DR. EHRLICH’S MAGIC BULLET (William Dieterle, 1940)

In the 1930s a popular series of films dealt in an intelligent way with notable figures from the past—scientists, writers, political leaders. Three of the Warner Brothers films, all directed by German-born William Dieterle, starred perhaps the most gifted American film actor of his day, Paul Muni, who was born in Austria and who began his American stage career in the Yiddish theater. The first of the films, a splendidly sober, concentrated The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), won Oscars for Muni’s performance and for the writing of Pierre Collings and Sheridan Gibney. (The pair, in fact, won two Oscars apiece: one for the story, one for the script.) The second, though a tad more diffuse, was polished and stirring: The Life of Emile Zola (1937), which won Oscars for the film (best picture), the writers, Heinz Herald, Geza Herczeg and Norman Reilly Raine, and best supporting actor Joseph Schildkraut, tremendous as Alfred Dreyfus. (Schildkraut was also honored by the National Board of Review; Muni was named best actor by the New York critics.) Completing the trio was an inferior spectacle, despite John Huston’s contribution to the script: Juárez (1939), which nevertheless contains massively brilliant work by Muni as Benito Juárez.

But then Muni left the studio in order to freelance. This sank his career, which took a back seat, anyhow, to his activities on behalf of the American war effort. (In the ’50s Muni triumphed on Broadway in the Clarence Darrow part in Inherit the Wind.) It thus fell to Edward G. Robinson to pick up in the Warners series where Muni had left off. Although Robinson is a good actor rather than, like Muni, a great one, the first result is a fine film, a biography of Paul Ehrlich, the Nobel Prize-winning German scientist who pioneered research of chemical antibodies to combat communicable diseases such as syphilis—a word uttered here for the first time in an American film. (Six years earlier, the degeneration and death of even W. Somerset Maugham’s most famous character, Mildred Rogers, in John Cromwell’s fine adaptation of Of Human Bondage was attributed instead to tuberculosis, giving young Bette Davis the heartrending line that helped make her a star: “It’s m’ lungs, Philip, isn’t it?”)

Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet is an engrossing, somber, humane account, then, of the stubborn, sometimes ungracious man who discovered a cure for diptheria as well as developed a drug for the treatment of syphilis. Focusing on his dedication and hard work, the film covers the range of Ehrlich’s long career—and without subsidiary romance, domestic comic relief, or the sort of breathless exultation that would attend scientific breakthrough in Mervyn LeRoy’s glossy Madame Curie (1943). Here, as with his Pasteur, Dieterle simply refused to condescend to his audience; he cared too deeply about giving an authentic sense of his subject. Nor is his film narrowly academic; for it discloses the shortsightedness of the hospital administration—the medical establishment—with which Ehrlich (like Pasteur) had daily to contend, the slippery politics involved in procuring research funding, and the mania for Teutonic “purity” that likewise opposed Ehrlich, who was Jewish—in 1940, an issue of great, and growing, relevance.

Above all, Dieterle marshaled for the occasion good filmmaking. For example, the film’s most remarkable passage quietly evolves, with a subjective camera matching the perspective of one of Ehrlich’s syphilis patients and recording the man’s gradually restored sight under Ehrlich’s care. The whole finely edited sequence astonishes, reminding how seldom experimental techniques enter(ed) Hollywood films, no less in as thoughtful, rather than emptily ostentatious, a way as here. Moreover, at the libel trial—shades of Zola!—where Ehrlich seeks to prove the value of one of his discoveries, Dieterle’s camera, in a single startling forward tracking shot, follows into court an elderly Dr. Emil von Behring (Otto Kruger, in the role of his career), once Ehrlich’s professional champion, then his adversary, now again his champion, subtly evoking, by purely visual means, the foolish pride with which Ehrlich had long ago “turned his back” on this loyal friend, and in a gravely mysterious way evoking, too, the old age that now shadows them both. From such expressive use of the camera one could hardly imagine that Dieterle was en route to making enormously popular soap operas replete with swelling, sentimental music, and with visuals aimed at dazzling the eye rather than developing valuable material.

Noble and humanistic, Magic Bullet also benefits from the following: a superior script by Huston, Herald and Norman Burnside; subdued black-and-white lensing by James Wong Howe; Robinson’s acting, which renders Ehrlich sympathetic without idealizing or sentimentalizing him; Warren Low’s sensitive editing; and an unusually tactful Max Steiner score. The high level of everyone’s contribution is proof of how significant the film’s makers deemed the project. It is also a reminder of how highly collaborative Hollywood filmmaking was and remains.

Dieterle’s next good film, blending German expressionism, Hawthornian legend, and gorgeous Americana, would be the historical fantasy All That Money Can Buy (1941)—Stephen Vincent Benét’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” with Walter Huston, the old devil, hilarious as “Mr. Scratch.” The commercial and artistic failure of Tennessee Johnson (1942), which focuses on President Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial, found Dieterle withdrawing into fanciful romantic melodramas. But hasn’t the recent impeachment of another U.S. president made the Johnson film worth a second look?

WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (Mike Nichols, 1966)

Some great films have come from stage plays, including, from Kaj Munk, Carl-Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1954), perhaps the greatest film ever. But American films based on plays haven’t been so fortunate. In particular, nearly all American films taken from sophisticated dramas have stripped down the original to the lowest level of reference. Typical in this regard is stage director and (with partner Elaine May) stand-up comic Mike Nichols’ maiden effort as a filmmaker, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which author Edward Albee’s main characters, George and Martha (as in Washington), no longer prophesy by their bankrupt marriage America’s sensible and moral decline and, more generally, the decline of Western civilization; nor does the film pay notice to the theme, at the play’s heart, that in the highly advanced society which this couple represents the idea of God maintains only a fragile face of hope while in fact undermining by its medieval irrelevance the human content underneath. This and other import removed, the film barely resembles the play despite retaining most of the text. For George and Martha no longer function as metaphor; now they are only an unhappily married couple. Although, as time has shown, even the play barely tapped Albee’s brilliant talent, scenarist Ernest Lehman and director Nichols have betrayed it utterly with their hollow, simplistic adaptation.

If the original ideas are absent, though, Nichols can nevertheless lay claim to having made a sad and gripping film about a rotten marriage. It in fact remains his best film in a dismal career. We may deduce, therefore, that its relative strength owes far less to him than it does to the exceptional Oscar-winning black-and-white cinematography by Haskell Wexler and the agile, sensitive cutting by Sam O’Steen. Who knows what level of orchestration Nichols provided; perhaps he merits some credit for the film’s highest accomplishment, the worn, faded “look” that at first hordes and then later lets loose a store of sorrow. But, again, much of the credit, if not all, must go to Wexler.

Credit also must go to the principal actors. Although he is preposterously miscast and, more a theatrical exhibitionist than an actor, misinterprets his role by a wide margin, in particular by so far failing to come to grips with George’s crippling sense of failure that he appears to be evading the issue altogether, Richard Burton nonetheless gives the performance of his career. Even as he misses George’s character almost completely, Burton rivets our attention. Elizabeth Taylor, on the other hand, correctly interprets the role of Martha from the get-go; but, lacking Burton’s technical facility, her often magnificent portrait wobbles—until, that is, the scene of Martha’s lament for her nonexistent child the illusion of which George takes it upon himself to destroy, whereupon the actress earns her second Oscar with a peerlessly searching depth of humanity. Rarely if ever, has grief over the loss of a child been taken this profoundly to its ontological root, the human place where, with the loss, one finds one’s whole world and sense of self canceled, vanished. No wonder Taylor also drew prizes from the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle.

It is amusing to consider that Nichols and Burton were given such credit at the time for pulling Taylor up to this level of performance; one wonders why neither could do the same for himself. (For the record, though, Taylor would surpass her work here two years hence in Joseph Losey’s Secret Ceremony, and in between, opposite Burton, proved a fine Kate in Franco Zeffirelli’s one decent Shakespeare film, The Taming of the Shrew.)

George Segal and Sandy Dennis—she also won an Oscar—play Nick and Honey. They are perfectly adequate, even though Dennis has a tendency to go over the top. But to judge by a recording of the original production, we may have to admit that only Burton betters his stage counterpart, the Canadian actor Arthur Hill. Uta Hagen, George Grizzard and Melinda Dillon, the other original cast members, sound terrific.

BOY OF BAGHDAD (Saba Al-Moswi, 2004)

The premise is inviting. In postwar Baghdad a 12-year-old boy has had to drop out of school and struggles daily to help keep his impoverished family afloat. However, this bare-bones documentary, available on both VHS and DVD, shows us precisely what we already know. Kheer Allah, the boy, is charming and plucky, and the postscript informing us that he and his family were evicted from their home two weeks after Saba Al-Moswi’s digital camera stopped shooting comes as a considerable blow. But producer-director-cinematographer Al-Moswi has come up with nothing more than a slight anecdote, not a work even remotely approaching the gripping and devastating quality of Roberto Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero (1947), about Edmund, another 12-year-old boy, coping with the aftermath of the Second World War in a blasted and blighted Berlin. Edmund shoulders an even greater burden in supporting his family and pays a much higher price. By contrast, Boy of Baghdad seems wearyingly rosy in its youthful outlook despite the postscript.
     Kheer Allah—I am sufficiently ignorant not to know whether to refer to him as Kheer or Kheer Allah—narrates Dr. Al-Moswi’s piece. (What’s the purpose of slapping this pretentious title onto a very simple, even simplistic film?) “Life is too hard,” the boy tells us near the outset. “We can’t go out. There are robbers, thieves and explosions.” Robbers, thieves and explosions, oh my! I am sorry; but this pre-adolescent prattle trivializes to an almost unconscionable degree the impact of foreign invasion, war, insurgency, counter-insurgency, torture, and so forth, while retaining access to the convenient cop-out, Well, it’s a kid speaking, for gosh sake. Give him a chance! Rossellini didn’t make his Neorealist masterpiece about a 12-year-old by descending to a 12-year-old’s level. This is a Disney-like version of a horrible circumstance that perhaps reaches its nadir when, at a bazaar, Kheer Allah remarks that he can only look at toys because he is too poor to buy any. Oh, brother!
     Since the boy’s family, the film stresses, was dirt-poor before the U.S. invasion, it is possible, I suppose, that Al-Moswi intends a sly dig at U.S. ambitions. Nothing has changed in Iraq; things have merely gotten a little worse. But the shallow thing that Al-Moswi appears to have slapped together, with the hint of fairy tale that the title gratuitously provides, suggests a want of both irony and a specific point of view—other than the boy’s, of course.
     The child’s voiceover narration carries a fictional pedigree. One of its sources, perhaps, is the girl’s voiceover in Terrence Malik’s Days of Heaven (1978). Although Malik’s film has severe limitations of its own, there the narration settles into a fairly complex fabric; here, in Boy in Baghdad, the images trot hand in hand with the voiceover, the voiceover, with the narration. At one point Kheer Allah laments his dearth of friends. Given the context of the “preemptive war” waged against Iraq by an incompetent, vicious or insane U.S. president (depending on the day, take your pick), such a remark is pabulum. Al-Moswi’s film never escapes the box into which its childspeak plants it.

THE FIRST BREATH OF WIND (Franco Piavoli, 2002)

The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis

Writer-director Franco Piavoli’s Al primo soffio di vento unfolds on a single August day, beginning in the afternoon, within a single family, on a well-heeled country estate. The camera probes faces for causes of feelings. The woman, feeling betrayed, is bitter and unhappy. Feeling unloved, she recalls her and her husband’s first meeting years ago. She can touch the memory, the stillness of their bodies and the silence of opening possibility preceding a “breath of wind.” Meanwhile, locked away from these momentous events in her life, her spouse indulges in scientific investigation. Insects occupy him, and their example leads to thoughts about humanity, about variations within a single species. So much love for one, so much thought for the other.
     There is no organic family in this film; the reality is separate people living separate lives, although at least at one point, in the deep night, they are all under the same roof. Piavoli has said the film, which he shot in and around his country house, is partly autobiographical. “Sometimes, working and living under the same roof,” he explains, “we can reach a saturation point. So my wife retires to her own rooms, and we don’t see each other for a week.”
     How do we then reconcile the film’s critical and autobiographical elements? Perhaps the film’s overwhelming urgency derives from Piavoli’s sense that his own settled life is in danger from attack by forces from within that this settledness hides from view. Marriage is no less vulnerable and fragile for being happy. Happiness can turn, as day turns to darkness—and as quickly.
     Piavoli cinematographed, using natural light. Each flicker of sunlight, splash of water and breath of breeze is sublimely rendered to a point of stillness. Amidst mortal lives, everything intimates eternity.

THE SON’S ROOM (Nanni Moretti, 2001)

The awarding of the Palme d’Or at Cannes to the 2002 French film The Pianist alerted us to the tremendous artistic comeback of Roman Polanski, the one-time remarkable director of “Two Men and a Wardrobe” (1958) and Knife in the Water (1962). The film that won the world’s most prestigious film prize one year earlier was La stanza del figlio—The Son’s Room—by Nanni Moretti. I mention the two in the same breath for more than the identical prize that both men won. Both these artists who—let’s be frank—have many times disappointed us reached deep into the bowels of their being to create the works for which they were thus honored. Each could scarcely have made a more deeply personal piece of work. For The Pianist, Polanski revisited the trauma of a lifetime, his own boyhood escape from the Nazis as the hunted Polish Jew whose adventures would form a partial basis for friend Jerzy Kosinski’s electrifying (and largely autobiographical) novel The Painted Bird. Polanski did this—earlier, he had passed on the opportunity to direct Schindler’s List because he wasn’t ready to turn his eyes back—in order to essay the wartime hiding of another one of the hunted, concert pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman. The seed for Moretti’s co-writing (along with Linda Ferri and Heidrun Schleef), directing and starring in La stanza del figlio was the trauma he recorded in his earlier Caro diario (Dear Diary, 1994), which Moretti likewise wrote, directed and starred in, on that occasion playing himself. The trauma was this: Moretti had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Fortunately for us as well as for him, reports of the Italian artist’s imminent demise proved premature, and subsequent word that he was about to become a father triggered in full his radiant sense of survival and renewal. Art can be wrenchingly ironic. La stanza del figlio, about the death of a son, testifies to Moretti’s sense of newfound life. The connection is there for us to see, however; what more powerfully impresses with the ultimate value of life than its inconceivable loss? And what better way to record this than in a comedy—a comedy of life? By far, La stanza del figlio is Nanni Moretti’s best—and, I swear, funniest—comedy. He has come back from the grave with artistic life and truth such as I never imagined he would attain.

Moretti in this instance (beautifully) plays Giovanni, a middle-aged, middle-class psychologist with a wife and two teenaged children, a daughter and a son, and of course a roster of hilarious patients. (For the record, Nanni Moretti is sometimes credited as “Giovanni Moretti.”) Paola is his wife; Irene, his daughter; Andreà, his son. The family’s essential stability and happiness, proceeding from Giovanni’s relaxed authority at its head, is everywhere perceivable, but one extraordinary scene projects their contentment to the utmost: following Giovanni’s lead, the entire group sings together during a car trip.

Nothing in this film escapes ambiguity, however. In the back seat, the two offspring seem to slide from slight mockery to genuine participation when joining their parents in song. Giovanni seems more attached to his son than to his daughter. Giovanni’s work, because it involves providing professional help to his patients, sometimes interferes with his off-hours home life, to which all the other members have had to adjust. Andreà lies to his father about a school escapade in which he helped “borrow” and accidentally broke a fossil from science class; Andreà lies to his mother also, but he eventually tells her the truth. In the meantime, Giovanni suspects his son of the theft. Andreà worries about disappointing his father, who finds him (unlike his sister) insufficiently competitive in sports. About tennis Giovanni tells Andreà, “You play to win.” Andreà’s response: “No, I don’t.” Indeed, Giovanni is competitive in most everything, and to this aspect in his personality even Paola has had to yield quietly. When they have lost their Andreà, however, the marriage falls apart in part because Paola is no longer willing to pay the emotional duties that marriage to Giovanni seems to require.

In their grief over their son’s absurd death in a diving accident, Giovanni and Paola find every piece and corner of their lives together ransacked and emptied. Theirs is not a loss capable of being compartmentalized; the loss of their son is an abyss into which everything falls, including Giovanni’s capacity to tend to his patients in a competent and professional manner. In retrospect, perhaps it was Andreà who had been the real center of Paola, Giovanni and Irene’s family life.

I have never seen so powerful a film about parental grief, and the miracle, surely, is that Moretti has created a sufficient emotional elasticity so that the film retains its identity as a humanistic comedy; not once is there the slightest collapse into melodrama. (We are not In the Bedroom here.) Be warned, therefore: this film is a heart-battering experience. There isn’t any sentimental outlet to reassure one’s feelings. Moretti wants nothing less than that each audience member should actually experience, however vicariously, the sudden, cruel stroke of loss that the characters experience. We are used to such films generating intense sympathy; I know of no other that generates empathy instead. This film of exquisite finesse, therefore, has its raw side, and depending on how far into the abyss of loss you are not willing to follow the film you may wisely choose to pass the experience by. Moretti’s film provides no “free ride.” In particular, Giovanni’s shafts of memories of his son constitute the most heart-piercing flashbacks in cinema since Akira Kurosawa’s in Ikiru (1952).

What a wonderful comedy of life Moretti this time conjures, with what depth of human spirit and the capacity to endure the most calamitous jerks of circumstance. The opportunity for healing occurs as suddenly, as unexpectedly, as the wounding loss. It comes in the form of a letter to Andreà—a letter from a girl, Arianna, whom his parents knew nothing about. Paola in particular feels obliged to let Arianna know that Andreà is dead. It turns out that Arianna and Andreà had only just met, just once, but Arianna looked forward to seeing him again. Arianna visits; tentatively a couple again, Giovanni and Paola, along with Irene, end up escorting Arianna and a boy with whom she is traveling part of the way on the next leg of their lives’ journey. The film concludes with a shot into which the entire film pours: from Andreà’s vantage in heaven, a survey of father, mother and sister below, all of them distributed in the frame to underscore their potential as family again but, in the meantime, the separateness, the painful isolation, of each. “The son’s room,” it turns out, isn’t Andreà’s bedroom, as we had thought; it’s whatever space the loved ones he has lost now occupy. The final shot suggests that father, mother and sister compose Andreà’s uncompleted poem: a poignant finale.

Everything in this film is gracious and graceful, and nowhere is this more the case than in the note of transcendence and hope on which the film closes. Although the camera is looking simply across at the end, Moretti’s conclusion recalls the heavenward pan, with its intimations of eternity, at the close of Roberto Rossellini’s supreme masterpiece, Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950). In retrospect, the stolen, broken fossil looms as “the family”; we recall the secular nature of Giovanni and Paola’s lives—the fact that they did not even join the Mass at their son’s funeral. Forget about Palombella rossa (1989) and Caro diario. Nanni Moretti, refreshed, is in a different league now.

In addition to winning the Palme d’Or, the film took the best actress prize at Cannes for Laura Morante’s stunning performance as Paola, a role that encompasses every conceivable note of a mother’s inconsolable grief. Morante also won the David di Donatello Award as best actress, and indeed the film took the best film prize. The Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists agreed: La stanza del figlio is the best film of 2001.

Moretti’s finest collaborator here is his color cinematographer, the great Giuseppe Lanci (Bellocchio’s Leap Into the Void and Devil in the Flesh; Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia). This is supernally clear color photography, and it suggests, perhaps, Andreà’s spiritual participation in the mise-en-scène even prior to the departure of the character.

In all manner and fashion, this is a film with a wondrous glow to it. The Son’s Room is a comedy to cleanse the senses.