When I interviewed writer-director Kundan Shah for the Jaane bhi do Yaaro book a few years ago, he mentioned learning one of the principles of movie comedy while watching silent films at the FTII – how to “build a gag on a gag on a gag on a gag on a gag on a gag until you have a pyramid of gags”. Watching the 1923 Harold Lloyd-starrer Safety Last! (on a newly acquired Criterion disc-set), I thought again of those words. The film, with its multiple gag-pyramids – which add up to form one giant pyramid – is testament to how much thought, effort and practice can go into little moments that achieve nothing more “consequential” than making people laugh, or gape, or do both things at the same time.
I came to Safety Last! much later than I should have, but like so many others who haven’t seen the film I knew it by its most famous image: the scene where Lloyd (playing his stock character, the bespectacled everyman known here as The Boy as well as Harold) hangs for dear life from the face of a building clock. That scene is a cornerstone of the film’s biggest “pyramid” – circumstances having forced the hapless Harold to climb a 12-storey building for a publicity stunt – but there is so much more to Safety Last!. Watching it was a reminder that good silent-film comedy – with its sight gags, set-ups, incredible feats of timing, balletic physical movements, and minimal reliance on inter-titles – was one of the purest expressions of “pure cinema”. And that Keaton and Chaplin weren’t the only masters of those underrated arts.
In the best cases, even the inter-titles (which performed a functional role in most silent movies) would be used to clever effect. Consider the grim one that opens this film, and the shot that immediately follows it:
The camera then draws back to show two weeping women – the Boy’s mother and girlfriend – on the other side of the bars. A policeman and a priest enter the frame too, and the meaning of the scene appears clear from these elements – but of course it’s a set-up, the first of many fine sight gags: it turns out that they are all at the railway station, the “hangman’s noose” is really a loop used to attach mail for passing trains to pick up, and the Boy is only going to the big city for a job.
Once this has been revealed, it would be understandable if the film slowed down for a bit to establish the situation and the characters. Yet, after only a brief interlude – where Harold and his girlfriend Mildred (played by Lloyd’s real-life wife Mildred Davis) express their hopes for the future – the gags continue with a seamlessly executed scene where Harold, rushing to catch the train, picks up a pram with a baby in it instead of his suitcase. In itself, this is nothing special – a staple comedy-of-errors scene – but it is the necessary build-up to the final visual gag of this sequence. The baby’s mother catches up with him just as he is about to climb aboard, the mix-up is sorted out, but the distracted Harold doesn’t realise that the train has started moving away. Without looking, he stretches his arm out behind him …and ends up on a passing horse-cart instead. Discovering his mistake, he runs after the train and leaps on, by now a receding figure, but with enough presence of mind left to wave a second cheery goodbye. Fade out.
A description like this is no substitute for watching the two-minute scene play out, of course. It is a marvelous line of comic sketches, building on – and running into – one another: an opening shot that catches us off balance before allowing us a little chuckle of relief, 
then the mix-up culminating in the agile physical comedy. And in between all this, an important “serious” moment – a close-up of the lovers before they part – that suggests what is at stake for the main character: what the Big City, with its tall buildings, office politics, expensive food, menacing clocks, and rich shoppers bullying overworked salespeople, will mean for him.
The film has many more such sequences, leading up to that super finale where Harold climbs the building unaided, in pursuit of a 1000 valuable dollars. This is one of the great ascents in any movie, right up there with King Kong – also a visitor from the boondocks trying to make sense of the city – climbing the Empire State Building 10 years after Safety Last! was made. (Or this opening scene from another great silent film, King Vidor’s The Crowd, where a camera “climbs” a skyscraper.) The gags in this last act literally build as Harold climbs from one floor to the next, facing a new challenge each time. It is heart-in-your-mouth thrilling, but – without detracting from the “fun” – it is also emotionally resonant for anyone who has come to sympathise with the Boy (easy to do; Lloyd is a natural and likable actor). Here is a scene that literalises the idea of the small-town boy as social climber. As critic Leonard Maltin and archivist Richard Correll point out in the Criterion commentary track, not only do the obstacles pile up in the final sequence, they get tougher and more outlandish. (A vagrant badminton net? A mouse running up his pants leg? A photo shoot somewhere on the 10th floor, involving a man with a gun?)
Which means this could be an image of the upwardly mobile professional climbing the ranks in a cutthroat world, with the stakes constantly increasing: the danger of falling and losing everything becomes more pronounced the higher he goes. This lovely, light comedy – while consistently being a lovely, light comedy – is up there with any of the more serious-minded examinations of what can be lost and gained in the move from a “simpler” way of life to a more competitive one; a worthy companion piece to other silent classics of the time like Greed or Sunrise or The Crowd, which offered the big city as a place where you might lose your footing (or your soul).
I watched Safety Last! alone, on DVD, with a prior idea of what the film was about, and I was still deeply stirred by it (the orchestral soundtrack by Carl Davis from 1989 goes very well with the film too), so I can't imagine what it must have felt like to unprepared audiences in a theatre in the pre-CGI era – people who had never been exposed to such stuntwork in a movie. Even today’s viewers might find their mouths hanging open when a dazed Harold swaggers about on the very edge of the roof after being struck by a weather-vane. No wonder the last shot – with the Boy back on firm ground and in the safety of the Girl’s arms – brings such a sense of release. It is a little like King Kong with a different ending, one where the ape and the blonde are reunited for ever on the rooftop. But is this a happy ending exactly? Even a thousand dollars may not go a very long way, and if the city is going to keep throwing up such challenges perhaps the young man may have been better off with his head in that noose after all.
P.S. two shots from films about a struggler in the city. A tram sequence in Safety Last! with hordes of men clinging to the outside of the vehicle and to each other, like bees to a hive:
And Kishore Kumar on a bus in Naukri 30 years later:
I have written before about the Criterion Collection DVDs and their use of imaginative artwork to pay homage to great movies. Last week I learnt that the Satyajit Ray classics Charulata and Mahanagar will soon be out on Criterion, but equally pleasing was a glimpse of the cover design for Ernst Lubitsch’s brilliant 1942 comedy To Be or Not to Be. The picture on the DVD package juxtaposes a famous image from Hamlet - the glum prince, primed for a soliloquy, holding Yorick’s skull in his hand - with a figure dressed in a smart Nazi uniform, so that the skull covers the Nazi's head. This image of fascism defeated, or made buffoonish, by theatre nicely catches the mood of a film about a Polish acting troupe outsmarting Hitler’s men. It also reminds me of what the critic David Thomson said: “If one side is making To Be or Not to Be in the middle of a war and the other is not – you know which side to root for.”
No intention of spoiling Lubitsch’s film for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but just as an appetiser, its opening sequence involves the apparent appearance of Hitler – alone – at a market corner in 1939 Warsaw. As he hesitantly surveys the shops and residents gape at him, a breathless voiceover – resembling nothing so much as a baseball-match commentary – goes:
“He seems strangely unconcerned by all the excitement he's causing. Is he by any chance interested in Mr Maslowski’s delicatessen? That’s impossible! He’s a vegetarian. And yet, he doesn’t always stick to his diet. Sometimes he swallows whole countries. Does he want to eat up Poland too?”
More digs at the leader follow in the next few minutes: an actor (the man who was pretending to be Hitler in that opening scene) responds to salutes with a “Heil Myself”, and a little boy speculates that if a brandy took the name Napoleon, perhaps Hitler “will end up as a piece of cheese”.
Of course, To Be or Not to Be was scarcely the only Hollywood film of its time to lampoon the Fuehrer. One of my favourite “Hitler cameos” occurs in Preston Sturges’s 1944 comedy The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, about a small-town girl who gives birth to sextuplets, a national record. As news spreads across America and the world, we see the dictator's furious reaction and a headline from a German newspaper reads “Hitler Demands Recount!” Tangential though the scene is to the film, it links Hitler with terminology associated with voting and democracy, presented here as a symbol of America’s moral superiority over Nazi Germany.
Around the same time, the good folks in animation were making more direct propaganda films such as the pleasingly titled Herr Meets Hare (in which Bugs Bunny accidentally tunnels to Germany while trying to find Las Vegas, and speaks incomprehensible faux-German in a shrill, Hitler-like voice), Donald Duck in Nutzi Land (the peevish Donald finds himself working in a Nazi factory, which makes him even more ill-tempered than usual) and The Blitz Wolf, which begins with the assertion “The Wolf in this photoplay is NOT fictitious. Any similarity between this Wolf and that (*!!#%) Hitler is purely intentional.”
Not all these films draw positive responses today. People are often affronted by Nazism being treated lightly in a Hollywood movie (or cartoon!), especially one that was made at a time when the very real horrors of the concentration camps were underway far across the Atlantic. One argument goes that it amounts to trivialising the Holocaust, and some things, we are told, should simply not be joked about. Well, I disagree in a broader sense with that idea – I don’t think any subject, however ugly or distasteful, should lie outside the purview of humour – but in this case the nature of the comedy serves an obviously desirable function: it strips a pompous, self-important figure of his dignity.
Recently there was a comparable scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, where a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan, the white-supremacist group, turns into farce when the members find that they can’t see properly through the little slits in their white hoods; and these are the very costumes that they think make them look so awe-inspiring! The scene drags on too long, but one can’t fault its intention: undermining evil by making it banal, then ridiculous, so that by the end the group is more klutz than klux. (Incidentally, the real history of the KKK has an equivalent for this. In the 1940s, the author William Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the group and passed on its code-words for use in a children’s radio programme about Superman; as little children – including the children of mortified Klan members – began using the “secret words” in their games, the group’s air of mystery was diluted.)
It is useful to have good satirical depictions of this sort in cinema, because there have already been films – powerful and influential and superbly made films – that have depicted evil in grand terms. Two that readily come to mind are Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will – a 
document of Nazi rallies that begins with a stirring scene where Hitler is framed as a deity surveying his land from his plane before descending to make his speeches – and D W Griffith’s silent epic The Birth of a Nation, which portrayed the KKK almost as knights in shining white armour. The movies served different functions: Riefenstahl’s was explicit propaganda, made for the National Socialist Party, while Griffith – a Southerner who grew up with assumptions that we would consider very illiberal today – was possibly making an honest effort to capture the realities of a particular time. But their ability to sway audiences, to make violence and intolerance seem appealing, can’t be denied; think of Birth of a Nation audiences in 1915 watching new techniques such as fast-paced cross-cutting, which made the climactic action more rousing.
What films like To Be or Not to Be do is to provide a counterpoint by puncturing that balloon, and I’m thankful for them every time I see how fashionable it is for a certain demographic of Indian youngster (this includes a lot of management students, incidentally) to posture and claim fondness for Hitler’s Mein Kampf – a book that has long been a bestseller in India – or to express admiration for his “leadership qualities”.
That said, good comedy can have morally ambiguous consequences too, as can be seen in the viral popularity of the “Downfall spoofs” on the internet. Using a scene from the 2004 film Downfall – a serious treatment of Hitler’s final days – where the dictator becomes unhinged as he realises defeat is at hand, these videos rewrite the English subtitles to make it seem like Hitler is ranting about sundry inconveniences and oddities of the modern world: thus, “Hitler finds out that Twitter is down again” and “Hitler discovers that Oasis have split up”. Many of the results 
are hysterically funny, but you might wonder about the implications: what does it say about us when a mass-murderer becomes a fellow pilgrim in expressing rage at relatively minor things? Empathy can be a tricky thing: these videos make Hitler one of us, and remind me of another exchange in To Be or Not to Be, when the director of the play expresses doubt about the effectiveness of the actor playing the dictator: “It’s not convincing. To me he’s just a man with a little moustache.” The actor replies: “But so is Hitler.”
[Did a version of this for my DNA column]
Hard as it is to believe, we are nearing the hundredth anniversary of the start of one of the most important movie careers ever. A while ago, in this book, I came across some transcripts of inter-office memos by Universal Pictures, circa 1912 - the memos have people in high positions discussing the worth of a young comic who had applied for a job at the studio, and the first one reads:
“Interesting eccentric comedian. Better in sketches with dialogue than sight gags. However, not outstanding enough to warrant either testing or sending to coast.”
And later, when the test did happen after all (because there was an unanticipated vacancy):
“Many objections have been raised to the use of the derby hat...also, the moustache must go. And do not allow him to walk comically. This may look all right on English music hall stages but for mass audience we must try to avoid offending people who are bow-legged, or crippled.”
Happily, Charles Spencer Chaplin won the battle to keep his hat, his moustache and his walk, and here we are a century later, still marvelling at the effect he had on a new art form that was searching for direction – most popularly as a performer, but just as vitally as a filmmaker and all-round creative genius, one of the first true auteurs.
Eagle Home Entertainment has recently made available a series of Chaplin’s feature-length movies in good, restored prints, and it’s been a good excuse to catch up on films that I took for granted when I was a child. There are many gems here, including The Gold Rush, Modern Times and, from later years, Limelight and Monsieur Verdoux, but if I had to pick a favourite it would probably be the lovely City Lights, which Chaplin determinedly made as a silent film at a time when talkies were all the rage. (A sly opening scene has pompous officials speaking gibberish while inaugurating a statue – probably a reflection of what Chaplin himself felt about talking movies!) This story about a tramp who falls in love with a blind flower girl while also managing an oddly intimate, on-again-off-again friendship with a drunk millionaire, combines all the 
best qualities of his work: imaginative physical comedy (notably the superb boxing-ring scene), unforgettable little gags (the "lucky" rabbit foot, the spaghetti and the streamers), gentle romance and pathos.
To watch the classic Chaplin films is to marvel at the influence they have had on cinema over the decades – and to discover, almost from one scene to the next, how strongly his work has seeped into popular culture across the world. (It's a bit like realising that a favourite novel - say, Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury or Richard Matheson’s What Dreams May Come - gets its title from a phrase made popular by a Shakespeare play.) Everyone knows about the effect he had on Raj Kapoor’s work, for example, but watching the beautiful last scene of City Lights where the tramp meets the girl, her sight now restored, I was reminded of the final moments of the Kamal Haasan-Sridevi tearjerker Sadma, where a man finds that the girl he had cared for through a mental ailment no longer recognises him now that she has regained her memory.
The City Lights sequence is (somewhat uncharacteristically for Chaplin) very understated, while the Sadma one belongs to a tradition of high melodrama, but the emotional link is so strong that it almost doesn't matter. To my eyes at least, Haasan almost comes to resemble Chaplin in that scene; even his moustache seems to droop in a similar way. But then, optical illusions of this sort are part of the Little Tramp’s legacy - you find traces of him in the unlikeliest places.
It also barely matters that the first film ends on a seemingly hopeful note whereas the latter's ending is sad and pessimistic; in the Chaplin universe, the possibility of melancholy exists in the most joyful situations, and vice versa. In any case, the viewer's knowledge of the Tramp's screen persona - the fact that he's a drifter perpetually bow-legging it from one situation to the next - makes it difficult to imagine a genuine romantic union between him and the flower girl, and this could be one reason why the last scene of City Lights is so movingly ambiguous. As Andrew Sarris put it, the final close-up is "the definitive image of a man who feels tragically unworthy of his beloved". It's a classic Chaplin theme.
[From my film column in Business Standard Weekend]
Watching a short film titled Andheri recently, I thought about movies that attempt to capture the character and pulse of a big city. Perhaps the only way to do this is to look at individual stories – at the fears and hopes of the people who populate a metropolis and make it what it is, but who also have an uneasy relationship with it.
Andheri, directed by Sushrut Jain, is a spare, simply told story about a young live-in maid, Anita, who runs away with dreams of leading an independent life. In a bus, she meets a newlywed Muslim girl who has just arrived in Mumbai with her husband, and they strike up a conversation. Then something happens that makes Anita realise how foolhardy it is to try and survive alone in an impersonal world.
I wish the film had been a bit longer (the running time is under 20 minutes and the ending feels a bit abrupt) but I liked that it didn’t try to underline its central point with needless talk. The story is told through the uncertainty on the faces of the two women and their tentative smiles, through images of crowded colonies and tall buildings flashing by, and the comical way in which total strangers collide with each other whenever the bus stops abruptly. But by the end, there’s no escaping the contrast – from Anita’s point of view – between the cold anonymity of life on the streets and the cosy familiarity of the flat where she has to work for a sharp-tongued old woman but where she at least has someone she can call her own (and watch Kasautii Zindagi Kay with). At the same time we get a fleeting sense of the loneliness of the old lady who is probably also, in a different way, a victim of city life.
A video essay on the film’s website mentions that the city of Mumbai, “the most densely populated place in the world, is home to millions of stories of hope and despair”. This observation reminded me of the famous closing line of one of the most vivid “city films” I’ve seen, Jules Dassin’s The Naked City. “There are eight million stories in the Naked City,” says the film’s narrator at the end, “and this has been one of them.”
The reference is to the population in 1948 of New York – where the film was set – and the line would later become the catchphrase for a popular TV series of the same title (a forerunner of detective/police procedural shows such as NYPD Blue and Hill Street Blues). Dassin’s movie, inspired by a book of photos by Arthur Fellig, follows a homicide investigation: when a young model named Jean Dexter is found murdered in her apartment, a team of 10th Precinct detectives headed by the Irishman Lieutenant Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) get to work. A chronic liar who was close to the dead girl soon becomes the chief suspect, but 
some twists and turns lie ahead, and this entails a lot of legwork for the youngest member of the team, Jimmy Halloran - who, we are told, “had walked halfway across Europe with a rifle in his hand" during the War, and who must now "play Button Button in a city of eight million”.
As Halloran walks the streets and an invisible narrator (journalist-turned-producer Mark Hellinger) comments on the city’s bustling life, the tone of the film 
starts resembling that of a documentary. This impression is strengthened by the extensive location shooting – very unusual in a mainstream American film of the time – with its many shots of sweaty office-goers taking the crowded train home, and children hosing each other down on the streets. (As Hellinger tells us at the beginning, “This is the city as it is...the hot summer pavements, the children at play, the buildings in their naked stone, the people without makeup.”)
This narrative is consistently engaging (if also a little precious and self-consciously literary at times), but for me one of the most telling scenes is the one at a morgue, where the dead girl’s parents have to identify the body. These are small-town people whose daughter had – in the face of their disapproval – run away 
from home and become involved with the wrong sorts of people, and the mother initially tries to be detached, then contemptuous, about her wayward child. ("I hate her, I hate her.") But she fails and breaks down, and in her grief we see how the lure of city life can divide families and presage human tragedies. (“Wanting too much – that’s where she went wrong.”) Eventually Jean (not her real name - small-town girls change their names when they move to the city!) became just another statistic, just one of the millions of “stories”, soon to be forgotten. For all the beauty of the film’s locations, it’s possible at this moment to see the city as a mechanical monster greedily gulping down its victims while holding its arms wide open for more.
[Did a shorter version of this for my Business Standard film column. Here's a post about another Dassin film, Brute Force]
Howard Hawks’ 1948 classic Red River is usually described as a Wild West version of Mutiny on the Bounty, and this is certainly true at a superficial level. Basic plot: in the 1850s and 1860s, the single-minded Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) builds a cattle empire and then initiates a drive – with a herd of thousands of animals – from Texas to Missouri. Along the way he becomes so tyrannical and insensitive towards his men that his adopted son Matthew (Montgomery Clift) leads a rebellion against him.
But there's a lot else going on in this multi-layered film. It's a psychological drama built on ambition and lust for power. It’s also an intriguing (though not fully developed) look at gender and familial relations – about fathers and sons, about men who haven’t had a strong female presence in their lives, and about women who shake them up. The film buff can see it as an identifiable Hawks creation, with some of the motifs that ran through this great director’s varied body of work. And there’s even a bit of horror movie buried in it, with innocents being pursued (and haunted in their nightmares) by a seemingly omniscient bogeyman, ready to jump out of the darkness. Who knew that John Wayne could be a prototype for Freddy Krueger!
All that said, Red River is first and foremost a brilliant Western, with everything you could want from the genre. It has an acute sense of history – the struggles of the pioneers and visionaries of the Old West, the constant need to shrug off painful losses, look ahead and move on – and strongly written supporting characters, such as Dunson’s old buddy Groot (played by the always-wonderful Walter Brennan). The location shooting is outstanding; there are cattle-drive and stampede scenes that equal any of John Ford’s action setpieces. (What an experience it must have been to see all this on the big screen!) The film is driven by visual storytelling, a point underlined by the fact that though we get occasional glimpses of a scroll of paper with a handwritten version of the narrative on it, the scroll rarely appears on the screen for more than two or three seconds. It dissolves in and out before the viewer has had time to read the full page – you’re left with a basic impression of the first couple of sentences, which is all you really need, because the camera is speaking so eloquently.
Much of the interest in the film today centres on the contrast in acting styles between old-school leading man Wayne and the young, introspective Clift, who was one of Hollywood’s first major performers from the Method school. Actually the contrast isn’t as pronounced as you might think, because Wayne smartly underplays his role, especially when he portrays Dunson as middle-aged. Here, the swaggering, crinkly-eyed Western hero of the 1930s is replaced by a terse, tight-lipped man, and there’s no doubting Dunson’s hard-headedness. In his overall demeanour one sees something resembling the dogmatism of the religious fundamentalist, and indeed his modus operandi is to calmly outdraw and shoot someone, and then nobly read from his Bible over the dead body. There’s something vaguely touching about this the first time he does it (the victim is the henchman of a powerful land-owner, and at this point Dunson can still be seen as a heroic figure), but soon it becomes creepy. Incidentally the Bible theme leads to an amusing monologue, delivered in a sing-song voice by one of the other men:
Always planting and reading! Fill a man full of lead, plant him in the ground, and then read words at him! Why, when you’ve killed a man, why try to read the Lord in as a partner on the job?
Montgomery Clift's Matthew, on the other hand, is dreamy-eyed and often smiles shyly. He’s a sensitive, almost new-age Western hero who sighs “I’m sorry” after he happens to 
raise his voice slightly during a conversation – compared to him, even Henry Fonda’s reticent Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine seems like a rugged frontiersman. Despite the Mutiny on the Bounty comparisons, Matt is no Fletcher Christian. Shortly after leading the mutiny, he says of Dunson, “He was wrong”, but then adds with a conflicted look on his face, “I hope I’m right.” This introspection and self-doubt is in direct opposition to Dunson’s proclamation “I’m the law.”
The emotional vulnerability of Clift is on view throughout the film, but one sees a different sort of vulnerability from Wayne, and it’s especially effective because this is the old-world macho man who doesn’t usually show weakness. Wayne is startlingly good in the scenes just after Dunson leads the shooting of three men who were talking about quitting: watch the paranoid way in which he jerks his head around and says “Where are you going?” when he sees Matt walking away, or the way he looks at another man who he thinks might be reaching for his holster. You get the sense that Dunson inwardly realises he is being unreasonable, but that he can’t swallow his pride. Soon he becomes a control freak, refusing to sleep so he can keep an eye on all the men, all the time (this is, of course, an indication that he realises he can no longer trust anyone).
The sleeplessness motif will be repeated later in the film, when Matt and his men are plagued by nightmares about the vengeful Dunson tracking them down. (“Every time you turn around, expect to see me, because one day you’ll turn around and I’ll be there.”) You won’t see many other great Westerns populated by insomniac and fearful men, but like I said, this film is a genre-bender. The fog in the night scenes also creates a look and atmosphere that is very unusual for a Western – you can cut the tension with a knife.
In fact, some of the later scenes in Red River remind me of two other great films made in the same year: John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (with gold prospectors driven by greed, eventually in danger of losing their sanity) and – would you believe it – Laurence Olivier’s adaptation of Hamlet. Think about the Danish 
prince being approached on a misty night by his father’s ghost, and then watch the scene in Red River where Matt wanders restlessly about on a foggy night, dreading Dunson’s arrival.
In Olivier’s film, the role of Hamlet’s mother Gertrude was played by an actress who was more than a decade younger than Olivier – this underlined the story’s Oedipal theme, turning the Hamlet-Gertrude-Claudius relationship into a twisted romantic triangle. In Red River, the main female character Tess has a similarly ambiguous relationship with both Dunson and Matt.
Men, women and Hawks
Many of Hawks’ movies are about men who live in a confined, emotionally limiting world, surrounded mostly by other men (or, in one memorable case, by dinosaur bones!) until a woman comes along and becomes a disruptive force, or a stabilising influence, or both. (On occasion, it’s possible to read the male relationships as being deeper than just strong friendship – watch the way the young cowboy Cherry Valance looks at Matt the first time they meet, and the subsequent gunplay between them, and tell me it isn’t vaguely homoerotic.)
There are two women in Red River; they are never seen together, but there is a strong symmetry in their roles, and in how they affect the central relationship between Dunson and Matt. Very early in the film, the young Dunson loses his girl Fen in an Indian attack (after he’s told her not to accompany him – he’ll return for her later). The very next morning, the boy Matt comes into his life, eventually becoming his adoptive son. Fourteen years later, shortly after the conflict between Dunson and Matt, Tess (Joanne Dru) enters the picture, becomes romantically involved with Matt, and sets about playing agony aunt and relationship-mender (in a striking scene where she wears a flowing black gown, she looks very much like a maternal, Madonna figure).
When Matt leaves Tess behind, promising to return for her later, it’s a repeat of Dunson’s promise to Fen, but with a twist: shortly afterwards, Dunson arrives and agrees to take Tess with him. He’s showing some flexibility for the first time, which represents a major progression in his character – it should help the viewer prepare for a reconciliation and a happy ending.
Unfortunately, the actual climax – with Tess breaking up a display of machismo between Dunson and Matt – is too abrupt, and jarringly shifts the tone from grand tragedy to homely farce. I think this same ending could have worked better if it had been drawn out a little more, and if the Tess character had been given more importance in the lead up to it. Perhaps she could have been played by a bigger star – someone like Barbara Stanwyck, or even Olivia De Havilland – so that she became the film’s belated third lead. 
(And how about Lauren Bacall, who had stood up so well to Humphrey Bogart in two earlier Hawks classics, To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep?) But the role as it’s written is too marginal – almost an afterthought – to sustain such an idea. Tess isn’t quite the equal of the “Hawksian women” from other films. (While on that, see this piece by Germaine Greer.)
If it were possible for an otherwise great film to be ruined by its last one minute, this would be a candidate. But Red River is such a complex and satisfying movie in other respects that it almost doesn’t matter; when you think about it a few days after watching it, you’ll only remember the good bits. And wish you could see it in 70 mm.
Related posts: on the John Wayne star persona in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; and on A Streetcar Named Desire (which also had two leads who represented different acting styles – also see the comments discussion).
...or, why you don't always have to use a long spoon while supping with Satan. My latest Yahoo! column is about some of the cooler movie Devils.
Update: here's the full piece
A depressive, hung-over actor named Toby Dammit is being asked a string of banal questions at a press conference. He answers them crabbily; he looks like he hasn’t slept in weeks.
“Do you believe in God?” asks a reporter with shiny white teeth. “No,” sighs the actor, terribly bored and distracted.
“And in the Devil?”
Now, for the first time, Dammit looks animated. He leans forward, says “Yes. In the Devil, yes.”
“How exciting!” exclaims the questioner, delighted to have hit home, “Have you seen Him? What does He look like? A black cat, a goat, a bat?”
“Oh no,” says Dammit, a faraway look coming into his eyes, “To me the Devil is cheerful, agile…”
Cut to an shot of a girl, her pale face occupying the left half of the screen, leering at the camera
“He looks like a little girl.”
I’ll leave you to discover the rest of Federico Fellini’s atmospheric short film “Toby Dammit” (or “Never Bet the Devil Your Head”) for yourself. But the scene is a reminder that Satan, or Beelzebub, or the Prince of Darkness, is the most adventurous of screen characters. He comes in many forms, and He’s a lot more willing to show Himself than his opposite number – you know, that guy in the Other Place – is.
God, as a snarling Al Pacino reminds us in The Devil’s Advocate, “is an absentee landlord” – aloof, unwilling to have much to do with mortal affairs. But Devils are always around, always willing to listen, and the most genteel and hospitable of them all has to be the one in Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait. This witty 1943 film begins with the deceased protagonist Henry presenting himself to Hell of his own accord, for as a title card tells us:
“As Henry van Cleve’s soul passed over the Great Divide, he realised it was extremely unlikely that his next stop could be Heaven. And so, philosophically, he presented himself where innumerable people had so often told him to go.”
The appointment chamber of Hell is a spacious room lined with bookshelves, which suggests that the Devil (referred to here as His Excellency) is a well-read gentleman. Dressed in a tuxedo and sporting a somewhat pointy beard as a small nod to tradition, he greets Henry courteously and enquires if he had a peaceful demise. His Excellency is patient and solicitous. (He does lapse into a sly smile once in a while, but then nearly all of Lubitsch’s characters have a bit of devilry in them!) After listening to Henry’s story – the story of a life marked not by any major crime but rather a “continuous series of misdemeanours” – he weighs things and shakes his head. “Sorry Mr Van Cleve, but we don’t cater to your class of people here,” he says, instructing the elevator boy to take Henry “upstairs”.
Like every other Lubitsch movie, Heaven Can Wait is elegant and packed with clever dialogue. But it also has perceptive things to say about the human tendency to deal in polarities – in this case, the idea of a Heaven for do-gooders vs an eternal hellfire for sinners. As the Devil gently reminds us at the end, things usually aren’t so cut-and-dried. Even if Henry’s peccadilloes and philandering ways earned him some red marks, it’s just possible that Heaven has “a small, not-so-comfortable room vacant in the annex”, where he might be permitted to stay for a few hundred years before they let him into the main building. Why not give it a try? Why be so hard on yourself?
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Other screen Satans are less urbane and less understanding, but they have a sense of humour and know how to have a good time. A great rascally portrayal of the Devil is in Benjamin Christensen’s silent movie Häxan. This is, believe it or not, a rationalist film (remarkably so for the time it was made in) about witch-hunts, but Christensen uses the Devil sequences to illustrate the delusions that superstitious or credulous people suffer from. In one scene, an old woman recalls her acts of witchery, including riding on broomsticks through the night and participating in a devil’s feast. But then the poor thing is being tortured by the priests of the Inquisition; under those circumstances, I suspect I would have similar “recollections”.
Satan’s superb first appearance in this film has him leaping out at a plump monk who’s studying the Bible. (If you watched MTV in the mid-1990s, you’ve probably seen this delightful shot already, without knowing it.) He’s repulsive to look at, bare-chested, pot-bellied and lumpy, waggling his forked tongue, knocking on boudoir doors and enticing young women into his hairy arms even as their husbands doze nearby. He’s also played by the director, and I suspect Christensen had fun in the role.
[If you see Haxan, try to catch the 1968 “remix” titled Witchcraft Through the Ages, set to a jazz score (!) and with narration by William Burroughs, who tells us in his brilliantly deadpan, gravelly voice, that “belief in the Devil was so steadfast that many people gave incredible descriptions of this horrid individual”, and that witches had to show their respect for Satan “by kissing his ass”.]
However, if I had to pick a single favourite screen Devil, it would be Walter Huston as the grizzled Mr Scratch in The Devil and Daniel Webster. This adaptation of the Faust legend shifts the tale to rural America in the mid-19th century, where Mr Scratch, with his little black book and self-combusting visiting card, makes a misfortune-plagued farmer an offer he can’t refuse: a hoard of gold coins in exchange for his soul, contract to be renewed in seven years. “And why should that worry you?” Scratch says persuasively. “What is a soul? A soul is nothing. Can you see it, smell it, touch it? No.”
Huston’s Devil is diabolical and charming at the same time, but in a folksy, Midwestern sort of way. He isn’t a supernatural figure arbitrarily thrust into the story – it’s possible to see him in realist terms as a roguish tramp sitting about on the sidelines, stirring people up – but the viewer can never have the slightest doubt about who He really is; this is exactly what old Lucifer would look and behave like in the 1800s if he tucked his pointy tail away, whisked off his horns and visited a farmstead. Best of all, this isn’t a Devil who turns sullen when his plans are foiled at the end: Scratch’s maniacal grin only becomes wider and he departs with a polite nod, as if he knows this is a temporary setback and many more triumphs lie ahead of him. After all, he has eternity.
The film’s unforgettable last shot has Scratch flipping through his black book, then looking up, staring straight into the camera, grinning and pointing at us, as if to say “You’re next!” The message is clear. In cinema’s early days, puritans would denounce the bioscope and the movie camera as being “the devil's instruments”, and in a sense that’s still true. Few other movie characters are this hypnotic.
This is part of an occasional series I'll be doing about little connections between films – scenes that echo each other in some way, even if it's a couple of fleeting shots that may have been conceived as a tribute (and even if it's all only in my head!). Apologies if this sounds film-schoolish – that isn't the intention. Just being self-indulgent really, and sharing an aspect of movie-watching that I personally find rewarding.
There’s a playful scene in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, which reminded me of Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt. (As mentioned in this post, Scorsese admits to being a big fan of Godard's movie.) The Contempt sequence, quite a famous one, has a nude Brigitte Bardot lying on her stomach – she plays Camille, the wife of the film's protagonist Paul, and they are in bed together. As they talk, she asks him to look at various parts of her body and assess them. “Do you like my ankles? My knees?” “What do you think of my behind?”
The back-story is that Godard was instructed by his producer to include a few nude shots of Bardot (what's the point of having Bardot in your film if she's covered up?) – something he was reluctant to do because it was such an obvious sop for the 
mass audience. Eventually, he retained some of his integrity by coming up with a scene where the sex symbol deconstructs herself (or her screen image) by explicitly drawing the viewer’s attention to parts of her body. The idea was to de-eroticise Bardot, though I'm not really sure that happened: I think the scene is still quite sexy in its own way, partly because of how it suggests the relaxed intimacy between a married couple who are very familiar with each other's bodies – it just isn't sexy in the way that more typical Brigitte Bardot films tended to be.
Now for a scene in Mean Streets, made a decade later. Charlie (Harvey Keitel) is in a post-coital moment with Teresa (Amy Robinson). They banter, he gets defensive about something, she gets annoyed, jumps out of bed and stands at the window naked. They fool around some more, and Scorsese fools around too; when Charlie forms a gun with his hands, points it at Teresa and pulls the “trigger”, we hear a real gunshot on the soundtrack.
Then she starts to get dressed and tells him not to look. Charlie obeys, but after putting his fingers over his eyes he splays them so he can see her. He moves the hand covering his right eye from a vertical to a horizontal position and spreads his fingers out again – it's like a film’s clapboard opening and closing. Effectively, he's changing the angles, like a camera shifting perspective. (It reminds me of Godard's use of colour filters while photographing Bardot in that scene in Contempt.)
Finally there comes a moment where Charlie, still looking through his fingers, contemplates Teresa's bare bottom (partly covered by her shirt) from an unusual side-angle – there's nothing erotic about this image, in fact it's faintly ridiculous, and Charlie can't stop himself from giggling at the sight.
But the undercurrent to this lighthearted scene is that Charlie knows he’ll never be able to marry Teresa (his family has warned him not to get involved with her, and he’s an obedient, partly repressed Catholic boy). Being aware of the barrier between them, he keeps trying to distance himself from this girl. In this scene, I think the detachment takes the form of his “fragmenting” Teresa, so that he can view her as a set of dissociated parts rather than as a whole woman, a person with feelings. And it’s typical of Scorsese that he pays homage to a favourite film in such a way that he enriches his own movie in the process. There’s nothing gimmicky or derivative about this scene – it’s an echo, but it works perfectly well on its own terms.
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]
My latest Persistence of Vision column for Yahoo! India is about why I think of Martin Scorsese as a kindred spirit first and a great director second. Here goes.
Update: here's the full piece
The great director as permanent student
A long, long time ago, I got my hands on The Variety Book of Movie Lists, a collection of "best-of" listings in numerous categories. The contributors included critics, authors and directors, and most of their lists, as you'd expect, were restricted to ten or fewer films. Neatly selected and pruned, a single list rarely took up more than half a page. But there was one notable exception. Martin Scorsese - designated as "director and film history expert extraordinaire" - blithely named dozens of movies in each category that he contributed to.
His personal selection of noir titles ran to over 60 films, including many B-movies I hadn't even heard of. His list of "Best Colour Films" included nearly 80 movies, spread over three pages. (I soon realised that "best colour films" didn't mean best films that happened to be in colour - in that case, Scorsese's list might have been book-length! - but films that, in his view, made the best use of colour photography.)
Going through these lists told me a few things about the man who had drawn them up. They told me, first, that Scorsese had watched a LOT of films and that he wasn't obsessed with proclaiming favourites or ranking movies "in order of preference" (his lists were alphabetical). Also that he had very wide-ranging tastes and was unapologetic about it: he would put a brassy, big-budget Hollywood studio epic on the same page as an artistically high-minded European avant-garde movie; his choice of horror films from the Hammer Studios included movies that many respectable critics wouldn't even deign to watch.
At the time, the only Scorsese-directed films I had seen were Mean Streets and Taxi Driver (I was into Old Hollywood then, not all this new-fangled - meaning post-1960s - stuff). Both films feature a cameo by the director: in Mean Streets, he plays a hitman who gleefully kisses his gun before shooting Robert De Niro's Johnny Boy in the neck in the violent climax; in Taxi Driver he appears, bearded, sinister, looking vaguely Satanic, as a passenger who makes De Niro's cab-driver stop outside an apartment where (he claims) his wife is cheating on him.
These two roles were my first glimpses of Scorsese on screen, and they fixed him in my mind as a tough guy who made gritty, violent urban movies about gangsters and psychotic loners (and who presumably wouldn't have much time for the gentler films of an earlier age). But the Scorsese I subsequently discovered - through his interviews and the video introductions he did for various films - was the antithesis of those cameo roles, a kindly, middle-aged man with a seemingly boundless knowledge of film history.
Interestingly, many of the movies that Scorsese loves are movies that most viewers would think of as very un-Scorsese-like. Take Jean Renoir's The River, a beautifully photographed tale about an English girl coming of age, learning about love and loss, in Bengal in the early 1950s. I love the look of this film - particularly its poetic use of dissolves - and I also appreciate that though the main characters are British, it isn't patronizing towards India and Indians (quite an achievement for a foreign film made in that era). But The River is also static in places, heavily dependent on voiceover, and the acting is very uneven. I'm perplexed by Scorsese's unqualified adoration for it.
On my DVD there's a video introduction by Scorsese, who was instrumental in the restoration of the print. He first saw this film at age nine, he tells us, and it was one of his formative experiences as a child. "It was my first experience of a very different culture," he says, adding self-deprecatingly, "My family wasn't well-educated, I didn't know much about other places, but despite my own very different Italian-American background, I identified with these people on the screen, I felt for them."
****
Watching Martin Scorsese speak about a favourite movie is a good way to get excited about the medium. He waves his hands about, talks in the rapid-fire style one associates with gangster films of the 1930s; he's an excitable child, but he's incredibly eloquent and perceptive at the same time. You see the master technician take over when he discusses Renoir's careful framing of the lush tropical landscape in The River, the role of colour as a character in the film, and how the rich, intense photography reminded him of the Impressionist paintings of Renoir's father Auguste (whose work Scorsese had also seen as a child without knowing anything about the connection between the two men).
Many of us, after entering adulthood's prison, tend to be wary of the films that held us in thrall when we were children or adolescents; we are afraid that revisiting them might reveal them to be quaint and embarrassing, and destroy our idealised memories. But here's Scorsese, director of groundbreaking modern movies like Raging Bull and Taxi Driver and Goodfellas, saying in the most matter-of-fact way that he still watches The River at least three or four times every year, he loves it that much.
Of course, it's one among hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of movies that he cares about. I've read his views on many films and I've rarely if ever found him saying something strongly critical - he comes across as the archetype of the open-minded movie-lover whose first (and often only) instinct is to see something good or useful in a film. I find this quality fascinating in a man who is himself a very exacting, particular filmmaker. Surely you'd expect Martin Scorsese to be more discerning, even snobbish?
When he does mention a film that didn't appeal to him too much, he's almost apologetic about it; he dissects his own response. Discussing another Renoir movie, Rules of the Game (in an interview in the book Projections 7), he says that he couldn't personally relate to it because he didn't understand the aristocratic world and the class divide that it depicted. When he says he prefers Godard's Contempt and My Life to Live to his later work, he adds, "It grabs me when his films tell stories; I'm not hip enough to get into the other stuff." (Italics mine.)
After I became more familiar with Scorsese's own cinema, I came to appreciate how often and how generously he pays tribute to the films that influenced him. The opening credits of Mean Streets (still my personal favourite Scorsese movie) include a shot of a motion-picture camera coming to life, which is reminiscent of the opening credits of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (another film Scorsese helped restore). In a pivotal emotional scene near the end of Casino, Scorsese uses a few notes from Georges Delerue's lovely, mournful score for Contempt. Unlike most other great directors, he unselfconsciously remakes films made by other people: films like the workmanlike 1960s thriller Cape Fear (which, again to my surprise, Scorsese referred to as a "gem" in one of his interviews; sorry Marty, but it ain't anything of the sort!).
Audacious as this will sound, much as I admire Scorsese's own body of work, I still think of him primarily as a film buff and permanent student - and therefore, a kindred spirit. If I had to name a single director, from any period or any country, with whom I'd want to spend a week discussing and arguing about movies, he would get my vote hands down.
P.S. For some of Scorsese's typically enthusiastic mini-reviews of old Hollywood films, visit this site and check the archives.
