MAN OF MARBLE (Andrzej Wajda, 1977)

I’m torn. The historical importance of Czlowiek z marmuru; its strategy of deconstruction; its captivating style; coming from Communist Poland, the sheer amazement its anti-Communism generates—that the film even got made; its examination of government/media manipulation of individuals and the public: all these factors argue on behalf of Wajda’s film.      On the other hand, it strikes me as a lame film. Can someone help me out by explaining the ending, with the filmmaker (that Krystyna Janda plays) keeping apace with the son of the guy she is making the film about? I confess: I’ve never understood this ending. Someone, help. I don’t doubt that everyone’s correct—that this is a great work; but it may not be for me. I don’t even think Janda’s performance is all that interesting. What do you think? Are there Man of Marble-enthusiasts out there? And whether you are or aren’t, please, someone, explain the ending.

WISE BLOOD (John Huston, 1979)

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

Sin is a trick on niggers. . . . Jesus is a trick on niggers. . . . There is no peace to the redeemed. — Hazel Motes, in Wise Blood
     The legacy of Christianity in the South is this: It was a method for drawing obedience from African slaves. It promoted the obscenity that such obedience (to the overseer’s lash, for instance) constituted a kind of discipleship to Jesus, holding out hope for an eternal reward no matter the hardship of the slave’s mortal lot.
     Flannery O’Connor’s novel about the early twentieth-century son of a preacher man becomes a powerful film thanks to a good ol’ atheist, John Huston. This was the director’s own favorite among his films.
     Hazel Motes, the protagonist, is also an atheist. This isn’t theology; this is human—a reaction against his preacher-grandfather. But Motes can’t escape the family business. A cab driver mistakes him for a preacher because he looks like one. Motes starts up his own church: The Church of Truth Without Christ Crucified, because Christ’s blood redeemed no one. This becomes The Church of Truth Without Christ.
     Through a series of stark color images, Huston achieves a vision of an ordinary world whose religious underpinnings render it, first, absurd and, finally, tragic. It remains cinema’s finest exploration of the role of religion in the culture of the United States, especially in the Bible Belt.
     Brad Dourif beautifully plays Motes. Shame on us! Despite his Oscar nomination for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975), we haven’t permitted this gifted actor the career we needed him to have. Nor have we been honest about the cruelty of Christianity in the American landscape.

NORTHERN LIGHTS (John Hanson, Rob Nilsson, 1978)

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

Northern Lights, co-directed by John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, attempts to blur the line between its historical fiction and documentary. Blending actors and nonprofessionals, it brings an achingly beautiful black-and-white immediacy to the American past and creates a stirring ode to the American labor movement.
     In the fierce North Dakota winter clime of the 1910s, farmers find themselves discounted by politicians and set upon by foreclosing bankers. The grain they work hard to harvest—in a snowstorm, no less, in one of the film’s most amazing passages—is sold for processing to grain elevators; the banks and railroad that control these pay exceptionally little. Thus the farmers unionize, in the Nonpartisan League. One of the organizers envisions their cooperatively owning their own grain elevators and becoming shareholders in state-chartered banks. Northern Lights, then, depicts the daunting circumstances the farmers face and the countervailing efforts of these new pioneers. It documents the retaliation they endure from the current institutions arrayed against their attempts at social change. It finds in dark, drafty rooms sparse though glowing light—a persistent symbol of hope.
     The narrative unfolds as the reminiscence of one of the League’s organizers. It is framed in the present. Sadly, the ringing optimism of the tail-end of this narrative frame would soon be erased by the pathological presidency of Ronald Reagan, and so, in our minds, we must add another coda to Northern Lights, however much doing so breaks our hearts.
     There is a spirit to this film that’s irresistible—and, in the extended context of the crippling of unionism in America, which Reagan launched but which considerable mismanagement by unions themselves abetted, this joyful spirit assumes a tragic dimension.

NASHVILLE (Robert Altman, 1975)

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

I saw a leg sticking out. . . . I need something like this for my documentary! It’s America: all those cars smashing together. —Opal, BBC reporter
     As a friend recently reminded me, I used to not like Robert Altman’s most celebrated film. The passage of time, though, has helped me see that I was wrong. Nashville really is a masterpiece.
     Altman’s Nashville zigzags among different stories involving performers and “civilians” at a particular time in Nashville. Someone with a loudspeaker attached to his vehicle is a presidential candidate seeking to abolish the Electoral College and “The Star Spangled Banner” as the national anthem, and a self-involved Brit is on hand making a documentary about America for the BBC. But the wonder of Nashville is its tightly woven fabric of somewhat peculiar American lives. Like Alfred Hitchcock in Psycho (1960), Altman finds the American mainstream full of human aberration.
     Perhaps the most remarkable contributor to this composite portrait of American behavior is Tom Frank. Frank, part of a trio, is narcissistic; he makes love while tape recordings of his songs play. Yet, when a performer (not in the trio) is shot down on stage from the audience, he is there, helping however he can—instantly. Keith Carradine, as Tom, gives the film’s finest performance. He also wrote and composed the film’s two best songs. Carradine won an Oscar for “I’m Easy”; but how many realize he also wrote “It Don’t Worry Me,” the anthem by which another character, beautifully played by Barbara Harris, rallies the shaken audience after the (likely successful) assassination attempt? Nashville is Altman’s, but also Carradine’s—a step in his becoming one of his generation’s most interesting American film actors.
     Nashville includes Altman’s best shots: closeups of the American flag rippled by a disconcerting breeze.

THE LONG GOODBYE (Robert Altman, 1973)

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

During the seventies, Robert Altman made a series of “revisionist” films testing the assumptions of familiar genres. Perhaps the most brilliant of these is The Long Goodbye, from one of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe private detective novels.
     Let me give an example of the film’s method. One of the assumptions of the genre is that the detective is a lone wolf, drawing strength of purpose from his version of rugged individualism. But, instead, Elliott Gould’s updated Marlowe is an hilariously pathetic loner, more unhappily lonely than ruggedly alone, and very nearly terrorized by his cat, who claws him and rules the roost before abandoning him after he fails to buy the desired cat food. Other generic assumptions meet a similar prodding and twisting, with the surprise of a lifetime befitting this procedure awaiting those who have read the book: a different murder solution than Chandler devised—and one that fits just as nicely. Here is, perhaps, the most entertaining American movie-movie of the decade.
     Richard Nixon, nowhere mentioned, had been reelected U.S. president. He, along with related aspects of American political, social and cultural life, represents the entrenchment of generic assumptions—the accepted clichés, the way things are supposed to be. Altman combatted reactionaryism by refreshing our whole sense of what’s going down.
     In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, a mobster disfigures his mistress’s face to threaten Marlowe, explaining that if he would do this to someone he loves . . . ! This not only turns the assumption of misogynism, as part of the fabric of the world which detectives and criminals share, on its ear (again, hilariously) but also suggests the irrelevancy of love in a reactionary world—unless, as Nixon would insist when he resigned office, one’s mother was a saint.