Grand Illusion

Grand Illusion is Jean Renoir's stirring humanist depiction of the complicated relationships surrounding a group of French officers imprisoned in German POW camps during World War I. The film is a dramatic account of the bravery of these soldiers as they attempt, again and again, to escape from the camps, not because conditions are so bad — the Germans treat them with remarkable civility and respect — but because of their patriotism and desire for freedom and sheer self-respect. As the noble Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) says, explaining his sportsman-like desire to escape, "Golf courses are for golf, tennis courts are for tennis, prison camps are for escaping." But the film is not only a prison escape movie. In fact, Renoir doesn't devote that much screen time to the actual escape attempts, condensing most of them via liberal use of ellipses. The film is much more directly concerned with the camaraderie among the soldiers, and especially the ways in which they form bonds of respect and loyalty with one another despite gaps in class and ethnicity that, in civilian life, would almost certainly have separated them irreparably.

Boeldieu is socially distinct from his fellow officers, a part of one of the last true generations of titled nobility in European high society. As a result, he comes across as aloof and haughty, constrained by manners from expressing himself openly, rarely displaying anything like emotional reactions. He stands apart from the roughness and free spirits of the other soldiers, even if they are officers like him. While the other officers take the opportunity of the Germans' hospitality to have as much fun as they possibly can under the circumstances — even putting on a hilarious stage show in which some of the men dress up in drag, sating sexual appetites so starved that even this poor imitation of femininity is exciting — Bouldieu does not partake in the festivities, always retaining his formal, noble manner. And yet it is undeniable that Bouldieu respects and even cares for his fellow soldiers, and that he earns their own admiration through his cavalier bravery and daring. He forms an especially close bond with the roughneck lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin), with whom he shares so little in common that the two men can hardly be called proper friends despite their mutual respect. The same is true of Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), a Jew who is lightly ribbed by his compatriots for his heritage, but who is proud and happy to share with them the bounty of food he receives in parcels from back home.

None of these men — there's also a bookish intellectual (Jean Dasté) and a carousing, vulgar jokester (Julien Carette), among others — would likely associate with one another outside of military life, but in these circumstances they become fast friends. Renoir frequently emphasizes their unity with group shots in which the men are tightly clustered together, leaning on one another and singing and laughing. The camera pans across their faces, so different and yet all men fighting for the same country and placed in the same situation. In them, Renoir finds beauty and humor and emotional complexity, their different backgrounds often causing them to spar or exchange joking comments, but never overwhelming their basic humanity and respect for each other.


Renoir's humanism extends equally to the German side of the war, who are without fail depicted as completely and complexly as their French counterparts. There is no demonizing of the enemy here: the Germans treat their prisoners well, and are even remarkably indulgent of escape attempts. At one point, Maréchal is punished with solitary confinement for inciting the prisoners with news of French victories in the war, but even this is comparatively tame, as is the way the Germans finally punish the multiple escape attempts of the officers only by moving them to a new prison. At this new, supposedly inescapable mountain fortress, Maréchal, Bouldieu and Rosenthal find themselves under the command of the German nobleman Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim). Rauffenstein was the ace pilot who shot down Maréchal and Bouldieu in the first place, and who greeted his enemies then by inviting them to dinner with him. Some time later, he is badly injured, sidelined as a soldier, and he takes over as commander of this prison. Rauffenstein is, in terms of class, an equivalent of Bouldieu, and the two men quickly become friends: they share the same interests, the same social circles, the same acquaintances. Bouldieu has more in common with this enemy commander than he does with any of his fellow soldiers, and he begins spending time with Rauffenstein.

The German is less tolerant than his French counterpart, tending to view the lower classes as beneath his attention, unworthy of the aristocratic status that he and Bouldieu possess. Bouldieu quietly but forcefully argues against him, not getting much traction with his insistence that all men are worthy of respect and honor, until his actions ultimately speak louder than his words: he's willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of his "common" compatriots. Throughout the film, Renoir keeps his focus on such moral and philosophical questions rather than on the particulars of the plot. His storytelling style is elliptical and lyrical, and the editing from scene to scene is often abrupt, as though each scene lasts only as long as it needs to before rapidly fading out or simply cutting directly to a very different scene.

Renoir treats time and place very loosely, carelessly eliding details about when and where things take place. In the early scenes, he cuts directly from Maréchal and Bouldieu planning to take off on a mission, to the interior of a German base where Rauffenstein is talking about shooting down a French plane. It's obvious enough what happened in between, but Renoir's extreme elisions can sometimes seem like sloppiness. It soon becomes apparent, however, that he is simply much more interested in thematic blocks than he is in narrative progression. The film's pacing is purposefully uneven, broken up into an episodic structure in which only the key scenes are shown, the rest left for the audience to fill in the blanks. Only in the film's final section does the pace slow down for an idyllic, romantic interlude at a German farm, where the escaping Maréchal is cared for and eventually comes to love a sweet, widowed German woman (Dita Parlo), whose sadness about the harsh toll of war causes her to protect Maréchal and Rosenthal rather than turn them in. These kinds of choices are at the heart of Renoir's work: to forge connections rather than sever them, to learn the languages of others, to work towards peacetime happiness and pleasure rather than perpetuating violence and aggression.

Defiance

To give you a good idea of just how obvious and leaden Edward Zwick's Holocaust survival drama Defiance is, I need only point to its opening minutes: black and white footage of Hitler, shots of Jews being rounded up by SS troops, processed to make it look "old," and then, intercut with these images, are earnest titles giving facts and figures about the Holocaust, telling us that the Nazis are rounding up Jews. Thanks, I think I've heard that story before. This epidemic of exposition is typical of Zwick, who seems to feel that he's not really doing his job as a director if he's not hitting his audience over the head with his film's grand messages. What's odd is that the film is based on a story that most people really haven't heard before, and Zwick does this potentially fantastic material a grave disservice by treating it with such a heavy hand, by warping it so that it fits into familiar Hollywood molds. There's an exciting idea here — a group of Jewish refugees in Eastern Europe escape into a forest, where they rally around a trio of tough, charismatic brothers who variously attempt to forge a community, become bandits gathering food and supplies, and seek bloody revenge on the Germans. Why then is the film so dull?

Certainly, it's not because of the central performances, which are mostly strong, albeit confined within the limited parameters of the Hollywood action hero. The three brothers are Zus (Liev Schreiber), Tuvia (Daniel Craig) and Asael (Jamie Bell), and all three actors turn in fine performances, particularly Bell and Schreiber, who show more nuance in comparison to Craig's Bond-like stone face and cold stare. Zwick doesn't allow a whole lot of emotional range here, and yet oddly enough he seems to want the story's central conflict to be between the vengeful, violent, warrior-like Zus and the more peaceful, reserved Tuvia, who prefers community building and food-gathering to making war. The film sets up a dialectic, more or less, between government and army, even within the makeshift communities and armies that these refugees manage to build for themselves. And yet this conflict never really progresses beyond abstraction, beyond a surface-level glossing of the issues involved, which are really quite heavy: the ethics of revenge, the question of collaboration and who is culpable for the Germans' crimes, the capacity for abused and tormented people to turn to violence themselves. The film raises some of these issues in passing, but never treats them with any complexity or intellectual curiosity.

There is a scene here that is very much like a certain famous scene in Alfred Hitchcock's World War II drama Lifeboat, a scene that is as famous as it is precisely for its ambiguity, for its courage in allowing the victims and their tormentors to switch places, for its willingness to treat morality in a serious way. The Hitchcock film is not one of his best, mainly because it commits some of the same sins Zwick commits throughout this film (heavy-handedness, preachiness), but this one particular moment is masterful. Zwick knows enough to rip off the scene, but he robs it of its ambiguity, its implicit morally engaged perspective; he has his heroes all literally turn their backs on the scene and walk away, essentially shrugging off any of the troublesome questions that might have been raised at this point in a better film.


The film's ponderous, clichéd quality is evident throughout its length. There are few points at which Zwick does not make the choice that results in the most obvious image, the most obvious line, the most obvious possible way of representing his story's themes onscreen. The tension between religious sentiment and intellectual socialism is represented, of course, by a kindly old man of faith and a young publisher of socialist tracts who become friends and play chess together while playfully arguing about abstractions in sound bite form. The film's themes are all so broadly telegraphed, so basic and trite, that one never gets a feel for the story as more than a high-school level civics/ethics primer. There's a visceral, exciting, thematically complex story in here somewhere, but Zwick certainly doesn't know how to tell it. He resorts, whenever possible, to formulaic plot devices that constrain a potentially remarkable story to a dull, plodding, heartstring-tugging wartime thriller.

The film's failure is most evident in its predictability, its tendency to fit this highly unusual story into a readymade story structure. Of course the camp has one loudmouth troublemaker who you just know is going to face off against Tuvia by the end of the film. Of course there's the obligatory starvation montage once winter sets in and food grows scarce. Of course by the end of the film all three brothers have women, though none of the love stories, nor the women themselves, are developed beyond the most perfunctory stage. I could go on, but why bother? The film occasionally stumbles upon some compelling images — the early scenes of well-dressed Jewish refugees appearing in the middle of a forest have a slightly surreal, non-sequitur quality that the film never goes any further with — but on the whole it's a bland, painfully dull affair.

The Road To Glory (1936)

[This is a contribution to the Early Hawks Blog-a-thon hosted right here at Only The Cinema. It will run from January 12 to January 23, 2009.]

The Road To Glory is the culmination of Howard Hawks' early cycle of World War I military dramas, borrowing elements, for better or worse, from both The Dawn Patrol and Today We Live. The resulting film feels like something of a retread for those familiar with Hawks' early oeuvre, but taken on its own merits, it's a fine wartime action flick, hampered only by its abrupt turn into overwrought melodrama in its final act. The film concerns a particularly resilient company of French soldiers during the first World War, led by the brave but tormented Captain Paul La Roche (Warner Baxter), who is driven to drink and pills by his unit's inordinately high casualty rate and dangerous assignments. His only comfort is the companionship of a young local woman, Monique (June Lang), who doesn't love him but has a certain sympathy and warmth for the brave older man — not to mention gratitude for the way he has saved and taken care of her family. This dynamic is familiar, not from one of Hawks' war films, but from Tiger Shark, since it's virtually a repeat of the older man/younger woman relationship between Edward G. Robinson's crippled fisherman and the lovely Zita Johann. Naturally, as in the earlier film, a younger, more handsome man soon enough enters the picture to disrupt this comfortable but dispassionate romance. In this film, the role is taken by the newly transferred Lieutenant Michel Denet (Fredric March), who persistently pursues the beautiful Monique without knowing her importance to his superior officer.

This romantic triangle could quickly become tiresome — and its outcome is as predictable as in Tiger Shark or any of the countless other films of the era that exploited similar setups — but Hawks conspicuously downplays the romance. The scenes between Michel and Monique are subtle and moody, touching for the way the two young lovers find in each other a brief respite from the horrors of war all around them. This symbolic quality of their love is established right from the moment they meet, when Monique takes shelter in a basement from a German air raid, only to find Michel quietly playing an abandoned piano amid the rubble. Later, with their love developing, they return to this basement for a moving scene that Hawks ends with a discreet fade to black that says it all. Hawks keeps these scenes to a minimum, but he uses Lang strikingly as a figure of hope and beauty for both of these men, who desperately cling to her.

Monique, uncharacteristically for a Hawks character, has deep religious feelings — she even delivers a cloyingly earnest prayer for the men's safety at one point — but Hawks is much more interested in the way this woman has become a religion for the men who love her, a reason to live through the otherwise suffocating horrors they experience every day. Lang's natural beauty helps in this regard, but Hawks also lovingly photographs her, imparting a nearly spiritual quality into her closeups. The cinematography throughout the film is dark and atmospheric, tending towards heavy grays and blacks with very little traces of light or brightness (outside of the occasional explosion), but the scenes with Monique are as expressionist and stylized as anything in Hawks' oeuvre outside of Scarface. Her face is sculpted from the shadows, her bright white skin glowing in the dark, her porcelain features chiseled out of the blackness draped around her. In this way, Hawks is able to inject a subtle poetry into scenes that might otherwise have been token sops to the audience's desire for romance; Hawks delivers the romance, delivers the pretty girl, but he connects her appearances intimately to the film's wartime desolation.


And indeed, in many other ways this is a startlingly bleak film, perhaps even more so than Hawks' earlier The Dawn Patrol, with which it shares many similarities. Like the earlier film, The Road To Glory focuses on the repetitive, cyclical nature of military life, emphasizing the cycles of combat and downtime, the routine replacement of the dead with new recruits, the same speeches and ceremonies recurring with predictable regularity. As usual, Hawks finds room for generous helpings of humor, particularly in the character of the blustery drunken sergeant (Gregory Ratoff) who has memorized only two songs that he whistles compulsively, or in La Roche's expansive father (Lionel Barrymore), who lied about his age in order to be able to enlist. Barrymore and Ratoff get a great, hilarious scene together in which, without saying a word explicitly, they conspire to "lose" the orders that would send the eager-to-serve old Barrymore away from the front. Hawks is always conscious of the need to relieve the gloom — he even stages some dashed-off physical gags in the midst of an urgent air raid — but the film as a whole is a harrowing depiction of combat.

Most overpowering of all, in this regard, is the lengthy sequence with the company on the front lines, doing a rotation in the trenches under heavy artillery fire. When they arrive, they find that the troops they're relieving have left behind one of their men, who is trapped in the barbed wire outside the trenches, screaming and crying nonstop. The Germans have left him alive to lure men out, and those who try to reach the wounded man inevitably get machine-gunned to death. It is a blunt, grim introduction to trench warfare, and Hawks pulls no punches in dealing with the abject horror of the situation. Equally effective is the way the trench sequence becomes an exercise in clock-watching suspense once the troops hear telltale noises beneath their feet, signaling that the Germans are digging below the ground, planning to plant a mine to blow up the outpost. Unable to do anything about it, the soldiers must simply sit tight, listening to the continual tick of the shovels below the ground, waiting for their replacements to arrive. It's a nail-biting segment, made even more unnerving by the knowledge that the soldiers are essentially just waiting to pass the fate of near-certain death on to the platoons who are relieving them. They know that somebody has to die; they just don't want it to be them. This setup seems like questionable military logic — why wouldn't they just pass the news on and get ready for either an evacuation or an attack on the digging Germans? — but it's a typically Hawksian image of fatalist, stoic masculine bravery, not only facing death but implicitly accepting it, even welcoming it.


Hawks ends this sequence with a potent but simple image: the soldiers finally walking away from their post at the end of their tour of duty, only to hear the expected explosion behind them, turning to see a plume of black smoke rising into the air. "How many men?" La Roche asks, looking for a number to attach to this abstracted symbol of mortality, this rising smoke that stands like a tombstone over the impromptu graves of many men. Hawks' visual symbolism throughout this film is very pronounced, particularly for a director who so often favored more direct visual expression.

A central sequence dealing with religion, itself an unusual subject for the worldly Hawks, finds the director playfully toying with religious icons in several different ways. He first cuts directly from a battle scene to a mass in session at a church, a puzzling change of scenery until the camera pans across the congregation and the preacher, passing over a makeshift wooden divider into the hospital ward that's been set up in the other half of the church, with the injured lying in beds as nurses scurry among them. It's a striking image, uniting the treatment of the wounded with the spiritual exaltation happening just on the other side of a flimsy wooden fence. Hawks then cuts directly from this scene back to the battlefield, specifically to an image of a grave marker, a cross, turned on its side. He holds the static image for a moment, as though suggesting that religion itself has collapsed, lost its meaning in the middle of the wartime violence, and then a soldier's helmeted head begins to poke up from the bottom of the frame, slowly rising into view. It's a playful, irreverent image, and coming on the heels of Monique's earnest prayer that her two men should be kept safe (a prayer not entirely answered in the end), it suggests nothing so much as Hawks consciously undermining the religious sentiment of the preceding scene. Certainly, none of the soldiers ever pray or mention religion; Hawks heroes always know that death will come get them eventually anyway.

The film starts to unravel a bit in its final ten minutes, diverting into melodramatic distractions that directly recycle the worst elements of Today We Live: sudden blindness (in this case happening offscreen), the quest for redemption, a sacrificial mission, and of course the need to get one of these guys out of the way to resolve the romantic triangle. It's particularly out of place because Hawks had so assiduously avoided melodrama and overstatement throughout the rest of the film, which established its wartime atmosphere with such economy and blunt effectiveness. This soapy, contrived denouement is obviously a concession to give the film some sense of dramatic closure, however unsatisfying, because otherwise Hawks seemed to be driving at an anticlimactic non-ending that would emphasize the endless circularity of death and living. The final scene, basically a restaging of the final scene of The Dawn Patrol, gets at this theme anyway, ending the film on the note of ambivalence it clearly demanded: the war will continue, men will die in great numbers, many more will take their places, and any happy endings, for the two young lovers or for anyone else, are at best temporary respites from the certain approach of death.

Today We Live

[This is a contribution to the Early Hawks Blog-a-thon hosted right here at Only The Cinema. It will run from January 12 to January 23, 2009.]

Today We Live finds poor Howard Hawks valiantly struggling against the maudlin, lumpen nature of the stock WWI melodrama he's been saddled with, trying to throw some jolts of energy into an odd, limping script. The film's most interesting subtext is its occasional flirtation with turning a typical love triangle into a square by adding the leading lady's possibly too-affectionate brother into the mix. There's a strange, unsettling pleasure to be found in this straight-faced perversity, in the way that Hawks plays up the film's sexual roundelays. Diana (Joan Crawford) is at the center of these games: she's engaged to Claude (Robert Young), who has been best friends with her brother Ronnie (Franchot Tone) since all three of them were youngsters. The three have grown up together, and maintain such a tight camaraderie into adulthood that Claude seems to be engaged to Ronnie just as much as he is to Claude, while Diana sometimes nearly seems to be marrying her own brother. It's an incestuous set-up; Diana and Claude are hardly ever alone, preferring to stroll arm-in-arm with Diana in between her brother and her lover. When they're all together, they patter back and forth in the kind of jesting, referential language that can only pass between people who have spent their whole lives together.

However bizarre the whole thing is, the trio seems happy enough, even though the two buddies are continually going off to war, and can only visit with Diana for very brief periods of time. Enter Bogard (Gary Cooper), a rich American who is coming to take over Diana's ancestral home for obscure reasons that aren't quite explained in the film — something to do with the war effort, one supposes. He shows up at a bad time, immediately after Diana has learned that her father died in combat, but she makes a brave effort to mask her feelings and show the visitor around as though nothing has happened. There are a lot of barely contained emotions in this film, a lot of holding back tears and putting on a jolly façade. The film's emotional palette seems equally derived from British "stiff upper lip" decorum — the characters other than Bogard are all meant to be Brits, though only Crawford does even a passable job of pulling it off — and from the usual Hawksian emphasis on good cheer in the face of death.


In this respect, the film is often reminiscent of Hawks' first sound film The Dawn Patrol, which used similarly clipped tones and abrupt pseudo-British speech rhythms to suggest the emotionally conflicted atmosphere of war. Today We Live recycles some of the footage from the earlier film's bombing raid scene for its aerial footage, although Hawks apparently also pilfered liberally from Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels for some more aerial footage. But the film is most reminiscent of The Dawn Patrol in its adaptation of the earlier film's condensed, laconic vocabulary; it's very rare that anybody says a complete sentence here, instead spitting out disconnected phrases and words. The characters say "right" and "stout fellow" more than anything else, this latter often directed as Crawford's character, who is praised like one of the guys for keeping her emotions in check. One is reminded also of the drunken wake in Only Angels Have Wings, in which Jean Arthur's Bonnie Lee is first tentatively accepted as one of the guys because she's able to put on a brave, cheery face rather than bawling.

To a large extent, this is what Crawford is asked to do throughout this film: there's scene after scene of her looking glamorous (often in outrageously avant-garde couture) while holding back tears. The problem is that the melodrama isn't really grounded in anything, and when Crawford essentially sticks to the same emotional register for nearly two hours, it simply becomes tiresome (or a guessing game of sorts: is she going to react to anything with something other than restrained tears and a fake grin?). These problems become apparent when, early on, Diana and Bogard abruptly declare their love for one another after hardly sharing a scene together. The film was cut substantially before release, with nearly 20 minutes hacked out of Hawks' original cut, and one can only conclude that the natural development of this romance was left on the cutting room floor. If so, things don't get much better even in the presumptively uncut later sections, because the supposedly loving couple proceed to spend much of the rest of the film apart, with only brief scenes together scattered here and there. In a way, it's a good thing; it's not like the glam, wide-eyed Crawford ignites any chemistry with taciturn, stone-faced Cooper.


Despite this romantic foundation, it's typical of Hawks that the core of the film is actually an extended pissing match in which the three men size each other up and test each other's limits. There are two lengthy scenes, one directly following the other, in which the men take turns testing one another. Bogard is in the air force, a bomber pilot, and he looks down on Ronnie and Claude, who man a small boat on mysterious but obviously dangerous missions from which they often return wounded. Despite this, the boat crews are routinely mocked by the other military men, who tend to assume that these little boats don't leave the harbor, and that their crews know nothing of real combat. It's with this mindset that Bogard brings Claude along on one of his bombing runs, enlisting him as a gunner; he intends to shock the cheerful young man by showing him what "real war" is like. Claude of course keeps his head, blasting enemy planes out of the sky with a broad grin on his face the whole time. Despite the recycled footage in this sequence, which is not nearly as well-paced or as skillfully assembled as the viscerally thrilling battles in The Dawn Patrol, Claude's gleeful shooting is a blast. Hawks follows this scene with one in which the boat guys return the favor by inviting Bogard along, proving that their work is equally dangerous and important. It's a great bit of Hawksian dick-measuring, a game of "who faces death more bravely?"

But the film's finest hat-tip to mortality is the hilarious funeral for Claude's poor pet cockroach, an unlikely victim of German gunfire. The airmen hold a lavish funeral for the roach, flanking his matchbox home with candles and singing drunken songs of mourning for the little guy. No one was better than Hawks at turning funerals into causes for celebration and morbid humor, and this short bit has to rank up there with the best Hawksian wakes. Even better is the earlier scene when Diana helps Claude and Ronnie catch this roach in the first place. She scurries around on the floor, grinning widely, and then Hawks inserts a closeup of the roach crawling across a woman's hands, joining Crawford's glamour and femininity to this image of filth and abjection. It's a bizarre and memorable moment.

Today We Live is at its best when Hawks is able to bring out such nasty, uncomfortable, conflicted emotions in this story, to exploit the weird incestuous triangle at the story's core. Because really, Cooper's Bogard is almost extraneous to the film's romantic substance. The real sexual tension is between the brother, the sister, and the best friend, as exemplified by the scene where Claude and Diana tell Ronnie, somewhat shamefacedly, that they "didn't wait" (a bold moment even by pre-Code sexual standards). Ronnie's response, of course, is a joyful smile spreading across his face, to express his profound happiness that his best friend is having sex with his sister. Hawks has a lot of fun with this stuff, bringing his playful sensibility to this often tired material whenever he can. But as good as the film often is in isolated moments, he ultimately isn't able to elevate the film much above its standard melodramatic plot.

The Dawn Patrol (1930)

[This is a contribution to the Early Hawks Blog-a-thon hosted right here at Only The Cinema. It will run from January 12 to January 23, 2009.]

Howard Hawks' first sound film after a string of silents, The Dawn Patrol is as technically rough, ragged, and uneven as one expects an early talkie to be. And yet the film is undeniably potent and enthralling, as well as displaying many of the characteristics that we have come to think of as Hawksian: it seems that the director's aesthetic and signature concerns were forged relatively early. The aviation film is of course perfectly suited to Hawks, and he would return to this subject many times over the course of his career, including for one of his most successful slightly later works, Only Angels Have Wings. The flying milieu provides Hawks, readymade, with all the elements he needs to craft his aesthetic: the tough, manly men facing death with bravado; the constant threat of mortality hanging over everything; the responsibility of leadership; the aerial adventures and daring of the fliers. As in his later aviation films, Hawks primarily uses this genre to explore the behavior of men who are continually confronted with their own mortality and the mortality of their friends and loved ones.

The film centers around a squadron of World War I bomber pilots located not far from the German lines, and therefore repeatedly called upon to undertake incredibly dangerous missions at or even across the enemy lines. The constants of this squadron are Dick Courtney (Richard Barthelmess) and Doug Scott (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.), two ace pilots who have earned veteran status simply by surviving for the longest amount of time, as their squad mates cyclically die and get replaced by new recruits. The two are inseparable friends, united in their defiance of death, though as the head of the seven-man A-flight, Courtney has the heavier load, feeling personal responsibility for each man he loses in battle. This responsibility weighs even heavier on their superior officer, Major Brand (Neil Hamilton), who receives his endless supply of near-suicidal orders with a heavy heart, knowing that his protests will do no good, and he'll have to keep ordering his men into danger. He does this with regret, but with a stoic dedication to duty that earns him the ire of Courtney, who needs to transfer his own rage somewhere.


The film's central theme is the cyclical nature of war, de-emphasizing the individual in order to show the constant stream of bodies, young men being thrust into positions opened up by their now-dead predecessors. The film's structure ingeniously displays the repetitive nature of combat, with certain key scenes reappearing at intervals like recurring motifs in a piece of music, slightly altered each time to accentuate the changes that have occurred in between repetitions. One such scene is the one where the squad's commander sits in his office listening to the sound of the planes returning from their latest mission: he counts the number of motors he hears and can therefore tell how many of his men have returned, and how many died in battle. Hawks places the audience in the position of the commander, listening to the motors swooping in on the soundtrack, trying to count the number of planes. There are many scenes in which Hawks does show the aerial combat, but he almost always cuts away from the battle before its conclusion, so that he can return to the base for that tense, uncertain moment, the commander wondering how many men he has sent to their deaths this time. Many a war film has focused the audience's sympathy squarely on the lower ranks, depicting the higher-ups as craven, careless desk jockeys with no knowledge of the risks their subordinates are taking. Not so for Hawks, who not only understands the commander's horrible burden but makes him the audience's surrogate, waiting with a pit in his stomach to hear what has happened next.

Hawks also continually returns to the scene in which the commander — first Brand, then later Courtney, assuming command when Brand is promoted — delivers his orders to a reluctant subordinate, who accepts each dangerous assignment with a hate-filled glare. This is a film in which nearly every line is delivered with gritted teeth, as though each man was being forced to swallow a horrible poison and then grin afterward. The actors, still adjusting to sound, are not always up to the task, but Barthelmess at least is fantastic at playing dark and glowering. He has a fiery intensity to his stare that seems to radiate throughout his hard-set face.

In other ways, however, the acting is often melodramatic, and the delivery of the dialogue stiff and surprisingly formal, qualities that mesh awkwardly with rugged displays of Hawksian masculinity. It is obvious that the actors are transitioning uncomfortably into the demands of the sound film, and that the primitive sound equipment does them no favors. There is virtually no soundtrack music in the film — other than periodic blasts from the base phonograph — and the dialogue scenes consequently play out in an eerie, unnatural silence that emphasizes each stilted line and uneasy stab at camaraderie. Barthelmess mostly fares okay, other than a few over-the-top speeches, but the fresh-faced Fairbanks can't shake a kind of gee-whiz naiveté, and William Janney, playing Scott's younger brother Donny, is even more overwound.


If the film occasionally falters in its rough early dialogue scenes, Hawks more than compensates with the gritty brilliance of his aerial combat staging. The film was remade in 1938 as an Errol Flynn vehicle, but director Edmund Goulding retained much of Hawks' aerial footage; it's easy to see why. The flying scenes, accomplished with a great deal of grainy rear projection and scale modeling and just a minimum of real flying, are far from realistic, but they have a raw, straightforward intensity that is often as involving as the best that much more realistic effects can produce almost eighty years later. Hawks, always a master at translating the efficiency of his productions into a powerful directness onscreen, captures the essence of flying in the broadest strokes possible: a few striking shots of dot-like planes streaking across a cloud bank, along with tight in-the-cockpit closeups against rear projection backdrops. When Courtney and Scott go off on their own for a midnight bombing raid against a German encampment, Hawks turns it into an exhilarating tour de force, capturing the adrenaline rush of the fliers as they swoop and dive in their strafing assaults on the enemy.

The film is remarkable, in scenes like this, for capturing the emotional atmosphere of war rather than its concrete details. The whole war, for these men, seems to take place in this hazy rear projection universe with a relatively constant backdrop of sky and clouds, and only occasional glimpses of enemy combatants on the ground below. There is little sense of physical location, little sense of the broader picture of the war's progress; the fliers are given only tidbits of information, just enough fragmentary knowledge to identify their targets and carry through their immediate mission. Hawks passes only this information on to the audience in turn, keeping the film locked into the tunnel vision of the fliers, who in the cockpit can see only as much of the sky as they can crane their necks to take in. One is reminded of the fog-drenched atmosphere of Only Angels Have Wings, which achieves with the greater visual sophistication of a decade later roughly the same effect that Hawks already sketched out here with the limited means of the time.

Hawks also of course has a feel for the brighter emotions of these fliers, their joy in a particularly bravura maneuver, their playful camaraderie (at times hampered by the stiff acting, though the idea comes across anyway), their soulful music, singing songs intended to ward off the sadness of losing a friend. As in many of Hawks' films, coming to terms with the masculine world means masking one's emotions beneath a surface toughness and laughing off danger with a song and a grin. It also means maintaining a healthy respect for one's enemy, as shown in the extraordinary scene — virtually unimaginable in later, more propagandistic war films — in which the fliers capture a shot-down German pilot and wind up grudgingly inviting him to drink and sing with them. The same impulse is there in the enemy pilots who exchange salutes even as they gun each other out of the sky. The film suggests that all these men, on either side, are unified in their nobility and bravery, that war is not so much a necessary conflict between diametrically opposed sides, but a game, a proving ground for brave young men to test their mettle against those who, by pure chance, have been placed on the other team.

Sergeant York

Sergeant York is truly a film from another time, infused with values and ideas that seem today entirely alien, at least as portrayed unironically in a modern movie: earnest religious conviction, equally sincere and unapologetic patriotism, the forgiveness of those who do one wrong. The real-life Alvin York, as played by Gary Cooper, embodies all of these attributes, as he transforms himself from a dirt-poor rural farmer and drunken rabble-rouser into a reformed Christian, and later a decorated World War I hero. Surprisingly, the film version of York's unusual life, made under the able guidance of director Howard Hawks, does not focus on his wartime exploits, instead developing at a leisurely pace with the emphasis on his time in rural Tennessee before he is drafted for the army.

In this sense, the film's title is misleading: York does not attain his titular rank until the very end of the film, and indeed the combat adventure promised by the title is a long time in coming. In its place, the film offers a religiously tinged drama of abjection and redemption. York is a rough, hard-living man, working a barren farm with rocky soil, getting as much of a crop as he possibly can out of this unforgiving land, providing for his mother and two siblings. As a result, he's also apt to strike out, going on periodic drinking binges with a pair of equally downtrodden friends, taking out his angst in bar fights and drunken revelry. When he falls in love with childhood neighbor Gracie (Joan Leslie), now all grown up, she gives him the drive to better his position in life, causing him to work harder than ever in his attempts to earn a piece of land with better soil. Meanwhile, the local preacher Pastor Pile (Walter Brennan) works to save York's soul, convincing him of the virtues of faith and forgiveness to such a degree that York even forgives and humbly acquiesces to the men who cheated and deceived him out of his one opportunity to get his own land. York transitions from a rowdy, temperamental drunk — he's introduced in a hilarious scene where his gunshots and hollers continually interrupt the pastor's sermon — into a near-saint, so humble and self-effacing that he'll turn his cheek at almost anything.

Only Gary Cooper could sell this radical transformation so convincingly. Cooper seems essentially decent even when he's playing a drunk and a habitual brawler who's been in and out of the local jails, and his basic goodness shines through the layers of slow-witted stubbornness and bitterness etched on his face. Cooper's portrayal even manages to overcome the inherent sappiness of the script, which attempts to smother the central performance with leaden Biblical references and sentimentalized stagings. York's conversion is symbolized by a scene that obviously references, in a stunning bit of presumption, the story of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus: York is struck down off his horse by a bolt of lightning, powerful enough to bend his rifle (which he intended to use for vengeance) into a horseshoe-shaped loop. It's a heavy-handed contrivance, but Hawks' touch is felt in the following scene, which expresses the nature of York's conversion in a way that fits much more comfortably into the Hawksian universe. Following his solitary experience in the woods, York wanders into the nearby church, where Pastor Pile is leading the congregation in enthusiastic singing. As the singing intensifies — "give me that old-time religion," the worshipers chant — York wanders, as though dazed, into the crowd, which begins to gather around him. Hawks cuts between shots of the parishioners singing in tight clusters, and York's slow assimilation into their midst. The sequence culminates with a high-angle shot from behind the altar, as the pastor reaches down towards York, who is now kneeling in the center of the gathered throng. This is a distinctively Hawksian moment, one that has often recurred throughout his work, albeit not often in such a religious milieu: the people gathered in song, the music infused with emotional subtexts, as a lone individual is accepted into the group. Surely this is a vision of religious experience that would have made more sense to Hawks than York's lightning-bolt revelation on the road, which is staged in a much more saccharine, conventional manner, with hazy lensing and angelic choirs on the soundtrack.


Hawks continually makes his touch felt in this way, putting his own slant on material that is in many ways not a natural fit for his talents. He does have a strong feel for the folksy rhythms of everyday life in York's small rural community, and the early stretches of the film are packed with subtle down-home humor. The scenes of York carousing with his friends in the local bar — positioned right on the Tennessee/Kentucky border to take advantage of differing liquor laws — are a case in point, as Hawks nudges his camera in close to the three men. He sets up triangular compositions with Cooper in the middle and the two other men flanking him on each side, with the camera maintaining a conspiratorial closeness, as though it was huddled in to whisper and joke with the three drunken friends. Hawks also clearly has a lot of fun with a rough-and-tumble bar brawl, which manages to mix bawdy humor with rugged physicality. And one of the bar rats delivers an amazing running commentary on the largeness and impressiveness of a nearby dancing woman, showcasing the kind of irreverent sexual wordplay that feels much more attuned to Hawks' sensibility than anything else in the film.

Even the underwritten romance between York and Gracie — which proceeds almost entirely through the chemistry of the actors in a few key scenes, with little help from the screenplay — provides Hawks with an opportunity for some masterfully executed banter. York shows up at Gracie's house one evening to find her sitting on the porch with his rival, Zeb Andrews (Robert Porterfield). Once again, Hawks films it as a triangular composition, with York forming the pivot of the triangle in the center of the frame, bisecting the line between Gracie and Zeb. This composition becomes the basis for a great scene in which the two rivals trade barbs while jockeying for Gracie's attention, before York finally sends the other man packing. None of the romantic material is very fully developed here, but Hawks' graceful touch, coupled with the performances from Cooper and Leslie, manage to sell what otherwise would've been an wholly unconvincing screen romance.


The film remains interesting in its final stretch, the forty-five minutes dedicated to York's reluctant induction into the army. The recently devout York is convinced that fighting and killing are wrong, and tries to get an exemption as a conscientious objector on this basis. But when the army doesn't buy it, York goes off to war anyway, conflicted over whether he should actually fight or not. The result is predictable, particularly considering the film's timing: it was released in 1941 with an obvious eye towards inspiring American soldiers and potential soldiers. Still, the film's propagandist slant is unusual, dealing as it does with the potential conflict between religion and nationalism. What seems most extraordinary in today's context is that such a baldly patriotic film should posit that there even could be such a disjunction between God and country, that the tenets of religion might pose an obstruction to the orders of one's government, or vice versa. There is no hint of the suggestion, so familiar from modern wars and their accompanying propaganda, that God is on our side. York's moral dilemma is melodramatically staged, with lots of stirring shots of him sitting with his dog on a mountaintop, reading about the history of the United States, but it is no less genuine for all the corn piled on top of it. This is a moral quandry that centers around differing interpretations of Biblical texts, and conflicts between different forms of duty and ideals. If the film resolves York's choice with a pat reference to a single Biblical verse — "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's..." — it nevertheless retains the moral integrity that it earned by asking these tough questions in the first place.

Ultimately, Sergeant York is a film at war with itself, or at least with its director. When Hawks is able to suppress or ignore the sentimental tripe of the story — as he does for most of the taut, excitingly filmed wartime action sequences towards the end — he crafts some typically fun, engaging drama. If the film occasionally threatens to sink under the weight of its own overbearing corniness and melodrama, Hawks is frequently able to buoy it back up with scenes of grace, intelligence, and economic emotional storytelling.

To Have and Have Not

If Howard Hawks' low-key WWII thriller To Have and Have Not seems a bit too much like Casablanca for comfort, the film goes a long way towards making up for its lack of originality in the accumulation of small details and the fine central performances that Hawks brings to the film. Obviously contrived as an attempt to restage Bogie's iconic turn as Rick, this "sequel" once again sets down Humphrey Bogart in the middle of contested wartime Martinique, this time as the fisherman-for-hire Harry Morgan, doing his best to stay out of the increasing strife between Vichy sympathizers and the "Free French." I'd normally summarize some more of the plot here, but Hawks seems largely unconcerned with it, so I'll just go ahead and admit that so was I. There's something about a rebel (Walter Szurovy) who needs to be ferried into Martinique, and for some reason his on-island allies decide that Morgan is just the man for the job. There's a daring escape from a Gestapo patrol boat, and an inquisitive and leering Gestapo captain (Dan Seymour) who's putting the screws to Morgan to find out what he knows.

With all this at stake, both for Morgan and Martinique as a whole, you'd never know it from the film's meandering, laidback pace — despite the trappings, this isn't really a suspense film, or a spy film, or a wartime thriller. It's a showcase for Bogie, and especially for his sizzling onscreen romance with first-time actress Lauren Bacall, sauntering onto the scene as the young girl on the run from her past and adrift on her own. Bacall is the film's real star, delivering a stunner of a performance that threatens to make even Bogart recede into the woodwork altogether. As soon as she slithers into Bogart's room for the first time, uninvited and interrupting a frantic conversation concerning the Resistance fighters, she takes over the film with her sheer presence. She just wants a light, but she might as well have said, "Hey, forget all that spy stuff, look over here." Even the way she asks Bogie for a match, her mouth twitching suggestively and her hips nestling against his doorframe, telegraphs her raw intensity and sensuality. Her chiseled marble face, already looking wise beyond her years, is a fount of subtle emotion, and she invests her cipher of a character with far more depth and complexity than the writing deserves. Just looking at her, the way she carries herself and the way she speaks and the way her eyes move, is to know something of her story and what she's like. Her sidelong glances, cast back over her shoulder, freighted with hidden meanings, carry a static charge that can't help but energize anybody hit with that blazing stare.

Bacall manages to carry her character, "Slim" (a typical Hawks nickname), through even the script's unusual excess of misogynistic tripe, which seems a bit much even for a Hawks film. It's not enough that the film is populated with one "silly dame," it has to add a second (Dolores Moran as the frail wife of the French Resistance fighter), and has both of them confess to Bogie that they're "making a fool" of themselves in front of him. These women both seem eager to apologize to this man they hardly know, and the film's weaker moments require a real suspension of disbelief to see the rock-hard Bacall making gestures of contrite acquiescence towards her leading man. It's slightly more bearable when it's Moran in this role, playing a one-note weak woman who faints at the slightest provocation despite her initially hard aura. The whole second woman thing is silly to begin with, so much so that even the two leads seem to realize it, and consequently Bogie downplays his reaction to this interloper even as Bacall downplays her jealousy. The result adds some pleasant friction to these scenes, and even comes close to redeeming the contrivance altogether.

Elsewhere, there's the usual undercurrent of Hawksian machismo, a sense that women shouldn't get in the way of men's stuff, and that the men who allow such intrusions are somehow cowardly and weakened by it. The script requires Bogart, who's clearly outmatched by the fiery Bacall, to nevertheless get the best of her, seeing right through her and condescending to her at every turn. Only Bacall's innate toughness allows her character to come through it unscathed, and as a result it's hard to take Bogart's bluster too seriously in relation to her. Instead of two equals sparring, it seems more like Bogart's putting up a masculine front in an attempt to save face. But it's a vain effort, and once he finally gives in to Bacall's charms, the game is lost. After one passionate clench, she tells him to go shave and gives him a playful slap on the cheek, a bit of S&M foreplay that mirrors an earlier scene where the Gestapo slapped around the completely unfazed Bacall as Bogart watched.

The film also offers up one other uncontested pleasure on the acting front, and that's the surprisingly nuanced turn from Walter Brennan as the hopeless old drunk Eddie. Brennan played the grizzled old coot, the comic relief sidekick, in countless movies, practically making a career out of it, but this performance is something of a revelation for anyone tempted to dismiss him as limited in range. Eddie's character is well within Brennan's comfort zone, a washed-up drunk who was, Morgan says, once a great fisherman, but is now just about useless. Brennan infuses this character with a ragged charm, a rambling, discursive wit, and an incredible amount of pathos. He's a man who knows he's used up, who clings to his last loyal friend with a puppy-like dedication and obedience. And yet he's also a soulful, complicated character, displaying flashes of a shrewdness that must be a carryover from his youth, and a sense of humor that's all his own. His frequently repeated joke, "was you ever bit by a dead bee?" coaxes some subtle repartee out of Bacall, who distinguishes herself by playing along with the old man instead of just dismissing him like everyone else does. In the two brief exchanges they have together, which mirror each other towards the start and end of the film, Brennan and Bacall prove why they're the film's true linchpins, as Bogart just stands off to the side and smirks.

Hawks is wise to let these fine actors just do their thing, and he's also wise to keep the focus as far off the plot as possible — the action happens in fits and starts only, with long scenes of moody, atmospheric stasis in between. Especially characteristic of Hawks are the many scenes that take place clustered around the piano in the local hotel. It's here that Bacall delivers a trio of sultry, low-voiced torch numbers, and where the local pianist (Hoagy Carmichael) croons out a handful of smarmy ballads. Hawks loves this kind of scene, with musicians and audience alike gathered around the piano, as many people crammed into the frame as possible, fostering a sense of warmth and camaraderie that is very dear to Hawks' heart. Variations on this scene recur frequently in his films, most notably in Only Angels Have Wings, though none of the scenes here have the poignancy, urgency, or depth that the similar scene possessed in that film, where the gathering at the piano took the metaphorical place of a drunken wake for a dead friend. Here, these scenes are just atmosphere, helping to infuse the film with a distinctively Hawksian character but not adding up to much otherwise. The same can't be said, fortunately, about a similarly crowded scene around the bedside of a man with a gunshot wound as Bogart attempts to remove the bullet. Hawks orchestrates this scene with surgical precision, culminating in a shot where Bacall stands in the foreground, holding a bottle of chloroform and fanning away the fumes, as across the prone body of the patient sits Bogart with scalpel in hand, two assistants holding a lantern and a water basin over his shoulders. This careful clustering also creates that tight, cluttered image that Hawks loves so much, though here the deliberate arrangement of the figures and the tensions that all focus on a single point as small as a bullet, create a scene of lasting power.

Despite its limitations, this is a sharp, smart film from Hawks, one that completely dispenses with its ostensible subject in order to squeeze in as much of the good stuff (Bacall!) as possible. Hawks presumably recognized the film for what it was, a somewhat cynical remake of a film that had, after all, only been out two years earlier with the same actor in the lead. And instead of taking it seriously, he decided to take to the margins and just have fun with it, letting Bacall's saunter and Brennan's wit take over the film. This holds true even down to the final shot, in which the central trio walk off into the foggy night together towards unknown adventures. Bacall executes her exit with as much aplomb as her entrance, slithering offscreen with a playful sway to her hips and a smile on her face, as Brennan agreeably bops his shoulders in sympathy. In keeping with the film's wry spirit, this trio doesn't just walk off into the fog; they dance off.

Black Book

Paul Verhoeven's Black Book is a brilliant slap in the face to the very idea of "tastefully" dealing with such important issues as the Holocaust or Nazi collaboration. When it first appeared, some critics derisively dismissed it as "Schindler's List meets Showgirls," an unwittingly apt description for a film that flinches away from neither the harsh realities of Nazi atrocities nor the perverse sexual adventures of the film's heroine, Rachel (Carice van Houten). The film is a blast of energy and enthusiasm, packing an emotional wallop that is in many ways much more genuine than the dour do-gooderism of Spielberg's famous Holocaust film. Verhoeven delves into the moral complications of resistance and collaboration in Nazi-occupied Holland, with van Houten as the central figure in a sprawling adventure epic largely set in the final months of the war. Van Houten is a wonder to behold here, gorgeous and sparkling with an intensity and depth that completely carries the film.

When the film starts, Rachel is a young Jewish woman hiding out at a farm house where the Christian family forces her to recite Bible verses, perfectly memorized, before she is served her dinner. This shining example of Christian hypocrisy, within a family that from outside would certainly seem to be exemplary in their sheltering of a fugitive, tips the viewer off early to Verhoeven's critical perspective in this film. His interest is not, per se, in the barbarity of the Nazi regime, which hardly needs pointing out these days — he's much more interested in the petty cruelties, manipulations, and quiet acquiescence to horror that takes place under the radar in everyday life, even among those on the "right" side. Rachel's life, following the bombing of this family's farm and her flight into the underground, becomes a neverending hellish descent, with Verhoeven battering the poor beleaguered girl until he is literally pouring shit on her. Her story takes a number of twists and turns, starting with the slaughter of her parents and brother during a failed attempt to sneak across the border, after which shetakes on a new identity and falls in with a group of resistance fighters. They soon ask her, though, to infiltrate the German gestapo headquarters as a singer, by seducing the garrison commander Müntze (Sebastian Koch), and as a result she's drawn into a complex web of deceit, treacheries, and machinations. The plot is structured as an escalating series of incidents and action, reminding me of a slightly calmer version of Emir Kusturica's frenetic masterpiece Underground, which similarly builds towards ever more harrowing evocations of wartime brutality, and similarly laces its horror with kitschy good humor.

Verhoeven has crafted this epic from some well-worn genre materials: the wartime spy thriller, the sexual noir, the campy Germanic cabaret film. But while the basic materials may be familiar, the ways in which they're combined and played out on screen are most certainly not. The trope of the female double agent who falls in love with the man she's supposed to be seducing is as old as the spy genre itself, but it somehow manages to acquire new life here, partly because van Houten infuses her role with such a winning combination of sexy playfulness and emotional investment. The cliché is further twisted by the fact that Koch makes his Nazi commandant a surprisingly sympathetic and multi-faceted figure, a man who has realized that his country has lost the war, and now only wishes to minimize the bloodshed in the final days before the inevitable defeat. The scenes between these two have a surprising electricity that's perfectly encapsulated by the scene where Rachel strips for Müntze, who's lying in bed, the bedsheets between his legs slowly tenting upwards as he watches her. Of course, he has a pistol down there, and in the following scene he caresses her breast with its metal tip as they smoothly segue between seduction and pumping one another for information.

If Müntze is a complex and very human Nazi, he's counterbalanced by the presence of his hulking, maniacally leering underling Franken (Waldemar Kobus), who's only missing a "stein" (the Jewish last name of the film's heroine, of course) to turn him into the monster he so clearly represents. He's a true movie Nazi, and Verhoeven seems very aware of it, taking cartoonish glee in this wholly artificial creation's outlandish evils. He's engaged in a plot to convince rich Jewish fugitives that they're fleeing with the resistance, when in fact they're being led into a trap where Franken can kill them and relieve them of their money and jewels. Franken may be a cartoon, but the evils he commits feel no less real, no less potent, for having been committed by this ridiculous figure, who in happier moments loves to pound on a piano and whistle along with Rachel's torchy crooning. In fact, Verhoeven's whole aesthetic purpose in this film might be summed up by the seeming contradiction between gritty realism on the one hand, and overt stylization on the other. He's equally committed to both narrative modes, and the film swings queasily back and forth between the two with little regard for stability.

Even more radically, Verhoeven extends his moral ambiguity to the resistance fighters, and in the scenes set after the war's end, implicitly questions the entire process of assigning blame and assessing collaboration versus resistance. The irony of high-ranking Nazi commanders being quietly assimilated back into society is juxtaposed against the even more unpalatable spectacle of the cruelties meted out by the victors against those dubbed collaborators. Most troubling is the treatment of women, which Verhoeven takes great pains to underline. Before the war is over, he has one of the resistance fighters explain what he'd like to do to the Nazi's women: shave their heads and dub them "Nazi whores" in acts of public humiliation before putting them against the wall. And sure enough, when the war ends, Rachel walks through the streets and comes across, in the midst of the celebrations, a display exactly as the resistance fighter described it, with tearful young women getting their heads shaved, signs saying "Nazi whore" hung around their necks. The undercurrent is a kind of sexual punishment and a sense of male entitlement about female bodies — the greatest offense is sleeping with the enemy, and when Rachel herself is branded with this crime, sexual humiliation (including a vat of feces poured over her naked body) is the primary punishment. Before Rachel first goes to seduce Müntze, she sleeps with the resistance fighter Akkermans (Thom Hoffman), who takes her as though she's his right, saying "at least I get to have you first" — who one sleeps with becomes a moral act in itself. Verhoeven's thrust in these scenes might even be called feminist, although his critique is complicated by the obvious delight he takes in sexualizing and fetishizing his protagonist's body right along with the characters on screen (and, by implication, bringing the audience along for the ride as well).

The implicit, unstated question underlying the entire film is the problem of assessing degrees of culpability, and degrees of brutality. This problem comes closest to being addressed explicitly by Theo (Johnny de Mol), a quiet, peaceable Christian member of the anti-Nazi resistance, and probably the film's most purely "good" and uncorrupted character. When he's forced by circumstances to commit a murder in order to save Rachel and his friends, he's wracked by guilt, and he melodramatically exclaims that he's "as bad as the Nazis." He seems incapable of making any moral distinction between wholesale genocidal mass murder and a single act of violence committed with more "just" goals in mind. He's a moral absolutist for whom murder is always murder, but Verhoeven doesn't necessarily take his side. In many ways, Theo's exclamation seems to be there as a not-so-subtle jab at the current prevalence of casual Nazi comparisons in political discourse, by which George W. Bush (among other targets) is declared to be "as bad as the Nazis." Verhoeven, by placing the statement in its original context, reveals the lie, and the laziness of such comparisons, while advocating for a moral attentiveness and an ability to make meaningful distinctions. Verhoeven presents a very muddled and ambiguous moral world, but his central characters must nevertheless make the best of the options open to them. The ambiguous ending, set 12 years after the main action at a kibbutz in Israel, serves as one last ironic comment on the place of morality in everyday decisions, as Rachel has set up a seemingly happy new domestic life for herself here, teaching schoolchildren, marrying and having a family. But in the film's final shot, Rachel and this happy family walk away into a barb-wire-protected compound, as explosions and gunfire and soldiers mobilizing on the ramparts signal the continuing war and brutality happening all around their oblivious domestic core.

This emphasis on moral choice and accountability is startling in a film that at times seems to revel in schlock, and Verhoeven walks a thin line between camp and verisimilitude. It's a film where the continuously thrilling, exciting, engaging surface narrative rapidly pulls the viewer into a deeper moral engagement with the material. Black Book works on its primary level as a lurid wartime spy thriller, infused with melodrama, eroticism, and action — it seems calculated for maximum visceral impact. But its sneaky insistence on never taking the easy way out of moral dilemmas, of never shrinking away from tough but important distinctions, propels it to a whole other level as a complex moral investigation. It's a film about corruption, greed, inhuman brutality, and, somewhat perversely, love and sexuality as well. Not to be missed.

10/9: Meetin' WA; Stalag 17

As a follow-up to King Lear, I re-watched Godard's short film Meetin' WA, a very interesting short in which Godard interviews Woody Allen, who appeared briefly to recite a few lines towards the end of Lear. When I first watched this short, I hadn't seen much of Allen's work yet, and my focus was on Godard's distancing techniques, which are at their strangest and most distracting here. Watching it now, it's more successful than I at first thought, and extremely interesting for the way in which these two very different filmmakers keep slipping past each other without ever coming to terms. In Woody Allen on Woody Allen, Allen speaks briefly about appearing in Godard's Lear, and though he professes to be a great admirer of Godard and thrilled to have worked with him, he seems to have been largely baffled by the whole thing. He says that he never saw the finished film, but his work on it left him with the impression that it was going to be "a very silly film."

To some extent, that impression seems to have been carried over here. Allen frequently looks bemused and mystified by Godard's probing and esoteric questions regarding the influence of television and the processes of editing and filming. When Godard says that certain scenes in Hannah and Her Sisters seem to have been influenced by the rapid pace of TV aesthetics, Allen can only muse, "It's possible, I don't know." With Godard switching back and forth between English and French (with a translator on hand), the language barrier is clearly an issue, but a more profound gulf exists between the filmmakers in terms of their ideas about film and filmmaking. The most obvious example comes early on, when Godard brings up the use of on-screen titles, which Woody had just recently done, at that time, in Hannah and Her Sisters. Woody correctly points out that, while for Godard such titles are a cinematic device, an image to be used in exactly the same way as an image of a person or a place, in Allen's film the titles were purely a literary device, used much like chapter titles in a novel. This distinction sets the tone for the rest of the conversation, in which it becomes obvious that while Allen thinks of writing as the foremost component of film, for Godard the image must always come first. Even their thoughts about the ideas in their films are diametrically opposed. Allen expresses his regret that the finished film has never, for him, quite lived up to his intentions or his original idea; he is always disappointed by the result because the idea is, to his mind, imperfectly expressed. Godard rebuts him by saying that he used to think this way, but that now he is convinced that he can never know the idea of his film until it is finished. This is the collision of two totally opposite perspectives on filmmaking. For Allen, a film expresses an idea or ideas. For Godard, it is much more complicated: the process of making a film is the process of forming and exploring ideas.

This central disjunction keeps the two filmmakers from ever reaching a real rapport, but it doesn't keep Godard's short from being interesting. He captures, to some extent, the frustrations of communication between incompatible minds, and the half-understood exchange of ideas that results. This idea is enhanced by his fragmentary editing and the mixing in of stills from Allen's films (he seems particularly fascinated by Diane Keaton, who he once wanted to play the love interest in his proposed film about Bugsy Siegel). Ultimately, the film doesn't provide any deep insights, but it's a worthwhile curiosity for fans of either director — though, preferably, both directors. Once again, the only way to see it is a rather shady BitTorrent VHS rip, but it's certainly better than nothing, and image quality isn't too crucial here anyway.

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Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 is an interesting but not entirely successful film that, as the opening voiceover declares, sets out to be an unconventional war movie, one that looks at the sad fate of POWs rather than heroics on the frontlines. Set in the eponymous German prison camp during WW2, the film centers on a group of American sergeants in one barracks of the camp. After an escape attempt by two prisoners is foiled by the Germans, the soldiers begin to suspect that there's a spy in the camp. They naturally set their sights on Sefton (William Holden), a cynical and hardened GI who openly trades cigarettes and assorted goods with the German guards and his fellow prisoners in order to enrich himself. Sefton's nakedly self-serving ambitions are a stark contrast to his fellow soldiers' gung-ho idealism and sarcastic sparring with the Nazis. He further sets himself apart with some borderline socialistic remarks regarding a lieutenant from a rich family who shows up in the camp. It's subtle, as it had to be at the height of the HUAC hearings, but Sefton is clearly what could be called "class conscious," though ironically his sharp trading is capitalism at its most unrestrained. In this way, the soldiers' immediate identification of Sefton as the traitor — and the subsequent beating he gets — might be seen as a veiled (very veiled) commentary on McCarthy.

On the whole, though, the film strikes an odd and precarious balance between silliness and seriousness, with the silliness largely winning out for the bulk of the film. The soldiers are constantly goofing around in the camp when they're not plotting escape. They spy on the Russian women who are showering at the adjacent camp — a joke that gets way less funny when one stops to think what might really have happened when Nazis, Russian women, and showers were all in one place. They continually joke with the Nazi sergeant who comes around on rounds, and at one point all the soldiers don fake Hitler mustaches and salute their overseer, yelling out "kaput!" and other German phrases. Much of the rest of the humor is more innocuous, largely involving the characters of Animal (Robert Strauss) and Shapiro (Harvey Lembeck), whose dim-witted patter and slapstick gags are usually funny but never quite gel with the film's more serious side.

Of the major players, the only one who seems to truly grasp the film's duality is Otto Preminger, who turns in a rare acting role as the vicious camp commandant, Colonel von Scherbach. Preminger alone achieves the balance of silliness and toughness that Wilder was reaching for throughout the film. His performance mingles ambitious jealousy (he aspires to have more than a muddy prison camp under his command) with a real sadist streak and a Germanic campiness that makes him a sheer delight to watch even when he's at his most cruel. He tosses off his lines with a guttural snarl that makes even his most mundane pronouncements sound simultaneously threatening and hilarious. In his best scene, while in the midst of interrogating an American officer, Preminger stalks around in full dress gear and no boots, his white socks padding along the floor. When he prepares to receive a call from a higher-up, he puts his boots on so he can click his heels in a good Nazi salute, even over the phone, and takes them off again immediately afterwards. It's a hilarious scene, with all the humor contained in the smallest touches, handled fluidly so that Preminger's ludicrous actions subtly blend into the otherwise straight-faced interrogation.

Preminger's character most fully embodies the film's dual nature, its shaky balance between the ridiculous and the somber. Everyone else seems to be playing in one key or the other, and the film suffers because of it. There are numerous great scenes here, especially the comedic scenes between Animal and Shapiro, and Holden's glowering dramatic performance (for which he, probably rightfully, received a Best Actor Oscar), but the unevenness of the whole picture is fairly unsatisfying. Wilder's larger points about the scapegoating of outsiders and the value of cynicism in a dark world are largely swallowed up by the film's noisy plot and numerous gags. This remains, in spite of its flaws and incomplete feeling, an interesting and worthwhile film from Wilder. Its performances don't all quite fit together, but individually each one is fantastic, and there are some fine set pieces, both comedic and action-packed, to keep the film constantly entertaining.

10/8: Pale Flower; King Lear; In Harm's Way

Pale Flower is one of Masahiro Shinoda's best mid-60s genre deconstructions. Stylistically, it seems to have some connections to the French New Wave of the same time period, though it also bears the distinctive stamp of Shinoda's highly idiosyncratic style. The story follows the yakuza killer Muraki (Ryo Ikebe), who has just been released from prison following a stretch for murdering a rival gang member. Upon his release, he finds that not much has changed, except that his gang has formed a truce with their former rivals, and a new rival gang has risen instead. While gambling, he is attracted to the young girl Saeko (Mariko Kaga), who seems to be a rich socialite with a thirst for danger and risk; she throws down massive amounts of money gambling, but this is already getting boring for her and she wants more.

Shinoda's film is a stunning examination of the profound emptiness that leads these characters onto a path of self-destruction and thrills. The film opens with a rapidly edited montage of Tokyo's crowded streets and subways, as Muraki laments the sameness of his environment, the hollowness of his existence, and the worthlessness of human life in a place where it is so common. These characters are drawn in by darkness, perhaps because it's the only thing that provides them any glimmer of happiness. When Muraki and Saeko have had some close call or visceral thrill together, they throw their heads back and cackle joyfully, a momentary burst of laughter in the midst of their otherwise dull lives. They drag race, they gamble, they flee from the police, but none of it is able to forever postpone the feeling of emptiness that always returns to them when the thrill is over. Inevitably, then, Saeko begins seeking greater and greater thrills, first in drugs and the company of the cold killer Yoh (Takashi Fujiki), and then when Muraki offers her a look at the ultimate thrill: murder.

Shinoda presents this story in gorgeously moody noir visuals, with the characters almost always bathed in shadow and dim light. But despite the grimness of the story and its themes, he also allows plenty of black humor to creep in, especially in the form of the aging yakuza bosses. In one scene, Muraki visits his boss at the dentist's office, and the old man advises Muraki to fix his own teeth, while simultaneously instructing him with his new orders. In another scene, Muraki visits the old man at the hospital to congratulate him on his new son; the boss thanks him and talks lovingly of his wife and new baby, then gives Muraki an assassination order. This mingling of domesticity and hardness in these characters is just one of the film's subtle subversions of gangster conventions. At every turn, Shinoda turns the genre in on itself, making this perhaps the ultimate existential gangster film.

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Jean-Luc Godard's radical re-interpretation and "study" of King Lear is one of his least-seen and least-loved films, outside of his even more obscure Maoist period with the Dziga Vertov Group. In fact, though, this much-maligned film appears to be a masterpiece in its own right, and the culmination of Godard's masterful run of films in the 80s, from his return to cinema with 1980's Sauve qui peut (la vie) to Lear in 1987. The film is not so much a retelling of the Lear story (especially since Godard reputedly read only the first few pages of the play), but an attempt to examine the nature and essence of a work of art and the place of the past's masterpieces in the modern world. Godard sets his film in the time after the Chernobyl reactor explosion, with the premise that the world's artworks have all been lost and must be reconstructed in the wake of this destruction. The idea that the meaning and role of art can be altered by traumatic world events has long been a key concern for Godard, and is in fact the thrust of his video essay Histoire(s) du cinema, where he explores the Holocaust's effect on Western art. In King Lear, the task of re-discovering Shakespeare's plays is given to one of his ancestors, William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth (Peter Sellars), who sets off to find King Lear in the modern world.

Within this absurdist framework, Godard engages in a complex rumination on art and its meanings, all the while taking stabs at getting to the heart of Lear. Is the essence of an artwork in its words? In its characters? In the names of specific people and places? Can Lear's meanings and ideas survive the transition to modernity intact? Can they survive the transplantation to new characters, new situations, new contexts? And what, anyway, is the relationship between words, which Sellars meticulously copies down, and the things they are meant to represent? Godard is continuously asking questions of this type, indirectly, in the way he explores the characters of King Lear and his faithful and brutally honest daughter Cordelia. He frames the contest between the two in terms of power versus virtue; he re-frames it in terms of incestual desire. He also speaks extensively about the role of the image in interpreting the world. The relationship between reality and the image is a central theme here, as in much of Godard's work, and ultimately he comes down to the idea that they are in fact one and the same. For Godard, the image is reality, or becomes, for all practical purposes, the reality of those who see it. The image replaces reality once the image is shown. In much the same way, Godard seems to be saying, the "image" of the play King Lear is a stand-in for the realities of power dynamics, both in political situations and in sexual relationships. Cordelia is the dissenter, who refuses to be cowed by power, who will say nothing (or "no thing" as the intertitles continually remind us) rather than be untrue to herself and her feelings.

In this way, Godard both politicizes and sexualizes Cordelia's silence, re-contextualizing the play's meanings to new realities — realities which the film, as image, then replaces. This continual shifting of meanings and ideas is the beating heart of Godard's work, and it is at its apex here. The film is a complex, puzzle-like construction of possible interpretations and comments on Shakespeare's play, all arranged loosely around the documentarian figure played by Sellars. His efforts to rediscover the play in its literal rendering, word for word, are countered by Godard, in the role of the ludicrous Professor Pluggy, who believes that names and words are irrelevant, and the artwork must be rediscovered through images and ideas. The process of interpreting Lear thus becomes the process of making a film, assembling shreds into a whole through editing. Godard's film is ultimately about the incompleteness of art, an incompleteness that requires the artwork's audience to fill in its own meanings and interpretations. Throughout the film, Godard plays with flickering and momentary lights, illuminating only sections of images and obscuring the rest in darkness. A lighter flame flickers above a section of a painting; a sparkler hisses in the black; a bare light bulb swings back and forth; TV monitors glow with frozen images in a dark room. Always, only a part is seen, never the whole, and this, Godard seems to be saying, is the way we see both art and reality.

This is one of the most exciting and vibrant films in Godard's career, a high point of his already excellent 80s filmography, and unfortunately one of the last of his major works still unavailable anywhere on DVD. For those who are interested in seeing it anyway, for now you can download a BitTorrent VHS rip, which is of watchable quality but not much better. Even in this less-than-desirable format, it was very obvious that this film has the same careful attention to color and composition that is apparent in all of Godard's 80s works, and I greatly look forward to the day when I can see an optimal presentation of this visual brilliance. Until then, though, I'm just glad I've been able to see what is clearly a major and under-valued landmark in Godard's massive filmography.

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In Harm's Way occupies something of an axis point in director Otto Preminger's career. All of his generally acknowledged masterpieces were behind him, and he was right on the precipice of a critical and commercial decline that would last pretty much until the end of his career. This well-made WW2 picture doesn't exactly fall neatly into either category. It's not as complex or as deep as Anatomy of a Murder or Bonjour Tristesse, which are among my top picks for A-grade Preminger, but it's by no means a bad film. It's a solidly crafted entertainment, enhanced by the strong characterizations, fluid camera, and subtle attention to detail that have always been among Preminger's hallmarks as a director. Preminger's sweeping film, weighing in at close to 3 hours, takes in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, its immediate aftermath, and a series of counterattacks in the Pacific by the American naval forces. It's a big field to play in, but Preminger wisely never allows the proceedings to become too epic or grandiose. He keeps the scale focused squarely on the human dramas at the story's heart.

The opening scenes set the tone right from the start. The film opens on an officers' dance taking place on the eve of Pearl Harbor, with one of the officers' wives, drunk and out of control, treating everyone to an extraordinarily sexy dance. It's an incongruous start to a war film, and it signals immediately that this is a Preminger war film. The woman turns out to be the wife of an officer (Kirk Douglas), who's at sea while she's out partying. She leaves the party with another officer, goes down to the beach and strips, and wakes up the next morning in time to see the Japanese planes flying over. Preminger gently sneaks into war through sex, suggesting from the very start that he's as interested in the people here as he is in the grand gestures of battle and strategy. He's blessed with a great cast in that regard, and the performances carry the film. In addition to Douglas, who's his usual volatile self, there's John Wayne, Patricia Neal, Tom Tryon (back for more after the harsh treatment Preminger gave him as the lead in The Cardinal), Burgess Meredith, and Henry Fonda in a cameo as a high-ranking admiral. Clearly, there's a lot of acting talent on tap here, and Preminger uses them to good effect in stories that verge on melodrama, but are nevertheless engaging and entertaining.

And Preminger's attention to detail keeps the film from ever seeming too superficial or bland. His characters are fleshed out to great effect, but he captures them best in small moments and visual touches which illuminate their characters. The scene when Patricia Neal and John Wayne discuss their love for each other without ever bringing up the word or anything like it is a perfect example of Preminger's ability for circumspection and nuance, and the scene ends with a perfect touch when Neal lets her shoes drop to the rug as an implied prelude to lovemaking. These kinds of witty small touches in the characterizations keep the film interesting, as does the camerawork, always a strong point of Preminger's films. His distinctive fluid panning is as effective as ever here, especially when he deploys it in the cramped quarters of the navy ships. Several shots follow Wayne from room to room, fluidly zipping through doorways and around corners, keeping close to the action and establishing a sense of motion that drives the scene. In this way, Preminger is able to carry over the action of battle into scenes of strategizing and preparation by commanders aboard the ships. The battle scenes themselves are economically achieved, with a minimum of smoke and gunfire and a lot of suggestion. In the opening scenes of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the film barely even shows a Japanese plane, but the effect is just as powerful and convincing.

This is undeniably a light and somewhat minor effort from Preminger, who at his best could transform such grand and melodramatic epics into something much deeper and more interesting. Here, he mostly stays on the surface, observing his characters with finesse and following the action plot with great energy, but never really taking the material to another plane as he so often did. Still, it's a solid blockbuster with some great scenes, and just a cursory comparison to the execrable Pearl Harbor should provide a hint of the difference a competent and original director can make to standard material.

10/1: Play Dirty; The Lady From Shanghai

Play Dirty is an absolute stunner of a dark, cynical, unconventional war movie, following on the heels of The Dirty Dozen's success but itself a clear precursor to later efforts like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. Director André de Toth has truly impressed me here; my only previous exposure to him was the thoroughly mediocre 1953 Randolph Scott vehicle Thunder Over the Plains, and this film shows de Toth at his best, at the extreme end of his career. It was de Toth's final film, coming after a lengthy absence from filmmaking, and he apparently only got to direct after Rene Clement was removed from the project. Still, under these less-than-ideal circumstances he crafted a film I have no qualms about calling a masterpiece.

The film concerns a group of ragtag soldiers, mostly former criminals, stationed in Northern Africa during World War II. Led by a British captain (a very young Michael Caine, delivering a fiery performance), they're sent on a mission deep into German territory, disguised as an Italian convoy, to blow up Rommel's major gas depot. But the film is not a freewheeling adventure, nor does it have much action or military battles. During the film's only real conventional military battle, Caine's unit is hiding on top of a plateau, watching another unit of British soldiers get slaughtered by the Germans, unable to blow their cover by helping. This alone is a clear indication that this is not a conventional war film, but something much more interesting. For all intents and purposes, this is actually a process movie, close kin to heist films like Rififi or taut suspense thrillers like The Wages of Fear, films where groups of men engage in highly detailed mechanical tasks which are shown on screen in all their complexity. In de Toth's film, the brief skirmish of the one-sided battle isn't even given as much attention as the burial of the dead afterwards, which he shows in a tightly edited montage of shovels digging, bodies being dragged, and shadows moving on the ground. He also dedicates a massive stretch of time to a lengthy, Fitzcarraldo-like scene in which the soldiers use pulleys and cables to get their jeeps to the top of a mountain. The tension is dragged out here to almost excruciating extremes, with every pebble on the way up a source of concern; it's like a miniaturized version of the drama of Fitzcarraldo's steamship.

Similiar attention to detail is paid to a tense mine-defusing operation, and an even tenser walk across a minefield during a sandstorm. De Toth turns each of these mechanical, slow-paced activities into opportunities for long examinations of physical labor and careful movement, both ratcheting up tension and in the process exploring the intricacies of human motion and labor under pressure. De Toth's camera, in these scenes and throughout the film, strikes an uneasy balance between stasis and motion, largely achieved through judicious use of the zoom and pans across the featureless desert landscape. De Toth's zoom is especially effective, since he uses it, often zooming out, to isolate his characters in this vast empty space — there are many long shots of the jeeps drawing abstract patterns across the desert sand, viewed from afar with the camera pulling back even further. Perhaps the film's master shot, the one that most succinctly demonstrates what it's all about, is an eye-catching extreme zoom out from the top of a cliff. The camera at first looks down on Michael Caine, who's glancing up a mountain, and then the camera disorientingly pulls rapidly back to give the view from the top of the mountain, with the soldiers and their jeep just a tiny flyspeck on the canyon floor. For de Toth, the placement of the soldiers in this never-ending desert-scape is a visual metaphor for the role of the soldier in war; tiny, insignificant, a mere pebble amid the shifting sands of war.

This is clearly a very stark and different war movie, in which its characters are far from heroes, and it's less concerned with action than with process. In fact, I'd venture to say that de Toth seems very little interested in such things as character or plotting here. The characters are mostly stock types with little to do, aside from an unlikely pair of gay Arabs who walk a thin line between malicious caricature and surprising sensitivity. And the narrative itself is remarkably straightforward at its core; its most radical features are its still-shocking ending and the cynical depiction of higher officers as casually cruel and glory-mad adventurers who play games with men's lives. But it's mostly the way de Toth treats the situations that makes them so extraordinary, the way he elevates small moments into epic dramas of isolation and suspense. This is a rediscovered classic of anti-war cinema, as fierce and uncompromising a vision of war as has ever been committed to the screen. Even now, almost 40 years later, this brutally honest and carefully crafted film remains as sharp and incisive as ever.

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Excepting his first film, Citizen Kane, Orson Welles never made a picture within the Hollywood system which he could say was completely his own. After the enormous success of Kane, he went on to make one compromised picture after another, all of them hacked to bits by studio interference and his own temperamental nature. The Lady From Shanghai is no exception, and the version we have now is roughly a full hour shorter than Welles' original cut and with entirely different music than Welles intended, so it's something of a miracle that so much of the film's brilliance shines through the studio mangling. It's also worth noting that Welles didn't seem to care too much about the film in the first place; he made it to fulfill an obligation, and he randomly picked a book he'd never read to adapt for the script. This indifference to the material shows through in the rushed, slapdash structure of the film. Most of the studio's cuts were purportedly from the legendary funhouse ending, into which Welles poured all his creativity, so it's somewhat tempting to attribute the messy structuring of the film's first half to Welles rather than the studio execs.

The story follows Michael O'Hara, an Irish seaman, petty criminal, and aspiring novelist, played by Welles himself with a thick brogue and his characteristic intensity. O'Hara meets the beautiful young Elsa (Rita Hayworth) in a park, and soon finds himself working on her lawyer husband's yacht while romancing her and getting dragged reluctantly into a shadowy murder/insurance plot. The film is loaded with twists and double crosses, but ultimately Welles seems blase about this material — the characters don't follow much internal logic and the narrative skips around carelessly in between crisply written dialogue scenes which seem to be the film's true raison d'etre. The first half of the film is overwhelmed by countless sloppy montage scenes of the yacht cruising around the Caribbean and parties on tropical islands. The impression is that the film is in a rush to get somewhere, so it charges through the required scenes and even seems to skip over a few. Where is the real romance between O'Hara and Elsa? It happens somewhere between scenes, and when next we see them they're talking about running away together. It doesn't matter if we don't actually see it happen, we know they're hooked on each other now. Welles (or the studio heads?) takes these kinds of shortcuts everywhere. It makes no difference, though. The film still crackles with raw energy and really lights up for a few scenes here and there when Welles takes advantage of the noir style to the greatest effect. The scene where O'Hara describes a shark feeding frenzy to his employer and his cronies, with all the metaphorical implications bubbling underneath, is a perfect example of what's best in Welles' noirs. There's a weird, unsettling vibe to these types of scenes, with Welles' distinctive voice, somewhat disembodied because of his predilection for post-dubbing, and the dark shadows cast across his face giving him a foreboding look.

If Welles seems in a rush to get through the obligatory plot points, it becomes apparent why when the ending comes, and here it's most sad that we'll never see the film as Welles originally intended. The funhouse showdown which ends the film is certainly among the most amazingly avant-garde sequences ever shown in a Hollywood cinema, and if this is what the studio deigned to leave in, the mind boggles at what they might've cut from what was supposedly a much longer scene. Throughout this scene, the screen is broken down and chopped by myriad mirrors which multiply each character in numerous fragmented images. Welles is really playing here, letting close-ups overlap with multiple long shots and breaking the screen down into long vertical segments in which the characters try to face each other. For a film in which twists and betrayals are the norm, it's the perfect ending, a showdown in which nobody is even sure where their enemy is. It's a wonderfully disorienting scene, and truly visually stunning, at times even almost abstract in its effects, looking more like the work of early avant-garde montage artists like Man Ray than a Hollywood auteur. I could easily watch another hour of this, if that's what was cut from the film. As it stands, though, it's a remarkable conclusion to a bizarre and always intriguing noir.