THE SERPENT’S EGG (Ingmar Bergman, 1977)

Ingmar Bergman considered The Serpent’s Egg, which he wrote and directed, to be a horror film; he was right. Like his earlier English-language film, The Touch (1971), it is about a Jewish American—in this case, Abel Rosenberg, a jobless trapeze acrobat stranded in inflationary, impoverished Berlin in the 1920s as a result of the economic penalties that Great War victors imposed on Germany following its defeat. But unless I’m misinterpreting the voiceover narration and other more scattered clues, its time-reference is more complicated. The film is really located twenty years later during the Second World War, but only in the historical mind in which it is flashing back so as to be able to prophesize the rise to power, ten years later, of Adolf Hitler and all that happened as a result of that: the fully formed reptile already visible inside the serpent’s egg.
     It is a dark, dank film, with infernally red-glowing underground cabaret and, outside, incessant rain. People are so desperate that they slaughter a horse in the street in order to have something to eat; and Bergman, shooting in West Berlin, is so desperate about his tax problems back home in Sweden that he actually had a horse slaughtered for the scene. Bergman could be a real bitch, and in fact this film is almost entirely unpleasant, beginning with the suicide of Abel’s brother, Max—an event that goes unexplained until the movie’s last gasps. A lot of secret experiments on humans, orchestrated by Hans Vergerus (Heniz Bennent, giving the best performance), are proving again humanity’s potential for inhumanity. Meanwhile, Manuela, Max’s compassionate widow (who else? Liv Ullmann), is reaching out to protect and comfort Abel, who is fragile and volatile. Some of the emotional scenes between them are gut-wrenching—but, like much else in this film, loose beads that have jumped their string. David Carradine is an almost total washout as Abel; Dustin Hoffman—Bergman’s first choice—would have been much better.
     A number of scenes suggest Kafka’s The Trial; but Kafka’s wit is nowhere in evidence.
     It provides something of a guidepost to recall that Bergman hated his father, a Lutheran priest who had died in 1970, because (among other reasons) this man hated Jews.
     The Serpent’s Egg is from West Germany (where it was called Das Schlangenei) and the U.S.

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DRÔLE DE DRAME (Marcel Carné, 1937)

The French team of scenarist Jacques Prévert and director Marcel Carné is celebrated for their poetic realism in moody, fatalistic works and for the tragic enchantment of their period romances. However, the Leftist pair also created a zany, brilliantly funny comedy. Drôle de drame ou L’étrange aventure du Docteur Molyneux is the complete title of the film known in the States as Bizarre, Bizarre. From the 1912 novel His First Offence by Scotland’s J. Storer Clouston, the film is set in either very late Victorian or very early Edwardian London—about 1900. This small point of indeterminacy correlates to a motif of false identity and deceptive appearances; although he is a horticulturist, Irwin Molyneux (Michel Simon, wonderful) expands his income as a crime novelist under the nom de plume of Felix Chapel. Keeping up social appearances after the cook and another servant have bolted, with wife Margaret (Françoise Rosay, also wonderful) hiding away in the kitchen preparing the duck while pretending to be out of town, Irwin hosts a meal for a self-invited guest, Archibald (Louis Jouvet, perfect). Unfortunately, this cousin, a vicar, because Margaret seems missing intuits that Irwin must have murdered her. Scotland Yard investigates!
     The film opens in a deliberately stagy setting, with the vicar denouncing Chapel for encouraging murder with his books. The audience includes Chapel/Molyneux and, because the vicar has a point, William Kramps (Jean-Louis Barrault, perhaps stealing the show), a serial murderer of butchers who, blaming the dire influence of Chapel, plans on killing him next. (While both are hiding away, William woos Margaret.) The vicar’s sparsely attended denunciation, which pits fuddy-duddy religiosity against popular culture, contrasts with the throngs of humanity flooding the street in response to the vicar’s allegations. A Brechtian air fills indoors and out-.

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PRICK UP YOUR EARS (Stephen Frears, 1987)

The title of Stephen Frears’s best film, Prick Up Your Ears, can be read in two entirely different ways (one referring to ears, the other to another, specifically male body part), and one of these was considered sufficiently salacious in Ronald Reagan’s reactionary America that the film couldn’t be given mainstream advertisement in many parts of the U.S., including where I lived. The controversial title, though, came from the book that scenarist Alan Bennett adapted; its author is drama critic and son of Bert, John Lahr. No Cowardly Lion, he. Lahr, played by Wallace Shawn, appears as a character in the film.
     The protagonist is tragicomic London playwright Joe Orton, whose success, finally, contributed to his violent end in 1967, at 34, at the hands, and hammer, of longtime companion Kenneth Halliwell, whose literary success lagged behind Orton’s, and likely would never have caught up, and who, seven years older than Orton, considered himself his partner’s mentor. Orton was impudent and prone to danger; Halliwell, insecure and overly dependent. After he murdered the love of his life, Halliwell committed suicide.
     Following his brilliant Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy (Alex Cox, 1986), Gary Oldman (best actor, London critics) made the most of another doomed soul drawn from life, giving the performance of a lifetime as Orton, whose restlessness and sparkle crossed his homosexual outlaw with the figure of an Everyman, especially toward the end of his life, much as Frears’s turbulent, fascinating film finds a spot where Orton and Halliwell’s personal history intersects with a bit of theatrical history. Memorable shot: Orton, naked, leaping into the frame and into his lover’s arms: a spontaneous moment that catches us.
     Flashbacks; post-mortem. Vanessa Redgrave (best supporting actress, New York critics) marvelously plays Orton’s shrewd agent.

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WELCOME, MR. MARSHALL! (Luis García Berlanga, 1952)

“I will not put up with any irony.”

Sharply written by the director, Luis García Berlanga, along with Juan Antonio Bardem and Miguel Mihura, ¡Bienvenido Mister Marshall! is a film from Spain whose hectic satirical comedy, especially given its lively, dense scenes of humanity, somewhat resembles Preston Sturges’s Hollywood films. (Fernando Rey’s calm voiceover narration acts for us as a buffer.) It centers on Villar del Río, a small town sparked into anticipation of the visit by U.S. officials charged with determining recipients of post-World War II European recovery funds under the Marshall Plan. Can Spain, with its sitting brutal dictator, have any hope of lassoing any funds? Perhaps a masquerade will help; the inhabitants decorate their town, costume themselves and hire whom they must, including a celebrated flamenco dancer, to project an image that might ingratiatingly hoodwink their guests. Franco’s Spain must not appear to be Franco’s Spain.
     Apparently all the jabs targeting the United States kept Franco and those around him from seeing how they also were being gored by García Berlanga’s film.
     Early on, there is a lovely visual joke supposedly engineered by the narrator. A freeze frame keeps one of the townsfolk burdened by the heavy sack he is shouldering—until the narrator apologizes and releases him from the freeze frame so that he can put down the sack. The symbolism is striking and devious: the burden of Francoism requires the intervention of magic—cinema, perhaps—to remove it.
     García Berlanga’s uneven, even grab-bag film, however, doesn’t come into its wickedly brilliant own until a late series of important townsfolk dreams midwived by American movies. In one of these, a nightmare, the local priest imagines himself surrounded by anti-Catholic Ku Klux Klansmen—this, after he had earlier condemned the U.S. for its rampant sin, for instance, divorce, and too many Protestants. (Ironically, he and the KKK share racist sentiments.) The town’s verbally challenged mayor dreams he is a mute sheriff, who though he can’t keep his hand from shaking is involved in an Old West barroom shootout.
     Best film, Spanish critics.

WET ASPHALT (Frank Wisbar, 1958)

Written by Will Tremper, immersed in gorgeous gloom by Helmut Ashley’s black-and-white cinematography and electrified by Horst Buchholz’s lead performance, Nasser Asphalt is a superficial film, set in 1951 Berlin, about honest versus dishonest print journalism in relation to the gathering “history” referencing the recent world war that ended in Germany’s defeat. It is about lingering German immorality, at least on the Western side of the divided city, but the crusading journalist that Buchholz plays offers hope for the future.
     Himself jailed for attempting to “get at the truth” by interviewing convicted war criminals at Spandau Prison, young Greg Bachman finds himself released early because of established journalist Cesar Boyd, who hires him as an assistant and publishes Bachman’s articles under his own, that is, Boyd’s, byline. Pressed for time in which to deliver a “hot” story to a Paris news agency, Boyd makes one up with his chauffeur’s help, with the story becoming an international sensation: for six years, five German soldiers have been trapped in an exploded bunker in Poland. As it develops, the story strokes Cold War paranoia. When he finally realizes that the story comprises an expanding series of lies (the initial clue, rather too blatant, turns on an impossible phone conversation owing to the nonexistence of the public telephone supposedly involved!), Bachman seeks to expose Boyd publicly, while Boyd tries to make Bachman seem the guilty party. Both men seek support in their conflict from Bettina, whom Bachman presumably loves and Boyd lusts after.
     With Die Halbstarken (Georg Tressler, 1956), also written by Tremper, and the hilarious Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (Kurt Hoffmann, 1957) under his belt, Buchholz extended his marvelous versatility. However, Greg’s feelings for Bettina constitute the least convincing aspect of Buchholz’s performance.
     Frank Wisbar inconsequentially directed.