NIE FUR DEN BUS LAUFEN (NEVER RUN FOR THE BUS, Serge Grebiot, 1969)

Serge Grebiot died this week, to little fanfare. The deaths of fellow French filmmakers Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol this year were rightly mourned and their lives celebrated, as two quite different men who produced worthy art up to their deaths. Grebiot lacked their consistency, for sure, and perhaps more precisely, their desire to make films (his last completed effort was 1997's How To Make An American Quit, a lazy and outdated jingoistic diatribe, displaying, finally, his complete loss of ju-ju), but when his powers were firing, most notably between 1968 and 1973, the art he offered could stand toe-to-toe with almost anyone.

One reason for his annexing from the canon could be that he was a Frenchman who made films in Germany, thus falling between the cracks of two national cinemas in various stages of revolt and reform. Young France had enough angry philosophers in-situ. Young Germans on the other hand, wanted to wipe out the old guard, in their desire to make a hopeful new statement about their forlorn nation. But this also meant a rejection of outside influences too; they could not mimic the stylings of American or British idioms such as rock'n'roll, pop, nor the strong-armed glamour of dizzy Hollywood. Same went for anybody else. Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, Kraftwerk, Can and Neu, all flying on the fumes of '68, painted new future possibilities, built new roads, distinctly German but not stiflingly so.

Serge Grebiot; Die Französisch Deutsch ('The French German') was born in Montpellier, joined the resistance as a teen to subvert the Nazis, and was subsequently stationed in Frankfurt as the Allies carved up the corpse of a land. Grebiot stayed, fell in love with a German girl, and made movies. It was a deeply unfashionable place to be making art in the late fifties; whereas Grebiot's countrymen were harvesting international acclaim with chic new-wave manouvres, Germany had yet to find her post-war feet, and as such much of the art produced was samey and fearful. 'Remember; we could not sweep away all of the Nazis; we still needed school teachers and policemen and judges. Many witnesses to atrocities were still in power. As such, most art tried to ignore the past quietly, and was thus beleagured and anodyne.' said Uschi Obermaier, model, activist and member of freeform radicals Amon Duul.

Grebiot, as an outsider, was freed from this compulsion toward self-invention, but also humbled and challenged by it. As such, his films can be seen as definitively German at times, in much the same way that it took immigrant talent (von Sternberg, Chaplin, Garbo, Dietrich, Wilder, Lang, Ophuls, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera) to define Hollywood in the first half of the 20th Century.

Nie Für Den Bus Laufen (1) was dubbed 'Hausfrau Noir' (the delicious mangling of two languages in the phrase a doff of the chapeau/kappe to Grebiot), and it rings true; the noir is there in the sharp silhouettes on-screen, which carry echoes of the Weimar gargoyles that went by boat to Hollywood and paired with a hard-boiled and pulpy American sensibility. Here, Grebiot reinherits the stylings, refurnished as they are with various detective-in-morally-complicated-waters motifs, and ties them, incredibly, to a one-room drama about a working class household in Frankfurt. Instead of a weary but smart Sam Spade, we have mother of four Irma (Betty Schneider), whose tired demeanour betrays a domicile at the end of its tether (a 'digs' in a hole, if you will, or an abode of corrode, or a crashed pad, even a dwelling of dwelling (2)). Her husband is absent, presumed dead, and the action (or lack thereof) centres on Irma's quiet inquisition of her children, who, it seems, are purpetrators of various minor misdeeds such as being messy and drinking all of the milk.

Grebiot centres on such mundane details that the viewer is thrown; Irma seems like normal mother and simultaneously insane, and the way in which the regular seems irregular (the checkerboard territories of the tablecloth, the luminous whiteness of the plates, the endlessly held stares of the children) offers a Realism/Realisn't duality of a Beckettian lean. The narrative, in which she slowly pulls out clues and jumps on hunches, spins like Chandler in a kitchen-out-of-sync. And the conclusions Irma draws about the slack moralities of her own generation and the potential of her children is equally hopeless and angry. This was taken as a harsh indictment of his adopted country, but Grebiot refuted this at the time. 'I do not speak of Germany. I speak of the world.' (3)

Immer für den Bus überfahren, Nein, Nie für den Bus laufen Directed by Serge Grebiot Produced by Karl Stuch Written by Max Friedl, Serge Grebiot Starring Betty Schneider, Patty Ernst, Lukas Fricker, Tomas Fricker, Roland Schneider Futurefilm/Octocinema Productions Release date UK: Oct 1970/ US: Nov 1971 88 mins Tagline:'Mutter Weiß Gut' ('Mother Knows Best')


1. The full title of the film was Immer für den Bus überfahren, Nein, Nie für den Bus laufen, translated as 'Always Run For The Bus, No, Never Run For The Bus', apparently to reflect Irma's indecisive nature, for their are no buses mentioned in the film. She betrays a confusion over the correct punishment for her children, or even whether they merit punishment, and speaks frequently with a muddled folksy wisdom. Even if we do not hear her say these words, we imagine them in her voice.

2. Such inane punning and repetition to diminishing effect (the lines above were especially selected to illicit annoyance and groans; that is why such crackers as 'crib of glib fibs' and 'grovel hovel' were deliberately hidden out of plain view in a footnote.) is relevant. As Irma grills the kids, she constantly clicks from accusation to apology and back, each time trying to cover her anger with humour and her sadness with a joke. Her lines are filled with many desperate jokes that are meaningless to an English speaking audience, including refences to German Shibboleths used during wartime to oust non-native spies.

3. Cahiers Du Cinema, March 1971.

OPULENCE (Josef von Sternberg, 1937)

'I can see heaven; as no man or woman has ever seen... I have burned in the sun's outer rings... charred my wings on re-entry, fallen to Earth with a crash... but I can see heaven...'

von Sternberg's final creation around Marlene Dietrich's hollow stare was his most decadent. A story of a Princess in a mythical Eastern kingdom who seeks the love of her people with ever-grander cityscapes, a multitude of gifts, and lavish balls. Her delirium means that she aims to build the grandest kingdom in the history of time. At first, this ambition causes the people to love her, as streets are paved, glorious food gifted to the poor, jobs secured and every individual paid handsomely. But soon the mania causes people to talk- should streets be covered in gold in a civilised society? Should each resident have every desire fulfilled? - and the more she feels she does for the nation, the more they resent her for what she cannot do- guarantee them against death. When a plague that was thought to have been eradicated by the queen's sanitation plans returns, the people riot. The queen then becomes a recluse, and turns her attentions to the palace. She builds within it a holiday planet of gargantuan excess: over thirty years her army of designers, artists and labourers construct one thousand floors of golden heaven.

The delight of Sternberg's vision is that he sympathises with the queen. She seems to be the most obvious cypher yet for the director on screen- a grand artist whose delirious vision grew unfashionable. Indeed, it is unfathomable that any Post-war director in Hollywood could re-create Opulence's damaged innocence without turning it into a tediously judgmental morality play concerning wealth. Dietrich herself describes Opulence as her favourite film, and suggested in 1984 that:

'... modern Hollywood talks socialism; nary a big movie can be made that doesn't root for the little guy, and bash the powerful. And yet they are made by the biggest and richest. Hollywood is a rich man dressing as a poor man... and Josef was a poor man dressing as a rich man. They hated this... and they hate it even more now...Josef is seen as morally conservative because he wanted to make grand pictures... but he was a rebel, a dreamer, always foreign' 1

Indeed, a strength of Opulence is also a point for which it receieved criticism: There is no explanation of where the money comes from, where the country gets its riches. And the film evades easy feminist readings too- for although the Queen is powerful, she is also beautiful, and she loves her people; she leads without sentimentality, but cares, and ultimately is prone to lengthy bouts of internal wrangling.

In some grand crescendo (gifted to us by a dream from the night before), the queen draws plans for an entire planet that can motor under its own influence, but when her head architect (Lionel Atwill) jumps from the tallest tower of the palace in horror at the never-ending vastness of these ideas, she is distraught: her ambition cannot be sated, she cannot have victory over herself, she can only lose. The final sequence of the movie follows Dietrich from her 40-poster, forty metre bed, up a spiralling staircase moulded entirely from diamonds that cut her feet, through a cavernous parlour the size of The Vatican, into a great hall the size of Switzerland filled with an army of one million blonde children, through a 100 acre interior orchard filled with hand carved wooden trees, golden apples and felt grass studded with sequins, through a flea zoo, an elephant zoo, a Victorian toy room, a midget funfair, a hall of mirrors, entire floors filled with water, or food, or bean bags or nudists, up through levels of complete darkness (for quiet contemplation) and levels of brilliant, shadowless light (for honest self-evaluation), up a slide which inverts gravity, through ever grander and more plush dining rooms and lounges, bedrooms and halls, until finally coming to an elevator-for-one filled with silk cushions that goes to floor 99999, which is still incomplete.

From this point, we can see how close the construction is to the surface of the moon- Dietrich reaches out above her head and lays her hand on the surface, pulling back a handful of dusty cheddar. With tears in her eyes, she tastes the moon, and utters the final, famously stuttered, words:

'It. Needs. Salt. The Moon. Needs. Salt.'

Opulence Directed by Josef von Sternberg Produced by Josef von Sternberg Written by Josef Louys Starring Marlene Dietrich Lionel Atwill Paramount Pictures Release Date US: March 1937 UK: June 1937 Tagline: 'I Can See Heaven'

1. New Yorker interview, April 15, 1984.

THE SECOND DRAFT (John Loose, 1999)

I wanted to introduce this entry with a spine-tingling suggestion... but its gone.

So: Based on the elemental short story written by Puppy Smith1 (the authoress whose fledgling career was cut short by death at the age of nine), The Second Draft is a shifting thought-dribble regarding creativity, celebrity, and identity. John Loose vowed to never make a movie again after the post-modern afterburn of the project left him in hospital for weeks. His idea, of taking the frustration of the protagonist in the short story (who is bemoaning his lost first draft, which contains, he tells us, an incredible tale, beautifully told) and turning it back on the viewer by causing a similar second-hand psychosis, was always a tricky sell. He erased from view all plausible drama, making all situations roll with suggestion and suggestion only. The movie thus appears as a series of unfinished vignettes, with all of the major action happening off-screen, and this non-storytelling twisted the director in complicated knots. His execution took it far beyond what even he expected, leaving whole conversations muffled behind doors, and lengthy post-flashpoint silences. It was, Barry Norman told us, 'a cryptogram dressed up in a jigsaw hidden in a coming-of-age drama'2

Kieran Culkin plays the young American who moves to the sleepy seaside coast of Sussex, England with his grandparents. They spend their time watching classic Hollywood movies, and are excited when a woman who moves into a vacant flat in their streeet bears a startling resemblance to Marlene Dietrich. So far, so regulation. We wait for the unlikely friendship between the old dame and the mute boy; but this promise is withheld. No climax that is suggested is given. We are left to wonder, with the boy, along sunny, silent, coasts.

'Who the hell is the old lady?'3 cried critic Paul Hallus, and spent paragraphs describing himself throwing his hands in the air in frustration (itself a daring homage to the sensibilities of the film) But the old lady is not really the point. The story is subsumed below worries of how to tell it, just as young Joe (Culkin) is concerned that his small detective tale is a narrative with its bottom falling through. His life seems supernaturally tinged, but even he is aware that his grandparents (played zestfully by Albert Finney and Maggie Smith) play a huge part in the contrivance: Is the family's fantastic capability for suggestibility (as displayed in various scenes where they mistake incidents in classic Hollywood for intrigue in their personal lives) as cute as it first appears? Or are we party to a collective mental illness? Many events outside the house happen without the camera as witness, and we are only told about them by a grandparent. In turn, when young Joe begins to write a diary, we begin to see gaps between his words and the truth.

Loose slackens his grip; Smith disappears from view. Invisible lies smoke out the Dietrich lady, who is the cast-iron MacGuffin. Young Joe, innocently, is a flawed narrator. The English Channel is filled with sharks pushing teeth-holes through scrunched white pages.

An interesting phenomenon has plagued critics of both the short story and the film, Second Draft Syndrome, which is now worthy of its own Wikipedia entry. Many writers have seen their own first drafts of criticism of The Second Draft disappear: be it house-fires, computer problems, or authorial tantrum, many perfect pieces have been lost to fate. Both the LA Weekly and New York Times film critics failed to file a review on time, citing writer's block, and both produced apologetic synopses a week late; Paul Hallus himself lost a hard-drive when writing his, Roger Ebert lost a kidney, and a class in Iowa studying differences between the story and the film forged a suicide pact before turning in their papers, and although none of them went through with it, one of them, Marie Staedler, nearly did herself in with a stapler the following Spring (her own, if you will, second-time-around failure. This is the root of the phrase 'Doing a Staedler' which means to perform a task badly, especially one that involves harming oneself.4).

The Second Draft Directed by John Loose Prduced by Smith Brown Written by John Loose and Curt Dugless, based on a story by Puppy Smith Starring Kieran Culkin, Albert Finney, Maggie Smith Film Four Pictures Release Date UK: Jan 1999 US: May 1999 Running Time: 122 mins Tagline: 'I'm Sure I Said It All So Much Better Before'

1. The Second Draft won the Chehkov Prize for Short Fiction in 1999, ten years after Smith's death. Her collected stories, Unstories won the National Book Award in 2000. John Barth declared the end of the short, short story in an essay entitled 'Who, Where, Shorts, Shorts?' following the announcement of the prize. He later softened his claim in a follow-up argument in 2004, 'Aye, Where Short Shorts.'

The critical division over the short story prompts me to print it entirely here:

The Second Draft by Puppy Smith

'The elements stole my first draft. And you should know that that is something of a crying shame, for it was a kingly piece of work. Every word slid and locked into place, held by some magic. The tools of fiction were at their quickest in there. It not only told my story in an entertaining and enlightening fashion, it might have had something for someone other than myself too.
It not only told the story, but in interlocking haikus it managed to convey some power of everything I’d ever known. But a wind blew up and carried it off.
But what a draft; within it were codes and schemes. Surveillance systems were debunked, governments toppled; assassins evaded, crucial answers found.
But now they’re just mapcap theories, scribbled in invisible ink and lost; the pages are still disappearing across the beach in the wind. A whole bible of noise lost, chased across the stones, rediscovered page by page; a Hansel and Gretel trail to a big haunted house of an idea.
It started with the following; this much I remember.

Steven liked to break into houses on the Sussex Coast. His mother had died when he was small, hit by a bus, and his father had died some two years later, drunk with a broken heart. He’d walked into the sea, and washed up three miles along the coast. Steven was five. He went to live with his grandparents, who watched old movies all the time. These films filled Steven’s brain, haunted his sleep, and this fact may or may not have contributed to the present tale.

A wonderful part of my first draft dealt with the anecdote whereby a younger version of myself attempting to write an early version of my memoirs, aged seven or so, described the feeling of being an orphan as akin to ‘waiting for a wonderer to return.’
Grandad corrected me on my mistake. ‘It’s wanderer, Steven. Wanderer. Someone who wanders off.’
But Grandma saw the dramatic possibility of my word, and cut Grandad short. ‘Or did you mean wonderer, Steven, like someone who wonders why?’
They looked at me expectantly. ‘I think I mean both,’ I said.

Aah. That’s how it went. Or something. Ask the sea next time you’re on the Sussex coast. The sea ate the first version, the truest version of the story. This draft is inferior, it’s akin to development sketches of female parts I’d never seen. But it must suffice.
So the films; this is the important thing with my Grandparents. Let’s try:

Granddad had a penchant for gentlemen. Humphrey Bogart was enjoyable, but greasy. Cary Grant had it. Grandmother had a taste for the nice faces- James Stewart, Fred MacMurray; but father though them a touch soft.
There was Dietrich, who possessed some of the beauty of his mother. In Blonde Venus, she was barely plausible as a mother, and Steven supposed his own mother was like this; too beautiful, too stellar, to be plausible as a mother. That was why she’d died, he supposed. God’s will.
Oh, and Joan Fontaine in Rebecca, with Grandad’s Larry.

And then there was the woman who lived on our street, that aged, frail German, who Grandad thought was Marlene Dietrich.

'She doesn't live in Sussex' Gran said.

'I'm sure it is her,' Grandad said.

He was the straightest of die; Religion? A fearful hotch potch. Enigmas were never cultivated. But Marlene on the coast? True as true.

A convoluted interlude saw my boredom turning to crime, breaking into large flats on the seafront, watching their videos, drinking their tea. And then, inevitably, I was caught by the old lady, the cranky, would be Marlene; and the ensuing unlikely friendship was dreamt in a plausible and pretty way. I didn't evade the cliche, I embraced it, and these passages were some of the most rewarding on those papers.
And then, of course, we hear that Dietrich is dead in Paris; and of course, the flat is on the market; and we never see our Marlene again, except in our sleepy fantasies.

'Good, proud lady, that Marlene' Grandad said.

'You never met her, silly,' Gran said.

'Perhaps not. But she kept her garden tidy and was kind to the boy,' Grandad said.

I've been through my notes to find a scent of the magic; this outline does not suffice. All I find in my extensive perusals are plundered wordlists and defected lexicons. Now I’m gutting books, ripping their spines, to find suggestions of all that I had. I need a skin draft.'

2. BBC Film 99, Jan 26th, 1999.

3. Sunday Times magazine, Jan 30th, 1999

4. Eg:'I wanted to wax my legs this morning, but I completely did a Staedler and missed with the waxing strips and gave myself an inside-out mohawk.'

DEATH CLANG (Fritz Lang, 1955)

Lang's taut direction is strangely perfect for this ephemeral tale of the Grim Reaper's earthly representative (Barbara Stanwyck) and her seduction of a string of young artistic men, persuading them into Faustian bargains which are later collected by death's bailiff (a haunted Peter Lorre). Edward G Robinson stars as a former writer who gave up on his dream and is tempted by Stanwyck into returning, much to the upset of his girlfriend Joan Bennett, who remembers how unhappy Robinson was before she met him. A wise, non-judgemental treatise on artistic endeavour and ambition, the most striking thing about the film, beyond it's all-star cast and the stunningly dreamy midsummer Louisiana setting, is the sympathy for the villains: Stanwyck drifts from flinty femme to teary cog in a wheel, and Lorre is so sweetly apologetic, finding any excuse he can to evade his duty. Bennett emerges as the villain, somehow(a woman who nursed an alcoholic back to sobriety, remember) , slowly squeezing the life out of her man as she holds him.

The film embarks on a series of red herring dream sequences midway, and the plot becomes so convoluted (imagine The Big Sleep on a swamp, with dialogue by Marlowe and Freud) as to be left behind, replaced by Stanwyck and Bennett in billowing evening gowns atop the clouds of Robinson's fevered imaginings, Lorre dressed as a sad court jester, and five minute sequence in which all the characters wonder through the woods, evading the unseen, all-powerful Pan (voiced by a hysterical Orson Welles). Lang's ability to dance with cliche is vital, as he embraces some of the hokier psychology with straight-faced aplomb.

Lorre's sad turn as a man in an occupation he cannot escape was ignored by all of the award ceremonies, but it is crucial to weighing down the silliness here. Robinson is thoughtful and beautifully confused, and Bennett is revelatory as a sympathetic noble woman realising her own mistakes. Stanwyck's sly critique of her own persona, and impersonations of Dietrich, Garbo and Hepburn make her performance a spotter's delight.

The ending, where the four attempt to evade the certainty of death in a fairground is brutal but open, with punishments worse than death suggested, but not shown. Hollywood's coyness is to its credit this time, with the downbeat, enigmatic conclusion superior to any alternative that comes to the frazzled mind.

Exhibit A in the case for the studio system's ability to throw off its own shackles.

Death Clang Directed by: Fritz Lang Produced by: Nunnally Johnson Written by: J.H.Willy RKO Radio Pictures Inc. Starring: Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G.Robinson, Joan Bennett, Peter Lorre Music by: Arthur Lange Release Date US: January 1955 Release Date UK: May 1955 RunningTime: 83mins Tagline: 'Do You Hear The Toll, The Toll Of The Death Clang?'