A rambling tribute to Red River

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).

Detectives, drunkards and vampires: same role, different actors

[Was asked by Crest newspaper to do this piece about characters played by many different actors onscreen. Fairly assembly-line and hurried, as such write-ups tend to be, but fun to do – reminded me of the light cinema pieces I used to write for the Cafedilli website a decade ago. Only putting this up here because the blog is malnourished these days]

When Robert Downey Jr took off his shirt for an action scene in the new Sherlock Holmes, movie historians dashed to their research hubs: was this the first onscreen Holmes to get into a topless fight? We may never know the answer – the legendary detective has been portrayed so many times on film that keeping track of “firsts” is impossible. It’s best to stick with the subjective assessment that Downey Jr has the most impressive pectorals.

Fine actor though Downey Jr is, he isn’t the best Holmes; the competition is too stiff. Consider Christopher Plummer, nicely sardonic in Murder by Decree, which pitted the detective against no less a quarry than Jack the Ripper. Or Michael Caine, playing an actor hired by Dr Watson - who's the real star of the show - to impersonate Holmes in the genre-bending comedy Without a Clue. Jeremy Brett’s Holmes in the 1980s series was probably the most “authentic”, but that was television so I’ll only give it an honourable mention. My personal vote for best feature-film Holmes (and I haven't seen them all, I should add) goes to the urbane Basil Rathbone, who played the part in a very popular series of films in the 1940s. The profile, the cap, the voice... everything about Rathbone was exactly as readers of the original stories envisioned, even if the plots were sometimes updated to fit then-contemporary events.

Conan Doyle’s sleuth is one of many fictional characters that the movies never tire of; his closest competitor in the popularity stakes (pun unintended) is Count Dracula from Bram Stoker’s novel. The Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi initiated the portrayal of the bloodthirsty Count as a darkly attractive figure, Christopher Lee sank his teeth even further into the part in the British Hammer films, and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version had Gary Oldman playing a dashing combination of Dracula and Vlad the Impaler, with a bit of werewolf (!) thrown in. But the creepiest vampire portrayal ever is from the great silent film Nosferatu. With his lean physique, spidery fingers and rodent-like face, the German actor Max Schreck was perfectly suited to the part. His vampire was repulsive and otherworldly – so otherworldly, in fact, that it was possible for another film made decades later to play around with the premise that Schreck was a vampire in real life! Nosferatu gets extra points for being decidedly unsexy, unlike the vampires in popular culture today.

Dracula is famously undead, but Death has a long tradition of appearing in human form in movies, the most iconic representation being in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, about a medieval knight being shadowed by the Grim Reaper. Brad Pitt made a luscious Death in the overlong drama Meet Joe Black – the camera was clearly in love with this toy boy – but my favourite is the Grim Reaper parody in the goofy comedy Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey. In Bergman’s film, the knight challenged Death to chess; in this one, Bill and Ted make him play Twister and electric football, and beat him like a drum. Cheating Death was never such fun.

It’s difficult to choose just one among the actors who played another death-cheater, James Bond, but we’ll do the purist thing and stick with Sean Connery. Timothy Dalton, George Lazenby (remember him?) and Daniel Craig were more laconic – arguably closer to the spirit of the Ian Fleming novels – but Connery’s roguish charm and litheness gave 007 a dimension that even Fleming hadn’t envisioned. Roger Moore comes a close second. Pierce Brosnan? Fine actor, but for anyone who watched Remington Steele for more than one season it’s impossible to associate him with another recurring character.

From the ultimate man of action to a tragic hero burdened by indecision: Shakespeare's Hamlet has long been a litmus test for actors, and its screen adaptations are innumerable. Laurence Olivier won the best actor Oscar for the atmospheric 1948 version, and Mel Gibson gave one of his better performances (which isn’t necessarily saying much) in Franco Zefferelli's 1990 film, but I have to go with Kenneth Branagh, whose sumptuous-looking four-hour version retained the entire text of the play, yet still managed to be gripping throughout. Branagh was a wonderfully energetic Hamlet; his recitation of some of the key soliloquies was so vivid that I can still hear the words in my head years after I last saw the film.

Among the Bard's heroines, Lady Macbeth has had a long and varied screen life. In Roman Polanski’s excellent 1971 Macbeth, the fragile-looking Francesca Annis performed her hand-washing soliloquy in the nude, whimpering as she is supervised by nurses. Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool gave us a fine desi Lady Macbeth, Nimmi, all the more effective because we never thought the ethereal Tabu could be a manipulative vixen. But the best Lady Macbeth by a country mile was in Akira Kurosawa’s classic Throne of Blood. Isuzu Yamada’s chilling performance as Asaji isn’t rooted in psychological realism – the film is based on the Noh theatrical form, and Yamada’s face is made up to resemble an impassive mask – but when she’s on screen it’s impossible to take your eyes off her.

One character it’s surprisingly easy to take your eyes off is Indian cinema’s favourite tragic hero, Devdas. Here’s a role that can make a lazy performance look good: produce a distant, glaze-eyed expression, slur a little and you’ll be admired for “understated acting”. This is what most actors from K L Saigal to Abhay Deol have done over the decades, so why not judge the role by its very limited requirements and hand the trophy to that master of self-conscious “understatement”, Dilip Kumar, who played Devdas in Bimal Roy’s 1953 movie? (Yes, this IS a back-handed compliment.)

Of course, recurring characters don’t have to be fictional. Historical figures can be very popular too, and the more colourful the better: take England’s Henry VIII, famous for dispatching wives and ministers to the royal chopping block. The mercurial monarch has been played by some fine actors, including Richard Burton (Anne of the Thousand Days), Robert Shaw (A Man for All Seasons) and, most recently, Eric Bana (The Other Boleyn Girl), who took the modern, interior approach and avoided being influenced by stereotypes. These are all fleshed-out performances, but ironically the best screen Henry of them all was a deliberate caricature of the king as a gluttonous buffoon. The 1933 British film The Private Life of Henry VIII makes no pretence at being historically accurate, it just has a grand old time depicting Henry’s boudoir shenanigans, and the great Charles Laughton (who, incidentally, also gave the definitive screen performance of other popular characters such as Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty and Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame) chews up the scenery magnificently, in an Oscar-winning role.

In fact, so iconic was Laughton’s performance that it ended up defining Henry for generations of viewers. Which returns us to Downey Jr and a troubling question: will future generations think of Sherlock Holmes as that dude with the rippling muscles?

Flop

And while on pets, here’s the new addition to our family.


Looks coy and innocent but she's very street-smart, being one of the pups I mentioned in these posts. After the last of her siblings got adopted she was left by herself and the adult dogs in the neighborhood were snapping at her, so we decided to take her in – she spends the days with my mom (who pampers her outrageously) and then sulks when she has to come to our (considerably less exciting) apartment for the night. (It must feel like having to go to a boarding-school hostel each night, as my wife puts it.) She's long-limbed and has magnificent frown lines that remind me of Laurence Olivier playing Heathcliff. The resemblance isn't immediately apparent, but trust me.

We’re still undecided on a name: informally she’s Foxy, because mum believes she’s reincarnated from a recently deceased dog she used to call by that name. I’ve suggested Flopsy because of her ears and because it sounds enough like Foxy for her not to get too confused at this late stage, but my mother objects that we’d then have to nickname her “Flop”, which would be pessimistic. She wants her to be a very successful dog.

(And no, I won't be sending photos of her to unsuspecting people on email. Can't afford to do that after all my rantings about parents who share baby pictures.)

In which Kate and Larry turn 100: two mini-reviews

This month sees the hundredth birth anniversaries of two iconic actors of the last century, both of whom also happen to be personal favourites. I became closely interested in the careers of Laurence Olivier and Katharine Hepburn around 16 years ago, when I first started watching old American and British films. My interest in birth dates being just as strong back then, I knew Olivier was born on May 22, 1907, but I’d always thought of Hepburn as being a November-child and was confused by the subsequent revision of her birthday to May 12 (you expect actors to change years, not months!). There’s an explanation in the Wikipedia entry: apparently, for much of her life she passed off her long-deceased brother Tom’s birthday as her own and revealed the truth only recently.

Hepburn and Olivier were friends, or at least close associates (in fact Hepburn was the impromptu maid-of-honour at the hush-hush late-night wedding ceremony of Olivier and Vivien Leigh in 1940) and their long acting careers came close to intersecting on a couple of occasions, especially after Olivier overcame his initial disdain for cinema. However, they acted together only once, late in their careers, in a lightweight made-for TV movie titled Love Among the Ruins. It’s probably just as well; too much star power can cause film stock to ignite.

As expected, these centenaries are being celebrated with the release of special DVD box-sets (if only I’d had more time in that HMV store last week...) as well as screenings and festivals in many parts of the world. To mark the occasion in my own small way, here are notes on two cherished, dog-eared books.

Tracy and Hepburn: An Intimate Memoir
by Garson Kanin

“We do not remember chronologically but in disordered flashes,” says playwright/screenwriter Garson Kanin in the Preface to this tender, wonderfully personal account of his long friendship with Hepburn and her favourite leading man Spencer Tracy. What Kanin achieves in this book is astonishing, especially considering that it isn’t a structured account of two lives. Instead, he hands the page over to his free-flowing memories of Hepburn and Tracy over a 30-year association with them. This results in a collection of seemingly patternless anecdotes that add up to much more than the sum of their parts, with the two giants coming alive in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in most conventional biographies.

As a friend and confidant, Kanin was uniquely placed to comment on the quirkier aspects of Hepburn’s personality, the things that made her a willing misfit among the media-savvy, politically correct movie stars of her time. (She was designated “The Most Uncooperative Actress of the Year” by the Hollywood Women’s Press Club a number of times, which, given the nature of celebrity journalism then as now, we can take as a high compliment.) This vantage point also allowed him to relate delightful little stories such as the one where she raises her hand dramatically and swears on her mother’s life while telling a blatant lie (to Cary Grant), and later coolly says to Kanin: “It’s an arrangement I have with my mother. She swears on my life too. All the time.”

What eventually emerges is a picture of an very private person living, usually on her own terms, in the public gaze; a maverick in the truest, most un-put on sense of the word – this was a woman who wore trousers and smoked on Hollywood sets (unheard of for an actress in the 1930s) without turning it into a statement – and, of course, an outstanding actress.

Laurence Olivier: A Biography
by Donald Spoto

But if we’re talking conventional biographies, they don’t come much better than Spoto’s comprehensive, well-researched but compact account of Olivier’s life and career. This book is equal parts a life history and a psychological profile of a very complex man who was always trying to raise the bar for himself and for his profession. Almost by default, it’s also an illuminating portrait of the English theatre (and, to an extent, Hollywood) in the 20th century, especially between the 1920s and the 1960s.

Spoto is particularly good at contrasting “Larry” with “Lord Olivier” – that is, setting the humbleness of Olivier’s origins against his eventual status as a revered public figure and a knight of the British Empire. In making this contrast, he captures the man’s deep-rooted insecurities about being under-educated (which led him to indulge in much grandstanding later in his life - making florid, often incomprehensible speeches at ceremonies under the belief that this was how a Peer was expected to talk), his obsessive need to be the very best in his field and his often churlish attitude towards his great rival John Gielgud, who was of more genteel stock.

In fact, Olivier’s unorthodox approach – spitting out Shakespeare’s words instead of reciting them mellifluously; interpreting Iago as a homosexual driven by his feelings for Othello – probably came from the need to defy the classical tradition that Gielgud was a flagbearer for. Here’s an account of the famous 1935 production of Romeo and Juliet, in which Gielgud (an established actor at the time) and Olivier (still the young upstart) alternated the roles of Romeo and Mercutio:

The settled tradition was to stress the poetic lyricism of Shakespeare’s verse. But from the first reading, Olivier spoke his lines as if they sprang from blunt feeling and were not lines of venerable iambic pentameter: he was clearly preparing to play Romeo as a hot-blooded adolescent seething with sexual eagerness. Cast and director heard the verse as if it were not verse at all, but a spontaneous rush of passionate desire, impossible to suppress. “He felt that I was too verse-conscious and exhibitionist,” Gielgud reflected years later. “Of course, he was a great exhibitionist himself, but in quite a different way – daring, flamboyant and iconoclastic.”

Rereading these books, I realised that this was what Hepburn and Olivier had in common apart from the levels of excellence they achieved: they were both nonconformists, both way ahead of their time. It’s hard to believe they would have been turned hundred this month, so fresh are their legacies and personal styles.

P.S. John Wayne was yet another Hollywood legend born in May 1907. I admired a lot of his work – especially in Red River, The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Quiet Man – without being a big fan. Coincidentally, Hepburn’s only film appearance with Wayne (in Rooster Cogburn) was the same year in which she did Love Among the Ruins with Olivier. Wayne and Olivier never acted together – indeed, it would be difficult to imagine a film of any quality that could accommodate both of them, though they each appeared in bloated multi-cast war dramas late in their careers.

On Stanley Kramer and Judgment at Nuremberg

In the heftily titled but excellent book Conversations with the Great Movie-Makers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute by George Stevens Jr (himself the son of one of those great directors), I came across an interview with producer-director Stanley Kramer. Kramer was known as a maker of “socially conscious films” – in the 1950s and early 1960s he directed a number of solid dramas that dealt with such issues as racism (The Defiant Ones), nuclear fallout (On the Beach) and the Scopes Trial (Inherit the Wind), in addition to producing such classics as The Caine Mutiny and The Wild One. [Later, taking a break from all the seriousness, he also made the overblown slapstick comedy It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.]

Like many other independent-minded directors working in the US at the time, Kramer didn’t have the freedom to be an auteur in the true sense of the word. Given that he wanted his films to reach a wide audience, his goals had to be realised while working within the constraints of the studio system. This often meant populating his films with well-known actors (some of whom were, in the Hollywood tradition of the period, Star Personalities – associated with a certain type of role in the average moviegoer’s mind). And though the scripts that he worked with were weightier and more nuanced than those in the typical studio film, critics haven’t always been kind to him – his work has sometimes been dismissed as bloated and self-conscious, with contrived resolutions and simplistic treatment of important issues. In short, “Hollywoodised”.

In the interview I mentioned, Kramer himself shows humility and introspection about these aspects of his career. An excerpt:

“When I began work as a filmmaker I wanted desperately to be an artist. From my standpoint, I never came close. The reason was that I was born into film at a time when to make my mark and to do what I wanted to do, I had to take on the establishment within the Hollywood firmament…To get On the Beach made, I made a deal with United Artists that I would use two stars and UA would finance the picture. This has happened to me twenty times. I always had to work on such large canvases to get the film made at all…

I didn’t want Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner in On the Beach because they made it much less realistic for me. The presence of the stars made the film less powerful, less to the point…For me, a film like Hiroshima Mon Amour which was about being able to sustain life on a planet faced with atomic warfare, was more powerful than On the Beach. The difference is that I’m an American [studio director]. I made On the Beach and it was seen by millions of people. Hiroshima Mon Amour got a limited release and was seen by a select audience.”

It’s commendable that Kramer could make these self-critical remarks, but I think he’s being hard on himself. His best work still holds up quite well today (unless your idea of good cinema is restricted to indie films that are entirely uncorrupted by studio money). Among the movies that he directed, the one I’m fondest of is Judgment at Nuremberg, his stark three-hour epic about the Nazi war trials shortly after the end of WWII.

I first saw it as a 14-year-old when I was trudging from one video library to another with the Leonard Maltin Movie and Video Guide in my hand, picking up any pre-1970s movie that the reviewer had given a rating of 3 or more stars (how strange this seems, given my supercilious attitude to the rating system now). I loved the film unqualifiedly back then. Watching it allowed me to combine two seemingly irreconciliable interests: a) the historical period in question – WWII, the Holocaust and its aftermath, and b) the careers of actors such as Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift.

Shot in austere black and white, Judgment at Nuremberg opens with the ageing Judge Haywood (Tracy), an American freshly arrived in Nuremberg, being driven to his quarters. Haywood looks around him at this wasted city that hosted grand Nazi rallies at the height of the Third Reich; later, he will go for a walk in a deserted quarter, observe the wary quietness of the few people around, and imagine hearing Hitler’s rabble-rousing speeches – the sense of decay is almost palpable, and resentment and guilt seem to exist side by side.

But most of the action in this fictionalised version of the Nuremberg Trials takes place in the courtroom, where Haywood is presiding over the trials of four Nazi judges, men of influence and high standing during the Nazi regime but now war criminals being asked to account for their actions. Among the accused is the solemn Dr Ernst Janning (Burt Lancaster), a respected figure in his day and central to the film’s theme that in times of severe political change and uncertainty, even well-intentioned people can end up doing things foreign to their essential natures. Other principals include the attorneys for the defence and the prosecution, and witnesses such as a baker who was forcibly sterilised by the Nazis and a hausfrau whose elderly Jewish friend was put to death on the charge of having an “improper” relationship with her.

There are no villains in Judgment at Nuremberg, or rather, there are no individual villains: as screenwriter Abby Mann says in an interview on the DVD, “the film’s real villain is patriotism” – that is, people believing that they needed to do certain things collectively for the good of their country or state, without examining their consciences. And the idea of shared guilt is central to the script. (Some scenes reminded me of the great ending of Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, where people at different levels – concentration camp guards, commandants, generals – shift the responsibility for the Holocaust on to someone else, and the narrator asks plaintively, “Who is responsible?”)

But the film doesn’t cop out when it comes to fixing responsibility. In what may seem a contrived resolution, the courtroom drama climaxes with Ernst Janning responding to the call of his conscience and making a tidy little speech condemning himself and his associates for complying with events that they knew were wrong. Some critics have suggested that this scene, involving as it does one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Burt Lancaster, is a sympathy-generator. But this is a ludicrous allegation, for just a few minutes earlier we have been shown documentary footage of the brutalities of the Nazi regime (this is hard-hitting stuff straight out of the concentration camps – certainly not something you’d expect to see in a mainstream Hollywood film of the time). Though the film has sympathy for people who were swept along by the dark current of history and made momentary decisions that they would regret for the rest of their lives, at no point does it suggest that the guilty mustn’t be held accountable.

What the script does manage to convey is the ambiguity surrounding the actions of practically everyone involved in the rise of Nazi Germany. When Judge Haywood pronounces his verdict at the end, we agree with his insistence on making individuals accountable for their acts; but at the same time we never lose sight of the points the defence attorney makes in his closing speech – about moral relativism, about Churchill’s praise of Hitler while the Third Reich was building its strength, about American complicity in the growth of industrial Germany, about the long and complex series of events that allowed the horrors of Auschwitz to take place.

Today, more than 15 years after I first watched Judgment at Nuremberg, it’s easier for me to see the flaws – for instance, that some scenes are static and heavy-handed. But it was very courageous for the time, and it certainly didn’t pander shamelessly to the box-office or attempt to spoon-feed a mass audience. And while some of the courtroom scenes are clumsily shot (you can almost sense that the cameraman was running out of places to put his equipment in this claustrophobic setting), it still looks good as a whole and its most powerful moments haven't dated at all.

Star power

Kramer says in his interview:

Do you think United Artists wanted to make Judgment at Nuremberg, the story of a Nazi trial? They weren’t at all interested in those people in the ovens and the crooked judges. I studded it with stars to get it made as a film so that I would reach out to a mass audience.

Given those conditions, I think he did extremely well. It’s all very well to condemn a film for having too many big names in it, but why not simply judge the performances on their own terms? Watching Judgment at Nuremberg, hardly ever does one get the impression that star power is intruding on the film’s basic function. Spencer Tracy, that master of understatement, is the anchor here as the old judge, showing as he so often did that great acting doesn’t have to be about flashy, attention-grabbing moments (the sort that run with the nomination announcements at award shows) or playing a variety of characters with different looks and accents. In Tracy’s best work, everything could hinge on a single glance, or on the way his character listened to and responded to something said by someone else – and there are many such moments in this film; the moral dilemmas Judge Haywood faces give the actor a lot of scope for internalising his feelings.

There isn’t a major weak link in the cast. The prosecuting attorney is played by Richard Widmark, another consummate professional, the fiery defence attorney Hans Rolfe is played by Maximilian Schell (who won the best actor Oscar for this role despite being the least-known member of the cast – or perhaps because of it). There are short but very effective cameos by Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift as Nazi-regime victims who testify in court. (If you’re at all interested in acting styles, it’s fun to contrast Clift’s attention-grabbing Method performance with Tracy’s naturalistic one.) And on the sidelines is the magnificent Marlene Dietrich (all of 60 at the time but looking ageless as ever) as a German general’s widow who forms a wary friendship with Judge Haywood.

Burt Lancaster is the only member of the cast who seems out of place to me, but even his casting wasn’t simply a means of adding star value to the film. Around this time Lancaster had in fact started branching out into character roles – something he would do very successfully in films like Birdman of Alcatraz, The Leopard and The Swimmer. (That said, it would have been brilliant if Kramer had got Laurence Olivier – his first choice – to do the role.)

P.S. I have conflicting views on this idea of star power undermining the credibility of films that deal with social issues, or that are “realistic” in the usual sense of that word. In this post, I mentioned that the non-mainstream Amitabh Bachchan starrer Main Azaad Hoon, his honest attempt at doing something different, didn’t work for me because much as I adored AB, I could never see him as John Doe or Everyman. The quality of Amitabh’s performance was beside the point, since his reputation and screen image would be a mental block for a viewer regardless: for the film to truly achieve what it wanted to achieve, the lead role would have had to be played by an unknown actor, or at least someone who didn’t have iconic status.

However, attractive though this idea is – that star personalities shouldn’t be allowed to mix with Serious Cinema – it’s also very exclusivist, besides being impracticable of course. Another post on that sometime.

To Marilyn on her 80th

[When Baradwaj Rangan of The New Indian Express asked if I could send in a quick, impromptu piece about Marilyn Monroe – the peg being that her 80 birth anniversary went by recently – I forgot all about my phobia of short deadlines and made a beeline for the laptop. Not because I’m a big MM fan, but because it gave me an all-too-rare opportunity to write something about Old Hollywood – which was the one subject I could comfortably have done many long theses on in my adolescent years. This piece, especially the snippets on some films at the end, was a happy change from some of the writing I've recently been doing.]

Of Marilyn Monroe's many early films, one that deserves to be revisited is Howard Hawks' Monkey Business. In this madcap 1952 comedy, Marilyn – no longer an ingénue but not yet a star – played second fiddle to a baby chimpanzee as well as to the human leads, Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers, but she was both wide-eyedly endearing and arrestingly sensual in her short role – a combination that set the tone for the rest of her career. The movie never became part of the Marilyn cult and for that reason it's refreshing to watch today – a reminder that there was more to her than the scenes that have been so widely referenced and parodied over the decades: "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friends", the skirt billowing up over the New York subway grating, the movie stills with the femme fatale posing languidly against the background of the Niagara Falls. In Monkey Business one can see the rough outline of the image that would make MM one of the icons of 20th century popular culture, without being overwhelmed by the image itself. Somehow, even the fact that the film is in black-and-white helps; it defies the gorgeous Technicolor poster stereotypes one normally associates with the actress. Here, it’s possible to see Marilyn as just another attractive young supporting actress, albeit one with that most elusive of qualities: it’s difficult to keep your eyes off her when she’s on screen, even when she’s sharing space with the great Cary Grant.

The threadbare plot of Monkey Business involves a scientist trying to develop a "fountain of youth" potion. Marilyn, being forever young herself, wouldn't have needed it – she died at 36, quickly becoming one of the many celebrities whose mystique partly lies in the fact that we never saw them old and wrinkled, complaining curmudgeonly about how much things have changed since their day, muttering platitudes about “the pictures getting smaller”.

On June 1 this year she would have turned 80, an idea that's as hard to process as, say, a pot-bellied, 65-year-old Jim Morrison croaking out verses from "An American Prayer" on the David Letterman Show in front of a bored young audience. Or an aged Madhubala being cajoled into playing a silly role in Dev Anand's latest ego project. Cruel as the thought might seem, Marilyn's iconic status probably hinges on her sad early exit. It's hard to imagine her sustaining her stardom past the mid-1960s. Hollywood became leaner and meaner as that decade progressed and despite her latter-day resolve to be taken seriously as an actress, and the Method-acting grit on view in her final film The Misfits, it's unlikely that she would have been able to effect a 180-degree turnaround in her screen image.

Nor would it have been easy to simply vanish into oblivion. Greta Garbo managed it, but that was in a less celebrity-obsessed age, and besides Garbo really did "want to be alone". Marilyn probably wouldn't have had the willpower to drop out of sight for good. She was famously insecure, famously needed to be loved and sought after; chances are she would eventually have been sweet-talked out of retirement and made to parody her own screen image in some B-grade summer comedy – perhaps as Britney Spears's hep grandmom in a teen-movie turkey. What better way to shatter the fond memories of millions of film buffs.

So happy birthday to Norma Jean, and may her star shine evermore – even as we allow that had this been a real birthday rather than a birth anniversary, the celebrations may have had to be muted.

Recommendations:

Some Like it Hot
Billy Wilder's acerbic comedy with smashing performances by MM as singer Sugar Kane and by Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as murder witnesses in drag. A pox on those who thought Curtis looked hotter than Marilyn!

The Prince and the Showgirl
Not a top-notch film but one that's worth seeing just for a demonstration of the unfathomable mysteries of Star Quality. This was largely an ego project for director-actor Laurence Olivier, trying to show he could step out of Shakespeare mode and make a (relatively) contemporary film opposite a leading Hollywood actress. By all accounts Marilyn, though initially keen to work with one of the world’s most respected classical actors, felt very uncomfortable and out of place during the shooting. Watch the film today, however, and none of that shows; all you see is the Floozy stealing every scene from right under the nose of the Great Actor.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
The classic musical about two gold-diggers, played by MM and Jane Russell. Some fine setpieces including the career-defining "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friends" and quite a few breezy comic scenes. However, it’s difficult today to see why this was her vehicle to stardom: most people now prefer Russell’s knowing performance as MM’s wisecracking friend. And she was a brunette.


Bus Stop
MM’s first attempt at being a "serious actor" – by toning down the make-up to appear unglamorous for her role as a melancholy saloon singer, and more importantly, by turning in a thoughtful, poignant performance. Unfortunately, it still isn’t among her most widely seen films.

P.S. I always thought MM was devoid of mystery thanks to all the hype, but one time I found her genuinely alluring was in that small role in Monkey Business. It’s an avowedly silly film and has dated in some obvious ways, but I recommend it to anyone who likes any or all of the following: Cary Grant; Ginger Rogers; screwball comedies; chimpanzees; and of course, Marilyn.

A tribute to Spartacus

When I started watching American and British cinema seriously, around 1990-91, my entry point into those movies (like that of most viewers who aren’t intrinsically interested in a technical aspect of filmmaking) was through the world of actors. For the longest time I was obsessed with star filmographies from Classic Hollywood (anytime between the late 1920s and the late 1960s). I would scan video-library catalogues for epic films with large star casts (and if the plot involved a historical period I was interested in, all the better) - which was how I came to see, in those very early days, movies like Judgement at Nuremberg, The Longest Day, Becket and How the West was Won. And most memorably of all, Spartacus.

Having just finished a minor school project on the decline of the Roman Empire, I had reason enough to be interested in the story of the slave revolt and its enigmatic leader, who almost brought the Empire to its knees in the 1st century BC. But there were other, less lofty reasons. To begin with, what a cast! There was the film’s producer, Kirk Douglas, in the title role (though to be honest, I thought Douglas was the most unobtrusive member of the cast at the time). A way-too-waiflike Jean Simmons as Spartacus’s lady love Varinia. Tony Curtis as the dreamy young poet Antoninus, who joins the slave revolt (I learnt later that the role had been written in for no better reason than that Curtis had told Douglas he wanted to be a part of the project!). And best of all, a great trio of British actors: Laurence Olivier as the Roman general Marcus Licinius Crassus (who was historically a member of ancient Rome’s First Triumvirate along with Pompey and Julius Caesar – though this doesn’t figure in the film); Charles Laughton as his political rival, the senator Gracchus; and the multitalented Peter Ustinov (who won the supporting actor Oscar for this role) as the wily slave-trader Batiatus.

And those were only the leading players. The supporting cast was equally interesting to me, since it included actors I was familiar with from other films, even in those early days. The woodenly handsome John Gavin, who had a small role here as the callow young Julius Caesar, had played Sam Loomis in Psycho. Also in a supporting role was John Dall, who was one of the homosexual killers in another Hitchcock film, Rope. All this helped make Spartacus a comforting experience, quite apart from the fact that I was enthralled by the movie itself.

The films we have a deep affection for as children rarely live up to our memories of them. Our tastes evolve as we get older (more so when film-watching is more than a hobby, as in my case), our gaze becomes more analytical and self-conscious on a repeat viewing, so that it’s possible to be slightly embarrassed by performances and dialogue that one originally had a very high opinion of. A scene that one’s memory had inflated into something very grand and elaborate turns out to be a trifle, lasting just a couple of seconds, when one re-watches it; it’s like returning to that mansion-like house you had visited as a child and finding that the halls and stairways are much narrower than you expected.

Over the years, when I returned to Spartacus, I was able to see the little flaws more easily – the Hollywoodisation (read: cheesiness) of some scenes, the incessant, manipulative music score, the fact that occasionally (but only occasionally) one gets so fascinated by the acting bouts between titans like Olivier and Laughton that one forgets about the characters they are playing. But in essence, my high opinion of it hasn’t changed. This is one of the best-written, best-acted, most intelligent epics of its time, superior in most ways to others of its time and genre (Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, Quo Vadis?, The Fall of the Roman Empire). Part of that superiority comes from the fact that there are no religious overtones in the story at all (this was something that made many of the period epics of the time both maudlin and distracting) – the focus is entirely on the internal politics in the Roman senate.

The Stanley Kubrick quandary

I find it annoying that Spartacus has suffered a decline in critical appreciation for a reason that doesn’t have much to do with the actual merits or demerits of the film itself. The facts are these: the movie carries a “directed by Stanley Kubrick” credit and Kubrick, as most of us know, was one of the great directors (more crucially, a great auteur-director). But on Spartacus he was a pawn – he was hurriedly brought in after the original director Anthony Mann had quit, and throughout the shooting he not only had to be subservient to Kirk Douglas’s vision, he also had to deal with the massive egos of the British actor-directors working in the film. By all accounts it was a traumatic experience for him and in subsequent years, short of actually disowning Spartacus, he did everything to make it clear that it wasn’t “his” film. And over the years, as Kubrick’s own reputation as a master filmmaker (deservedly) grew, some critics and moviegoers turned their resentment to this one film he never had full control over.

But this is silly reasoning. Just because Spartacus isn’t a good Stanley Kubrick film doesn’t mean it can’t be a good film on its own terms. Agreed, there are certain kinds of movies that would fail miserably if their directors weren’t allowed full control. But this isn’t one of them. It was already in production long before Kubrick arrived on the sets, it had been carefully scripted and planned by some of the most dedicated people in the craft (including the writer Dalton Trumbo, who had been on the Hollywood blacklist for Communist affiliations and who Douglas permitted to use his own name on the project) – and the results are there for all to see. This film is a remarkable collaborative effort between some of the most talented people (across all fields) in the film industry of the time, and a movie that somehow managed to shape up coherently despite a long and very problematic filming process.

However, there’s something else that gets overlooked. When a great artist contributes to a work, no matter how half-heartedly, it’s inevitable that he’ll leave his stamp on it. Notwithstanding Kubrick’s own resentment of the film, Spartacus does also contain a few ideas and visuals that foreshadow his later work – notably the theme of the conflict between humanity and mechanisation. Spartacus postulates that the practice in ancient Rome was to turn human beings into machines through the practice of slavery - world dominance was maintained by stripping people of their humanity and turning them into cogs in the machinery that kept the Roman Empire running. Some scenes (the clinical, relentlessly efficient Roman battalions intercut with the disorganised slave camp; the cold gleam in the eye of the sadistic slave-master who was once a slave himself) palpably come from the same hand that gave us Dr Strangelove struggling with his own mechanical arm, Alex being systematically transformed into a Clockwork Orange, and the magnificent image of Dave Bowman dismantling the computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Over 1200 words. Lots more to say but will stop now.

P.S. As I mentioned in the previous post, the special features on the DVD are awesome, especially the commentary by Kirk Douglas, Peter Ustinov, Howard Fast, Saul Bass and restoration expert Robert Harris, and the long interview with Ustinov where he supplies some uproarious impressions of Olivier and Laughton. Excellent DVD review here, by the way.

And if you’re interested in knowing more about the film and its shooting, do read Douglas’s wonderful autobiography The Ragman’s Son.

Shakespeare on film

Latest prize acquisition: Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. One of the best things about the DVD is that it has two subtitle options, one by Linda Hoaglund and the other by Donald Richie. Both are Japanese film experts – I have Richie’s comprehensive book on the director, The Films of Akira Kurosawa - and so either set of subtitles should be better than the terrible ones on the print I first saw around 10 years ago. Even better, there’s a very informative commentary track by another expert, Michael Jeck.

Throne of Blood is an undeniably great film but I’ve always been slightly perplexed by the irony-laden chorus about how a non-English movie is perhaps the best Shakespeare film ever. I wonder about that sometimes; it’s easy to see that Kurosawa’s epic captures the spirit of the Bard’s great tragedy but is it strictly speaking a Shakespeare film? Are the original words, the poetry of the original language, completely irrelevant? One of the reasons I’m ambivalent about this is because I grew up with the strict sense that you can’t claim to have read a classic if you’ve only read an abridged version of it. (I remember snootishly informing a schoolfriend who’d laboured his way through a Lamb version of a Shakespeare play that he mustn’t imagine he had read Shakespeare – "it isn’t enough to just know the story, the work is defined by the words the author originally used".)

Another reason is that I have a very special relationship with my favourite "conventional" Shakespeare movies: soliloquies that I couldn’t remember after merely reading the play somehow miraculously stuck in my mind after I heard Olivier, or Gielgud, or Branagh, or even Brando, declaim them. Pleasant way to learn. (Though the casting agent who put poor Brando in the position of repeatedly having to mumble the word "honourable" in Mark Antony’s funeral speech must have been one of Satan’s little helpers.)

I’m probably nitpicking about Throne of Blood; I’d have no problem at all if it was designated "best film based on a Shakespeare play". So I’ll just be tactful and say that it’s more Kurosawa’s triumph than it is Shakespeare’s. Meanwhile, here are some of my favourite films that do employ the Bard’s language:

Macbeth (Roman Polanski, 1971)
Great director puts his own distinct stamp on this tale of guilt and overvaulting ambition. One of Polanski’s most effective devices is to introduce an element of stream-of-consciousness by presenting soliloquies as half-spoken, half-in-voiceover (often alternating from one line to the next). Loved his final, typically macabre touch of showing Macbeth’s successor, the young prince, entering the witches’ coven for consultation. But far more morbid is the way art holds up a mirror to life in the scene where Macbeth is told that Macduff was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped”; Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, had been stabbed to death by Charles Manson and his gang a few years earlier.

Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh, 1996)
Branagh took on the task of making a four-hour version of Hamlet with the full text of the play, and somehow managed to make it cinematic. Great principle cast, Derek Jacobi superb as Claudius. Some of the many cameos – Jack Lemmon as Marcellus, Robin Williams as Osric – are distracting, but some – Charlton Heston as the Player King, Billy Crystal as the Gravedigger – work brilliantly.

Titus (Julie Taymor, 1999)
Shakespeare’s strangest, queasiest, most unwatchable play (assuming it was his at all) gets the post-modernist treatment in this visually fascinating movie that doesn’t shy away from any of the text’s horrors, and in fact even punks them up. Sir Anthony Hopkins, on a break from playing Hannibal Lecter, feeds Jessica Lange her sons’ cooked remains.

Julius Caesar (Joseph L Mankiewicz, 1953)
With apologies. This is a star-spangled, slightly Hollywoodised production but it has a lot going for it. John Gielgud’s mellifluous, classical reading of Cassius makes for a fascinating contrast with Marlon Brando’s rough-hewn performance as Mark Antony; two completely different acting theories, separated by hundreds of years, but occupying the same frame here. And Edmond O’Brien in his brief role as Casca shows how Shakespeare’s lines can be spoken in a completely natural, non-theatrical way (and with a gruff American accent to boot) – and still be utterly convincing.

Henry V (Laurence Olivier, 1944)
Brilliant use of Shakespeare as a rallying call for an England that was in the thick of WWII. In his directorial debut, Olivier – until then always more of a stage performer/director - showed an unanticipated understanding of film technique.

Much Ado About Nothing (Branagh, 1993)
No consistently good but great fun throughout. Branagh at his most democratic, with roles for actors like Denzel Washington and even Keanu Reeves.

Othello (Orson Welles, 1952)
Brooding, impressionistic movie that Welles somehow managed to get made despite the inevitable financial problems. The cinematography is dazzling.

Richard III (Olivier, 1955)
No, it isn’t anywhere near as cinematic as Olivier’s other Shakespearean forays but his performance as the conniving hunchback king is enough to place this high on the list.