life. This is no cozy Rhapsody in Blue (1945).
     Godard himself is an influence; Straub and Huillet draw upon his elegiac sensibility. Another influence is Roberto Rossellini’s austere The Rise of Louis XIV (1966), a film about a king that actually shows the monarch’s activities.
     And the music is glorious.

ARTISTS AT THE TOP OF THE BIG TOP: DISORIENTED (Alexander Kluge, 1968)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Germany, Scandinavia, Finland & Austria list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

From the New German Cinema, which addressed contemporary issues and Germany’s right-wing past, the first outstanding West German films emerged. Alexander Kluge’s Yesterday Girl (1966), which I haven’t seen, may have been the first of these. His Artists at the Top of the Big Top: Disoriented would remain among the movement’s most brilliant entries.
     Inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s methods, Kluge’s film is a collage juxtaposing fictional, documentary and pseudodocumentary elements. Its protagonist is Leni Peickert, who runs a political circus. She is the anti-Riefenstahl Leni, whose aim is, through entertainment, to urge Germans to confront the recent past that most Germans would sooner forget. Because this is also Kluge’s aim, the circus-within-the-film and the film enrobing it, a kind of bigger circus tent, combine to direct our attention to a consideration of the political role of art in general. But Kluge is unsettled as to what this role should be. His film weighs possibilities.
     A point of departure is how Germany’s Nazi past influences current art. The past is simply there, so Kluge juxtaposes the circus operation with shots of a Hitler rally. The fact that performers actually die in this circus, as in any other, reflects on the discussion that Leni’s team encounters at a writer’s convention: “Can there be art after Auschwitz?” Kluge’s answer would seem to be: there must be—if for no other reason than to honor the dead. Moreover, by assisting audiences in confronting the past, art provides a therapeutic means of dealing with national trauma.
     The film opens with footage of a Nazi “festival of the arts”—something Riefenstahl might have devised—and, later, achieves its symbolic apotheosis recollecting zoo elephants that died in a fire: the past that “won’t forget” and won’t let us forget, either.