A WALK WITH LOVE AND DEATH (John Huston, 1969)

Although he eventually directed her to a richly deserved Oscar for her sly, manipulative Maerose in the satirical crime comedy Prizzi’s Honor (1985), John Huston openly regretted starring teenaged daughter Anjelica, in A Walk with Love and Death, too early. In the face of the largely derisive notices Anjelica received, the elder Huston felt guilt. As it happens, Anjelica Huston was “ready,” giving an outstanding performance—proud, sensitive, volatile—as Lady Claudia, a 14th-century aristocrat who falls in love with a student during the Hundred Years War.
     The protagonist of this anti-war film is really the boy, Heron du Fois, who abandons his studies to trek across France to the sea, which he longs to see for the first time. He thus traverses a war-torn, corpse-strewn landscape, during which he meets Claudia, all but falls in love with her on the spot, wears her protective blue scarf, leaves, and then furiously rides back on a white horse he has bought upon hearing that the castle of Claudia’s father has been burned down by revolting peasants. It turns out that Claudia has survived. The pair join fragile forces. Huston had telescoped their single fate in the film’s preface: “In the 14th Century, England and France were engaged in a war that would last a hundred years. Claudia and Heron were born after the war began, and would die before it ended. . . .” The penultimate shot shows the lovers clinging to each other as their death approaches—a scene rendered especially poignant by the brief first and last use of Heron’s voiceover narration. Dale Wasserman adapted Hans Koningsberger’s 1961 novel.
     How successfully Huston’s medieval drama reflects the U.S. trauma in and over Vietnam in the sixties is subject to debate. It is a pity that his initially strong, sardonic film grows slack, peters out.
     Assaf (Assi) Dayan, son of Moshe, at the time Israel’s defense minister, is adequate as Heron.
     Georges Delerue’s music haunts.

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LE CHAT (Pierre Granier-Deferre, 1971)

Julien and Clémence Bouin live at the end of what had once been a pretty street in Courbevoie, a Paris suburb. The retired couple, a former typesetter and an acrobat, hardly speak to each other, eat separate meals, sleep in separate beds; Clémence wonders whether it is her pronounced limp, the result of a circus accident, that accounts for Julien’s coldness. She recalls moments when they were young and in love.
     Well, maybe they still are, beneath contemptuous façades. From Georges Simenon’s novel Pierre Granier-Deferre has made a superlative film. What is The Cat about? That depends on how one interprets the demolition that noisily attends to the Bouins’ dilapidated neighborhood, where sterile high-rises nearby have replaced trees, and Julien worries that boys in the street will harm his beloved cat once Clémence, jealous, has let him out. If all one sees is the projection of an elderly couple’s antagonism, the film isn’t about much; but if one sees instead the passing of a grace and a humanity from France, indeed, from the Western world, the film is monumental—and nearly intolerably moving. Julien is the way he is, the film suggests, because the world he knew and felt comfortable in, along with his youth, has crumbled.
     Granier-Deferre relegates to the right proportion the wrecking ball’s assaults and, indoors, provides stunning closeups of Julien’s pet, a silent, curious witness to the distressing marital battles that will cost him his life.
     Jean Gabin and Simone Signoret both won acting prizes at Berlin for their work here. Signoret’s Clémence, one of the “walking wounded,” comes uncomfortably close to suggesting Joan Crawford, but Granier-Deferre scores a visual coup with a cut from the cat’s eyes to Signoret’s catlike eyes. Meanwhile, Gabin is phenomenal as Julien—shrewd, lively, heartrending.

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THE WEDDING NIGHT (King Vidor, 1935)

Three very good performances from Gary Cooper, Helen Vinson and Ralph Bellamy spark The Wedding Night, an affecting early production code-era drama for which King Vidor won the directorial prize at Venice. Edith Fitzgerald’s script, from a story by Edwin H. Knopf, revolves around Tony Barrett (Cooper), a young writer whose successful first novel has seduced him into a glittery, dipsomaniacal lifestyle and buried him in debt. After his publisher rejects his latest novel, which he himself has branded as “tripe,” Tony and Dora, his spendthrift wife (Vinson), retreat from Manhattan to their country home in Connecticut. The possibility arises for Tony to make some money by selling his land, but he opts instead to write a novel about a Polish immigrant farm girl, Manya, whose beguiling simplicity and straightforward nature have rekindled in his heart the will to live and to write seriously again. Tony at least thinks he is in love with Manya, who certainly falls in love with him; but we note something on his part that may bound beyond the parameters of romantic love: the manipulation of reality to create an energizing “plot” with himself at the center. Tony’s self-resurrection, in which God has been denied all participation, includes sobriety but which necessarily endangers his marriage. Indeed, two marriages may fall since Manya, in exchange for dowry, is due to marry Fredrik Sobieski (Bellamy). The match has been arranged by Manya’s father, who has thus brought the Old World with him into the New, and Fredrik is of the same traditional stripe. It is meaningless to both Fredrik and Manya’s father that Manya is not in love with Fredrik. In their eyes, she is Polish and will do as she is told. However, Tony’s attention and affection have crystallized her intent to be American in reality, not in name only. When Fredrik, drunk, grows fiendishly jealous on their wedding night, tragedy results from the collision of the old and the new.
     Often this film is dismissed even by Vidorians who fail to grasp its thematic depth and potent ironies—this, despite a truly remarkable passage. At the celebration following Manya’s wedding ceremony, when Tony intrudes, Fredrik cuts short Tony and Manya’s dance and proceeds to impress Manya into their own dance. “This is my property!” Fredrik is announcing to Tony, and to Manya also, and to himself. People as property: powerful stuff.
     Of course, the film is infamously wobbled by Anna Sten’s stilted, unconvincing performance as Manya. For the third time, producer Samuel Goldwyn attempted to make the Russian Sten a foreign-born Hollywood star along the captivating lines of M-G-M’s Garbo and Paramount’s Dietrich. The public still didn’t take to her. Goldwyn then turned his attentions to another untalented actress who proved much more successful: the exotic, (unpublicized) biracial Merle Oberon.

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THE KARAMAZOVS (Petr Zelenka, 2008)

Sigmund Freud, no less, considered Dostoievski’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) the greatest novel ever written; and, while numerous books and essays of his refer to it, it is a focus of his 1928 article “Dostoievski and Parricide,” and his speculative masterpiece about the origin of culture, Totem and Taboo (1913), reeks of it. Modeled on Dostoievski’s own father, the novel’s Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is more than a monstrous father; rather, he is Father-as-Monster, implicating various forms of patriarchal tyranny. In Kamarazovi, the initially striking film adaptation from the Czech Republic, the four sons, by defining themselves in reaction to their father, express filmmaker Petr Zelenka’s disenchantment with democracy, a political system whose myth opposes patriarchal tyranny but whose reality reconfigures this and is all the worse for hiding its patriarchal roots. The three “democratized” countries involved—Russia, the Czech Republic, Poland—suggest the scope of the living stage of Zelenka’s political disillusionment despite all absence of nostalgia for Communist rule. A theatrical troupe from Prague has traveled to Krakow to rehearse Evald Schorm’s updated stage version of the novel inside a steel factory. (If we count Germany, which once owned and operated the factory, we have as many democratized countries implicated in the setting and action as Fyodor Pavlovich has sons.) Throughout rehearsals, the tensions among actors and the director reflect the turbulence of the novel and the play, and life and art spill over into each other. Finally, the sound of an actual discharged bullet rips through the factory; outside, a bloody corpse lies on the rain-puddled ground. The film concludes with a grim, gray long-shot in which troupe members are scattered within the frame. They are walking away from the factory; but where are they headed? Democracy has delivered no future for anyone.

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THE INDIAN TOMB (Joe May, 1921)

Fritz Lang intended to direct this film. He helped Thea von Harbou write the script, which was based on her 1917 novella. In 1922, Lang and Harbou married. (The marriage lasted until Harbou joined the Nazi Party and Lang fled Germany, eventually settling in the U.S.) The 3½-hour, two-part lavish adventure in India (filmed in Germany), Das indische Grabmal erster Teil—Die Sendung des Yoghi and Das indische Grabmal zweiter Teil—Der Tiger von Eschnapur, ended up being directed by Joe May, who had pleaded Lang’s inexperience to the studio. Lang, though, returned to the material, filming his own version in the late 1950s.
     The Maharajah of Bengal plans on entombing alive his unfaithful wife; he has a yogi bring over from England an architect to design the tomb—a point of interest, since the wife’s lover, whom the Maharajah has imprisoned, is a British officer. The Maharajah is thus also taking revenge against British colonialism, but little of this irony, apparently, survived May’s superficial treatment of the material.
     I say “apparently” because I stopped watching this maddeningly boring movie after the first part. It is nothing but visual storytelling—bastard cinema. A good many visual devices are applied, but they are decoratively rather than expressively used. May’s fixed camera never becomes a stabilizing coordinate in tandem with fabulous imagery, as happens in Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924). There are okay moments—for instance, the willed disembodied hand of the yogi traversing the study and confiscating a letter, which the architect has left behind for his fiancée, before she can discover and read it; but these offer only the faintest resistance to the film’s sluggish pace and turgid melodrama. The lepers, the tigers—the sickly and the exotic stuff: none of this leaps to life.

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