SCRATCH any Hollywood film and you’ll probably find a skyscraper of complicated craftsmanship mounted on a plot that seems to be used simply from theatrical habit.
(The last year in new TV drama could be separated into three types of afflicted fiction: stories in which a wry, arbitrary ending replaces the usual denouement—much of Playhouse 90; thrillers which are impossible to follow because an enormous amount of climactic occurrence has been crammed into endless, sluggish, unvaried dialogue scenes—“Perry Mason,” “77 Sunset Strip”; message plays in which the big anti-something notion is sprung from a wild string of corny, pulpish incidents—any of the “award-winning” dramas of Rod Serling.)
Recent works of elder-statesman movie directors show that even they have changed to an anti-plot kick, placing their blue chips on secondary aspects of production, such as the beautiful silhouette made by an Army brigade riding across the Cinemascope horizon.
Alongside the old granite constructions that appear on TV’s “Late Show” under John Ford’s name, The Horse Soldiers is the disaster of the month, an uneventful canter in which Ford, without any plot to speak of, falls back on boyish Irish playfulness (played by a rigor-mortified John Wayne, an almost non-existent Bill Holden, and a new gnashing beauty named Connie Towers) to fill a several-million-dollar investment. The “comedy,” which includes Wayne’s troubles with a drunken top sergeant, a soldiering doctor and a captive Southern belle, is interspersed with Ford’s stolidly evolved, beefy, Rosa Bonheur-ish “pictures.” It all takes place on a plodding journey, which sends 1,700 Union cavalrymen into the Confederacy on what turns out to be an unsuccessful search for a screenplay.
In The Nun’s Story, Fred Zinnemann, the strong story-weaver of High Noon, barely squirts a romantic woman’s-magazine story between great slabs of educational footage, mostly of the prettily photographed regimen in a strict Belgium convent (brown-black-white harmonies, reminiscent of the more delectable Cubist paintings). When the plot turns up—corny scenes of a noble nursing nun (Audrey Hepburn) flunking an exam on orders, curing the Congo with a genius surgeon, working in the Belgium underground—Zinnemann reduces each heroism to kernel size and then resumes his tasteful but rather insipid documentation.
The anti-plot development is perhaps the final signpost in the decline of scenic-action story telling, the mode which started the movie madness and which, since the rise of the Orson Welles type of Lindy’s-Toots Shor intellectual, has been a dying parody of its original silent-screen self.
As yet, no one of D. W. Griffith’s stature has appeared with a substitute form. But there are always middlebrow rebels, usually from the neighborhood of the New School in Greenwich Village, with a technique that sneers at Hollywood practice, breaks records for grinding out hysterical boredom (The Goddess, Paths of Glory), and, unintentionally, looks like an antiquated version of the material which old silent directors left on the cutting-room floor.
The story of Middle of the Night—an elderly widower rejuvenating himself with a lost, neurotic tootsie—is exposed in the first shot, and the following two hours are an evasion consisting of Paddy Chayefsky’s intense interest in dialogue-character-idea clichés. Only two scenes are allowed to be played out instead of small talking the spectator into a visit to the pop-corn machine. And both scenes—a Poconos weekend tryst and a panting-around-the-apartment seduction—are crippled by a characteristic Chayefsky ploy, such as the extended one-note misery of an amateur drinker having a hangover. Assisting Chayefsky in his scorn for Hollywood’s old story-through-action technique, the director, Delbert Mann, does a clichéd grim realism with backgrounds, weather, faces. The two miscast leads, Fredric March and Kim Novak, are a sometimes effective but generally square approximation of garment district miserables.
That the plot has become a vestigial part of the screen practice is due at least partly to the fact that scenery and fast action are practically dead issues in the naturalistic film. There hasn’t been a convincing fight on the screen since the 1940 heyday of masculine directors. As for scenery, The Young Philadelphians is like a Ladies Home Journal illustration. The Five Pennies uses a noisy, tourist-y, musical comedy substitute for native scenery, and Pork Chop Hill offers another generalized nothing, without any feeling of a particular war, period or state. Given a dodging attitude on sets and action, it is to be expected that each film (the best being Five Pennies) turns into a dull fantasy in which the plot whirls around in a vacuum, free, foolish and unattached to anything except a memory of slick-magazine fiction.
July 6, 1959