DVR Diary: THE LONG SHIPS (1964)

Richard Fleischer's The Vikings (1958) inspired a cycle of Viking films in Europe, including two by Mario Bava, but U.S. audiences apparently had seen enough the first time. Jack Cardiff's The Long Ships, a British-Yugoslavian co-production boasting Hollywood stars, was enough of a bomb at the U.S. box office to earn a mention in the Medved brothers' Hollywood Hall of Shame book. It's perhaps the most eccentric item in Sidney Poitier's filmography: a rare if not sole outing as a villain, reportedly ballyhooed as his first "non-Negro" role. He plays a Moorish ruler, al-Mansuh, who covets a legendary golden bell forged by Christian monks generations earlier. A storytelling beggar in his territory, Rolfe (Richard Widmark), claims to know where the bell can be found. Rolfe boasts of his Viking credentials, but you might share al-Mansuh's skepticism when this clean-shaven man throws off his robes to reveal the vest and shorts that supposedly serve as his bona fides. Chased from the territory, Rolfe appears to swim all the way back home to Norse-land, to reunite with his brother Orm (the actual protagonist of Frans Bengtsson's source novel, played by Russ Tamblyn, also clean-shaven) and his troubled lord and father (Oscar Homolka in comedy relief). The bell story gets him a crew who help him steal the longship dad had just handed over to his overlord, King Harald (Clifford Evans). While Rolfe has been built up as a rogue if not an outright liar, it turns out that he does know where the bell can be found, but he doesn't quite know how to land his ship in the right location. Wrecked in a whirlpool, he and his men fall into al-Mansuh's hands, but the lure of gold convinces the Moor to build Rolfe a fresh ship for one more try at the bell. If he fails, Rolfe and his men will have to ride the steel mare, and one doesn't do that and live to tell about it....

Poitier as a Moor with Widmark as his antagonist can't help making you wonder what they could have done as Othello and Iago. That seems more in Widmark's line than the role of Rolfe. Widmark had a respectable range, encompassing irascible authority figures and psychopathic imbeciles, but he lacks the swashbuckling panache that Rolfe requires. Similarly, Poitier doesn't fully take advantage of this one great opportunity to go over the top, though he could be excused for thinking that his costumes and his pompadour wig had already done the work for him. Neither is awful, but neither is really up for the type of performance this story seems to need. Russ Tamblyn's dance background makes him more of an action-hero type, but he would have been better served by a more faithful filming of the novel. As an action film, The Long Ships is a mixed bag. There's a terribly shot battle on a beach in which Rolfe's Vikings throw a wave of spears at Moorish cavalry. Cardiff cuts to horses and men tumbling under the impact of apparently invisible missiles. On the other hand, a disastrous attempt to drag the great bell down from its perch atop a cliff is very well done, and as far as special effects are concerned the waterborne model work is mostly quite good.  The film veers in tone from tragic violence to dubiously broad comedy, e.g. the Viking's lusty invasion of al-Mansuh's harem and the general abuse of a comedy-relief eunuch. Overall, it's a more comical film than I remember from childhood viewings, and also somewhat better than my dim memories. But while it's the sort of thing I'm tempted to find inherently entertaining, I can also see why American audiences left it rather than taking it to heart.

Too Much TV: FAHRENHEIT 451 (2018)

With all the talent involved it's stunning how bad the new version of Ray Bradbury's dystopian classic is, but 2018 is probably both the right and the wrong time for dystopias. The Donald Trump presidency has put a lot of people in a dystopian frame of mind, but that creates too great a temptation to turn any dystopia into a commentary on Trump and Trumpism, which are at most symptoms of potential dystopia rather than precipitating events. If someone uses "America" and "again" in the same sentence, especially as a slogan, as is done in Ramin Bahrani's film, it's all too obvious that you're saying something about Trump that isn't necessarily relevant to Bradbury's vision. Worse, however, is the new film's preoccupation with social media as the alternative to not only literature but all the arts, demonstrated mainly by using the fronts of skyscrapers as Facebook Watch style screens flooded with comment emojis (and words!) and constant invocation of "the Nine" as the place where everyone looks at everything. The story's message is muddled for no good reason by the idea that some of the classics, at least, survive in emoji translation, as if that somehow dilutes their dangerous potential. In general, Bahrani goes for a "day after tomorrow" look rather than the more futuristic vision Francois Truffaut aspired to in his 1966 adaptation, the Second Civil War that led to the rejection of books, on the ground that they provoke ideas that in turn provoke conflict, having happened only very recently from appearances. Bahrani's 451 is arguably more about 2018 than Bradbury's or Truffaut's were about the actual dates of their creation, to the new film's disadvantage. Its presentism arguably explains its abject failure as a dystopia, since it portrays a moment where the new order doesn't really seem to have sunk in, but must still resort to terror against a resistance (the "Eels") of uncertain scope. We never do meet true believers who take the post-literate order for granted, or at least we encounter none as important characters in the story. Instead, we get a villainous authority figure, the top "fireman" of Cleveland (Michael Shannon) who appears obsessed with text, writing excerpts from literature from memory on cigarette papers only to destroy them, even as he lectures his protege Montag (Michael B. Jordan) on the perils of books. This character is too ambiguous for the story's own good, while Montag himself, Bradbury's protagonist, is fatally detached from the ordinary dull society that actually alienates him; the scenes featuring his wife (Laura Harrier) were left on the cutting room floor for some reason. Perhaps Bahrani decided that her storyline and its preoccupation with status and conformity dated the overall story as a relic of the suburban Fifties. Whatever his reason, he reduces Montag to a loner who is, if anything, egged on to explore books by his conflicted commander -- and worse, he saddles the character with a hackneyed "fathers and sons" story in which flashbacks conveniently reveal long-suppressed truths about the elder fireman's fate. For an indie filmmaker who won acclaim for social-realist views of immigrant and working-class life, Bahrani is strangely determined here to reduce Bradbury's fiction to a collection of genre cliches, down to an inept climax involving a bird infected with the sum total of human knowledge needing to fly through a hole in a barn in a race against time with Shannon's slow-motion flamethrower, distracted by a Montag angling for martyrdom. As I recall, the Truffaut Fahrenheit is generally thought of as a failure, yet in retrospect it seems superior to the new Fahrenheit in every way. It shouldn't have been so, because it really isn't that hard to see how a consensus against uncomfortable ideas could arise in our time, and it shouldn't have been hard to translate that vision to film, yet the new film pays only lip service to how appealing and tempting that reaction might be in its rush to turn Bradbury's dystopia into just another action movie.

UNCERTAIN GLORY (Incerta gloria, 2017)

Twentieth century Spain, from the civil war through the Franco dictatorship, is the new capital of gothic cinema. There's something morbidly picturesque about the ruined architecture and the passionate politics that has inspired not only Guillermo del Toro but other filmmakers as well. There's nothing supernatural about Agusti Villaronga's film or the Joan Sales novel, one of the classics on the civil war, that inspired it, but the mood is inescapable. Ruins, crypts, corpses abound, and these details make gothic what could almost as easily, from a different aesthetic vantage, have been film noir. From the country that gave us Paul Naschy and The Spirit of the Beehive, gothic seems right somehow.

The story focuses on a quadrilateral of characters: the Republican soldier Lluis (Marcel Borras), his wife Trini (Bruna Cusi), his buddy Soleras (Oriol Pla) and the local aristocrat, the Carlana (Nuria Prims). We meet the Carlana first as she barely escapes with her life when an anarchist army overruns the Carlan's estate and executes him. She convinces the soldiers that she was just a sexually-exploited maid, and now she continues to occupy the property. Looking to her children's future, she wants them recognized as legitimate heirs to the land. As no witnesses to her marriage to the Carlan to survive, she looks to Lluis to help persuade some local peasants to perjure themselves by swearing under oath that they witnessed the wedding. She's made it clear to lonely Lluis, far from home and wife, that helping her with this is his best chance at getting to ride more than the Carlan's horse.

The Carlana is a black widow, a noirish femme fatale willing to kill her deadbeat dad when he shows up to extort money from her, yet you can't help empathizing if not sympathizing with her survival instincts given the savagery of the anarchists and the brutality (we learn of it later) of most men she's known. Amid the collapse of civil society it's every woman for herself as everyone struggles to keep their heads above water. While Lluis's loyalty to Trini wavers, Soleras, struggling with his own desire for Trini, changes sides altogether, going over to the Falangists in a sort of protest against Lluis's imminent infidelity. Chickening out of a suicide attempt, he vents his spleen at the Carlana, invading her sanctum and forcing her at gunpoint to strip and reveal the scars of past tortures.

Lluis and Trini try to reconcile but their child's illness brings a new crisis. Medicine for diphtheria is in short supply on both sides of the war, as Soleras unhappily admits, but someone of the Carlana's standing can deliver the goods -- for a price. The price she extracts from Lluis for his son's life is Soleras's death. Fortunately, Soleras is more willing to pay that price than Lluis did, but what good does any of this do anyone while the war grinds on. A closing air raid blends into newsreel refugee footage, with some of our actors added, to suggest that any victory in such an environment is only temporary.That's the moral of this vividly shot picture -- cinematographer Josep M. Civit runs the gamut from the funereal darkness of the crypt to the blazing light on the landscapes. It's more a sensational, psychological piece than a historical or political drama: the foreign viewer won't learn much about the civil war from Uncertain Glory, apart perhaps from how it was experienced on an unideological individual level. You don't really need to know what any side stood for to appreciate the film's human drama and its dramatically picturesque presentation. At a time when societies everywhere seem to be coming apart, it might seem less like a period piece and more like a premonition in its gothic timelessness.

On the Big Screen: MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (2017)

After an unlikely period as a director of high-profile tentpole pictures -- Thor, Jack Ryan, Cinderella -- Kenneth Branagh returns to more personal filmmaking with this new adaptation of Agatha Christie's beloved novel, previously filmed to great effect by Sidney Lumet in 1974. It's a more personal picture this time because, unlike those recent efforts, this one stars Kenneth Branagh, following in the prominent footsteps of Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov, and the deeper tracks of David Suchet, by taking on the role of Christie's fussy Belgian, Hercule Poirot. For that you need an accent and a moustache. Branagh's Poirot accent -- I don't know whether it can be described accurately as a Belgian accent -- is at least superior to his attempts at an American accent; he's one of the few British actors who can't really do that well. It's with the moustache that Branagh really tries to differentiate himself from past Poirots. Certainly the preemptive favorite for the Best Moustache Oscar, should that category suddenly come into being, it's big, brown and bristly where the typical Poirot look is small, black and oily. As the years tell on the former boy-wonder actor-director, you wonder sometimes whether this is a Poirot mystery or The Sam Elliott Story. Ultimately, however, there's no mistaking the familiar story of a murder with a seemingly ever-expanding number of likely suspects, and if you've seen the Lumet movie (I have) or read the Christie original (I haven't) the only suspense the new film offers is whether Branagh's writer, Michael Green -- who was very busy this year with Wolverine, Alien and Blade Runner sequels -- would dare change Christie's ending. Spoiler alert: he doesn't.

That leaves it up to Branagh and his cast of actors to make the story fresh in other ways. There are some stabs at progressive casting that let Penelope Cruz and Leslie Odom Jr. into the picture, but only Willem Dafoe as the Pinkerton man (with an extra level of imposture) is arguably an improvement over his 1974 predecessor. The other actors aren't bad, though Michelle Pfeiffer goes maybe too far over the top, but as a director of actors Branagh, for all his Shakespearean experience, is no Sidney Lumet. He proves that further by indulging in overblown camera movements in an effort to give what should be an economically staged story -- apart from the Orient Express's necessarily luxurious furnishings -- a quasi-epic feel. If two characters are chatting in a boxcar, he'll have the camera hovering at some distance, and then he'll have it rise from below, or descend from above. Toward the end he rolls out a long shot following Poirot through a number of train cars, but it only reminds you that he'd done a much more impressive tracking shot in his debut film, Henry V, nearly thirty years ago. He even gives Poirot a Bond-style prologue as a mystery-solving peacemaker in the Old City of Jerusalem, and for all we know, given the nod toward Death on the Nile at the very end, he may have a franchise in mind, if audiences demand it. The theater where I saw the film is a neighborhood arthouse where the audience skews older, and there was a healthy crowd for a second matinee on a cold November afternoon, but I doubt the houses will look the same at the multiplexes. If he wants and gets another chance at Poirot I'd recommend that Branagh not go for the pre-sold titles but look for stories that have not been filmed as theatrical features. His Murder is not a bad film by any means, but in the end it did nothing to make me forget the Lumet film or what I knew to expect from the Christie mystery. But as someone who remembers a 43 year old movie fondly, perhaps I wasn't this film's target audience. Maybe those who know nothing of Agatha Christie or Sidney Lumet are the ones who'll rightly decide this film or this franchise's fate.

Pre-Code Parade: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (1931)

Like the original film version of The Maltese Falcon, Josef von Sternberg's adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's 1925 blockbuster novel is overshadowed by a remake. Sternberg's American Tragedy has the extra misfortune of being overshadowed not only by George Stevens' 1951 A Place in the Sun, but by a previous screenplay that was never filmed. Shortly before, Soviet montage master Sergei Eisenstein apparently got the green light from Stalin to try and make good in Hollywood. He wrote a treatment of the Dreiser novel that David O. Selznick privately praised as one of the greatest screenplays he'd ever read, but he also found it overlong and prohibitively depressing -- if not also too subversive, Eisenstein and Dreiser both being leftists. Sternberg got the project, with an all-new screenplay, and while he might seem an unlikely candidate for such a piece of social realism, known as he is today for his glamorous work with Marlene Dietrich, he had made his name with an independent project, Salvation Hunters, that dealt with working-class striving. He also had an interest in a certain sort of criminal mind that found later expression in an adaptation of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. All of that notwithstanding, his version of the Tragedy is regarded as a botch and is rarely seen today, while it was regarded by Dreiser (who was dead when Place in the Sun came out) as a crime against his vision. I have to confess that I never made it through the novel, which is vast, but I read enough of it to understand what Dreiser was griping about. The Sternberg film gives short shrift to the background and upbringing of protagonist Clyde Griffiths (Phillips Holmes), starting him out already established as a Kansas City bellboy. More importantly, Dreiser sees Griffiths, a character based on a real-life murderer, in determinist fashion as a product of his socio-cultural environment, driven to strive for social advancement and ready to sacrifice one love for another when that stronger passion dictates. The 1931 film, however, seems to come down on the interpretation of Griffiths advanced by his defense attorney to save him from the death penalty, which is that Clyde is essentially a "moral coward."

Clyde's on trial for his life because his efforts to dump a working-class girlfriend (Sylvia Sidney) for an upper-crust counterpart (Frances Dee) ends in disaster, despite his last-minute decision not to murder the poor girl. It involves a boat on a lake in a way that suggests that the nearest spiritual adaptation of the novel is F. W. Murnau's Sunrise, even if the girl in that film doesn't die and the poor couple has a happy ending. Sternberg's Tragedy is disproportionately dedicated to the climactic murder trial, which, to be fair, is the most entertaining part of the picture, thanks to the dueling bombast of Irving Pichel, as the prosecutor, and Charles (Ming the Merciless) Middleton as a defense attorney. Even A Place in the Sun is to a large extent a trial picture, one that most likely earned Raymond Burr, its prosecutor, his career-defining gig as defense attorney Perry Mason. Pichel and Middleton, both charismatic hams with great voices, give Sternberg's film moments of not just life but fun as the lawyers threaten to throw down and fight right in the courtroom. Pichel, probably best remembered as an actor for his ultra-creepy supporting turn in Draclua's Daughter, really gets to shine as the prosecutor methodically demolishes Clyde's defenses. He and Middleton damningly expose the film's fatal vacancy, which is Phillips Holmes' performance, which really does very little to make you sympathize with Griffiths (as Montgomery Clift manages in the Stevens film) even as you concede his guilt. Holmes always has struck me as a superficial pretty boy, and this film only proves that he never had a tragic hero in him.

As for Sternberg, there's little he can do stylistically with a courtroom drama, though there's one startling scene, when a spectator is ejected from somewhere near the nosebleed seats of the courtroom for heckling Clyde, that gives you a shocking sense of the almost literal theatricality of the whole event. There are some other isolated moments of pictorial or storytelling genius, the former when a fatal joyride is filmed from the outside, looking through the windshield of Clyde's car, the latter when the camera follows Clyde and the rich girl paddling their way into a boat party cacophonous with singing and laughter that all goes silent instantly when gunshots are heard, as Clyde's boat continues gliding through the muted crowd. Otherwise, either the story or the stars fail to inspire Sternberg to make something distinctive or characteristic of the material. Because I think Sternberg more capable of doing justice to the subject than others may believe, I find that a minor tragedy in its own right.

DVR Diary: THE NEW LAND (Nybyggarna, 1972)

Jan Troell's two-part naturalist epic about Swedish immigrants in the U.S. was some kind of weird, only-in-the-Seventies phenomenon. Part one, The Emigrants, was nominated for Best Foreign-Language Film of 1971, and returned in a edited-down English dub (it played with subtitles instead in some markets) and got a flat-out Best Picture nomination in 1972, while New Land (the original title translates to "The Settlers") was up for Foreign-Language Film. Most freakishly considering the grim content of these films, they inspired an American New Land TV series in 1974, but at last reality reasserted itself and the show died a quick death opposite All in the Family on Saturday nights. Troell shot the two films simultaneously, adapting a tetralogy of novels by Vilhelm Moberg, Nybyggarna being the third book. New Land thus resumes the saga of Karl-Oscar Nielsen (Max von Sydow), his wife Kristina (Liv Ullmann) and his brother Robert (Eddie Axberg), who struggled their way from Sweden to Minnesota in The Emigrants. Like that film, New Land is episodic rather than strongly plotted, probably in keeping with the Moberg novels. So a lot of stuff happens. Robert grows impatient to strike out on his own and finally leaves for the California gold fields, only to return flush with cash. Kristina battles homesickness and keeps having kids until a doctor says to stop, but then keeps on trying. Karl-Oscar makes constant improvements to his farm, deals with new Swedish neighbors who threaten to bring the old country's religious conflicts to Minnesota with them, volunteers for the Civil War only to be rejected due to his limp, and sits out the suppression of a violent Sioux uprising to tend his ailing wife.

Troell may have been depending on his superstar leads, king and queen of Swedish thespians, to dominate the film, but the most interesting things happen to other people. To be specific, the most visually interesting things happen to other people, perhaps Troell felt he had to be more creative as a director when von Sydow and Ullman weren't on screen. The main case in point is the long flashback telling the truth of Robert and his buddy Arvid's (Pierre Lindstedt) misadventures en route to California. Scored with modernist percussion, the sequence is an increasingly delirious montage climaxing when the Swedes get lost in a desert chasing a mule. Arvid dies after drinking from a poisoned stream while Robert contracts yellow fever (or some variant on the blood-coughing Movie Disease) tending his dying Mexican guide. He strikes gold quite by accident by inheriting the guide's savings in gold coins, but foolishly exchanges them (I assume he thought they'd prove he didn't literally mine gold) for Southern Bank of Indiana notes that are worthless back in Minnesota, where he presents them to his brother and sister-and-law as triumphant gifts. While most of the two films are paced and shot so they seem like windows into the actual 19th century, Robert's story feels very much like a Seventies movie, and it's the closest Troell gets to making the Swedish equivalent of a spaghetti western. The other major sequence, the Sioux uprising, feels more like an American revisionist western of the period.That's not to say Troell sympathizes with the Sioux, though Karl-Oscar is told by another immigrant that, while he may not personally have stolen land from the Indians, he definitely purchased stolen land. Instead, the uprising is introduced with an atrocity sequence, the massacre of a Swedish family, that arguably tops anything similar in American films of the time with its gruesome exclamation point of an impaled human fetus. Then, skipping over the war against the renegades, Troell just about tops that, measured by pure horror rather than raw gruesomeness, with the mass hanging of a few dozen Sioux, one swing of an axe dropping the platform under all of them while the director holds the camera to let us watch them swing.

While the most spectacular sequences are only tangentially relevant to the Nielsen saga, Ullmann and von Sydow are powerful enough actors to make their family scenes just about as compelling as the more violent moments. If New Land has a unifying plot it's the Nielsen's struggle with a homesickness that Kristina never really overcomes, each horror or other setback merely renewing it. Her final scene gives the film a crowning irony. Kristina's astrakhan apple tree has at last blossomed, and Karl-Oscar offers her its first ripe fruit. Barely able to bite into it, she's enraptured by the smell of it. "I'm home!" she says, but the tragic truth is that, in her delirium, "home" still means back in Sweden. There's a further irony in the denouement: by the time of Karl-Oscar's old age, his children have fully made themselves at home in the new land, but in doing so they've ceased to be Swedes. An old neighbor has to write to the old country of Karl-Oscar's death because his children don't know the language. An American superpatriot might say that's just as it should be, but the loss that goes with the process is still tragic, while Troell, still observing from a Swedish perspective, leaves viewers questioning whether everything really was worth it. In a sense he isn't telling the full story because the Nielsen children get short shrift in the last half of the picture, but it may be the same way in Vilhelm Moberg's novels. In any event, Seventies cinema tended to question the purpose of almost every endeavor once taken for granted, and in that respect Troell's immigrant films are quintessential Seventies movies.

On the Big Screen: BEN-HUR (2016)

I was probably the youngest person at a screening of Timur Bekmambetov's film this afternoon, and I am not a young man. The word is that Ben-Hur is bombing, and I think I understand why. This third Hollywood version of Lew Wallace's "Tale of the Christ" is by no means a B-movie, but for anyone to whom "Ben-Hur" means anything, the fact that a remake of the Oscar-winning 1959 blockbuster is not being treated as a tentpole event must make it look sight-unseen like a poor imitation of both the William Wyler epic and its 1925 precursor. In 1959 there was no bigger tentpole than Ben-Hur; probably something bigger couldn't be imagined. Biblical or Bible-era epics were the superhero films and CGI extravaganzas of their day, just as contemptible in many critics' eyes and just as compulsively spectacular for the masses. By then, Ben-Hur had set the standard for spectacle for generations, in theater before movies. If you had a big action climax in a movie you called it your "chariot race." But when was the last time your chariot race was a chariot race? Movies can soar in so many ways now that they'd seemed to pass Ben-Hur by, so that to remake the story again with such inevitable modesty as one must have in the 21st century must seem like an insult to those for whom the Wyler film was the biggest thing ever.

By now, you've probably detected a note of regret implying that the 2016 film has gotten a raw deal. So let me end the suspense by saying that Bekmambetov's movie is an often-worthy remake into which a lot of creativity has gone, that it shouldn't be judged by comparisons of scale to previous versions of the story or the hype surrounding them, and that I recommend it despite the way it trips across the finish line and falls on its face.

While some people may dismiss the new Ben-Hur in advance as another product from Bible-film purveyors Roma Downey and Mark Burnett, it's still a film from the director of Nightwatch (and, alas, Wanted), co-written by the screenwriter of 12 Years a Slave. It is no mere "Bible movie," though the biblical parts are certainly its weakest. Inevitably it embraces Christianity, but it does so almost in pragmatic rather than proselytizing fashion, its message being that Jesus's message is the only thing to keep people from destroying themselves and each other. But it's a minimalist, theology-lite Christianity that boils down to little if not nothing more than "Forgive Your Enemies." Unlike the previous Hollywood Ben-Hur films, this one looks Jesus in the face and lets him talk, but in the most perverse casting choice of the year the actor who played Frank Miller's god-monster Xerxes in the 300 films here plays Our Lord & Savior. While the new film departs from its cinematic predecessors in normalizing Jesus -- watching the Wyler film I can't help wondering whether Jesus was horribly deformed, given the way one Roman reacts to that face we can't see, though a Roman in a similar situation reacts the same way to Rodrigo Santoro here -- it also departs from Lew Wallace's story (or so I assume, not having read of it) in important and interesting ways.

Part of the modesty of scale that has handicapped the new film is that it comes in at nearly 90 minutes shorter than the 1959 film. Keith Clarke and John Ridley do this by eliminating the Nativity prologue and, more significantly, the whole storyline of Quintus Arrias, the Roman admiral who adopts Ben-Hur as his son and secures a pardon for him after the wrongly-condemned galley salve rescues him during a sea battle. The new writers prefer to have Judah Ben-Hur (fourth-generation film dynast Jack Huston) a criminal and fugitive when he returns to Jerusalem for vengeance on his enemy Messala. As for the Roman antagonist, his is the most dramatically altered storyline. In the new film, Messala Severus (Toby "Koba" Kebbell) is Judah's adopted brother, his own family having been disgraced, if not condemned, for its participation in the conspiracy to assassinate Julius Caesar. Some wags have speculated that Messala has been made Judah's brother to preempt the homoerotic reading of the story inspired by Gore Vidal's  purported injection of subtext into the 1959 screenplay. But given that Clarke and Ridley have Messala fall for Judah's sister Tirzah (Sofia Black D'Elia), establishing a family tie need not rule out any shipping or slashing between the men. In any event, brotherly love prevails until Messala, feeling alienated as a practicing pagan among Jews, enlists to reclaim his Roman heritage. Before that, to show what a good guy he is, we see him and Judah drag racing in Bronson Canyon until Judah's chariot hits a rock and tosses him headfirst to the ground. Messala's own ride having run away, the Romano-Judean carries the unconscious Judah all the way back to the city. Throughout, we're reminded of the almost unbearable pressure Messala is under to prove himself and restore his ancestral family's good name by getting tough with Judean insurgents. Even past the point of no return, certain moments illustrate his horror at what has happened. Just before the chariot race, as Judah guides his team to their starting position, we see Messala in the foreground, leaning his head forward on his arms as if struggling to absorb what's about to happen. Even during the race, the film softens Messala by having him do without the scythes on his chariot wheels that did so much damage in the 1959 race. In sum, the new Messala is an intriguingly, evocatively ambiguous figure, at once embodying the arrogant occupier and the unassimilable immigrant. He threatens to be irreconcilably Other, except that this Ben-Hur is doggedly dedicated to reconciliation.

Meanwhile, Judah starts out dangerously ambivalent toward the enduring Zealot insurgency against Roman rule. He doesn't believe in violent resistance himself -- and for that is accused of privilege -- but can't bring himself to rat out Zealots when the returned Messala, now the right hand of Pontius Pilate (Pilou Asbaek), asks for help in pacifying Judea. Judah believes in peace but has no clear idea of what peace requires. He's unimpressed by his first encounter with Jesus, who you may be surprised to learn plied his carpentering trade in Jerusalem for a time. When Jesus tells him that God has a plan for everyone, Judah asks how that's different from slavery. Perhaps tellingly, Jesus doesn't have an answer to that just yet. Whatever Judah's plans are, they begin to unravel when he ends up reluctantly harboring a wounded Zealot who takes the place of a loose roof tile as the instrument of doom for the house of Hur. When Pilate and his army make their entrance into Jerusalem, after Judah and Messala have tried to discourage violence, the Zealot can't resist the opportunity to take a pot shot at Pilate and incriminate his hosts. The entry into Jerusalem is one of the new film's best scenes. Because the script has emphasized the importance for both Messala and Judah of the event going off peacefully, tension is established early. It's heightened when the Romans come in chanting belligerent sounding marching songs in Latin, almost as if daring the Zealots to do something. Making Pilate the victim of the roof incident rather than some pointless, otherwise nameless Roman also helps tighten up the plot.

From here the plot develops in familiar ways, apart from Judah washing up after the sea battle directly into the custody of Sheik Yilderim (Morgan Freeman). The sea battle has been the most acclaimed part of the new film so far, since it's probably the easiest part of the 1959 film to top. However, the CGI skies and waters don't look that much less fake than the studio tank Wyler had to use. On the other hand, Bekmambetov's strategy of staying inside the doomed galley, with only fleeting glances of the action through oar windows until the ship is rammed, earns the scene some honest suspense, as does Judah's climactic escape, which requires him to unchain himself underwater from a line of drowned men. Freeman's Yilderim is a more ruthless character than Hugh Griffith made him in his Oscar-winning 1959 turn. The sheik is ready to turn an escaped galley slave over to the Romans until Judah shows some horse-whispering and horse-doctoring skills that will make him useful to a breeder of chariot-racing animals. Yilderim is a realist whose cynical wisdom comes from futile experience as an insurgent against Rome. The most you can do to Rome, he advises Judah, is humiliate their champions in the no-holds-barred environment of the chariot circus. Since chariot racing is for all intents and purposes a death sport, racing for Yilderim gives Judah an opportunity to embarrass Rome and kill Messala, especially after Yilderim makes immunity for Judah part of his bet with Pilate.

The 2016 chariot race has been criticized, mostly, as a poor, CGI-fake imitation of the 1959 race contrived by Wyler, Andrew Marton and Yakima Canutt. But I don't think Bekmambetov need be embarrassed by comparisons with 1959 or 1925. While CGI allows him to come up with plenty of new stunts, the 2016 race is also soundly structured dramatically. Yilderim has advised Judah to hang back for the first half of the race, since the front of the field will be a demolition derby early on. Since Messala heads for the front immediately, this means the two antagonists will be separated for half the race. The new film solves this problem by giving each man a preliminary antagonist, Judah a bald Egyptian in the back of the filed, Messala a turbaned lunatic up front prone to yelling "I kill you!" These early rivalries are punctuated by disasters befalling other drivers, all of which sets us up nicely for the main event. Some of the stunts are frankly preposterous. To top Charlton Heston's somersault bump, Huston actually falls out of the chariot and is dragged for a seemingly-lethal period of time before he pulls himself back in by the reins. Other moments are brutally spectacular, and one of my most vivid memories of this movie will be of one chariot tumbling into the seats and the horses running amok in the stands as spectators flee in all directions. Overall the 2016 chariot race works as a climactic action scene, and thematically as well. In a way it exposes Judah and Messala's feud as irrelevant and petty, since all the other drivers seem ready to kill each other with nothing personal entering into it. It also exposes the hollowness of the symbolic vengeance on Rome Judah and Yilderim hoped for. As Yilderim enters Pilate's box to collect his winnings, he sardonically consoles Pilate over the Roman's defeat.  Strangely, Pilate doesn't feel defeated at all, apart from the money he's losing. Surveying the Judean mob that's swarmed onto the track to celebrate Judah's victory, some of them bouncing a seemingly-lifeless Messala about like a meat puppet, Pilate observes that they're all Romans now.

By the way, this film's Pilate is rather unbiblical in one important respect. In the Gospels, you get the impression that Pilate doesn't know Jesus from Adam when first presented with the prisoner, and of course he famously states that he finds no guilt in the man. Here, Pilate actually witnesses an impromptu Jesus sermon after the carpenter rescues some petty thief from a stone-throwing lynch mob. Hearing Jesus preach forgiveness, Pilate advises Messala that the carpenter will prove more dangerous than any Zealot. Violence can be answered by violence, after all, but what is Rome's answer to Jesus's message. The answer, of course, is crucifixion, and since the Sanhedrin isn't shown at all in this picture, there's no doubt where it places responsibility for Jesus's execution, which has been foreshadowed both by Judah's march to the galleys, arms tied behind him, which Jesus witnessed, and Judah's floating on a cruciform fragment of a ship's mast.

Jesus's capture at Gethsemane begins Ben-Hur's death plunge. I suppose there was no way to escape the ending we got given how the screenplay had harped on forgiveness and reconciliation, but even if you still believe that Christianity is capable of achieving those results you'd probably concede that this film's resolution is way too good to be true. Lew Wallace himself would probably think so. For the most part, of course, the denouement follows the familiar story. Judah tries to intervene during Jesus's march to Golgotha but is told to stand down by the condemned man, who goes to death willingly. Judah watches the crucifixion and hears Jesus's dying words, "Father, forgive them..." making an especial impression by provoking flashbacks to better times with Messala. Upon Jesus' death a healing rain falls, curing Judah's mother and sister of the leprosy they contracted in a prison where they were sent by Messala's subaltern without his commander's knowledge; the man had explained to Judah that he'd wanted to save Messala from himself on this point. Yilderim uses some of his race winnings to pay for the Hurs' release. Judah heads to the Roman barracks to see what became of Messala. He survived the race (as he does in the novel, though he doesn't survive the novel) but has lost a leg. He deliriously vows revenge, promising to grow his leg back the better to kill Judah with, until Judah reminds him of the time he carried Judah home after the chariot accident. After everything, this suffices to reconcile the brothers into a sobby embrace of mutual forgiveness, and that brings Messala back into the family fold, and back into Tirzah's embrace, all of them presumably Galileans now. Obviously the writers wish this to happen, and for the film they are God, but they're the ones in a delirium for the last five minutes or so of the movie. It's an embarrassingly bad finish given how good most of the movie is, but it's not enough to sink the film, especially if you concede that this version of the story probably couldn't end any other way. If no other Ben-Hur movie existed, I suspect most people would think more highly of this one. As it is, in some respects it's better than the Wyler film or the 1925 picture. None of them are truly great films because, or so I infer, Wallace's novel isn't really great source material. But as a Ben-Hur for our time, Bekmambatov's film will do -- or it would have had people really wanted one.

DVR Diary: THE VIRGINIAN (1929)

Owen Wister's 1902 novel The Virginian is one of the ur-texts of the western genre. It contributed a phrase to the American language -- "When you say that, smile!" usually paraphrased as "Smile when you say that!" and formed the basis for at least four movies and one long-running TV series. I happen to be more familiar with the TV show than the book, which the show of necessity adapts very loosely in order to last for nine years. While the TV Virginian is one of the greatest westerns in that medium, it very quickly ceased to have anything to do with Wister's story. It can be jarring to watch an adaptation that comes closer to the source, though Victor Fleming's 1929 film is twice removed from the novel, being adapted from a more action-oriented 1904 play that Wister co-wrote. The essence of the story remains: the ever-nameless Virginian (that wouldn't be allowed to stand in a modern TV show) feuds with the rustler Trampas (who on TV was never anything but the hero's pal, and often the hero of his own episodes) and is forced to hang his feckless friend Steve (who was written out of the TV show, presumably still alive, after two seasons). The hanging complicates his courtship of Molly Wood, the new schoolteacher from the east (on TV a journalist until she's murdered offscreen in the second season) but everything turns out right after the archetypal showdown in the street with Trampas.

What surprised me about the 1929 Virginian is how much of a coming-of-age story it was. This comes through the most when the film focuses on the title character's friendship with Steve. As the Virginian -- he's never called by that title but is once referred to as "that Virginia boy" -- Gary Cooper is approximately the same age James Drury was when he commenced the role on TV, but compared to Cooper, who shows some early-talkie rawness here, Drury's Virginian seems like a much more mature man. My impression was that this was the film that typed Cooper as a cowboy, but his Virginian isn't the laconic Cooper cowboy ("Yup.") of caricature, and in any event Louella Parsons suggests that Cooper got the part because he was typed already, as a he-man if not a cowboy.

Still, Cooper's Virginian is a flirtatious prankster in the first half of the film, fond of practical jokes like switching a room full of babies awaiting baptism so they'll get the wrong names. For all that, he has an ambition that Steve (Richard Arlen) lacks, perhaps because Steve has a fatalism the Virginian lacks, a feeling that it makes no difference what you do when you end up dead anyway. Like many a modern gangster or gangbanger, Steve drifts into crime because he doesn't really give a damn about anything, not even himself. There's something about him I think audiences would recognize today, while by comparison Trampas (Walter Huston) is a stock villain. The best part of the 1929 film is the sequence leading to Steve's lynching, and this is where Cooper really shows his acting strength. The Virginian is doubly horrified by the necessity of hanging a rustler and his friend's apparent indifference to his feelings or his own imminent death. The scene is softened when someone slips him a note from Steve explaining that he actually couldn't face his friend without "playing the baby," and it closes on a bromantic note when our hero after the hanging hears the call of a quail, which had been his and Steve's private code, as a kind of epitaph for Steve's untamed nature. Corny, but effective.

"Virge," as I call him, is going to take it all out on Trampas, but the bad guy drygulches him first, forcing our hero into a recuperation period under Molly's (Mary Brian) anxious care. The showdown when it comes is a nice climax to some well paced build-up of tension as Virge wanders the streets and Trampas builds up liquid courage. It can't live up to the same scene in the novel, which is the one substantial section of it that I've read, in which Wister gives us a psychologically convincing look into the mind of a man watching the minutes drain away before possible death, from Trampas's point of view. But it's still nicely put together by Fleming, and the film as a whole is pretty fluent for a 1929 all-talking picture mostly shot outdoors. I like it better than the bland 1945 remake with Joel McCrea and Brian Donlevy as hero and villain. On the level of pure story and performance, there are some episodes of the TV series I like better still -- but that's another story.

DETECTIVE BYOMKESH BAKSHY! (2015)

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

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

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

 

Above, Bakshy makes a disgusting discovery.

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

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

 

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

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

 Neeraj Kabi as the multitalented Dr. Guha.

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

On the Big Screen: CAROL (2015)

While Patricia Highsmith's novel The Price of Salt was reprinted at least once under the title Carol, it surprised me that Todd Haynes went for the alternate title for his film of Phyllis Nagy's adaptation of the book. This was never going to be a blockbuster, so I don't assume that the studio feared people confusing The Price of Salt with a diatribe against the high cost of living. Moreover, under its original title Highsmith's novel (originally pseudonymous) is virtually a canonical novel. My assumption was that The Price of Salt is a more pre-sold title than the bland Carol. So why the latter rather than the former? I couldn't tell you until I saw it and saw how Christmassy the thing is. It's Christmassy down to the period setting. December 1952 is for all intents and purposes contemporary with the 1940s setting of some of our most echt American holiday films like It's A Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story. Carol has the strange effect of reaffirming rather than subverting the notion of that period as our golden age, even though its intent clearly is to expose a cruel repression underway in those years. Its romanticism subverts any subversive intent, but the film's virtues don't really depend on subversive intent or effect. That's a good thing, since subverting the repressive sexual-moral consensus of the 1950s sixty years later would be like shooting a dead horse in a barrel. With that battle largely won, Haynes and Nagy can concentrate on character development and a convincing recreation, rather than a deconstruction, of a time when just about anything seemed possible in the U.S.A. Cinematographer Edward Lachman and the film's production designers nail the look of the period, making all the right choices of color and design. As a kid in the 1970s I saw vestiges of this world all around me and Carol matches my memories of them. Another good choice was the decision to film in Super 16mm, a more intimate format that suits the romantic story and makes the narrower frame more like a window opening directly into the past. For me, making this a nearly impeccable period piece was nearly half the battle.

The other half is the story, of course. That's pure eyes-meet-across-a-crowded-shop-floor romance, the eyes belong to posh shopper Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) and doll-department clerk Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), the latter sporting a Santa hat and helpfully suggesting, against the grain of the time, that Carol buy her daughter a train set instead of a doll. Nowadays Scott Lang's daughter in Ant-Man has a train set in her room, but Thomas the Tank Engine is something different from the deluxe affair Therese recommends, and I suppose the choice is a sort of signal beyond what these women's eyes told each other. Carol is married but estranged; she's already had an affair with a childhood BFF (Sarah Paulson) but her hubby Harge (Kyle Chandler) is desperate to reconcile, or simply to possess Carol. At stake is custody of the Aird's daughter, but despite the risk Carol is drawn inexorably to Therese, choosing a road-trip with her over spending the holidays in Florida with Harge and their little girl. Therese has a boyfriend she has no real feelings for and a BMF who encourages her to pursue her photographic vocation. Carol's Christmas gift of a pricey professional Nikon kit helps clinch Therese's identification of her with a better future for herself on every level, but her connection with her new friend transcends such calculations.

Things can't go easy in those days, but Carol is smart (presumably following the novel) in not having its heroines persecuted for their sexuality as such, but having their consummation exploited (by a private eye played by Cory Michael [Eddie Nygma] Smith) to give Harge leverage in the Airds' custody fight. On another level Carol herself is persecuted for her choices, but her subjection to inquisitorial psychoanalysis -- the story rejects the crude notion, articulated by Therese's boyfriend, that there's some psychological problem "in the background" of homosexuals --  is kept behind the curtain and is only referred to in the film. From here the film heads for a sort of Capracorn climax as Carol gives a big speech during the pre-hearing custody negotiations in which, after having ditched Therese in a panicked effort to keep her daughter, she effectively sacrifices her claim to the child, or most of it, rather than give up either Therese or her own nature. It gets positively Chaplinesque at the end, which is a wordless exchange of glances that confirm, despite all, the original exchange at the start of the film.

Like many films these days, Carol is just a little non-linear, opening with a scene that actually comes, when we return to it, very late in the story. But Todd Haynes is enough of an artist to eschew the "x months earlier" blurb that many filmmakers rely on rather than make the point cinematically without spelling things out. I still haven't seen Haynes's best known-film, Far From Heaven, for which Carol is already seen as a companion piece, but a knack for critical period recreation shown there and reconfirmed in his Mildred Pierce miniseries allows us to take Carol and Therese as authentic creatures of their time. Cate Blanchett can take care of the rest easily enough but Rooney Mara holds her own with the master thespian and takes a big step toward fulfilling the promise shown in The Social Network. There's been some controversy with the coming of awards season over critics and Academy members being steered toward considering Mara as a supporting actress rather than an equal to Blanchett. I can understand the complaint given how much screen time Mara has and Therese's nearly co-equal status with Carol in the story. It's really only the custody scene that seems to put Blanchett ahead, but I don't really have a problem (unless Mara does) with putting the two stars in separate categories. Shouldn't people who really like this film want both of them to win something? I have to admit that I haven't seen much this year to compare them with, but right now Blanchett and Mara are my favorites for distaff acting honors this year, and Carol is one of the best films I've seen in 2015.

Pre-Code Parade: THE NARROW CORNER (1933)

One of the things insisted on most vehemently in the period of Code Enforcement, from 1934 through the mid-1960s, was that movie characters couldn't get away with crimes, especially killing. Something like The Narrow Corner, despite its literary credentials as a W. Somerset Maugham novel, probably couldn't be made as a movie a year or two after Alfred E. Green's film came out. The hero (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) is clearly a fugitive as the film begins, though we don't find out why he's on the run until later in the picture. An American (or English) fugitive in exotic exile was a popular motif at this time; the idea combines the appealing prospect of starting over with the persistence of threat if not outright guilt for whatever you've done. This time there's the added terror of repeating your original mistake. Fred Blake, it turns out, killed a man back home. Green illustrates this awkwardly, in a manner presumably inspired by the Rouben Mamoulian Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, using a split screen to show both Fred telling the story and the story itself in flashback. Showing Fred talking really adds nothing to the sequence, which is highlighted by the faceless shot of a woman's hand putting a gun in Fred's hand as he grapples for life with her husband. This matters because Fred is falling in love again with another man's woman. The man is Ralph Bellamy in something like his eventual archetypal role as the loser boyfriend, the guy who gets dumped in favor of the more charismatic star. But this was still a time when Bellamy could win the girl in some of his pictures, and even when he doesn't you're in for a fight if you try to take his woman. In Narrow Corner he sort of wins but definitely loses, choking out Fairbanks in a fit of jealous rage but horrified immediately by what he's done. "I killed him," he moans in exactly the tone of voice you associate with those guilt-stricken, stupid predators who think they've done in Bugs Bunny, but before Junior can pop up and kiss him the inconsolable lug goes and kills himself. Bellamy dies, dead, as Old Ygor might explain it, Junior dies, live! The way is now clear for Fred Blake to get the girl, and as long as he can steer a boat through some treacherous reefs he and she can start over, presumably without worries over the man he did kill or the man for whose death he bears at least a little responsibility. Not that I object morally, mind you, but a lot of people in 1933 did seem to object to such seemingly triumphant immorality. For me it was just in keeping with the admirable seediness of the whole project, and it's preferable to some stories I've seen where the big twist is that the hero (or heroine) didn't actually kill anyone back home. Fairbanks, Bellamy and female lead Patricia Ellis are surrounded by a strong cast of grotesques, from alcoholic sea captains and opium-addicted doctors to cantankerous old codgers boasting of their ancient conquests in the islands. The show is purely studio and soundstage bound but the special effects for the story's dangerous sea voyages are, if modest, at least dramatically effective also. Narrow Corner is another entertaining Pre-Code star vehicle for Fairbanks Jr., for whom the period meant freedom, above all, from having to be his father's son on film. He showed a range in these few years at Warner Bros. that, his other virtues notwithstanding, he would never show again.

DVR Diary: THE EMIGRANTS (Utvandrarna, 1971-2)

 

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Jan Troell's Utvandrarna was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film of 1971, but lost to Vittorio De Sica's Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Nevertheless, Warner Bros. saw something marketable in Troell's tale, adapted from the first in a series of Swedish novels by Vilhelm Moberg, of immigrants struggling for a better life in America than they'd endured in the old country. Warners lopped something like 40 minutes off the original running time, leaving it approximately 150 minutes long, and re-released it both with English subtitles and in a full English dub to which stars Max Von Sydow and Liv Ullmann contributed their own voices. As The Emigrants Utvandrarna became one of the few movies nominated for Oscars in multiple years, with Troell nominated for direction and his contribution to the adapted screenplay -- he also did the cinematography and editing -- and Ullmann nominated for Best Actress. There was a nomination in the main Best Picture category as well this time, but awards night was a wipeout, as 1972 was the year of The Godfather and Cabaret. Still, Warners felt they had found something in Troell, who already had a sequel ready to roll and would finally report to Hollywood to make a real western, Zandy's Bride, with Ullmann, for the studio. Well, it was the Seventies and the public was in the mood, so it was resumed, for revisionist views of the American experience. Troell was the man for the job, for if anything his portrait of his homeland, presumably reflecting the viewpoint of an author who would commit suicide at arguably the moment of his greatest global fame, in 1973, is far less flattering than what little we get of America in the final act of The Emigrants.

The early acts, set in some rural backwater, are reminiscent of the more sordid revisionist westerns made by Americans. Equally far from the Swinging Sweden of the X-rated imagination or the austere Symbolist landscape of Ingmar Bergman, the Sweden of Utvandrarna is a filthy place from which anyone in his right mind would want to escape. Farmer Karl-Oskar (Von Sydow) can't support his wife Kristina (Ullmann) and their growing brood of kids -- they argue frequently over who's to blame for the expansion -- on his rocky soil. The couple ends up leading a little band of losers and outcasts -- two brothers, one of whom is cruelly accused of making love to his heifer, as well as dissident members of a local church congregation -- across the Atlantic in a wretched, life-threatening passage. In America, they struggle to make their way to the open, fertile country, depending on one man reading phrasebook sentences to strangers in the hope of getting directions. It's here that the absurdity of an English dub becomes apparent. In this format, we get the emigrants asking their English expert, in English, to ask for directions; he asks and is answered, and the emigrants ask, in English, what the American, in English, had said. That aside, I can see why Warners went for it, especially since Von Sydow and Ullmann were by then fluent in English, though it also means that the dubbed film suffers a little from the sense that the words are spoken in a vacuum, while the obvious presence of omnipresent voiceover actor Paul Frees among the voice artists undercuts the naturalist authenticity Troell was aiming for.

Around the world, it seems, the Seventies were a golden age of cinematic naturalism, providing aesthetic justification for the pervasive mud and dysfunctional personalities of revisionist westerns and genre revisionism in general. Audiences seemed to want to see the world and its people warts and all, scrubbed clean (ironically speaking) of the romanticism of generations of genre. Before the decade was out, the rigors of such films as Utvandrarna left audiences ready for romance again, but if the squalor of Sweden wasn't alienating enough, Troell filmed the story in an anecdotal rather than dramatic narrative manner, without character arcs or film-length conflicts or courtships to tighten its focus. Perhaps appropriately, that narrative style may have made the film authentically foreign for Americans, whether they saw it subtitled or dubbed. In any event, audiences were more adventurous then, or so we think when idealizing the Seventies, and Troell's grim chronicle is convincing and compelling enough to make me eager to see The New Land, the sequel, at some point. More immediate on my agenda, however, is a TCM showing later this month of Zandy's Bride, which should make for interesting comparisons if nothing else. Watch for a DVR Diary review, coming soon to this blog.

THE PLEA (Vedreba/Mol'ba, 1967)

During the mid to late 1960s Eastern European moviemakers created a cycle of black and white epics. Not necessarily epic in budget, they contemplated the past with gritty verisimilitude and an unflinching candor about the cruelties of centuries ago. I've categorized these as a "History of Cruelty" cycle, and at first glance Tengiz Abuladze's film, made in the Soviet republic of Georgia, resembles those films. It has the archaic architecture for authenticity and the eye for cruelty, though Abuladze's is a glancing rather than a staring eye. The Plea adapts the epic poetry of a Georgian literary hero, Vazha-Pshavela, and that gives the film its epic quality along with a more lyrical ambition. Abuladze aspires to cinematic lyricism, choosing his images to illustrate the spirit as much as the letter of the original verse. The screenplay itself is in verse, presumably repeating lines and stanzas from the original. Much of it is spoken in voiceover, and when Abuladze goes into montage mode his film looks like a precursor of Terrence Malick. He has the talent, and Vazha-Pshavela has the poetic authority, to make the resort to voiceover seem like the correct approach to the material. Malick's writing often falls short of poetry, to this ear at least, and this makes his use of voiceover, which when employed by anyone threatens to reduce image to illustration of spoken words, sometimes seem pompous. Somehow because Plea is based on real poetry -- and the English subtitles on the Ruscico DVD try to keep up metrically and in occasional rhyme -- word and image fit together better, more harmoniously.

 

Abuladze gets the plea of the title out of the way quickly. "Don't let me just live and breed," the narrator appeals to God. He asks for a divine madness, an unquenchable thirst for goodness, and "to grow the sprouts of joy" until death reunites him with his parents, the earth and stars. We know this narrator as a Pilgrim who wanders through the land if not also across centuries. We see him in ancient settings in a series of framing scenes in which he encounters a beautiful white-clad woman and a fat, hairy and sinister slob named Matsil. The Pilgrim idealizes the woman while he fears the bestial man, who himself covets the woman, as a devil. We return to this trio repeatedly after following other storylines. We learn when a farmer tries to shoo the Pilgrim off his land, that it had once been the Pilgrim's home, which burned down as only the woman tried to save it, while Matsil took water for himself. Later still, Matsil will marry the woman, and in short order the woman is hanged. It's pretty clear that these too are symbolic figures, but what they symbolize I'm not quite sure, except that the woman is the Pilgrim's (and the poet's) ideal of selfless love and his muse.

The real meat of The Plea is the two mirror-image stories of the feuding mountain folk, the Christian Khevsurs and the Muslim Kistins. In the first of these stories, Aluda the Khevsur hunts down Mutsil the Kistin horse thief. The two sharpshooters have a showdown that becomes a kind of epiphany for the triumphant Aluda. Discovering profound respect for the man he's killed, Aluda renounces the Khevsur custom of chopping off Kistin hands as proof of their kills. More scandalously still, he wants to sacrifice a young steer in memory of the man he now regards as a hero in his own right. For this sacrilege his own people ostracize him. They can't comprehend what's come over Aluda; it's not like he hasn't killed Kistins before. He can only be a heretic or a traitor. They order his home sacked -- which has led some observers to assume that the Pilgrim, who tells of his ruined home soon afterward, is an older Aluda.

Some even assume that Aluda is the Khevsur character in the second story, although another actor is credited with that role. This time a Kistin hunter, Dzhokola, encounters a fellow hunter, who happens to be a Khevsur, who hasn't had a good day. Dzhokola respects a fellow hunter as Aluda respects a fellow warrior and invites the man who calls himself Nunua to share his own kills as Dzhokola's guest in the Kistin village. The outraged villagers identify Nunua as an old enemy, Zviadauri, who killed two local brothers, for whom vengeance is demanded. If Dzhokola is embarrassed by his ignorance he doesn't show it. Instead, he doubles down on his hospitality principle; nobody's going to touch his guest if he has anything to say about it. But as it turns out, he doesn't. Instead, he's virtually lynched and left to watch Zviadauri die.

 

Abuladze's heroes are the men of both faiths who recognize humanity across sectarian lines. They're tragic heroes because they're ahead of their times, but Abuladze seems to question whether they were appreciated even in Vazha-Pshavela's time. I'm not sure how far in the past the two tales take place, though as noted Aluda and Mutsil have firearms, but the poet bridged the 19th and 20th centuries and the film occasionally segues to that era. The farmer who tries to shoo away the medieval-looking Pilgrim is a figure closer to our time, and as we return to the final scenes with Matsil and his "queen" we see more 19th century types as partygoers and spectators honoring the beast-man and watching the woman's execution. Out of nowhere Abuladze throws us a stunning scene of a march of beggars, led by a lame man, that scatters at the approach of sabre-swinging cavalry, leaving their leader to tumble to the cobblestones. Injustice endured, it appears, even as the culture celebrated the great poet, while the Pilgrim flees from a landscape of moderns digging graves. All he has to sustain him is the enduring vision of the woman walking toward him through a field, embodying love and goodness even after death.

I fear it would be a distraction to write down the jaw-crunching names of the Georgian actors, who do pretty good considering the constraints of Abuladze's format, but the cinematography of Aleksandr Antipenko and the powerful music of Nodar Gabunia really deserve credit for setting the director's mood with decisive eloquence. Gabunia comes through throughout while Antipenko really nails the moment when the doomed woman, as the ladder is taken from under her feet on the gallows, seems to transform into a shaft of light. They give The Plea the uniquely poetic flavor Abuladze intended, making it a uniquely successful exercise in translation from one medium to another. Indisputably pretentious, Plea also has moments of indisputable power and profundity. It deserves wider recognition as one of the great achievements of Soviet cinema.

Pulp on Film: HENRY GOES ARIZONA (1939)

Henry Harrison Conroy was about five feet, six inches in height, rotund, 55 years of age, with a spare growth of taffy-colored hair on his head. His face was moon-like, the muscles sagging quite a bit now, and adorned with a huge, putty-like nose which was forever red. In dress he was a typical down-at-the-heel vaudevillian, an old-time tragedian in manner.

- W. C. Tuttle

"Henry Goes Arizona" was published in the February 23, 1935 issue of the weekly Argosy pulp magazine, a copy of which I happen to own. The seeming grammar error presumes that one "goes Arizona" as one "goes Hollywood." W. C. Tuttle was a veteran pulp writer who specialized, to be specific, in the western comedy detective genre. He'd already been writing such stories for something like twenty years, with Hashknife Hartley being his most enduring character. Henry Harrison Conroy may have passed Hashknife in popularity. Before 1935 was over he had graduated from novelettes to "book-length novels," i.e. serials, and regularly won the Argosy cover when a new serial began. After Argosy underwent a format change in the early 1940s, Tuttle moved Henry over to Short Stories, a biweekly pulp, and continued writing about the so-called "Shame of Arizona" at least until late 1948.

Henry's first cover: Argosy, September 14, 1935.

A less flattering, more comical cover introducing a 1937 serial

This one's from 1938, after Argosy abandoned its signature red band cover format.

While Short Stories published numerous Henry stories, this 1947 issue has the character's only cover story.

By 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had recognized Argosy as a source of likely screen material. The studio had launched a successful film series based on Max Brand's re-launch of his Dr. Kildare character in a series of Argosy serials. M-G-M made movies of two Marco Page serials, Fast Company and Fast and Loose, about yet another husband-wife team of detectives. As Henry Harrison Conroy was one of Argosy's most popular recurring characters, he must have seemed a likely prospect for the Tiffany studio. Once Metro acquired the rights, the only real question was whether the studio would do the obvious and hire W. C. Fields to play Henry. The original story practically begs Fields to play the part, harping often on Henry's red nose, and the pulp character never deviates from a Fieldsian ideal, albeit in benevolent mode. For all we know, this came close to happening. We know that Fields was in negotiations with M-G-M for the title role in The Wizard of Oz. Had the great man taken that part, and had a contract come with it, he very likely may have played Henry. But he signed with Universal instead and did a comedy western of his own, or of Mae West's, in 1940. And as it turned out, the man who played the Wizard, Frank Morgan, also played Henry Harrison Conroy.

Morgan shouldn't be blamed for the botch Metro made of Henry. Florence Ryerson and Milton Merlin adapted Tuttle's origin story, and Edward L. Marin directed it. Something clearly went wrong during the production. George Murphy and Ann Morris were cast as the story's romantic leads, and publicity items described the rigors they endured while making a western, but both ended up on the cutting-room floor. Someone had decided to make Henry Goes Arizona a kiddie film. This meant creating an original character, a little girl named Molly (Virginia Weidler) as the main figure for Henry to interact with. That move killed whatever distinctive quality the Henry stories have. They're really no great shakes. I've read some of the serials and they grow repetitive in a sitcom way as each of Henry's supporting cast comes in to do his particular comedy bit. Most of those characters are absent from the movie. We're left with Henry's principal sidekick, the alcoholic but still-sharp lawyer "Judge" Van Treece (Guy Kibbee), while the irascible cook Frijole and the stock Swede ranch-hand Oscar are nowhere to be found. Instead we have Boris (Tenen Holtz), who seems like nothing else but a nod to Mischa Auer's genuinely unorthodox Russian deputy in Destry Rides Again, which had come out earlier in 1939. While Kibbee may have made a good Judge Van Treece, despite the physical mismatch -- Judge is the tall man to the right on the Short Stories cover -- in the Pre-Code era, in the era of Code Enforcement there was almost no point in making a Henry movie at all. There's nothing especially violent or salacious about Tuttle's westerns, but if the Henry series has a particular spirit to it, that spirit can be described as whiskey-soaked. Henry and Judge are epic drinkers who imbibe at every opportunity. In our time, to get the same effect, they'd have to be stoners. Yet we can't have that innocent little girl consorting with a couple of drunks, so apart from occasional mentions of going somewhere for drinks we get nothing like Tuttle's characteristic scenes of his protagonists arguing sardonically in their cups, never as impaired mentally as people suggest. Instead, we get silly scenes in which Judge convinces Molly to hide in a hay loft so he can convince Henry that she's been kidnapped, and thus motivate him to stay in Tonto Town, where in story and film the over-the-hill vaudevillian has inherited a cattle ranch from a murdered brother, rather than flee from threats of violence, only to find Molly actually kidnapped by the time he brings Henry to the barn to tell him the truth. And we get pathetic scenes in which Molly tries to shame Henry into sticking it out despite his cowardice. To sum things up, Molly is an albatross around this film's scrawny, 66-minute neck, and there was no good reason for her to be there.

I think Frank Morgan could have played a more authentic Henry. Tuttle's character has a self-deprecating attitude toward himself and a bemused attitude toward everything happening around him, especially once, in later stories, he's made the sheriff of Wild Horse County. He has more cunning than most give him credit for, or else how could he solve all those mysteries, but his preposterous appearance and laid-back demeanor keep him on the brink of recall and earn the county the "Shame of Arizona" label that stuck with the series to the end. In short, imagine what Fields could have done as Henry, and I think Morgan could have done something similar. But the screenplay reduces Henry to a fuddy-duddy fraidy-cat until he's shamed into taking a stand and uses his makeup kit to lure his enemy into a trap. In the original story Henry charges into a burning bank because he suspects a corpse will be found inside. The film keeps some incidents from the story, including a banquet that ends with an assassination attempt and Henry mistaking catsup for blood. It also expands on a bit in which Henry takes a tumble while dismounting a horse, showing us his difficulties in climbing aboard in the first place, but Morgan isn't enough of a physical comic to keep the pratfalls interesting. Just about nothing is as it should be in this picture, and yet it shouldn't have been hard at all. For all the times when Hollywood improved on pulp or slick magazine material, there are also times like this one when Hollywood tried to improve on something that really was no masterpiece for starters and only managed to make it worse. As a result, Henry Goes Arizona stands forlornly alone while W. C. Tuttle kept on writing Henry stories for another decade. In this case, M-G-M should have left pulp fiction to the experts.