MOVIETONE NEW8 . - Parallax View Annex

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MOVIETONE NEW8 . 

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B PIX, FILM. NOIR, ETC. 

HOWARD D ULM.ER D M.INNELLI 

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MOVIt~TONt: NEW6 

No. 48: February 29, 1976 

EDITOR 

Richard T. Jameson 

BUSINESS MANAGER 

Kathleen Murphy 

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS 

Robert C. Cumbow, R C Dale, 

Ken Eisler, Rick Hermann, 

Peter Hogue, Kathleen Murphy, 

Jon Purdy, David Willingham 

PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS 

Ken Eisler, Judy Hennes, 

Judy Rieben 

ASSEMBLY and MAILING 

Carol D. Boyd 

Entire contents © copyright by 

The Seattle Film Society 

5236 18th Avenue N.E. 

Seattle, Washington 98105 

(Telephone [206] 329-3119). 

All rights revert to authors 

upon publication. 

See inside back cover for 

information concerning 

subscriptions, contributions, 

advertiSing, etc. 

COVER: "The ultimate B movie"- 

Edgar G. Ulmer's "Detour" 

(photo Museum of Modern Art 

Film Stills Archive) 

c o N T E N T 

Back Door to Personal Expression 

The blessings of B-dom. William K. Howard's 

Back Door to Heaven, appreciated 

By James Damico 

Tracking Shot 

D.O.A. and the Notion of Noir 

Journey to the end of night 

By Richard Dorfman 

Closing Down the Open Road: 

Detour 

Life am ong the process screens, savored 

By David Coursen 

Letters 

In Black & White 

s 03 

o 10 

o 11 

o 16 

o 19 

o 20 

"B" Movies and Kings of the Bs, reviewed 

~ By Peter Hogue 

\The Birth of the Talkies, reviewed 

\ By Claudia Gorbman 

Touch of Evil: 0 23 

Removing the Evidence 

Unretoucbing an important article 

You Only Live Once 0 24 

"The American Dream" for UW LecCon 

A Piece of The Cobweb 0 27 

A note on suggestive mise-en-scene 

By Dana Benelli 

Quickies 0 30 

Barr)' Lyndon (2), The Magic Flute, Hearts of the World, 

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Between Friends, 

The Man Who Would Be King; Take It like a Man, Madam 

SEATTLE FILM SOCIETY BOARD OF DIRECTORS, 1975-76 

R C Dale, Diane Dambacher, Ron Green, Judy Hennes (Secretary), 

Rick Hermann (PreSident), Richard T. Jameson (Program Director), 

Doug King (Vice President) , Lindsay Michimoto (Treasurer), Ray Pierre, 

Veleda Tritremmel Pierre, Jon Purdy, Kitty Reeves, Margo Reich, Mike Richard, Curt Stucki 

ALTERNATES: Martha Dambacher, Sharon Green, Mike Sharp

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DOKTOR MABUSE DER SPIELER 

(Dr. Mabuse the Gambler) 

I - Der grosse Spieler 

II -Inferno 

Germany, 1922 

Directed by Fritz Lang 

Scenario: 

Lang and Thea von Harbou; 

based on a character created by Norbert Jacques 

Cinematography: Carl Hoffmann 

Art direction: Otto Hunte, Stahl-Urach 

Ullstein-Uco Film-Decla-Bioscop-Ufa 

Cast 

Dr. Mabuse Rudolf Klein-Rogge 

Yon Wenck Bernhard Goetzke 

Countess Told Gertrude Welcker 

Count Told , Alfred Abel 

~~a~r?~~~.~~~..::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::.~~~s~;ref~r~i~~~~ 

Edgar Hull Paul Richter 

Chauffeur Hans Adalbert von Schlettow 

Pesch .•............................................................................................................ Georg John 

Fine Grete Berger 

Karstein Julius Falkenstein 

Told's servant Karl Platen 

and 

Lydia Potechina, Anita Berber, Paul Biensfeldt, Karl Huszar, 

Edgar Pauly, Lil Dagover, Julius Hermann, Adele Sandroch, Max Adalbert, 

Hans J. Junkermann, Auguste Prasch-Grevenberg, Julie Brandt, Gustave Botz, 

Alfred Klein, Erich Pabst, Hans Sternberg, Olf Storm, 

Erich Welter, Heinrich Gotho, Wily Schmidt-Gentner 

Dr. Mabuse made his bow, via this two-part film, early in Fritz Lang's career, but he was 

to reappear often, whether in his own name or that of some other criminal mastermind 

(Adolf Hitler, for example, during the war years) or, indeed, as the abstract but 

absolutely felt presence of Fate. The Seattle Film Society picked up on the good 

doctor's adventures in mid-career when we presented the 1932 Das Testament des 

Doktor Mabuse-in September 1974.lt really doesn't matter. The malignant, indomitable, 

almost supernatural spirit of Mabuse is timeless, as Lang's four-decades-long cinematic 

obsession with him gloriously testifies. We look forward to this long-delayed full-length 

showcasing of Mabuse's arrival (the film has been shown previously only in a mutilated 

single-feature compression, "The Fatal Passions, directed by Fritz Lange"). And by no 

means coincidentally-in regard to the present issue of MOVIETONE NEWS-Lang and 

Mabuse can share billing as the fathers of film noir. 

Piano accompaniment by Russell Warner

William K. Howard as a prosecuting attorney in his independent film Back Door to Heaven. 

BACI( DOOR 

TO PERSONAL EXPRESSION 

~~~~~~~~~~~3 

By James Damico 

I 

, 

I

BACK DOOR TO HEAVEN (1940) 

Direction: William K. Howard. Screenplay: John Bright and Robert Tasker, after a story by Howard. 

Cinematography: Hal Mohr. Art direction: Gordon Wiles. Editing: Jack Murray. Production: Howard; 

associate: Johnnie Walker. Odessco Productions; release by Paramount. (81 minutes) 

The players: Wallace Ford, Aline MacMahon, Jimmy Lydon, Stuart Erwin, Patricia Ellis, Van Heflin, 

Georgette Harvey, William Harrigan, and (unbilled) William K. Howard. 

B films are not so much maligned as misunderstood. 

The designation, often loosely applied to any film 

employing unknown or fading actors which is obviously 

inartistic and inept, properly denotes not an 

aesthetic classification but an economic one. Moreover, 

with some few exceptions, its use should be 

confined to those 19 30s-5Os American films whose 

budgets were rigidly held to a predetermined low 

level (varying with the producing organization and 

the changing economy) and which were intended 

primarily for pre-sold markets (to serve as conveniences 

for theatre owners and generally leased to 

them by fixed-fee rather than percentage-of-the-gross 

arrangement). 

Perhaps most neglected and misjudged about B 

films is their variousness, for it is somehow difficult 

to accept the idea that such an unassuming classification 

can encompass as many examples of genres and 

gradations of artistic quality as larger budget categories. 

What this view overlooks, however, is that 

while the limitations of the B film may have sapped 

or totally failed to engage the creative energies of 

some filmmakers, others found that not having stars 

and lavish budgets resulted in,. among other 

effects, the salutary "benign neglect" of studio 

superiors. Since markets were assured and fee arrangements 

only allowed for a limited profit, studio 

executives were inclined-as long as budgets were not 

exceeded-to pay little attention to the making of 

these films. This, for certain creators, provided just 

the leeway and impetus needed to permit a personal 

expression not always possible in bigger films which 

carried the weight of star reputations and financial 

success or ruin riding on the outcome of each day's 

shooting, and which therefore almost demanded 

continual studio supervision and interference. Consequently, 

and perhaps surprisingly, it is often easier 

to find a truly personal statement among B films than 

among their more expensive counterparts. 

A good and completely neglected example of this 

phenomenon is William K. Howard's Back Door to 

Heaven (1939). Though one of the rarer independent 

Bs and with a budget somewhat higher than the 

average, it is nonetheless a particularly informative 

illustration of how the B film could, with care and 

attention, serve as a supple and ready vehicle of 

self-expression. 

4 

Howard had a curious career. Today, when he is 

remembered at all, he is thought of as one of a long 

line of slick, commercial Hollywood directors. In the 

late Twenties and into the Thirties, however, he was 

considered a stylistic realist, a bright American 

artistic hope, a Very Big Man on the Hollywood 

Campus, and worthy of being mentioned in the same 

breath as such contemporary notables as Stroheim, 

Sternberg and Vidor. Indeed, while respectfully noting 

his $3500-a-week salary, a fan magazine (Motion 

Picture Classics of July 1928) called him an "idol," 

"more discussed than Von Stroheim." On the 

strength of his most critically-acclaimed work, White 

Gold (1927), judged by some to be one of the 

highpoints of the late American silent cinema, he was 

rated a challenger to "the Germans"-rare praise at 

the time. 

Although he failed to live up to such inflated 

appraisals, he made in addition to White Gold a 

number of very provocative films, including Transatlantic 

and Surrender (both 1931), The Trial of 

Vivienne Ware (1932), Mary Burns-Fugitive (1935), 

and, from Preston Sturges' script, the muchremarked-upon 

The Power and the Glory (1933), 

often regarded as a prototype for Citizen Kane. In 

1937, still a top director, with a big-budget Paramount 

comedy just behind him, ThePrincess Comes 

Across, Howard went to England to direct a comparatively 

lavish costumer, Fire over England. Staying on; 

he became involved in a pair of low-budgeters. Upon 

his return to the U.S. his career took a sudden, 

unexpected, and permanent nosedive. Possibly he was 

the object of a studio boycott resulting from his own 

halting of production on Princess until Paramount 

withdrew the supervisor Howard had ordered off the 

set for undue interference (in what was the first 

invocation of a newly-gained power under Screen 

Directors' Guild policies). But what may have been an 

equal part of the problem was Howard's determination 

to do as his next project the very uncommercial 

Back Door to Heaven. 

The original story, which the director had written 

himself during his stay in England, was an intensely 

personal one. Set in Howard's hometown of St. 

Mary's, Ohio, it had been inspired by the lives of his 

schoolmates, one of whom had grown up to become a 

member of the Dillinger gang. Having killed a sheriff

and been sentenced to die, the friend was gunned 

down trying to escape from the death house. Howard 

had obviously brooded over these events and their 

setting for years. An interview in The Film Spectator 

of November 8, 1930, recounts: "A visit to his home 

town several years ago gave him pictures of age and 

decrepitude he hasn't been able to .shake out of his 

mind to this day." He was, however, unable to 

interest a major studio in his. story. It was only 

through the efforts of his friend and former film star, 

Johnnie Walker (whom he had directed in earlier 

days), that backing by a new independent company, 

Odessco Productions, and distribution by Paramount 

(contingent upon seeing the final print) was secured, 

and the film was made as Howard had envisioned 

it-in perhaps the only way such a highly subjective 

and commercially risky work could be-as a relatively 

low-budget B. 

At the time of its release, Back Door gained some 

unusual notice-before it sank into obscurity-by 

virtue of being the second feature shot at the 

once-more reactivated Paramount Astoria (Long 

Island) studios, rechristened for the occasion the 

Eastern Services Studios. This was good enough to 

garner the film reviews in Time and Newsweek it 

might otherwise have not received. But the blessing 

was double-edged, for Time (May 1, 1939) criticized 

the work as "an awkward attempt to crash the back 

door of the cinema industry" and characteristically 

referred to the dubbing of the director by his friends 

as "Noel Howard" for his multifaceted efforts in 

directing, writing the original story, producing and 

acting (in a small part as a prosecuting attorney), as 

"no compliment to England's Noel Coward." 

Apparently Howard's omnipresence was also part 

of what infuriated Frank S. Nugent, who in The New 

York Times of April 20, 1939, railed at Back Door as 

"emaciated," "a lulu," "banal, outrageous and maladroit," 

"this nosegay" and "the most arrant poppycock," 

before making one of two specific charges 

against it: "Mr. Howard has let his cameras freeze, has 

reduced his narrative to a series of static dialogue 

frames and has mistaken incoherence for impressionism." 

Putting aside the prickly question of how a film 

can be simultaneously banal and outrageous-and 

though it's not difficult to find fault with Back 

Door-the film can't fairly be dismissed as incoherent. 

It tends in fact to be overdetermined, reflecting its 

maker's insistence on his grim view of life. And it was 

probably to this vision that Nugent in reality objected, 

and not to the director's handling of it. Such a 

conclusion is supported by his second specific charge, 

that the film was "predicated on the conception of 

the law as an instrument of persecution and governed 

by an almost sophomoric fatalism." But this reading 

too is not borne out by the work, which holds the 

law and its agents no more guilry than any institution 

or person for the inevitable extinguishment of human 

aspirations. Morever, there is no bitterness in this 

view, merely acceptance of the unavoidable pain of 

existence. And while this is assuredly fatalistic, it is 

not notably of the sophomoric stripe, whose characteristic 

is to accuse everything and everyone for life's 

miseries. 

Yet even this cranky and hyperbolic criticism 

attests to the quality of the film that is most apparent 

and arresting: its personal stamp. If anyone is to 

blame for Back Door, Nugent suggests, it is Howard 

and the peculiarities of his life-view. True enough; but 

though his conception may, for whatever reasons, be 

misinterpreted or rejected, its distinctiveness is 

undeniable. 

It was a distinctiveness recognized and more 

sympathetically responded to by other observers. 

Though having reservations about the "sometimes 

implausible script," Newsweek (April 24, 1939) 

praised Back Door as "an unusual and interesting 

film, staged with grim and eloquent sincerity." And 

Philip T. Hartung of Commonweal found its fatalism 

particularly moving: 

This film, made on a small budget for serious 

minded adults, reaches a new high point in 

hopelessness and helplessness. Unfortunately 

too many loose ends keep you asking why and 

how. But it has the kind of an unadorned 

realistic story that in real life frequently does 

make you ask why and how.. .. This is all 

pretty somber, but with production, direction 

and original story by William K. Howard, it has 

unity, startling quietness and many fine touches. 

(May 5,1939) 

The unity is of course the result of the cohesiveness 

and consistency of the filmmaker's viewpoint-a 

quality not always easy to find in the more elaborate 

films of the time. What is even 

more pertinent, however, is that the specifics of 

Howard's outlook could never have formed part of 

bigger budget films simply because they comprise a 

concept of life that is undramatically, unpretentiously 

and irremediably pessimistic. No studio would have 

chanced a large sum of money on such uncommercial 

material, no stars would have risked their images on 

such un theatrically downbeat parts, and very probably 

no large section of the general moviegoing 

audience, weaned on far less unremitting fare, would 

5

have sat still for it. Only in the relative obscurity and 

security of the B world could such a vision have 

found cinematic expression. 

A summary of the plot, excerpted from Newsweek's 

review, gives some indication of the film's 

nature: 

Frankie Rogers, born on the wrong side of 

[a small town's) railroad tracks ... and his 

classmates prepare for graduation day under the 

gentle direction of their beloved teacher, Miss 

Williams. In order to contribute his share to the 

graduation exercises, Frankie breaks into a 

hardware shop and steals a harmonica [and 

$8.70). And instead of high school, Frankie 

goes to a reformatory. 

Characterized by Wallace Ford with subtle 

intensity, the adult Frankie is first seen in a 

state penitentiary. With his release he determines 

to go straight, but the cards ... are 

stacked against him. [The rest depicts) Frankie's 

subsequent frustration-his innocent involvement 

in a holdup and murder, his break 

from a prison death house to return to [his 

hometown) and his class reunion for a last 

glimpse of his schoolmates before inevitable 

capture and death .... 

At 35 years' remove, it is possibly difficult to 

differentiate this narrative from dozens of other 

ostensibly similar ones that served as the basis for 

contemporary major and minor films. Yet, though 

they may not be readily apparent from a bare 

summary, the distinctions are real and significant. 

Countless films of the time utilized the plot device 

of the underprivileged kid started on a life of crime 

through no fault of his own. But it is Howard's sober 

view that gives Frankie-beyond his poor home 

environment, which is more than counterbalanced by 

a totally supportive one at school-little excuse for 

the theft of the harmonica and none at all for the 

additional theft at the same time of cash from the 

store's register. It is not, as it might have been in the 

Warners' "social protest" (read gangster) films of the 

period, his drunken father or a truly no-good friend 

whoreally steals the money, for which act the child is 

then blamed, causing his unjust imprisonment and his 

first step onto the treadmill of crime. Whatever has 

made Frankie what he is, he is guilty. As he says with 

unaffected and unpleading simplicity, "I took it." 

Nor does Howard allow Jimmy Lydon (who gives 

a remarkable performance as Frankie the boy) any of 

the stock emotional appeals that very often suffused 

the playing of children in similar films. As he does 

with all the actors, the director keeps Lydon under a 

restraint that is dignified, persuasive and occasionally 

eloquent. This is the "quietness" that Hartung found 

so "startling," and it is an approach that logically 

generates far more empathy for the child (and other 

characters) than the more usual Hollywood attitude 

toward such figures, which seems to have them 

alternately begging for or demanding sympathy. 

Another and allied feature of Howard's outlook 

apparent in the film's performances is its total lack of 

rancor. The truculence and resentment that inevitably 

accompany the stealing and the reformatory and 

prison stays of many similar characters played in their 

adult form, for example, by James Cagney have no 

part in Frankie's makeup. The boy is depicted from 

the outset as having a sad but mature understanding 

of the hardness of life, and his turn to crime and its 

subsequent punishment he sees simply as one more 

manifestation of the rigor of existence. Though the 

film is thoroughly sentimental, it does not calculatingly 

employ sentimentality as a device to win easy 

audience acceptance. Its creator is so convinced of 

the rightness of his sentimental/pessimistic life-view 

that he feels no need to make any special pleadings in 

its behalf or to trick or persuade his audience of its 

truth; it suffices for him simply to show it. This is a 

requisite of personal artistic expression much less 

likely to find its way through the labyrinth of the 

egotistical and commercial demands of big-budget 

films. 

Relatedly, Howard seems at various points in the 

film to evoke traditional cinematic conventions for 

the purpose of pointing up their falsities and rejecting 

them. Released from prison, Frankie takes two 

ex-con buddies back to his hometown, where he visits 

the only successful member of his grade-school class, 

the president of the local bank. Taking Frankie on a 

tour, the president ostentatiously and unwittingly 

discloses to him the secrets of the bank's safe and its 

radio-beam burglar alarm. Pointedly, Frankie asks 

him if the bank is insured, to which the president 

proudly responds that it is. Having no plot point 

whatever, the scene is clearly intended to raise the 

expectation-familiar from other films-of a bank 

stickup by the three ex-cons and the usual dramatic 

device by which a character like Frankie gets back at 

the town that sent him to jail. And when he steps 

outside, precisely on cue his buddies suggest that the 

bank would be an easy mark. Frankie, however, 

instantly quashes the idea. But the irony of his reason 

for abstaining-"This is my hometown"-is revealed 

by his response to a passing pedestrian's request for 

directions to the Chamber of Commerce: "I don't 

know. I'm a stranger here." 

Irony is a consistent feature of Back Door but it is 

never sardonic or-again to dispute Nugent-never

photos this page: Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive. 

easy. A sequence detailing the 

teacher's opening of gifts from her 

now-grown pupils, all of whom she 

believes are "successful", counterposes 

her description of their young 

talents with shots of their present 

real-life situations: the class speechmaker 

is shown as a struggling lawyer 

unable to pay his rent, the would-be 

violinist as a soda jerk, the budding 

artist as earning drinks by painting 

pinups over a bar, and the aspiring 

singer idly warbling the film's theme 

lament, "I Need a Friend," alone 

with only a pianist in a rundown 

cafe. Another song, "Hometown," 

catalogues the joys of smalltown 

living and impels Frankie to return to 

his birthplace; but it is sung in a city 

style in a city dive by one of Frankie's 

ex-con buddies, who is a city boy 

with the most obvious of urban faces 

and manners. The touch here, however, 

as it is throughout the film, is 

distinctively gentle and low-key. 

This sure restraint and control 

culminates and achieves a homely 

eloquence in a scene in which 

Frankie returns to his boyhood 

home. It is undoubtedly one of the 

places where Nugent felt Howard let 

his camera "freeze" (though four or 

five setups are utilized) and reduced 

his narrative "to a series of static 

dialogue frames." This type of setpiece, 

however, had always been the 

basic structural unit of Howard's 

visual style. Though his range of 

features includes all manner of 

camera and editing stylistics (The 

Trial of Vivienne Ware, for example, 

is a delightful cornucopia of every 

possible visual and editing device to 

invoke speed-an orchestration of 

swish pans, flash cuts, tilts and constantly 

varying angles), and though 

he was a confessed admirer of Murnau 

and could move his camera with 

skill and alacrity (especially, as 

William K. Everson has pointed out 

to me, when he had a cinematographer 

such as James Wong Howe 

who favored a mobile camera), he 

seemed to reserve for his important 

7

narrative or most deeply-felt scenes carefully composed 

and relatively lengthy shots with nearly imperceptible 

camera movement, actor stability, and 

minimal interposed cuts. Even more essential to 

Howard's style was his penchant for chiaroscuro. The 

sharpest black-white contrasts seem to have represented 

for him the indissolubility of joy and darkness in 

life, and their continual juxtaposition in shot after 

shot of film after film testifies to the director's 

philosophical duality (although it is clearly darkness 

which predominates in his compositions). 

All these : features are notably part of the 

aforementioned scene of Back Door in which Frankie 

returns to his childhood home to question the black 

family living there about his mother. And it is 

precisely in its so-called "static" quality, of which 

Nugent complained, that Howard's attitude and 

approach are distilled to their essence; for it is this 

quality which supports and at the same time reveals 

and becomes part of the filmmaker's concept of the 

somber, crushing, but inevitable and somehow dignifying 

burden of existence. - 

The characters-Frankie, Mrs. Hambleton and her 

two children-are set in position at the start of the 

scene and scarcely gesture during its several minutes' 

length. In an unstressed allusion to his own childhood' 

in the house, Frankie is placed next to the seated and 

Inexpressive boy of the family, at whom he occasionally 

glances while listening respectfully and attentively, 

but with a kind of intense distraction, to the 

mother as she talks about the fate of his parents. He 

finally addresses the boy directly to ask if the child is 

going to be a railroad porter like the relative whom 

the mother has held up as a success in life. The 

passive boy returns Frankie's neutral look and murmurs 

a noncommittal "Maybe," fusing as he does 

into a composite figure with the man across the years' 

difference in their ages, forming because of his color 

nearly the photographic negative of the boy Frankie 

visible in and indivisible from the man. It is a rich and 

reverberatory understatement of the kind that in- 

forms the entire scene. When Mrs. Hambleton reports 

i to Frankie that they took his mother "away to 

Toleda. Is that the place where they carry crazy 

people?" Ford as Frankie replies, "Yeah, that's the 

place," in the same simple, straightforwardly accepting 

manner that characterizes Lydon's performance 

-and the entire cast's, for that matter-without 

resorting to a blink, a gulp or even a tremor of the 

lower lip. And when the chance to display a theatrical 

bitterness presents itself with the black woman's 

attempt to comfort him that his father "died with the 

most loveliest .smile.on his face," his response-v'Was 

he plastered?"-is still muted and given with almost a 

flush of embarr.assment at being unable to contain, 

not his bitterness, but his anguish. Sentimental, to be 

sure, but sincere, authentic and without guile, subterfuge 

or appeal for effect. 

This distinctive' vision extends to the technical 

aspects of the film and also provides another instance 

of the widely, and sometimes wildly, varying nature 

of B films so often overlooked. Though there are 

literally hundreds of Bs that appear to have been 

made by Brownies with Brownies in front of High 

School Drama Society settings, there are many, like 

Back Door, that reflect the most precise attention to 

aesthetic and technical matters. The finished film 

clearly displays Howard's (and Hal Mohr's) careful 

compositions and lighting setups; the director's (and 

the art director's) stress on the importance of 

appropriate and veracious, though not necessarily 

expensive, sets; and the most detailed consideration 

in casting, exemplified by the exact physical pairing 

of child with adult actors-not just Lydon with Ford, 

but also with the look-alike youngsters who are 

matched to the unusual appearances of Patricia Ellis 

and Van Heflin. It is a categoric demonstration of the 

range of possibilities and the freedom of choice 

inherent in the B system. 

Freedom is perhaps the most difficult concept for 

the general consciousness to reconcile with the 

B film, for the misapprehension of the classification 

has centered on two of its comparatively few restrictions: 

the lack of star actors and the limited budget. 

There were others, of course, and serious ones-the 

small salaries, for example, most often meant besides 

poor acting, even poorer direction and scripts. But 

what should be realized is that this process of 

minimization did not operate unfailingly, and that 

when a filmmaker of even a limited talent and vision 

apprehended and responded to the possibilities of the 

category, it provided to some extent a less encumbered 

outlet for his expression than 'the nominally 

grander categories of film.• 

James Damico is a play- and TV-writer who resides in 

New York City. He has previously published film 

criticism in The Journal of Popular Film.

The Seattle Film Society is proud to present 

A TRIBUTE TO 

JEAN RENOIR 

featuring 5 of his least-seen films: 

7:30 p.m. Thursday, March 11 - 2 French films 

MADAME BOVARY 

1934 - 1st Northwest showing 

ELENA ET LES HOMMES 

1956 - in color, with Ingrid Bergman 

7:30 & 9:30 Friday, March 12 - the legendary film of Indian life 

THE RIVER 

By special arrangement with producer Kenneth McEldowney, 

we are showing a rare 35mm Technicolor print 

7:30 Saturday, March 13 - 2 American Renoirs 

SWAMPWATER 

1941 - Walter Brennan 

THE SOUTHERNER 

1945 - Zachary Scott & Betty Field 

All shows in 130 Kane Hall, University of Washington 

Admission Thurs. & Sat.: SFS $1.00, UW student $1.50, others $2.00 

Admission for THE RIVER: SFS $1.50, UW student $2.00, others $2.50 

Phone 329-3119 for more information.

TRACKING SHOT 

The nominations for the 1975 Academy of Motion Picture 

Arts and Sciences Awards have been announced, and the 

contenders in the leading categories are: 

Best Picture: Barry Lyndon, Dog Day A fternoon, Jaws, 

Nashville, One Flew 0 ver the Cuckoo's Nest. 

Best Director: Robert Altman, Nashville; Federico Fellini, 

Amarcord; Milos Forman, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest; 

Stanley Kubrick, Barry Lyndon; Sidney Lumet, Dog Day 

Afternoon. 

Best Actor: Walter Matthau, The Sunshine Boys; Jack 

Nicholson, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest; AI Pacino, Dog 

Day Afternoon; Maximilian Schell, Man in a Glass Booth; 

James Whitmore, Give 'Em Hell, Harry. 

Best Actress: Isabelle Adjani, The Story of Adele H.; 

Ann-Margret, Tommy; Louise Fletcher, One Flew over the 

Cuckoo's Nest; Glenda Jackson, Hedda; Carol Kane, Hester 

Street. 

Best Supporting Actor: George Burns, The Sunshine Boys; 

Brad Dourif, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest; Burgess 

Meredith, Day of the Locust; Chris Sarandon, Dog Day 

Afternoon; Jack Warden, Shampoo. 

Best Supporting Actress: Ronee Blakley, Nash ville; Lee 

Grant, 'Shampoo; Sylvia Miles, Farewell My Lovely; Lily 

Tomlin, Nashville; Brenda Vaccaro, Jacqueline Susann 's Once 

Is Not Enough. 

Best Screenplay-Original: Ted Allan, Lies My Father Told 

Me; Federico Fellini and B. Zapponi,' Amarcord; Claude 

Lelouch and Pierre Uytterhoeven, And Now My Love; Frank 

Pierson, Dog Day Afternoon; Robert Towne and Warren 

Beatty, Shampoo. 

Best Screenplay-Adaptation: Lawrence Hauben and Bo 

Goldman, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest; John Huston 

and Gladys Hill, The Man Who Would Be King; Stanley 

Kubrick, Barry Lyndon; Dino Risi and Ruggero Maccari, The 

Scent of a Woman; Neil Simon, The Sunshine Boys. 

Cinematography: John Alcott, Barry Lyndon; Haskell Wexler 

and Bill Butler, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest; Conrad 

Hall, Day of the Locust; James Wong Howe, Funny Lady; 

Robert Surtees, The Hindenburg. 

Cuckoo's Nest leads the pack with nine nominations; Barry 

Lyndon has seven, Dog Day Afternoon six; The Man Who 

Would Be King and Shampoo each received four. 

The Awards themselves will be announced March 29. 

* * * * * 

Costarred with John Wayne in that new Don Siegel film, The 

Shootlst , is Lauren Bacall. Others in the cast include Ron 

Howard and "guest stars" James Stewart, Richard Boone, 

John Carradine, Yaphet Kotto, Harry Morgan and Sheree 

North. 

John Frankenheimer is now filming Black Sunday for 

producer Robert Evans. Ernest Lehman and Kenneth Ross 

have written the screenplay and the stars are Robert Shaw, 

Marthe Keller, Bruce Dern and Fritz Weaver. 

Can Mel Brooks shut up long enough for a Silent Movie? 

That's the title of his current project, to star himself plus 

Marty Feldman, Sid Caesar, Bernadette Peters and Dom 

DeLuise. 

Latest entry in the Sherlock Holmes sweepstakes is 

Sherlock Holmes in New York, now shooting at 20th 

Century- Fox under the supervision of John Cutts. Roger 

Moore stars, Patrick Macnee is Watson, and Moriarty is 

played by John (shades of Noah Cross!) Huston. Boris Sagal 

is directing the film (on leftover Hello, Dolly! sets), which is 

to prem iere on American TV and play theatrically in Europe. 

Oh yes, Irene Adler's part of the mix, in the form of 

Charlotte Rampling. 

Skipping is the new title of that Jack Lemmon - John 

Korty project The Phoenician and the Gypsy. Genevieve 

Bujold costars. 

A completer cast listing for the new English-language 

Claude Chabrol, The Twist: Bruce Dern, Ann-Margret, Sydne 

Rome (star of Roman Polanski's still-mostly-unseen What?), 

Stephane Audran, Maria Schell, Charles Aznavour, Tomas 

Milian, Gert Frobe, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Curt Jurgens. 

Paddy Chavefskv , having copped an Oscar for The 

Hospital, has written Network. Sidney Lumet is directing 

Faye Dunaway, William Holden, Peter Finch, Robert Duvall, 

and Darryl Hickman therein. 

Meanwhile, Irwin Allen, ever in an apocalyptic mood, is 

following The Poseidon Adventure and .The Towering Inferno 

with The Day the World Ended. Next act? 

Clint Eastwood has displaced/replaced Philip Kaufman as 

director of The Outlaw-Josey Wales ... starring Eastwood, 

natch. . 

Add Ray Milland and Dana Andrews to the folks already 

announced for The Last Tycoon. 

Milos Forman will direct the film version of Hair. One 

flew back to the cuckoo's nest? 

Elliott Gould is set to make his screen directorial debut 

with a film of Bernard Malamud's novel A New Life. Gould 

also stars. 

Look for two John Sturges films in the more or less near 

future-one new, one new-old. Sturges is preparing to direct 

Donald Sutherland and Michael Caine in The Eagle Has 

Landed. In the meantime, Chino, a film he made in Europe 

with Charles Bronson several years ago, is due in the States. 

Peter Fonda, Blythe Danner, Arthu r H ill and a 

re-transistorized Yul Brynner are in Futureworld. 

Aram Avakian, whose directorial career has been spotty 

but "interesting," reverts to his former task of film editor for 

The Next Man. 

The cast of a new World War II spectacular, A Bridge Too 

Far-in alphabetical order, of course: Dirk Bogarde, James 

Caan, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Elliott Gould, Gene 

Hackman, Anthony Hopkins, Hardy Kruger, Laurence 

Olivier, Ryan O'Neal, Robert Redford, Maximilian Schell. 

(Don't let anyone tell you there are no more good roles for 

women.) Richard Attenborough directs, from a screenplay by 

William Goldman. 

Dirk Bogarde is also in Providence, a new English-language 

film by Alain Resnais. His costars: Ellen Burstyn, John 

Gielgud, David Warner. 

Two mucho macho directors are working on feature films 

in Germany now: Robert Aldrich, on Silo III, starring Burt 

Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Paul Winfield, Melvyn Douglas, 

Joseph Cotten, and Charles Durning; Sam Pe ckinpah, on 

Steiner, a James Coburn picture .•

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PHONE 3%9-3119 FOR ADDITIONAL INFO.

cannot be distinguished from them. In -fact, one's 

sympathies are almost reversed as Bigelow becomes 

the bully, hounding people who only wish to be left 

alone. * 

The noir world is a state of nature. The police, the 

physical embodiment of the law, to whom Bigelow is 

telling the story in retrospect, are useless. It is 

Bigelow who discovers the crime, solves it and metes 

out justice. If, in the romantic view, the noir crusader 

is a knight-errant, he is also a fascist with no more 

respect for the law than those he opposes. Mike 

Hammer's success in Kiss Me Deadly is due largely to 

the fact that he plays the villains' game better than 

they do. 

The seemingly diverse strands of D. O.A. cohere in 

the person of its hero. It is Bigelow who brings 

together the connection between Majak and Halliday, 

how Halliday conned his partner Phillips into buying 

the stolen iridium so that it would be "clean" when it 

was resold. It is in Bigelow's mind, literally, that the 

whole story exists, for no one else knows it. Others 

can see part, but even those who have created the 

dilemma cannot see his part, while after they have 

played theirs he can see not only the inspiration at 

the beginning and the machinations in the middle, 

but also the end he will write. 

When Phillips takes the blame for stealing the 

iridium, Bigelow is the only one who can clear him 

because he has a record of the bill of sale, which he 

notarized, that will show whom Phillips bought it 

from. This is the reason Bigelow is poisoned. Halliday 

realizes Bigelow can prove to be his undoing and 

poisons him even though Bigelow cannot even recall 

the transaction. The implied irony is that if they had 

not killed him he would never have become involved 

and the crime would have gone undetected. As it is, 

Bigelow becomes-as the New York Times put it 

when the picture opened-"caught up in a web of 

circumstance that marks him for death." 

Once, Bigelow regrets his decision to hunt his 

murderers. There is a strange scene after Majak's 

hoods capture Bigelow in his hotel room. The phone 

rings. It is Pamela calling from the office. She is 

worried because he has not talked to her recently. In 

. fact, he has not told her of his imminent demise and 

has been very short with her in their previous 

conversations. While the two hoods flank him-one 

(Neville Brand) holding a gun to his head, the other 

the receiver to his ear-he talks to her, softly, as if the 

others weren't present. This would almost seem to be 

* D.O.A. does not predate the current yield of vigilante films 

so much as form part of the tradition, which reaches back to 

the frontier where a man was his own law. 

the case, for director Rudolph Mat~ holds the shot 

and the men remain in the same positions, completely 

stationary, as if they were statuary or had found 

themselves in front of the camera when they 

shouldn't be. After a while one forgets them and 

concentrates instead on Bigelow. What comes across 

is a scene of intimacy between lovers rather than one 

of danger. And the intimacy is genuine, for Bigelow 

tells her he loves and misses her, talking without 

interruption longer than would seem safe from the 

criminals' point of view, risking discovery as a 

consequence. That the shot of the three of them, held 

in medium closeup, is played for longer than it can be 

sustained does not detract from the film's strength 

but rather is part of it, contributing to the sense of 

general dislocation. 

Pamela Britton is protected from this seaminess by 

virtue of being a woman. As such, she is not only 

dependent on Bigelow but subordinate to him. 

Bigelow originally leaves her so that he can be alone 

and decide if he wants to marry her, if this is really it. 

She, of course, is sure. If the two of them marry she 

knows it will be something "wonderful." Here 

marriage is an ideal to aspire to, a creative union that 

serves as a substitute to any real artistic inclinations 

in the middle class. But Bigelow is not sure that it's 

right, and tells her that he's seen what can happen 

when two people begin to hate each other. It's always 

the woman who gets hurt worse, he assures her. 

The form of his meditation on matrimony is a last 

fling. He goes to San Francisco, where he knows no 

one, and eventually arrives at a bar, The Fisherman, 

where life is uninhibited-as opposed to the restricted 

existence he has been leading. Bigelow is in the 

process of picking up some woman' when he .is 

poisoned by a mysterious stranger who switches 

drinks on him. He is, in effect, punished for both his 

disloyalty to Pamela Britton and his interest in casual 

sex as opposed to marriage. t In fact the music from 

the bar is played again over the soundtrack when 

Bigelow corners Halliday and guns him down, to 

remind the audience of the true source of Bigelow's 

affliction. * 

Women in film noir are never seen to be active 

without the aid of a man. Often they are not active at 

all, like Britton. This is not to say that she is of no 

help to Bigelow in her own right; in fact, she is the 

t It is the opposite of the principle in Hitchcock's films 

where the woman is punished for her boldness and must go 

through some ordeal in order to be purified (viz. 'Tippi' 

Hedren in The Birds and Mamie, and Ingrid Bergman in 

Notorious .) 

* For this observation I am indebted to Gail Petersen.

one who finds the record of the bill of sale. It is just 

that she is tied to the switchboard at his office while 

he is playing the hero. When women are active in film 

noir, it is often in the role of temptress, hard and 

scheming, like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, 

or a gun moll 0 n the perip hery of intrigue, 

exuding sexual availability like Maria Rakubian 

(Laurette Luez) here-which makes her "bad". 

Maria's foreignness is emblematic of her bad qualities, 

for it excludes her from the middle class, which is 

solely white in these films, and in which the greatest 

disgrace that can come to a woman is to be "fallen". 

The middle class is the repository of good in 

America and the bulwark against the grasping world 

which organized crime represents. It is caught at the 

crossroads between the puritanical values it espouses 

and the realities operative in the world it seeks to 

deny, a world in which everything is allowed because 

it is only in that way that anything can be gained. 

The middle-class man provides through his work and 

protects his family from any invasion from the 

outside. Yet at the same time he must be able to act 

in that world at times, if he has not actually pulled 

himself up from it in order to provide that 

protection. Film noir is the first to suggest that this 

defense is beginning to crumble. 

Bigelow finally tracks Halliday down as his killer. 

He returns to the empty building where Halliday has 

his office-a building whose vastness suggests the 

isolation and meanness of men-and stalks Halliday as 

he attempts to make good his escape. Running down 

the stairs, Halliday spies Bigelow and fires first, but 

Bigelow, at the top of the stairs, has the advantage in 

position (and righteousness, sure to improve his aim) 

and guns him down, emptying his revolver. 

The film ends in the police office where Bigelow, 

recounting his story, finishes just in time to drop 

dead in front of the calm eyes of his audience, the 

police. It is as if he had no life outside this adventure, 

living only to see it through. For his heroics have 

provided him with just that sense of adventure that 

was missing in his normal life. The film itself provides 

this vicariously for its audience. If Bigelow has seen it 

through to the end, he still cannot comprehend how 

he got involved in the beginning. It is an existential 

mystery, the imperious hand of an arbitrary order 

pressing down on him. "All I did was notarize a bill 

of sale," he says.II 

Richard Dorfman writes about film from Somewhere 

in New Jersey. His review of The Nickel Ride was 

printed in Bright Lights. 

C~I .•C)SINC. I)C)lfN rl'lll~ C)I)I~N BC)111) 

I» I~'1'nIJIt 

IIY Dil VID (~OIJRSEN 

DETOUR (1946) 

Direction: Edgar G. Ulmer. Story and screenplay: Martin Goldsmith. Cinematography: Benjamin Kline. 

Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC). (69 minutes) 

The players: Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald, Tim Ryan, Esther Howard. 

Detour is a masterpiece of wry perversity, a film 

virtually constructed on irony and paradox: an 

incredibly claustrophobic film about hitchhiking on 

the "open road"; the bleakest of films noirs, with the 

bulk of the action taking place during the day and 

away from the city. But perhaps the supreme ironies 

relate to the film itself. Despite acting that ranges 

16 

from incompetent to bizarre, a story line bordering on 

the absurd-alternately trashy and fanciful-and a 

minimum of sets or characters, Detour somehow 

speaks directly and compellingly to the dark side of 

several pervasive American myths, forcefully expresses 

a coherent vision of the way the world 

operates.

. I 

I 

But if Detour can reward the receptive filmgoer, it 

does, by its very nature, demand a little more than 

the ordinary film. After all, there is no denying that a 

film shot in a very short time (rumored to have been 

four days, more likely five or six), on a budget of-it 

almost seems-something in the neighborhood of 45 

cents, may lack some of the slickness and polish we 

ordinarily expect. But if we focus on what the film 

offers rather than what it lacks, we can begin to 

appreciate what is, on reflection, an extraordinary 

piece of filmmaking . 

. To understand Detour's wry perversity ,it may be 

necessary to know something of the man who made 

it, Edgar G. Ulmer: an extraordinarily gifted German 

who began his career working with people like Lang 

and Murnau, and himself made films in Hollywood 

for over 30 years. Yet the biggest "star" he ever 

directed was Zachary Scott and his longest shooting 

schedule was 12 days, with most of his films made 

even more quickly. He deliberately refused to work 

for any major studio, preferring the complete creative 

freedom and low budgets of Poverty Row. The 

"freedom" he found there enabled him to direct 

Yiddish-language pictures, a Ukrainian musical, a 

Harlem movie, and a prison film called Women in 

Chains. Ulmer may have been able to make such films 

exactly as he wanted, but with such dubious projects, 

with budgets so small many scenes were done in one 

take, his freedom often must have seemed as illusory 

as that of Detour's hitchhiker. 

On the surface, the film is fairly simple: a man 

hitchhiking across the country, inadvertently involved 

in an accidental death, becomes involved also in a 

murder. Initially, his traveling suggests the exercise of 

free will, but as the road begins to seem endless this 

freedom is revealed as complete entrapment. The 

reversal extends even to the ways we perceive the 

visual imagery. As he sets out, full of faith and 

optimism, riding down the highway in an open 

convertible seems like an expansive, liberating experience. 

But when later he, as driver of the car, picks 

up a hitchhiker himself, all the space "out there" 

beyond the car ceases to matter as his circumstances 

constrict his existence to the narrow dimensions of 

the car's interior. The sequence in question has a 

heightened effect precisely because that expansive, 

open world is so prominent visually, its physical 

proximity so evident yet so increasingly irrelevant to 

his existence as the alternatives it offers are increasingly 

closed to him. • 

This notion of contrast, often extended beyond all 

rationality, is central to Ulmer's method. Grim, 

sordid, bizarre events take place in the most banal 

surroundings, and, because of those events, the 

18 

meaning of the surroundings themselves is somehow 

altered, our responses to them changed. The first 

death in the film is an accident so farfetched it seems 

surreal, but the second death-a grisly murder by 

longdistance telephone-seems to exist beyond all 

laws of plausibility. But it is the very implausibility of 

the action, juxtaposed with the ordinariness of the 

milieu-a nightclub, an apartment, a used car lot, and, 

of course,. the road-that gives the film much of its 

force. Ulmer is actually taking several American 

fantasies ("going west", looking to Hollywood for 

success and happiness, finding freedom and happiness 

on the open road-cf. Capra's It Happened One 

Night) and performing unnatural acts on them, with 

devastating effects. If, for example, we think of the 

hitchhiker in terms of an Horatio Alger character, we 

see that he meets with just the opposite of an 

unbroken string of good luck and success; each 

ridiculous plot twist narrows his alternatives, increases 

his victimization, further emphasizes his lack 

of free will. In fact, the closest thing to a moment of 

freedom in the movie (though the character doesn't 

perceive it as such) comes in the extraordinary' 

sequence in which, working in the nightclub he 

professes to despise, he plays a brilliant, disjointed 

piano improvisation, shown largely through closeups 

of his crazily moving fingers. 

At the heart of the film, then, is its belief in the 

existence of fate: irrational, relentless, malevolent. 

Fate seems almost a palpable thing, shaping the 

action with a malicious perversity beyond reason, 

beyond resistance. But Detour is so perverse it upsets 

even our sense of inevitability. From the introduction 

we know that the film's flashbacks will gradually 

reveal the chain of circumstances that have brought 

the character to his present state of desperation. But 

we are not really prepared for anything more, for a 

final injustice presented in a casual longshot so 

indifferent it's practically a throwaway. In retrospect, 

this shot perfectly extends the. logic of the main body 

of the film by denying that final myth of mobility 

and freedom, of the doomed outcast bound to 

wander forever. 

When we discuss the conditions of Ulmer's career, 

the necessity for choosing between "selling out" to a 

major studio or working on Poverty Row, we can 

easily see how he might have felt a personal affinity 

for a project like Detour. It is no accident that the 

hitchhiker's intended destination should be Hollywood 

where he will find success and happiness. 

(There is even one shot in which two characters are 

framed in a window that looks for all the world 

exactly like a movie screen.) After a decade of Jive 

Junctions and Women in Chains, of limited options

and illusory freedom, of entrapment within the 

economic imperatives of Hollywood, Ulmer was exceedingly 

well-equipped to handle Detour's desperate 

fatalism. The film's grim acceptance of a malignant 

fate, its deliberate mockery of some of the more 

facile American myths, its singular admixture of the 

banal and the bizarre surely reflect the director's 

belief in the existence of the illusion of free choice, 

not the substance of free will. It is hardly surprising 

LETTERS 

The list of films I managed to see in 1975 was severely 

lacking due to my place of residence at that time. Now, once 

again, I'm one of Seattle's avid bargain-matinee attenders and 

popcorn freaks. 

Meanwhile, here's my list of ten best (purely subjective, as 

usual): A Brief Vacation, One Flew 0 ver the Cuckoo's Nest, 

The Passenger,Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, A Woman 

under the Influence, Man in a Glass Booth, The Mother and 

the Whore, Hearts and Minds, Antonia, Nashville. 

An older, very likeable film I saw for the first time in '75, 

and definitely worth mentioning, is Thieveslike Us. 

• 

Ann Baxter 

Here is a list of my ten favorites among the movies I first saw 

in 1975. As you'll notice, I don't count so good, though I can 

list things in proper alphabetical order: 

The Civil War (John Ford segment of How the West Was 

Won, 1962), Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1946), Forty Guns 

(Sam Fuller, 1957), Four Sons (Ford, 1928), French Cancan 

(Jean Renoir, 1954), Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949), 

Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937), Nashville, 

Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947), The Passenger, 

Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948), The Shanghai Gesture 

(Josef von Sternberg, 1941), The Tarnished Angels (Douglas 

Sirk,1958). 

On the negative side, all recent films paled beside the 

terribleness of The Terror of Tiny Town, a 1933 musical 

western with an all-midget cast. It sounded so funny in the 

catalogue (HA unique western adventure that is definitely 

'campy' H) I couldn't resist. From now on I'll stick to 

Bedtime for Bonzo and Here Come the Nelsons. 

David Coursen 

• 

Eugene,Oregon 

Seattle premieres, 1975: The Four Musketeers (Lester), The 

Godfather, Part Two (Coppola) [Seattle 1974 =Ed.}, Autobiography 

of a Princess (James Ivory), Farewell My Lovely 

(Dick Richards), Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks), Jaws 

(Spielberg), Night Moves (Penn). 

Personal premieres, 1975: Dodsworth (William Wyler, 

1936), Curse of the Cat People (Gunther Fritsch and Robert 

that he made of this project perhaps the finest of his 

ten-day wonders, a forceful and compelling articulation 

of a distinctive world-view. a 

David Coursen has been involved in film programming 

and film education in the Eugene, Oregon area. His 

article on John Ford's Judge Priest and The Sun 

Shines Bright appeared in MOVIETONE NEWS 42. 

Wise, 1944), The Little Foxes (Wyler, 1941), Kiss Me Deadly 

(Robert Aldrich, 1955), Secret Agent (Alfred Hitchcock, 

1936), Underworld U.S.A. (Sam Fuller, 1961), Unfaithfully 

Yours (Preston Sturges, 1948), Wuthering Heights (Wyler, 

1939). 

Grace A. Cumbow 

Olympia 

.' 

Worst: A Boy and His Dog 

Best: Les Violons du bal 

Most Overrated: Nashville 

Hello. • 

Here' are ten that I liked from 1975: Nashville, Le 

Petit-Th6tJtre de Jean Renoir, The Man Who Would Be King, 

The Wind and the Lion, A Brief Vacation, French 

Connection II, Rancho Deluxe, Arabian Nightst 

Is for Faket (Welles), Smile. 

(Pasof inil , F 

In addition, I came upon severalspecial older films for the 

first time, including: Moulin Rouge (John Huston), The 

Killers (Don Siegel), 'The Leopard (Visconti), Love in the 

Afternoon (Billy Wilder), Meet John Doe (Capra). 

I appreciate the opportunity to submit this list. It gives me 

another chance to recall some very special images. 

• 

I missedsome, but those I saw: 

Tom Huckin 

Sincerely, 

Michael P. McKinnon 

Tacoma 

Nashville, The Man Who Would Be King, A Brief Vacation, 

Hustle, A Woman under the Influence, Le Petit-ThI!fJtre de 

Jean Renoir, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, The Wind 

and the Lion. 

Seen fo he first time in '75-outstanding: Klute (Alan 

Pakula, 1971), Day for Night (Truffaut, 1973), The Last 

Tango in Paris (Bertolucci, 1974), Tiger Shark (Hawks, 

1932), Scarface (Hawks,1932). 

Veleda T. Pierre 

19 

"I 

J

IN BLACK & WHITE 

"8" MOVIES. By Don Miller. Curtis Books. 350 

pages. $1.50. 

KINGS OF THE Bs. Edited by Todd McCarthy and 

Charles Flynn. Dutton. 561 pages. $6.95. 

"If some bright new critic should awaken the world to the 

merits of Joseph Lewis in the near future," Andrew Sarris 

once wrote, "we will have to scramble back to his 1940 

record: Two-Fisted Rangers, Blazing Six-Shooters, Texas 

Stagecoach, The Man from Tumbleweeds, Boys of the City, 

Return of Wild Bill, and That Gang of Mine. Admittedly, in 

this directions lies madness." 

Sarris was referring to Lewis' days as a director of 

B movies on Hollywood's "Poverty Row," and, as he later 

noted, Lewis has been "discovered," and so those seemingly 

forgotten B movies from 1940 are marked by auteurists and 

cultists for future research. And perhaps it is a form of 

madness that auteurists or anyone else should want to 

seriously examine the low-budget films turned out as 

program fillers on Hollywood's production lines. For there is 

little indication so far that this aspect of Hollywood's history 

deserves fuller appreciation, and the films themselves have 

been mostly unavailable since the last great splurge of 

B movies on television. 

But the Poverty Row films of Lewis, Edgar G. Ulmer, 

Robert Siodmak, Andre DeToth, Anthony Mann and others 

loom as tantalizing examples of talent and inspiration 

triumphing over limited means. These directors gained 

recognition of one sort or another and went on from the Bs 

to bigger budgets and better things. But has their later success 

given their B movies a visibility not granted so far to worthy 

B directors who never graduated to heftier budgets? At 

present, we have little way of knowing. Felix Feist, for 

example, is a director about whom next to nothing has been 

written, but my own chance encounter with The Devil 

Thumbs a Ride (RKO, 1947) had sufficient appeal to make 

him a subject for further research of my own. Similarly, 

Black Angel (Universal, 1946) and a Sherlock Holmes entry 

like The Scarlet Claw are enough to indicate that Roy 

William Neill is a director worthy of attention. 

Beyond questions of auteurist scholarship, however, there 

are the peculiar aesthetics of the B movie. Inevitably, part of 

the appeal of a "good" B has to do with its having given us 

"something" where obvious low-budget conditions led us to 

expect little or nothing. In this perspective, criticism can 

become dependent on a deliberate scaling-down of values and 

expectations (which, as it happens, is pretty much the 

approach taken by Don Miller in "B" Movies). But the 

unadorned professionalism and the necessary or inevitable 

lack of pretension in the B movie can make for a direct, 

simple, hard-edged kind of film art. The conventional plots 

give filmmakers and performers a space to fill with whatever 

vitality and ingenuity they can muster. The result is 

20 

sometimes a relatively unpremeditated modern folk art, in 

which movies are less images of reality than small, bright, 

intense additions to it. Or so I tell myself from time to time. 

(The B movie is also a fertile ground for the surrealists' 

deliberate, imaginative misreadings-but that's another story.) 

Don Miller doesn't mess with this sort of thing, but he 

does provide information about a great many B movies from 

the Thirties and Forties. His book and his Focus on Film 

piece (No.5, Winter 1970), together, might have been to the 

Bs what Andrew Sarris' The American Cinema is to the 

"mainstream" of Hollywood filmmaking. They are not, 

simply because Miller's critical standards are so modest, but 

the book gives us an interesting (if spottily written) survey of 

B moviemaking between 1933 and 1945, and the article 

provides a useful list of over 100 worthy B films from a 

lengthier period, 1935-1959. Since the book was commissioned 

as an expansion of the Focus on Film article, it is 

doubly disappointing that the latter's unique aspects were 

not incorporated into the longer work. But Miller does call 

attention to dozens of interesting-sounding films, and both 

his appreciation of professional skills and his "inside information" 

on remakes, pseudonyms, box-office opportunism, etc., 

throw some useful light on a relatively unexplored area of 

American moviemaking. And after all, it just may be that 

Miller's B critic plainness is the only antidote to the madness 

contemplated by Sarris. 

* * * 

I didn't come across Kings of the Bs until most of the above 

had been written, but I am happy to report that it serves as a 

varied and appealing companion to Miller's work, and often a 

more sophisticated and daring one to boot. The book is an 

anthology, and it is as concerned with genuine B movies as 

with what co-editor Charles Flynn calls "schlock/kitsch/ 

hack" movies. There are interviews, director pieces, and film 

analyses; considerable space is given to producers; the 

subjects include Roger Corman, Russ Meyer, Samuel Z. 

Arkoff, William Castle, Albert Zugsmith and (somewhat 

incongruously) Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night and 

Edmund Goulding's Nightmare Alley. There's an abundance. 

of fine selections: the editors' informative study of B movie 

economics; Myron Meisel's thoughtful piece on Joseph H.' 

Lewis; Richard Thompson's highly personal analysis of 

Thunder Road; Peter Bogdanovich's interview with Edgar G. 

Ulmer; Richard Straehling's survey of "teen films" (from 

Rolling Stone); Douglas Gomery's discussion of They Live by 

Night (B or no B); a new piece by Andrew Sarris and two old 

ones by Manny Farber; and co-editor Todd McCarthy's 

filmographies for 325 directors (where else can you find 

listings of The Films of Joseph Kane, William Witney, Christy 

Cabanne , Lew Landers, Harry Horner, Frank Tuttle, Reginald 

LeBorg, Eddie Cline, Lloyd Bacon, Richard Thorpe, William 

Beaudine, and Felix Feist, and Roy William Neil!, etc., etc.").

Such ingredients make it a very worthwhile book-and yet 

the real Kings of the Bs still remains unwritten. 

Any book about B movies will almost inevitably have a 

cultist aura about it. But whereas Don Miller's lack of 

pretentiousness is especially appealing in that light, the 

Flynn-McCarthy anthology pushes the cultist element into 

less comfortable territory. Flynn rightly insists that B movies 

must be reckoned with as part of our evolving sense of 

American film history. But the "schlock/kitsch/hack" 

syndrome which hovers over much of Kings of the Bs is 

essentially negative: there is an implicit feeling that the Bs are 

of interest precisely because they are negations of "serious" 

or "prestige" films. But if the Bs are to assume their rightful 

place in "film history," then a more positive sense of B movie 

chemistry and aesthetics must be developed. What I'd like to 

see is not only more "honest criticism," but also an account 

of the qualities which make B movies a uniquely attractive 

branch of American movies. Such an account might deal with 

the appeal of the Bs' directness and simplicity, with their 

blend of artifice and raw artifact, with the aesthetics of 

blatancy and omission, with the psychology of the lurid, the 

petty and the naive. This, too, sounds like madness, but 

Kings of the Bs provides several sane leads on the issues 

-especially in Thompson's meditation on Thunder Road and - 

in Sarris' insights on "Beatitudes of B Pictures": " ... a 

disproportionate number 'of fondly remembered B pictures 

rail into the general category of the film noir. Somehow even 

mediocrity can become majestic when it is coupled with 

death, which is to say that if only good movies can teach us 

how to live, then even bad movies can teach us how to die." 

Peter Hogue 

THE BIRTH OF THE TALKIES: From Edison to 

[olson. By Harry M. Geduld. Indiana University Press. 

337 pages. $12.50. 

Most film enthuusiasts have at some point memorized 

certain Essential Dates in Film History. 1895: the Lurniere 

brothers turned a cafe basement into the world's first 

moviehouse and projected the first films for the public with 

their cinematograph machine. 1927: Al Jolson starred in The 

Jazz Singer (directed by someone or other), the first sound 

feature. 1927 sticks in the mind like 1215: the Magna Carta, 

of course, but what was the Magna Carta, and where did it 

come from? If we know anything about the actual events 

that prepared the movies' momentous transition from silence 

to sound, it's because we've watched a handful of films from 

1927-1928, if we're lucky, and have read a few accounts 

based primarily on memory and hearsay. Now Harry 

Geduld's book presents a comprehensive history of the 

coming of synchronized sound to films. He does not get to 

The Jazz Singer until well after the book's halfway point, but 

rather addresses first the problem of sorting through the 

talkies' murky prehistory. 

Geduld begins back in 1877 with Edison's invention of the 

phonograph: "Thereafter, from the 1890s to the 1920s, the 

history of attempts to link the phonograph and film is 

checkered with failures, half-failures, and abortive successes." 

Edison's talking machine immediately suggested to some 

witnesses the possibility of realistically reproducing life and 

movement by having the phonograph operate in conjunction 

with a device that could show moving pictures. In a letter to 

Nature in 1878, one Wordsworth Donisthorpe of Liverpool 

even conceived of a sound feature film in color-a 

not-so-faraway vision of the "complete" capture and 

reproduction of reality that the cinema promised. Edison also 

continued to -work separately on moving pictures, and 

-though Geduld (and Gordon Hendricks before him) raises 

serious doubt as to whether Edison should be given 

credit-his Kinetoscope peep-show was on the market by 

1894. He and his assistant W.K.L. Dickson attempted to 

achieve a synchronous link between Kinetoscope and 

phonograph, but gave up in that same year. 

There followed many attempts by other experimenters, 

including the British William. Friese-Greene, and Alexander 

Black (whose "picture-plays" conceived in 1894 consisted of 

photographic slides, four per minute, portraying stories for 

the audience as Black supplied live spoken commentary and a 

musician accompanied). If the 1890s ultimately failed to 

produce motion pictures with sound, it is nevertheless then 

that screen-projected movies (the Lurnieres' cinematograph 

and Edison's Vitascope), as well as the dream of 

synchronized film, were born. 

Actually, the silent pictures were never silent: 

sound-effects men, live commentators, musicians, and 

phonograph recordings were always around in some 

combination to flesh out the moving ghosts on the screen. 

Geduld devotes a chapter to these forms of aural 

accompaniment, concentrating on the phonograph because of 

its position of obvious importance on the evolu tionary scale. 

There were terrible problems facing phonographaccompanied 

films: synchronization, amplification, and the 

fact that a record's playing time was a fraction of that of a 

reel of film (and switching records in mid-reel lost any 

syncrhonization that had been established). We read of the 

turn-of-the-century synchronization experiments of Auguste 

Baron (who unfortunately went blind, and broke, as he was 

trying to perfect stereoscopic sound films), mogul-to-be 

Charles Pathe and filmmaker Ferdinand Zecca, and the 

"Phonorama" system developed by three inventors in time 

for the Paris Exposition of 1900. But most impressive of all 

at the Exposition was the "Phone-Cinema-Theatre" of 

Clement-Maurice and Lioret, a system which permitted the 

operator to momentarily adjust the projection speed to 

accommodate to the phonograph. The Phono -Cinema- 

Theatre filmed, recorded, and presented a galaxy of stars: 

Sarah Bernhardt in Hamlet and a host of other artists and 

vaudevilleans got rave notices throughout Europe, although 

the harshly poor sound quality of this process would lead to 

its demise two or three years later. Leon Gaumont continued 

to improve on phonograph and film technology, and his 

"Phone-Scenes." a kind of talking theater, eclipsed his 

competitors until the war. By 1912 he was even offering a 

program in "natural color," whose short subjects included "a 

rooster crowing, a lion tamer cracking his whip in a den of 

roaring lions, a banjo player and a sailor reciting 'The Battle 

of the Clampherdown'." 

21

I 

I 

I 

· Geduld picks up the story's threads in Germany and 

England, and then returns to the U.S., where Edison has now 

developed the Kinetophone-a modified, screen-projected 

version of the Kinetoscope with barely bearable sound 

reproduction, and which easily fell out of synch. The 

sound-on-disc problems were far from solved. 

But aside from this flurry of stillborn and abortive efforts, 

a separate group of experimenters worked on a sound process 

quite unrelated to the phonograph. The next chapter traces 

the progress of sound-on-film, from Charles E. Fritts to Lee 

De Forest. Lest we be tempted to think that optical sound 

recording was developed as an answer to Warner's Vitaphone 

in the Twenties, Geduld takes us back to 1880 again, when 

Fritts first recorded sound on film-though not until 1910 

did the French E.A. Lauste first photograph sound and scene 

on the same strip of film. Geduld continues with that relish 

peculiar to historians: "Lauste is not exactly a household 

name even among film specialists. But for every hundred who 

know something about him and his work, it is doubtful if 

there is one who has even heard the name of Joseph 

'I'ykocinski-Tykociner , who gave a public exhibition of his 

optical sound system at the University of Illinois on June 9, 

1922." The inventor of the photoelectric cell, Jacob Kuntz, 

happened to be employed across the street in Physics, and 

Tykociner got from him the idea of using a photocell for his 

machine rather than the then-standard selenium cell. A 

strange combination of insufficient funds and shortsightedly 

bemused superiors was responsible. for stifling his career, 

even after that auspicious sound-film demonstration in which 

"His first film showed a woman in a white dress (Mrs. 

Tykociner) holding a bell. Her lips could be seen to move as 

she spoke words that were clearly audible throughout the 

hall. 'I will ring,' she said. The sound of a bell could be heard 

next, as she shook it. Then, after a brief pause, she could be 

heard to ask, 'Did you hear the bell ring?' " 

Meanwhile, others worked on patents for sound-on-film. 

"Pallophotophone ", first used for radio broadcasts in 1922, 

was later to be adopted by Paramount for a postsynchronized 

soundtrack (consisting of music and sound 

effects) for William Wellman's Wings, which premiered two 

months before The Jazz Singer. And there were Europeans 

-most importantly Engl, Massolle, and Vogt, whose 

"Tri-Ergon" system could also be witnessed as early as 1922 

and which was bought by the German Tobis company by 

1926, and temporarily in the latter Twenties, by Fox in the 

U.S. 

De Forest, however, is the real father of sound-on-film, 

having perfected his "Phonofilm"'s sound reproduction and 

amplification the first. His production of Phonofilm shorts 

(1923-25) predated Warner's Vitaphone shorts by several 

years, though no features appeared until 1929. The shorts 

included Pavlova in a swan dance, Elsa Lanchester in "Mr. 

Smith Wakes Up," performances by Eddie Cantor, George 

Jessel, Gloria Swanson, Joan Bennett, President Coolidge, 

and hundreds more. De Forest even started a talking newsreel 

series in 1924-three years before Fox's Movietone. His 

mid-Twenties filmmaking years were interrupted by lawsuits 

from 1926 onward, involving infringement of his patent 

rights by the Tri-Ergon inventors and-especially ironic-by 

Theodore W. Case, a fellow scientist and former associate, 

22 

who virtually stole De Forest's work from under his nose, 

renamed it Movietone, and became partners with Fox. 

Geduld turns next to the "spectacular swan song" of 

sound-on-disc, Warner's massively successful Vita phone age. 

He traces the mid-Twenties improvements on sound-on-disc 

systems, and the lukewarm reactions of the movie kings to 

this squawky and costly new medium, except for Warners' 

all-or-nothing gamble on feature sound pictures. The rest, we 

may say, is history. But Geduld's writing on Don Juan 

(1926), .The Jazz Singer, on the transitions from an all-music 

soundtrack to one in studios and the equipping of movie 

theatres, and the subsequent struggles between sound-on-disc 

and sound-on-film, give shape and depth to the most volatile 

era of film history. Joseph Tykociner aside, Geduld most 

actively champions the directorial talents of Alan Crosland, 

who directed not only-yes-The Jazz Singer (AND Don 

Juan), but several sound films before and no fewer than 21 

afterwards. 

The most remarkable thing about The Birth of the Talkies 

is its vitality. It's only every once in a while, as we read 

through what ought to be the most tedious accounts of 

technological developments, legal squabbles, and economic 

ventures, that we marvel at Geduld's seemingly effortless 

ability to make dead documents come alive. About to quote 

an article concerning recording sessions for the score of Don 

Juan (the first sound feature, but without dialogue), Geduld 

sets us up with fervid anticipation: "One visitor to these 

sessions was a reporter for Moving Picture World, who 

rapturously noted his impressions in that journal's issue for 

July l O, 1926, less than a month before the film's premiere 

... " (The quote follows, an anonymous paragraph out 

of a trade magazine.) One envisions the author surrounded by 

masses of trade magazines, newspapers, and government 

records of the period, suddenly smiling with perversity at the 

discovery of such gems of misjudgment as the following, 

written in kind reaction to a badly un-synchronized early 

Vitaphone short of a Met songstress doing a selection from 

Rigoletto: Geduld writes that a certain critic, "rising to the 

defense, charitably ascribed these shortcomings not to any 

defects in the Vitaphone system but to the fact that 'the 

movements of Miss Talley's lips limped ... Miss Talley's 

tones are formed in her throat before the lips have apparen tly 

been framed for these tones, as we, the audience, watch the 

young lady. The Vitaphone caught the tones as formed.' " 

The author indeed shows himself to be a collector of juicy 

quotations and even includes an appendix full of relevant 

ones. For instance, William Fox, who would be one of the 

first people to change his mind, wrote upon seeing Don Juan, 

"I don't think that there will ever be the much-dreamed-of 

talking pictures on a large scale. To have conversation would 

strain the eyesight and the sense of hearing at once, taking 

away the restfulness one gets from viewing pictures alone." 

The Birth of the Talkies is a history of economics and 

technology, and is clearly not meant to be an inq uiry in to the 

aesthetics of the early sound film. But it lays solid ground for 

well-informed studies on the filmic creations of those crucial 

years. As such, it is an indispensable book, as well as a 

monument to careful scholarly work untainted by academic 

stuffiness. 

Claudia Gorbman

TOUCH OF EVIL 

Removing the Evidence 

Inadvertently, a scene from the "longer version" of 

my article on Orson Welles' Touch of Evil was cut in 

MOVIETON,E NEWS 47. When Vargas discovers that 

Quinlan has framed a Mexican shoeclerk for a 

murder, he confronts Quinlan, then calls a meeting in 

his hotel of Quinlan's superiors to present his proof 

of their police chief's dishonesty. This meeting is 

intercut-in the short version-with a scene between 

Menzies and Quinlan in a bar. Drinking coffee (why is 

Quinlan drinking coffee in a bar?), Quinlan tells 

Menzies about the murder of his wife years ago and 

the death of her killer in World War One. The 

beginning of this scene does not appear in the short 

version, but it does appear in the longer version. 

Menzies finds Quinlan in a bar and tells him of 

Vargas' meeting with his superiors. Quinlan sits 

smoking and drinking at the bar. We see him and his 

reflection in a mirror behind the bar. Menzies enters 

(shown only in the mirror): 

Menzies: Hank, I've been looking for you in 

every bar in town. 

Quinlan (turning to him): I've been in half of 

them-only here on the wrong side of the 

border. ... (taking a drink) I never drink on 

my own beat, partner. 

As Quinlan turns to Menzies, the camera pans from 

their mirror image to Quinlan and Menzies themselves. 

Menzies (to bartender): Bartender, give him 

some black coffee-quick. 

Quinlan: I don't need any black coffee. 

Menzies: About the meeting ... 

Quinlan: What meeting? 

Menzies: Vargas and the D.A. at his hotel ... 

Quinlan: Where? 

Menzies: Right here. Across the street. 

Quinlan (turning his back to the bar and 

rising): Well, I don't need any coffee, not 

yet. 

The scene continues with the discussion of the 

murder of Quinlan's wife. As Quinlan gets up to 

leave, he forgets his cane (a telling gesture throughout 

the film) which Menzies retrieves for him. 

Gary Bordzuk of Universal 16 has pointed out to 

me that Quinlan's interrogation of Sanchez (the 

shoeclerk) in an earlier scene has a different sound 

mix in the longer version. While Vargas washes his 

hands in Sanchez's bathroom, offscreen sounds suggest 

that Sanchez is being given the "third degree" by 

Quinlan-an important detail absent in the shorter 

version. 

John Belton 

Brooklyn 

• 

MOVIETONE NEWS regrets the omtsston of the 

passage in question from the original article. The 

reason was not, as Mr. Belton graciously suggests, 

inadvertence but Editorial misunderstanding and, if 

you will, interference. "Guilty, Guilty. Every last one 

of them-guilty. " Right on, Hank ... 

RTJ 

23

," 

I I 

\ I 

Emlyn Williams, Robert Newton, and Charles Laughton in a scene from Josef von Sternberg's abortive 1937 film I, Claudius. 

Fragments of this doomed endeavor have been preserved in a fascinating BBC documentary narrated by Dirk Bogarde, The 

Epic That Never Was. The film also includes interviews with survivors of the project: Williams, Merle Oberon, Flora Robson, 

Claudius author Robert Graves, and the subsequently deceased Von Sternberg. It will be shown at the Seattle Art Museum as 

the first installment in this year's Vernal Equinox Film Festival at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 1, with (no fooling!) Fritz Lang's 

Siegfried (1924). Other vernal treasures include: Carne and Pr~vert's Les Vislteurs du soir (1943), on April 8; judex, Georges 

Franju's 1965 tribute to the poetic serial adventures by Louis Feuillade, on April 15; and Cocteau's La Belle etla B~te (1946), 

April 22. Admission to each Program is $1.50. No reserved seats, and the auditorium holds 250, so ... 

YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE 

FILMS IN SERIES 

"The American Dream" is the title of Spring Quarter's 

Lectures & Concerts Film Series at the University of 

Washington-and if you think you've heard this one before, 

hold on a sec. Series coordinator R C Dale's very interesting 

notion is that certain American film classics not only provide 

an evocative index of the historical period in which they were 

made but also serve equally well to typify key developments 

24 

in the American cinema of that day, as well as essential 

characteristics of the directors who made them. He has 

selected ten films-to be presented in nine separate 

programs-to exemplify what he has in mind, and the list is 

enticing: 

March 30: Way Down East (DW. Griffith, 1920). Lillian 

Gish's performance as Anna Moore, the country girl wronged 

by a big-city rake and left to bear the burden of her

"dishonor" alone, belongs on any responsible list of the 

screen's great portrayals. Griffith's-and cameraman Hendrik 

Sartov's-pastoral images remain ravishingly beautiful, the 

more so for our realization that such countrysides now exist 

largely in our memory. The basis of Way Down East's story 

was a creaky stage piece ludicrously out of fashion even in 

Griffith's day, but that liability evaporates like late frost in 

the glow of spirituality surrounding Lillian Gish and Richard 

Barthelmess. But Griffith was more than merely a director 

blessed with a sensitive cameraman and an inspired cast (and 

don't discount Lowell Sherman's superb work as, of all 

unlikely 1920 things, an ambiguous lounge lizard). There are 

moments of cinematic possibility that remain unequalled by 

any contemporary filmmaker: for instance, the scene when 

Anna Moore, still a stranger, simply passes the gate of the 

Bartlett farm, and she and David Bartlett (Barthelmess) 

register one another's presence without realizing that they've 

done so. Sound confusing? It's breathlessly lucid on 

film-lucid, and mystical at the same time. 

Piano' accompaniment for this nearly-three-hour silent film 

will be provided by Dan Grinstead. 

April 6: The Big Parade (King Vidor, 1925). The first 

installment of King Vidor's projected American trilogy on 

"War, Wheat and Steel" (Our Daily Bread, 1934, and An 

American Romance, 1944, completed it in token if not in 

full spirit), The Big Parade fairly surges off the screen with 

the idealistic passion and bitter rage that marked Vidor as a 

primary spokesman of the post-World War I era. John Gilbert 

and Renee Adoree star. (At this time it is not clear whether 

Dale plans to run a music-tracked print or provide 

on-the-spot accompaniment once more; but at any rate, the 

film will not play dead-silent.) 

April 13: Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932) and Footlight 

Parade (Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley, 1933). Two 

hyperkinetic celebrations of "making it" as the Twenties 

highballed into the Thirties: Scarface remains the greatest of 

all gangster films (pre- or post-Godfather, it doesn't matter) 

and Footlight Parade' looks more and more like the finest 

Busby Berkeley musical comedy of them all-partly because 

Lloyd Bacon's non-musical sequences are as dynamic in their 

comic realism as Berkeley's celebrated show-stoppers (but 

not this show!) in their surreal perversity. Paul Muni, George 

Raft and Boris Karloff are featured in the Hawks film; James 

Cagdey, Joan Blondell, Frank McHugh et al. in the 

Bacon-Berkeley. If it's possible to be exhilarated and 

exhausted at the same time, that's how the audience will be 

after this double bill. 

April 20: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, 

1939). James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Claude Rains, Edward 

Arnold Thomas Mitchell, and a characteristically handpicked 

'cast down to the most "insignificant" political hac~ 

help make this one of the very best films tn, Frank Capra s 

filmography. At every level of production It s a triumph of 

Hollywood craftsmanship, whether you glance mto SI?ney 

Buchman's beautifully detailed script or scrutimze Lionel 

Banks' utterly convincing reconstruction of the U.S. Senate 

Chambers or time any of Gene Havlick's precision cuts. But 

it's still a' one-man, one-film show from the most pragmatic 

idealist of them all. If you harbor a received opinion that 

Capra made simplistically optimistic films, here's an excellent 

opportunity to find out how inaccurate that one is. 

April 27: The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940). 

Unfortunately all of Ford's greatest films fall outside the pale 

of this series by virtue of the need to fit contemporaneity to 

chronological progression. But an American Dream series 

withouta John Ford movie would look silly indeed, and this 

official masterpiece more than holds its own. The subject, of 

course, is the Okies and their migration westward after the 

Dust Bowl catastrophe. Gregg Toland's pre-Kane cinematography 

is stunning and some of the performances-those of 

Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine-have virtually 

become folklore in their own right. 

May 4: No film because of a school holiday. 

May 11: Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, 1944). 

There are worse ways to represent the Forties and World War 

II than to show this scathingly funny Sturges comedy about 

wartime heroism and civic virtue, and maybe there aren't 

many better. Eddie Bracken is fine as Woodrow Lafayette 

Pershing Truesmith, the manic flipside of a Capra smalltown 

hero; Ella Raines may be even truer to the mark as a 

smalltown girl who mixes loyalty and calculation in shrewd 

proportions; and of course there are those magnificent 

Sturges regulars-venal, pompous, raging, kvetching; smarrning, 

defiant,jubilant-the character player in excelsis: William 

Demarest, Franklyn Pangborn, Raymond Walburn, Al Bridge, 

Harry Hayden, Georgia Caine ... 

May 18: Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958). Welles' last 

American masterpiece (at least until' we get a gander at the 

new one) does double duty, representing film noir and the 

deviously ferocious Fifties. Dale has booked the restored, 

long version described in MTN 47 by John Belton. With 

Welles himself, Charlton Heston, Joseph Calleia, Janet Leigh, 

Akim Tamiroff. 

May 25: Junior Bonner (Sam Peckinpah, 1971). Everything 

we read about it made it sound as if Junior Bonner just had 

to be a major bummer: the Old West is dead, baby, and ain't 

nothin' fit to take its place. But in fact Junior Bonner proved 

to be one of the quietly joyous films of the Seventies, an 

unlikely scenario of unlikelier survivals. Steve McQueen is 

Jay-Are, a rodeo rider just nudging middle age, with a father 

(Robert Preston) who wants to run off to Australia, a mother 

(Ida Lupino) who doesn't want to run off at all, a brother 

(Joe Don Baker) who's demolishing the old homestead to 

make room for a trailer park, and a bull named Sunshine that 

damn well is going to be rode. People who get so angry about 

Peckinpah's violence that they want to break things can put 

their objections away on this one. Nobody pulls a gun and 

nobody dies. But there is this fight in a saloon, and you 

might like to know that it's just about the most rapturously 

well-edited sequence since those Cossacks came down the 

Odessa steps. 

June 1: Fat City (John Huston, 1972). Dale wanted to do a 

film series that would end with the last scene of Fat City. A 

good place to start. Another good place is Kris Kristofferson's 

song "Help Me Make It through the Night." Kristofferson 

isn't in the movie, a tale of tank town boxers, but Stacy 

Keach, Jeff Bridges, Nicholas Colasanto, Art Aragon, Candy 

25

'II 

I 

Clark and Susan Tyrrell are, and-with the exception of 

Tyrrell's accomplished, Oscar-nominated, but out-of-key 

wino-they are as good as anyone has been in movies in 

recent years. The scene is Stockton, California, but the 

location is the night of the soul which doesn't even manage 

to be dark anymore, just grungy via Conrad Hall's location 

shooting. It's the end of some kind of line, but curiously Fat 

City isn't a depressing movie-it's too undemonstratively 

sensitive and truly observed to have that effect. 

The series begins, contrary to custom, the very first 

Tuesday of the academic quarter, so bear that in mind. 

Matinee (3:30) and evening (8:00) performances are held; 

specify which you're looking for when you order your 

ticket(s). The showplace is Roethke Auditorium, 130 Kane 

Hall. Admission, as always, by series ticket only: nine 

programs for $9.00 (nonstudents), $7.00 (students). Phone 

543-4880 for how-to-buy info. 

ChristiM and OtnDttu, Curti. 

Pr.pridor~ 

681.-1&6'7 

Our local theatres have been pleasantly a-stir-starting, 

naturally, during the month when we didn't have a You Only 

Live Once column. The newly-made-over Moore-Egyptian 

(2nd & Virginia, 622-9352) is running the Harry Truman 

picture, Give 'Em Hell, Harry, for which James Whitmore has 

received a Best Actor Oscar nomination; the film of this 

theatrical success was actually shot in the Moore itself just 

before the renovation. Probably on March 26, the Moore- 

Egyptian will open one of those new Lina Wert milller 

pictures, All Screwed Up (Everything Ready-Nothing 

Works); and Claude Jutra's Kamouraska is still on their list of 

promised attractions (it has been deferred thus far while the 

new house is busy raising its recognition value with Seattle 

Cive a 

MOVIETONE NEW5 

8ift subscripLicll1 

filmgoers). SFS members should bear in mind that the 

Moore-Egyptian has joined the list of local theatres giving 

SFS discounts. 

Among other theatres honoring SFS memberships with 

their discount rate, the Broadway (Broadway & Olive, 

323-1085) expect to be playing Sidney Lumet's Dog Day 

Afternoon soon. The Edgemont has lined up The Wind and 

the Lion and Zulu for Thursday-Sunday, March 4-7 (a rare 

chance to see Zulu on a wide screen instead of da toob-it 

was filmed in 70mm Technicolor and is pictorially very 

handsome); Thurs.-Sun., March 11-14, the Edgemont bill is 

Three Days of the Condor / Harry and Tonto. Meanwhile, the 

Neptune (N.E. 45th & Brooklyn N.E., 633-5545) is running 

Three Days of the Condor the previous week, March 3-9, 

with Chinatown as cofeature; they'll follow that with Funny 

Lady and a rare 35mm revival of the 1942 Fred Astaire - Rita 

Hayworth picture You Were Never Lovelier. The Rose Bud 

Movie Palace (3rd S. & S. Washington, 682-1887) will be 

playing Hawks' 20th Century on Thurs.-Sun. March 4-7 and 

11-14-Carole Lombard and John Barrymore star in that 

granddaddy of screwball comedies-and then the Goldwyn- 

Wyler film of Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes-Bette 

Davis, 1941-on Thurs.-Sun. March 18-21 and 25-28. Among 

the Rose Bud's upcoming attractions will be Lady in the 

Lake, the Robert Montgomery version of the Raymond 

Chandler novel (the one with the camera standing in for 

Philip Marlowe); Conquest, with Garbo and Charles Boyer, 

directed by Clarence Brown; and Hitchcock's The 39 Steps. 

The Cinemond in Redmond (885-1994) was fresh out of 

confirmed bookings when we called, but they're still out 

there and they continue to offer the SFS discount. 

A goodly number of new foreign films are upon us, thanks 

to several houses. Bergman's The Magic Flute will be 

succeeded at the Varsity (4329 University Way N.E., 

632-3131) by Francois Truffaut's The Story of Adele H., for 

which Isabelle Adjani has won two major Best Actress awards 

and an Oscar nomination. Losey's The Romantic Englishwoman 

continues at the Guild 45th (N. 45th & Meridian N., 

633-3353); next up is the independently-made and 

-

A Piece of 

THE COBWEB 

By Dana Benelli 

THE COBWEB (1955) 

Direction: Vincente Minnelli. Screenplay: john Paxton, after the novel by William Gibson; additional 

dialogue by Gibson. Cinematography (CinemaScope and EastmanColor): George Folsey. Music: Leonard 

Rosenman. Production: john Houseman. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. 

The players: Richard Widmark, Lauren Bacall, Charles Boyer, Gloria Grahame, Lillian Gish, john Kerr, 

Susan Strasberg , Oscar Levant, Olive Carey, Adele Jergens, Edgar Steh li, Bert Freed, Paul Stewart, Fay 

Wray, jarma Lewis, James Westerfield. . 

The following essay was originally prepared in fulfillment of a routine requirement in a 

University of Washington film course on American Directors of the Fifties. It has been 

edited only slightly for reprinting here. 

Briefly, The Cobweb deals with a couple of dozen characters-about half of them key 

figures-mutually involved in the increasingly disordered life in and around a mental 

institution: doctors and other staff members, their families, the patients. The pointedly 

absurd focus of the film's complex action is the need for a new set of curtains for the 

library. Determining how and from whom these curtains will be acquired involves tortuous 

power plays draining the energies of all concerned, and threatening the very existences of 

several characters. 

Filling the visual space provided by the widescreen 

format offers both unique opportunities and problems 

for filmmakers. Obviously a cast of thousands 

can look less like a herd of sheep if they have more 

room to move in. But in filming individuals or small 

groups of people, the horizontality of the widescreen 

has an advantage too. Corresponding more closely to 

the eyes' breadth of vision, it can show-and hence 

offer an increased sense of-natural milieu surrounding 

individuals, particularly individuals in closeup or 

medium closeup. In The Cobweb, Minnelli works 

with our widescreen view in a more creative, expressive 

way in his use of background actions by characters 

other than those directly involved in a central 

action going on in the foreground. These background 

actions, which may not be dramatically relevant in 

the present moment, may have an immediate thematic 

appropriateness or an eventual dramatic effect. 

Crucially, this usefulness is established without distracting 

from the scene's main focus. Meg Rinehart 

(Lauren Bacall), for example, is reading a magazine in 

the background of a shot of Dr. Devanal (Charles 

Boyer) and Vicki Inch (Lillian Gish) discussing new 

curtains for the library and their place in the financial 

scheme of the institution; after a moment she gets up 

and exits, pausing briefly at the door in the extreme 

right and extreme background of the Scope setup 

before finally disappearing from view. Her attention 

to the discussion, peripheral in the scene where we 

note it, later proves to have been the source of her 

idea that the patients themselves should create the 

new curtains. This sort of CinemaS cope mise-en-scene 

27

operates in relation to the key themes of the film, 

cumulatively fostering a kind of thematic and narrative 

economy on Minnelli's part. 

The problems of the widescreen format arise when 

the focus of viewer attention must be constricted for 

thematic or dramatic purposes, or when the tension 

of a scene emanates from a single person or pair of 

people. Then the spaciousness of the screen may 

prove a distraction. Even empty, this leftover space 

may suggest an additional presence, a placid contrast 

to the intensity of the moment. The "answer" to this 

problem for Minnelli is the use of objects (flowers, 

lamps, candlesticks, curtains, etc.) that will block 

off-in a sense, use up-an area of the screen. As with 

the widescreen itself, such a technique is both an 

unavoidable "given" and an opportunity. Minnelli 

finds ways to expressively exploit this situationintroducing, 

for instance, a certain statue in three 

sequences of The Cobweb. 

Our first entry into Meg Rinehart's art barn 

coincides with her visit from Stevie Holte (John 

Kerr). He is carrying-though we don't know it till 

later in the scene-his drawings for the library 

curtains. Their conversation is carried out in oneshots, 

as befits the fact that he's "not interested in 

people much"-a comment that implies more conscious 

choice than he actually exercises in the matter 

of his not connecting with other people. In this scene, 

however, he is connected by the film to two elements 

of the room. Verbally he is connected and drawn to 

Meg Rinehart, owing to their common experience of 

losing their families and having been threatened 

psychologically by a parent. In addition, in the shots 

of Stevie standing in the doorway, he is linked to a 

statue positioned on a shelf to his right. The empty 

space on the right side of the frame further ernphasizes 

the only two figures we do see. 

What the statue portrays is unclear to me, though 

the possibilities seem to be that it is a reproduction of 

a classical Greek or Roman statue, or perhaps 

Michelangelo's David. (It may be a more mundane art 

model of some sort; even so, its usefulness still 

applies.) Our suspicion that Stevie and the statue are 

meant to be linked is confirmed when Stevie momentarily 

assumes the same pose as the figure. While 

a precise "meaning" is elusive, several relevant and 

persuasive ideas are raised by the association. On the 

most immediate level, the statue suggests the notion 

of an ideal that contrasts to Stevie's reality of being 

out of balance and control. 

By itself, this contrast would only have negative 

connotations of Stevie's failure to be ideal. But 

another factor, the idea of art, operates in the scene 

and film, making the connection of Stevie and the 

statue more positive. We know from Stevie's conversation 

with Karen Mciver (Gloria Grahame) that he is 

interested in art, and from the patients' meeting that 

he is an artist. In the meeting, though, it is unclear 

whether he will, or can, produce. His illness and art 

are connected. In this scene we see him evidence signs 

of personal progress by means of his drawings, and 

through the hopeful conversational contact he has 

with Meg. (This stands in contrast to the futility of 

the bitter therapy session with his analyst, Dr. Mciver 

[Richard Widmark] .) 

The film and the clinic attach therapeutic value to 

creative expression. Hence, Stevie standing in the 

doorway is also an art object created in particular by 

his own effort. This scene connects him to the statue 

to evoke the rational ordered "ideal", sanity, that he 

seeks and now shows signs of being able to reach. 

The next time we see the statue, it has taken the 

form of a drawing hanging very noticeably in Stevie's 

room. It appears in the background of the visit of Mr. 

Capp (Oscar Levant), who brings word of Dr. 

Devanal's memo announcing that the library curtains 

will be purchased. That Stevie has drawn a picture of 

the statue and made it an element of his personal 

environment suggests that he has connected himself 

to it-as we have previously-presumably in recognition 

of the same significance (as an ideal to work 

toward) that we have seen in the figure. If so, the 

picture then indicates Stevie's conscious awareness of 

what it is that he seeks. This would be yet another 

sign of progress on his part. That an interpretation 

such as this is not totally presumptuous is indicated 

later when Stevie tells Dr. Mciver that he had been in 

his room thinking that he was becoming normal. That 

awareness of what he seeks does not constitute final 

health is perhaps also indicated by the drawing's 

being in black, with the arm positions reversed-a 

"negative" image of the statue at this very moment 

when, upon hearing Capp's news, Stevie loses control 

once more. 

Our final view of the statue occurs when Dr. 

Mciver catches up with Stevie as the young man is 

ripping his curtain sketches off the display frame in 

the art barn. Mciver borrows Meg Rinehart's officesite 

of the earlier Stevie-Meg conversation, with the 

studio area visible beyond-and leads Stevie in for a 

talk. Following Mciver in, Stevie pauses in the 

doorway. For several shots of the ensuing conversation, 

our view of Stevie consists of a frame 

divided into thirds, with the statue on the left side of 

the screen, Stevie on the right, and the open door 

between them. Through the door we see the overturned 

display board. Graphically, the disorder of the 

room caused by Stevie's violence and lack of self-

control separates Stevie from the statue. It is a precise 

description of the part of Stevie's self that stands 

between him and his ideal of normality. 

In another way, coupled with Mciver's reprimand, 

the statue and the room seen through the doorway 

suggest alternative forms of behavior confronting 

Stevie: that is, expressiveness through control and 

consciously created form, or expressiveness through 

the disorder and violence born of lack of self-control. 

At this point, in the film and in his progress, Stevie 

has reached a stage where he has choice over the 

matter of his behavior and consequent further progress 

toward health. This is what Dr. Mciver insists on 

his accepting in this scene. His helping to put the 

display board back up indicates his willingness to face 

this final hurdle of accepting responsibility for and 

control of his life. 

The statue in Meg Rinehart's office is a rather 

unextraordinary element of the room's overall decor, 

and its presence is never insisted upon by attentiondemanding 

closeups. Yet in Minnelli's mise-en-scene it 

is clearly expressive of the evolving nature of the 

struggle Stevie is involved in-ultimately, a quest to 

ascertain identity, a challenge that confronts the 

viewer himself from those earliest glimpses of the 

clinic when we are left for a while to wonder who are 

the sane, who the insane .• 

The Seattle Film Society is pleased to offer the 

Northwest Premiere 

of another film by 

KENJI MIZOGUCHI 

S STERS OF G ON 

Japan, 1936 

8 pm, Saturday, Apri I 5 

Bloedel Aud, St. Mark's Cathedral, l229 lOth E. 

SFSSl.00 Others S2.00 

Please call 329-3119 for more information. 

29

-- .. - 

- ~- - ...., 

_~ !_---:;n 

- - 

Lady Lyndon (Marisa Berenson) at spa with Barry Lyndon (Ryan O'Neal), whose five years in the army, and some 

considerable experience of the world had by now dispelled any of those romantic notions regarding love, and who now 

began to have it in mind to marry a woman of fortune and condition in this scene from Stanley Kubrick's "Barry Lyndon," 

starring O'Neal and Miss Berenson, written for the screen, produced and directed by Kubrick, based on the novel by 

William Makepeace Thackeray. Patrick Magee and Hardy Kruger also star in the Warner Bros. release. 

QUICKIES 

BARRY LYNDON 

Screenplay and direction: Stanley 

Kubrick, after the novel by William 

Makepeace Thackeray. Cinematography: 

John Alcott. Production design: 

Ken Adam. Editing: Tony Lawson. 

Music: Irish traditional music plus 

works by Bach, Frederick the Great, 

Handel, Mozart, Paisiello, Schubert and 

Vivaldi, arranged by Leonard Rosenman. 

Production: Kubrick. 

The players: Ryan O'Neal and) in order 

of appearance, Gay Hamilton, Marie 

Kean, Leonard Rossiter, Godfrey Quigley, 

Diana Koerner, Hardy Kruger, 

Patrick Magee, Marisa Berenson, Leon 

Vitali( Steven Berkoff; Michael Hordern 

narrator). 

30 

( 1.) 

Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon is a 

film in which the expected always 

happens-but usually in quite an 

unexpected way, much as a detail in a 

painting will surprise and delight, 

regardless of the ordinariness of its 

context. The world of Barry Lyndon, 

first of all, is not the 18th-Century 

Europe of historical reality; it is the 

18th-Century Europe of Art-of the 

literature, painting, music, sculpture, 

architecture, costume, and design of 

the period. That's as it should be for a 

film from a picaresque novel about a 

rudely-reared, would-be gentleman's 

striving after the elegance befitting 

what he feels to be his rightful station. 

And it's as it should be for Kubrick, 

whose preference for the realm of art 

and ideas over that of natural, 

historical, quotidian reality is evident, 

and whose cinematic studies of Manipulated 

Man, even at their rawest, have 

always been couched in idealistic 

terms: tidy sets, tidy costumes, tidy 

makeup, and tight, impeccably composed 

shots, I've never seen quite so 

many absolutely symmetrical framecompositions 

in such a short time as 

during the running of Barry Lyndon; 

and no form-for-form's-sake, either

-the symmetry of individual shots and 

of montage directly reflects the 

symmetry of the story of Barry 

Lyndon's rise and fall. As good big 

films should be, Barry Lyndon is a 

world unto itself: fascinating and 

precise, with room for taste, elegance, 

suspense, action, humor, compassion, 

and insight. Most of all, it is a film 

of-and about-beauty. As beauty has a 

certain timelessness about it, so, too, 

do Kubrick's shots :..in Barry Lyndon. 

Indeed, the film is remarkably consistent 

with the style and atmosphere of a 

picaresque novel: Within a shot, as 

within a well-wrought literary sentence, 

time stands still, or is even 

stretched. But between shots, as 

between sentences, minutes or years 

may flash by. Kubrick has structured 

Barry Lyndon in classic narrative style, 

to the point that the space between 

sequences, bridged by Michael Hordern's 

smooth narration, fairly invites 

one to imagine a title: "Chapter the 

Fourth, In Which Our Hero ... " 

Because of the unusual duration of 

many of the shots, camera movement 

is slow and intermittent, tending to 

correct and adjust a still point of view 

rather than take us into the action of 

the film and its characters. Tracking 

shots are so infrequent that when they 

do occur, we are almost physically 

startled. But we always remain outside, 

and the film, even when it meets us on 

the most agreeable and inviting terms, 

does so only within the context of 

reaffirming that basic outsideness. My 

favorite example of Kubrick's alternation, 

in Barry Lyndon, of fluid with 

frozen time and of fulfilled anticipation 

with subverted expectation is the 

sequence in which Barry first approaches 

Lady Lyndon. Kubrick crosscuts 

as they eye each other across a 

gaming-table, curious, tentative, under 

the watchful eye of her chaplain. At 

last she tells the chaplain she is going 

out for air, rises, and leaves the scene. 

We've seen this a hundred times 

before: Barry and the chaplain will 

exchange glances, and Barry will get up 

and follow the lady out. But the 

chaplain does not look-significantly, 

suspiciously, or at all-at Barry. And 

Barry himself just sits there. Finally 

Kubrick cuts away from the shot 

altogether, to a profile of Lady 

Lyndon ou tside the palace, still as a 

statue in the blue of the evening. 

Though we didn't see him get up to 

follow her outside, our faith that Barry 

will join her remains unshaken; so we 

wait. And Lady Lyndon waits. But she 

faces confidently away from the 

palace, while we eagerly seek the space 

behind her, at screen left, for some sign 

of our hero's approach. We pick up a 

pair of French doors and watch them. 

We've seen this before: he'll come out 

of the background as she stays 

motionless before us. But time and the 

lady continue to stand still. Finally we 

see-or do I only imagine?-a figure 

pass by one set of French doors, 

headed toward the other. Now we're 

ready. We lick our lips. And Kubrick 

cuts away again, abruptly presents us 

with a close shot of Barry already 

entering the frame-from screen-left, as 

we expected, but much closer to us 

and the lady than he could possibly 

have got during the time since that 

form passed the doors. Our expectation 

demands that Barry be there, and 

Kubrick's awareness of that anticipation 

puts Barry there. But how he does 

it-ah! that's what makes Barry Lyndon 

so eminently worth watching. 

Robert C. Cumbow 

(2.) 

The question is, did Charlie Chaplin 

set out to create a masterpiece when he 

conceived City Lights? Did Renoir say 

to himself back in 1938, "I'm going to 

create a masterpiece and call it The 

Rules of the Game?" This question 

becomes relevant in discussing Barry 

Lyndon because more than anything, 

Kubrick's film looks like a "masterpiece" 

created by someone intent on 

creating a "masterpiece". "Kubrick's 

Grandest Gamble," proclaims Time. A 

gamble, yes. Anyone in the mid-1970s 

who believes he can gross better than 

$30 million on an adaptation of a 

minor Thackeray novel is, if nothing 

else, a gambler. But has Kubrick produced 

a great film? His masterpiece? 

Let me admit that three hours of Barry 

Lyndon left me overwhelmed by the 

expansive power and beauty of Kubrick's 

creation. The cinematography, 

the settings, the whole evocation of the 

18th Century possess an unbelievable 

richness; the film must have been a 

nightmare of logistics. There is little 

doubt that Barry Lyndon is an intelligent 

film by an important film artist. 

But. .. Something's missing here. I 

was not moved by Barry's loss of his 

only son. Ryan O'Neal didn't make me 

feel it, Kubrick didn't make me feel 

it-because Kubrick is too emotionally 

detached from his characters to feel 

this central tragedy of Barry Lyndon 

himself. We get no sense that Kubrick 

cares for, identifies with, or even has 

simple compassion for any of his characters. 

Only when the performers 

themselves amplify their roles-as Patrick 

Magee (the Chevalier) does, but 

O'Neal fails to do-is any feeling imparted 

to the viewer. John Huston's 

The Man Who Would Be King, in many 

ways a lesser film, never fails to inform 

the audience that however foolish the 

characters played by Caine and Connery 

are, deep down, Huston really 

loves the sons-of-bitches. Even Bufiuel, 

the darkest of satirists, finds a certain 

discreet charm in his characters. Kubrick 

does not. When was the last film 

in which Kubrick had any genuine 

feeling for any of his characters? In 

this context, 2001 is and will continue 

to be his masterpiece: Kubrick moving 

the universe without ever touching the 

human spirit. We care more for HAL 

than for Lockwood or Dullea; HAL 

reduced to singing "Daisy" us far more 

moving than Lockwood's abandonment 

in space. Barry Lyndon has been 

termed Kubrick's Lola Montes and this 

is a valid and useful comparison. 

Kubrick's control of 

camera, his unerring perfection approaches 

Ophuls', though I prefer 

Ophuls' vertiginous tracking movements 

to Kubrick's more static compositions. 

But Kubrick will never 

possess Ophuls' joyous sensuality, the 

spirit with which he celebrates life 

while baring its follies. Following Redmond 

Barry's travels across the absurd 

social and political landscape of 

18th-Century Europe, one wonders 

why Kubrick chose this work. If it tells 

us that men are vain, greedy, and 

uncaring, that history is little more 

than the narrative of man's warring and 

petty struggles for power, then so 

what? There is no feeling that any real 

people are caught up in this tragedy. 

Barry, after all, only gets what he 

deserves. I guess I like my masterpieces 

more ragged-the raw, disjointed emo- 

31

MOVIETONE NEW8 

"The best publication on film in the English language" 

-Molly Haskell 

Highlights of recent issues: 

MTN 38: "Best Films of 1974"-choices and comments by Contributing Writers; "Moments out of 

Time"-special shots, scenes, stances from 1974 movies, recollected and savored; "Weddings, Etc., in 

Blood"-Ken Eisler on Oshima's The Ceremony; James Monaco on "The Apprenticeship of Mordecai 

Richler"-an interview with the author of Duddy Kravitz; quickie reviews of The Night Porter, The Seduction of 

Mimi, The Towering Inferno, juggernaut, The Man with the Golden Gun, Erotic/Wet Dreams, l.e Petit-Tbedtre 

de jean Renoir, etc. 

MTN 39: Special issue on Luis Buiiuel, featuring independent essays on Un Chien andalou, CAge d'or, Las 

Hurdes, and Los olvidados (R C Dale), Subida at clelo and Viridiana (Peter Hogue), Belle de jour (Kathleen 

Murphy), Tristana (David Willingham), and Le Charme discret de to bourgeoisie (Richard T. Jameson); also 

quickies on Amarcord, Young Frankenstein, Gold, Zatoichi and the One-Armed Swordsman, Tendresse 

ordinoire, I'm a Stranger Here Myself, Murder on the Orient Express, etc. 

MTN 40: Three Howard Hawks articles: Peter Hogue on Only Angels Have Wings, Kevin Cooney recording 

some very personal reactions to Scarface and His Girl Friday, and Richard T. Jameson on To Have and Have Not; 

plus Part One of "Freedom and Entrapment," an article on Scenes from a Marriage by Birgitta Steene; 

"Morricone Encomium" (Robert C. Cumbow); an index to MTNs 29·38; plus quickies on Love among the Ruins, 

The Four Musketeers, Rejeanne Padovanl, Love and Anarchy, Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins, Rancho 

Deluxe, etc. 

MTN 41: "Caliban in Bodega Bay"-Robert C. Cumbow on The Birds; Alan Williams on montage and 

mise-en-scene in Fahrenheit 457; the conclusion of "Freedom and Entrapment" (Birgitta Steene); Billy Wilder's 

Ace in the Hole (Bernard F. Dick); also quickies on The Passenger,Get to Know Your Rabbit, Antonia, Shao Lin 

Martial Arts, Hanqup, Lacombe Lucien, Brannigan, etc. 

MTN 42: "John Ford Reprints the Legend"-David Coursen on judge Priest and The Sun Shines Bright; "See 

Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me"-Jon Purdy on A Woman under the Influence; "The Passenger: David Locke's 

Discovery of David Robertson's Body" (Catherine M. Hendricks); James Monaco on "Sound and Sight"; book 

reviews (Women in Focus, jack Nicholson Face to Face); also quickies on The Return of the Pink Panther, jaws, 

The Wind and the Lion, Super vixens, A lice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, The Drowning Pool, W.W.and the Dixie 

Dancekings, Bring Me the Head of A Ifredo Garcia, French Connection II, etc. 

MTN 43: Richard T. Jameson on Nashville; Ken Eisler on the Vancouver Film Festival (esp. Les Ordres, The 

Middle of the World, The Goat's Horn); also quickies on Day of the Locust, The National Health, Hennessy, At 

Long Last Love, Night Moves, The Great Waldo Pepper, etc. 

MTN 44: "A Dalmation Called Nixon"-the adventures of a moviemane (Ken Eisler) in Mexico; Jorge Ayala 

Blanco's commentary on Mexican director Matilde Landeta; "Alice in Wanderland" (Maria Gargiulo on 

Scorsese's Alice); reviews of Raymond Durgnat's Renoir and Hitchcock volumes; Cukor's Travels with My Aunt 

(Jessie S. Brandt); also quickies on A Boy and His Dog, Smile, And Now My Love, Farewell My Lovely, Posse, 

etc. 

MTN 45: Special Raoul Walsh issue, featuring a major essay by Peter Hogue concentrating on 13 of Walsh's 

most characteristic films; plus Rick Hermann on High Sierra; also quickies on Rooster Cogburn, Peau d'ane, 92 

in the Shade, Three Days of the Condor, etc. 

MTN 46: Robert C. Cumbow on two films of Bernard Girard ("Mad Rooms"); Douglas McVay on Chaplin's 

Limelight; Ken Eisler 'on Nanni Loy's Why-?; Peter Hogue's and Richard T. Jameson's views of the 19th San 

Francisco Film Festival; also quickies on Blanche, Capone, Le Secret, Hard Times, Captain Kronos- Vampire 

Hunter, etc. 

MTN 47: John Belton on the restored version of Touch of Evil; "On the Absence of the Grail"-Bresson's 

Lancelot du Lac (Alan Williams); Best Films of 1975; "Moments out of Time" (Jameson and Murphy); also 

quickies on Dog Day Afternoon, The Nickel Ride, La Vie revee, Conduct Unbecoming, The Sunshine Boys, 

Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother, The Romantic Englishwoman, etc. 

M(JVIt~TON[ NEW6 

is distributed exclusively in the United Kingdom by 

The Motion Picture Bookshop 

at the National Film Theatre, South Bank 

London SE1 8XT (Tel: 01 9283517)

tions of a Nashville over the passionless 

perfection of a Barry Lyndon. Kubrick's 

film is assuredly more than a 

"collection of pretty pictures" as some 

critics have charged. But at its very 

center there is a void which all of 

Kubrick's intelligence and technical 

grace cannot fill. And that is the 

feeling that something man does redeems 

his more venal side. On the basis 

of Barry Lyndon, I'm not sure Kubrick 

feels there is much: in condemning 

Barry, he condemns us all. 

Douglas F. Palau 

THE MAGIC FLUTE 

HEARTS OF THE WORLD (1917-18) 

Direction: David Wark Griffith. 

The players: Lillian Gish, Dorothy 'Gish, Robert Harron, 

George Siegmann, Ben Alexander, Erich von Stroheim, Noel 

Coward. 

Let's face it. No matter how much homage we pay (and 

rightly) to D.W. Griffith as the father of narrative cinema, no 

matter how many 'sublime's and 'magnificent's we garnish 

our appreciations with, The Master made his share of films 

that, as watched movies, are bummers. The film scholar and 

the diehard film freak want to see them all, and should. The 

film programmer has other criteria besides his own curiosity 

to bear in mind, though. If he wants to bust out of the 

official-classics repertory of The Birth of a Nation, IntoleranCe, 

Broken Blossoms, Way Down East and Orphans of the 

Storm but has seen (and probably has had opportunity to 

see) nothing else, he proceeds at his and his audience's peril. 

The colossal miscalculation of a Dream Street or the choppy 

turgidity of an America may be the reward for his commendable 

adventurousness. Now, just incidentally, True 

Heart Susie and Abraham Lincoln are two titles I'd add to 

any must-see/must-show list of Griffiths; and having just seen 

Hearts of the World I'm eager to recommend it as well. 

As Alanna Nash wrote in her excellent Take One article on 

the occasion of Griffith's centenary, the mysterious rarity of 

prints may have something to do with the neglect of this, one 

of Griffith's finest works. Also, Lillian Gish has recorded that 

Griffith regretted his propagandistic overkill of German 

brutality (the British War Ministry acted as semi-official 

coproducer) and doubtlessly encouraged downplaying the 

film in later years. Upon actually seeing the movie, one is 

bewildered at the director's retrospective slur against himself: 

although the titles get a bit hysterical and there is a sequence 

which makes clear-without quite showing-that Erich von 

Stroheirn and a couple' brother officers have raped and 

murdered several French maidens, again and again the action 

of the film insists upon the fact that there were good, 

decent-minded Germans caught up in the war just as there 

were good, decent Frenchmen. One of these intercedes to 

Direction: Ingmar Bergman. After the 

opera by Mozart and Shikaneder; adaptation 

by Bergman. Cinematography: 

Sven Nykvist. Music conducted by Eric 

Ericson. 

The players: Ulrik Cold, ) osef Kostlinger, 

Erik Saeden, Birgit Nordin, Irma 

Urrila, Hakan Hagegard, Elisabeth 

Eriksson, Ragnar Ulfung, Britt Marie 

Aruhn, Kirsten Vaupel, Birgitta 

Smiding , Urban Malmberg, Erland Van 

Heijne, Ansgar Krook, Gosta Pruzelius, 

Ujf ) ohansson. 

Out of the Past 

While in the past I've been struck by 

a certain, sometimes openly selfconscious 

interplay between roles and 

"reality" in Bergman's films-sand while 

I've often felt sorely put upon to 

endure its exposition-it's a similar 

sense of an interface between what is 

real and what is staged in The Magic 

Flute that prepares for one of the 

continued on .page 36 

spare Lillian Gish when her potato-hauling efficiency falls 

below the optimum level and a guard begins brutalizing her; 

another speaks up for Justice when an Ubermenscn gives out 

with a might-makes-right rationalization. (Trivial surprise: 

The chief hun bully named Von Strohm turns out not to be: 

played by Von Stroheim.) 

Hearts of the World displays Griffith's celebrated epic 

sweep via some purportedly actual trench-warfare scenes, but 

the director's sense of space in the battles is surprisingly 

inchoate-by Griffith standards, at least-and one All Quiet 

on the Western Front-like conceit, in which opposing armies 

attack and counterattack over the same terrain, fails to make 

good on the absurdist payoff Milestone would achieve a 

dozen years later. The true glories of Hearts of the World are 

to observed in the privileged intimacy of Griffith's interpersonal 

mise-en-scene, in those unimpeachably timeless 

moments that require no historical defense. Indeed, the first, 

prewar half of the film is the richer, not the least because 

that doomed and beautiful boy Robert Harron is permitted 

so many opportunities as "the poetic youth" to glance round 

at a world whose tranquillity he would scarcely outlive. 

Harron owns this stretch of the movie, and his utterly natural 

playing-vis-a-vis the spiritual Lillian Gish, the hilariously, 

dynamically physical Dorothy, or an equally hilarious Ben 

Alexander as his adoring younger brother (a lovely relationship 

Griffith treats with surprising drollery)-manages to lend 

his "poetic" quality great validity, and make decency 

immensely likable and reassuring. This is scarcely to denigrate 

that irreducibly luminous emotional center of Griffith's 

finest works, Lillian Gish, who has several moments here 

when her psychological concentration and the fascinated 

long-take integrity of Griffith's mise-en-scene combine to 

literally awesome effect: her reactions to the death of her 

mother (prefiguring that extraordinary cascade of conflicting 

emotions at the parlor door in the 1919 True Heart Susie), 

and to Harron's reappearance from somewhere offscreen 

after he has been presumed dead-an apparition as beautiful 

as, and even more com plex in its effects than, the Little 

Colonel's homecoming in The Birth of a Nation. 

RTJ 

33

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: Jack Nicholson, Nathan George.

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST 

Direction: Milos Forman. Screenplay: Lawrence Hauben and 

Bo Goldman, after the novel by Ken Kesey. Cinematography: 

Haskell Wexler, Bill Butler; additional cinematography: 

William A. Fraker. Production design: Paul Sylbert. Editing: 

Richard Chew. Music: Jack Nitzsche. Production: Saul 

Zaentz, Michael Douglas. 

The players: Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, William 

Redfield, Brad Dourif, Will Sampson, Sidney Lassick, Danny 

De Vito, Christopher Lloyd, Vincent Schiavelli, Dean R. 

Brooks, Scatman Crothers, Marya Small. 

In just about every Jack Nicholson performance there is a 

moment (often more than one moment) when Nicholson's 

face reflects something suddenly and deeply wrong with the 

universe. In Milos Forman's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest 

one of those moments of both recognition and profound 

confusion comes after Billy has been trundled off to bed with 

Mac's 'girlfriend Candy and McMurphy has disposed himself 

near the open window to wait. He begins by sharing some 

rum with Chief Bromden and finally sinks to a sitting 

position on the floor. Closeup on Nicholson's face. He smiles, 

glancing in the direction Billy and Candy have gone, and then 

without warning or apparent reason the grin drops from 

sight, McMurphy's mouth opens slightly, and his brows pull a 

little closer together. The window is open behind him, but 

somehow you know (regardless of whether you've read the 

book or the play) that McMurphy will not be crawling 

through it, and you're not really sure why. After a moment, 

the smile creeps back onto Nicholson's face, but then his eyes 

close and we cut to the next morning, the window still open, 

McMurphy and the Chief passed out underneath it. 

lt could, be argued that Forman lets the camera linger a 

mite too long on Nicholson's face. In The Passenger, 

Antonioni does the same thing with Nicholson, and the result 

is totally different, and, I think, slightly more credible-not 

because Antonioni might be a better director (whether he is 

or isn't is beside the point) but because his wasted 

intellectual protagonists can more naturally evoke the ennui 

that lies at the bottom of their souls. McMurphy, needless to 

say, is not presented as the introspective type, and yet 

Forman lets more of Nicholson's brooding (shades of Bobby 

Dupree contemplating himself in the mirror at the end of 

Five Easy Pieces) seep into the scene than seems consistent 

with the rest of the performance. To a point, one must 

sympathize with Forman's brief indulgence. Here he is with 

Jack Nicholson on his hands, and Nicholson is so good at 

doing that sort of thing that it would be difficult to shoot a 

whole movie without giving Nicholson at least one of those 

quietly volcanic moments in which to unload all that barely 

submerged chaos. And in a way, Nicholson's changing facial 

expression-and everything underneath it-at that particular 

moment is the story's turningpoint, but its overtness seems 

more than anything to underline a lack of clarity: what is 

going through McMurphy's mind right then? 

Part of the problem may derive from an uncertainty about 

point of view. The nature of Forman's dilemma may be 

hinted at in that lingering closeup where there seems to be an 

out-of-balance tension between what is essentially Nicholson 

and what is supposedly McMurphy; the tension is something 

which Forman seems generally to be conscious of, and which 

he tries to keep in balance by carefully handling McMurphy's 

part in a way that prevents McMurphy's point of view from 

becoming our point of view as well. For while Nicholson is 

the kind of actor it's damned hard not to watch every second 

he's on the screen, McMurphy is scarcely the sort of 

protagonist you want unequivocally to identify with. When it 

comes to holding these two tendencies in some kind of moral 

and aesthetic balance (being engrossed by Nicholson's performance 

without adopting an overly empathetic relationship 

with McMurphy), Forman's sensitivity to the people he is 

filming proves to be his saving grace. For instance, when 

McMurphy begins lambasting some poor guy in a wheelchair 

who doesn't know what's going on in the world and the 

audience is beginning to react with a few scattered laughs 

(McMurphy wants another vote in favor of watching the 

World Series on television) the subtlest camera movement 

suddenly brings Nurse Ratched into the frame as well, and 

her presence makes it much more difficult to think that the 

way McMurphy treats some of the patients is in any way 

funny. Time and again Forman does this kind of thingperhaps 

using a series of cuts to bring us away from 

McMurphy and back into the larger context of the group. 

The result is a subtle modulation of an overall point of view 

that allows Forman to maintain an essentially compassionate 

undertone by keeping us always in touch with the patients as 

a community of human beings. 

Often this feeling of community spills over into the very 

atmosphere the characters exist in, creating a strongly unified 

tract of dramatic and psychological space that provides an 

intense intimacy within the world of the mental ward. As 

peripherally an ambient detail as a somewhat motley group 

of mu sicians who play flutes and guitars just outside the fence 

when McMurphy comes out for the first basketball sequence 

turns into something like a leitmotif when, during the next 

outing, only their music seeps onto the soundtrack, as though 

its pastorallightheadedness and charm were as much a part of 

the air surrounding and penetrating those cyclone fences as 

Nurse Ratched's mind-dulling Muzak is a part of the 

communal room insidethe hospital. But when it comes time 

to explode that sense of unity (as well as confinement) with a 

venture out into the world world-when McMurphy hijacks 

the bus and boat-we are struck by a palpable freedom 

reflected in the stares of the patients as they pass along the 

ordinary streets of an ordinary town as though coursing 

through some magically alien environment-and at the same 

time we're hit with a realization of the suddenly incongruous 

makeshift quality of Forman's conception and direction of 

the sequence. Where do we draw the line? Where is the 

elated/paranoid point of view of the patients to be differentiated 

from a wobbly directorial aptitude for handling an 

outdoor action and comedy sequence (slapsticky comedy at 

that) in a film where such a placid and reflective manner of 

depicting people as Forman's is more successfully realized in 

his articulation of a collective spirit and his almost Bergmanesque 

poetry of the human face? 

Forman seems most comfortable in the confined, often 

claustrophobic domain of the ward where he can orchestrate 

the human components of his mise-en-scene in a way that 

accentuates that poetry and hence leads to an essential 

stylistic distinction in Forman's work that has a lot to do 

35

, I 

, I 

with the kinds of people he has populated the screen with. 

Many of those people weren't actors before Forman started 

rolling the camera down in Ken Kesey's neck of the Oregon 

woods, and one might easily anticipate such an arrangement 

leading to a tension between the tentativeness in the way 

nonprofessionals grope for their roles and the director's 

attempt to capitalize on their hopefully unpretentious 

behavior in front of the camera. To a point, Forman does let 

the actors' roughhewnness work towards a more "realistic" 

flavoring, much in the same way that Cassavetes, using 

nonprofessionals, can coax forth performances that seem 

natural and, usually, painful evolutions of dialogue and 

emotion. But Forman's frequent use of facial close shots 

(comparable to Cassavetes as much as to Bergman) doesn't 

just serve to index emotional intensity, nor are those faces 

coldly scrutinized as though one side of the screen (or 

camera) had nothing to do with the other. Instead, Forman 

tends to explore his characters in a way that makes it appear 

that the actors are taking a large hand in defining the roles 

they play (which in fact they are) while the director eclipses 

himself to the extent of encouraging spontaneity and trying 

to have the camera pointed in the right direction when 

something flickers between the characters. 

But it's never quite that simple. Forman's use of a 

nonprofessional cast probably does contribute to some of the 

unstudied-seeming portrayals. It's the director's efforts, 

though, that makes those portrayals an interconnected 

whole. Especially in the group therapy sessions where 

intercut reactions form an important integrating thread in the 

ebb and flow of temper and sympathy, Forman, like 

Cassavetes, is particularly concerned with creating a credible 

totality of interrelationships from which the camera can pick 

and choose the nuanced supporting bit as well as the central 

THE MAGIC FLUTE 

continued from page 33 

film's most delightful achievements: to 

have us thinking, by the time it's all 

over, that all the seemingly different 

shadings of both Bergman's and our 

perception finally rotate in the penumbra 

of Art. In other guises, maybe 

that has been Bergman's "message" all 

along. The kingdom, though, is not 

self-enclosed this time, as it was in 

Cries and Whispers, nor is there that 

sometimes uneasily taut polarization 

between the stiflingly realistic overtones 

and the undercurrents of pure 

poetry running through the dialogue of 

Scenes from a Marriage. Nor, for that 

matter, is there much hint of existential 

parlor tricks a la Passion of Anna, 

wherein each of the four main characters, 

at some point during the movie, 

takes a moment to sit back, not as the 

character he/she portrays but as the 

performer he/she is, and reflect upon 

the part's genesis within him-/herself. 

The closest Bergman comes to anything 

like that in The Magic Flute is 

when Erland Josephson's face is momentarily 

caught among the members 

of the audience that Nykvist's camera 

is doing its best to transform into an 

expressive visual counterpart of Mozart's 

musical overture. There is no real 

point to be made. Josephson is simply 

there to hear The Magic Flute like the 

rest of them. And yet one can't help 

but feel a twinge of life-meets-art headiness 

at seeing a regular Bergman actor 

-and sometime writing collaboratorin 

a Bergman movie watching Bergman 

make that movie while at the same 

time partaking of the emotions and 

responses contained within it, and 

hopefully extending beyond it, touching 

the surface of our own expectations 

of art. for during that opening 

performance of focal dialogue. With Cassavetes, however, this 

actual uncertainty as to what's going to happen next, where 

the camera will go now, is tied to a strong feeling of 

improvisation that Forman only infrequently tries to bring 

off, usually with Nicholson in the immediate vicinity. In one 

scene early in the movie it works particularly well. Me- 

Murphy has just arrived and has already had a chance to 

threaten the subdued ambience of the ward while strolling 

around a group of card-playing patients who are trying to 

pass a quiet morning. Now he's meeting for the first time 

with Dr. Spivey; Spivey starts asking those deceptively 

amiable, condescendingly frank questions- "Why do you 

think you're here, McMurphy?"-when McMurphy notices a 

photograph of the doctor holding a huge chinook salmon by 

a chain. McMurphy starts asking questions about it, and the 

doctor, perhaps sensing an opening for "communication" 

with his patient, follows right along. The whole thing is 

slightly ridiculous: McMurphy ends up wondering if they 

weighed the chain as well. It works, however, because, 

whether it was carefully scripted or not, the halting, 

exploratory way in which they run through it makes it seem 

freshly and refreshingly improvised, especially in contrast to 

some lines that come a moment later during the interview 

-lines nudging almost uncomfortably at some kind of Big 

Theme about the relativity of madness and violent behavior 

("Rocky Marciano knocked out 40 guys and he ain't in jail"). 

Laid out in such cutely paradoxical terms, the point seems 

too easily digestible, again perhaps because it's enclosed 

within that point of view-McMurphy's point of view-that 

we're sometimes led to accept at face value without closely 

examining the less palatable underside of McMurphy's selfdestructive 

temperament. 

Rick Hermann 

sequence of briefly-glimpsed faces 

something happens, or should happen, 

to us: as we watch an audience listening 

to the overture of The Magic Flute, 

our act of seeing comprises an overture 

in itself. We are struck with the perhaps 

obvious but nevertheless suddenly 

reaffirmed importance of what it can 

mean to people to sit before a work of 

art and derive meaning, pleasure, and 

sustenance from it. In that sense the 

audience in the movie certainly mirrors 

the audience in the movie theatre-or 

hopefully does so; but the image is not 

so much a simple reflection as it is a 

distillation and translation of something 

we are seeing into something 

essentially about what we see. The 

people in The Magic Flute's audience 

arc not just there, but there radiating 

all the variables of complexity, wonder, 

and even (maybe especially) innocence 

that ought to define what it

means to be moved by an opera, a 

movie, a painting, a song, or whatever 

you happen to meet up with. As the 

movie progresses, and as the opera gets 

under way, we begin to glimpse the 

actors offstage; but again, as with the 

audience that is more than just an 

uninvolved sea of prettily photographed 

individuals, what we glimpse is 

charged with just enough stylization to 

carry the momentum of illusion off 

into the wings and leave a residue of 

our suspended disbelief to settle 

around the characters. Ulrik Cold/ 

Sarastro reads from a folio of Parsifal; 

Josef Kostlinger/Tamino and Irma 

Urrila/Pamina play chess and caress 

one another while they wait in the 

dressingroom for the next act; Birgit 

Nordin/The Queen of Night takes a 

drag from a cigarette and lazily proffers 

a hand to a makeup girl who 

bru shes it with powder; Hakan 

BETWEEN FRIENDS 

Direction: Don Shebib , Screenplay: Claude Harz. Cinematography: 

Richard Leiterman. Editing: Shebib, Tony Lower. 

Music: Matthew McCauley. 

The players: Bonnie Bedelia, Michael Parks, Chuck Shamata, 

Henry Beckman, Hugh Webster. 

One thing about Canadian director Don Shebib, he gives 

an actor room to stretch out. Too much room, some viewers 

feel. Shebib is obviously willing to risk viewers' impatience 

with yet another long take, a la Cassavetes, of his anti-heroic 

"boys" horsing around, yet another closeup of some guy 

struggling to put his inchoate feelings into words. When these 

indulgences fail, you get one of those arid well-whadda-youwanna-do-tonight-Marty? 

patches. But when they work, you 

may get a passage as moving as Joey's (Paul Bradley's) 

heartfelt, tipsily self-revealing speech at his own wedding in 

Goin/ down the Road. 

It seemed to me that in Between Friends, Shebib's third 

feature film, he and his' co-editor Tony Lower deployed a 

fairly sure sense of just how long things can profitably be 

allowed to run. Mixed in with the fraternal banter and the 

inevitable medium- and longshot scenes of the young 

rowdy men at play are more quick shots than heretofore, 

catching people's reactions to each other, their significant 

and sometimes comic gestures, fleeting facial expressions, eye 

contact, avoidance of eye contact. And when you do watch 

those two bosom buddies, intoxicated with each other's 

company and with nostalgia for their adolescence (the film's 

original title was Get Back) slaloming drunkenly, on roller 

skates, amongst beer bottles set up at midnight in a Toronto 

gutter, the scene, though thematically important, is kept 

mercifully short. Furthermore, against the boys' beerily 

Hagegard/Papegeno wakes up from a 

nap just in time to tumble downstairs, 

insert a perfectly timed trill on his reed 

flute, and wander onstage not a moment 

too late or too soon. The performance, 

obviously, is not confined to 

the stage, although Bergman trusts the 

proscenium when what it shows seems 

a sufficient chunk of the action, and, 

like Olivier in the best of the Shakespeare 

movies (Henry V), makes no big 

issue of shifting from one narrative 

plane of reality to another. (Indeed, 

Olivier too used a "live" audience to 

create a similarly layered texture comprised, 

in an ordering that moves progressively 

towards a reality that could 

be most handily termed cinematic, of 

the movie audience, the audience 

watching Shakespeare's play, the actors 

in the playas they exist on stage, and 

those same actors swept into a stageless 

context of pure illusion.) Bergman, 

happily, manages to capitalize on his 

. prerogative to cast a cinematic spell 

and at the same time to stay out from 

under Mozart's feet. His stylistic intrusions 

into the whole affair are unprofound 

but significantly reflexive. 

For instance, the first face we see on 

screen is that of a young girl, goldenhaired, 

round-cheeked, lips a-glistening 

as though she is tasting the first notes 

of the overture that has just begun. We 

see that little girl a lot during the 

. course of The Magic Flute, and if the 

subtly shifting tonalities of her expression 

are not a part of the performance, 

they are at least an index of our own 

sensitivity to what is going on up there 

under the lights. Bergman seems to 

relish the idea of such an intimate 

exchange being presupposed by our 

honestly felt response to Mozart's 

opera. 

Rick Hermann 

sentimental perspective on their own merriment Shebib now 

explicitly juxtaposes the perspective of a partly amused but 

mostly disgusted third party: Bonnie Bedelia. 

Bonnie Bedelia. I saw this actress for the first time many 

years ago in a made-for-TV movie called (I think) Then Came 

Bronson. It was a pilot for a series, and like many pilots, it 

was a hell of a lot better than the series that followed. Her 

co-star then, as in Between Friends, was Michael Parks. Parks 

played, as usual, a drifter; monosyllabic, self-contained, 

mumblingly Brandoesque with a core of strength and a nice 

line in not-meant-to-mortally-wound sardonic humor. He 

finds himself unexpectedly saddled with a pampered poor 

little rich girl (Bedelia) and while they're on the road he 

"tames" and humanizes her. They also, naturally, fall in love. 

For this modest pilot, Bedelia delivered 

In Between Friends she does it again. But this time we're 

deep in the cinematic Canada country described by Canadian 

Forum critic Robert Fothergill in his definitive article "Being 

Canadian Means Always Having To Say You're Sorry (The 

Dream Life of a Younger Brother)". This time it's Parks, the 

male, who's feckless, weak, out-of-touch with his feelings; 

and it's the female who is strong and mature, if a bit stymied 

by the refractory nature of the charming boy-man she loves. 

The Parks character, Toby, drifts up to Toronto where 

Ellie (Bedelia) is living with Chino (Chuck Shamata in a 

beautifully judged performance), a bumptious young man 

who works as a short-order cook and is hatching a big heist 

with Bedelia's father, fresh out of the slammer. In their 

palmy Southern California days, some six years ago, Toby 

was young Chino's surfing mentor and they were a duo: The 

Best on the Coast. Toby the Drifter drifts into consenting to 

eo along with his old buddy on the forthcoming job, a 

37

'I 

payroll robbery at a nickel plant in Sudbury. Meanwhile, he 

also drifts into reciprocating-well, sort of-Ellie's growing 

affection for him; anyway, they're soon sleeping together. 

This triangle plot and its downbeat dGnouement don't 

exactly dazzle a viewer with surprises. But to call. Between 

Friends a "formula screenplay," as a Vancouver daily film 

reviewer did when he panned the film during its brief local 

showing at the Varsity's summer International Film Festival a 

few years ago, is nevertheless doing less than justice to both 

Claude Harz's laconic screenplay and Shebib's richly detailed 

direction. 

Shebib's Lost Youth motif, which permeates his three 

features-a nostalgia for those ostensibly untainted days of 

postadolescent, pre-alienation roughhousing, for the grace 

and vitality and virtual communion represented by sports-if 

not exactly "formula" is, I suppose, hackneyed enough. But 

in practice, Shebib brings to it a personal charge that is 

redeeming. 

Parks telephones Shamata long distance. "Where the hell 

are you?" says Shamata after they exchange pleasantries. 

Parks simply holds the mouthpiece of the phone at arm's 

length, for about 15 wordless seconds; and Shamata, up in 

Toronto, joyously takes in this soundscape, processes it, 

cries: "Malibu!" A short pause, and he goes on to 

inventory-gleefully and, to judge by Parks' expression, 

accurately-the prevailing surfing conditions. 

The robbery attempt, however, fails-of course. Bedelia's 

father and the embittered Shamata are both fatally wounded. 

A high shot shows us the getaway car and the rendezvous car 

placed in the bleak Ontario winter landscape not far from 

Sudbury. Bodies are hauled out onto the road, Bedelia's 

father dead, Shamata clearly dying. I wondered where Shebib 

could go from here, how he could end his film. Probably I 

should have guessed; probably the answer is entirely too 

predictable. And yet his long and lovely, fluidly edited 

slow-motion coda-sunlight, waves, skillful surfer skimming 

ever closer to the beach ... and, almost voluptuously, wiping 

out-hit me hard; and the rest of the house seemed pretty 

quiet too. 

A final word needs to be said about Richard Leiterman's 

beautiful color cinematography and Matthew McCauley's 

music, if only to get something on the record besides the 

aforementioned Vancouver reviewer's accusation of filmic 

"pretentiousness" 

score." 

aggravated by "a painful piano and violin 

When the small thieves-like-us party nears the nickel plant 

on their reconnaissance trip before the job, Shebib unleashes 

a somber combination of moving-car shots of the dreadful 

slag-ridden Sudbury industrial wasteland, within-the-car 

behavioral density, and evocative music featuring a piano and 

(sic) cello-a combination that I found lyrically potent in a 

way reminiscent of the work of the very best directors. 

McCauley's score is otherwise functional and allusive in a 

quiet way. When the boys are out in the gutter at midnight 

slaloming through beer bottles, music is booming from a 

phonograph inside the house. Ellie, standing in the open 

doorway, protests against this high-decibel period stuff; goes 

in and turns it off; is bullied by Chino to start it up again. 

The incident dramatizes her mounting impatience at 

"running a nursery" for the immature Chino, Chino's 

obliviousness to her feelings, and the primacy of male 

friendship in Chino's life. 

One further footnote on the music: unless I'm very much 

mistaken, that's Ronee Blakely we hear, pre-Nashville,singing 

her poignant "Dues" behind a brief and 'rather weak 

shabby-hotel-room scene suffused with the standard neon red 

from a blinking neon sign. 

Ken Eisler 

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE 

KING 

Direction: John Huston. Screenplay: 

John Huston and Gladys Hill, after the 

story by Rudyard Kipling. Cinematography: 

Oswald Morris; additional 

cinematography: Alex Thomson. Art 

direction: Alexandre Trauner. Music: 

Maurice Jarre. Production: John Foreman. 

The players: Michael Caine, Sean 

Con nerv, Saeed Jaffrey, Christo pher 

Plummer, Shakira Caine. 

John Huston said recently he has 

made only three good films in the past 

decade: Reflections in a Golden Eye, 

Fat City and The Man Who Would Be 

King. Though I'm still holding out 

-more or less alone, I think-for The 

Kremlin Letter to be included among 

his better works and I have serious 

doubts about Reflections, there is 

Michael Caine as Peachy Carnahan

certainly no argument that The Man 

is one of the director's finest 

achievements of any decade. It's a 

pretty neat trick to make a film so 

~ completely faithful to the spirit of 

~pling's original story while not 

violating for even a moment the spirit 

of John Huston as well. Kipling's "The 

Man Who Would Be King" is, in a 

sense, Heart of Darkness in a comic 

vein (should I have said "light-hearted 

vein"?). Kipling was a believer in the 

White Man's Burden-"to bring light to 

the darker parts of the earth", as one 

of his likeable rogues remarks in the 

film-and saw colonialism's responsibility 

as one of giving as well as taking, 

not pure exploitation. Yet on the 

whole, both Kipling and Huston are 

kinder to the take-the-money-and-run 

man, Carnehan, than to Dravot, the 

man who would be king. To be sure, 

Dravot is never less than likeable; as we 

see him through Peachy Carnehan's 

eyes, we understand and pity, rather 

than detest, his weakness for power. If 

his motives seem to become those of 

Conrad's Kurtz, he is in death and 

memory much closer to Lord Jim. 

Material goals always elude the Huston- 

TAKE IT LIKE A MAN, MADAM 

This Danish film was written and directed by three women 

and shot by a mostly (entirely?) female crew. MOVlETONE 

NEWS deeply regrets that, despite a valiant series of 

endeavors, we were unable to obtain any names beyond the 

single one retained from a viewing of the film, that of the 

star, Tove Maes, 

Attend a special screening as one of a collection of handpicked 

weirdos and you deserve whatever you get. Seattle's 

Specialty Films outfit has. been looking at a recent Danish 

film by women, and inviting others to do so as well, as a 

means of gauging whether the property has any commercial 

future in the United States. The audience in which I sat was 

composed of Specialty Films employees, recognized regulars 

at company-affiliated theatres (the Movie House and the 

Guild 45th), and two conspicuous sub-groups, "film people" 

and feminists. 

Before the screening got underway, theatreowner and 

Specialty Film s rep Randy Finley thanked the audience for 

coming and advised us that we were about to see a very 

interesting film; advised us also that the first 20 minutes or so 

was "a little heavy" but we should "stick with it." 

A little heavy, yes. Take It like a Man, Madam begins with 

a series of titles statistically documenting the un-extraord inariness 

of the late-fortyish housewife and mother played by 

Tove Maes. As the credits periodically appear, and long after 

ian aspiran t; near the climax of the 

film, when the riches which were the 

original object of the sortie into 

Kafiristan slip almost parenthetically 

down the mountainside, there is no 

forgetting that this is the vision of the 

man who made The Treasure of the 

Sierra Madre. The fall of the treasure 

presages the fall of Danny Dravot, 

itself a quite literal correlative for what 

the Book of Proverbs says about pride 

and an haughty spirit. Huston makes 

rather more of the Freemasonry motif 

than did Kipling. In the short story, 

the occurrence of Masonic imagery 

among the Kafiris was a semi-comic 

coincidence; in the film, with Freemasonry 

traced back to the time of 

Solomon and before, effort is made to 

suggest the identity of Kafiri religion 

with the primitive origins of the 

Masonic Rite. Asked what Masonry is 

all about, Peachy explains, "It's about 

the brotherhood of man under the eye 

of God." That's what the film is about, 

too: the kind of brotherhood that 

obtains among the Masons (Kipling, 

Carnehan, Dravot), and that larger 

brotherhood which they all respect but 

which Dravot ultimately violates out of 

--------------1 

a conviction in his own manifest 

destiny. His breach of his "contrak " 

with Peachy coincides with his breach 

of faith with his Kafiri subjects, which 

brings about his figurative and literal 

downfall. But both story and film are 

far more complex than some "power 

corrupts" homily; for even at their 

most serious they maintain a delicately 

comic touch, a loving and optimistic 

approach to both the best and the 

worst in men. Huston's film is quite 

the other side of the Kremlin Letter 

coin, as light and jubilant an expression 

of the director's vision as the earlier 

film was dark and grim. What ultimately 

happens in The Man Who 

Would Be King is scarcely different 

from what happened in Huston's rust 

film, The Maltese Falcon: One whale 

of an adventure story is climaxed when 

someone who has come through hell 

stumps into an office and leaves an 

Object on the table. As the finale of 

Huston's new film hauntingly reveals, 

that Object is at once as paltry and 

transitory as the fake Maltese Falcon, 

and as rich and enduring as the genuine 

romance of kings. 

Robert C. Cumbow 

they've ended, we are asked to bear witness to her deadening 

lifestyle. She vacuums the carpets. She vacuums the cushions 

on the davenport. She straightens the pillows. She listens, or 

does not listen, to a radio quizmaster as he stumps other poor 

benighted housewives with trivial questions and then consoles 

them with "Maybe hubby can explain it to you when he gets 

home." She looks through her bank of house plants at the 

apartments across the way and sloshes a mid-afternoon dose 

of vodka into her glass. She tries to share some musings with 

her husband at the dinnertable and he gets up and wanders 

away-not contemptuous of what she was saying, merely 

oblivious to the fact that she was saying anything at all. She 

watches her grown daughter heft the newest baby around 

while talking about resuming her educational career, and 

smiles at the grandchildren who barge in to ask what 

Grandma has brought them this time. She accompanies her 

husband to a farewell testimonial dinner for a member of his 

firm and observes how her conversation, and that of the 

other wives, girlfriends and secretaries, is deemed irrelevant. 

The guys talk business. She gets snockered and ventures that 

her husband doesn't know what he's talking abou t. And so 

on and on. 

Oh, I know, I know: It's All True. Very bad. Very unfortunate. 

Very unjust. But also, as enumerated here, very 

very dull. Tove Maes contributes a quietly sympathetic 

presence, but it's not enough. The fact-events are laid out as 

testimony, but without wit or nuance or notable hint of 

I

individualized perception (can three people direct one film ?). 

Even the males' crassness and petty chauvinism lacks the 

force of its own banality. And stylelessness is not to be 

confused with documentary validity. Ideas of symbolic 

inequities are transferred to film-nothing more. We get the 

point rightly enough, but there is nothing but the point, from 

one shot, one scene, to the next. 

Then Maes reflects: "What if it were the other way 

around?" And the ... I can scarcely say the film, but the 

whatever-it-is takes off. Husband, in apron, is fixing dinner. 

Wife comes home from a meaningful day at the office. How's 

it going, dear? Oh, fine [pained smile j , but you could help 

me by setting the table, I'm so wrapped up in this 

cooking ... Polite smile of concurrence, with, of course, the 

table remaining unset despite several gingerly reiterations of 

the request/suggestion. Woman friend comes in and begins 

stroking the embarrassed cook: hiya, cutie! have I ever been 

looking forward to this visit so I could see sweet little you 

again! And it's very funny. Not inspired; not inventive; not 

more imaginatively staged and filmed than the preceding 

depiction of marital stultification. But the reversal concept is 

audacious in itself, and the all-too-familiar oppressive rituals, 

enacted in a violently deranged context, take on a comic 

awfulness they lacked when the-way-it-is passages were 

onscreen. Besides, the performers-female and maleobviously 

relish the turnabout, and their delight is infectious. 

For half an hour or so, as scenes continue in this vein, 

the ... it still isn't a movie, really, just sketches recorded on 

film; but whatever the category, it's quite enjoyable, and also 

didactically effective. Why didn't they simply start here, I ask 

myself, and do the whole film this way? Given the want of 

any cinematic style, it might have been just as well to make it 

a short; but it would have been a funny and pointed short. 

(During this stretch of the film the women have, you should 

pardon the expression, a ball; but the men are directed even 

more interestingly: with perhaps one exception, they step 

right into traditional roles, poses, and mannerisms of women 

-or rather, girls-without in the least suggesting they've 

become fags-a tribute to both the cast and the filmmakers.) 

It can't last. Maes awakens from her reverie with a start, 

and also with a nervous collapse the warning signs of which 

her (male) physician has shrugged off as "typical" menopausal 

phenomena ("Get her a puppy," he advises the husband). 

But she has awakened to something and insists on 

redirecting her life. Getting a job is hard, of course. She's 

older than the optimum starting age, she's not qualified for 

anything in particular, she's neither physically capable of nor 

interested in seizing such employment opportunities as charwoman. 

Temporary clerical jobs do arise, then evaporate on 

her. She joins a consciousness-raising group consisting of 

female coworkers; we are vouchsafed representative fragments 

of their complaints and aspirations. On the job she 

suddenly finds herself on the periphery of a strike action that 

has class as well as sexist implications. She seizes a key 

symbolic role that her immediate neighbors have not recognized, 

or have avoided seizing themselves; and we learn via a 

subsequent dialogue that she has lost her job for it, although 

she doesn't greatly mind that since the strike itself succeeded. 

"Things are changing," she tells her husband, slyly merry; 

and as he just begins to turn her way with a newly apprehensive 

look creasing his features, and her own are flushed 

40~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 

with the pleasurable anticipation of righteous battle, the shot 

freezes and the film ends, a feminist marching song on the 

soundtrack. 

I fill out my preview questionnaire and drop it off in the 

lobby. The air is rather charged out there. I keep on moving. 

Outside the theatre Finley asks me what I think of it and I 

start telling him. I am about to say something like "Well, 

cinematically it's worthless and politically it's blameless'.' 

when two women emerge from the lobby. "All the men are 

saying, 'Well, aesthetically it stinks-'" I turn around and 

say, "Well, aesthetically it does leave something to be desired, 

wouldn't you agree?" She gives me the look. She reads me 

right down to the tight elastic in my boxer shorts. She knows 

what that one means: They can"t take The Truth! Suspecting 

it's hopeless, I hazard a "Wouldn't it be nice if somebody 

made a movie that said all the right things and was also a 

good movie?" "It is a good movie!" "Why?" "Because it's 

time somebody made a movie like that!" I was under the 

impression people had been making movies like that for some 

time now; that's just the trouble. I say as much, and am told: 

"Why don't you make one then?" "As a matter of fact, I'm 

not making any movies; I'm not a filmmaker. But, look, I 

mean, you can have a good movie and a movie that says good 

things, can't you? I mean, wouldn't that be nice? Would it do 

any harm?" I'm obviously camouflaging my raging masculine 

insecurity, so she says, "We don't always have to have art all 

the time!"-and with that, pops into a now -waiting car and 

tools away, I am left with no one to ask, "Are you suggesting 

you want to cede art as an exclusively masculine realm?" 

Other screenings of Take It like a Man, Madam are held. 

Friends who receive invitations report that the watchword is: 

"The women all love it and the men all hate it. See it with a 

man[/womanj-it's more fun that way." 

There's no question that that's the most effective way to 

sell the film, if it ever does come to selling the film. (As of 

this printing, it is unknown whether the movie will be acquired 

for U.S. distribution.) But it's a damned unfortunate 

way to black-and-white the issues, either aesthetically or 

politically. My sidewalk interlocutress knew what she wanted 

the film to say; it said it and she was happy. (She also knew 

what I-or any other male-really meant no matter what I 

might actually say.) But what good does it do to preach to 

the converted? It may recharge their batteries, but will it 

effect anything else? Take It like a Man, Madam is such a 

tract film that the people to whom its commentary might be 

news are the very persons least likely to sit through it and 

learn from it; let a real-life Tove Mails tentatively recognize 

herself in the first several minutes and announce as much, 

and hubby would drag her out of the theatre to go see a 

Charles Bronson movie. 

In the film's favor-aside from, again, the hilarious center 

section - it must be said that it is not in the least hysterical, 

selfrighteous, or shrill. More importantly, it exemplifies a 

direction that, as Kathleen Murphy has suggested, more filmmakers 

might profitably take: to deal with a woman who is 

not a closet glamor-girl and not given to leaping into the 

station wagon and driving off across the .S. of A. in search 

of the romance of liberation. It is a film a out a woman-a 

person-who, like most of us, has to stay at orne and make 

the best of it. 

RTJ

MOVIETONE NEW6 

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