DVR Diary: EMITAI (1971)

World War II wasn't the "good war" everywhere. Far from Europe, in Europe's colonies, what Hitler was up to hardly mattered. In some places the Allies, the good guys of the usual narrative were the oppressors. That's the context of Ousmane Sembene's war picture, which shows the war's impact on the Diola people in French-ruled Senegal. They and their crops are resources for France to draw upon at will. Emitai starts with colonial troops pressing villagers into military service. The young men must listen to a French officer praise them for volunteering and exhort them to revere and obey Marshal Petain, at that moment (Spring 1940) France's last hope against the Nazis. One year later, Petain leads a collaborationist regime, but France's alignment means little to the Diola, who are now required to give up their rice crops to the colonial power. The village elders debate the necessity for revolt and, perhaps more importantly, the will of the gods. Their chief has grown skeptical toward the pantheon -- if not toward their existence, then toward their effectiveness in this modern crisis. Ironically, it's he, mortally wounded in a futile uprising, who receives a vision of the gods. They chide him for his lack of faith, while he reproaches them for their apparent indifference to their worshipers' dire situation. After he dies, the film slows down as the village prepares for the chief's funeral, the remaining elders -- in hiding from the colonial troops -- ponder how to appease the gods and/or the French, while two French officers and their native troops hold the women and children hostage, with rice as the ransom. Sembene's deliberate, novelistic pacing -- he was a novelist before taking up the camera -- immerses the viewer in the life of the embattled village while steadily heating up indignation against the elders' preoccupation with the gods. They balk (rightly) at sacrificing rice to the French, but then one sacrifices a goat to the gods on impulse. The bawling animal has its throat cut and bleeds out before being dumped like so much garbage. Sembene respects Diola culture in the broadest sense but is clearly secular in his sympathies, or at least highly critical toward religion. The elders' folly sometimes nearly overshadows the oppression of the French, who switch sides in the world war, abandoning Petain for de Gaulle, with no change in their treatment of the Diola. But the film ends with a sharp reminder that, whatever their faults, the elders, like their fellow villagers, are essentially villagers of a regime that must have seemed little better to them than any tale of Nazi rule the French might have told them. Unsurprisingly, several years passed before either Senegalese or French people could see Emitai, but films like Sembene's are valuable, not necessarily as correctives to a particular narrative of World War II, but as examples of perspectives from which the moral drama of that conflict is not and never will be central, and the winners of it may never be the good guys.

On the Big Screen: DUNKIRK (2017)

How ironic that reviewers have rushed to call Dunkirk Christopher Nolan's best film, as if in implicit rebuke to all his genre pictures, when all he did was make a war film just as he would make a genre picture. As for reviews declaring Dunkirk one of the greatest war pictures, don't make me laugh. It's neither that nor Nolan's best film -- for me, that is either The Dark Knight or The Prestige -- but it is a decent war film and admirable in its compactness at under two hours. More than anything else, Dunkirk is a battle movie done as a thriller, designed to keep the audience in constant suspense regardless of their knowledge of history. Most people going to the movie  know (I hope!) that the good guys win this one, that the British manage to evacuate their army with help from a cross-channel civilian flotilla. But that doesn't tell you whether Nolan's fictional characters will make it through or not. Unlike most battle films, Dunkirk is a micro-epic, focusing on whether a few particular characters whose individual fates are uncertain will survive or succeed. We don't really get the macro perspective except for Kenneth Branagh's scenes as an anxious naval commander, and unlike the classic World War II battle film template, we don't get the enemy perspective at all. On one level that hurts Dunkirk because it can't answer the question of why the Germans didn't make a serious effort to wipe out the British army, though any film of this story can't help but beg that question. On the other hand, it's a matter of artistic license not to care what the Germans were thinking.

The whole point of Nolan's Dunkirk is to immerse 21st century movie audiences in the terrifying immediacy of 20th century war, and it succeeds at that as much as any film can that simultaneously distracts the audience with Nolanesque gimmickry. To Nolan's credit, he's upfront about the gimmickry as he introduces his three storylines. The gimmick is that the three stories, while intercut with each other constantly, aren't actually concurrent until near the end of the picture. The opening story, dealing with some stray soldiers straggling to the beach and struggling to worm their way onto any available escape ship, takes place over the course of a week. A second narrative featuring Mark Rylance as a civilian boat captain taking part in the rescue mission over the objections of Nolan stalwart Cillian Murphy (who has a seemingly incomplete story arc of his own linking the beach and boat stories) takes place over the course of one day. The third thread, focusing on Tom Hardy's Spitfire pilot (the actor again spends much of a film behind a mask) battling German planes, plays out over the course of a single hour. There's no real reason to do this apart from "Christopher Nolan," but as long as audiences understand what the onscreen notes explain it doesn't really hurt the picture, either. None of the storylines spoil each other, allowing the audience to concentrate on each individual deathtrap or combat episode. Structurally, Dunkirk is not unlike those feature-length condensations of golden-age serials that include all the cliffhangers but leave little room for much else. Think of it as a Republic picture made with absolute mastery and a grown-up screenplay on an unlimited budget, with the added Nolan virtue of minimal fakery of the sea and air action. There's no disputing that Nolan is very good at suspense, and credit is definitely due the skill with which he (as sole writer) finally converges the three storylines, as Hardy battles to keep a German plane from slaughtering helpless soldiers, including our beach heroes, swimming from a sinking minesweeper to Rylance's boat. The hyperbole of early reviewers might provoke a backlash that the film doesn't deserve, but that hyperbole does compel me to say that Dunkirk, for all its virtues, is the most overrated film of 2017 so far.

THE BATTLE OF MIDWAY (1942)

So I'm watching Five Came Back, Laurent Bouzereau's three-part Netflix documentary adapting Mark Harris's recent book about the World War II adventures of five canonical directors: Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens and William Wyler. Sporting a bombastic kickass theme by Thomas Newman, the series, scripted by Harris himself and narrated by Meryl Streep, assigns five current directors as guides to its protagonists: Francis Coppola for Huston, Guillermo del Toro for Capra, Paul Greengrass for Ford, Lawrence Kasdan for Stevens and Steven Spielberg for Wyler. I'm not sure what criteria determined these assignments but the modern directors' comments are usually interesting, particularly when Coppola defends Huston faking battle footage for his San Pietro. Anyway, the first episode climaxes with Capra's intellectual masterstroke of detourning Leni Riefenstahl for his Prelude to War and Ford's baptism of fire when the Japanese attacked Midway Island. Greengrass is understandably a big fan of the short documentary that resulted, even if Ford's shaky-cam effects are purely involuntary. The documentary does a grand job of hyping The Battle of Midway as cinema verite if not avant-garde for Ford's willingness to show the film's rough edges, including frame jumps, as proofs of its authenticity. Netflix has conveniently made the documentaries mentioned in Five Came Back available for streaming alongside it, so I took advantage of the opportunity to watch Midway whole. It's only 18 minutes long but manages in that brief time to be very different from what Five describes.

The incredible footage Ford shot while being bombed (he was slightly wounded in the process) is there, but so is a lot of stuff that Five Came Back deemed not worth mentioning, revealing Midway as an uncomfortable mix of radical realism and Hollywood hokeyness. It must be remembered that Midway is primarily a propaganda rather than a documentary film; Ford's purpose was as much to manipulate public opinion as to record the events of the battle. As a propagandist Ford was learning on the run, puzzling out what his film needed to say as well as show. There's a note of humor early as he shows some birds that are Midway's only native inhabitants and his narrator -- there are several, including Donald Crisp of  How Green Was My Valley, as well as other guest vocal artists we'll mention later -- notes sardonically, "Tojo has promised to liberate them." Then the film threatens to spiral down into Fordian folksiness with a sentimental accordion solo and the most bizarre part of the film, when suddenly we hear voices (including Henry Fonda) discussing one of the soldiers onscreen, identifying him by name and hometown. The idea, I guess, was to anticipate or simulate the voices one might hear in a theater, should they recognize any of the soldiers as one of their own. We then take a quick jaunt to the soldier's home town, where we're shown his father working in a railyard and his mother knitting with one of those special banners honoring her boy's service. The voices will come back in and out of the film wishing the soldiers well or urging medics to help them during the battle. To we moderns these interventions are as jarring as the rough editing of the bomb attack must have been to the original audiences. They may well take you out of the picture, so corny do they seem now. Likewise, after the battle Ford returns to those birds and has a voiceover express their presumed opinion of the situation: "We're just as free as we ever were!"

You can see a bomb dropping from the Jap plane at far left above.

Below, a bomb impact nearly blows the film out of the camera

(the dark line near the top is the frame divider)

Of all the documentaries made by the Five directors, Midway probably has the most obvious directorial signature. That may be a matter of retrospection, since I'm struggling to recall how many funerals Ford filmed before Midway. The documentary may well have helped make such scenes specifically Fordian, and they must have had a strong impact on audiences at a time when many more such funerals could be anticipated. The government apparently feared that the burials of sea would have too strong and too wrong an impact, so that Ford had to butter up President Roosevelt by adding footage highlighting the proximity to battle of one of FDR's sons in order to ensure the film's release on his creative terms. Five Came Back emphasizes ironically how many of the films it covers flopped at the box office, but Midway went over big. It probably helped that Ford followed those grim scenes with a bombastic coda racking up the score of Japanese naval vessels taken out in the battle.

My one reservation about Five as a book and show is that its biographical focus on the big five directors overshadows a more complex account of movie propaganda during the war, but I'll concede that the way these masters (Huston was a comparative neophyte but had just made The Maltese Falcon) tried to work with the biggest story of their careers, and one they could never hope to impose creative control upon, is compelling in its own right. It's interesting to learn, for instance, that while Ford made it through Midway more or less with flying colors, D-Day broke him, driving him to a bender that ended his career as a wartime documentarian. Perhaps he no longer had the confidence in his ability to process what he saw with the Hollywood devices he'd used before.

FRANCOFONIA (2015)

Alexander Sokurov has become quite the cosmopolitan since his 2002 one-take epic Russian Ark made him an art-house star. Since then his subjects have included the American occupation of Japan and the German Faust legend, while his latest film is a sort of critical sequel to Ark, taking the Louvre museum in France. Francofonia strikes me as a sort of homage to Jean-Luc Godard in its mix of scripted scenes, essayistic narration and other meta elements, and while it's an homage to French cinema to that extent it also shows that you can take the boy out of Russia, but you can't always take Russia out of the boy. The nearest thing to a plot in the piece is the relationship between Jacques Jaujard, the French national museum director (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing), and Franz von Wolff-Metternich (Benjamin Utzerath), the German official in charge of preserving occupied France's cultural heritage. Jaujard had already evacuated most of the Louvre's contents to auxiliary chataeux by the time Wolff-Metternich arrived, but as it turned out the German took his cultural preservation mandate more seriously than his Nazi masters probably intended, eventually earning the French Legion of Honor for his trouble. Their story, punctuated for some quasi-Godardian reason with a visible soundtrack, is interlarded with a Russian Ark-style tour of the Louvre, Sokurov's Skype (?) chats with someone transporting precious art by stormy sea on a freighter, and comments on the museum's history. The museum tour is reminiscent of Sokurov's earlier triumph not in its lack of editing but by the appearance of a historical figure, Napoleon Bonaparte (Vincent Nemeth). He haunts the Louvre, childishly pointing out paintings of himself and explaining that much of the museum's classical collection was plundered by him from the Middle East. The museum has another resident spirit, Marianne (Johanna Korthals Altes), France's counterpart to Uncle Sam. She frolics about in her liberty cap shouting the French Revolutionary buzzwords, "liberty, equality, fraternity," but in a telling moment the tour narrator urges her to get rid of the obnoxious Napoleon after he's grasped her hand, but neither she nor we can shake the Little Corporal.

You may have recalled by now that Bonaparte was a great enemy of Russia, perhaps second only to Hitler, but it's in Sokurov's discussion of what his people call the Great Patriotic War, particularly the treatment of the Louvre and Paris compared to the treatment of Leningrad and the Hermitage museum -- the setting of Russian Ark -- that particularly Russian hurt feelings come to the surface. You get the impression that Sokurov holds it against France that Paris didn't suffer the devastation that Leningrad endured. Never mind that France had surrendered before the Germans had to consider bombing Paris, while Leningrad became a symbol of continued Russian resistance to the Nazi war machine. What really bugs Sokurov, it seems, is the idea that Paris and the Louvre were spared because on some level Germans like Wolff-Metternich saw France as part of European civilization, but didn't extend Russia the same courtesy. I suspect that Sokurov suspects that that wasn't just because of Nazi anti-communism, though that clearly had something to do with it, and to do with why he closes the film with a loud, discordant version of the Soviet national anthem. Francofonia is subtitled An Elegy for Europe, but the overall tone isn't really elegiac. It use of Napoleon links France and Germany together in a culture of imperialistic aggression against the East, in the name of a Europe defined by its exclusion of Russia. You may not like or agree with that message but at least it shows that Sokurov hasn't sold out by returning to his museum motif. This newest film isn't as good as Russian Ark or Faust, but it still proves Sokurov one of the most consistently interesting filmmakers working today.

DVR Diary: FOUR BAGS FULL (La Traversée de Paris, 1956)

Filmed only a dozen years after Paris was liberated from the Nazis, Claude Autant-Lara's film must have seemed shockingly irreverent to many French viewers. A kind of mock-epic or mock-thriller, it portrays one man's night from Hell in the occupied city as he tries to deliver a butchered pig to a black-market customer in the four bags that give the film its American title. It's dangerous work, if not heroic, because the Germans are always on patrol. But what makes the night especially hellish for our clandestine courier Marcel (Bourvil) is his new partner, an impromptu replacement for his usual assistant, now in jail. For the foreign viewer, the shocking thing about La Traversée is Jean Gabin's performance as Grandgil, Marcel's new "helper." Gabin often comes across as Mr. Cool in his movies, but for Autant-Lara he gives a John Goodman-like performance of boorish bluster. Grandgil seems almost sociopathic in his determination to exploit the illegality of it all for his own gain, intimidating Marcel's colleagues while constantly endangering both of them with his bombast. We learn that there's more to Grandgil than there first seemed. He'd told Marcel he was a painter, but looking at him Marcel took him to be a house painter. It turns out he's a fine artist, with Germans among his customers. This comes in handy, for him at least, when the pair finally get arrested, since the local commandant, a cultured man, recognizes the artist. Even when an order comes to herd everyone in confinement onto trucks for deportation to a work camp, the commandant pulls strings to get Grandgil off the truck. Marcel isn't so lucky, and an epilogue that shows that he survived the war doesn't quite wash away the bad taste that has built up. You wonder about Grandgil's privilege and whether he could be deemed a collaborator, and whether on the other hand his adventure with Marcel was the painter's larkish foray into resistance of a sort -- or whether he was taking crazy chances out of some desire to be caught and punished for who knows what. It's a vaguely disquieting yet constantly funny performance from Gabin, and the film as a whole is the sort of black comedy in which the perfunctory reassurance of the epilogue is part of the grim joke. Not all the comedy is black, unless you feel that comedy under German occupation can only be black. Autant-Lara complements Gabin's loose-cannon antics with plenty of slapstick and sight gags -- the leaking suitcases get our heroes followed by bothersome dogs -- and with some inspired visual moments that make the film a kind of comic noir. The best of these is the heroes' arrest, filmed through an indoor window with the actors's distinctive shapes silhouetted in the lights of patrol cars. You can see Marcel run for it, and there's a moment of awful suspense before he reappears in front of the window as a prisoner. The character and actor have earned our empathy for enduring Grandgil's recklessness throughout the picture, and the only real disappointment of the film is that Marcel never gets any payback, though it's probably realistic to deny it to him. I suspect the French will see more in this film than the rest of us can, but the rest of us can at least be entertained by it.

DETECTIVE BYOMKESH BAKSHY! (2015)

Byomkesh Bakshi is a contemporary of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. He was born in 1932 in the mind of Bengali writer Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay. Like many successful character creators, Bandyopadhyay tired of his creation relatively early but eventually resumed writing about his private detective or "seeker after truth." He was working on another Bakshi story when he died in 1970. The detective came to cinematic life in 1967, with no less a figure than Satyajit Ray, India's most acclaimed director worldwide, helming his inaugural appearance. In the last decade Bakshi has become a Bengali cinematic and TV mainstay. Less common are Hindi-language Bakshi films. Dibakar Bannerjee's film -- he changed the English spelling of the detective's last name because he felt "y" was a more dynamic looking letter than "i" -- is the first Hindi-language feature film about the detective to my knowledge, though he had appeared on Hindi TV in the 1990s. If my association of Bakshi/Bakshy with Spade and Marlowe is an attempt to place the Bengali sleuth in the pulp tradition, Bannerjee's movie is even more of an attempt, down to the gratuitous exclamation point. While several of Bandyopadhyay's novels have been translated into English, I'm just discovering Bakshy with this movie so I haven't had a chance to compare the film with the books, though the movie makes me very interested in trying the originals. I could believe that Bannerjee, who freely adapted the first novel, filtered it through his experience of Inglourious Basterds or Captain America: The First Avenger or some nostalgia for 1940s India that the 46 year old auteur never knew personally. I don't know yet whether Bandyopadhyay should be considered a pulp writer, but Bannerjee definitely made a pulp movie that is great fun to watch.

 Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! convincingly recreates 1940s Calcutta, often using authentic locations

Bannerjee has moved Bakshy's first big case forward to 1943, at a time when Japan was bombing Calcutta (now Kolkata) where the story is set, and where nationalists, inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and other leaders, were agitating for independence from the British Empire. The story starts in indisputably pulpy fashion when hooded killers interrupt a drug deal. Bakshy (Sushant Singh Rajput) takes on an apparently unrelated case: Ajit Bannerjee (Anand Tiwari) wants to know where his father, a chemist, has disappeared to -- and he doesn't want to hear any theories about his dad being a criminal. When we first see Ajit, he says that Byomkesh looks like someone you'd like to punch in the face, and before the scene is over he's done just that. Like any private eye worth his salt, Bakshy takes a beating over the course of the convoluted story. Despite Ajit's feelings, Byomkesh learns from fellow tenants at the father's boarding house that the chemist apparently was blackmailing his boss, a factory owner involved with a Bengali nationalist party who faces a schism led by his own son. When Bakshi and his new friend Dr. Guha (Neeraj Kabi), the man who runs the boarding house, find the chemist's body, the factory owner becomes the prime suspect in an apparent murder. But when he drops dead, apparently poisoned, in Byomkesh's presence, after gasping out the last words "young gang," or something like that, all bets are off.

 

Above, Bakshy makes a disgusting discovery.

Below, Byomkesh turns to mysteriously enhanced betel leaves in an attempt to visualize the mystery.

Byomkesh soon learns that he's been manipulated with false leads by Dr. Guha himself, but it may be for a higher good. Guha shares the nationalist aspirations of most Bengalis, and is willing to collaborate with the Japanese to win independence from Britain. Seeing Byomkesh as a potential protege -- he impressed Bakshy earlier with a Holmsean dismantling of a cover story the young detective tried on him -- the doctor invites Byomkesh to collaborate, but our hero can see only carnage and mass destruction resulting from Guha's scheme. Instead, he tries to thwart the impending Japanese attack, though he learns eventually that something more sinister than an invasion is actually planed.

 

Say what you will about her acting; you will remember Swastika Mukherjee's name.

Throw in a traditional femme fatale -- the singing movie star Anguri Devi (the insensitively named Swastika Mukherjee) -- as well as a good girl, the factory owner's daughter ( Divya Menon) and the killer gang from the prologue and you have a combustible pulp mix that's sure to explode in exuberant fashion. I'll spare you too many spoiler details in the hope that people will give Detective Byomkesh Bakshy! a try on Netflix. Bannerjee has put together a nifty period piece (albeit with some stridently anachronistic hip-hop music on the soundtrack) that should appeal to fans worldwide of pulp or hard-boiled fiction. For those not initiated into the mysteries of genre the film is made worthwhile by the terrifically charismatic performances of Sushant Singh Rajput and Neeraj Kabi as hero and villain. Netflix exaggerates slightly in saying that Dr. Guha has a plan for world domination, but you could believe this man has something like that in him. Bakshy may not quite by Calcutta's Sherlock Holmes, but Guha is a full-on Moriarty, and Neeraj Kabi makes the most of such a mighty role. Someone hire that man as a Bond villain! Meanwhile Sushant Singh Rajput succeeds in making Bakshy ingenious yet fallible, a novice with obvious great potential bolstered with courage and conscience. The climactic showdown in which Bakshy tries to make Guha believe an awesome bluff is thrilling tense despite an initial absence of action -- the scene soon deteriorates into Tarantinian mayhem, albeit carried out with demonic brio by Neeraj Kabi -- thanks entirely to the two actors' charisma and commitment to their roles.  

 Neeraj Kabi as the multitalented Dr. Guha.

Bakshy! gives new life to pulp/noir tropes that may be near exhaustion in their original U.S. context, and serves as a reminder for those who need it that Indian cinema isn't all Bollywood song and dance. The film's ending promises a sequel, or at least hopes to create demand for one. It succeeded with me, at least.

THE SKIN (La Pelle, 1981)

The ending of Liliana Cavani's account of the ambiguous liberation of Italy feels like a culmination of trends high and low in postwar Italian cinema. After spending most of the picture in Naples, the American army is finally closing in on Rome. Once the locals are persuaded that the men on tanks aren't Germans, they welcome the advancing troops, singing, dancing and waving American flags.  It's the sort of image Americans got used to seeing in newsreels. Here's a guy waving a flag with his kid riding on his shoulders, dancing backwards in front of a tank, until he stumbles and falls.

 

Cavani pulls no punches here. For one moment she nearly out-gores all her Italian peers. The effect is crude but effective and the director lingers on it. We get one more close look at the bloody sludge that had been a man moments ago -- his son managed to fall between the treads and scrambles out from under once the tank stops -- and then we see Marcello Mastroianni observing the spectacle.

 

 

Mastroianni is only the most obvious Felliniesque element in this account of la dura vita. He's playing Curzio Malaparte, the author whose book Cavani adapted, a onetime fascist and onetime prisoner of Mussolini's regime, now commissioned as a captain and acting as an interpreter for the Americans. There's something odd about the interpreting that makes me question whether the Cohen Media DVD has the definitive soundtrack. Their edition is in Italian but dubs the American actors (or actors playing Americans) almost entirely into Italian, so that an Italian character will speak Italian, and then an American character will ask Malaparte, in Italian, what the Italian said, and Malaparte will translate from Italian to Italian. Maybe that didn't bug the Italians the way it bugs me, but it would have been cool to hear Burt Lancaster's own voice. Lancaster for the Italians seems to have been what Olivier was for Americans: the mark of quality for a prestigious production with international aspirations. For once the American star plays an American in an Italian film. While IMDB and Wikipedia identify his character as General Mark Clark, the film's English subtitles dub him Mark Cork, perhaps out of deference to the actual Clark, who was still living when the film was first released. Cork is not flattering to Clark. He's an egoist fond of referring to himself in the third person and describing the army he commands as his personal possession. He spends most of the film negotiating with a local mafioso (Carlo Giuffre) over the transfer of a few hundred German POWs. They haggle over the local's compensation: he wants to be paid back for feeding his prisoners, by the pound. At least the Germans are assured of eating heartily, whether they want to or not.

Most of the people in Sicily aren't as assured of daily meals, and for the most part La Pelle chronicles their survival measures, most of which involve offering themselves to G.I.s or whoever shows up seeking supple flesh. Whatever indignities fascism imposed on Italians, liberation brought something seemingly new: the commodification of modern man. While the powerful men haggle over the sale of former warriors, the poor can only sell themselves, or their children. The common American soldier proves a willing customer -- the lines at a brothel wind down several flights of stairs -- but the higher-echelon types Malaparte has to show around get indignant at Italians' apparent surrender of dignity. For much of the picture our hero has to squire around Col. Deborah Wyatt, a military aviatrix and powerful politician's wife (Alexandra King, apparently in her only film role) whom Cork wants to get rid of as soon as possible. Some characteristic Mastroianni comedy ensues, particularly an upside-down airplane ride that Caviani ought to have milked for more of Marcello's comic discomfort but films flatly with an exterior process shot. Things get more Felliniesque as Malaparte introduces Wyatt to the dregs of society. Here are mothers prostituting their young sons to turbaned strangers -- where on earth are they coming from in the middle of a war? Here is some sort of homosexual party (with some rocking Sicilian folk music) highlighted by the ritual birth to a male mother of a mythologically endowed baby; its phallus is as big as the rest of him. Wyatt is horrified by it all, as are other idealistic Americans; none of this matches their expectations for the behavior of a liberated people. Malaparte has to remind them that the Italians have lost the war, and that women and children have lost more than others.

Curzio Malaparte seems to have been an early observer of American indignation at the inadequate (or perhaps inappropriately abject) gratitude of liberated peoples. The point certainly isn't that Italians were better off under fascism, but it does have something to do with the rather heedless manner in which Americans rush about liberating people and expect them to begin living happily ever after immediately. An aristocrat jokes that the Americans are the first occupiers of Sicily who took the trouble to knock before coming in; Gen. Cork jokes back, noting the damage from bombings to her ceiling, that perhaps we knocked a little too hard. If the Americans of La Pelle often seem obtuse, I don't think that makes the picture anti-American. The historical coincidence of an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius -- the mass evacuation under a fiery shower is one of Cavani's best sequences -- suggests analogically that the American occupation is a similar force of nature, no more comprehending of the damage it does and no more malicious at heart. The occupation seems like a supreme subject for Italian cinema, so it's surprising that it fell to Cavani, whose main credential was that triumph of arthouse Nazisploitation, The Night Porter, to put The Skin on film. She's not enough of a stylist, nor enough of a comedian, to make the film fully successful, but it has plenty of memorable moments and has clear historic interest as one of the last gasps of Italian cinema's aspiration to world leadership, and one that seems like a summation of everything that cinema had to offer in its golden age.

DVR Diary: KANAL (1957)

Andrzej Wajda's epic of the Warsaw uprising -- the gentile one, as opposed to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising -- immediately struck me as one of the great World War II films, but it's a strange one considering the time and place. For Poles, I'd assume, the 1944 uprising against the Nazi occupiers must be something like the Alamo for Americans, a noble to-the-last-man defeat on the way to ultimate liberation. For us, the Alamo is a tale of heroic sacrifice with strategic value. For Wajda, arguably Poland's greatest filmmaker and still active as of three years ago, the Warsaw uprising is a defeat of crushing completeness, a mental as well as physical defeat. The way he saw it seemed to be okay with the Communist government of Poland at the time, who might have been expected to expect a more patriotic, more Alamo-like affair. I wonder if the attitude of director and government alike -- Wajda would flee the country in the early Eighties during the crackdown on the Solidarity movement and return after the fall of Communism -- has something to do with the subject being a non-Communist uprising, one during which Soviet forces were supposedly in a position to lend aid but purportedly stood by to let likely future opponents of Russian dominance get slaughtered. Maybe Poles in 1956 saw the uprising leaders, or were ordered to see them, as presumably noble and definitely tragic but also a historic dead end that had to pass from the scene before a postwar revolution could take place. I can only guess because I see no obvious ideological context in Kanal and I don't recall the Russians being mentioned. Yet the film literally follows uprising fighters into numerous dead ends, both physical and mental, as if to say there was never any hope for this revolt. Maybe Wajda was just making an anti-war film, since there's little inspiring or worthy of emulation here. Outside of Japanese cinema I've hardly seen military defeat portrayed so definitively.

Kanal opens on an epic scale, showing itself a technical tour-de-force of tracking shots and composition in depth as we meet the unit we'll follow to the bitter end as they hustle carefully from one position to another. Wajda's directorial proficiency compares favorably with Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, but Wajda gets to top Kurbick, at least on the technical level, with dangerous looking scenes of urban destruction as our heroes bug out under fire.  The plan ultimately is to race through the sewers (hence the Polish title) and break out and disperse in a safer part of the city. Our group is broken up into smaller units, each with its own storyline. Each story features some sort of physical or mental breakdown or breakdown of solidarity. A musician (Vladek Sheybal, who went on to an extensive English-language career) wants to contribute and also seeks creative inspiration; he gets the latter at the apparent cost of his sanity. An officer has been having an affair with a young female messenger; in a moment of stress he drives her to suicide by panicking and begging to live for his wife's sake. A commander is one of the very few to make it out, with one loyal soldier, after one more has cleared their way by being blown up; when his last follower reveals that there are no others left, and that he'd hidden that fact to keep up the officer's morale, the officer shoots him and jumps back into the sewer. Another man appears to make it, but finds the surface surrounded by Germans and prisoners in a scene shot with the brutal narrative clarity of a cartoon. The most heroic and competent character is a civilian female, Daisy, an almost too-good-to-be-true sewer-rat amazon (Teresa Izewska, who to my surprise, according to IMDB made only ten films before dying at 49), who just about literally carries a feverish, delirious man through the muck, only to run up against possibly the cruelest reality. She's found a way to the Vistula river, the most likely way to safety, yet the exit is barred by a metal grate. It's too big to be kicked away, and Wajda makes it sadly clear that Daisy can't squeeze her head through the bars. If Kanal is one part Alamo, it's also inescapably one part Third Man, and the so-close-and-yet-so-far hopelessness that comes with that comes through most eloquently when Daisy reaches the end of her trail. Was all of this worth it? Maybe if you're a Pole that's a question you just don't ask, and if the alternative is submission to the Nazis I suppose any question is moot. But once you watch Kanal you can't help wondering for the characters' sake. That might not make it an anti-war film, but it's certainly one of the most intimately humane war films I've ever seen.

DVR Diary: Keisuke Kinoshita's ARMY (1944)

Introducing this film on Turner Classic Movies, Ben Mankiewicz was at pains to frame Army as anything but a propaganda film, even as he informed us that it was commissioned by the Japanese military. But if Army isn't wartime propaganda, then neither is an American film like Since You Went Away. After all, in that picture Claudette Colbert bawls after sending her husband off to war, and everyone is very sad when they learn that Robert Walker has been killed. Yet no American critic would dare say that those scenes make Since You Went Away a subtle anti-war movie, yet Mankiewicz, or whoever writes his intros, makes such a claim for Army, on no better basis that that Keisuke Kinoshita and his writers dared make their characters fairly rounded human beings. If Army doesn't seem like propaganda to some viewers, that only reflects a very narrow notion of what propaganda can be.

However Kinoshita himself feels about war, nothing in Army subverts the script's propaganda account of 80 years of history leading up to World War II. In short, Army tells us that Japan's WWII enemies -- the U.S., Great Britain and Russia -- have always been hostile elements interfering with Japan's rightful regional aspirations and unfairly favoring China over Japan. At the brink of the Meiji revolution in the 1860s, the English-speaking powers are poised to intervene during a civil war. After Japan whips China in the 1890s, the European powers unjustly force Japan to return a province ceded over by China. The Russo-Japanese War a decade later is portrayed as just revenge on Russia for its role in Japan's earlier "humiliation." In the 20th century, the Chinese need a new rebuke because they've been "looking down" on the Japanese. In the film's most eccentric reading of history, Army accuses China of manipulating the U.S. and U.K. into helping them conquer Japan! But whoever's manipulating whom, all these countries need a beating, and Japan's just the country to do it. Of course, this summary of recent history overlooks Japan's role in World War I, when it allied with some of these benighted nations against its eventual Axis partner, Germany, but history on film is always selective, whatever the filmmaker's intentions may be.

Army follows one family through these turbulent years. The Takagis are patriots who never quite manage to see combat, through no fault of their own. Circumstances keep them off the battlefield, and to compensate the current patriarch (Chishu Ryu) is a superpatriot, while the mother (Kinuyo Tanaka) goads their eldest son to be brave and excel in all things. The lead actors are major figures in Japanese cinema, each with a lengthy and honored career that in Tanaka's case extended into direction. They help make the case against Army as propaganda by effortlessly humanizing their characters. Tanaka in particular has a closing scene that became one of the great moments in Japanese movies as she races through town trying to get a final glimpse of her boy as he finally marches off to war. Her obvious feeling of loss is supposed to belie her eagerness to see the lad become a soldier, and sympathetic viewers of Army take all such moments as subversive of the desired patriotic message. But if Hollywood could have it both ways, so could the Japanese Army. Neither sought to deny that people would feel sad about giving up their boys to war.

Yet when Army invites empathy it's presumed subversive of itself because the script has characters, including the mother, tell us that Japan's young men really belong to the Emperor, while their parents are only caretakers until the boys are ready to go where they belong. I think it's wrong to see a contradiction between that viewpoint and the sadness the mother feels upon finally giving up her son. To see a contradiction is to presume that wartime Japan was a totalitarian state, so fanatical and inhumane that its cinema would only want to show parents rejoicing to send their sons to war. Army suggests a somewhat more relaxed, empathetic attitude, even though the film reportedly was partially censored. It's a propaganda film that takes indoctrination itself as a subject for admittedly gentle satire, the way a Hollywood war film might poke fun at rationing. It can even make fun of excessive patriotism, as when two characters get into a furious argument over whether the medieval Japanese could have beaten the Mongols without the aid of the "divine wind." It's probably a mistake to presume that Kinoshita, his writers, or the Army consider one side of that argument the right one. Yet there are also moments when the film seems critical of its own empathetic impulses. In one scene, a father hears a report of a battle in which his own son was involved, growing increasingly concerned as it appears that the boy's unit suffered heavy casualties. He asks for more detail until his informant rebukes him, seeing that the father is more interested in his own son's fate than the fate of the army or the nation. Army wants its audience to take the larger view while acknowledging their natural feelings. That is only not propaganda if you expect propaganda to portray its people as supermen rather than ordinary human beings. Hollywood propaganda didn't work that way and in this case neither did the Japanese version.

Kinoshita is one of the echt Japanese directors, along with Ozu and to a lesser extent Mizoguchi, whom some critics exalt above the more popular directors like Kurosawa and to a lesser extent Kobayashi whose work is too "western" or allegedly tailored to global arthouse audiences. For certain critics the great subject of Japanese cinema is not the way of the samurai or the soldier but family life. Army is an early film by one of the reputed specialists in intimate domestic stories that is meant to keep up the country's enthusiasm for war. In that respect, it does a good job emphasizing that this particular war will be some people's one opportunity to do something great for their country, to live up to the values listed in various imperial rescripts, etc. Its enduring virtue once its original purpose became obsolete is its ability to do several things at once. While Tanaka's dash through town at the end is the obviously great cinematic moment, an even greater if less flashy moment comes earlier, at the family's last dinner together. The mother asks the son to give her one final shoulder massage, and as he gives her the treatment the younger son, in monkey-see-monkey-do fashion, goes over to the father and gives the old man's shoulders a similar if less effective pummeling. All the while, the family is taking care of last things, but the absurdity of the little boy drumming on dad's shoulders lightens the moment and softens the blow that the mother will feel more strongly later. This scene is the essence of the picture, a mirror to the Japanese people's actual experience of the war -- not counting the bombings that audiences were enduring when the film was released at the end of 1944. The irony of Army is that it might have been most effective as propaganda had it been exported, because no one could watch it without realizing that, no matter how crazy they might be about the Emperor, and no matter how biased their view of recent world history, the Japanese are first and foremost human beings like the rest of us. To say that outside Japan in 1944 would really have been subversive.

DVR Diary: VERBOTEN! (1959)

Samuel Fuller is sometimes described as a cinematic primitive. What that means is that he is often unsubtle in his writing or direction, but also willing to try anything for an effect. Another way of looking at it is that Fuller could wallow in camp nearly as often as he achieved heights of insight. Verboten! is camp Fuller. Like proper camp it's written and filmed -- and in this case produced -- in earnest. Fuller simply knows no other way to address his subject than with rhetorical howitzers. The subject is the occupation of Germany by the Americans at the end of World War II. It opens with Fuller on safe ground: gritty war action on a budget with touches of authenticity based on Fuller's own experiences. Then the opening credits roll and we get the Love Theme from Verboten! Town Without Pity this isn't.

We have a love theme from Verboten! because Verboten! is a love story. G.I. David Brent (James Best) is wounded while fighting to take a German town but is rescued by Helga (Susan Cummings), one of the local frauleins, despite the hostility of her younger brother, a Hitler Youth who has already lost an arm in the war. After the surrender, David marries Helga and takes a job as a civilian administrator for the occupation. That puts Helga in a lucky position and however sincere her feelings for David may be, she can't help but be a little smug and cynical about her luck when a family friend, Bruno (Tom Pittman, who died in a car wreck before the film's release), returns from demobilization. She persuades David to vouch for Bruno so the German can get a job as a policeman. Part of his job is to ferret out Nazis, but Bruno has a secret agenda. He's part of the Werwolf, the vaunted resistance organization that the Nazis predicted would rise from their ashes. Now he's in a position to recruit Werwolves, steal supplies and arms, and build forces for an uprising against the Americans. Fuller apparently took the Werwolf more seriously than history justifies; Verboten! would have been a comfort to those who wanted to argue a decade ago that there was so resistance to the Allied occupation, so that the resistance in Iraq didn't look so damning by comparison.

The main problem with Verboten! is that the romantic plot and the Werwolf plot don't fit so well together. As Bruno stirs things up behind the scenes while continuing to play the loyal stooge of the occupiers, David's marriage threatens to fall apart when the American loses his job for provoking a riot. Bruno has informed David of Helga's cynical comments about David being a "goldmine" to her, and now the American sees her urging him to find work back in the U.S. as a way to dump him. Meanwhile, Helga's brother has joined the Werwolf but has second thoughts once the group starts hijacking medical shipments. He has third thoughts after seeing Bruno execute a man for criticizing the hijackings. He has fourth thoughts after he and Helga take a day trip to the Nuremberg trial. Large parts of Verboten! are filmed in glorious StockFootageScope, so we see the celebrity Nazis take their seats in the dock of the historic courtroom before we see Helga and her brother take their seats in what looks like a separate, more spartanly furnished venue, where they get to see a digest version of the evidence against the Nazis as narrated by Fuller. How coincidental that this presentation of the evidence quotes Nazi leaders using some of the exact phrases Bruno does in his pep-talks to the Werwolf. That, and the films from the death camps, turns the brother against the Nazis for good. Repentant, he rushes to rat Bruno out to a still-sulky David, but it's up to the one-armed kid himself to fight Bruno to a finish in a burning railroad car before David finally comes to the rescue and the film basically comes to a stop.

James Best, who continues to work in his eighties, will have the dubious honor of going to his grave remembered most (if not best) as Roscoe P. Coltrane, the hapless sheriff on The Dukes of Hazzard. For a generation before that show, Best had built himself up into a dependable character actor and a welcome presence in western films and TV shows. He's the best thing (sorry!) about Verboten!, and his best moment (sorry again!!) comes when David has to face down a small mob protesting food shortages. This scene boasts Fuller's liveliest writing, expressing the auteur's own ambivalence about Germany. When a protester mocks America's claim to have liberated Germany, David blows his top. You're damn right we're not liberators, he roars; "We're conquerors and don't you forget it!" At moments like this Verboten! becomes an authentic document of a moment when Americans were torn between the imperative to reconcile (a Cold War context is only hinted at) and lingering outrage over Germany's crimes against humanity. The postwar international family can only be restored when the Germans recognize and repudiate their country's crimes; then they can be forgiven in time for the happy ending. That's a historic burden Fuller's plot can't quite bear, given the flimsiness of the soapbox it stands on. His heart was in the right place but his skills mostly eluded him this time.

THE THICK-WALLED ROOM (1953-56)

In some ways, Masaki Kobayashi's Kabe atsuki heya is a dry-run for his three-part World War II epic The Human Condition. Set in a prison for "Class B" and "Class C" Japanese war criminals, it may be best grasped as a film noir variation on themes from the longer film. Its protagonists, as Kobayashi sees it, are taking the fall for their superiors. Sure, some of the top guys took the fall themselves -- in an early scene some prisoners indulge in literal gallows humor in the chamber where Tojo was hanged -- but but many others are prospering while the men who obeyed the orders rot in prison. The liner notes for the Criterion Eclipse DVD claim that the Shochiku studio shelved Thick-Walled Room for three years from fear of offending the American occupiers, but while our boys aren't exactly flattered by the film -- and some of us have strangely Slavic accents when actors speak English on screen -- Kobayashi is really pointing the finger at his own people.

The film focuses on the six occupants of one cell. The two main characters are Yamashita (Torahiko Hamada) and Yokota (Ko Mishima). Yamashita's unit took shelter in a native hut on a South Pacific island late in the war and accepted dinner from its friendly occupant. Yamashita's commanding officer doesn't trust the "savage" not to rat them out to the Allies, so he orders a reluctant Yamashita to kill him. When he's somehow fingered as the killer after the war, Yamashita hopes that his commander will absolve him by admitting responsibility at the trial, but the officer, who soon becomes a peacetime politician, proves a rat and a liar. Yokota is an intellectual who served as a translator in a camp for American POWs. His commander forces him to flog a prisoner who dies soon afterward. Whether for that reason or simply for being a camp guard, Yokota is stuck in prison, where he reads Oscar Wilde's prison writings and causes a scandal when he smuggles news of an escape attempt by Yamashita to his brother, a Communist agitator.

Yamashita longs to take revenge on his old commander, and he seems to get his chance when, despite his escape, he gets a one-day furlough. He confronts the frightened man but sees the face of the native he killed when he thinks of killing another man. Conscience-stricken, and also conscious of the trust his fellow prisoners placed in him, he spares the old officer and closes the picture by telling his buddies, "I'm back."

If you've ever seen the American film noir Act of Violence, think of Yamashita's storyline in Thick-Walled Room like that film told from the point of view of Robert Ryan's avenger rather than Van Heflin's guilty victim. 

If Yamashita ends up on the road to readjustment, others aren't so lucky. Another prisoner in the cell is tormented by surrealist dreams of atrocities and finally hangs himself, while Yamashita had only joked of growing a beard -- despite a warning that Americans don't like facial hair -- so he could use it to hang himself. Symbolically, he shaves the beard for his furlough. If Kobayashi himself seems to sympathize with the opinion that the war-criminal prison doesn't purge crimes from humanity, but purges humanity from the crimes, Yamashita's story gives cause for hope, demonstrating that not everyone need be crushed by the ordeal. The Thick-Walled Room is an effective appeal for equitable treatment of Japan's veterans, a plea against killing the spirits of the rank-and-file while the higher-ups make different kinds of killings in the new economy. In his third-directed (though not third-released) film, Kobayashi is stretching his pictorial muscles -- maybe even invoking Citizen Kane when a prisoner sees snow inside a crystal to trigger a flashback -- while keeping the film grounded in the personal stories of the principal prisoners. It ended up one of three 1956 releases for the director now included in the "Masaki Kobayashi Against the System" collection, followed by the baseball drama I'll Buy You and the more noirish-sounding Black River. Look for reviews on this blog in the weeks to come.

Koji Wakamatsu's CATERPILLAR (2010)

We've heard this story before: a young man marches off to war and comes back mutilated and crippled. It's the stuff of popular song and a metaphor for war's waste of youth. Inevitably the young man must seem a victim, but Koji Wakamatsu saw things differently. Caterpillar is his critical take on the maimed warrior motif, pitched somewhat closer to Johnny Got His Gun than to Born on the Fourth of July, yet closer in spirit, I dare say, to Tod Browning than to Dalton Trumbo. I have a friend who likes horror movies who found Browning's Freaks the most repulsive film he'd ever seen. I'll never show him Caterpillar.

Wakamatsu's film follows the misfortunes of Tadashi Kurokawa (Keigo Kasuya), the warrior idol of a small rural village who returns home a "war god." He's survived some terrible ordeal that cost him all his limbs as well as his hearing. Nearly half his face is scarred from burns. Given the reputed Japanese attitude toward death in battle I'm surprised the effort was made to save his life. Kurokawa was probably surprised as well. His wife Shigeko (Shinobu Terajima) is horrified but eventually assumes a patriotic duty of caring for him: feeding him, cleaning him, dressing him up for outings and, increasingly, servicing him sexually. However improbably, Kurokawa's manhood survived his trauma, and he comes to crave sex as much as he craves food. Through the miracle of CGI we get to see him do the deed, frequently, albeit at a distance intended to be respectful. I imagine many viewers will find it neither respectful nor distant enough, but Wakamatsu specialized in disquieting cinema and wants you to be disturbed.

 

Kurokawa, before and after

 

We're used to an unfortunate like Kurokawa learning to bemoan war, but the man's deafness, and possibly other brain damage, make such pathetic eloquence impossible. He can barely choke out single words, though an attempt to write with a pencil in his teeth indicates that he's somewhat more sentient than he looks. Shigeko reads a little of his scrawl: the subtitles translate it as "I want to do it." Suicide? Sex, more likely, or so Shigeko assumes. Kurokawa, we learn, was a domineering, violent husband when whole, but war has reduced him to a sulky, demanding invalid. But maybe he was a big spoiled baby all along.

 

The symbolism of the "war god" as an embodiment of Japan's fatal militarism is pretty blatant, but the virtue of Caterpillar isn't its political satire but its unflinching examination of the shifting dynamics of the Kurokawa marriage. Just as mutilation doesn't confer sainthood on Kurokawa, neither can we easily identify Shigeko as victim, heroine or other. On one obvious level, Japan's defeat in war and its analog in the film's village, an impoverished yet strangely idyllic place haunted by a jolly village idiot and untouched by bombing, from what we can tell, are a kind of liberation for her. At the same time, she discovers a capacity for intimate cruelty, whether she's smashing precious eggs into hubby's face or mocking him (and giving the film its name) by singing some kind of nursery rhyme as he rolls on the floor in an agony of the damned, flashing back to his rape of a Chinese woman -- referenced briefly at the start of the show -- and the ensuing fire and building collapse that ruined him. The Kurokawas are a plausibly if idiosyncratically dysfunctional couple, and Wakamatsu's gutsy portrayal of it, aided by two gutsy actors, transcends the picture's more obvious political context. Caterpillar definitely works as a satiric history play, but it works best when Wakamatsu refrains from reducing his characters to generic or sexual-political types. That creative restraint makes Caterpillar probably the best mutilated-veteran picture ever made.

Koji Wakamatsu died on October 17, aged 76, after getting hit by a taxi. He made one more film after Caterpillar, a film about Yukio Mishima that should prove one of the must-see pictures of 2013 in the U.S. Long a cult figure for his provocative "pink" films of the Sixties and Seventies, Wakamatsu seemed to hit a new stride in his eighth decade, his global profile raised by his 2007 portrait of leftist self-terrorizing, United Red Army. One suspects, or at least hopes, that his last film will reconfirm what the two prior films suggest, that Wakamatsu, tragically, died at the peak of his powers.

THE HUMAN CONDITION (1959-61)

Once upon a time in Hollywood, Erich von Stroheim wanted to release a literary adaptation that ran more than eight hours, but Hollywood shot him down. About eighty years later, English-language audiences happily sat through nine hours' worth of literary adaptation from Peter Jackson, who figured out that reasonable spacing between installments (Stroheim had anticipated audiences coming in for two consecutive nights to get through Greed) made the whole easier to swallow. Jackson's idea was no innovation, however. Back in 1959, the Shochiku studio released Masaki Kobayashi's adaptation of Junpei Gomikawa's novel in three parts between January 1959 and January 1961. The Human Condition clocks in at 9 hours, 34 minutes, and I first learned about it from a Guinness Book of World Records that listed it as the longest film ever made. I'm not sure if that's an accurate description given the three-episode format (and each episode is divided into halves by an intermission), since to my mind the longest feature film would be the one that requires you to sit for the longest stretch at one time. In any event, Human Condition and Lord of the Rings are two of a kind, if only in format, but that should be enough to shame people who hesitate to try the Kobayashi due to its length. You don't have to watch it all at once, and as far as I know no one ever has. But it's definitely worth watching as a critical epic of the Japanese occupation of Manchuria during World War II.

The Human Condition is mainly the story of Engineer Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai), who avoids military service at the height of the war (1943) by taking a management job at a Manchurian mining camp. Kaji is humane and conscientious to the point that colleagues and military people think of him as a "Red." A certain obsessive contempt for "Reds" among the Japanese is a point of identification for American audiences, and while Kaji himself sometimes expresses faith in a socialist future, the film itself (I can't speak for the novel) takes a less optimistic viewpoint. From an early point, Kobayashi establishes that Kaji's good intentions will benefit him and his Chinese charges very little. He is given a work crew of POWs who've been crammed into cattle cars and starved en route to the mind. In the film's first big set piece, the survivors surge toward a grain wagon like a horde of zombies despite Kaji's warning that gorging themselves so soon could be fatal. He's forced to use a whip to drive the wretches away, looking no less the slave-driver than his less humanistic comrades.

The first installment puts Kaji at odds with the Japanese military police, who despise his humanism. This conflict climaxes when the authorities accuse him of allowing POWs to escape and try to torture a confession out of him. Not for the last time will Kaji suffer for his country's sins, but the first installment ends with him jumping from the frying pan to the fire, resigning his mine job to join the regular army.

 

The second installment (released in November 1959) puts him through a cruel boot camp, tormented by veterans who assume a license to abuse rookies both physically and psychologically. Far from folding like a soft civilian, Kaji thrives in adversity while others collapse and kill themselves. He proves a better soldier than most, becoming a leader after his unit is decimated during the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in August 1945. The biggest battle scenes of the story take place at the end of the second installment, and they are pretty hellacious. The front-line Japanese are hopelessly outgunned and barely barricaded against the Soviet tank and artillery assault, and the actors look authentically imperilled by huge explosions going off around them. Somehow Kaji survives this first wave, sustained in large part by his determination to reunite with his wife Michiko (Michiyo Aratama).

 

 

The final installment sees Kaji and the other suriviors desperately trying to cross Soviet lines and reach Japanese-controlled territory, acquiring a motley band of civilian refugees along the way. Of this Stagecoach-like assemblage a prostitute, despised by the others, proves the most hardy and the only civilian to survive the ordeal alongside the soldiers. Her reward is to be killed (and raped?) by Chinese partisans who find the band squatting on their farm. Kaji's crew encounters foolhardy die-hard soldiers and a refugee village of lonely women and one old man, where the other soldiers satisfy longstanding urges while Kaji continues to pine for Michiko. When a Soviet unit stumbles upon the village Kaji is ready to make a last stand, but at the urging of one of the village women he surrenders to the Russians. To this point he had an idealized view of the Russians as progressive Socialists, dismissing atrocity stories as the transgressions of the usual bad apples. Now he sees them exploiting and abusing helpless prisoners, whom Kaji feels should not be blamed for Japanese atrocities, and hypocritically granting privileges to the same vicious officers who, if anyone does, deserve to face retribution, all in order to meet the usual unreaslistic production quotas. In prison, abused by Japanese and Russians alike, Kaji's idealism is exhausted at last. Ever resourceful, he manages to escape, but by now, despite all his righteous humanism, he has become everything he never wanted to be, a war criminal and a cold-blooded murderer of his own kind. At the same time, he remains self-consciously self-denying to an ultimately insane degree. Having stolen a dumpling from a Chinese village and kept it despite a beating, the starving Kaji refuses to eat it, saving it as a present for Michiko, whom he still expects to meet again but who may be long dead for all we know. To bring Greed back into the discussion, Human Condition closes on as grim and fatalistic a note as the Stroheim film, the wintry wastes of Manchuria comparing quite nicely to Greed's Death Valley.

 

Needless to say, Kobayashi's view (or the novelist's) of the human condition is not a nice one. The film is a damning indictment of Japanese militarism if not of Japanese culture in general, the sort of thing the Japanese got good at, perhaps of necessity, after losing the way, and the sort of thing we wouldn't see in American cinema until the Vietnam era. The title leaves open whether the film's sentiments are self-loathing or all-encompassingly misanthropic -- it's not The Japanese Condition -- and the story forces the question whether any individual can maintain personal integrity in the midst of a collective crime. Throughout, we can always say that Kaji is a better person than many other Japanese (or Russians, or Chinese), but he's still an exploiter and a killer who can't escape the brutalization he despises in others. Kaji has no rivals for main character status and the role is a huge challenge to which Tatsuya Nakadai (best known in the U.S. as the star or Kurosawa's Ran) responds tremendously. Purely on a quantitative level it's probably one of the greatest performances in film history, but it ranks qualitatively as well.

Cinematically, I could see how some might see The Human Condition as a sort of pretentiously middlebrow endeavor akin to Schindler's List. There's a certain self-important pretension to it all, a self-conscious classiness compared to the more concentrated outrage of a contemporary war film, Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain. Kobayashi's eye for composition is perhaps too masterly, Yoshio Miyajima's monochrome cinematography perhaps too brilliant. But such pictorial ambition is probably appropriate to the filmmakers' epic intentions, and the results should prove indelible for anyone who makes the epic effort to watch it all. Human Condition is heroic cinema and indisputably one of the world's great war movies. It's worth nine hours or so of any true movie lover's time.

DVR Diary: MERRILL' S MARAUDERS (1962)

A fitting film for Memorial Day in more than one sense, Samuel Fuller's fact-based account of a grueling American incursion into Japanese-occupied Burma self-consciously honors the memories of the men who fought but was also, without actually saying so, a memorial to its star, Jeff Chandler, who died of complications from a back injury suffered on the Philippine location a year before the movie's release. He didn't hurt his back while the cameras rolled, but apparently endured an ordeal of pain for the remainder of the shoot in some ways comparable to that portrayed in the picture. Chandler finally submitted to surgery back home, but died from it. He made his name in movies, after some success in radio, playing the milestone heroic-Indian role of Cochise in Delmer Daves's Broken Arrow (1950). I always found Chandler unconvincing in period or ethnic parts -- he's one of Hollywood's most unconvincing Arabs in Flame of Araby, for instance -- but that limitation doesn't pose a problem when he plays a hard-boiled general with a heart condition who drives himself the same way he drives his men, despite the advice of the standard-issue compassionate medic (Andrew Duggan). When Merrill finally suffers a (non-fatal) heart attack just before the finish, it's as if Fuller were projecting Chandler's demise. It must have been an awful yet moving sight for his fans when the film first came out fifty years ago next month, but the film holds up now without the morbid fascination it must have exerted in the summer of '62.

Fuller's film is more an ensemble piece than a Chandler star vehicle. Warner Bros. clearly considered it a showcase for its young contract talent from television: Ty Hardin (Bronco), Peter Brown (Lawman) and Will Hutchins (Sugarfoot), while Fuller treated it as an audition for The Big Red One, which he hoped to make with Warners' money immediately afterward. Despite the quirks given each of the lead soldiers, Merrill's Marauders is a less character-driven film than the one Fuller finally made in 1980. The characters don't really rise above types and tics, and one soldier's tragicomic attachment to the company mule is just corny, but you could argue that this sort of war movie needn't be and maybe shouldn't be character-driven. Fuller's eye for dramatically framed action drives the film, and he gets maximum value for his dollar in the Philippines. The battle scenes are nicely staged, though some of them were apparently shot for other pictures and cut in by cost-conscious Warners. The most pictorially intriguing is a skirmish at an oil refinery constructed almost like a labyrinth, punctuated by a post-fight walk by a soldier across the tops of odd structures almost shaped like coffins on top, as bodies lay below. But I was most impressed by a more quiet scene. The exhausted troops are resting in a liberated village. The villagers offer some of their meager food to the hungry Americans. An old woman brings a small bowl to a bearded, barely conscious Claude Akins, who seems to be Fuller's substitute for his usual dogface alter ego Gene Evans. She and her child pantomime that the stuff is food that you eat, but Akins seems too tired even to eat. Finally the child takes a handful of the stuff and puts it in Akins's mouth. At that point, with the compassionate old woman hovering over him, Akins bursts into tears and finally starts to feed himself. You don't expect it from Akins, one of the great tough-guy character actors of the era in film and TV, but it feels utterly spontaneous and you understand without further explanation why he's crying. That's the sort of bonus Fuller brings to his war movies and the sort of thing that makes them worth watching for people who don't like war or war movies in general.

The original trailer has spoilers or history lessons, depending on your perspective. It comes from the Turner Classic Movies website.

JAPAN'S LONGEST DAY (1967)

Sometimes a movie wants to be one thing and ends up another. The English-language title of Kihachi Okamoto's docudrama seems to faithfully represent the director and writer Shinobu Hashimoto's intention to emulate The Longest Day, the sprawling all-star international D-Day epic from 1962. For Japan, however, the longest day doesn't see a big battle or even an American bombing raid. After about 20 minutes of barely-dramatized exposition (narrated by Tatsuya Nakadai in a grave waste of a great actor), the film focuses on the 24 hours leading up to the August 15, 1945 radio broadcast by Hirohito, the Showa Emperor, announcing Japan's surrender to the Allies. With The Longest Day's international scope impossible for him, Okamoto juggles a number of plot threads to make room for a huge cast, this being a Toho showcase celebrating the studio's 35th anniversary. The points of interest are the characters' varying reactions to Japan's unprecedented admission of defeat in war, with the most attention going to those desperate and despairing dead-enders who want to stop the broadcast and topple the civilian government in order to keep the war going. As officers of the Imperial Guard kill their commanding officer and attempt to seize control of the Imperial Palace, and while a rogue military unit attacks the prime minister's house, the warmongering madness and the race-against-time format become less reminiscent of any other World War II film and more reminiscent of those doomsday twins of 1964, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and Sidney Lumet's Fail-Safe. But while those movies milked futile attempts to avert Armageddon for maximum suspense -- the Kubrick almost in spite of itself -- Japan's Longest Day gets its paradoxical suspense -- it works as a thriller despite our knowing that the conspirators must fail -- out of desperate efforts, in the wake of Armageddon, to keep it going.

If you can get past those first turgid reels, Okamoto comes up with an effective historical thriller. Despite the initial evidence, he proves quite capable of manipulating time as the government dithers over the text of the Imperial Rescript the Emperor must read and the propriety of the Emperor speaking into a microphone while the madmen plot their mayhem. Anchoring the picture, predictably enough, is Toshiro Mifune as War Minister Anami. This character serves more or less as the film's moral compass. A superpatriot, he's initially reluctant to surrender. He believes, almost insanely, that Japan shouldn't consider itself beaten until the Allies invade and a major land battle decides the issue. He stuns fellow Cabinet members with the assertion that Japan has been handicapped by having to fight on small islands where its full military might couldn't be brought to bear. His personal belief is that the millions who've already died will have done so in vain if Japan doesn't fight to the bitter end. In short, he thinks much like the maniacs who try to prevent the surrender, except for one thing. His values are grounded in obedience, like any good soldier's, and when the Emperor speaks and says the war is over, it's over as far as Anami is concerned -- end of discussion, that's an order. If he feels he still has a debt to the dead, or to the Emperor he feels he failed, his proper recourse is seppuku. Those who throw tantrums and otherwise act out, assuming that the Emperor has been tricked and the country stabbed in the back, are forgetting something important. They're putting their own personal feelings and prejudices before the word of the ruler and the good of the country. Anami is no hero -- he does nothing to suppress the uprisings, leaving that to others -- but his personal example is damning to the conspirators. Mifune's performance is of a quality out of proportion to the commercial ambitions of this all-star studio project.

But the ensemble acting is really good all around here, and the crosscut action has a thematic coherence that makes the finished product much better than the first twenty minutes would leave you fearing. When a historical picture can make you feel suspense the way this one does -- it does probably help if the audience doesn't know Japanese history that well -- it's a praiseworthy accomplishment. But even if you know the general history you may not know what happened to particular people, and the cast here is good enough to keep you interested in their several fates, while our sense of the stakes makes the plight of even minor characters like a radio announcer suddenly important. When the announcer faces down a gun-toting soldier who demands to read a speech condemning the Rescript in advance, you feel that it's not only the climax of the film but a fateful moment in history.

With the suspense comes some cathartically violent moments. The death of the Imperial Guard commander is preceded by a close-up decapitation, and Anami's suicide, seconded by himself with a slice to the jugular, is hardly less gruesome in black and white than it would have been in color. These scenes may be tough to watch, but they bring the war home to the last privileged quarters of Japan and remind us more effectively than any stock footage that this is still a war movie. This is a stern film with a strong message. If it resembles a nuclear nightmare more than a classical battle, it at least gives a hopeful account of people with the courage to step back from Armageddon at the last possible moment.