It's All True!: September 2012

King Lear
USSR, 1971
Directed by Grigori Kozintsev

Russia, from another movie

Awesome. Everything attains real magnitude, while nothing is remotely inflated. Everything is bold, but there’s not a misstep to be seen. The setting is monumental, the cinematography is equal to it. The set pieces—the division of property, the first confrontation with the infidel daughters, the moor, the reconciliation, that appalling conclusion—are thunderous, but every small thing is exquisitely turned, and in its own way equal. Performances! Soviet subtext? There are lots of displaced serfs, and the king’s discovery of his complicity is quite pointed. But it is in the text, isn’t it? You regret the cuts, but not really for completist or purist reasons. Sure there are lacunae, but it’s more that every cut means that much less of this film. Awesome.

http://www.facetsdvd.com/product-p/dv86929.htm

The Hand

Czechoslovakia, 1965

Directed by Jiří Trnka

Think, first, of what you know about this place, at this time in history. That’s what this film is about. But because it’s not only timely, but timeless (cf. Hugh Nibley, 1978), then there’s also much more to it than just this particular regime, or that impending tragedy. Trnka’s work functions as pointed parable or as nightmare, the latter adding dire uncertainty to the former, the former adding dread practicality or even inevitability to the latter. His Everyman figure looks like a consumptive Pierrot—it’s Chaplin’s Tramp, whisked forward into a dire, blasted modernity, split between Kafka and Beckett.

Comparisons are helpful, and they are apt, but the work itself doesn’t really need them. If you don’t know the specifics, then you’ll still feel a powerful, more unspecified chill. The execution of this thing! The way that eponymous, unrelenting hand slips glancingly in, like sin or the velvet glove over the iron fist. That marionette/flight section is a thing of terrible beauty. The conclusion is terrible, terminal. The regime will have its way, or the absurd cruelty that stands as the only alternative to murderous regimes will have its way. Then they’ll twist it all around to their ends anyway. I guess Trnka never made another film! What more was there to say?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7-EO0f1G_E

The auteur

The Running Jumping & Standing Still Film

UK, 1960
Directed by Richard Lester and Peter Sellers
Written by Richard Lester, Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan

This is silly, eventually quite genially so, and it establishes director Richard Lester’s unique combination of qualities right from the get-go. He’s very friendly, and he’s formally aware to the point of being formally adventurous. That sounds a lot like Jacques Tati, and though Lester is a less stratospheric filmmaker (working in an altogether different context), the comparison is apt. Speaking of silly ambition, you can sense the Pythons in the wings, though they’ll eventually go in very different directions.

The settings here are very bleak. They are craftily (ironically?) balanced by jaunty music and insistent birdsong. Lester is leading with sound, even this far back. Some of the jokes are a bit larking-with-your-friends indulgent, but there’s always an interesting sense of space, and of relationships between spaces. The record player joke is fine, and its second theme, there in the background of the shot, is also the shape of things to come. The last gag, with the beckoning finger and that guy coming in from way back there, is superb, and quite properly celebrated. Space, duration, and cartoon silliness/violence.

Juggernaut

UK, 1974
Directed by Richard Lester
Starring Richard Harris and Omar Sharif

This looks a lot better than most of the other big disaster movies of the period. It’s missing what at the time seemed like gloss and flash and spectacle. In fact it kind of feels like a disaster movie made by Robert Altman—compounded plot, obscured views, stacked images and soundtracks. Oh wait—Lester was doing all of that even before Altman showed up. Here, contained in this one production, is the paradox of one of film’s more interesting careers—they’ll ask him to take over Superman II, for spectacle's (and profit's!) sake. And yet, if we look over the whole oeuvre, we’ll find the consistent craft/versatility/profundity of a pretty remarkable, estimable aesthetic. What would he have done or been in the old studio system?

Back to the film. The vessel at the drama's centre may actually be the British Ship of State, or maybe the site of a pretty well articulated battle between corporate interest and corporate integrity, with politics and the spectre of (impending) Thatcherism lurking round the corner. Or, it’s a great big spectacle made up of sharply observed and well integrated components, characters and incidents all well balanced and leading to a conflict, crisis and conclusion with some heft and meaning to them. There’s even a bit of Howard Hawks, unfussily celebrating the hard work that hard men do, and the squint-eyed, crow’s-footed regard that naturally emerges out of the process. Not just the heroes are involved, but the cops too, and even, a little bit, the culprit. When you look closely, though this isn’t Hawksian in that regard, the women are empathetically included as well. This is probably something of a job of work for most of the people involved, but the work is very well done.

The Three Musketeers

US/UK, 1973
Produced by Ilya and Alexander Salkind
Directed by Richard Lester
Written by George MacDonald Fraser

More painterly than Renoir, and just as farcical and humane. More multi-planed and modernist than Altman, and so much more accessible. Very bawdy, not remotely vulgar. Full of comic virtuosity—not only compound gags, but compound gags compounded through the frame and across the cuts—but in the end its decency registers most. (Cf. the last exchange between Dartagnan and Buckingham). Decency is further evidenced by the scrupulous period recreations, meaning not only the usual appointments of costume and décor, but also the completely unnecessary elaboration of domestic, courtly and labour processes. (The washhouse/dyeing works!) Going the second mile: they cared enough to make it right, for the sake of the source, its period, the audience, their craft. It's moving, actually.

Dumas

The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge
US/UK, 1974
...

This brings Losey’s Don Giovanni to mind. The French decors, the various costumes—practically Sternbergian in their grand excess—the magnificent Spanish settings: ignore the story and turn the sound off and you’ll still be rewarded to the point of ravishment. Three Musketeers things still apply, obviously, since it’s all basically the same film. (Made by the same people, at the same time.) Lester’s staging is wonderful, as is the sound design. The film is saucy, even—Milady’s chamber—bawdy. But it’s bawdy according to august precedent, and human reality. Age and appropriateness: if I were young those things might linger and trouble. As it is they register and fall harmoniously into the whole Chaucerian tapestry.

Douglas Fairbanks in the 1921 version

Screenwriter Mr. MacDonald Fraser is channeling Dumas, of course, but also introducing some of his own mordant wit. (Cf. his surpassingly cynical and accomplished series of Flashman novels.) This means that there’s velocity and hi-jinx, but also that things get dark, even bitter. We have intimations of mortality, a hint of how high spirits seem inevitably to end in disappointment and sorrow. (Have fun watching it with the kids, and then mention to them why fidelity and circumspection might really be the best way after all.) That breakfast on the battlement sequence features some really nice derring-do, but behind it, and with the gentle and suggestive introduction of the Protestant stuff, is a sense of factional and historical intractability.

Similarly, the fighting starts out as a combination of acrobatic and comic. Then it evolves, and darkly: from fun (the battle on the ice is good knockabout) it moves to desperation, then ends in actual savagery. The battle at the convent ends in a terrible conflagration, one that feels like more than just local or particular. And finally we get to the deaths. And what deaths! This isn’t just violence, but cathartic violence. In its own PG way Milady’s dismantling of the Puritan warder rises to de Laclos/Dangerous Liaisons-like levels. And because we feel for the culprit, as well as for the victim, the subsequent assassination of Buckingham is positively fearsome, pitiable. Awkward, comical, erotical Raquel Welch gets strangled! Villainous Christopher Lee’s demise gives us no comfort, given the mighty, equalizing/humanizing struggle that precedes it. And however much she may deserve it—those close ups!—Faye Dunaway’s beheading is dreadful. Visually speaking the staging of the event is heartless. The reactions to the event are not. Again, this is politics, as in realpolitik, and the individual just scrambling to survive.

Machiavelli

The film's very conclusion is especially impressive. Richelieu/Heston—a superb creation/performance—represents another politically apt, practically Brechtian ideological observation. His last interview with Dartagnan really sums things up nicely. Ally, mis-ally, re-ally: in the end there is only to try to keep on your feet. For some that means dishonour, for others a Confucian rolling up of the sleeves. (In fact, the film also has a great deal of useful stuff to say about administration, administrative appointments, the grudges you might have, and how forgiving and forgetting is not just a principle for religious adherents or Socratic refusers.)

A lot of pointed, perceptive politics for such a blockbusting film. But the last impression we get is more moral than ideological, religious even. In the end the poignantly illiterate D’Artagnan—they’ve very gently distributed this fact all through the movie—tries to give his new commission to his friends. They refuse, but not just for chivalry's sake. Remember how much older they were, way back when all of this started? As combatants, they're finished, and they know it. They're not actually musketeers any longer. As the film ends we cut to that last Magnificent Seven tracking shot, and yet we perceive that this is not really the appropriate, or actual ending. Suddenly, after all the décolletage, this is Everyman having need of his soul, or Bunyan's Christian, crossing the river. The possible depths of the popular!

Bresson, 1950. "What does it matter? All is grace...

Robin and Marian

US/UK 1976

Written by James Goldman

Directed by Richard Lester

I'm afraid that I just find Audrey Hepburn to be overrated. Winsome and delicate and even exquisite—absolutely, obviously. And that's just as true now, in her middle age, as when she went on that Roman Holiday. (She's actually quite good in that one.) But beyond a certain range, or set of dramatic circumstances, you can really feel the strain. I can, anyway.

Excuse me. In addition to Audrey Hepburn, who is also very cool, there are some tremendous things going on in this film. The Crusade material is basically a straight, very effective parallel to the Pythons' Holy Grail argument. To make that argument they replace Errol Flynn and Ian Hunter (WB, 1938) with grit and grime, greed and villainy. Eventually, soon, the cinema will go unpleasantly too far with this—cf. Terry Gilliam's entire directorial output—but here they've got it just right: the celebrated and idealized thing was not actually worthy of celebration or idealization, and we double the lie when we say otherwise. Richard Harris's Lionheart is a pretty triumphant illustration of this idea. He's charismatic, all right, but he is also, finally, poisonous. His shocking demise is all sorts of good. Wielding power, charismatically and unrighteously to the very end.

Dumbledore, when he were a hooligan... (1963)

That’s just the prologue; the main body of the film, in design, conception and execution, is just as meaningful. (Plus, Audrey Hepburn.) Douglas Fairbanks larger-than-life is replaced by a small scale, melodrama with ambiguity and even humanity. The forest is small, and so are the nunnery, the town, the castle. Robert Shaw’s Sherriff is tremendous—knowing his place, knowing its limitations, doing his best to act decently within limits that really couldn’t have been surpassed, or even quite comprehended. That long fight is really good. It’s both an attempt at period authenticity and a reproof of Hollywood punch-ups. The main characters’ grudging, sort-of reconciliation is nicely paced and handled. So, I think, is its frank, unforced and easy carnality. Olivia de Havilland or Melanie Wilkes are one thing, but life was short, you slept in the same room with your parents, and all the animals were just outside, being agricultural. Also, Sean Connery is some actor!

The end of this film has real tragic heft, and a certain Tristan and Isolde-like, grandeur. Borzagian even, according to Dave Kehr. That's about right. The arrow!