MOVIETONE NEW8 . - Parallax View Annex

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
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