Producer John Houseman and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, culture-vulturing, made a film from one of William Shakespeare’s few boring plays, Julius Caesar; the one claim on our interest is, perhaps, that the film recycles sets from other M-G-M films. Like the play, the film is about the assassination in Rome, in 44 B.C., of Julius Caesar, whom others among the elite worry, or pretend to worry, is too politically ambitious. They convince themselves and one another that he may turn dictator on a dime.
This is a ridiculously inept and unconvincing film. Let us consider, first, Caesar’s chaperoned march to the Roman Senate, where he is turned into a pin-cushion by a swarm of knives—the only vivid moment in the film. It is the Ides of March, and a soothsayer has already warned Caesar of danger on that day, and now Calpurnia, his adoring wife, has had what she is convinced is a prophetic dream, in which a statue of him is mass-stabbed, resulting in a thousand rivulets of blood-loss that kill him. Lovingly, Caesar decides to stay home to soothe his wife’s worries; but when those tempting him to this blood-flood arrive and explain away the dream, adding that he is about to be given total power, Caesar reverses himself and heads out to his funeral. In the play, the governing idea is clear and sharp: Caesar is so driven by a desire for power that it overwhelms his judgment. But nothing of the sort comes through in the film. By making of Caesar a near-doddering fool, we blame foolishness for his fatal decision, although this signature quality of his makes it impossible to believe that the masses would have wanted to be ruled by him in the first place. There never would have been a need to assassinate this Caesar. For the record, Mankiewicz was wedded to the scene of assassination, which is rendered again ten years later in his Cleopatra.
And this is only one in a series of missteps, the most disastrous of which is Mark Antony’s speech to the crowds, overturning the effect of Brutus’s speech right before it which convinced the Caesarians that the murder of Caesar saved Rome from tyranny. Marlon Brando plays Mark Antony, and as Brando delivers that speech, with his phony accent, jerky cadences and histrionic air, and bringing absolutely no force at all to rhetorical ironies that without such force would go quite over the heads of the crowds, it is impossible to believe that the people of Rome would be moved, pricked and swayed, sending the conspirators on the run.
From start to finish, this is a terrible movie, with nearly all the actors giving either superficial/histrionic or one-note performances. Briefly, however, Deborah Kerr is a lovely Portia, Brutus’s wife. James Mason is good as Brutus, one of several roles for which the National Board of Review named him best actor of the year.
Archive for May, 2009
JULIUS CAESAR (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1953)
May 30, 2009SUNDAY’S CHILDREN (Daniel Bergman, 1992)
May 30, 2009“I am forever living in my childhood.” — Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman is eight years old in the mid-1920s; his family nickname is Pu. It is hard to say how his mother, nurse Karin Åkerblom, feels about him, but, at least according to Söndagsbarn, he was the apple of his father Erik’s eye. This wistful, lovely film was directed by Daniel Bergman (International Critics’ Prize, Montreal) from his father’s autobiographical script. It is painfully divided, perhaps by the competing motives of Daniel and Ingmar, perhaps originally by those of Ingmar and Pu. Throughout, one senses that the film might have been directed very differently, generating a very different, and inferior, result.
The film’s principal and culminating event is a day-trip that Erik and Pu make together, by bicycle, train and ferry. Pu the morning before the trip overhears a solemn conversation between his parents. Karin, more her mother’s daughter than her husband’s wife, feels imprisoned with Erik, an energetic Lutheran priest, and wants to take their three children and separate for a while; Erik has always felt alone and now feels humiliated, the class divide between him and Karin as deep as ever. (See Bille August’s The Best Intentions, 1982, written by Bergman, about Bergman’s parents’ courtship.) The next day Erik will guest-preach in another parish; hence the trip. For the most part it is a blissful moment of father-son intimacy, somewhat interrupted by a hard slapping that Erik administers onboard a ferry when Pu’s behavior terrifies his father that Pu might drown. Bicycling back home in a rainstorm, the pair take refuge in an open barn; lightning strikes a tree in their sight, and Erik takes off his jacket and wraps it around his son—an action that director Bergman shows us, poignantly, twice, first, from behind them inside the barn, and again from the front. Earlier, Erik apologized for losing his temper and explained to Pu the alarm that momentarily took hold of his heart. The film ends in the past, with father and son closely, warmly bonding, both soaked, together going home.
But four or five times during its (long) course the film flashforwards to the late sixties, with a fifty-year-old Ingmar visiting his widowed father, who is very sick and who is pouring over Karin’s diaries. “What did I do wrong?” he asks his son, who is cold, unfeeling, unkind, unforgiving. Ingmar tells Erik that he, his siblings and their mother were all fearful of his rages, which seemed to target them out of the blue. And yet what we see is a humble, remorseful old man who is being pointlessly confronted by an unbending, nearly monstrously inhuman son—one whom the father, from his deathbed, blesses. Is this what the scenarist wanted us to see? Was he challenging his own cruelty to his father, suggesting how his own hostility toward his father, in his relations with this man, turned him into an image of how he saw his father? Or has the filmmaker given us a perspective on things at odds with his father’s? I don’t know. I know I will never know.
Thommy Berggren, Bo Widerberg’s Joe Hill twenty-one years earlier, gives a wonderful performance as Erik Bergman.
THE WAGES OF FEAR (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1953)
May 29, 2009In fictional Las Piedras, various lives—people from all over—have reached their dead-ends. The area, somewhere in South America, is exploited and ruled by S.O.C.—the Southern Oil Company. Three hundred miles away, one of the fields is aflame; two pairs of drivers are offered $2,000 each by the U.S. company to drive trucks loaded with, combined, a ton of nitroglycerin to help contain the fire. Poverty is so deep, hope fragile, that applicants abound; the lucky four will have to transport their volatile cargoes over unpaved mountain roads in company trucks—this, a metaphor for capitalism—that do not even come equipped with shock absorbers! One of the four makes it.
From Georges Arnaud’s novel, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le salaire de la peur, which took the top prize at Cannes, is one of the most suspenseful thrillers ever made—a road picture where every bump—every obstacle—along the way may be fatal. The opening shot is of a backwater child tormenting with a stick cockroaches he has tethered. (Stringboarding.) Cosmos seems to be treating all adult humans in the same Shakespeare/Learian way.
The four men are a young Corsican, Mario (Yves Montand, strikingly good, sumptuously athletic), an aging French gangster, Jo (Charles Vanel, terrific—best actor, Cannes), Bimba, a Dutchman embittered by his Nazi imprisonment, and an Italian, Luigi, whom a doctor has just informed has only months to live. Jo seems convincingly courageous behind his gun prior to the trip, and Mario slips under his wing; but he proves cowardly during the trip, confessing, “I’m not dangerous anymore.”
Clouzot achieves turbulent, apocalyptic imagery involving black oil and black night, and raging fire. Fear had made the one survivor careful; stripped of that, he crashes and dies on his way back.
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THE MUMMY (Karl Freund, 1932)
May 29, 2009“They broke in upon me and found me doing an unholy thing. . . . For thy sake I was buried alive.”
Without doubt the jewel of the early sound Universal horror films is Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934). What is the next-best? Neither Tod Browning’s Dracula nor James Whale’s Frankenstein (both 1931), I would say, but The Mummy, which Karl Freund directed—the cinematographer of German silents and Oscar-winner for The Good Earth (Sidney Franklin, 1937). The plot mines memories of a sensational archaeological event, the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in Egypt in 1921, and draws on elements of stories by Arthur Conan Doyle.
The film begins with script: “This is the Scroll of Thoth. Herein are set down the magic words by which Isis raised Osiris from the dead.” Thirty-seven hundred years ago Princess Anck-es-en-Amon died; her remains were sealed in an elaborate tomb. In despair, Im-ho-tep violated the sacred Scroll of Thoth in hope of being reunited with his beloved. He is caught and punished—wrapped in layers upon layers of cloth strips and buried alive. Excavated in 1921, Im-ho-tep comes “alive”—like Dracula, he is closer to being the “living dead”—when the scroll, which was buried with him, is freshly violated. Eleven years later, as Ardath Bey he directs another team from the British Museum to the princess’s tomb and pursues Helen Grosvenor, who is the reincarnation of the princess. She must die, that is, endure “moments of horror for an eternity of love.” Meanwhile, she has found someone her own age to love.
Bey’s flashback in a pool of smoke, by which he reminds Helen of their history after putting her in a trance, is a silent film accompanied by his voiceover narration. Indeed, the entire film seems driven to embrace a past as ancient as Bey’s minutely dessicated skin. Its story and sensitivities all seem divided—between ancient and modern languages, silent and sound film, West and East, British Museum and Cairo Museum, science and culture, soullessness and soulfulness. Helen’s modern boyfriend, who is part of the British Museum’s expedition, is stiff and proper; he tells Helen, “I know I can make you love me”—an unpleasant way to put things, to say the least. By contrast, Bey’s dead eyes glow with sudden life, warmth and passionate love as he approaches Helen.
Boris Karloff gives a good performance as Bey/Im-ho-tep. Zita Johann is gorgeous as Princess/Helen.
The deliberate, grave pace of the film helps pull us back, too.
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MEXICO: THE FROZEN REVOLUTION (Raymundo Gleyzer, 1971)
May 31, 2009The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis
Raymundo Gleyzer’s pulsating, deeply moving México, la revolución congelada is a brilliant Argentinean documentary about the “stillborn” 1910 Revolution that failed to bring economic and social justice to Mexico, but, rather, maintained the desperate poverty and hunger of the country’s indigenous peasants. Gleyzer, 34, was kidnapped and murdered by Argentina’s ruling military five years after this film. (His films are usually about Argentina.) Gleyzer won for it a special prize at Locarno for Third World production.
The film combines historical documentation, consisting of voiceover and old photographs and newsreel footage in sepia or black and white, as well as footage from the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City during the 1968 Summer Olympics, which claimed 400 lives, many of them students, and freshly shot material in color. The latter includes material from the 1970 presidential campaign—at least I think at least some of it is fresh—and interviews with rural peasants, for instance, Mayans.
The materials are dazzlingly assembled; the result, trenchant. Gleyzer explores the reasons for the Revolution’s failure, its departure from socialist principles, its co-option by reactionary forces, including middle-class business, and so forth, and the effect of all this on the lives of actual people. At the outset of the Revolution, 1% of Mexicans owned 97% of Mexico’s land; nominal ownership expanded to about 50%, wherein persisting feudalism kept crops that these “owners” raised, on the land that they worked, nearly entirely out of their hands and their children’s mouths, prompting their further victimization by usurious lenders. All this also entailed the collaboration of Mexico’s exploitational neighbor to the north.
The nobility of starving Mayans is apparent in their faces, their willingness to work, their love of family—and their great ancestral stone carvings, which this peerless film also encompasses.
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