AMPHIBIAN-MAN (Gennadi Kazansky, Vladimir Chebotaryov, 1962)

When Ichthyandros was a child, his scientist-father Dr. Salvador explains, “he developed an incurable lung disease. To save him, I gave him a transplant of shark’s gills.” The success of the operation launched Salvador’s dream of an underwater republic, with Ichthyandros its “first citizen.” A young man now, Ichthyandros alternates his life amongst his lair in the sea, the vast sea off the coast of perhaps Spain or Mexico, and Salvador’s laboratory/home on land, to which he brings sea-stuff that might help his father pursue his wet dream. (Oh, that can’t be the right way to express it.) But after he rescues gorgeous Gutiere from a shark attack, Ichthyandros must find this girl to love, and so he takes to the port city in search of her: a passage surely inspired by Guy’s search for Mimi—that is, Fred Astaire’s for Ginger Rogers—in London in The Gay Divorcée (Mark Sandrich, 1934).
     Indeed, there is music as well in Chelovek-Amfibiya, from Aleksandr Belyaev’s novel, and directed by Gennadi Kazansky and Vladimir Chebotaryov. The alien that Ichthyandros appears to be has been dubbed by fishermen and the press as “Sea-Devil”—although he is angelic. When he enters a nightclub as part of his romantic search, a girl sings: “In my heart, there’s only the Sea-Devil. He’s the one for me. . . .”
     Clearly, handsome Ichthyandros is a God-figure, a Jesus-on-Earth, who, once captured, imprisoned and kept submerged by authorities, loses his amphibious capacity and must leave Gutiere forever—they have indeed found one another—and return to the sea: a crucifixion and an ascension—or, in this case, descent.
     This being a Soviet film, though, the Christian allegory lies hidden behind another level of meaning, whereby Ichthyandros is an anti-capitalist—after giving away a fish seller’s fish, he explains that there are fish enough for all in the sea—and the film’s villain, Ichthyandros’s romantic rival, Pedro Zurita, is a scheming capitalist who sees in the boy’s amphibious existence the potential for exploitive profit.
     This is not a perfect film; the romance and the Ichthyandros-Pedro clash are lackluster, and there is even a poorly edited conventional chase that doesn’t raise a heartbeat. But much of the imagery, especially having to do with the water, enchants: the boy’s underwater lair, with its sliding gate that resembles a spiderweb; his rhythmic underwater swimming; after he is falsely accused of stealing, an overhead shot of his dive into water, the gradual subsiding of ripples, his disappearance; the final return to the sea.
     “As a human being, do I have a right to love?” Ichthyandros asks his father. How I wish that that question had led to the sort of passion that the puritanical Soviet Union would not permit.

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HANGOVER SQUARE (John Brahm, 1945)

Despite a few showy though by no means expressive shots, including the opening bravura one, Hangover Square is surely the lamest film by John Brahm that I’ve seen. Set in Edwardian London, meant thereby to capitalize on the success of Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944), this moody thriller is a clever variant on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—not Robert Louis Stevenson’s brilliant Victorian novella, but the movie versions that gave Jekyll/Hyde two love interests who are polar opposites: one, prim, conventional; the other, a whore. Brahm’s film, like Gaslight an adaptation of a work by Patrick Hamilton, revolves around a schizophrenic classical composer who during blackouts—in Hamilton’s 1941 novel, George Harvey Bone also drinks heavily—is a serial killer and pyromaniac. The two women here are the daughter of a distinguished classical conductor and a cheap music hall performer who lures Bone away from the concerto he is working on, feigning romantic interest so he will devote himself to bringing her to stardom. The impetus behind Hamilton’s book was his unreturned love for pre-Hollywood Geraldine Fitzgerald.
     This is a dull film whose single point of (unpleasant) interest is that the “good girl,” a blatant snob, is as selfishly motivated as the “bad girl” is. There is much else to object to: Laird Cregar’s performance as Bone is ridiculously over-the-top; Bernard Hermann’s score, including the concerto, is banal; an adorable cat meets a violent end.

FESTIVAL (Rituparno Ghosh, 2000)

“Construction, deconstruction, construction,
deconstruction . . .”

Winner of best film and best director prizes at India’s National Film Awards, Bengal writer-director Rituparno Ghosh’s Utsab is an exquisite, rich, vibrant tapestry of a mostly middle-class family—two sons, two daughters, spouses and offspring—that has gathered together under matriarch Bhagabati’s expansive roof during Durga Puja, the annual six-day celebration of the fierce, redemptive maternal Hindu goddess who would become identified with India’s independence from British rule. Satyajit Ray’s brilliant Devi (1960), you may recall, opens with fireworks during Durga Puja.
     The scattered family is in disrepair in other ways as well. One of Bhagabati’s sons will lose his job if the company for which he works closes next week. One daughter, Parul, has suffered from the arranged marriage that the family deemed more suitable than the poor boy she loved could offer; ironically, Parul’s spouse is absent, at work in Singapore, while the “poor boy,” now wealthy, shows up with an offer to buy the family estate. Parul’s husband is compelling Joy, their son, to get a college degree in business rather than pursue filmmaking, his heart’s desire. (Framing the film’s action are Joy’s videographing of family activities and a delightful glimpse of the gifted result.) Here, future threatens to repeat past, because Joy’s Uncle Asit, Bhagabati’s eldest, was forced to study economics rather than literature. Daughter Keya is on the verge of divorcing Arun, whose failed stabs at painting and politics have turned him into a drunk. Self-determination, it would appear, is no panacea for this family’s woes. But hold on: Out of this mess of a marriage will come reconciliation, revival, renewed tenderness.
     Some of the characters, to be sure, are more interesting and affecting than others; but Ghosh’s confident naturalism creates a compelling unity. Visually, each and every shot either sparkles or glows, and many of these shots suggest elements of past and present either colliding or co-existing within the same frame. In one shot, which departs from naturalism toward expressionism, Parul looms in the right-foreground on the upper landing while the man who was once the boy she so dearly loved, enrobed in spacious darkness, exits down below.
     A captivating choice: the festival itself, outdoors, isn’t shown except in glimpses—such as through the window in the darkened bedroom where Keya and Arun are making love. Ghosh, here as elsewhere, isn’t distracted by spectacle; he attends to what his characters attend to.
     Warning: In Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar (1963) and Charulata (1964), Madhabi Mukherjee was twenty or twenty-one. There is quite a bit more of her as Bhagabati.

ONLY THE VALIANT (Gordon Douglas, 1951)

Vapid, wooden Gregory Peck gave some of the most execrable performances in Hollywood history, in Duel in the Sun (King Vidor et al., 1946), Gentleman’s Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), Moby-Dick (John Huston, 1956), The Big Country (William Wyler, 1958), Beloved Infidel (Henry King, 1959) and To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962), among others. Sometimes he was okay, however, if the roles did not tax too heavily his severely limited, school-level abilities, and on rare occasion Peck was quite all right: Yellow Sky (William A. Wellman, 1948), The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (Nunnally Johnson, 1956) and, in between, Only the Valiant, an immediately post-Civil War western in which U.S. Cavalry Captain Richard Lance attempts to defend Fort Invincible in the American Southwest against an onslaught of vicious Apaches. It is a sacrificial mission for Lance and his hand-picked batallion, which aims to forestall the savages, led by Tuscos, thereby protecting the area until the arrival of supplemental Cavalry forces.
     It is interesting to note the principle on which Lance based his selection of soldiers: they are the ones that the Cavalry can most easily afford to lose: criminals, cowards, malcontents. For this reason, some feel that Gordon Douglas’s film, from a script by Edmund H. North and Harry Brown adapting a Charles Marquis Warren novel, prefigures works such as The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967); but, as Lance’s group is killed off one by one, it is more the case that the film’s inspiration comes to the fore: John Ford’s The Lost Patrol, about a doomed British batallion in the Mesopotamian desert in the First World War. One of the most brilliant American films ever made, it also inspired Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954), which paid homage by evoking one of Ford’s most powerful images.
     Like Peck’s General Frank Savage in his all-time best film, the haunting 12 O’Clock High (King, 1949), Lance is disliked by his men. Their feeling has been exacerbated by an ill-serving contrivance: Lance, upon orders that the men do not know about, substituted William Holloway (Gig Young) for himself on a preliminary mission that took the life of the popular lieutenant, who was also—wouldn’t you know—his romantic rival. The film defines as Lance’s no-nonsense maturity that he sits on the truth. (Ironically, Lance is ordered to stay behind because he is the least expendable officer at the fort.) One has cause to find this dubious, though, since Lance’s silence risks undermining the integrity of his command of the group of soldiers. It is especially laughable, and disgraceful, that Cathy Eversham would think even for a moment that his motive for the substitution is that Lance, as she puts it, saw Holloway kissing her. For the record, Peck and actress Barbara Payton had an affair during the shoot—much as Peck had had an affair with Ingrid Bergman during the filming of Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945).
     If we were talking Ford and actor John Wayne, the pair would have mined guilt over Holloway’s death as the reason for Lance’s silence. But Douglas and Peck are not so interested in the complexity of human emotions. Indeed, theirs is a superficial western from start to finish, one in which the racial conflict is granted no tragic dimension, the Apaches are all rotten-evil, and the Civil War is summoned for a sight gag of two of Lance’s men fighting. Still, the action is fairly absorbing, and Peck, as I’ve said, is much, much, much better than usual.

DEMONS OF WAR [BY GOYA] (Władysław Pasikowski, 1998)

Despite the opening montage of trenchant Goya etchings portraying, often phantasmagorically, the inhuman nature of war or of human nature at its worst, Polish writer-director Władysław Pasikowski’s Demony wojny według Goi more or less resolves itself into a conventional actioner whose centerpiece consists of the oversized posturing of Bogusław Linda as Major Edward Keller, the “colorful” “rogue” commander of an IFOR peacekeeping unit towards the end of the Bosnian War. I giggled when a troop member, required by Keller to kill, protested, “I am a pacifist!”
     Indeed, the film ransacks the irony of military murder as the modus operandi of keeping the peace. Critic Andrew J. Horton, making many astute points about the film before arriving at the conclusion that it is, despite its pretense to the contrary, “pro-war,” notes that Bosnian suffering rather than Keller’s heroics would have made for a more humane focus. I confess; I simply don’t know how to make sense of Pasikowski’s film. Horton is probably correct; but it is not impossible that Pasikowski and/or Linda’s exaggerated portrait of Keller is aimed at blasting the character, and the self-aggrandizing war ethos that he represents, rather than adulating him. Or it may be that we have here an odious commercial gambit that, like Franklin J. Schaffner’s Patton (1970), contrives matters so that those in the audience who wish either to praise or damn General Patton can comfortably do so. However, when Maj. Keller tells someone, “I am a soldier. That is all,” I simply couldn’t see how anyone could take such nonsense straight.
     The burst of Polish nationalism and military patriotism with which the film ends: let us hope that there is room here for irony. Couldn’t this solemnity be mock-solemnity?
     Regardless, though, this is a tedious film.