East of Eden March 30, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1950s , 3 comments
Elia Kazan was incredibly prolific between the years 1947 and 1957, directing twelve films released in that period and one each year beginning with 1949’s Pinky. Two won him Oscars while also taking Best Picture - Gentleman’s Agreement and On the Waterfront - and two more earned him nominations - A Streetcar Named Desire and East of Eden
If you go back to his feature debut A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Kazan directed an astounding 24 Oscar-nominated performances, with 9 wins, from 1945 to Splendor in the Grass in 1961. As movies, though, I’d argue that most of his directorial output is spotty and inconsistent. He was much better at making great performances than great movies. Under his direction, many actors gave the performance generally regarded as the best in their career, but extraordinary acting certainly does not always translate into high-level cinema. In fact, showy roles can often hinder a movie, turning it into an acting showcase that’s ultimately less than the sum of its parts. Of course, electric performers like Marlon Brando or James Dean can make films fascinating and enjoyable without perfect stories, but, even for Kazan’s films, those actors are more the exception than the rule.
I have a lot of conflicting feelings about Elia Kazan and his films (even excluding politics and his involvement with HUAC). I’m stunned by the raw, emotional acting of Brando, Dean, and, especially, Andy Griffith, who never even came close to being utilized like he was by Kazan in A Face in the Crowd. I see the unmistakeable correlation between the great performances he directed in the 1950s and the dynamic accomplishments two decades later by Hoffman, Pacino, De Niro, etc. Yet, Kazan’s films often seem ridiculous, phony, and overcooked fifty years later. By all accounts, he was a tyrannical troublemaker on the set, stopping at nothing to elicit the best performance possible from his actors. That makes me wonder how much attention he was actually paying to the finished product, in lieu of his dogged determination to torment his actors into creative perfection. Therefore, I’ve come to the conclusion that Elia Kazan nearly ruined the 1950s for American film.
I mentioned the weakness of 1950s Hollywood movies in my last entry, without citing Kazan specifically, and I’ve thought about it a little since. As a transitional decade, the fifties were plagued by a lot of cinematic overacting, undoubtedly influenced by the Method and the Actors’ Studio, but probably exacerbated and encouraged by Kazan’s success with A Streetcar Named Desire. This style of acting eventually begat brilliance, but it also did away with the fluid gracefulness of movie acting from the 30s and 40s. Some of the magic of Hollywood was destroyed in favor of a step towards brooding realism. All of that’s fine, I suppose, since it arguably allowed the viewer a greater emotional connection and expanded the possibilities of movies, but sometimes I still lament the loss of suavity and glamour. Keeping all that in mind, I thought I’d finally sit down with East of Eden, one of the few pictures Kazan directed from this fruitful period that I’d previously not seen.
Adapted from John Steinbeck’s classic book, Kazan’s East of Eden focuses on the Trask brothers, Cal and Aron, and their stern father Adam (Raymond Massey). Cal, played brilliantly by James Dean, is different from his brother and deeply covets love and acceptance from his father. Cal sees Aron as a difficult example to live up to and struggles to please their father in the same way he thinks Aron does. The allusions to the biblical story of Cain and Abel are obvious, from the similarity in the names to the direct reference in the title. As the film begins in 1917, the United States is on the brink of entering World War I and Adam is experimenting with using blocks of ice to refrigerate shipments of lettuce. Like other Steinbeck stories, East of Eden is set amid the Salinas Valley, off the coast of Northern California. The film uses beautiful Cinemascope photography and vibrant, painterly colors, both finally well-represented on the two-disc DVD from Warner Bros., to great advantage, and is probably the most visually appealing movie Kazan ever directed.
Like many of Kazan’s films, East of Eden is engrossing, but uneven. The contrast of acting styles between James Dean and pretty much everyone else can be disorienting. Dean comes across as a living, breathing young man excitingly captured on film. The viewer is transfixed when he’s on the screen, and the film suffers when he’s not. His magnetic presence distracts from the often wooden or comparatively uninteresting performances of his co-stars (with the exception of Jo Van Fleet, who deservedly won an Oscar for her work here). Dean’s acting style makes most of the other actors seem like they’re in a different movie from a different era. It’s this problem that frequently plagues dramatic films of the decade, as actors of disparate generations often fail to mix well with each other. You marvel at one performance, such as Dean’s here, but, in terms of the evolution of screen acting, you realize how much ahead he was of most everyone else in the film.
East of Eden is nevertheless one of the stronger efforts in Kazan’s filmography. Aside from Dean’s staggering debut, the movie also has a well-told story to work with via Steinbeck’s book. The allegory is laid on quite thick, but the idea of family dysfunction remains endlessly fascinating due to its nearly universal applicability. Bitterness and jealousy, to varying degrees, are such common themes in sibling relationships that Steinbeck is able to sacrifice originality for compelling entertainment without much complaint. In Kazan’s best films, such as the two written by Budd Schulberg, the viewer becomes enmeshed in the story as much as the acting. If that’s not completely the case with East of Eden, it’s probably more the result of Dean’s acting than Kazan’s storytelling. It’s almost understandable for the actor’s presence to border on distraction given his unique position in film history. With only three significant screen roles, the iconic Dean commands the viewer’s attention when he’s on screen.
No one has played festering alienation hardly as well as James Dean did both here and in the more successful Rebel Without a Cause. His brief career, unfettered with attempts at stretching his persona, has placed a mystical quality on Dean that blurs the line between acting and being. Unlike other movie stars, we have little to explore outside of his screen performances. The footage we know of Dean consists almost exclusively of him in character, removed from the constraints of “celebrity.” Straddling between cool antihero and annoying young punk, no one was doing what James Dean was at the time. He may (or may not) have been a mostly one-trick actor, but it was a trick no one had ever pulled off before.
Paths of Glory March 22, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1950s , 2 comments
Given the opportunity to attend a conversation with the beyond legendary Kirk Douglas, I not only jumped at such a chance but also finally gave Paths of Glory
With that admission comes another one: I tend to avoid Stanley Kubrick films. I’ve never watched a lot of his movies (2001, The Shining, Dr. Strangelove, and Barry Lyndon) and I rarely re-watch the ones I have seen. Eyes Wide Shut is the major exception, probably because it was the only one I was able to discover for myself in the theater, despite bad publicity, lackluster box office and many misguided reviews. All of the Kubrick films I’ve seen have been highly worthwhile, extraordinary experiences that I’ve enjoyed immensely. Nevertheless, I’m keenly aware of his position as a point of entry for so many cliched young film enthusiasts and I’m not a fan of cliches so I’ve tried to not fall into that trap. This speaks nothing to the quality of Kubrick’s films, only to the quality of his admirers. You know, the ones with the poster for A Clockwork Orange in their dorm room. Yeah, that wasn’t me.
Related to that point, I also usually shy away from writing about films that have been discussed elsewhere enough to destroy a small forest’s worth of trees and/or induce massive amounts of carpal tunnel syndrome. Those films, with enough critical baggage of brilliant essays already churned out to intimidate most would-be writers or force them to rehash every single idea that’s already been written more persuasively and observantly ten times previous by others, are only interesting to read about if you’re attacking them in a provocative manner. Since that’s not my aim, I normally stick to underappreciated topics in the hope that I can figure out why I’ve liked or disliked a movie. Writing as cathartic therapy for my love of movies, I guess.
With that lengthy introduction necessarily complete, I have to say that there are times when I watch a canonical classic and the astonishment lingers enough that I have to type up something just so it will loosen its grip on me. Kubrick’s Paths of Glory has been pinging around my head since I watched it, two days before last night’s conversation between Mr. Douglas and Dr. Annette Insdorf, film professor at Columbia University and frequent contributor to DVD supplemental features. The film is a masterpiece of restraint, its 87 minutes covering more about the hypocrisies of war than any overblown epic or multipart documentary has ever managed to achieve. Insdorf called it the greatest war film in the English language and I’d have difficulty mounting much of an argument. War films should be more than just realistic explosions and hellish imagery. Better than anything by Spielberg, Stone or Coppola, Paths of Glory brilliantly shows the bureaucratic senselessness that almost always accompanies the much more glamorous battle scenes in war, but only rarely in film.
Loosely based on a true story and adapted from the novel by Humphrey Cobb, Kubrick’s fourth feature film is set in France during World War I. A French general (played by Adolphe Menjou) instructs the subordinate Mireau to take a hill from German invaders and promises him a promotion. General Mireau then commands Colonel Dax (Douglas) to formulate the mission despite the low possibility of success and certain death of a majority of the soldiers. Dax understandably balks at the suicide mission, but Mireau insists. When the attack fails, as numerous French soldiers lie dead, Mireau demands accountability to deflect negative attention from himself. Three men are chosen as examples, all innocents, to be tried for cowardice. Dax, a criminal attorney before the war, asks to defend the three soldiers, but their fates have already been sealed. Banned in France until 1975, the film remains an upsetting, uneasy experience.
It’s not surprising that Douglas, who also produced the film, is great as Col. Dax, giving one of the best performances of his career as the somewhat unconventional hero. On the one hand, it’s the most morally centered role I’ve ever seen from Douglas, an actor who claimed to have made a career of playing “sons-of-bitches.” Yet, even though Dax never strays from moral high ground, his actions ultimately make no difference. His mission, that he fought against conducting, is gravely unsuccessful and he’s unable to spare an additional three soldiers from their deaths. Heroes usually save people in movies, but Dax is met with failure at every turn. It’s certainly no direct fault of his own that his actions are ineffectual, but all the dead soldiers are casualties nonetheless. Dax’s continued failure, coupled with the film’s final scenes reminding us of the seemingly endless cycle of war, make for a much more powerful and emotional wallop than the rah-rah jingoistic sacrifices we’re used to seeing in war movies.
Aside from the short, documentary-like battle scenes that are brutal and technically impressive, one of the most striking things about Paths of Glory is how modern and fresh it remains, now fifty years since its release. A big complaint I have with American films from the 1950s is a certain awkward staginess that often makes for uninteresting films with over-emoting actors yelling away their “pain.” The studio system was collapsing and a new era in Hollywood was emerging that required movies to sort of shed their skin and stumble around a little before regaining their footing the following two decades. Of course there are exceptions, like many of the films from Hitchcock, Wilder and Ray, but too many stage adaptations crippled the drama genre, in my mind, and the method acting style, while eventually leading to many superb performances, made for lots of overblown, unbearable to watch films and performances.
The ones that survive unscathed are mostly either one-offs like Laughton’s Night of the Hunter and Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success, or from visionary directors who put their own unique stamp on their selection of actors and material. After watching Paths of Glory, though, I’m inclined to ease up a little on the 1950s, just because of how unabashedly brilliant a film Kubrick made. I’d probably still rank the decade below all others of the sound era except the 1980s, and possibly the 1930s, but I’m nonetheless impressed to see a non-noir, studio-financed drama from the ’50s that’s at such a high level. It’s the kind of movie that I honestly doubt would be made by a major Hollywood studio today, especially by a young, unproven director.
More than just a war or anti-war movie, Paths of Glory powerfully condemns the powers that get young persons killed to satisfy some childhood fantasy of heroism. Like Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Bob Dylan composed his brilliant indictment of warmongers “Masters of War” after watching Kubrick’s film. The song, part of 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, foretold the horrors to come of bellicose leaders anxious to send others to kill and be killed only a few years after the album was released. As history somewhat repeats itself, perhaps part of the strength of Paths of Glory, a power that wasn’t there the first time I saw it, is in viewing it with modern eyes and current knowledge of the existence of these same people, with the same ideals but different names. In that regard, I’d love to see the film eventually become irrelevant to modern audiences, but experience and history tell me that’s unlikely.
On a lighter note, Paths of Glory came up a couple of times in last night’s conversation. Douglas mostly deferred to Insdorf’s glowing praise without sharing any new or interesting stories about that film or my personal favorite Ace in the Hole, aside from a general compliment to director and friend Billy Wilder’s brilliance (and a regret that he turned down the lead role in Stalag 17 that eventually won William Holden an Academy Award). Instead, he talked a little about the more popular Spartacus, mentioning the well-known ordeal of Dalton Trumbo’s writing credit including Kubrick’s suggestion that the script be credited to the director. The ninety-year-old stroke survivor is probably as much an icon as any living person, with his mind and body both incredibly spry, so it was understandable that he basically stuck to the script of mentioning his new book as often as possible while telling entertaining anecdotes about his family and friends. After being in the presence of some extraordinary people the last few years, I’m not one to be starstruck, but it never left my mind how amazing it was to spend an hour and a half of seeing Kirk Douglas in person. Spartacus be damned, I saw Chuck Tatum in the flesh.
A Man Vanishes March 16, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1960s, Shohei Imamura , add a comment
The fallacy of truth in cinema is as much the main subject of Shohei Imamura’s A Man Vanishes as the investigation into the disappearance of a Japanese businessman that initially appears to be the focal point of the 1967 film. The director, whose films have been the subject of a Brooklyn retrospective the past two weeks, made his initial stab at nonfiction filmmaking with this rarely seen examination of a missing plastics salesman, Tadashi Oshima, who unexpectedly vanished in April 1965 while on a business trip. Oshima left behind a fiancee, Yoshie, and joined the hundreds of Japanese businessmen who dropped out of sight without any obvious motive or warning. Imamura was intrigued by this growing phenomenon, called “Johatsu,” and randomly selected the police file of Oshima as the subject of his filmed case study.
The first three-quarters or so act as a typical, straightforward exploration into why Oshima may have disappeared. We’re introduced to the woman Oshima was to marry, Yoshie Hayakawa, and her sister Sayo, who both play large roles throughout the film. Imamura employs an interviewer (professional actor Shigeru Tsuyuguchi) who travels with the camera crew to speak with friends and family of the missing man, as well as police detectives and Oshima’s boss. We learn that he had been caught embezzling from the company and this is discussed as a potential reason for the disappearance. A past romance and the idea that he may have been unsure about marrying Yoshie are also considered as possibilities. A female shaman (who provides some strikingly eerie moments throughout the film) is consulted in an effort to summon Oshima or otherwise provide some answers to the many questions swirling around the vanished man.
It’s all shown in a very matter-of-fact, documentary style, as though the filmmakers are attempting to get to the bottom of the situation while gathering information that might help them in their pursuit. At first, the camera is almost an afterthought, a necessary evil to drum up interest in Oshima more than a probing, opportunistic distraction. Then we see a group of men in a small room, apparently the filmmakers, discussing the project and the film, not the disappearance or search for Oshima. Their disdain for Yoshie, whom they call “The Rat,” becomes obvious and you can see the slight shift from a film about Oshima and the phenomenon of Japanese men who suddenly disappear to a film about the filming of such a movie. Any hint of objectivity, an idea Imamura almost certainly is arguing as a false concept in documentary filmmaking, has been destroyed.
The film takes a step into near absurdity when the on-screen interviewer questions Yoshie about whether she has fallen in love with him. She replies that she believes she has. It’s a small jolt, bordering on hilarity, as the film up to that point had retained a procedural sincerity when confronting interviewees. Everything I read about the film beforehand made a point to mention the development of Yoshie proclaiming her love for her interviewer, but it’s shown with such nonchalant casualness that it still feels oddly unexpected. The scene has little ramification for the rest of the film and serves only as one piece of evidence that A Man Vanishes is much more ambitious than it initally seems.
The picture above shows an omnipotent Shohei Imamura peering over the shoulder of his interviewer, perfectly illustrating the director’s chosen role as a puppetmaster silently pulling the strings without explicitly inserting himself into the action. Imamura eventually removes the curtain to reveal the utter fictionality of his movie. The two sisters and a fishmonger eyewitness argue over whether Sayo had been Oshima’s companion on a particular occasion and, thus, possibly involved romantically before the teahouse they’re in is revealed to be nothing but a movie set with collapsing walls. The remarkable scene gives the audience a headscratching revelation worthy of any famous magician. Immediately, the viewer’s mind races to figure out what was real and what wasn’t. Imamura himself tells us that what we’ve just seen is fiction based on truth.
The argument continues in the street outside though, as Sayo maintains that she never walked with Oshima despite the fishmonger’s assertions to the contrary. In these, the film’s final moments, repetition and frustration set in, shedding no new light on an already impossible situation. Oshima is gone, probably never to return and possibly dead, and the phenomenon of Johatsu is just as much an enigma now as before the film began. We’ve learned the details of Oshima’s existence prior to the disappearance only through recollections of people who we know as neither trustworthy nor duplicitous. In making an examination into the nature of truth in cinema, Imamura has crafted his own spin on Kurosawa’s Rashomon, but without actors or a script.
The persons interviewed are real people, but the question remains whether they’re playing themselves or being themselves. There’s never any way to know these answers for certain in documentary films and the filmmaker is always free to skew the footage however he wants. The on-camera discussions among the filmmakers in A Man Vanishes remind us that every little filmic choice affects the audience’s perception of these “characters.” It’s essentially impossible for the viewer to be sure that a nonfiction film is ever reflecting truth since the line is constantly blurred between what is real and what is the reality intended for audience consumption.
By giving his audience this insightful experiment, Imamura blends truth with fiction and the perception of reality with the realization that everything we’ve seen is staged, to varying extents. It’s a brilliant and thought-provoking look at film as a medium unable to show unfiltered truth. The director’s patience to produce a 130 minute exercise, where the vast majority of the running time makes the film look like an ordinary missing persons investigation, was a daring thing to do to his audience, who may feel uneasy by the lack of a resolution. While the time spent investigating Oshima’s disappearance is never uninteresting, it’s the reveal near the end that catapults Imamura’s film from a curiosity to an essential.
(Like most of Imamura’s films, A Man Vanishes is unavailable on DVD with English subtitles. An interesting and worthwhile trailer, showcasing the wonderfully spooky score, can be found on YouTube for this fascinating film.)
Pigs and Battleships March 12, 2007
Posted by clydefro in : Classic Films, 1960s, Shohei Imamura , add a comment
Shohei Imamura’s breakthrough film Pigs and Battleships (translated onscreen as Hogs and Warships) is a grimy tale of the underbelly of a Japanese port town under American occupation following World War II. Released in 1961 (though not until the 1980s in the U.S., following the director’s first Palme d’Or win at Cannes for The Ballad of Narayama), the film now appears to be a precursor of things to come from Imamura and his fascination with the criminal lower class of postwar Japan. The four previous efforts from Imamura had been studio assignments and were much less indicative of the style for which the director later became known. With its mixture of anarchic, frenetic plot and dizzying, technical bravado filmmaking, Pigs and Battleships fits perfectly in Imamura’s claim that he liked to make ”messy films.”
The film’s characters are unspectacular and common, noteworthy only for the truthful way Imamura approaches them. Kinta, a young man involved with selling pigs on the black market, stupidly agrees to take the fall for the yakuza in exchange for a significant amount of money. He has also impregnated his girlfriend Haruko, whose family wants her to prostitute herself either literally or in the form of marriage to some American sailor who can provide for her. These are not noble people or even worthy of sympathy in the hands of most filmmakers. Yet, Imamura seems to find comfort in the working class, regardless of how low down the food chain they are, and nearly forces the audience to share his empathy.
By balancing out the careless and greedy villains among both Japanese and American characters, the film seems to be conceding that Kinta and Haruko may be far from perfect but at least they’re harmless by comparison. I see it as sort of a white-collar crime vs. blue-collar crime argument where there’s no real defense for the minor improprieties of the common criminals, but their actions ultimately pale in comparison to the evil doings of military, corporate and organized malfeasance. The bumbling yakuza that Kinta tries to impress and the obnoxious American soldiers who act like overgrown frat boys are the real source of the problems presented in the film. The lower class who’ve developed some ideas of ambition (even if they have to sacrifice an honest living) are merely trying to adapt to the changing climate of Westernization and take advantage of the opportunities given to them, whether it’s working with organized crime or servicing the sailors who are stationed nearby.
Kinta may appear to be a dimwitted kid more interested in the lures of money and promise of Western-type material riches, but is he really the one to blame? Certainly it would be inaccurate to attempt to victimize him or shift the responsibility for the personal choices he makes. Nevertheless, as in many of the director’s films, Imamura somehow paints a heavily flawed character as our protagonist, one who’s comparatively not so bad and whose heart is mostly in the right place. He seems committed to Haruko and supportive of her decision to defy her mother by rejecting a passive, secondary role as wife/whore to an American sailor. While their relationship does appear to be more out of circumstance than genuine love, Kinta and Haruko still share a common bond of experience and hope for a better, more independent future.
It’s with the character of Haruko that any hope to be found among the denizens of Pigs and Battleships must begin and end. The final shots of her literally meeting and passing by the hookers awaiting the incoming ship of sailors is both symbolic and affecting. Her rebellious encounter with a trio of Americans earlier in the film left her ashamed, but also more certain of what she wanted from life. When the opportunity presents itself to either stay where she is, doomed to a fate she doesn’t want, or set out on her own, Haruko displays an empowering self-reliance by choosing the latter. The character is like any number of young women from small towns all over the world - ordinary and average, but not content to spend forever stuck in an endless routine.
That all of this happens within a film usually referred to as a comedy or satire is all the more impressive, showing Imamura’s ability to blend absurdity with a bit of neorealistic poignancy. Though the climactic scene, where unleashed pigs (the animal variety, not the comparatively less innocent humans Imamura draws parallels with throughout the film) wreak havoc in the street, and the overall tone of the film are both laced with obvious elements of farce, Pigs and Battleships arguably defies being identified within any one genre. Just as there are moments of pure comedy, such as a well-placed insurance advertisement billboard, there are also heartbreaking scenes, drained of any humor, that allow the viewer to remember that Imamura wants you to laugh only after you’ve understood the seriousness of what’s at stake.
The film’s overall lively tone veers only a little from the irreverence you’d expect after repeatedly hearing John Phillip Sousa’s ”Stars and Stripes Forever” (part of a wonderfully playful score) in a film where everything American comes with negative connotations. Instead of seeming inconsistent, those forays between the harsh realities of postwar occupation and Kinta’s wild interactions with the yakuza and the hogs breathe life into the film that established Imamura’s unique place in the film world. Wacky adjectives like “madcap” often infect descriptions of Pigs and Battleships, but it’s the searing examination of truth, told with daft sprinkles of humor and the hovering feeling that an audience should laugh to avoid darker emotions like anger or sadness, that really makes the film stick out.
(Pigs and Battleships remains unavailable on DVD in the English speaking world, with an impending release from the Criterion Collection due at some point in the future.)
