The Reading Experience

The Road of Skepticism

In a series of posts about director Frank Tashlin and one of his early films, Son of Paleface, Ray Davis writes of the film's star, Bob Hope:

Buster Keaton and W. C. Fields drift mildly upwards into their personal unreal, tethered by rude tugs of slapstick and abuse. The Marx and Ritz Brothers drive reality squealing like a moneylender from the temple. Approaching sometimes the misanthropic babble of Groucho and sometimes the nightmarish openness of Fields, Hope is the first movie comedian to attain enlightenment by the road of skepticism: an absolute distrust that undercuts narrative drive, filmic convention, and his own part. On the other hand, he's not a delicate instrument; like a cartoon star, you know that if a bomb dropped on Hope, he'd be nervously wise-cracking in Hell next scene.

I agree with Ray entirely. In the great tradition of American slapstick comedy (what I also like to think of as a tradition of "carnivalesque" comedy as described by M.M. Bakhtin), Bob Hope is one of its most important figures, and perhaps the figure most unjustly left out of critical considerations of this tradition. Ray captures his "carnivalesque" qualities precisely: "an absolute distrust" of everything "serious" that informs all of his best films, right down to a distrust of his own role in the film. Not all of the jokes in all of the films work equally well--certainly not as consistently as those in the Marx Brothers films--but as a "movie comedian" his persona is just as acerbic as the other comedians Ray mentions and his best film work just as rewarding. (It must be admitted that he did make more bad films than most of the other great screen comics, especially later in his career, but his early work still holds up.)

Some viewers might object to Hope's films based on a dislike of his conservative political views. But, as with Charlton Heston, such viewers should reconsider the extremely tenuous connection between those views expressed offscreen and Hope's considerable skills as a skeptical comedian.

Charlton Heston

Charlton Heston's political descent into right-wing crankery never really made me think less of his films--at least his better ones--just as Alec Baldwin's liberal activism doesn't make me think more highly of his. (Or, for that matter, make me value Heston's films of the 50s and 60s, when he was himself a Hollywood liberal, more than those he made during and after his political conversion.) Whether actors choose to exploit their celebrity status in order to promote favored political causes is ultimately of little interest to me, although I certainly reserve the right to find their political views obnoxious, as I often did find Heston's.

Unfortunately, Heston was for the most part a rather wooden actor, so it's only in a handful of cases that one has to make the effort to separate the work from the man to begin with. Most of Heston's bad films (and there are many) fail because of poor scripts and/or his own undistinguished performances. Moreover, in some of his better films their success comes at least as much from the compensatory skills of the director (Orson Welles, Anthony Mann, Sam Peckinpah) or from a fortuitous match between role and Heston's impassivity as an actor (the various spectacles with which he is most closely identified). One remembers that Heston was in these films, but it is not his skills as an actor that make them memorable.

A significant exception to this pattern is Will Penny (1969), a relatively overlooked Western that depends entirey on Heston's sensitive portrayal of the eponymous protagonist, an aging cowboy who suddenly finds himself forming a family with a stranded married woman trying to make her way to California along with her young son. While Heston's previous "strong, silent" characers were laconically heroic, larger-than-life figures, Will Penny, though equally laconic and with his own kind of inner strength, is a modest, in some ways nondescript man mostly concerned just with surviving from season to season. Heston manages to find both the strength and the vulnerability in this man, and although the film creates considerable emotional resonance, it does not sentimentalize Will Penny and his circumstances, primarily because Heston manages to make the character's guilelessness, his essential innocence, seem genuine.

Will Penny probably belongs among the other "revisionist" Westerns of the late 60s/early 70s (The Wild Bunch, Little Big Man, Ulzana's Raid), in which the conventionally heroic view of the American West, complete with gunslingers and persevering ranchers, was subjected to vigorous critique. In this case, the West is depicted as a place of hardship for those trying to extract a living from the land, the landscape itself rather bleak and blighted, including by those inhabiting the landscape, such as Quint (played by Donald Pleasance), a lunatic preacher who with his depraved sons stalk Will Penny almost to his death. Will Penny himself seems a revisionist Western hero, an unassuming, instinctively nonviolent character who even when he rides off into the sunset at the end of the film does so less as a gesture of rugged individualism than as a consequence of his own self-understanding--as much as he loves both the woman (played by Joan Hackett) and her son, as much as a settled life might appeal to him, he knows that he is too old and too habituated to his cowboying existence to adapt and that the woman, Catherine, should not be asked to sacrifice her marriage for a life as difficult as that she would share with him.

Heston manages to convey Will Penny's struggle to resolve his own conflicting impulses--to live an ordinary family life and to be honest with himself and the woman he loves--with affecting authenticity. Indeed, his performance is probably all the more convincing because of our association of Charlton Heston with Hollywood-style heroes of great determination if little depth. Will Penny seems to allow Heston to express facets of his talent his other roles forced him to suppress. In the process, Heston's performance in Will Penny helps to de-mythologize both the Western hero in particular and the Hollywood image of masculinity more generally. I don't know for sure what the later NRA President would have thought of this, but his opinion isn't really important, anyway.

Lonely Humans

Of the reappraisals of Michaelangelo Antonioni that have appeared since his recent death, this one by Seymore Chatman at Artforum is one of the most incisive:

His greatest films appeared just after cinema moved to the wide screen. That was no accident. With the exception of Il grido (The Cry, 1957), which relied heavily on the bleak, broad landscape of the Po valley, his films of the narrow-screened 1950s were too crowded. He needed a larger format to create mise-en-scènes with enough space to evoke the emotional isolation of the characters. In L’avventura, when Anna’s friends search for her on the tiny island of Lisca Bianca, they cross the steep terrain, with the endless horizon of the sea always visible behind them. When Lidia wanders around Milan in La notte, she is isolated by the emptiness of the urban background and, in a visual climax, stunningly dwarfed by crowded skyscrapers. In Il deserto rosso (Red Desert), characters emerge singly from the ghostly fog as they watch Giuliana walk away from the car that she has almost driven off a pier. One of Antonioni’s favorite painters was Giorgio Morandi, from whom he surely learned the art of grouping. But unlike the painter, the filmmaker found no tranquillity among scattered groups, for his were composed of lonely humans, not pots.

To an unusual degree, Antonioni’s art is governed by his keen attention to the ground against which he placed his figures. Like the Abstract Expressionists, Antonioni, with his telephoto lens, flattened things against broad surfaces. Particularly in the ’60s, he sought out framing boxes; for instance, to pin Monica Vitti against the wall in L’eclisse and Red Desert. Rothko’s signature bisection of the horizontal dimension (and Barnett Newman’s of the vertical, and Mondrian’s obsession with the whole box) may well have lingered in the filmmaker’s mind. (Antonioni once famously compared his work to Rothko’s, saying that it is “about nothing . . . with precision.”) In L’avventura, he revisited de Chirico, showing Sandro and Claudia fleeing a deserted Sicilian town built in the rectilinear Fascist style. In Red Desert, and again in Il mistero di Oberwald (The Mystery of Oberwald, 1980), he experimented with background space by introducing a subtle movement in texture—a kind of crawling of the colors on walls; for example, the wall in Corrado’s hotel room after he and Giuliana make love. Like Rothko, Antonioni manipulated saturation, tone, and hue to suggest emotional turbulence. . .

Beyond brilliantly meshing visual form with theme—empty canvases with empty lives—Antonioni contributed early to cinema’s migration from Victorian narrative modes, as necessary and welcome a move as was that from Great Expectations to Mrs. Dalloway for literature. Beginning with L’avventura, his films are firmly liberated from Hollywood’s obsessive insistence on the conclusive denouement, on tying things up, whether for better (Mildred Pierce; Stagecoach) or worse (Sunset Boulevard). This was not easy or profitable for the director. The sophisticated audience at Cannes in 1960 was no more prepared than the general public to watch a film whose ostensible heroine not only disappears but is forgotten by the other characters. Probably expecting another film noir, where the body would be found and the mystery solved, the Cannes crowd booed vigorously. But, as Antonioni explained, L’avventura was a noir in reverse. Fortunately, the audience’s disapproval was quickly rejected by great cineastes and critics alike. Antonioni’s later films were no less rigorously open-ended: La notte’s tormented couple lie loveless after sex in a golf-course sand trap; L’eclisse’s couple vow to meet again and again but never do, leaving us on a dismally empty street corner in a Roman suburb; Red Desert’s neurotic heroine fails to communicate her despair to a Turkish sailor who speaks no Italian; Blow-Up’s photographer protagonist is literally erased after playing an imaginary tennis game with mimes; The Passenger’s burned-out hero, after a fruitless attempt to change his identity, lies dead in a provincial hotel room, without even the sound of the assassin’s pistol shot to mark his passing.

It is undeniably true that, whatever one thinks of individual films made by the great "art film" directors of the 1950s and 60s such as Antonioni, they did bring modern film closer to modern art and literature in their innovations with cinematic form and style. Indeed, one of the reasons the films of Antonioni and Bergman and even Robert Altman might now seem dated, quaint, out of synch with current cinematic practices is that Hollywood films since the late 70s (with exceptions, always exceptions) have essentially returned us to the days of conventional framing and Victorian narrative modes (although probably not back to the predominance of "invisible editing"--American films in particular have become increasingly hyperkinetic). If the films of Antonioni and Bergman and Bresson seem self-consciously "arty" it's partly because current films have again become so utterly formulaic.

The influence of art and literature on a filmmaker like Antonioni was not to move him to, say, adapt literary works in order to bring us filmed versions of fiction, to borrow the presitge of literature in order to convey a ready-made "quality" on the adaptation. Instead it moved to him to further explore the unrealized potential of his own medium; in Antonioni's films (as in Bergman's and Altman's), there is an effort to elevate film to the status of the other major art forms by implicitly asserting that its powers of aesthetic representation go well beyond its beginnings as "moving pictures" and "screen plays." Antonioni's films are "serious" because they take seriously the formal and stylistic possibilities filmmakers had yet to exploit in the relatively brief history of cinema. Paradoxically, the inspiration of modernist art and literature in Antonioni's case served to help him reveal more of the latent properties of film itself.

Altman and the Filmgoing Experience

Although I have boundless admiration for the work of Robert Altman in general, I've never much cared for M*A*S*H, unfortunately the film of his most popular among casual viewers. Its humor seems pretty sophomoric to me (especially in comparison with a truly great work of "black humor" set in wartime such as Heller's Catch-22) and what it has to "say" about war--it's really bad, and thus invites compensating "bad" behavior--seems rather trite. Every time I rewatch it--this time as part of a career survey of Altman's films I am hereby initiating--I think perhaps I'll finally get it, will understand why everyone else likes it so, but I never do. (I actually like the tv show much better, especially the first couple of seasons.)

But at least this time around I was able to see those things in it that are of a piece with Altman's later and better work, even how directing this film might have inspired him to further pursue its strategies, with greater success, in the later films. It may not be one of his best movies, but it probably will still turn out to be one of his most important.

M*A*S*H is, of course, an "inversion" of the war film, just as McCabe and Mrs Miller inverts the Western, The Long Goodbye the detective film/film noir, Thieves Like Us the gangster film, etc. Rather than focus on scenes of battle and heroism, it depicts the results of battles--carnage--and the decidedly nonheroic behavoir of its protagonists (except when they're in the operating room trying to undo the damage inflicted by war heroism). Rather than extolling the scene of war as one in which traditionally "masculine" virtues are revealed at their best, in which boys become men, M*A*S*H shows men acting like boys. This is presented as the most authentic response to the stupidity of war. And rather than portray war with the solemnity that might seem its due, the film offers outrageous humor, humor that exceeds in its acidity all those previous war comedies that tried to find the "lighter" side of war.

The subsequent exploded genre films will continue this strategy, reversing our expectations of the genre in question, upending assumptions about gender, in general mocking the conventional practices that pretend to represent American life and attitudes in the movies. That M*A*S*H did it first and in 1970 perhaps partly explains why this movie became popular--such questioning of inherited beliefs and conventions was surely reaching a receptive audience at that time.

M*A*S*H also shows Altman developing (or refining) what will become his signature methods and techniques, an approach that here and afterward can be identified as his distinctive (and, for American cinema, innovative) fillmmaking style. Most discussion of Altman's style focuses on his use of long takes and overlapping dialogue--both are on display in M*A*S*H, although the latter somewhat less so--but to me what stands out most in Altman's use of such techniques, including his restless camera, is the way in which it works to substantially underdramatize his films' narratives. This can be seen in M*A*S*H, and also in That Cold Day in the Park, Altman's most immediately previous film, released in 1969. Both films are deliberately and episodically developed, although That Cold Day in the Park is ultimately more linear in its narrative strategy that M*A*S*H, which is literally presented as a collection of episodes. That Cold Day in the Park, in fact, could almost be called a thriller of sorts, although the story is told in such a matter-of-fact, understated way that one is almost caught offguard when it eventually makes its way into Pyscho/Peeping Tom territory. Sandy Dennis's underplayed performance as the psycho (again a reversal of our expectations of such a character), whose diffidence and adherence to class norms mask her mounting frustration and despair, anticipates all the similarly underplayed, ad hoc performances Altman managed to elicit in his subsequent films from all of his actors (occasionally at some cost, if Altman's reported conflicts with Donald Sutherland and Warren Beatty are to be credited).

Altman's style and his unhurried, off-the-cuff mode of storytelling have the effect of almost de-familiarizing the filmgoing experience. We don't expect movies, or at least American movies, to proceed in this way. Where's the melodramatic conflict, the overwrought gestures, the clearly signalled plot twists? Altman's films force our awareness of them as films, or at least enforce our recognition of the formulas employed in most other films, formulas Altman either attacks or ignores. And this happens even though the techniques Altman does employ are otherwise unobtrusive, more authentically realistic as aesthetic choices than most of those used to create "realism" in American cinema. The ultimate effect of Altman's approach to filmmaking, it seems to me, is to more fully immerse us into the filmgoing experience, make us more aware of viewing films as an experience, very much in the spirit of John Dewey's notion of "integrating the parts" I discussed in the previous post. Very few other American filmmakers encourage us to ponder the nature of aesthetic experience in its cinematic form in quite the way Robert Altman does.

In my opinion, That Cold Day in the Park actually performs this task in a more satisfying way than M*A*S*H. It is, I think, one of Altman's more underrated films, even while M*A*S*H is one of his most overrated. Its exploration of the conflict between classes and between "liberated youth" and the repressed older generation might seem to fix the film to the 60s era it to some extent does seek to render, but its very lack of affect and its unostentatious surface (the youth with whom Sandy Dennis's character becomes obsessed is not a blustering radical but for much of the film simply remains silent) lure us in and prevent it from being an obvious period piece. In some ways, M*A*S*H, with its willed anarchy and its scarcely hidden analogies to Vietnam, seems more dated. Neither film really shows Robert Altman to be the great film artist he will demonstrate himself to be in just a few years hence, but That Cold Day in the Park, at least, does announce he has the promise to become one.

Conservative and Mannered

In a post reflecting on the career of the recently deceased film director Robert Wise, Flickhead observes that

Nearly a household name during the days of West Side Story and The Sound of Music—their poster graphics were once an inescapable, integral part of ‘60s pop culture—Wise was virtually forgotten a decade later. Whether viewers who are now in their twenties or thirties will ever screen his pictures seems doubtful. Like so much of pre-1980’s American film culture, Robert Wise represents a cinematic language that’s rarely ever spoken anymore.

Wise may not be as well-known as he once was, but in my opinion it's simply incorrect to say that he "represents a cinematic language that's rarely evey spoken anymore." To the extent that Wise possessed "mannered, conservative instincts," as Flickhead also puts it, he seems to me to epitomize current Hollywood filmmaking. (I don't necessarily mean to disparage Wise's achievements; some of his films--The Body Snatcher, Born to Kill, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Haunting--are very good indeed.) The vast majority of Hollywood movies are every bit as formulaic, predictable, and vacuously "well-made" as most of the films to come out of the "machine" in operation during the so-called "golden era" that also produced a director like Wise. Although there is a more vibrant independent film culture now, I can't say that very many of the films produced by the indies seem to me particularly radical or experimental. At best these films are more idiosyncratic, less obviously commercical in content, but they're hardly groundbreaking in technique. I've seen nothing in recent years that makes me think about the possibilities of the film medium in fresh ways. (Memento came close, but Christopher Nolan's subsequent films have been notably disappointing. And David Lynch continues to provoke.) Slices of life, coming of age stories, and "quirky" comedies predominate, and we're exposed to few characters who can't be played by the likes of Ben Stiller and Jason Lee.

What made the golden age of Hollywood "golden" was that despite the strictures and conservative assumptions of the studio system, directors of more than ordinary talent and with distinctive styles--Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock, Lubitsch, Sturges--were nevertheless able to flourish. There was room for skillful, artistically respectable filmmaking despite the commercial imperatives with which these directors had to live. Now all is commerce, the cost of making films and the need to find financing on a project-by-project basis seemingly requiring an adherence to established codes and conventions. Robert Wise certainly does not belong in the same artistic company as Ford or Hitchcock, but his "conservative" approach has hardly been superseded by contemporary directors of the usual Hollywood product.

Notice: Anyone who would like to set me straight and point me to recent films that do indeed encourage us to "think about the possibilities of the film medium in fresh ways" are hereby invited to do so.

In Defense of It's a Wonderful Life

Gerard Baker calls It's a Wonderful Life "Frank Capra’s hymn to sentimentalism." Nonsense. Sentimentality is created through an excess of sentiment or feeling--in excess of what is warranted by the situation from which it arises--and It's a Wonderful Life is not excessive in any respect. It's a skillfully made film in which the strong feelings the film does evoke--but not until the very last moment--are manifestly appropriate and entirely well-earned. It is not only among Capra's least sentimental films--both Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (also great movies, nevertheless) come closer to sentimentality--but it is among the least blatantly sentimental of any of the classic Hollywood films, few of which really avoid sentimentality altogether or for very long.

I have always found it rather puzzling that It's a Wonderful Life became a Christmas-time perennial in the first place. What it has to say is actually quite un-American: wealth corrupts, the powerful are out to get you, ambition is overrated, the "American Dream" itself only leads to nihilism and despair if pursued to its logical conclusions. Some say that the character of Mr. Potter is overdrawn, a caricature of the rapacious businessman (compensating for his own deficiencies), but I don't think so at all. He's monomaniacal, indifferent to the consequences of his actions for other people, dedicated to the proposition that owning everything and operating it all according to his own notions of efficiency and bottom-line results are what life is all about. In other words, he's everything the modern CEO has proven himself to be.

Sam Wainwright, the film's "entrepreneurial" character, comes off no better. He's every bit the braying jackass his constant "hee-haws" suggest he is. Something like Sam's life, escaping Bedford Falls, "doing things," making his mark on the world through his acquired skills, is what George Bailey dreams for himself, but of course the film shows that these are not things worth aspiring to. They only separate you from life as it's really lived, blind you to your own real talents, to your own humanity, and the film finally suggests that George is well rid of them. How many Yale undergrads are going to benefit from this advice?

It's a Wonderful Life is one of the few Hollywood films, maybe the only one, to show its protagonist going through an authentic existential crisis. He's forced not just to think about what his own life has been about, but he confronts the prospect of annihilation itself, literally looks into the void of his own nonexistence. The extreme close-up of Jimmy Stewart's terrified face, looking in utter despair from side to side after his own mother has denied him, as if he's looking for some other universe to inhabit than the nightmarish one in which he's currently trapped, is, to me, one of the most frightening and truly emotion-provoking images I think I've ever seen. This is hell indeed.

George Bailey is authentically plunged, through circumstances not of his own making, into an episode of despair so profound he seriously considers suicide but after pondering the implications and the possible consequences of his act (and finally this is what the encounter with his guardian angel and the subsequent nightmare vision of Bedford Falls, though rendered symbolically as narrative, really comes down to) decides to try living again. This is sentimentality? How many of us can really say that?

It has become more fashionable to deride Frank Capra for his sentimentality, even his hypocrisy, since the publication of Joseph McBride's Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. This is a dreadfully-written, -researched, and -argued book that makes much of the fact that Capra came from a bourgeoise background and was a registered Republican. It becomes the main prop for the book's argument about Capra, that he and his films were not what they seemed, were instead simply opportunistic excuse for Capra to become famous while making movies whose "progressive" themes he didn't really believe in. This is again all nonsense. Nobody who bothers to examine Capra's body of work could say the best of his films are anything but superbly made comedies of American life that could not have the impact they do if Capra hadn't believed strenuously in his own artistic integrity. Ignore anyone who comes speaking of "Capra-corn."

I first saw It's a Wonderful Life when I was helping to teach a large undergraduate film class at a Midwestern university in the early-to-mid 1980s. We sometimes forget that this film has been a "classic" Christmas movie only for the last 15 years or so. Before that it was almost forgotten. I think it was forgotten because it is indeed a disturbing film that seemed both at odds with its Christmas setting and not really consistent with our notions of what Hollywood studio films are like. I can't really say why it was embraced in the superficial and ill-informed way characterized by Baker's remarks, but I do recall that when I watched it for the first time I was overwhelmed by it. It may have been the first movie I had ever seen that did truly earn its happy ending. I also recall that the students in the class seemed genuinely moved by it. Unfortunately, while some people may still claim to be moved by it, most likely it is no longer possible for their response to be genuine.