GLEN AND RANDA (Jim McBride, 1971)

Nuclear war devastated civilization some time ago. There are no more families or schools; existence, which is tribal now, is keyed to survival. In Jim McBride’s Glen and Randa, a strikingly beautiful tracking long-shot surveys rural scavenging. Society has been reduced to hippiedom, if you will, and teenaged lovers Glen and Randa, introduced to us as naked as Adam and Eve, break away from the pack to go on a quest of their own. Glen has read about the City of Metropolis in a Wonder Woman comic book, and he just has to find it. This boy aches to expand his horizons. “I’ll be sitting in a river,” he says, “and wonder how many people have seen this river before. And I don’t know anything about any of these people.” He is frustrated at having no concept of humanity; he is desperate to employ imagination.
     McBride follows the pair on their journey through a series of ravishing landscapes. Nastiness would confront the pair in other post-apocalyptic movies, but here they are helped along the way, and one soul in particular, a fisherman who hasn’t encountered other humans in twenty years, sails above a fleeting trace of self-concern to become their protector and benefactor. By this time Randa is visibly pregnant.
     Somehow human kindness has survived. Perhaps God is the explanation.
     In a ripped-open trailer home, there is a television set. The fisherman is old enough to know what it is. Not Glen, to whom the fisherman explains: “Oh, that’s a TV. People used to watch it all the time.” Later, we catch Glen “watching it.” McBride, refreshingly, doesn’t make fun of him for doing this; rather, we are touched by Glen’s attempt to connect with a larger past community through a no longer possible shared activity.

LETTER TO JANE (Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, 1972)

Following her starring role in Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Tout va bien (1972), Jane Fonda was invited to Vietnam. A photograph of her there was published, captioned, in the French news magazine L’Express and reappeared throughout the West. Analyzing this photo, Godard and Gorin’s Letter to Jane appeared shortly after.
     This amazingly astute film notes that Fonda the star is in sharp focus at the forefront of the photo; the face of the Vietnamese woman to whom she is listening, who is facing her, we cannot see. Nor can we see the Vietnamese male who is out-of-focus in the background. The caption “lies”—the filmmakers’ word—by characterizing Fonda as speaking rather than listening. They ultimately conclude that her bogus tragic look covers the fact that she isn’t really listening but (like Nixon at home, and Kissinger at the Paris peace talks) she is speaking without, first, listening. We need to know just what sort of peace the Vietnamese people want.
     The filmmakers ask how cinema and stars can help the Vietnamese people to win their independence. They must listen to these people and learn things. Their analysis of the photograph contrasts Fonda’s solitudinousness, her failure as actress to consider her militant activity, with the urgent reality of the Vietnamese male in the background. Fonda’s face reflects her studied performance according to old rules; the Vietnamese’s face reflects his surroundings, the horrors (“. . . torn women’s bodies . . .”) he faces every day. Cunningly the filmmakers trace Fonda’s thoughtful, “tragic” “look” to cinematic antecedents, including her father as Tom Joad in “future fascist” John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940). They are somewhat less convincing relating the camera’s low angle to Orson Welles’s cinema, although they are correct that this angle is calculated, not “innocent.”

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GOING MY WAY (Leo McCarey, 1944)

Only a Hitler or a Scrooge could resist Leo McCarey’s warm, genuinely funny Going My Way, a sentimental entertainment that garnered seven Oscars, including best picture. For me, this musical-dramedy provides merry and melodious viewing every Christmastime.
     Elderly Father Fitzgibbon is failing to keep afloat St. Dominic, the working-class New York City church he built 45 years ago, thus requiring the assignment of a progressive young curate to effect, if possible, the rescue of it. Fathers O’Malley and Fitzgibbon clash over the divide of years and different interests and temperaments. Bing Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald, at their most appealing, both won richly deserved Oscars for their roles here.
     The music, secular but for “Ave Maria” and “Silent Night,” is gloriously sung by throaty Bing, throatless—heavenly—Risë Stevens, and the Robert Mitchell Boy Choir.
     One of the film’s most compelling aspects is the relationship between O’Malley and Genevieve Linden, the opera star that Stevens plays. McCarey deftly, indirectly establishes that O’Malley and Linden were lovers prior to O’Malley’s becoming a priest—Linden’s first lover, in fact (“Father O’Malley was the first person to tell me I could sing”). O’Malley, we glean, is the love of Linden’s life. (She remains unmarried.) During a choral rehearsal in the basement of St. Dominic, a frontal shot of O’Malley and Linden in the lead is unexpectedly interrupted for a lateral view. Linden is standing; in the foreground of the shot, O’Malley sits at the piano, playing. Both are singing. Linden’s face is lit as she looks lovingly at O’Malley; his face is in shadow, as he has no residual romantic interest in Linden since pursuing the path that led to his becoming a priest. We glean from this shot, which is so packed with information and emotion, that O’Malley was the inspiration for Linden’s musical training and subsequent career, that Jenny’s singing has been a way of sublimating her feelings for O’Malley.
     If this is the film’s best shot, the best scene is yet to come: Father Fitzgibbon’s reunion with his 90-year-old mother, which Father O’Malley has arranged.
     Steeped in Irish Catholicism, and not the secular kind that comes, say, from John Ford, an atheist, Going My Way is a little precious, even a little lugubrious, but mostly fresh and wonderful. I love this movie.