LITTLE CAESAR (Mervyn LeRoy, 1930)

Edward G. Robinson, tremendous, claimed the role that made him a star in Little Caesar, Mervyn LeRoy’s ultimately brilliant meditation on the unnaturalness and perniciousness of the American ethos of “rugged individualism,” which, to say the least, wars with humanity’s quest for sociability. LeRoy’s film, based on an unpublished novel by W. R. Burnett, also addresses the difficulty of self-determination—in America or, for that matter, anyplace else. It is one of the most important Hollywood films of the 1930s, and its success helped define abiding features of the cycle of gangster sagas that Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927) had launched.
     Squat, pudgy and with a face not even a mother could love, middle-aged Robinson plays a character, in part modeled on Al Capone, with twin identities: Cesare Enrico “Rico” Bandello and “Little Caesar.” Rico refers to himself in the third person—for instance, when he says, “No cop’s ever gonna put cuffs on Rico”—as a way of determining and confirming his reality and identity; “Little Caesar” is a creature of the press that proves to be his downfall, the price exacted for his quest to rise from anonymity “in the gutter” as a two-bit hooligan to become, in the words of Tennyson’s Ulysses, “a name”—a somebody, but a somebody owned by the press, which helps determine the course of his life and death. In effect, Rico’s success, his climb up the ladder of crime, requires the appropriation of his identity and theft of his self-determination, culminating in his fall, making him vulnerable to the collusion between press and law enforcement that ruthlessly engineers his sanctioned murder at night on a dark street. (LeRoy would criticize the U.S. press on other grounds in his best film, They Won’t Forget, 1937.)
     Rico participates in yet another “double identity.” Joe Massara and Rico started out together on their low-grade criminal careers. Now, Massara has begged out of Rico’s gang to pursue his own passion, dancing, which provokes Rico’s confrontation with the solitudinousness and loneliness of his individualism, which Massara’s loyalty and companionship had helped assuage. Rico has already proven he will shoot dead anyone he cares to (ever ready in this regard, Rico holds his cigar as if it were a gun, as a closeup demonstrates), and the matter of anyone who withdraws from Rico’s gang is a no-brainer. Indeed, Rico and his men break into Massara’s apartment precisely to shoot dead Massara and Olga, Massara’s girlfriend. At the last second, though, Rico’s eyes burn with something akin to tears and he cannot squeeze the trigger of his gun. For Rico, this paralysis results from the equal and opposite claims on his psyche that Massara’s rebellion has imposed; for Massara’s decision both deprives Rico of his sole friend but also in a flash comes to encapsulate the self-determination that Rico himself longs for. To kill Massara might also murder the possibility for Rico’s own self-determination. Put another way, Massara’s decision both impresses upon Rico his lack of control of things, which his notorious trigger-happiness aims to suppress from view (his own view and the view of others), and provides a model of such control that he dare not obliterate it. Put yet a third way, to kill his one-time close friend might mean Rico was also killing Rico.
     I am not discounting the sexual element either. Indeed, the casting of handsome 21-year-old Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in the role of Joe Massara underscores this element. It is simply the case that other elements of the Rico-Massara relationship contribute more fully and directly to the thematic aims and development of LeRoy’s film. (Fairbanks, incidentally, is excellent.)
     However, there is an obvious connection between the glimmers of Rico’s repressed homosexuality that the film provides and the film’s larger themes. It corresponds to the “rugged” in “rugged individualism” for which Rico strives. When he learns of Massara’s desire to become a dancer, Rico calls him a “sissy.” The number of notches in Rico’s belt, so to speak, shows how tough Rico is; he himself denounces “softness” in others. In short (or hard and long), LeRoy’s film implies that the American male pursuit of rugged individualism is, at root, an attempt to deny or cover up either homosexual inclinations or male anxiety over the existence of such inclinations. Indeed, this connection helps unify the film thematically.
     Apart from Robinson and Fairbanks, LeRoy’s film isn’t acted well; to accommodate the microphones of the day, most of the actors speak so slowly that their performances are studied and stiff. On the other hand, this helps Robinson’s rapid-fire manner of speaking, honed on stage, to rip through both the other voices and the film’s silences. Rico’s final moment—the film’s penultimate scene—is heart-piercing. Expiring, Rico delivers his famous utterance: “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?” Although the question is marvelously ambiguous (is Rico referring to the end of his life or the location, a gutter?), the answer he receives is almost instantaneous. It is because of his final words, I suppose, that some have characterized Rico as a tragic hero. He is not this, of course—not in any Aristotelian or even Shakespearean sense. Rather, he is closer to the modern anti-hero. Rico is a riveting monster, and the primitive nature of LeRoy’s film suits him to a tee.

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MIRAGE (Svetozar Ristovski, 2004)

“Hope is the worst evil, for it prolongs the torment of man.” — Nietzsche

Directed by Svetozar Ristovski from a script by him and Grace Lea Troje, Iluzija is a sober, serious although largely predictable and dull film from Macedonia despite flashes of deadpan humor. Its protagonist is a pre-teen boy, Marko, who is bullied by his older sister, Fanny, at home and by vicious classroom peers who resent his high intelligence (with grades to match) and the fact he is their Bosnian teacher’s “pet” in Macedonian class. Marko’s mother, who is abused by her husband, Marko’s father, is uninterested in either her son’s academic record or the poetry he writes. Meanwhile, Lazo, the husband and father is in a deeper rut than usual; out on strike from the factory where he works, he principally occupies himself with getting drunk every day. His attitude toward his son, drunk or sober, remains warm and paternal; but this serves to make wife and daughter feel even more estranged from Marko. Marko’s teacher praises his poems and encourages him to enter a competition that would take him to Paris if he should win. (”What is life without hope?” he rhetorically asks.) The patriotic poem that Marko writes as a “test,” for an Independence Day celebration, turns out to be something that the teacher disparages and rejects. “You should be ashamed of yourself!” he tells Marko, throwing the poem into his face. Meanwhile, Marko has attached himself to another surrogate father or “big brother”: “Paris,” a gun-toting thief, who gives Marko false hope that he will take Marko with him when he leaves for Paris. Paris, though, leaves without Marko, leaving behind something else: a gun.
     Adorable Marko Kovacevic gives an astute, sensitive performance as Marko; his transformation from a shy, quiet boy into a cold-blooded killer is more believable, almost, than we want it to be. Contributing to this outcome in Veles, the town where the action is set, are regional conflict and the town’s current occupation by NATO “peacekeepers.” So much that is out of his control is driving Marko’s life to its dead-end.
     I am not going to get into that parlor game where reviewers aim to decipher whether Paris is real or imaginary; the gun certainly seems real. His counsel, note, is the antithesis of what the teacher tells Marko: “Even the finest flower comes to stink in the sewer.” However, better than the dialogue that Paris spews are the images we associate him with. In Veles a transient, Paris is holed up in an abandoned car in the
“train graveyard.” Indeed, a visual refrain in the film consists of forlorn shots of train tracks going nowhere. It is noted that trains pass through town without ever stopping. It is possible, if Paris exists, that he would not have been able to take Marko along with him.
     Shorn of his opposite-image surrogate fathers, Marko can claim only one authentic father: Lazo. With his son by his side as they walked home down along the train tracks, Lazo told him: “Marko, you can be whatever you want in life; but just don’t be a rat.” Ordered to name names once he is the only student who is caught after he has been impressed into joining others in committing vandalism after-hours in a school building, even though his capture is the result of the others’ having locked him in a burning room, Marko heeds his father and “rats out” no one. Is it possible that hope is not the only “illusion” to which the title refers? There is the possibility of Paris, of course; but what of the murder that Marko commits? Perhaps that, too, is an illusion—compensation for a life that appears to be without hope.
      Vlado Jovanovski is good as Laso; an hilarious moment arrives when Marko asks him if he also wrote poetry as a boy and he responds with something betwixt a grunt and a sigh, as if he is thinking, “Lord, is this really a son of mine?” It is my favorite bit in the film.

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CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER (Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, 1961)

This monumental film by anthropological documentarian Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, Chronique d’un été (Paris 1960), marks the invention of cinéma vérité, the name given it by Rouch. An unconcealed “living camera,” “a highly portable lightweight camera connected to a synchronized sound recorder” (Sadoul), was used by the cameraman accompanying an interviewer who asked random Parisians in the street in the summer of 1960 a simple question: “Are you happy?” This was during the last years of colonial France’s participation in the Algerian War.
     Rouch’s film, then, was plain, unvarnished truth—except that the field of documentary, on that score, has been riddled with ambiguity from the point of inception. An interviewee, for instance, may be subsequently shown in his or her life, in his or her rooms, and the degree to which these episodes are staged, or partially staged, isn’t disclosed. Indeed, even in the absence of overt staging, the visible camera itself draws the individual whom it has followed into a selfconscious, or semi-selfconscious, performance—a considered confessional, or the viewable reënactment of what is ordinarily a privately pursued activity. Moreover, the candid conversations between Rouch and Morin that frame the film: done in front of the camera, to what extent are these also “performances,” in these instances, by the filmmakers themselves? The film opens with the sound of a siren: a warning, perhaps, that we the audience should be wary of whatever that follows that purports to be “the truth.”
     The question itself, “Are you happy?” turns out to be ambiguous. What after all constitutes “happiness”? The response “more or less” suggests the incapacity of some people to commit themselves to the certification of their own misery or happiness. One woman expresses outright her perplexity at the question, finally answering it evasively, “I’m happily married”—a ready cliché that almost invites us to discount its accuracy by its insistence on something that the interviewer in no way intended to challenge. Of course, hers is also a time-capsule utterance: the studied remark of a woman insufficiently liberated to gauge her own happiness apart from the current stability of her marital union, that is to say, her ardent hope for her husband’s happiness.
     Another interviewee is a laborer at the (now defunct) Renault automobile factory. His remarks are penetrating; he works, he says, 24 hours a day. Only nine hours are spent daily at the factory, but even his sleeping time, by readying him for the next day’s work, is work-centered and -determined. On the patch of ground outside his and his mother’s small house, he performs an after-work ritual of kickboxing practice: a letting-loose. Later, we learn that his participation in the film has cost him his job.
     The initial interviewer that we see is none other than Marceline Loridan, in time a filmmaker herself, here, a few years before uniting with Joris Ivens, and seventeen years before their marrying. Perhaps the most stunning moment in the film occurs when an interviewee, in a sit-down session with her, the filmmakers and others, refers to the woman he tried having a sexual relationship with, and Loridan confesses to being that woman. While she discloses some of her own personal history, the camera lights on the number from Auschwitz tattooed on her arm. Born Rosenberg, Marceline has an impossible time with the question of her own happiness: glad to be alive, she must remain burdened by the extermination of her parents. At one point, emotion floods her heretofore neutral, composed (and wonderfully Jewish) face. Later, she resists the claim she had become theatrical, surmising that she was “reliving” her past instead. Indeed, is there any certain point of “truth” in such a convolution and complex of loss, pain and survival?
     I left this brilliant, irreplaceable film knowing I might flash back to it each time I visited, or revisited, one of Loridan Ivens’s films. I will likely therefore remain under its spell.

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EVEN THE RAIN (Icíar Bollaín, 2010)

Paul Laverty took aim at globalization, comparing it to European conquests of the New World, in his partially successful script for También la lluvia, from Spain, Mexico and France; but Icíar Bollaín’s labored, unimaginative direction added nothing to this, resulting in a sour, schematic film. There are so many valuable anti-globalization films available for viewing—and, tellingly, no existing film in favor of globalization*—that I see no reason to recommend it despite its basis in actuality.
      También la lluvia belongs to the genre of movies about the making of movies. A Spanish director, producer and crew have come to Cochabamba, Bolivia, to take advantage of drastically less expensive actors, extras and other costs than they would find at home. Their film is a period-piece about Columbus’s Spanish invasion and oppression of the natives five hundred years earlier; but their own rerun of the same old exploitation, this time without the rationalization of Christianity, eludes them.
     As it happens, a local laborer who has been hired to play an important role in the film-within-the-film, a young indigent, plays a lead role in protests that erupt due to the privatization of regional water resources, which would require inhabitants to pay for the water that Nature provides, even rainwater. The demonstrations are brutally put down. All this occurred in 2000, in Cochabamba, as it happens, after a U.S. corporation, Bechtel, bought the water supply from the Bolivian government. In the end, the Bolivian people, winning out, resumed their rights to well-water and the rain.
     A sentimental plot involving the alleged political enlightenment of the heartless producer is close to ridiculous. Luis Tosar is too broad an actor to engineer so delicate a transformation. Gael García Bernal does better with the simpler role of the director.

* as far as I know

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SUMMER LIGHT (Jean Grémillon, 1943)

Given the title, the enrobing irony is that Lumière d’été is so dark. Much of it unfolds at night, including two major passages outdoors, and the electric light doesn’t work in her room at the mountain resort hotel, The Guardian Angel, where Michèle has just arrived. Initially, this is comical. Michèle is expecting to be joined by Roland; when Julien enters the room by mistake, she kisses him, presuming in the dark that he is her lover. Something else in the lightless room, a vase of sunflowers, completes the joke. By the end of the film, however, the darkness resonates with symbolism about which there is nothing funny.
     Written by Jacques Prévert and Pierre Laroche, and brilliantly directed by Jean Grémillon, Lumière d’été revolves around Michèle, whom Roland, drunk, tells that he doesn’t love her enough, that he loves himself more, and that she should leave him for her own sake. Also at the hotel is Patrice, owner Cri-Cri’s bored lover, who instantly falls for Michèle as a lifeline out of his current relationship. (Note how Cri-Cri arranges for Patrice to see the old news clipping she keeps of Patrice’s wife’s “accidental” shooting death—a hint to us what has kept Patrice at Cri-Cri’s side for so long.) Roland, a self-pitying, narcissistic painter (Pierre Brasseur, at full steam), and Patrice, a piece of upper crust who fetishizes guns, are both ten to fifteen years older than Michèle; Julien, a salt-of-the-earth working-class youth, is much the same age as she. Class-contrast is an important element of the film, and a dynamic passage shows the crew of laborers to which Julien belongs hard and intricately at work at night constructing a dam. Unlike indolent, decadent Patrice, these men are active and vital. (An equally dynamic, parallel although contrasting set-piece shows a costume ball, its participants at fastidious play rather than work and modeling themselves on the past rather than building part of the future.) Julien instantly falls in love with Michèle, and the couple they become offers hope for France’s future.
     What is the symbolism of the darkness, which the “light of summer” throws into relief? The Occupation of France, of course, and the similar fate immersing in shadow most of the rest of Europe. Grémillon has made a brave and gripping film, a truly stupendous piece of work watching which stirs the heart afresh in the direction of a hopefully liberated France.

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