OH! WHAT A LOVELY WAR (Richard Attenborough, 1969)

This elephantine, star-studded production, based on Joan Littlewood’s theatrical series of satirical antiwar sketches, was actor Richard Attenborough’s official directorial debut. Despite its best film Golden Globe, Oh! What a Lovely War is sufficiently shallow and obtuse that Littlewood had her name removed from the credits. It is a soulless, insufferable, bloated thing.
     A lavish, decorative period piece, it is set during the outbreak and the course of the First World War, but actually takes aim at the Vietnam War, in which Britain was currently involved. The governing metaphor is war as a gigantic game at an amusement park, which Everyfamily—the Smiths—journeys through. Throughout, (now) nostalgic songs arise, culminating in a wide-angle shot of a vast Christian graveyard accompanied by an unseen immemorial chorus: “ . . . and when they ask us how wonderful it was,/ they’ll never believe us,/ they’ll never believe us . . .”
     There is no reason why such material should not have yielded an admirable result; but Attenborough’s infantile compulsion to inflate everything squeezes out all trace of feeling except the bogus affect of sentimentality. Attenborough was Spielberg before Spielberg was Spielberg.
     The British Academy awarded a gratifying prize to Gerry Turpin for his limpid, lovely color cinematography—and a perplexing one to Laurence Olivier for a cameo he might have been tossing off in his sleep. Perhaps Vanessa Redgrave comes off best, fleetingly, as a spirited feminist.

THE TROJAN WOMEN (Mihalis Kakogiannis, 1971)

Resonating in its own time as an indictment of the ugly, brutal U.S. intervention in Vietnam, The Trojan Women is Greek filmmaker Mihalis Kakogiannis/Michael Cacoyannis’s faithful rendering of Euripedes’ play about the aftermath of the fall of Troy into Greek hands—from the perspective of the ruined city’s women, who are led by Queen Hecuba, now all of them headed from rage, loss and grief into slavery.
     Indeed, Hecuba herself embodies the loss that war inflicts, having lost both her husband, Priam, and their sons (“I saw them fall under Greek spears”), as well as their daughters insofar as both have been (differently) compromised by becoming spoils of war. Additionally, Hecuba loses her grandson, a little boy from whom the Greeks fear retribution if he is allowed to live and grow up. This is the son of Hector and Andromache.
     Katharine Hepburn (best actress, Kansas City critics) is magnificent as Hecuba, projecting outrage, fierce grief, and massive dignity. This performance towers over the mediocre ones which brought Hepburn Oscars in the 1960s, each in a dreadful, stupid eyesore: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer, 1967); The Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey, 1968). Although certainly better (thanks mostly to Euripedes; Kakogiannis has used the Edith Hamilton translation) (Hecuba: “The ways of Fate are the ways of the wind”), neither is The Trojan Women an especially good film; for one thing, Kakogiannis fails to bring it to any sort of life. For the most part, his film is stiff and stilted, with inserted bits of flourish—Kakogiannis himself edited—that strain for effect, such as the subjective shot of the child’s drop to his death from a cliff from the perspective of the Greek messenger who has administered, by order, the fatal push.
     Irene Papas (best actress, National Board of Review) plays Helen of Troy, who incited the war that has cost other Trojans so dearly; it is a small, unpleasant role.
     It is Hecuba who articulates a theme that echoes throughout ancient Greek tragedy: “Count no man happy, however fortunate, before he dies”—for there is still time for a downward reversal. The same is true for a woman. Hecuba’s farewell utterance: “Carry me on to the new day of slavery.”
     Thus ends one of Hepburn’s strongest performances.

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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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ISADORA (Karel Reisz, 1968)

Despite the persistent efforts of choreographer Litz Pisk and herself, Vanessa Redgrave never does convince as a dancer, let alone the goddess of modern dance, Isadora Duncan. Otherwise, Redgrave (best actress, Cannes, National Society of Film Critics) is vivid, indeed vibrant, though at times, with Isadora’s free socialist spirit shoehorned into a broad American accent, she appears on the verge of Auntie Mamery. Redgrave is colorful, extravagant, borderline outrageous; because of Duncan’s loss of two children in an automobile accident that never ceases to circulate in her mind, moreover, Redgrave begins creating her own artistic signature: roles haunted by inconsolable loss.
     Drawing upon Duncan’s autobiography and Sewell Stokes’s biography, midwived by Melvyn Bragg and Clive Exton’s script, with additional dialogue by Margaret Drabble, Karel Reisz’s appealing, musically rich film uses a framing device that repeatedly pops up throughout, converting the frame into a motif—and a pertinent one, since an aging Isadora, with the help of an assistant, is attempting to piece together her life for the autobiography she is writing. Her memories come in bits and pieces, and not at all chronologically; it is her life as she lived it and something else: something monstrously legendary. Can she make sense of it? Duncan recalls various loves to hide from view flickers of the children the loss of whom continues to strangle her. What difference the series of men who came and went? It is a mockery of herself as an inspirational model that Isadora Duncan should lose children to fate.
     Writing Ma vie gives Duncan a toehold in life; but it’s a pinkie toe. Her last romance is with the stranger in the Bugatti, who nearly runs her over and, finally, strangles her with speed and her own scarf. He is the Angel of Death.

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THE PLEDGE (Sean Penn, 2001)

In The Pledge Jack Nicholson gives a brilliant performance, perhaps his finest, as Jerry Black, a retired Nevada police detective who can’t let go of a case, the murder of an 8-year-old girl, ostensibly because of his promise to her mother that he would find the killer. Sean Penn’s eerie, at times terrifying thriller is based on Swiss author Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s same-titled novel (Das Versprechen), which earlier had been made as a procedural by filmmaker Ladislao Vajda: Es geschah am hellichten Tage (1958), to whose script Dürrenmatt contributed. Penn’s relocation of the Swiss material is largely successful; the many changes wrought by scenarists Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski help Penn explore what he plainly regards as a sick American society. He makes a convincing case.
     In truth, Black’s pursuit of the killer is more complexly motivated than it appears, echoing Tennyson’s Ulysses: “How dull it is to pause, to make an end,/ To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!” His former colleagues are convinced that the actual killer is Toby Jay Wadenah, a former rapist, who committed suicide after confessing to the crime; but we agree with Black that the police interrogator himself convinced this suspect of his guilt.* Black has thus become a figure of ridicule; and haunted, ego-collapsing and increasingly deluded, he blurs the line between himself and the criminal he seeks by allowing an 8-year-old girl he presumably loves to become the next target for the killer he knows is still out there. Penn, therefore, attacks the police for two different mindsets, one that is blind to the effects of their vicious tactics, and the other that is expert enough to see the truth but, pursuing this more for the sake of their own ego than for justice, ends up fragile and lost in the convolutions of their own mental stress. Moreover, Penn intends a wider reference: the humiliated, discounted American working class. The actual killer, it turns out, also belongs to this.
     There are effective cameos by Vanessa Redgrave, Helen Mirren, Lois Smith, Michael O’Keefe and Mickey Rourke; but Aaron Eckart as Stan, Black’s hotshot replacement and police adversary, and Benicio Del Toro as Wadenah are dreadful beyond measure.

* We are sure from the start that Wadenah is innocent because of Penn’s treatment of his flight across the landscape, which a schoolboy witnesses and reports as guilty behavior. This is the main reason why Wadenah is considered a suspect, arrested and interrogated. But after he investigates the scene and sees the younger child’s bloody corpse, the boy responds in exactly the same way; he also tears through the snow as though in flight. This visual identification of the suspect with the innocent witness is a perfect way for Penn to establish the suspect’s innocence, no matter his eventual confession. Before interrogating him, Stan brags he will get Wadenah to confess in record time—and he does.

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