On ways of watching films (and connecting dots from The Apartment to the Bates Motel)

Yesterday I had the very happy-making experience of watching Billy Wilder’s The Apartment in a darkened mini-theatre, on a screen that, at a rough estimate, had a surface area around 12 times larger than that of my plasma TV at home (a TV with which I have sometimes tried to simulate the theatre experience). For selfish reasons I won’t say where this screening took place, but there were only two other people in the room, one of whom was my viewing companion, a huge Apartment fan. We had both seen the film recently enough for it to be fresh in our memories, so we murmured through parts of the screening, exchanging nerd-trivia and observations, imagining how much more subversive it would have been if James Stewart had played the manipulative corporate heel Sheldrake - and even remarking on the film’s tangential similarities with Hitchcock’s Psycho (naturally I was the prime culprit in this), which released in the same week in 1960.

(Have trouble linking the two movies? Well, think about illicit sexual liaisons conducted hurriedly in rented rooms; think social outsiders living lonely lives in stripped-down settings, photographed in sombre shades of grey. Think of one melancholy working-class girl, played by a film’s ostensible star, who dies unexpectedly in a shower before the halfway point, and another who almost dies in another bathroom after swallowing half a bottle of sleeping pills halfway through her film. Think of earnest, likable young men performing clean-up operations after crimes have been committed. And both films – it just occurred to me as I was writing this – have discomfiting scenes where a bullying man in a position of power casually, callously hands over money to an unhappy young woman, an act that precipitates a life-changing decision for her. The scene in The Apartment where Sheldrake, having strung the vulnerable Fran along for weeks, gives her a hundred-dollar bill as a Christmas present, is one of the cruelest moments I can think of in a fiction film, and the look on Shirley MacLaine’s face is devastating.)

Anyway, the Apartment screening was a reminder that for all my mad love of old Hollywood, I have only rarely watched movies of that vintage on a big screen (what sort of screen can be considered “big” is of course a relative matter these days) and that one is at a vast remove from what the original viewers of these films saw and felt. It also reminded me of observations in two essays about cinema. First, one of my favourite film writers David Thomson***, in an entry in The Biographical Dictionary of Film:

Intensive film study and film scholarship now work by way of the TV screen. It is seldom possible to review the great movies “at the movies”. Suppose I wanted to see Sunrise, Duel in the Sun, and Ugetsu Monogatari on big screens – where would I go? […] Yet I might be able to summon them up on video, where I could see them as often as I liked, with “pause” to access the full beauty of the frame. Everyone is doing it, no matter that the colour is forlorn (the United States has the worst TV colour in the world), the image format is different, the sound is tinny…and the passion is not there. That passion is made by the dark, the brightness, the very large screen, the company of strangers, and the knowledge that you cannot stop the process, or even get out. That is being at the movies, and it is becoming a museum experience. How can one tell one’s students or one’s children what it was like seeing Vertigo (in empty theatres – for no one liked it once) or The Red Shoes from the dark. We watch television with the lights on! Out of some bizarre superstition that it protects our eyes. How so tender for one part of us, and so indifferent to the rest?

And here is Pauline Kael, from a 1967 essay titled “Movies on Television”:

Not all old movies look bad now, of course; the good ones are still good—surprisingly good, often, if you consider how much of the detail is lost on television. Not only the size but the shape of the image is changed, and, indeed, almost all the specifically visual elements are so distorted as to be all but completely destroyed. On television, a cattle drive or a cavalry charge or a chase – the climax of so many a big movie – loses the dimensions of space and distance that made it exciting, that sometimes made it great. The structural elements – the rhythm, the buildup, the suspense – are also partly destroyed by deletions and commercial breaks and the interruptions incidental to home viewing […] Reduced to the dead grays of a cheap television print, Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons – an uneven work that is nevertheless a triumphant conquest of the movie medium – is as lifelessly dull as a newspaper Wirephoto of a great painting.

Reading these quotes, it might seem that both essays are prim condemnations of how things are “now” compared to how they were “then”, but that isn't the case - they are both pragmatic acknowledgements that things change, and that our assumptions, attitudes and ways of looking shift with them. Thomson in particular, being from a generation after Kael and having seen many further variations (including the phenomenon of people watching films on YouTube, or even on smart-phones!), has often written insightfully – in such books as Have You Seen...? and The Whole Equation – about the complex ways in which we engage with our art and entertainment in the contemporary world.

Meanwhile, in another astute piece, “Movies too personal to share with an audience”, Jim Emerson provides an important counterpoint to the idea that film-watching is best as a communal experience. I myself have had a terrible time watching films such as Vertigo with large, mostly indifferent audiences, and I know that I wouldn’t have enjoyed The Apartment so much the other night – notwithstanding the screen size and the print quality – if the room had contained people who had just happened to stumble in and didn’t care about the film. Perhaps what we thin-skinned and over-sensitive movie buffs really need is permanent access to a private screening room along with programming software that tells us exactly who we should be watching a particular film with.

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*** More on Thomson, and especially his book The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder, in another post soon. And here are some other connect-the-dots posts: Mean Streets and Contempt, Ozu's Good Morning, Altman's 3 Women, and Peeping Tom and Psycho

Blonde on blonde: a new biography of the many Marilyn Monroes

[Did a shorter version of this review for The Sunday Guardian]

“She looks both triumphant and afraid,” writes Lois Banner, describing a nude photograph that a young model named Norma Jeane posed for in 1949, “With one arm extended and a hand in her hair, she looks as though she might be climbing up a wall – to achieve an exciting future or to escape a threat.” The photo – “A New Wrinkle” – is included in Banner’s Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox and her description is spot on: framed against a lush red velvet curtain that seems like it might swallow her up, Norma Jeane – the future Marilyn Monroe – could be from one of those classical paintings of rape where the subject is presented (invariably by a male painter) as both seductress and quarry. But of course, Banner’s words also suggest Monroe’s tempestuous push-pull relationship with her own myth – with the stardom that made her universally desired as well as conflicted and depressed.

“A New Wrinkle” was an early version of Marilyn the ethereal pin-up girl (the picture – which she posed for because she needed money – caused a stir when a conservative, early-1950s Hollywood learnt of its existence), but Banner’s grounded approach is more accurately reflected in the first two images included in the book, which are atypical for a Monroe biography. One is a drawing of witches and other grotesque figures that Marilyn said she saw in recurring nightmares; the other is an autopsy sketch, which coldly depicts the scar from a surgery to remove endometriosis, a gynaecological condition that afflicted her for much of her life. Bald, flat-chested, anonymous, mannequin-like, the figure in the autopsy drawing is a morbid reminder that the Marilyn Monroe persona was often a blank slate, a repository for other people’s fantasies – and that the woman behind it has remained an enigma for generations of fans, critics and biographers.

“I was drawn to writing about Marilyn because no one like me – an academic scholar, feminist biographer and historian of gender – had studied her,” Banner explains, admitting that she had once dismissed Marilyn as a sex object for men but later felt impelled to re-evaluate her, and to wonder if a proto-feminist lay beneath the dumb-blonde image. Her book emphasises the many contradictions in the life of a girl who had low self-esteem and a speech impediment, but who succeeded in “manufacturing” a confident alter ego. (In high school, Norma Jeane described herself as “the mmm girl” – a play of words that encompassed both her stuttering over the letter M and the effect her physicality had on the boys in her class.) It is a portrait of the sex symbol posing for the famous subway-grate photograph with her skirt billowing up, but also the story of the woman who, later that same evening, had a violent argument with her husband Joe DiMaggio, who was incensed by the sight of “several hundred men looking at her crotch”.

Among other paradoxes, Banner notes that while Marilyn was a “goddess” on the outside, universally desired for her body, on the inside she had a hormonal disorder that caused extreme menstrual pain and may also have made it difficult for her to have a child. Though a symbol for unbridled female sexuality, she may have learnt how to perform an exaggerated version of femininity by watching a man (the female impersonator Ray Bourbon). She often played po-faced characters, the butts of other people’s jokes, but was known to have a wry sense of humour in real life (someone as wacky as Jerry Lewis was impressed by her knack for absurdist comedy, and even Groucho Marx, with whom she worked in a lesser film titled Love Happy, described her as a combination of Mae West and Little Bo-Peep). Marilyn modeled herself on earlier movie temptresses such as Clara Bow, Jean Harlow and Marlene Dietrich, but also strove to haul herself out of her ditzy image by turning to high literature (from Thomas Wolfe to Dostoevsky and Balzac), performing Molly Bloom’s closing soliloquy from Ulysses on stage, and stating a desire to play Lady Macbeth and Grushenka in The Brothers Karazmov; and in the process she sometimes resorted to the intellectual poseur’s strategy of reading selectively rather than reading well. (“When she browsed the shelves in Pickwick’s bookstore, she’d find an interesting paragraph in a book, memorise it and then go on to find another book.”)

It’s a fascinating story, with enough material to fill dozens of books – as indeed it has over the decades. The Passion and the Paradox has all the essential biographical information, from a childhood that was spent being shunted around foster homes (Banner gives more space to Marilyn’s early life and to the personalities of the many women who raised her than most previous biographers have done) to the final years: the bouts of depression, the overdependence on painkillers, the liaisons with the Kennedy brothers and the build-up to her mysterious death. But the “psychological” Marilyn is here too. Banner analyses her actions and choices and how they intersected with the larger world around her. In an effective structural decision, she includes a ruminative 30-page midsection titled “The Meaning of Marilyn”, which temporarily breaks the narrative as well as the fourth wall between author and reader.

In so doing, she situates the Monroe persona in the context of its time – “the ultimate blonde in a nation both fascinated by sexuality and uneasy about it, involved in both an ongoing sexual revolution and a conservative reaction against it”. (As one of Marilyn’s husbands, the playwright Arthur Miller, once wrote, America at the time “was still a virgin, still denying her illicit dreams.”) She makes special note of the function that Marilyn’s star-making roles may have served in a diffident, post-WWII era – the fact that she was regularly paired opposite older men or unremarkable Plain Joes may have been a subliminal ego-booster for the “regular” American guy. And she presents a nuanced view of the apparently all-American girl who could – perhaps due to her own troubled childhood – relate to marginalised people: reading Leftist literature during a time of the Communist witch-hunts; identifying with the black hero of Joyce Cary’s novel Mister Johnson.

This is a compendious biography – reflective, scrupulously researched, moderately well written – though it isn’t aimed at the reader who is principally interested in Marilyn’s films. I get the impression Banner isn’t much of a cineaste: there is a formalness in her descriptions of even major movies (The Asphalt Jungle “fits into the genre of film noir, a postwar category generated by Cold War fears and influenced by German Expressionism that highlights social corruption and often features an evil, seductive vamp”). But otherwise, her distinct voice is a reminder that good analytical biographies can tell us much about the personal concerns and biases of the writers. “I was intrigued by similarities between my childhood and hers,” she writes; she was born a little over a decade after Marilyn, grew up in a geographically and culturally similar milieu, won beauty contests as a young girl and (according to her) had the opportunity to aim for movie stardom, but chose a different career path. Consequently, there is the hint of a doppelganger perspective (or at least a “what if” perspective) here – one that offers a thoughtful counterpoint to some of the earlier biographies and theses.

For example: in a capsule review I recently read of Some Like it Hot, David Thomson – an intelligent, sensitive critic – proposes that Marilyn was naive, unaware of how her screen persona was being used by director Billy Wilder; but this book presents evidence to suggest that Marilyn didn’t like the fact that her character Sugar Kane was a foil for the two male characters in the story and that she wanted Sugar to have a more distinct personality. (Years earlier, while shooting Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, she had insisted that her character speak the line “I can be smart when it’s important, but most men don’t like it.” By the time Some Like it Hot was made, she definitely had her hackles up when asked to play a stereotype.) And as Banner herself notes, because Marilyn’s first husband Jim Dougherty said she was a virgin when they married, some male biographers dismissed her claim of being sexually abused as a child. This is a non-sequitur – sexual abuse doesn’t necessarily entail penetration – but it tells us something about the simplistic way in which a certain kind of man may view sexual assault or women’s “purity”.

I had a minor problem with the occasional bombast of Banner’s claims. Her Prologue is characterised by sentences like “Significant among my discoveries about Marilyn...”, “Revealing and analysing her multiple personas is a major contribution of mine...” – and later, “I will excavate the layers that lie underneath [her childhood], probing the texts and counter-texts...” Stretched beyond a point, this is tiresomely self-aggrandising language, and these claims – suggesting grand epiphanies and solutions – turn out to be contrary to the spirit of the book itself. For instance, Banner makes much of the question “Was Marilyn a feminist?” and then addresses it in a perfunctory, open-ended way in her Afterword. There is nothing wrong with this open-endedness – in fact, it affirms the author’s honesty, her willingness to acknowledge that a complex life cannot be easily explained – but why make the question sound so central in the first place? Especially when this book’s real strength lies in the attentive, well-rounded way in which it raises questions about Marilyn’s life and psyche, examining them from various angles but also permitting them to hang in the air if necessary – much like the girl in that photo, frozen on the cusp of becoming one of the great icons, and sacrificial lambs, of a cultural zeitgeist.

[An old post about MM is here]

Fizz in film: how Coca Colonised cinema

In-film advertising is a common thing these days – much too common (I sometimes fall asleep in a hall even before a movie begins, in the time it takes for the list of sponsors and media partners to display). But what happens when a brand is so big and so representative of a way of life that its very appearance in a film – however fleeting – can add layers to the narrative? Take the case of Coca-colonization, a term that links the world’s most famous soft drink with American cultural imperialism (and with enterprise, vitality, crassness and all the other supposedly American qualities that infuriate and fascinate people around the world).

Coca-Cola and cinema are roughly the same age (the drink was first bottled in 1894, a year that also saw the first copyrighted American film, Fred Ott’s Sneeze) and they have had many pleasing meetings over the past century. Once in a while, Coke has been central to a film’s plot – Billy Wilder’s One Two Three has an executive trying to get the drink into the Russian market during the Cold War years – but more often it has made humorous cameo appearances, as in Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin! where a bed-ridden German woman, unaware of the fall of the Berlin Wall, is startled by an enormous Coca-Cola banner outside her window.

In movies by directors as different as Jean-Luc Godard and Frank Capra, Coke has been used to denounce or celebrate aspects of Americana. Sometimes both things have been done in the same sequence: in I am Cuba (which I wrote about here), a distraught farmer sets fire to his crop when he learns that his land is being sold to capitalists; but simultaneously, in a joyous scene set at a nearby bar, we see his children drinking Coca-Cola and dancing at a jukebox playing rock music.

A lovely early sequence in the 1946 British film A Matter of Life and Death takes place in a black-and-white Heaven where deceased soldiers from battlefields everywhere (rugged Sikhs and excitable Frenchmen among them) are just arriving. When a group of Americans burst in, the background music becomes loud and strident, almost as in a radio commercial. The soldiers survey this strange new place, then point excitedly at something; the camera draws back to reveal a Coke machine, and the Yanks are feeling right at home again.



In a film that is largely about the differences between the English and the Americans (and the need to come together for a common cause during WWII), this good-natured but wary scene suggests the ambivalent attitude of the former Empire to the brash young country that was about to become the next superpower. ("Officer's quarters, of course," says one of the armymen, Coke bottle still in hand, to Heaven's receptionist. "We're all the same up here, Captain," she replies stiffly.)

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I confess to not having seen the 1950s Hindi film Miss Coca Cola, but the oldest instance I know of the use of Coke branding in a non-English-language movie is in the Ozu classic Late Spring (made in 1949, which was coincidentally the year Coca-Cola came to India for the first time). It’s just a two-second shot – as the heroine Noriko cycles with a male friend, we see a Coke ad in the foreground – but a notable one in a movie made just a few years after the war, and by a director who was known for calmly observing his society’s gradual shifts toward a more westernised way of life. (Here is a post about another later Ozu film Good Morning, in which television comes to Japan in the 1950s.)


My favourite cinematic Coke moments though are the ones that align comedy to subtle social observation. In the uproarious The Gods Must be Crazy, Kalahari bushmen discover an empty Coca-Cola bottle that introduces them to the concept of personal property; when this ferments feelings of envy and possessiveness, they decide that the ghastly object must be chucked off the edge of the world. But an equally funny – and more caustic – reference to Coke as a symbol of the Capitalist Way came in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. With the nuclear destruction of the world looming, a British group captain named Mandrake must get a crucial code across to the US president. He needs loose change for the phone booth, so he asks an American colonel, Guano, to destroy a nearby Coca-Cola machine and get a few coins out.

“That’s private property,” Guano bristles, “You’ll have to answer to the Coca-Cola company!”

The words are said with such reverence that there’s no missing the point: even at a time like this, corporate profit gets right of way. And when the Coke machine is eventually shot open, it’s almost like an apocalyptic prefiguring – because not long after this, the film ends with the planet blowing up. What we thought was just a fizzy drink turned out to be a cornerstone of our civilisation.

[If you remember any other notable Coke scenes in movies, please share them here]

On Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, and the celebrity cult

It would be putting things very mildly to say that recent Hindi movies haven’t made journalists – TV journalists in particular – look good. The typical representation is that of shrill, parasitic creatures tripping over each other in a mad frenzy, exhibiting buffoonery and insensitivity in equal measure as they thrust microphones into the faces of the unwilling.

The classic example of this theme was, of course, Peepli [Live], in which vanloads of predatory reporters arrive at a small village on the scent of the TRP-boosting “story” that a poor farmer has promised to kill himself. It was a portrayal of media both as an intrusive force in its own right and as a mirror in which a middle-class society built on “traditional values” could see its darker, more primal face.

But the template for the “ugly media” movie is Billy Wilder’s 1951 classic Ace in the Hole. Watching it again recently, I found it hard to believe it was six decades old – the story, about a personal tragedy being turned into a media carnival, is so ahead of its time that the film looks fresher and more relevant with each passing year.

To some extent, that’s true of most of Wilder’s work. His best movies are driven by acerbic screenplays that poke holes into just about any aspect of modern life – or social institution – you can think of. But even by his standards, Ace in the Hole is unusually savage and bleak. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, no happy ending, no bending to Hollywood norms about a lead character finding redemption.

In a recent film, Michael Douglas reprised the role of Gordon Gekko, the cold-blooded Wall Street trader whom he first played in 1987. But few actors could portray single-minded, obsessive characters as well as Douglas’s father Kirk. In Ace in the Hole, the senior Douglas is Chuck Tatum, a down-on-his-luck reporter stranded in a small town, working for an uninspiring local paper called the Albuquerque Sun-Bulletin (its high-mindedness as well as general lack of imagination summed up by the depressingly earnest motto “Tell The Truth”). When a local tourist guide named Leo gets trapped inside an old mountain cave, Chuck realises he has a story that could help him get back to the top of his profession (read: back to the big newspapers in New York), and he milks it for all that it’s worth.


“I don’t make the news, I only report it,” Chuck says defensively at one point, but we see him manipulating events for his own benefit – even to the extent of coercing the rescue-operation chief to use an unnecessarily time-consuming method to save Leo. Some scenes are spine-chilling: during his first conversation with the trapped man, when Chuck discovers that the cave was an ancient Indian burial ground, his eyes gleam and become animated; you realise he’s less concerned with Leo’s plight than with the tantalizing headline of the next day’s paper.


Typically, Wilder fills the screenplay not just with brilliant lines that draw attention to themselves but sly asides as well (“We’re the press, we never pay!” grumbles a young photographer when asked to shell out 50 cents for admission). But watching Ace in the Hole, I was repeatedly reminded of Wilder’s great visual sense – something that is occasionally forgotten because he is seen primarily as a man of words. Consider the breathtaking overhead tracking shot that reveals dozens of cars and trailers recently arrived in what was once a deserted outpost. Or the scene where Chuck draws Leo’s manipulative wife towards him for a clinch by roughly grabbing her head (with the camera positioned behind her so that his giant fist nearly fills the screen) – it’s one of the most subversive variants I’ve seen on the classic Hollywood kiss.

But the most most striking images – and perhaps the abiding one – is a long shot of carnival debris being swept along by the wind, as Leo’s father wanders desolately about; the shot is almost a symbol for the grime that accumulates over the course of the movie. At the end, there's no one left to clean it up.


P.S. In a way, I think Ace in the Hole makes for an interesting companion piece to Sunset Boulevard, which Wilder made the year before – the visual and thematic similarities between the two movies should have any fan of the Auteur theory smacking his chops. For instance, both films begin with a man incapacitated by not having a working vehicle (or in danger of being deprived of his vehicle) – a situation that leads him to an isolated setting where he will feel trapped and creatively stymied. Without giving away specifics, both films, at key moments, have very artistically executed close-ups of a dead man seen from underneath, so that his face is almost looking down at the camera.

And of course, both stories, in different ways, are about the creation of the celebrity cult. For me, one of the most disturbing moments in Sunset Boulevard is the brief shot of the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (playing herself) in the final scene, where Norma Desmond (former silent-screen star, now a delusional old woman) descends the staircase, imagining she is about to make a grand comeback. Hopper is shown teary-eyed as she watches the faded star, but one can hardly forget the role that her own pen played in creating, sustaining and then destroying the image of Norma Desmond.

[Two earlier posts on Wilder films: Stalag 17 and Some Like it Hot]

Peepli [Live]: quick notes

I thought Anusha Rizvi’s film was a really good black comedy. Very irreverent and caustic about many things while remaining basically sympathetic towards the tragedy of the people at the centre of the storm (the unfathomably helpless villagers who find a media circus descending on them after word gets around that one of them has decided to commit suicide in protest). This is a difficult balance to get right. When I spoke with Jaane bhi do Yaaro's dialogue-writer Ranjit Kapoor last year, he pointed out that throughout the creation of the many lunatic scenes in that script, he was careful to preserve the essential integrity of Vinod and Sudhir, the movie’s idealistic photographers/fall guys. The audience could laugh all they liked at the situations that these two guys find themselves in, but it was important that they took Vinod and Sudhir seriously.

- Peepli [Live]’s beleaguered protagonist Natha spends most of the film dazed by all the attention he is getting, uncomprehending of the fact that he has been turned into a Cause and a Symbol, perpetually fearful that having made an offhand statement during a private conversation with his brother, he will now be forced to follow through on his promise to kill himself. (Once his story get publicised, his life is no longer his own anyway: he's a pawn in a game that he can't begin to understand.) A little something to chew on: try comparing this reluctant Everyman with the rabble-rousing messiah figure played by Amitabh Bachchan in Main Azaad Hoon (itself a remake of Capra’s Meet John Doe). Consider that Main Azaad Hoon was hailed as a courageous, non-mainstream (or semi-non-mainstream) attempt to address the plight of the common man.

- I disagree with the common reaction that the film was too over-the-top in its satirising of TV journalism. A couple of the gags might have been obvious (such as the scene where a round-up of national news prioritises an item about Shilpa Shetty and Prince William, with farmer suicides coming third on the list) but try sitting down to watch our real news channels – Hindi and English – for a couple of days and you’ll find that the blackest satire is inadequate as a lampooning force; real life is always a few steps ahead. The many good vignettes in this film include throwaway shots of city journos brandishing the villagers' possessions in front of their cameras like spoilt brats who have found an artillery of new toys to play with, or milking every moment for its potential emotional impact, even when the villagers themselves are being stoical and dignified. (Something I’ve been wondering generally after watching this and other depictions of electronic media in our recent films: are there young journalists who have quit their jobs and opted for alternate careers, out of sheer embarrassment if nothing else? Or do skins in this profession get rhino-thick at a very early age?)

- In our media-saturated age, films like Peepli [Live] are begging to be made, but for an uncannily prescient portrayal of a personal tragedy being turned into a carnival by cynical journalists, do watch Billy Wilder’s 1951 masterpiece Ace in the Hole. Nearly six decades old, and that film looks fresher each year.

P.S. Here's a feature story done by the wife for Mint newspaper, about one of the country's many Peepli villages - this one in Aligarh on the UP-Haryana border.

Stalag 17, and Billy Wilder’s understated cynicism

I used to think of Billy Wilder primarily as a very witty, literate screenwriter who made sophisticated, Lubitsch-like films. But re-watching Sunset Boulevard and Stalag 17 recently, I was reminded again of how hard-edged Wilder’s sense of humour is. Of course, there was never any denying that he made some very cynical movies (most notably Ace in the Hole, which anticipates the evils of today’s media in its story of a reporter exploiting the situation of a man trapped in a cave). But because Wilder is such a clever writer who constantly comes up with lines that make you smile, and because his dialogues are so layered and fast-paced, requiring full concentration, you can sometimes lose sight of how dark some of his material is.

Take Stalag 17, a film about American prisoners of war in a German camp (or stalag) a few months before the end of the Second World War. The main plot involves their realisation that there’s a stoolie in their midst who smuggles information to the camp commandant; the finger of suspicion points at the unsocial Sergeant Sefton (played by William Holden) who spends much of his time trading with the Germans for special privileges (a few dozen cigarettes in exchange for a precious egg, for example).

The effect of this film is different from that of the obviously absurdist anti-war comedies – movies like Altman’s M*A*S*H* and Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. The deliberate, over-the-top lunacy of those movies paradoxically makes it easier for us to see how serious-intentioned they are. Army surgeons cracking jokes while digging about in the bleeding innards of their doomed patients? Mushroom clouds spreading gracefully across the earth’s surface while a gentle Vera Lynn song plays in the background? How can this not be ironical? But Stalag 17 is harder to figure out, because its tone is more realist and because, in a couple of scenes, it steers close to making POW life seem like one long buddy picnic. There are Christmas trees, there is much hurrahing to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again”, there’s a bit of fooling about with a genial prison guard, a bit of volleyball, and some ogling of the Russian women prisoners across the barbed wire.

Consequently, you might think this film is a bit flippant or at least that it’s somewhat sanitised (which it probably is, but that has more to do with the fact that it was made in 1953 than anything else). After all, when we think of Nazis as captors we reflexively think about the horrors of the concentration camps: we don’t think about the fact that the Germans would probably treat white American POWs towards the war's end at least marginally better than they treated the Jews. (In this case, being too nuanced is a step away from being callous. There’s something distasteful about a film depicting a German prison guard as genial, even if a few such men might actually have existed.) [Note: for a clarification of what I'm trying - unsuccessfully - to say here, see Feanor's comment and my reply to it.]

But despite its few instances of soft-pedalling, Stalag 17 is a very thoughtful movie. It never really allows us to forget its opening moments, when two prisoners are coolly shot dead by German guards while trying to escape, their bodies left to lie in the slush the next day while the camp commandant smilingly explains that “fortunately your companions did not get very far – they had the good sense to rejoin us”. And there are, in fact, a couple of scenes that seem to point the way forward to M*A*S*H*, which was made 20 years later in a more permissive Hollywood. In one scene, after the prisoners are given copies of Mein Kampf to read, they stick Hitler moustaches on themselves and make faux-speeches in a pidgin language that combines random German words (or German-sounding words) with American slang. “Everything is Gesundheit, Kaputt and Verboten! Is all you indoctrinated? Is all you good little Adolfs?” (Hawkeye Pierce and Trapper John would have been proud.) In another scene, one of the men receives a thinly disguised Dear John letter from his wife, informing him that she found a baby on her doorstep, that it has her eyes and nose, and that he must believe her.

The execution of the two wannabe escapees is filmed matter-of-factly, much like the gangland massacre scene in Wilder’s Some Like it Hot - there’s no underlining the tragedy of the moment, no stretching it out or dolling it up with sad music; that’s not the Wilder way. And there’s an immediate cut to a shot of Sefton, collecting his winnings – a pile of cigarettes – because he’d bet the other prisoners that the two men wouldn’t make it out of the forest. Naturally this isn’t the sort of thing that would endear him to the others, but he’s only measuring the risks and being practical. As he tells the other prisoners, “Let’s say you DO escape this place and get back to the States. They’ll just ship you out to the Pacific, put you on another plane, you’ll get shot down again and end up in a Japanese prison camp this time. Well, I’m staying put and making myself as comfortable as I can.”

It’s an impressive anti-war speech, but in the context of the story it also indicates a selfishness in Sefton’s personality. Subsequent events allow him personal growth. When he finds out the identity of the real stoolie, he’s in a position to milk the knowledge for personal gain, but he makes another choice instead. And it’s typical of Wilder’s style that this is depicted as unsentimentally as possible, without turning Sefton into the Hollywood Hero who saves the day.

P.S. More on Wilder’s wry treatment of death. My Sunset Boulevard DVD has audio commentary by Ed Sikov, who wrote a book about Wilder, and from it I learnt that the original opening of the film was a scene set in a morgue, where the corpse of Joe Gillis (the movie’s leading man, also played by William Holden) engages in conversation with other dead bodies. But during a preview screening, audiences laughed so hard at this scene that Wilder had to come up with something different: hence the macabre yet beautiful shot taken from the bottom of the swimming pool in which Gillis’s body floats as policemen try to fish it out and newsmen take photographs.

Notes on Luck by Chance (and Bollywood’s crumbling fourth wall)

[A shorter version of this appears in the Sunday Business Standard]

Meta-films – or movies that self-consciously comment on the movie-making process, thus breaking the fourth wall between the film and its audience – date back at least to 1924’s Sherlock Jr, with Buster Keaton as a theatre projectionist who walks right into a film screen and becomes part of the plot. In the decades since, the genre has included abstract movies (such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, about a screenwriter reluctantly bending to the demands of commerce and endangering his marriage in the process) as well as relatively straight narratives about the industry and its denizens (e.g., Billy Wilder’s superbly written and acted Sunset Boulevard, about a once-famous star living with her memories, Miss Havisham-like, in a decrepit mansion).

As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, mainstream Hindi cinema has seen a lot of indulgent self-referencing and in-joking in recent times: rival actors make “friendly appearances” in each other’s films, movies are titled after songs from earlier films, you get the impression that everyone is part of one big happy family that squabbles and makes up with equal aplomb. This reached its high watermark in Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om, which spoofed the phenomenon while simultaneously participating in it (and parts of which were impossible to understand without reference to Shah Rukh Khan’s career), and in the more recent Rab ne Bana Di Jodi, with its refrain made up of movie titles: “Hum Hain Rahi Pyaar Ke, Phir Milenge, Chalte Chalte”.

While this sort of back-patting and nudge-winking can be very enjoyable (especially if you’ve grown up with Bollywood and have a basic affection for it), I never expected that a mainstream film loaded with big-name cameos would attempt to thoughtfully engage with the workings of the industry. So I was pleasantly surprised by Zoya Akhtar’s Luck by Chance, a solidly performed and directed film that uses the intersecting fortunes of two wannabe actors, Sona (Konkana Sensharma) and Vikram (Farhan Akhtar), to examine what it takes to survive in this big bad world if you aren’t to the filmi-khandaan born. (Luck? Talent? A combination of both? In what proportion?)

The cast list includes celebrities in tiny appearances as themselves (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Karan Johar, Kareena Kapoor, Abhishek Bachchan, many others) as well as actors like Hrithik Roshan and Dimple Kapadia in fleshed-out parts, playing...not quite themselves, but people who can, in a certain light, be seen as variations on themselves. (This means that there’s always the danger of reading too much between the lines: in one scene, when Dimple’s character Neena Walia – a still-beautiful former star – seethed about entering the industry at age 16 without any family backing and having to do unsavoury things for producers, I overheard someone in the hall confidently saying, “Yes, that’s her true story – Raj Kapoor exploited her badly.”) There are also hilarious short roles for, among others, Anurag Kashyap, cleverly cast as a writer trying to exceed his brief by incorporating arty “film-festival” bits into a script rather than quietly acquiescing to a commercial-minded producer. All this creates an assortment of scenes where you’re aware that the line between fiction and reality is being blurred, only you’re never quite sure to what extent, and that’s part of the fun. (At times I was reminded of how Silsila – a meta-film of another kind, which played on public perceptions of the Amitabh-Jaya-Rekha relationship - made audiences feel uncomfortable by confronting them directly with their appetite for gossip.)

Luck by Chance could very easily have played it safe. Given the line-up of stars she had at her disposal, how tempting it might have been for Akhtar (and how much more audience-friendly it might have made her film, if the success of Om Shanti Om is anything to go by) to turn this into a hug-fest – a threadbare plot embellished with celebs waving at the viewer, assuring us that all is well in their world. Like the awards-ceremony scene and the “Deewangi” song sequence in OSO. But the best scenes in Luck by Chance – and many of the performances, notably those by Isha Sharvani (as Neena Walia’s bored daughter Nikki, in the grooming to be a starlet), Rishi Kapoor (as a producer named Romy Rolly), Kapadia and Roshan – have an edge to them, a disturbingly off-kilter quality.

A small example of the ambiguities that are set up by this film, and its complex use of self-referencing: when Sona is bluntly told by her producer that she will always be relegated to side roles, that no big hero would want to work opposite her, it’s a commentary on the industry’s attitude to someone who defies the Bollywood standard for what a heroine should look like (as the real-life Konkana Sensharma does), even if she happens to be one of the best actors in the country (as Sensharma is). But what adds irony to this scene is the viewer’s knowledge that Sensharma – Aparna Sen’s daughter – comes from a filmi background in real life, and that this undoubtedly made it easier for her to get that initial footing than it would be for the luckless Sona (and even then, she's basically seen as a non-mainstream actress, though that's mostly by choice).

At any rate, Madhur Bhandarkar no longer need worry about making a movie titled “Film Industry”. It’s been done now, and done with more nuance than he would have managed. Bhandarkar’s “topical” films (at least the ones I’ve seen – Page 3 and Corporate) set up their high-pulpit moralising by drawing a clear line between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, who may as well belong to two different species – so you rarely get a sense of the slow, almost subliminal process by which well-meaning and idealistic people can get corrupted; how you can get subsumed into a system without even realising it. Also, the protagonists in his films – the people who provide an entry point for the viewer – are innocents abroad (the Konkana character in Page 3, the Bipasha character in Corporate) who manage against the odds to retain their integrity, whereas the two leads in Luck by Chance are people who gradually learn about making concessions. Akhtar’s film has a better understanding of the subtly escalating nature of compromise in a world where only the fittest survive. There are few safety nets here and this is a more interesting landscape of people: just when you think you’ve got a “fix” on a character’s greed or hypocrisy, he does something that allows you to see the shades (e.g., Rolly introspecting about the humiliation he puts himself through when he kowtows before the star-sons whom he saw in short pants when they were growing up).

This is not to say Luck by Chance is an unqualified masterpiece – I thought it had many high points and a few low points (such as the scenes depicting the shooting of the movie that Vikram lands the lead role in, and his off-screen romance with Nikki), but the highs are so bloody good that it almost doesn’t matter. Some other things I liked:

– Kapadia’s character Neena is described as “a crocodile in a chiffon sari” at one point, but watching her lord it over her starlet-daughter Nikki, I was reminded more of a large black spider wrapping its victim in a beautiful silk shroud before sucking out its life-juices. (I chuckled at the scene where Neena interrupts her daughter playing Little Miss Muffet alongside a giant spider prop for a photo shoot, and thwacks the unfortunate arachnid away with her hand.) Also enjoyed her foul-mouthed outburst after reading a magazine article about an affair between Vikram and her daughter.

– The lovely little vignette with Zafar Khan (Hrithik Roshan) sitting inside his car, making faces at urchins who are pressed against the window; the pan shot that takes us into the car, removing the children from the frame and leaving us with a Zafar grimacing at his own reflection. (“I think of Zafar Khan as someone other than myself – a persona that I’m responsible for safeguarding,” he says, echoing words that Shah Rukh Khan has apparently used in real-life interviews.) He’s a boy-in-a-bubble here, much like Nikki Walia in her sterilely pretty pink room.

- Some of the fleeting appearances are very effective. I never thought I would apply the word “sinister” to anything involving Karan Johar, but the set-up and composition of the party scene where he appears is just that. Here, Johar looks something like a Dracula figure at a gathering especially held for creatures of the night – very different from the politely effete, eloquent host we know from that well-lit TV talk-show. The scene towards the end where Vikram – on the road to stardom – meets Shah Rukh Khan has a similar effect: on the surface there’s nothing menacing about it (an informal pub setting, SRK in jeans and a loose shirt casually inviting the newcomer over to his table for a chat and some tips, mostly in the form of platitudes about staying grounded) but I felt a brief chill when SRK rolled his eyes and hissed “It’s insane” in response to Vikram wondering what a superstar’s life must be like; for a few seconds, it reminded me of Laurence Olivier’s Crassus, drunk on power, giving political instruction to the youthful Julius Caesar in Spartacus.

Incidentally Shah Rukh tells Vikram never to lose sight of the people who knew him when he was a struggler – “they are the only ones who will always be honest with you”. Now I hear that SRK’s latest film Billu (also known as Billu Barber or Billu Chief Hair Executive Officer, if you prefer) casts him as a superstar who renews acquaintance with a small-town barber who knew him before he was a star. Is this to be the next step in the evolution of the Bollywood meta-movie, I wonder: a film containing a mini-trailer for another film due to be released a few weeks later? And is it ever again going to be possible for Shah Rukh to play a role where the fourth wall is firmly in place?

Film classics: Some Like it Hot

Of the many great directors who worked in Hollywood between the 1930s and the 1960s, Billy Wilder’s films have probably dated the best. Even while admiring the brilliance and the prolificacy of John Ford, Howard Hawks, Hitchcock or William Wyler, one usually has to make adjustments for a few touches of over-sentimentality in their films. But Wilder’s best work – notably Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Stalag 17 and The Apartment – has a hard-edged sophistication that’s instantly appealing to present-day viewers. I often get defensive about favourite old films, especially when watching them in the company of a viewer who’s been weaned on modern cinema and is liable to find them quaint, but I’ve never had this problem with Wilder’s movies.

His acerbic, always-literate screenplays (full of throwaway gems that you’ll miss on a first viewing) are key to this effect; their observations on the celebrity machinery, the dangerous side of the media, the compromises of modern living and Coca-Cola (!) seem just as relevant today as ever. [Watching the media circus that developed around Prince, the little boy trapped in a well near Kurukshetra a few weeks ago, I thought instantly of Wilder’s 1951 script for An Ace in the Hole, about a reporter who exploits a tourist guide’s cave accident.]

So engaging are Wilder’s screenplays that it’s easy to forget he was just as assured a director as a writer. His visual sense is demonstrated in the opening sequence of Some Like it Hot, wherein poker-faced gangsters and determined-looking policemen spray bullets at each other during a madcap car chase. When it’s all over, the title card “Chicago, 1929” appears over a shot of liquor bottles being smuggled in a coffin; it’s Prohibition time, and this entirely wordless sequence by a master wordsmith is a great establishing scene – capturing in just a few economical shots everything that one associates with a particular time and milieu.

Shortly after this, the words do flow, and how! The plot involves two jazz musicians, Joe (Tony Curtis) and Jerry (Jack Lemmon), who witness a gangland massacre and escape by pretending to be part of an all-girl band headed for Florida. On the train is the alluring but ditzy Sugar Kane (Marilyn Monroe), and soon a comedy/romance of errors commences. Meanwhile the gangsters, led by “Spats” (the veteran George Raft) are still hot in pursuit.

Given that Some Like it Hot is the definitive cross-dressing comedy – a genre that lends itself to low humour – it’s remarkable how sophisticated it is compared to the other films that followed in its wake. There are elements of slapstick as well as some risqué humour (“Get a load of that rhythm section!” exclaims Jerry as a scantily dressed band member prances by), but nothing that’s embarrassingly over the top. The laugh-out-loud moments have dissipated over the years, but the fine one-liners (or two-worders, as you’ll see right at the end of the movie) and sight gags (a hot water bottle used as a cocktail mixer; a gun hidden in a golf bag) still hold up well.

The comedy goes hand in hand with meaningful character growth, especially in the way Joe and Jerry gradually get in touch with their feminine sides. Anyone who’s only watched Jack Lemmon in post-1970 films associates him with careworn, self-analytical characters in heavy-duty dramatic films such as Save the Tiger, The China Syndrome and Missing. Some Like it Hot is a reminder of what a brilliant, warm comedian he was in the early days. In this performance you can see how much fun Jerry seems to be having as a woman after the initial discomfort; you can understand why the millionaire Osgood Fielding III (a superb supporting performance by the broad-faced Joe E Brown) falls in love with him. (Whenever I look at the standard movie poster of this film, with the three leads on it, my eye is instantly drawn to Lemmon’s warm smile.)

Also note the gradual development of the romance between Sugar and Joe (who begins the film as a sexist cad), and how Monroe gamely allows herself to look undignified in some scenes without sacrificing that famous mix of sexiness and vulnerability. This role was a big stepping stone in her attempt to be taken seriously as an actress, though unfortunately for her there’s so much else of note in the film that she is quickly overshadowed. Sugar’s crooning of “I Wanna Be Loved By You” and her final, tender reconciliation with Joe at the end of another song are moments that could have elevated any film to classic status. In this case, they are just two high points in a movie packed with them.

[Did an edited version of this for the New Sunday Express. Some previous posts on classic films: Strangers on a Train, Yojimbo, M*A*S*H, 8 1/2, Spartacus, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Twelve Angry Men, Peeping Tom, The Passion of Joan of Arc, Duck Soup]