COLD WAR (Zimna wojna, 2018)

Pawel Pawlikowski's follow-up to Ida, though mostly praised by critics, didn't have the same impact in the U.S. as the earlier, Oscar-winning film. The lack of a Holocaust angle in the new film may be the simplest explanation for this, but Cold War itself may have been a little too foreign -- which is to say too nationalist -- for American art-house tastes. It marks a territory of tragic Polish exceptionalism that has no true home in either the Russian-dominated east or the American-dominated west, though the film has little or nothing to say about the U.S.A. or actual Americans. Instead, it asserts a nebulous Polish authenticity apparently incapable of true expression in the film's Cold War setting. The nebulous element finds form in the film's heroine, the aspiring singer Zula (Joanna Kulig), who pretends to be a peasant in order to join a folk-singing troupe organized in the late 1940s by musicologists Irena (Agata Kuleza) and Wiktor (Tomasz Kot). Wiktor falls in love with Zula, and the romance keeps him with the troupe after Irena quits in futile protest against the Communist government transforming it into a Stalinist propaganda vehicle. Its propaganda function allows the singers to tour the eastern bloc, including East Berlin, where Wiktor, as artistically frustrated as Irena, hopes to defect with Zula to the west. Alas, Zula never makes the rendezvous, so Wiktor defects alone.

Later in the 1950s, the troupe travels the wider world, and in Paris Zula encounters Wiktor again. Our hero will find a variety of work in the west, from composing film scores to playing in a niteclub jazz band. He still hopes to bring Zula to the other side, but his efforts to transform her into a jazz singer, including arranging a cool-jazz version of the folk tune that serves effectively as her theme song, only estrange them further. The issue isn't that she dislikes modern music -- she's seen dancing to "Rock Around the Clock" almost as a form of protest -- but that Wiktor is trying to make her into something she isn't for no good reason. Wiktor seems to realize this, too, and you could argue that for him she embodies the true Poland, to such a degree that he risks certain imprisonment in order to return home to be near her. In a melodramatic scenario mercifully underplayed by all involved, Wiktor can only be freed from prison by Zula marrying the party hack (Boris Szyc) who corrupted the folk troupe in the first place. In true melodramatic fashion, she becomes a lush until Wiktor finally emerges from prison, his artistic career apparently mangled (with his hand) beyond repair. With it already established that the west offers no real escape for them, the only remaining option is romantic suicide -- again carried out with respectable understatement. A point is made nevertheless, presumably one that found an appreciative audience in a newly-nationalist Poland. Cold War isn't exactly saying "a plague on both your houses," but it does say quite clearly that the freedom promised by the west wasn't really freedom, at least for some people -- or else that the west's freedom wasn't enough for some people.  Wiktor seals his fate, against the advice of a harshly realistic Polish diplomat, with the explanation, "I'm Polish." What being Polish entails, if not what it actually means, is Cold War's ultimate subject, and it should be no surprise that, good as the film is -- strongly acted, sharply shot, admirably succinct -- it doesn't travel as well as Pawlikowski's previous effort. It should do no harm to his reputation, however, and whatever he does next is sure to be, most likely deservedly, an art-house event.

DVR Diary: THE IRON CURTAIN (1948)

William Wellman's red-scare drama for Twentieth Century-Fox has one of the most interesting soundtracks of the 1940s. Alfred Newman conducted and presumably curated a selection of themes duly credited to contemporary Soviet composers: Prokofiev, Shostakovich, etc. The idea seems to have been to craft a background musical portrait of Soviet communism. The music in the picture is both diegetic and non-diegetic. For laymen, that means some of the Soviet music is simply soundtrack (non-diegetic) and some is heard by the characters in the story. For instance, in the cipher office where Igor Gouzenko (Dana Andrews) works, music blares at all times for security reasons, so that people can't hear anything in adjoining offices. Later, another character hears a snatch of Shostakovich and identifies it as the first stirring of proletarian culture. For a non-diegetic example, during a moment of moral crisis Gouzenko hears voices from earlier scenes in the picture while we hear a particularly hellish bit from Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony. Throughout, the Soviet music is strident, turbulent, frenetic. The Iron Curtain soundtrack is a Fantasia of totalitarian themes and terror. Depending on your taste in classical music, it may be a more effective argument against Stalinism than the film itself.

The historic Iron Curtain was located by Winston Churchill in eastern Europe, but the Gouzenko story and the Iron Curtain movie take place in Canada. Gouzenko is assigned to the Soviet embassy in Ottowa as a cipher clerk while World War II is still in progress and the USSR is Canada's ally against Nazi Germany. The film shows the Soviets already looking ahead to a resumption of the irrepressible class struggle. Embassy workers and Canadian communists are shown recruiting people (including a member of parliament) to spy on their government and military, and later on the atomic bomb program under way in the U.S. Gouzenko is a loyal communist initially, despite an early mis-step when he recites to his new boss his actual personal background instead of the fake details that have been prepared for him. Gouzenko is warned not to make friends with Canadians, but that's no problem until his wife (Gene Tierney) is sent over to live with him. She can't help trying to make friends with neighbors, especially after their son is born. Occasionally they take walks through the city, once stopping awkwardly outside a church as hymns play inside. It's hard to tell what we're supposed to make of their apparent distress. Does the churchiness of it all disturb them in some way, or do they recognize this as something inviting yet forbidden to them? Later in the picture, an older Soviet observes that he's old enough to know what truth is, or was, while Gouzenko's generation isn't so lucky. That seems to be the screenplay's dig at Soviet atheism, but what's really subversive for the Gouzenkos is the sheer fact of family life. It makes them start to think of having lives of their own, which isn't part, apparently, of the Soviet program.

Gouzenko is increasingly uncomfortable with the embassy's involvement in atomic spying. To him and his wife it all seems to promise a new war so soon after the victory over Germany. Igor (many actors pronounce it "Eager") is also troubled by the breakdown of a colleague grown guilty over his role in state terror. That unfortunate is duly shipped back to Moscow -- it's a damning fact that no one looks forward to being recalled to the old country -- and when Igor learns that his family is to return home after he trains a replacement, the Gouzenkos make a personal decision to defect and a moral decision to expose the atomic spy network. What follows apparently follows fairly closely the events of their actual defection, which fortunately fits the framework of a "they won't believe me" thriller. The Gouzenkos are spurned by government, law enforcement and media, none of the above taking them seriously. In a historically accurate yet thematically significant detail, only when the embassy staff invades the sanctity of the Gouzenko home, having discovered his theft of damning documents, do the police take action to protect the defectors. Governments and other institutions may not be reliable, but at least our society -- Canada for this purpose being effectively an extension of the U.S. -- respects property and family when totalitarianism doesn't.

Like other anti-communist films, Iron Curtain isn't really ideological if that word leads you to expect a defense of capitalism against communism. Communism is primarily a political threat, the tyranny over humanity of a conspiratorial, paranoid party. Curtain is less a polemical or patriotic film than a kind of film noir, and while cinematographer Charles G. Clarke didn't work much in that genre he makes an effectively noirish impression here. Unfortunately, Gouzenko's story doesn't give Andrews much to work with, and Tierney gets even less, and the postwar Fox gimmick of portentous pseudo-documentary narration distances the audience further from the characters. Wellman directs anonymously; it really could have been anyone behind the camera and for all I know the job was a loyalty test like I Married A Communist was at RKO. The music really is the most interesting thing about the picture; it so overwhelms the mostly uninspired proceedings that audiences might have wondered who really had the more interesting culture. More likely they just found the music too loud.

DVR Diary: WOMAN ON PIER 13 (I Married a Communist, 1949)

It's hard to imagine many Hollywood movies more reflexively reviled than this Howard Hughes agit-noir from his recently-acquired RKO studio. According to legend, Hughes tried to make participation in the project a test of loyalty for studio talent -- loyalty to himself, I suppose, as much as to the American Way of Life. In general, overtly anti-communist movies get a tougher rap from critics than the overtly anti-Nazi films of a few years earlier. This is because the anti-commie movies are perceived to target not a fighting wartime aggressor but an underdog dissident faction. Regardless of recent histories demonstrating the complicity of American communists in espionage and crimes against international communists, most people's image of an American communist, if they have one at all, is not of a terrorist gangster actively pursuing the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Posterity has deemed the anti-red rhetoric of the scare years disproportionate to the actual threat. As a result, films like I Married a Communist are dismissed as absurdities if not offenses against truth. The fact that the film's title was changed quite quickly to the almost-pointless Woman on Pier 13 suggests that movie audiences during the actual Red Scare may have felt the same way. But rather than debate whether the film was fair to the actual Reds I want to pay attention to what the screenplay (credited to Robert Hardy Andrews and Charles Grayson) actually says and how it may belie our expectations.

I Married a Communist is a bit of a cheat title. It should have been I Married an Ex-Communist, because the object of the title, Brad Collins (Robert Ryan), quit the party in disgust more than a decade before the story starts. Since his street-fighting days as a labor agitator, Brad has risen, with the help of a name change, from stevedore to shipping executive. He's successful and just married to Nan (Laraine Day), the I of the title, when the trouble starts. Just when he thought he was out, the Reds pull him back in. Christine Norman, an ex-flame (Janis Carter) has the dirt on his Commie past, and so does the Party boss Vanning (Thomas Gomez). Since the revelations will ruin his career, and his role in a strike killing may condemn him to the electric chair, Brad must submit to blackmail. The simple part is the 40% of his salary he has to kick back to the Party. But then it gets interesting.

Brad's company is negotiating a new contract with the union. This being a Hollywood picture, the union honcho Jim Travers (Richard Rober) is a former flame of Nan's. But he's a good guy -- the most positive male character in the entire picture. He's not going to start a strike on his own; he believes in negotiation and compromise. But the Party wants Brad to precipitate the strike -- it presumably serves some international strategic purpose, since it will tie up the San Francisco docks -- by taking an intransigent stand against the union, against compromise. Here are two things worth noting. First, the right-wing propaganda of 65 years ago is different from the right-wing propaganda of today in some significant ways. Most notably, and maybe most surprisingly given Hughes's agendas, his anti-communist movie is not hostile to organized labor. In fact, as I suggested, Jim the union leader is the nearest thing to a hero after Nan herself. Meanwhile, the script seems to be telling us that employers who refuse compromise with unions are doing the Commies' work for them. Robert Stevenson directed this film at the cusp of the "Treaty of Detroit" era when management and labor agreed to share the wealth to an unprecedented extent in return for peace on the shop floor and the elimination of communist influence. 1949 was not a period of economic decline for which unions could serve as a scapegoat as they do now. Some observers might expect anti-communism in the McCarthy era -- the Senator from Wisconsin made his big splash into celebrity a year later -- to be synonymous with hostility to organized labor, but on this evidence it simply wasn't so.

While Brad reluctantly carries on his insincere negotiations, Christine jealously turns her seductive attentions to Nan's younger brother Don (John Agar), whom Brad had given a job before the trouble started. She gradually transforms Brad into a radical union agitator who shouts Jim down when the moderate leader pleads for moderation. This process apparently took longer in an earlier cut of the film, since Brad's radicalization and its role in provoking the strike is shown as part of a lengthy montage of snippets of scenes that clearly had important dialogue in them, while ominous music plays. Left intact is Brad's first introduction to communism at one of Christine's parties. This scene is as ideological as the movie gets. It tells us what the writers (if not Hughes) thought communism stood for. What it stands for, apparently, is "the scientific management of society," as one well-fed intellectual asserts. Nothing here about the proletariat or property or capitalism. An initially skeptical Brad senses that this is a form of elitism and tells his interlocutor that "I prefer democracy." So another thing missing that we in 2014 might expect in an overtly anti-communist propaganda movie is a defense of capitalism. Nothing here about "free enterprise," nor even about "freedom." The opposite of communism is "democracy." Communism, then, appears to be a political system above all, characterized by the rule of an elite justified by an appeal to science. This is actually a fair hit against Bolshevism or Leninism and the concept of necessary, incontestable leadership by a vanguard party who would do the dictating during Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat." Sixty-five years later you may be more likely to hear someone say that democracy and capitalism contradict each other, with capitalism getting the better of the argument. 1949 was a different world.

Where the 1949 film gets most outrageous is in its portrayal of blatant gangster tactics by American communists. Some were certainly involved in the sort of labor-dispute street fighting Brad took part in as a young man, but I Married a Communist goes beyond that. Communists are shown murdering a suspected informant, in part as a way to intimidate Brad. The victim is tied up and dumped off a pier as he begs for mercy. Brad, being Robert Ryan, is unimpressed by the attempt to scare him. Later, the Communists begin to devour their own. When Don begins to get wise to how he's been manipulated, Vanning orders a hit on him. The local Reds farm out much of such work to a carny who runs a shooting-gallery concession on the pier. Eschewing the obvious, the hit man kills Don by running him over with a car. Later still, Christine threatens to turn on Vanning, but he dumps her out a high window. The film's conflicts are ultimately resolved by gunplay, Brad killing Vanning while suffering a mortal wound so he can give Nan back to Jim, from whom he took her. In history, you often hear of "purges" among the American communists, but these weren't the sort of purges you had in countries where communists controlled the state and enforced their own laws. American communists who got purged usually formed their own splinter parties, even more futile than the original party. Mine wasn't the most thorough Google search, but I found nothing indicating that American communists killed each other on American soil to enforce party discipline or to punish informants. Actual labor unions seem more likely to have done such things. American communists seem to have been more "community organizers" in the pejorative sense than men of action or the sort of hard cases who carried out revolutions elsewhere. In Russia, Stalin robbed banks and Lenin condoned it. The category error of American anti-communism was to assume that America's communists were the same sort of people, that to be a communist was to be a criminal at heart. That feeling still persists, and so I Married a Communist will not seem quite as alien or surprising in its overall attitude as I'm suggesting here -- and I must also admit that a non-violent finish would have made a weak film only more dull. But my main point remains: to be against communism doesn't mean automatically that you'll also be against other things, or for other things still. An anti-communist movie of 1949 isn't necessarily a right-wing movie by today's standards -- and it's not really a good movie by any standard. But it's very interesting as a historical document and a great example of what movies can tell us about the culture they were made in and how it differs from our own.

OPEN LETTER TO THE EVENING NEWS (Lettera aperta a un giornale della sera, 1970)

Filmed in 1968 and edited into shape over a two-year period, Francesco Maselli's film is a criticism of academic Communists by a professed academic Communist. Maselli filmed it in a documentary style, deliberately overexposing the 16mm film to get the bleached look of authentic amateurism. At the same time, one suspects Maselli of certain concessions to glamor -- on the casting couch, perhaps? Maybe late-Sixties fashions make any woman look good, but on the other hand, did communism not attract more stridently plain or stocky female types? An air of radical chic hangs over the proceedings, even as Maselli satirizes some of that mentality. His target is a brand of communism that specializes in international posturing while apparently ignoring more immediate tasks at hand. The opening act is an all-night gathering to draft the title document, in which the signers vow to form an international brigade to fight the Americans in Vietnam. A mood of self-conscious yet unrepentant futility prevails, as the authors assume that the letter will never be printed.

Aren't they surprised when the letter is not only printed but popular, inspiring statements of solidarity from Dutch "culture workers" and the European left's No.1 celebrity intellectual, Jean-Paul Sartre. Needless to say, this puts our radicals on the spot, since none of them really assumed that the letter would be taken seriously. As they flounder for a way to spin the situation, the momentum of events gets out of their control. The Communist government of North Vietnam has consistently refused support from foreign fighters, but on this occasion, wouldn't you know, the Central Committee is reconsidering its policy, while negotiations are underway for Yugoslavia to arm and supply our intrepid protagonists. Everything turns out all right in the end, but it's a close call most of the way. The film ends with our main characters literally kicking a can down the road before releasing their tensions in boyish play.

I think Maselli made his point, but in case you didn't get it he also intercuts his heroes' misadventures with scenes of prisoners being tortured by a bored, coffee-sipping official. We're never told where this is happening, but I assume that the location is supposed to be Italy itself. If so, the film becomes a slap at leftist internationalism. On the NoShame DVD, Maselli (still with us at age 84) relates that his film generated a firestorm of "polemic" in the leftist press, but he had the good fortune to be an Italian Communist, a member of Europe's most liberal such party, and was able to withstand and answer criticism without getting expelled.

Whatever his own polemical intentions, Maselli thought of Open Letter as a character-driven cinematic novel. If the overall tone is satirical, he goes to great if not salacious lengths to humanize his characters. No doubt reflecting his own experience, he shows us communists who live and screw in the real world, driven by the same passions and jealousies as everyone else, perhaps at the expense of the will or discipline revolution may demand. In short, there's a lot of sexuality and bare breasts in the movie that may sweeten the polemical pill for the non-ideological audience. Female beauty clearly arouses the aesthete within him that Maselli may have meant to suppress with his deliberately distressed filming style. It sets Open Letter apart from later, retrospective films on the same subject that focus on fanaticism at the expense of humanity. Maselli humbly suggests that the trade-off between the two qualities is even more problematic, if also somewhat amusing.

MAN OF MARBLE (1976) and MAN OF IRON (1981)

In two films director Andrzej Wajda runs the cinematic gamut from arthouse classicism to guerilla filmmaking in a race with accelerating history. Together, the films form a two-generation saga of disillusionment and resistance in Communist Poland. They're parallel stories of a father and son and two chroniclers. In Man of Marble (Czlowiek z Marmuru) we follow student documentarian Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda) in the footsteps of Citizen Kane as she watches old newsreels and interviews survivors to learn whatever happened to a once-famous hero of Polish labor. Her subject is Mateusz Birkut (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), once idolized for setting a record for bricklaying during the construction of the city of Nowa Huta. Birkut is the title character, supposedly immortalized in stone but soon to become an unperson, denounced as a foreign agent and saboteur. As Agnieszka penetrates the veil between film and reality, Wajda shows us some scenes twice. We first see Birkut's bricklaying feat as it was shown on in black and white in theaters: an exemplary story of heroic labor to build the new Poland. The reality, as remembered by living witnesses, is almost Fellini-esque in its absurdity as an audience gathers, a band plays constantly, and an announcer keeps score during the spectacle of bricklaying. The director's also careful to show us Birkut's moments of barely-suppressed annoyance as the newsreel camera gets in his face. Still, Birkut starts as an idealist truly committed to spreading a more efficient method of bricklaying, but everything goes downhill after an odd incident when his hands are burned by a superheated brick during one of his personal appearances. At the lowest point, he shows up during a show trial, in raw footage never shown until Agnieszka screens it, to implicate himself in the incident. Even the authorities find that too ridiculous to believe.

Man of Marble chronicles the sordid demise of whatever socialist idealism actually existed in Poland. The country never seems to have become the totalitarian dystopia of the typical American imagination -- the film, though partly censored, was actually released there -- but something has clearly gone terribly wrong, and may have been wrong from the beginning. If there was an idealism during Birkut's salad days, it was based on some belief that through propaganda people could be made to believe in a Communist future. By Agnieszka's time, you get the impression that nobody really bothers trying to convince anybody. By the time of Man of Iron (Czelowiek z Zelaza), which eventually picks up where Marble left off, it's as if Johnny Friendly's union from On the Waterfront runs the country. It's government by bullying control over jobs and favors rather than the totalitarian brainwashing of Orwellian nightmares. When the authorities decide that Agnieszka can't finish her Birkut documentary, she's reminded that the state paid her way through film school and provided for her in every way, and told that she owes the state loyalty in return, or else they'll make sure she never makes another movie. That's the logic that makes dependence a dirty word in political discourse: if you owe someone something, you can't question them. It shouldn't be so, but people in power tend to think differently. Agnieszka is ruined and eventually jailed.

 Before Wajda re-introduces us to Agnieszka he opens Man of Iron with the misadventures of  Winkel (Marian Opania). Winkel is pretty much Agneiszka's opposite: sloppy, alcoholic, cowardly. He is tasked by his superiors with researching the background of Maciej Tomczak (Radziwilowicz again), a Solidarity leader in Gdansk, for a hatchet-job TV documentary. Winkel is one of cinema's wretches, so abject in his alcoholism (Gdansk has gone dry during the 1980 shipyard strike) that he soaks paper towels with the booze from a broken bottle and squeezes the liquor into a glass to drink. He has no integrity but seems too cowardly to actually betray the independent union. As he conducts his interviews, we're reminded, since we first met Tomczak late in Man of Marble, that the agitator is Birkut's son. We now learn of Birkut's tragic last years. Still recognized as a workers' leader in the shipyard, he refused to lead the workers out in support of student protesters, including his son, during the global tumult of 1968. Two years later it was the workers' turn and Birkut died during a street melee. The government allows his family to bury the body, only to exhume and vanish it later. In protest, Tomczak erects a cross and lights a candle on the site near a bridge where his father fell.

Later, Winkel is snuck into prison to interview Agnieszka, who relates what happened to her since Man of Marble. She'd fallen in love with Tomczak and married him, with no less a personage than Lech Walesa the Solidarity leader (playing himself) as a witness. There's something exhilirating yet almost unseemly about the way Wajda embeds himself and his film in history as it happens. Man of Iron is one part Medium Cool, another part one of those old Mack Sennett one-reelers where he'd set Fatty, Mabel et al loose at some public event. The climax of all this comes when Tomczak is reunited with a liberated Agnieszka at the moment when the government recognizes Solidarity as a legitimate workers' representative. The reunion of the lovers seems to be shot as the historic speech is actually happening. Wajda's apparent freedom of movement is amazing, even considering that 1981 was another moment of dramatic liberalization in Poland until the martial-law declaration of December put Walesa in prison and drove Wajda into exile in western Europe (where he made Danton and other films). Wajda was careful enough not to close Man of Iron on that Capra-esque note of triumph. While the film does end with the lovers walking off together, we first see that Winkel, despite his best intentions, is not redeemed, or at least not forgiven by the victorious union. We also see a bullying party hack warn him, prophetically enough, that the agreement wouldn't stand, that the government had been under duress, etc. Winkel's last scenes strike discordant notes that serve the film well retroactively, but you do wonder why Wajda seems so unforgiving toward his creation. It may have simply been that Opania is so entertainingly wretched that you wouldn't want to change him.

Man of Marble and Man of Iron are historic films from near the front line of dissent inside the Cold War Communist bloc. While Wajda doesn't have a Wellsian pictorial imagination to match the Wellsian ambitions of the first film, both films make the most of dramatic figures in the drably epic landscapes of Gdansk and Nowa Huta. An optimistic romanticism surges to the surface by the climax of Man of Iron that almost requires the last Winkel scenes as a corrective. The contrast between Winkel and Agnieszka itself belies much of the rhetoric against totalitarian power; neither is purely a creature of state-controlled upbringing, since otherwise they'd be more alike. Character matters, in life and in art, and Wajda's commitment to character over ideology makes his diptych more richly realistic and more morally meaningful. These are anti-Communist films (capital C, please) that aren't simply arguments for free-market capitalism -- the heroes of the sequel, after all, are labor leaders. They transcend ideology in a way their audiences should emulate.

 

Krystyna Janda and Lech Walesa in Man of Iron;

it may have been a brush with greatness for both people.

Pre-Code Parade: CLEAR ALL WIRES (1933)

 

Late in 1932 the Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons reported that M-G-M had replaced Clark Gable in the lead role of Clear All Wires with Lee Tracy. "Now we know Clear All Wires will rate at the box office," Parsons wrote. That's because Tracy, "in spite of his many sick lapses, is the man of the hour [and] has never given a single inferior performance." His casting in Gable's place put the George Hill picture on a "flying start." If you're wondering what alternate reality Parsons was writing from -- other than Hollywood -- bear in mind that Gable in 1932 was just breaking out as a leading man, while Tracy was coming off a big hit in Warners' Blessed Event and certainly had made a strong impression with RKO's Half-Naked Truth. Still, compare your instant mental images of Gable and Tracy -- if you have one for the latter -- and you have to imagine two very different pictures. You actually don't have to think very hard, since Gable eventually got his chance in 1940, when M-G-M very freely remade Clear All Wires as King Vidor's Comrade X. That was such a free remake that it got an Oscar nomination for Best Original Story, but contemporary reviewers noted its origins in the older film, itself an adaptation of a hit 1932 stage farce. All that remains of Clear All Wires in Comrade X, however, is the core idea of a cocky American reporter making mischief in the Soviet Union. The mischief is very different, however, and the remake is more overtly hostile toward the USSR than the original. A minor aspect of Pre-Code cinema is a relatively ambivalent attitude toward Communism -- the Code itself, I think, didn't require a harder or more critical stance but Hollywood did seem to take a harder line following Upton Sinclair's 1934 gubernatorial campaign, when M-G-M's Irving Thalberg -- who made the casting switch for Clear All Wires -- infamously produced fake newsreels warning of a hobo takeover of California should Sinclair win. Before that crisis, Hollywood seemed to regard the USSR as simply another exotic country with strange customs and eccentric politics. If the films of the period seem insufficiently outraged by Stalin -- well, it was a kind of amoral period. That's what the Code Enforcers were griping about.

Naturally, the abrasively loquacious Tracy plays an amoral star reporter. Buckley Joyce Thomas is the foreign correspondent for a major Chicago newspaper, and as the story opens he's reported missing among the Rif tribesmen, the notorious enemies of the French Foreign Legion. As a military force combs the desert for him, we find Buck enjoying the hospitality of a Rif chieftain, promising him favorable coverage in the global press. His liberation takes him quite by surprise, but he responds promptly, filing a dispatch reporting his narrow escape from captivity and death to the disgust of his main rival, the English journalist Pettingwaite. For his next trick, Buck intends to cover the 15th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, determined to interview representative Russians, the head of the GPU (precursor to the KGB) and possibly Stalin himself. He won't take no for an answer. "The Kaiser never gave interviews! The Pope never gave interviews! Gandhi never gave interviews!" he reminds skeptics, "But they all talked to me!" With his trusty and helpfully named flunky Lefty (James Gleason) in tow, Buck invades Russia and tricks Pettingwaite out of his Moscow hotel suite, as well as his press pass for Lenin's Tomb for the big parade. In fact, we see Buck light Stalin's pipe in what may be Hollywood's first portrayal of the dictator.

Despite Buck's aggressive tactics, his interpreter is unable to secure an interview with the GPU boss, and their visit to the Lubyanka ends quickly -- though not without the chilling sight of an execution in progress -- with the reporter directed to the egress, po-russki. Also complicating Buck's plans are his new girlfriend (Una Merkel), who happens to be his publisher's regular mistress, and a lunatic dissident (John Melvin Bleifer) who wants him to publicize his anti-Stalin campaign. "Stalinism is not Leninism!" Sozanov raves, "Stalinism is not Bolshevism! Bolshevism is not Communism! And Leninism is not Marxism!" Buck can only share our own confusion. Despite the man's boast of attacking a radio station, Buck insists that he isn't worth covering unless he does more than talk. He shows Sozanov an American newspaper for examples of what he means. One woman dominates the headlines because "She did something worthwhile, murdered her husband."

Buck's ambitions fall apart as the publisher learns of his affair and fires him, leaving him and Lefty without funds in a strange country. Our hero rages against his former employer: "What did he ever do besides inherit a newspaper? Predatory wealth!...I'm telling you, Lefty, there's something to this communism...." The farce plot kicks in as Buck decides he has to make news in order to regain his job. After rejecting the idea of stealing Lenin's body ("Too gruesome, too macabre.") he exploits his acquaintance with a Prince Tomofsky, allegedly the last surviving Romanov in Russia, setting the hapless aristocrat up for an assassination attempt, with Lefty poised to shoot to wound. Just then, the interpreter arrives at Buck's suite in triumph: he has brought the GPU commissar (the usually vile C. Henry Gordon in one of his most strangely amiable performances) for an exclusive interview. Of course, Buck has ordered Lefty to shoot at a man in a chair at an exact moment, when in fact the commissar occupies the fatal seat. Now Buck is unable to end the interview soon enough, as the commissar is happy to ramble on about the Five Year Plan. Ultimately Buck has no choice but to take the bullet, making the most of it by filing a dispatch crediting himself with saving the commissar's life. Unfortunately, when Pettingwaite arrives on the scene, he finds the dispatch Buck had prepared in advance reporting the shooting of Tomofsky. He goes to the commissar and gets Buck and Lefty thrown in prison, where in an adjoining cell they find Sozanov, who had taken Buck's advice with no success. Now everything clicks, and in a darkly ironic finish, when you take Russia's near future into account, Buck rescues himself by convincing an innocent man to confess to a crime and conspiracy in which he didn't take part. But it's a happy ending after all after Buck convinces the commissar to spare the obviously insane Sozanov's life. There's also a happy ending to the romantic complications, but I admit losing track of the women in Buck's life, and the happiness of it all may be compromised by the closing newspaper headline indicating that he's set his new wife up to be kidnapped for the usual publicity.

Clear All Wires is more interesting than entertaining. Tracy is about as obnoxious here as he ever would be, displaying no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and the farce aspect of the victim in the chair is laboriously anti-cinematic. For Pre-Code buffs it might even escalate to fascinating for its exceptionally whimsical attitude toward the Bolsheviks and its overall, almost overwhelming cynicism. Without much of a sex angle -- though Merkel gets to show off some lingerie -- Clear All Wires stands out as a distinctive Pre-Code film because it's the sort of movie, for many reasons, that you can't imagine Hollywood making just a short time later. And for some, it might be proof for the argument that Hollywood was better off stopping.

Now Playing: NOVEMBER 7, 1962

Feeling paranoid today? Take a break at the movies. Here's one opening today in Daytona Beach -- it opened last week in many other places.

Does that strike the wrong note? Try this theater in Miami!

Ideal viewing either way after the Cuban Missile Crisis, don't you think?

DVR Diary: BRITISH AGENT (1934)

R. H. Bruce Lockhart had a dramatic diplomatic career that became the makings of a movie drama when he published his Memoirs of a British Agent in 1932. Warner Bros. bought the film rights and had Laird Doyle write a script for Michael Curtiz to direct. Lockhart had been sent to the new Soviet Union in 1918 on a forlorn mission to keep the Bolshevik state in the war against Germany. He was eventually arrested and accused of conspiring to kill V. I. Lenin, only to be released in a spy exchange. Needless to say, Warners elaborated on this. In real life, Lockhart fell for the widow of a Russian diplomat of the old regime. Not dramatic enough. Why not have the movie Lockhart, called "Stephen Locke" (Leslie Howard) fall in love with a revolutionary instead? Star-crossed lovers and all that. So Locke meets cute with Elena (Kay Francis) when she strays onto diplomatic property trying to escape a Cossack she'd shot at during a riot. Since she's a revolutionary, why not make her part of the government after the Revolution takes place? That way she can be torn between her love for Locke and her love for her country and its new government. Thus she betrays his confidence as he negotiates with the Soviet leaders by letting them know that he has no actual authority to fulfill promises made to them. Events gallop beyond his control anyway; "the Soviet" concludes a peace with Germany and the British land troops in Russia to spark a counterrevolution. As in life, Lenin is shot, though for dramatic purposes he is more gravely injured, falling into a coma. As the arch-revolutionary fights for his life, his cohorts call for harsh measures -- "call it terror if you will," one says -- to suppress the White armies of the counterrevolution. Locke and his diplomatic buddies -- a gum-chewing American (William Gargan), a card-sharp Italian (Cesar Romero) and a young Frenchman (whoever) -- are trying to smuggle arms to the Whites, but the net is tightening. The non-anglophones are shot down and the American is captured and tortured. He won't give up Locke, but Elena convinces him to tell her so she can tip Locke off. Instead, she resolves the contradictions of her career by ratting Locke out, but meeting him in advance of the attack so she can die with him. But wait! At the last possible moment, Lenin wakes from his coma. Lenin will live! And his first words upon waking are "Stop the terror!"

You heard me. It'd be a moment of high camp if so many people wouldn't refuse to find it funny. It exemplifies the way British Agent bends over backwards to be evenhanded in its account of the Bolshevik Revolution. It's really an apolitical film -- certainly an unideological one. The Bolsheviks aren't recognizably "totalitarian" here; the movie takes their demands for peace and bread for the poor at face value, which is fair to a certain extent. One reason for the delicate approach may have been that some of the participants were still living. That requires some name changes. Instead of Alexander Kerensky, the Provisional Government that ruled between the fall of the Tsar and the Bolshevik coup is led in the movie by a fictional "Kolinov." J. Carroll Naish is easily identifiable by his fake hair as Leon Trotsky, also living in 1934, but his character is referred to only as "Commissioner for War." A couple of characters look like Josef Stalin, but no one is called by that name. So it's not quite the Russian Revolution we've grown familiar with in more than one sense. A difference in attitude would come shortly, as you can tell by comparing British Agent with Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka, released five years later. That film, a product of European imagination (Billy Wilder wrote it), famously portrays Soviet Woman as de-sexed, humorless, nearly soulless, someone who sacrifices her humanity, or at least her femininity, for ideology's sake. Kay Francis, however, is no Greta Garbo. Her Elena is passionate, violent (at least initially) and incorrigibly romantic. There's no suggestion that she's had to sacrifice her womanly nature to fight for the revolution or help govern the new state. If she seems unconvincing in her role, -- and she doesn't really live up to her first gun-toting appearance -- she's probably more so now than when the movie came out, as long as the emotionless-Commie archetype still prevails. The more romantic idea of a revolutionary still had an audience before Stalin gave revolutionaries in general a bad name. British Agent may be seen as an artifact of a more naive time -- that "stop the terror" line can only inspire bitter laughter from those who know their history -- but it's essentially a film about a revolution, not the tyranny that followed. In keeping with the anti-war mood of the Pre-Code era when the film was made,-- it was released under the Code Enforcement regime in the fall of 1934 -- the film can't get too worked up over the Soviet refusing to stay in that stupid war, and who can blame it? In any event, all those issues don't amount to a hill of beans compared to the love of two people, which shows that, despite its vaunted sophistication, Pre-Code was a simpler time in some ways after all.
Warners (here using their First National alias -- check out that FN shield!) insisted on calling Lockhart's book a novel. Here's how they pitched British Agent to 1934 audiences, as preserved by the ever-reliable TCM. com.

UNITED RED ARMY (2007): "There's no such thing as an anti-revolutionary cookie!"

In recent years, filmmakers from around the world have been probing the minds and motivations of the violent radicals of the generation before violent radicalism was identified with Islam. Koji Wakamatsu's three-hour epic belongs in the same category with Olivier Assayas's Carlos, Uli Edel's Baader-Meinhof Complex and similar subjects, and falls in between those two in terms of length. United Red Army is probably the most horrific of these films and the most discrediting toward leftist extremism -- as long as you take the atrocities presented as characteristic of extreme leftism.

Wakamatsu takes time getting going because he needs to present the political context that makes the story plausible. Like similar groups around the world, the United Red Army (I'll spare you the details of its institutional evolution) arose from anti-imperialist anger against the American war in Vietnam, and from specific Japanese anger at their own government's complicity in the war. Like the Weather Underground, the URA was a fringe extracted from a mass movement through a commitment to "all-out war" against the establishment. They were the people presumably most frustrated at communist parties' failure to spark popular revolution or even seize power through a coup d'etat, and the most likely to take their frustration out on each other. The joie de vivre and solidarity of youthful idealistic radicalism curdles into holier-than-thou recrimination and an overpowering urge to see someone punished for everyone's sins.

One reason the first hour seems slow is because it takes a long time for our main cast to make the cut, so to speak, as early members are captured or killed by the authorities. It could be frustrating to see characters introduced who seem to be important, only to see them end up in jail or fleeing the country. One attractive woman seems set to be the primary character, only to depart for Lebanon; we learn later that she survived the decades to officially disband the URA in the 21st century. But this is all necessary to see how power ends up in the hands of a singularly unworthy individual by default. Tsuneo Mori (Go Jibiki) is shown chickening out of an early action and exiling himself to a backwater town to be a labor organizer. He is forgiven and invited to rejoin as a common soldier because the rapidly-depleted revolutionary bands need manpower. As more leaders are caught, Mori rises to the top, where his presumably guilty conscience leads him to become a pitiless judge of everyone else's revolutionary inadequacies. He makes a point of saying that other people's records of actual activity or heroism won't count in the future. All that seems to matter, once the URA settles in for a Valley Forge-like winter in the mountains, is that revolutionary communists "self-criticize" at the drop of a hat.

 

If Mori or his eventual consort Hiroko Nagata (the austerely yet demonically beautiful Akie Namiki) isn't satisfied with the detail or sincerity of the self-critique, it's up to the whole URA to break down the recalcitrants' resistance by physically beating them down. At this point, in the arduous central act of the picture, the Army seems less like a revolutionary cell and more like a cult -- I'll leave it to the political philosophers to clarify the distinction. If you don't join in beating someone, you become suspect and subject to beatings. If you stupidly play along and confess to some personal ambition, Mori hypocritically labels you a "Stalinist" and has you put to death. More horrific yet than outright murder is the punishment meted out to Mieko Toyami (Maki Sakai), a good-natured, slightly frivolous revolutionary who's clearly out of her depth in military training. Her supposed vanity -- demonstrated by brushing her long hair -- provokes lethal hostility compounded by contempt in Nagata. When Toyami cluelessly confesses that she doesn't really understand what's required in a self-criticism, but is willing to do one because she wants to live, even that's the wrong answer. Wanting to live is counter-revolutionary. But the leaders accommodate her at first by allowing her to do a self-criticsm by dragging the body of a previous victim (all of whom, it must be understood, actually died of "defeatism") and digging a grave for it. It isn't enough; Nagata and Mori goad her into doing a true self-criticsm, without "help" from the rest of the gang, by beating her own face into a bloody pulp. In a moment of sadism, Nagata then mockingly puts a mirror in Toyami's face. Her face and hands ruined, Toyami is tied to a post and left to die deliriously despite Mori's command to shut the fuck up. In the end, history and the film tell us, the URA killed nearly half its own members, 12 out of 29, over the winter of 1971-2.

The final act begins with the URA's dispersal from winter quarters. Mori and Nagata manage to get captured, presumably without a fight, while another band makes a desperate march across a snowy mountain. Wakamatsu shows us the faces of all those killed as this band struggles on, as if to say that their comeuppance is imminent. Actually, it isn't. A handful of survivors invade a household and take a woman hostage, holding out for days against an eventual police siege. A break in the revolutionary tension finally comes when one idiot dares criticize another for taking an extra cookie from the confiscated stores. The guilty one has finally had enough of the insanity, protesting, "There's no such thing as an anti-revolutionary cookie." But the ultimate confession, perhaps the one real self-criticism in the group's history, comes as the band prepares for a last police attack. They start to talk about owing a brave sacrifice to all their lost comrades, as if they themselves, for never resisting Mori and Nagata, were not responsible for all those deaths. Finally, one of them breaks down and denounces the lot, including himself, for having been cowards all along. They are all taken alive. Mori found it in himself to commit suicide in 1973, while Nagata died in prison less than a year ago, after nearly forty years in captivity.

United Red Army can't help raising the old question of whether there's something inherently murderous about Marxism-Leninism, and parts of it could well be run on Fox News as proof for the proposition. But the film itself is a vindication of nothing. If anything, Wakamatsu appears to agree that the leftists were right in their original protests against imperialism. What happened afterward may be as much a question of cult dynamics as of ideology. In any event, to state the obvious, this sort of vanguardism is no substitute for a popular mass revolutionary movement, however necessary a vanguard may seem to be for the existence of such a movement. But enough of politics. If you can get past the dry docudrama newsreel-fueled opening, Wakamatsu's film becomes a powerful and often visually striking film that makes the most of locations including the director's own home. Heretofore, Wakamatsu has been more a cult than canon director in America, best know for sex-and-violence films like Go Go Second-Time Virgin. United Red Army represents a dramatic rise in stature in his mid-seventies, late in a long career. Like his peers in the failed-revolutionary genre, Wakamatsu has told a necessary tragedy, forcing our attention to a subject that requires the attention of intelligent, conscientious people. Whether you conclude that the URA's means discredit their ends, or that the idea is still good but desperately requires different means, United Red Army is one of a class of movies that might be considered objectively indispensible.

COMMISSAR (1967-88)

The Soviet Union was a censorious, repressive society, but its leaders and bureaucrats had a curious attitude toward film. Rather than destroy unacceptable movies, the U.S.S.R. tended to shelve them, presumably indefinitely. Even Stalin shelved Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible Part II rather than burn it, and under Khrushchev it saw the light of day. Likewise, the ambitious debut film of director Aleksandr Askoldov was shelved by the Brezhnev regime, ruining Askoldov's career, only to emerge in the days of Gorbachev. It was acclaimed then, but Askoldov, then still only in his fifties, appears never to have resumed his career. One wonders what the censors objected to. It may have been the decision to adapt a story by Vasili Grossman, a writer presumably on the outs with the government since his novel Life and Fate had been suppressed a few years earlier. But if that were the case, Askoldov shouldn't have gotten a green light at all. The real issue seems to have been form rather than content. Askoldov was one of many Soviet directors butting against the aesthetic limits of "socialist realism" in cinema. Like many an ambitious novice, he seems willing to try anything with the camera. That experimentation may have been off-putting to the extent that it expressed directorial individualism rather than an official vision of the civil war that followed the October Revolution. Commissar occasionally spills over from socialist realism into magical realism in a manner that can be stunning to the casual viewer but disconcerting if not offensive to Soviet aesthetic regulators. So-called totalitarian regimes seemed to distrust artistic experimentation, believing that all art had a propaganda function and should be comprehensible by the lowest common denominator. Yet I don't think viewers would have trouble getting Commissar. So some have speculated that the KGB objected to the film's supposed feminism, since the title character is a woman, or to its sympathetic treatment of Jews, though Askoldov's attitude may not be as positive as that speculation implies.  Maybe there just wasn't enough heroic march music; totalitarians dig that sort of thing.

The offending film focuses on Klavdia Vavilova (Nonna Mordyukova), a Red Army officer who arrives in a freshly-taken town and is quartered with the Magazannik family. She's left behind as unfit for duty because she's in the last stage of pregnancy. Yefim Magazannik (Rolan Bykov) is one of those "life-affirming" types, the kind who dances barefoot in his yard as some sort of prayer to God. He kvetches at having to give up his bedroom to the commissar, but he and his family prove friendly, the wife especially showing empathy, having five kids herself, with the pregnant officer. The boys in the family are rambunctious, and the way they're presented may be part of the problem the censors had with the film. For one thing, they like to play at war, pretending to cajole their sister's doll from a hiding place only to torture and execute it. Later, they treat the sister herself with some of the same childish brutality, calling her a "Yid" for extra measure. The offensive insinuation may have been that the Red Army's conduct may have inspired the boys' cruelty. They may have been offensive in another way in one scene when their mother is bathing them, only to be interrupted by troops passing through town. The curious kids rush out to watch, and Askoldov gives us one shot of their three naked penises through the passing wagons that could well have convinced Soviet censors that he was some kind of a pervert and could well give American viewers a little bit of the creeps. But the director may simply have meant them as symbols of innocence; a lot depends on the eye of the beholder.

For a while you think you know the direction the film's going. Klavdia is slowly domesticated, doing her share of household chores and clearly caring for her newborn. But the film takes a late turn when the approaching counterrevolutionary "White" army shells the town. Klavdia and the Magazanniks take shelter in a basement. The kids are panicking and crying, but Yefim calms them and entertains them by launching into one of his Tevye/Zorba-esque dances. In what becomes a dreamlike montage, he, his wife and the kids all dance past Klavdia in the darkness, urging her to join them. Then, in the film's most startling coup, the montage turns into a prophetic vision. Klavdia now sees Yefim doing a more subdued, submissive form of his dance as he and his family, all wearing Stars of David on their garments, are herded into a concentration camp as veteran inmates watch in their iconic striped pyjamas. Everything's there but the Nazi regalia -- though it can't be the 1940s because Yefim's kids are still kids. From there there's one more anxious episode as Klavdia rips apart the boarding covering a door so she can shelter her baby (temporarily left on a sidewalk) from an advancing army, and then the commissar's fate is sealed. She leaves the baby with the Magazanniks to raise as she hastily rejoins the Red Army for what looks like an unpromisingly undermanned assault on the enemy with a minimal orchestration of the Internationale playing as a coda.

So for all Askoldov's alleged philo-Semitism he (and presumably Grossman before him) seems to be saying that for all Yefim's quaint charm his attitude of faithful resignation is simply inadequate to the moment in history. It is not enough for Klavdia to put her faith in a higher power; she can't wait for things to happen, but must rejoin the struggle, even if that means sacrificing her motherhood, not to mention her life. That would seem to make her an exemplary Bolshevik and an ideal hero for a Soviet film. But Commissar seems to have been judged much as a Hollywood film would be under the studio system: the ending with its stark hint of sacrifice for its own sake isn't happy or affirmative enough to satisfy the audience the bosses presumes exist, or wants to exist. In short, a Soviet cultural bureaucrat was just as likely as a Hollywood studio bureaucrat to be a moron.

Visually, Commissar swings for the seats on every pitch, and Askoldov occasionally hits one out of the park. Apart from that stunning flash-forward to the Holocaust, the film's most arresting moment comes when Klavdia flashes back during labor to her wartime adventures and envisions the slaughter of her comrades. This scene climaxes with a host of saddled but riderless horses charging across a bridge and through the countryside, eventually accompanied by an eerie murmur of human voices. It left me wondering whether the scene had influenced Steven Spielberg's more restrained employment of riderless steeds in War Horse. Regardless, Askoldov's imagery has at least as much power as anything Spielberg achieved in his new film. Commissar is often self-indulgent but never in an annoying or pretentious way. Askoldov's show-offery doesn't distract from the forceful yet ambiguous point he wants to make about war. If it was too ambiguous for a 1967 commissar to comprehend, or too forceful for him to accept, those are badges of honor Askoldov and his move can wear with pride today.

IVAN THE TERRIBLE Revisited

When I was a kid the local PBS station regularly ran the then-canonical works of early global cinema: the German Expressionist silent films and the Soviet montage movies. The station occasionally ran sound films, including the talking pictures of Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet montage pioneer of Battleship Potemkin fame. While my memories of his Aleksandr Nevskii are, unsurprisingly, much stronger, I feel certain that I first encountered his Ivan Groznii at this time. I have stronger memories of Part I from frequent showings on A&E, way back when the cable channel took the "Arts" part of its name most seriously. Oddly, I can't remember the channel running Part II, but the sequel always lagged behind the original more than normally. As film historians know, Stalin was a big fan of Part I, but had Part II put on the shelf and halted production on Part III, mainly because the sequel seemed to make Ivan IV ("Groznii" signifies something more like "awe-inspiring" than the modern sense of "terrible") simultaneously weak and vicious while discrediting by analogy the dictator's own project of consolidating absolute power. He famously complained that Eisenstein had made the Orpichniki, Ivan's corps of enforcers, into something like the Ku Klux Klan, the complaint being phrased in a way that proved Stalin no fan of The Birth of a Nation. Curiously, the despot suppressed the film but did not destroy it, and within a few years after Stalin's demise Part II was finally authorized for release. Its world premiere came in 1958, fourteen years after Part I appeared and ten years after Eisenstein's death. Turner Classic Movies recently ran the two parts back to back, and I took advantage of the opportunity to reacquaint myself with the original and finally see the sequel in its entirety.

Part I reconfirmed my years-old impression that it was a stylistic step backward for Eisenstein after the epic power of Aleksandr Nevskii.  It's an unsettlingly mixed bag, combining some of the most brilliant and powerful images in cinema with some of the worst. Deepening his collaboration with composer Sergei Prokofiev, Eisenstein envisaged the Ivan films in operatic rather than epic terms. The performances, especially that of star Nikolai Cherkassov, are far more theatrically stylized than even the bombast of Nevskii, and Part II is very nearly a musical in its reliance on song, dance and performance. At the same time, Eisenstein, filming Part I in 1943, is still thinking like a silent film director. He too often forces gestures and facial expressions to do the work of dialogue when speech could and should have done the work better. My case in point is a painfully extended two-shot of Lyudmila Tselikovskaya as the Tsarina and Mikhail Nazvanov as Prince Kurbsky, Ivan's vacillating vassal and would-be lover of the Tsarina. Ivan himself is on the brink of death from fever, and Kurbsky is making his case for himself as her next husband and Tsar. Into the frame looms Serafima Birman as Euphrosina, Ivan's wicked aunt, who wants her idiot son Vladimir to succeed to the throne. Interminably, the three actors roll their eyes at each other, the two women on either side of Nazvanov leaning closer together to intensify their staredown, while none of them says a word. Instead of Prokofiev, the sort of sound effects you might hear on the Cartoon Network seem more appropriate at this moment. It's unnaturalistic without any real artistic compensation; Eisenstein put too much faith in the ability of facial expressions to tell the story. He might have gotten away with it in an actual silent film -- it would at least have looked less freakishly awkward. Here, however, it marks him as a director who hasn't yet caught up with the times.

Were these actors ever tempted to kill a take by turning a baleful eye on the director?

He certainly deserved it.

Fortunately, the good moments outweigh the awful in Part I, which covers more time in more episodic fashion than the sequel. The main story thread is Ivan's effort to centralize power in his hands and break the traditional power of the boyar nobility, which is shown to have crippled Russia in the face of ambitious enemies to the west and east. The main story in movie terms is Cherkassov's intensely physical performance, an extreme departure from his relatively standard heroics as Aleksandr Nevskii. The influence of two John Barrymore films on Cherkassov's look and manner -- the silent Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and the talkie Svengali, have been widely noted. The Russian actor isn't impersonating Barrymore, however; Eisenstein's inspiration seems to have been purely visual, though you could argue that Cherkassov's gradual transformation from golden youth (he was 40 when he filmed Part I) into goat-bearded, lank-limbed gargoyle echoes Barrymore's degeneration from Jekyll to Hyde. Ivan's theatricality is more justified than that of the other characters, since the Tsar is always "on," so to speak, and always playing to the farthest reaches of any crowd he finds. An absolute medieval monarch is a strangely perfect match for a director more or less committed to Communism throughout his career, but then again, look at what, or more excatly, who Bolshevism resulted in in Russia. Historical context and Hollywood influence aside, Cherkassov's performance still goes down as one of the greatest ever by a movie actor.

Part II, as I hinted, is a more concentrated narrative and more successful as drama. Eisenstein proves himself an effective if slow learner as he proves himself capable of building and sustaining tension through sound and image.  Early fears of anticlimax after Kurbsky abruptly disappears from the story (he was meant to return in Part III) are dispelled as Euphrosina makes her move to destroy Ivan and the Oprichniki in order to make a very unwilling Vladimir a pliant "boyar Tsar." Watching the story play out, I began to suspect that Stalin had been irked by the extent to which Eisenstein turns Vladimir, the Tsar's "worst enemy," into a tragically sympathetic character.

As the fool, Pavel Kadochnikov nearly steals the second half of the film from Cherkassov. As a  guilelessly infantile antagonist, he pitches the part somewhere between Harry Langdon and John Cazale, readily revealing once plied with drink that some folks are out to get rid of his pal the Tsar. "And do you know who they're going to replace you with," he asks in the one truly funny moment in the picture, "You'll never guess!" Meanwhile, the oily Ivan is cooly preparing to send Vlad to his death, dressed in Ivan's own robes to confuse the assassin known to be lying in wait. The slow buildup to Vladimir's inevitable destruction anticipates Coppola's technique in the Godfather films, much as Vlad himself somewhat anticipates Fredo. Eisenstein's use of color heightens the tension as Vladimir trembles at the exit of Ivan's exceptionally colorful Oprichnik party pit while the assassin waits back in the black and white world of the rest of the movie -- the lurid color becomes Vlad's last security at the brink of the abyss.

Better still, Eisenstein knows how to top himself. The climax comes not when Vladimir is whacked, but when his mother, having seen someone in royal robes go down, charges in to declare the country liberated, practically kicking the corpse. The director knows how to milk this for all it's worth, not letting Euphrosina discover her mistake until after the living Ivan shows himself, letting her have a moment to ponder who that might be on the floor before she goes mad from the truth. That last act leaves me leaning toward Part II over Part I as the better film, but it's still a close call. Both films have their false notes but they're probably to be expected from an unorthodox director's unconventional approach to historical drama. While all Stalinist art has been said to really have an audience of one, I think the rest of us can still find something of value in the Ivan films. Even under the thumb of the dictator, Eisenstein made movies that are unmistakably his -- and the dictator even liked one of them. Whether that's a triumph or not, history must judge.

LA CHINOISE (1967)

Without claiming to be an expert on Jean-Luc Godard, I had a feeling watching this film about French youth captivated by the Maoist mystique that it held a key to what the definitive New Wave director is all about. I've seen about ten of his movies over the years and I find his work both fascinating and frustrating. He's always seemed to be at odds with his own cinematic vocation because of his insistence on verbality. He wants desperately to communicate ideas cinematically and engage audiences philosophically, but his efforts often boil down to characters reading from books or reciting texts. It sometimes seems like he's leaving words hanging in dead air. While La Chinoise is a satire of infatuated youth -- an ironic one given that, infatuated with youth and ideology, Godard himself would shortly succumb to the youths' own infatuation -- but it's also arguably -- and appropriately, given the Maoist context -- an act of self-criticism, the young revolutionaries serving as metaphors for Godard's own revolutionary ambitions for cinema and illustrating the pitfalls and limitations of his approach.

What makes La Chinoise a key film for Godard, I think, is that in his Maoists he's found characters through whom the director can express his own concerns about our ability to communicate ideas without the dialogue seeming artificial or forced. The characters are the five members of a Maoist cell -- three guys and two girls -- who share an apartment. Anticipating "reality TV," Godard shows us interviews of the kids conducted by a documentary film crew intercut with their daily activities, which consist mostly of reading aloud from Marxist and Maoist texts, lecturing each other on theory and application, and drawing slogans on the apartment walls. Seeking to revolutionize the world, or at least France, they create for themselves a universe made of words. Godard illustrates this more abstractly by having the characters speak sentences collectively, each uttering one word at a time. When the time comes to kill a visiting Soviet dignitary (the Soviets being hated "revisionists"), they pick the assigned killer the way kids decide who's "it;" one of them reads a sentence from Chairman Mao's "Little Red Book," pointing a finger at each of the others for each word spoken. The characters tell parables and relate dreams about changing the meaning of words. It'd be a nightmare if the girls (Anne Wiazemsky and Juliet Berto) weren't pretty or the sets (shot by cinematographer Raoul Coutard) weren't pop-art primary colorful like a Little Red Romper Room -- or if Godard himself didn't feel that their efforts, however hapless, were still somehow necessary.

In this moment of clarity before he himself took the Maoist plunge, Godard has no idealism about his characters. Veronique, the ringleader, tells the interviewer that she's had no real contact with the working class because of her privileged background -- she's the daughter of a banker. Her solution to that problem is not to join the working class, but to study harder. She has no vision of a post-revolutionary future beyond propaganda platitudes, but that's alright as long as it's her generation's mission simply to destroy the existing order. This knucklehead isn't liberating jack, but Godard can't help empathizing with what he saw as Maoists' total commitment to total revolution, their desire to learn and share their findings, to find a common language of commitment. If it sounds like so much sloganeering, we already live in an environment of slogans. The challenge is to find a form of expression that is meaningful to you and whoever hears you, and that challenge is the constant drama of Godard's films. That's why his films have such long conversations and scenes of people reading aloud and words and sentences flashing on the screen. We shouldn't see these moments as Godard attempting to ram his own ideas down our throats -- no matter how tempted I am, sometimes -- but as illustrations of the difficulty anyone has communicating ideas, whether it's two characters on screen or the director and the audience. Godard could have made mondo-style essay films like Fellini did, and said, "Here's how I, Godard, see the world," but instead, at least in the films I've seen, he chose to dramatize his issues, and that must have been because he saw the problem of communication as social and universal, not merely a personal challenge. In La Chinoise, Godard saw the Maoists' project as his; in time, he would see his project as theirs, and the nature of his films, the story goes, would change.

If I haven't said much about the actual content of the students' ideology, that's because it's really less relevant to this picture than it would be, presumably, to those later films of Godard the true believer. Here, Maoist ideology is as much a part of the pop-art landscape as the figures of Batman and Captain America that appear in one montage. It's even the stuff of pop music like that earwig of a theme song, "Mao Mao" (pronounced Ma-Oh Ma-Oh) that runs through the picture. In La Chinoise Godard isn't yet fully convinced that the Maoists have found the way, but they have his sympathy because, like him, they're searching for a way. Some say that the ideology dates this film, but as long as people still feel that we need a new way, and not just to communicate with each other, this film, especially now in light of its proto-"reality" gimmick, will still feel relevant whether the ideology is or not.

If I can't get "Mao Mao" out of my head, why should you? Watch the trailer uploaded to YouTube by DVD distributor KochLorber at your own risk.