THE obvious fact about any movie image is that it can be read for any type of decisive, encapsulating judgment. A library has been poeticized about Keaton’s diluted Sitting Bull face, the horizontal hat, and the rigid sags of his clothes, an automatic “personality” which fades from view as the real Keaton works inside the frozen “armor.” Regardless of the occasion, Keaton uses the tar drop eyes, the discouraged fish-mouth (held closed by an act of will) like a slot machine to make a viable situation out of whatever lemon turns up in the scene. Critics sentimentalize Keaton into a wish-fantasy of poetic comedy—superimposed upon what they cannot help observing. They thereby attempt, also, to separate this intensely pragmatic, though original, craftsman from the movies in which he appears, and from the kind of crass opportunism which these comedies, the best of them at that, represent.
Keaton, a re-enactment of the silent film era by a crude writer, is a joy to read when Rudi Blesh is setting the scene at Keaton’s studio, presenting a clown who is a clutter of versatility (bridge shark, third baseman, lover) and directly opposite to the deadpan artist eulogized in film books. This is a fabulous book, but, when Blesh starts analyzing the comedies as great laugh machines, the pages become stiff, hard to assimilate. Much of Keaton isn’t meant for laughs, and what has been said about his sad, motionless pantomime, the famous frozen kisser, now is irrelevant. The shingle face, at the rare times when Keaton uses it in place of his angled body, is used as an efficient florid syrup, an acting weapon much beloved by its owner.
Blesh’s images of these comedies as a roller coaster of energy, a machine gun of perfectly manipulated gags, doesn’t have anything to do with Keaton’s normal zigzag. Sherlock Jr. is a slow scroll, a coiling together of short movements in which Keaton’s native fixation on mechanics and slow-witted concern for his own talent works as a drooping agent on the action. The prefabricated Sennett slapstick, which may have been energetic before it became worked into automatic maneuvers by constant repetition, appears to be moving in slow halt-go rhythm; in fact, the pavane-like motion sometimes is standing still. The disappointment now produced by Keaton comes from the fact that there is no real victimization from the disasters. Also, this world that has breathtaking reality and nowness—Santa Monica in the 1920’s—is hardly touched by the action, which is faded, automatic, overdecided.
There is a dreadful notion in criticism that movies, to be digested by esthetes, must be turned from small difficulty into large assets and liabilities. James Agee, who always paid out tribute like a public-address system, is never precise, but his fastidious pricing of a Lauren Bacall gave the reader the secure feeling that Bacall could be banked at the nearest Chaste National.
Henry Fonda, during a recent run-through of his films in New York, doesn’t add up as “one hell of an actor” (as Bill Wellman declared in a Cinema Magazine interview), but he is interesting for unimportant tics: the fact that he never acts one-on-one with a coactor.
When Glenn Ford is a boneless, liquidy blur as a cowboy dancer in The Rounders, Fonda fields Ford’s act by doing a Stan Laurel, suggesting an oafish bag of bones in a hick foxtrot. Again, in The Lady Eve, Sturges kids this Fonda-ism of opposing his playmates in a scene: Fonda’s Hoppsy is a frozen hopsicle, a menace of clumsiness, while Eric Blore and Eugene Pallette are clever acting dervishes playing scintillating types.
Fonda’s defensiveness (he seems to be vouchsafing his emotion and talent to the audience in tiny blips) comes from having a supremely convex body and being too modest to exploit it. Fonda’s entry into a scene is that of a man walking backward, slanting himself away from the public eye. Once in a scene, the heavy jaw freezes, becomes like a concrete abutment, and he affects a clothes-hanger stance, no motion in either arm.
A good director must chop Fonda out from his competition: John Ford isolates Fonda for a great night scene in Young Mr. Lincoln, communing with himself on a Jew’s harp; there is another one, in The Ox-Bow Incident, where Fonda explodes into a geometrical violence that ends in a beautiful vertical stomping. Left on his own, Fonda gets taller and taller, as he freezes into a stoical Pilgrim, sullenly and prudishly withdrawing while he watches another actor (Lee Tracy in Best Man) have a ball.
Fonda’s man-against-himself act was noticeable in his first films during the 1930’s, when his twenty-year-old Tom Joad–Slim-Lincoln were aged into wizened, almost gnomelike old folks by an actor who keeps his own grace and talent light as possible in the role. During the 1940’s, in Daybreak and Ox-Bow, Fonda starts bearing down on the saintly stereotype with which writers strangled him. In a typical perversity, he edges into the bass-playing hero of Wrong Man with unlikable traits: nervousness that is like a fever, self-pity, a crushing guilt that makes him more untrustworthy than the movie’s criminal population. Almost any trait can be read into his later work. From Mr. Roberts onward, the heroic body is made to seem repellently beefy, thickened, and the saintliness of his role as an intelligent naval officer–candidate–President shakes apart at the edges with hauteur, lechery, selfishness.
The peculiar feature of these later Fonda performances, however, is that he defeats himself again by diminishing the hostility and meanness—so that they fail to make us forget the country-boy style in which they are framed.
In his best scenes, Fonda brings together positive and negative, a flickering precision and calculated athleticism mixed in with the mulish withdrawing. Telephoning the Russian premier, desperate over the possibility of an atomic war (Fail-Safe), Fonda does a kind of needle-threading with nothing. He makes himself felt against an indirectly conveyed wall of pressure, seeping into the scene in stiff, delayed archness and jointed phrasing—a great concrete construction slowly cracking, becoming dislodged. It is one of the weirdest tension-builders in film, and most of it is done with a constricted, inside-throat articulation and a robot movement so precise and dignified it is like watching a seventeen-foot pole vaulter get over the bar without wasting a motion or even using a pole.
Before it reaches its two strippers at midway point, The Rounders shows Fonda in urbane-buoyant stride, but, even a second-team bit player, Edgar Buchanan, outfences him during a funny exchange in which Fonda explains the name Howdy. Eugene Pallette (Lady Eve), a buoyant jelly bowl moving skyward as he goes downstairs, is a magical actor, and nothing in Fonda’s divested vocabulary is equipped to produce that kind of spring-water bubbling and freshness.
The decisive encapsulating opinion in movie reviews comes usually from reading a plot that is all but hidden by molecular acting and direction. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is an example of Kaleidoscopic Limited, an ordered mélange with not too many pieces but each of them colliding against its neighbor, and all of them hitting like flak into the famous Albee play. The most famous scene is an erotic nondance, which is neither erotic nor dancelike, in which Elizabeth Taylor suggests a gyrating milk-bottling mechanism. Part of the problem here is that the view is top-heavy, and, while her pinchy face and Orphan Annie hairdo are very noticeable, there is no feeling of fatness in action. All the little effects—the acorns in her cheeks, cushion bust, tiered neck—mitigate against the story idea that this is a Bitch Wife drawn to an impotent Science Boy.
That the all-important George name is screamed, belched, panted at a non-George shows once again that movies must not be read as stories. The mangled name (even Miss Taylor yowls or jowls it, seeming not to know who it belongs to) is never acted by its supposed owner, a cyclonic acting-machine named Richard Burton. Burton is pleasing, but the emerging character is not Albee’s, or Martha’s, George.
This is not to say that Burton, who is far ahead of his co-workers in this movie, doesn’t add up to intensely absorbing, complex terrain. Alongside the mushy Taylor performance, Burton is without self-consciousness as a drinker, and, unlike his wife, who moves like a three-dimensional playing card, he fills a scene with body, talk, face. Everything flows around Burton, though at no point is he a masochistic, mediocre ultimate in soft, ineffectual husbands.
Miss Taylor’s Martha is also a perfect example of the error in trying to surround a performance with an imprisoning judgment. The role has been castigated as crude, monotonous, prankish, but there are at least two scenes in Woolf where she’s close to humor and uses the fat lips and lines enclosing them to fill the screen with credible humanity. Her opening mimicry of Bette Davis reacting to a messed-up bedroom should become an unforgettable movie bit, probably because it suggests Burton’s mentoring. The bit involves the expression “Wha-ta dum–puh!” said with a complain-y, whine-y little girl effect in which Miss Taylor ends up handing you the puh sound in dump; Miss Davis, a blatant blend of Sophie Tucker and Eleanor Roosevelt, should be jealous. Miss Taylor is even more haunting later in the film, when, after sleeping with the visiting professor (George Segal), she suddenly starts using the kitchen as a workable locale. Moving from counter to fridge to sink, her hips become a hub around which the kitchen appears to be moving.
Shifting Albee’s play into a Warner Brothers movie brings on a curious ambivalence. There is a need to make every surface intensely touchable or realistic in the manner of every rackets-film photographed by James Wong Howe. At the same time, opposing this old Warners trick is an abstract theatricalizing, a negation of scene and scenery when the play moves outdoors and into non-scenes: yards without neighbors, streets without cars or people, and a juke joint without customers. Yet the surfaces are intensely specific as air, bark, skin—even moon surfaces. A movie about intellectuals, sophistication, high verbosity, rattles with images of blindness, papier-mâché settings out of children’s operetta, streets ridden with street lamps and blinking signs that don’t light, and people staring into these fake lights without seeing anything, à la Orphan Annie and her blank circle eyes.
Thus, the movie loses reality by disallowing terrain, but picks up interest when people are treated as terrain. The movie’s pivotal scene is a long monologue, Miss Taylor weaving back and forth, using the word “snap” to suggest the final disruption of her marriage. Her weavelike motion, the lights moving kaleidoscopically on her face, a hairdo like a great tangled bird’s nest—the whole effect is a forest of tangled nasoid speech and crafty motion that doesn’t record as talk, but makes insidious impact as shifting scenery.
October 1966
USING unrealistic dialogue, de-emphasized story line, and what often seems a mosaic of disconnected actions, foreign directors have arrived at an interesting station in which Scene is more important than plot or characters.
An early instance of this burrowing inside a scenic fragment: Antonioni’s Red Desert, a silly film in which there is a continual shift away from murky characterization to take advantage of the director’s suavity with color, his knack for suggesting decay-apathy-strain by doing a photographic doodling with stiffness and stillness in modern landscape. Antonioni’s message, his mordant feelings about the New Class, is always filtering into kinds of puffed-up color, scenery which seems to be pulled apart from inside by a highly abstract Mondrian-ish sensibility. A fruit vendor done in one melancholy gray tone, a whole town in wistful pinkishness, a toy man wheeling across a nursery floor and then the distraught mother looking toy-sized as she wanders around the same apartment.
Each of these moments shows a massive effort to squeeze a portentous effect out of decorative elements, while the characters and/or actors are left out in space. One of the unforgettable mistakes in modern films is the queer orgy (that never happens) inside a shanty, with its curious recall of a beautifully engineered scene in a shepherd’s hut during a rainstorm in L’Avventura. Using a documentary that is always Inside Landscape, Antonioni creates a vividly tactile feeling of modern hedonists almost glued to a dour island with its fantastic impact of air and spray. Then, in a weird turnabout, he makes the same drifting types appear to be embedded within a shack that is like a dark matchbox in the center of a terrifying vastness. The photography within this cramped hut is perfect both in terms of realistic space and the nearly lost moderns who wander in from all corners of the island.
In the repeat of this scene in Red Desert, Antonioni has abandoned story line, and is doing a sort of wishful esthetics in which the scene gets moved in arbitrary directions towards a hoped-for psychic tie or pictorial tic. Between L’Avventura and Red Desert, his characters—the new industrial rich—have been steadily losing will as an important part of their characters. In the slowed up action of the Red Desert shanty, the actors have a papery unreality while the walls, painted surfaces, and odd jumbling of people have almost human impact. Besides Monica Vitti (a toy: possessing neither will nor self-control), there is a non-acted husband and Richard Harris who dissolutely trails after both. Harris’s queer impact comes from the fact that his engineer’s personality is built out from the skin in haute monde elegance which includes an orange bob and, from having enormous shoulders atop inadequate legs, an odd weaving stance.
Thus, in removing the insides of characters, the foreign director has suddenly arrived, without realizing it, at a scene built mostly with the appurtenances of Chic. To understand this current flooding of High Fashion calls for a memory of The Gunfighter, a fine Western in which there is a deliberate severity, a turning away from all types of brocade in setting-camera-acting.
That movie gets all of its intellectual movement and subtlety from Gregory Peck’s miming of quiet self-knowledge, stoicism—the quality of a man standing absolutely straight while being depressed by a hopeless state of affairs. Any recent film from the European avant garde seems, by comparison, to be plunged in couture, the materials of the Handsome Life, and the feeling of de-brained characters happy to be wafting about in an atmosphere of constant diversion.
With its crawling pace, witless use of phallic symbols, and a shady treatment of French peasant women falling for an itinerant woodcutter, Mademoiselle is a visual nightmare rather than an entertainment.
Jeanne Moreau, a schoolteacher who is the prize citizen in a French village, is set on the road to madness by unrequited love for an Italian woodcutter. The problem—making this pyromaniac an interesting character—is dodged rather than solved. Supposed to be as deeply involved with country character as James Agee’s first book about itinerant farmers, the movie becomes a curious case of Hidden Chic. Miss Moreau’s sickness is dissolved by a painful repetition in which she seems to be magnetically pulled towards a series of mirrors in her bedroom. In front of triple mirrors, the actress does a slow motion version of her favorite movie technique: running her short fingers over a dry flattened mouth, using an eye pencil on her unseeing eyes, and, at those rare moments when she can draw herself away from her likeness, gazing fondly at the snappy items to be worn to the next fire-flood-poisoning.
Miss Moreau has one marathon lovemaking scene around the entire Correze countryside in which she occasionally seems to move (the big moment: an item Richardson picked up from Morgan in which the actress imitates a hound while her boyfriend makes the noises and gestures of a hunter). Otherwise, she creates statue effects: asleep in the woods, staring at a snake worn belt-fashion around her boyfriend’s waist. It is no wonder that Richardson must force his sound, dramatizing a scene that is often simply a block of dark-on-dark photography. Miss Moreau’s voice (an alienated sound that she achieves without moving her lips) appears to journey around room, wheatfields, before it registers and some of the phallic effects (an axe buried in lumber) seem to crash into a deadened film.
The lack of motion in Mademoiselle is brutally shown up by Claude Lelouch’s A Man and A Woman, with its marvelous tinted color, feeling for pace, and know-how about the racing car scene. A widow and widower keep getting in and out of a Ford Mustang as the rain pelts down; this repeated image forms the basis for a modern romance that suffers from cuteness and the feeling that the racing driver (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and his film studio friend (Anouk Aimée) are the less-than-charming people always seen away from jobs in the more dismal TV commercials.
The Kennedy influence asserts itself here through images that could have been taken out of an album from the family’s scenes of young lovers and their two children, long walks along gray beaches, endless stunning shots of Cape Cod sunsets, boating. Much of the Kennedy impact comes from Anouk Aimée’s self-assured, slightly frozen performance: a Jackie Kennedy appearance in which she wears a wistfully urbane smile and keeps raking at her dark hair with a model’s gesture meant to be captivating and stylish. She seems not only outside the film but as though the love story of a stunt man’s widow were being acted straight at her stiff countenance.
Lelouch is registered in this film as writer-director-editor-cameraman. Actually, he is an insatiable doodler of mobile, easily crafted images which get strewn through the film in a mosaic of Affluence. For instance, the Good Life is exemplified in one long dinner table scene in which the love duo does an impossible-to-sustain chuckling over the widower’s son, a John-John type with a cute Spanish pronunciation of Coca Cola. For long stretches, all that are seen are the accoutrements of some attractive commercial. One long wrestle in bed, rendered in hot custard yellow with a deadly ballad singer replacing the voices of the actors. The only interesting item in this section are Aimée’s perfectly groomed fake eyelashes.
Lelouch is obviously not a top director, but he is (1) a surprising scene creator, and (2) a colorist. A veteran of Scopitone movies, his talent is for tiny Klee-like light reflections and tinier refinements in dry tints.
Lelouch’s movie is worth the admission price for a car-driving scene on the edge of the surf, a kind of skater’s drift and slide, using an expert driver and getting a car movement never attained on film. Later he gets the same delicacy with gesture: a father playfully tripping his small boy in a misty beach set-up, Trintignant applying a soccer player’s side-of-foot motion to spill his son. The peak achievements: Boudin-type effects of bleakness-fog-grayness in tinted blue-gray beach scenes.
Masculine Feminine is a clever follow-up for Godard of the technique he used in A Married Woman: almost no plot, often a fixed camera, and a narration that seems to be Godard’s own thoughts fed haphazardly through posters, interspersed titles, conversations heard above or behind the Godard seriousness they mouth. The chief difference between this and any other Godard: Jean-Pierre Leaud, a feverish actor with big head and small body who gives the film a smouldering dark effect, something like the cigarettes he keeps trying to pop into his mouth. Leaud plays a boy just finished with military service, falling in love with a pop singer, and spending most of his screen time trying to be a committed socialist.
The movie is broken into “fifteen precise actions,” each section shot in one locality with no beginning or end and no apparent relationship to the surrounding actions. The subject—the Children of Marx and Coca Cola during a particular political December in 1965—gets vaguely covered. But mostly it is a matter of ballooning an incident arbitrarily: Leaud writing “U.S. Go Home” on S.H.A.P.E. cars, interviewing a Miss Nineteen about the various devices for birth control.
Godard’s sociological interests are endless and he ticks them off with his pet interviewing technique, a sometimes endless verbal ping pong in which Leaud is seldom seen talking but the girls he gets involved with, the stray people who sit-eat-work near him, never stop proclaiming. Somehow, Godard manages to kill the interest of any item he contacts: Bob Dylan and why he is called a Vietnik, homosexuality, brassieres, suicide, etc.
Lelouch, in A Man and A Woman, gets exciting motion through his ease with gesture, glances, and particularly the persimmon-pistachio-sepia color. In Godard’s film, there is a similar dumfounding virtuosity and it comes through in the sporadic, jazzy actions of Leaud: an aggressive, sometimes hammering use of pantomime in which self-consciousness is balanced by a pathetic daring reminiscent of the clowns who hopped-jerked-raced through Mack Sennett. His declaration of love in an instant recording booth should live longer than the movie itself: an inventive stop-go affair with Leaud backing away, glancing nervously to the side, trying to affect the precise intensity, gesture to fit the doggerel poetry Godard wrote for this scene.
Thus, the directors with old and new reputations are involved in an Absolutely Now cinema in which the scene before you becomes the all of a film, an insatiable monster that blots out the old plot-character-flow elements of a movie. Some good work is still being done in the old style: a straight narrative unfolding within a hopelessly commercial project. The first twenty minutes of Wild Angels, an atrocity about fascists on motorcycles, is surprisingly somewhere in the neighborhood of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. A desolate, sun-baked California scene captured with an ingenious documentary camera and a neat trick: using very distant and very close detail shots to hide the sub-standard script and cast.
December 1966