The Thick-Walled Room (1956), directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Filmed in 1953, this movie was not released until 1956 because the studio considered it too provocative and critical of postwar American occupation of Japan and of Japan’s higher military establishment for heaping blame on lower-ranking soldiers for war crimes. On the surface, this is a war prison film with similarities to such films as Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1953), and Renoir’s La grande illusion (1937), although The Thick-Walled Room is more raw, even ragged. It contains touches of the surreal in a dream sequence, and it has flashbacks. Mostly it focuses on the broken lives of the inmates of a prison for soldiers, a prison guarded by American MPs. We follow the lives of a small group as they try to overcome the trauma the war has visited on them. The narrative, like the lives of the soldiers, is fragmented, in pieces as it were. One soldier grows a beard and when called upon to shave it, he remarks that he is growing it long, long enough so he can hang himself with it. Another solider actually tries to hang himself. These are lives broken. These men bear the burden of a war they did not start, did not want, and did not control. Although this film has little in common with Kubrik’s Paths of Glory, that film kept coming back to me as I watched The Thick-Walled Room. Both are powerful anti-war films. The Thick-Walled Room works as a prelude to Kobayashi’s masterpiece, the nine hour The Human Condition (1959-1961).

 

I Will Buy You (1956), directed by Masaki Kobayashi. It is World Series time now and so it seems appropriate to view a baseball story, or what is ostensibly a baseball story. This one tells of an array of baseball scouts  who chase a rising baseball star playing in what amount to the college ranks. We focus most closely on one of these scouts, Kishimoto (Keiji Sada), who provides intermittent voice over. What matters is simply money, nothing else. We see that people are commodities, loyalties are self-serving, money corrupts, and greed tops everything. Families are torn apart. Relationships sour. The player who has the attention of so many scouts is Goro Kurita (Minoru Oki), and he has been cared for by a fellow named Kyuki (Yunosuke Ito). Kyuki has trained and looked after Goro for the past four years. He seems to have nothing but Goro’s best interests at heart. He also has a gall stone that causes acute pain at times, often at convenient times to illicit the sympathy of others. Kyuki’s “disease” proves to be a metaphor for the state of the sport. It is a disease. Money is a disease. The film also touches on gambling. All in all, this is a dark vision of sport in which sport itself is a metaphor for the larger society. It is corrupt and fraught with duplicity. The film is, perhaps, a bit longer than it need be, but the acting is fine and for the most part the staging is excellent. For much of the film, our moral centre appears to be Goro’s girlfriend, Fudeko (Keiko Kishi), who sees how the quest for fame and money can change a person and not for the better.

 

Black River (1956), directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Taking a page from the noir script, Kobayashi gives us a tour of a slum dwelling near a U.S. Naval Air base. We get to know the inhabitants of this ramshackle dwelling, its landlady, and the nearby louts and gangsters who want to benefit financially from the demolition of this place so a new brothel can be erected! Pimps, prostitutes, gamblers, and dealers live here in the shadow of the U.S. military base. Indeed, the U.S. base influences the lives of these people, and not for the better. The group of people in the run-down building include layabouts, a young couple who ostensibly live off the young wife’s earnings as a hairdresser, although she is actually a prostitute, a communist who tries to organize the people and fight against the exploitation of the Americans who use their electricity but do not pay for it, and Nishida (Fumio Watanabe) a young engineering student who wants to be left alone to study. Nishida meets a young waitress, Shizuko (Ineko Arima) and the two clearly are attracted to each other. Unfortunately, local thug in sunglasses, Joe (Tatsuya Nakadai) also has eyes for Shizuko. Joe arranges for Shizuko to be set upon by a gang of hoodlums so he can “rescue” her. He does and then proceeds to rape her. She is devastated and asks Joe to do the honourable thing and marry her. He simply keeps her dangling, while knocking her about when the mood strikes him. So we have a love triangle of sorts amid all the goings on in this squalid place. Joe, by the way, has another young woman whom he mistreats. As you can see, this film is as noir as noir can be. The on-location shooting is effective. All the actors are excellent. And the climax is devastating. The end may not come as a complete surprise, but it does come with a punch.

 

The Inheritance (1962), directed by Masaki Kobayashi. This morality play begins with a well-dressed woman walking city streets, shopping. This is Yasuko (Keiko Kishi), former secretary of wealthy businessman Senzo Kawara (So Yamamura). As she walks the streets, she meets the late Kawara’s lawyer, and despite not liking the man, she goes for coffee with hum. Yasuko’s voice over leads us into the flashback that will tell us how Yasuko became the wealthy woman she is. The story turns on businessman Kawara who learns that he is dying of cancer. Once he dies, one third of his wealth is guaranteed by law to go to his widow, Satoe (Misako Watanabe). But what of the other two thirds? It turns out that Kawara has three children, none of them with Satoe, and none of them acknowledged, until now, by Kawara. He wants these children found to see if any or all of them are worthy of an inheritance. Those assigned the task of finding two of these children begin machinations to see the children do not inherit or if they do, then what they inherit will be shared with the one who has found them. In short, everyone around Kawara begins to try and get money for themselves, including Satoe who wants more than just one third of the estate. Meanwhile, Kawara turns his attention to his secretary, Yasuko. He tasks her with finding his third chid, a son. The son is a lout. His Dad, Kawara, is also a lout and he rapes Yasuko. You can, I suspect, see where this is going. Anyway, the film has a noir sensibility: voice over, a character trapped by circumstances, greed, city streets. Perhaps unlike noir with its claustrophobic placing of people in dark spaces, here we have lots of wide-angle shots that position people at a distance from each other. These shots nicely belie the false intimacy of the characters. This is a world rife with duplicity and self interest.

 

Samurai Rebellion (1967), directed by Masaki Kobayashi. Director of the 9-hour masterpiece, The Human Condition (1959-61), Kobayashi here gives us a samurai film that focuses on the human condition under authoritarian rule. The protagonist is Isaburo Sasahara (Toshiro Mifune), is a dutiful samurai working for a feudal lord in 18^th-century Japan. He has a wife and two sons and he lives a quiet, peaceful life carrying out his duties. Then a change comes when the lord dismisses the mother of his child and heir because she dared to lash out when she found the lord dallying with another woman. The lord orders Isaburo to arrange for the marriage of this woman to his eldest son. This order causes a ripple in the Sasahara household, but the marriage takes place according to the lord’s wishes. Lo and behold, the bride Ichi (Yoko Tsukasa) proves to be gentle and efficient, and her groom Yogoro (Go Kato) finds himself in love. Things seem to have worked out well. Then, at the lord’s place, the new mother of the heir dies, and the lord cannot have the mother of his heir be the bride of a vassal. Consequently, he demands that Ichi return to the lord’s place to live. In short, Yogoro and his father refuse to send Ichi back. The lord then demands that both father and son commit suicide (seppuku). They refuse thus setting up a final confrontation. What strikes me about this film is its sensitivity to human emotions and its examination of power and its misuses. The desire on the part of the Sasahara family just to live peacefully comes up against the corrupt use of power and the forced adherence to a set of conventions that ignore human desire. The film gives us the architecture (literally) of restraint and control and confinement by rules. The acting is superb and the pace of the action measured. This is a graceful and powerful film.

 A few noir inflected films for November.

“Lights in the Dusk suggests what it might be like to stare at Bill Murray in a coma for 75 minutes” (Ed Gonzalez in SLANT).

Lights in the Dusk (2006), directed by Aki Kaurismaki. This is the story of hangdog night watchman Koistinen (Janne Hyytiainen), who has grand plans to leave his job and start a rival security company. Sadly, he has about as much gumption as a sloth. He finds himself courting, if this is the right word, a blond woman who comes across as mysterious and vacant. She is actually a femme fatale (think Gloria Grahame without the charm) who is working for a gangster. This woman, Aila (Maria Heiskanen), dupes poor Koistinen by drugging him, stealing his keys and the codes to the mall he watches at night, and passing these to robbers who steal a bunch of jewellery. To top things off, this woman plants a bit of evidence that indicates Koistinen is the thief, and he ends up spending time in jail. Once out of jail, he finds a job as a dishwasher. Oh, but this is only temporary, he says. He continues to have dreams that will never come to fruition. Suffice to say there is not much light in this film, but there is much dusk clearly turning dark. The riff on cinema noir has its deadpan moments, but for the most part this is not a film that works for me the way other Kaurismaki films do. As others have noted, the look of this film has something in common with Edward Hopper’s work.

Guilty Bystander (1950), directed by Joseph Lerner. This low budget noir stars Zachary Scott as alcoholic and former cop Max Thursday. Max’s ex-wife, Georgia (Faye Emerson), finds Max in a sleezy hotel owned by Smitty (Mary Boland). He is the house detective, but he spends most of his time drinking and sleeping. Anyway, Max and Georgia’s young son has disappeared and Georgia wants Max to find him. Thus begins a rather convoluted plot peopled with gangsters, losers, hypochondriacs, and molls. Scott is good at playing the alcoholic and Emerson is convincing as his ex. The film is shot in New York with its suitable dark and wet streets and subways and fire escapes and less than savoury hotels and apartments. In other words, this film is dark as noirs should be, despite the rather cheerful ending. Especially appealing, in a dark way, is gangster Otto Varkas (J. Edgar Bromberg) whose hypochondria is extreme. The plot turns on the identity of a mysterious person named St. Paul. I do not think it is particularly difficult to know who this person is among the various characters. Without divulging St. Paul’s identity, I will just say that the person gives a fine performance. As noirs go, this one is a small gem.

The Long Night (1947), directed by Anatole Litvak. This is a remake of Marcel Carne’s Le jour se Leve (1939), although the Fascist implications are muted here. The acting is fine, Henry Fonda as Joe and Barbara Bel Geddes as Jo Ann are convincing. Then we have Vincent Price as smarmy magician Maximilian and Ann Dvorak as Charlene. Charlene is a character who is under developed, and perhaps this is true to a lesser extent with the other characters. What we have is a noir, and the lighting and camera work make this clear, that focuses on star-crossed lovers. The main character, Joe, is a murderer who elicits our sympathy. As with many remakes, The Long Night offers nothing new. It is efficient and impressively constructed, but so was the original. We have some strange goings-on here with the police spraying Joe’s apartment with bullets, and Joe shooting Maximilian after relatively little provocation. From another perspective, the police action and the lying Maximilian give us something contemporary to chew on. Perhaps this film has Fascist overtones after all.

 

The Raging Tide (1952), directed by George Sherman. This noir may be Sherman’s best work, although much of the credit must go to Russell Metty’s cinematography. The film boasts excellent lighting and compositions, familiar with the genre. We do have dark city streets, but we also have the open sea and a fishing boat. The plot has gangster Bruno Felkin (noir stalwart Richard Conte) murdering someone in the film’s opening frames, then finding himself on the run. We even have a bit of voice over, something the film drops before long. Since all roads and other means of travel, aside from water, are covered by the police, Bruno hides away on a fishing boat owned by crusty Swede Hamil Linder (Charles Bickford, by golly) and his son Carl (Alex Nicol). Rounding out the cast are Shelley Winters as Bruno’s girl, Connie Thatcher, and Stephen McNally as Lt. Kelsey. The script has some fine moments, especially when Connie and Lt. Kelsey are onscreen. Conte’s Bruno is a stone-cold murderer with a soft heart, if you can get you mind around this. His time on the fishing boat makes him appreciate hard work, and he comes to admire Hamil, while seeing just how much of a sap Hamil’s son Carl is. Bruno serves as something of a mentor to Carl, both in a bad way and a good way. The plot has Bruno saving Carl, literally. As noirs go, this one is well worth watching.

For the Defense (1930), directed by John Cromwell.  Suave William Powell plays slick William B. Foster, a hot-shot defense lawyer who thinks he is above the law. He also thinks his girlfriend, Broadway star Irene Manners (Kay Francis), will stay with him despite his wish to remain unmarried. He is wrong on both counts. Something of an early film noir, For the Defense finds lawyer Foster caught in a tangle he cannot extricate himself from. His conceit catches up with him. Irene accidentally kills a man while she is driving one night. The man with her takes the blame, and Irene asks Foster to defend this man. This is where things go awry, as you would expect. Kay Francis and William Powell make a fine couple. The film has something to say about corruption in the judicial system, and it does this efficiently. Cromwell’s use of back projection is excellent, especially for a film made in 1930. All in all, this is a slim film that holds up well.

The Wild Goose Lake (2019), directed by Yi’nan Diao. A yellow-lit bus stop in the rain with two strangers loitering, one a dishevelled man and the other a woman in red who asks for a light. This is the opening of The Wild Goose Lake, and it drips noir. We have the anti-hero and femme fatale. These two are about to find themselves in trouble. Well, they already have found themselves in trouble as the flashbacks tell us. The film might have been called Wild Goose Chase, since these two soon find themselves on the run from a wild gang of motorcycle thieves and a bunch of wild policemen. This is noir and so things won’t turn out well, at least for one of these two. The sleezy grimy back streets of this Chinese city are the backdrop for most of the action, the titular Lake appearing only briefly. What we have is a society in decay, rough tenements, dank eating establishments, and an unsavoury hotel. Corruption and violence are a way of life. The picture of society here is not flattering. Nods to such films as Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973), Now, Voyager (1942), The Warriors (1979), and others indicate that this exercise in neo-noir fits in the dark end of the cycle. The characters are less than fully rounded, but the action is sufficiently furious to keep one from nodding off. Filmed largely at night, the action plays out in various shades of yellow street lighting and grey to black corners, a palette that is becoming all too familiar in recent films. Here it is handled with confidence.

Nightmare Alley (1947), directed by Edmund Goulding. Guillermo del Toro has remade this film, and not being able to see the remake, I thought to revisit the 1947 version with Tyrone Power as the hustler Stanton Carlisle. This is a noir with bite. Lee Garmes’s photography brings to mind the photographs of Diane Arbus, as does the film itself. In the world of this film, America is a carnival sideshow filled with hucksters, grifters, con persons, and geeks. Sound familiar? Sliver-tongued Stanton rises from a menial jib to being a mentalist and then something of an evangelist before descending rather quickly into hobo status and finally becoming a geek, a sideshow freak who bites the heads off chickens for a bottle of hooch. If Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) comes to mind, then you are on the right track. As I watched Stanton’s rise, I kept thinking of Joel Osteen. The people in this carnival all suffer some sort of psychological damage, and the sparkling black and white photography outlines this in excellent fashion. This is both an unusual noir and a central example of the noir sensibility, presenting a world of psychological turmoil and tangled relationships coupled with selfish motives. It is not difficult to understand why del Toro chose to remake this film at this time.

 

Nightmare Alley (2021), directed by Guillermo del Toro. Here is film noir softened and sanded by time and trickery. The film looks dark enough and conjures up a time past out of time, but it lacks the sinister, creepy, and even vicious streak of Edmund Goulding’s 1947 version of the story. Bradley Cooper as Stanton Carlisle drifts through the action, a passive recipient of, for a while, good fortune. Tyrone Power, by contrast, plays Carlisle with a sinister lack of interest in anything but himself. Everything seems just a bit too studied, cool to the point of well-this-does-not-really-matter. Cate Blanchett, for example, plays Lilith Ritter with an iciness that aims for the femme fatale in sculpture. Even the riff on the carnival geek seems just a bit too calculated. We have a gallery of assorted players with familiar faces – Ron Perlman, Willem DaFoe, Rooney Mara, Toni Collette, Richard Jenkins, Mary Steenburgen, David Strathairn – but they come across quite simply as a gallery of familiar faces. Stanton Carlisle’s rise to spiritual medium is rather tepid, and I found it unconvincing that his patsies would fall for his patently artificial patter. All in all, this film is a disappointment. Oh, del Toro makes films always worth watching, and this one has its visual charms, but for a story so well suited to our times of fakery, lies, gullibility, and grift, it lacks the punch it ought to have, or could have, delivered.

 We are not far from Halloween, and so let's see if I can find a few appropriate films.

Confessions of an Opium Eater (1962), directed by Albert Zugsmith. Here is a shout out to Mark Bandola who suggested this film to me. Although the onscreen title refers to Thomas DeQuincey, what we see does not remind me much of the book I read years ago about an English Opium Eater. The director Zugsmith is the person behind such well known films as Sex Kittens Go to College, The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, and Psychedelic Sexualis. These titles might suggest that Mr. Zugsmith likes things lurid. The first ten minutes of Confessions will confirm this. In these ten minutes we have a ship transporting women and girls from Asia to America (San Francisco, where else?) to be auctioned for money and or opium. The women are tossed about unpleasantly when the importers of these women spot an inspection ship on their trail. Everyone flees the ship, just before the inspection ship shoots and explodes it. The survivors make their way to shore and the men begin to round up the women who are trying to flee despite their shackles. Suddenly a group of local Asian men appear and begin to do battle with, well with everyone and anyone. Near the end of this melee, one of the locals runs after a fleeing young woman who is being chased by one of the sailors. The local catches up to the fellow and the fellow catches up with the woman. A fight ensues in which the local is knocked for six and the sailor finds himself engaged with a mysterious white horse. Once the horse dispatches the sailor, we cut to San Francisco’s Chinatown where a dark clad Vincent Price seeks something or someone. Thus begins the rest of the movie that concerns the auctioning of women, a tong war between those who want to stop the auction and those who want to profit from it. Almost all the action takes place inside cavernous dark buildings decorated with objects from the East. Price, as Gilbert DeQuincey, meets a young girl whom he decides to rescue; he also meets an older female small person who helps him navigate the labyrinthine rooms and corridors and sewers of this place. Both these females are in large cages that hang from the ceiling. We have dancing girls, opium smoking men, dark hordes – all a bit unpleasant. There are some remarkable moments of slow motion and also speeded up motion, and the piece is filmed by none other than Joseph Biroc, a master of noirish lighting. The set designs are good. All in all, this is a weird mishmash.

Son of Dracula (1943), directed by Robert Siodmak. I have seen this movie more than once before, but I had forgotten how closely it follows the conventions of noir (not surprising, considering the director). It has the hero caught in a web of intrigue and danger, a femme fatale, shadows and light that enhance the gothic atmosphere, deep focus, and more than a hint of madness. It also has a vampire. The vampire here is Count Alucard (Lon Chaney, Jr.). Now spell Alucard backward and what do you get? The film makes much of this spelling. In any event, the Count has arrived in the new world where he reconnects with a dark woman he had met in Europe. The two of them conspire to gain control of the woman’s large swamp-surrounded mansion, where they plan to live their immortal (after the Count turns the woman) lives feasting on the strong blood of the locals, good American stock. At least this is what the Count thinks. Unbeknownst to him, the dear lady has other plans. She plans to become a vampire, then turn the man she really loves into a vampire, have this man get rid of the count and then the lady and her love live happily ever after feasting of those strong blooded locals. This is perhaps an unexpected gem in Universal’s cycle of horror films from the 30s and 40s. The special effects have Alucard transforming from human shape to bat, and from human shape to mist and from mist and bat to human shape. 

Night of the Blood Beast (1958), directed by Bernard L. Kowalsky. This little thriller is produced by none other than Roger Corman, and it has his imprint. The costume for the beast is the same one Corman used for his film, Teenage Caveman, filmed just two weeks prior to the filming of Night of the Blood Beast. The interest for me lies in the film’s attempt to criticize humanity’s rush to destroy that which it does not understand. In this, it might remind us of The Day the Earth Stood Still, except for the fact that Night of the Blood Beast cops out at the end. The plot mechanism here is also of interest because it looks forward to Alien (1992). In Night of the Blood Beast, astronaut John Corcoran (Michael Emmet), crash lands on return to earth. He appears to be dead, but his blood cells show signs not only of life, but of alien life. It turns out John has become the incubator for alien creatures, and he eventually rises from the dead. Meanwhile a large creature roams about causing the few people in the vicinity to become fearful and plan to kill the creature. The revived John keeps exhorting the others to leave the creature alone and find out why it has come to earth. He pleads with the others not to be so quick to destroy. By the end, the creature has managed to assimilate one of the human’s vitals so that it can communicate with humans. It does so, but to no avail since we now learn that the creature’s plan to save humanity from itself is to take over humanity. Bye bye creature, hello normal human propensity to violence. The film has a rating of 3.5 on IMDB, but this is one of those ratings that suggest bad is good. 

Death is a Number (1951), directed by Robert Henryson. A British film that mixes numerology, especially the number 9, with a Romany curse that dooms a family to end its line after the 9^th generation. Somehow an ancient non-existent Druid window also plays a part here. Told in a series of flashbacks that use stock footage, still shots, and some action sequences, the film tells of young man and racing driver John Bridgeman (Dennis Webb) who is cursed by the number 9, that number figuring in all sorts of ways in his life until he perishes in a racing car crash, the racing car that has the number 9 on its bonnet (hood). The special effects work here is experimental and not without interest. Note the ghostly outline of a mysterious figure, for example. The whole thing is perhaps a tad hokey, but coming in at just about 50 minutes, this short film will hold your interest. I found the bits about numerology at the beginning fascinating. So if you are looking to while away some time and find numbers of interest, this one just might be for you.

Count Dracula (1970), directed by Jess Franco. Once again, we have Christopher Lee playing the Count, and he does this well. As the film proceeds and he drinks more blook, he grows progressively younger looking. The narrative stays fairly closely to Bram Stoker’s novel, and we have the usual suspects doing what they do. Arthur Holmwood is missing, but Quincey Morris is here, along with Jonathan Harker and both Mina and Lucy. Herbert Lom takes a break from the Pink Panther films to play Van Helsing, and – one for the books – Klaus Kinski is on hand to play a mostly silent Renfield. All the players receive generous close-ups that become predictable as things go along. Special effects are minimal, but we do have those plastic bats swinging by strings outside Lucy’s bedroom window. As for the wolves, these are clearly quite lovely German Shepherds. The locations and sets are serviceable. All in all, this is a watchable version of the well-known and oft filmed story. 

The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), directed by Jean Epstein. Amazing. This is a film that draws on previous films by the likes of Murnau and Weine and Lang, but it is entirely itself. Based on Poe’s story, the film has Allen setting out to visit his friend Roderick Usher in the Usher mansion way out in anywhere land. Tod Browning must have watched this film closely because what we have anticipates Browning’s Dracula (1931) in many of its compositions and effects. Allen’s opening trip to the Usher mansion is laced with warnings of the strangeness to come with shots of bogs, and bare trees touching the sky and toads practicing piggyback, and mists and strange lights. Inside the Usher house is equally strange as Roderick obsessively paints his wife Madeleine as she pines and fades away. She appears to die, and the funeral procession just has to be watched to be believed as the coffin makes its way through a forest and bog to a cavernous crypt with large stairway into the depths. All along as the pallbearers makes their way we have an overlay of candles, a premonition of the fire to come perhaps. The camera shots are surreal as well as expressionistic. Luis Bunuel worked as Second Assistant in charge of interiors here, and I suspect he learned much from the experience. Perhaps a tad ponderous, the film nevertheless is quite simply amazing.

Vampyr (1932), directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer. This is a vampire film that delights in the uncanny, in shadow and light and mist and mystery. Long, even astonishing, tracking shots emphasise the depths of consciousness, the seemingly endless strangeness in which our protagonist, Allan Grey (Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg here known as Julian West, a non actior who funded the film), finds himself. Disorientation is the order of the day as Allan tries to find out what or who is perpetrating acts of horror such as the sucking of the blood of young Leone (Sybille Schmitz) or the killing of her father. Behind all the terror is the ancient vampire Marguerite Chopin (Henriette Gerard) and her helper, a fellow known only as Doctor (Jan Hieronimko). Everything is filmed in a grainy fog, and the action is slow as if in a silent film. This simply adds to the creepiness. Whatever else this film may be, it fits alongside a film like Bunuel’s Le Chien Andalou in its exploration of both cinematic effects and the unconscious. We have establishing shots that fill the screen with gothic paraphernalia, crosses, coffins, shadows, skulls, poison bottles, ominous spaces, a scythe and fellow who may just be about to cross Styx. We have close-ups that register terror, fear, dislike, eroticism, and the uncanny. We have shadows that act independent of that which casts the shadow. We have a dreamscape. We have a film that offers a vampire film like no other.

The Devil’s Hand (1961), directed by William J. Hole Jr. Edgar Ulmer was the first director signed to this picture, but for some reason he dropped out or was replaced. The flim has something of the Ulmer sensibility dealing with the occult and dangerous goings on with an erotic angle. The plot has Rick Turner (Robert Ada) dropping into a doll shop thinking to buy something for his girlfriend, Donna Trent (Ariadne Welter). Here he meets shop owner Francis Lamont (Neil Hamilton), who happens to be a cult leader and voodoo specialist. He likes sticking needles into dolls, dolls that are the spitting image of actual people. Anyway, Rick sees a doll that clearly resembles Donna, and he decides to buy this, but Francis says it is not for sale and pitches another doll that depicts a beautiful blond woman, a blond woman who begins to turn up in Rick’s dreams for several nights until finally he meets her in real life. She is his neighbour in the apartment building where he lives. What a coincidence! She seduces Rick and brings him into the cult as a follower of Gamba, the Devil-god. The place where the cult followers meet has a nude statue of the beautiful blond woman whose name is Bianca Milan (Linda Christian, whose actual statue of herself is used in the film; it used to be in Tyrone Powers’s garden when Christian was married to him). This place also has an irritating drum/bongo player, two lithe and sexy dancers, and a roulette wheel of sorts with wobbly daggers hanging from it. Oh, and I neglected to mention that Lamont, at the beginning of proceedings, has pierced the doll of Donna with a long needle and she has ended up in hospital. 

The She-Creature (1956), directed by Edward L Cahn. Here’s a strange one, a mixture of so many things, low budget, yet capable cinematography, a cast of familiar actors (most prominently, Tom Conway, brother of George Sanders), a blending of genres (monster movie, occult thriller, romance, morality play about the evils of money), and a study of science vs the unknown. This mixture adds up to less than the sum of its parts. The creature of the title looks like a female version, badly assembled, of the Black Lagoon creature we all know and love. She appears to wear flippers, have straggly hair, and prominent breats, along with the flapping bits up and down her back. Chester Morris plays Dr. Charles Lombardi, hypnotist extraordinaire, who puts the beautiful Andrea (Marla English) into a state of regression into her deep past when she was actually a wild creature who emerged from the sea. Lombardi’s adversary is the good Dr. Ted Erickson (Lance Fuller) who has eyes for Andrea and dislike for the crazed Lombardi. Lombardi’s only motive in his weird ways seems to be fame and money. Rich businessman, Timothy Chappel (Tom Conway), also sees a way to make a buck by promoting Lombardi and his hypnotic ways. Chappel’s daughter, Dorothy (Cathy Downs) is Dr. Erickson’s fiancé, but she seems unperturbed when he ogles Andrea, and she quickly turns her attention back to her ex-boyfriend and inebriate Bob (William Hudson who is perhaps best known for The Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman). All of this is mildly amusing. The film ends with the words, “She’ll never be back, will she” followed by a large question mark. In other words, what Lombardi calls the “transmigration of the soul” just might be possible. Wow.

 A scattering of films.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb (1964), directed by Stanley Kubrik. It has been 60 years since this film premiered. It was sobering then, and it is sobering now. Perhaps even more so. The array of phallic images throughout, and the nearly all male cast give us a world in peril because of a bunch of lunatic men, soldiers and politicians. Testosterone runs the show. General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), with his thrusting cigar and then ejaculating machine gun, represents the paranoia we see at work today, a paranoia that opens itself to conspiracy theories. Ripper fears that our “precious bodily fluids” are being tainted by the country’s water supply that has supposedly been poisoned by those darned Ruskies. Meanwhile we have B-52 Bomber pilot, Major ‘King’ Kong (Slim Pickens), donning his ten-gallon hat and riding off to doomsday with a hip and a holler, reminding us of America’s love of the Wild West and its willingness to exterminate peoples – in this instance all peoples. Names such as General ‘Buck’ Turgidson (George C. Scott) and Colonel ‘Bat’ Guano (Keenan Wynn) remind us of the scatological theme at work throughout. Then we have the mixing of forces: Communists, Fascists, Democrats, all nutty and bull-headed and given to violence. In the world this film depicts, no one is safe and friendly fire is serves as prelude to world annihilation. We do not see a lot of Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers) in the film, but he is the epitome of the mechanical man with a fantasy of a world in which beautiful women outnumber men 10 to 1. Sellers, by the way, plays three roles, Dr. Strangelove, President Merkin Muffley, and Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, a German Nazi, the American President, and an English officer. This three-way role is a reminder of the replication of idiocy across national boundaries. This satire is vicious, funny and disturbing, a reminder that when things look bleak or bleaker than bleak, laughter is perhaps the only way to cope. I say cope, not survive. Dr. Strangelove and Kubrik’s Paths of Glory (1957) are two of the finest anti-war films that we have.

 

Prisoners of the Mountains (1996), directed by Sergei Bodrov. This is an updated version of a story by Tolstoy. It tells of two Russian soldiers fighting against Chechnyan rebels, one a hardened soldier Sacha (Oleg Menshikov), and the other a fresh young recruit, Vanya (Sergei Bodrov), who find themselves captured by the rebels. The man who has them prisoner in a small mountain village is Abdul-Murat (Jamal Sikharulidze); he wants to exchange these soldiers for his son who is a prisoner of the Russians. As things move along, we come to know a few of the villagers, including Abdul-Murat’s daughter Dina (Susanna Mekhraliyevah), the tongueless Hasan (Aleksandr Bureyev) who likes to “sing,” and Vanya’s mother (Valentina Fedotova) who is a teacher. The two prisoners find ways to interact with the villagers, and even become friends with some of them. Vanya fashions a clever bird mobile for Dina, and both soldiers enjoy the company of Hasan. This is, however, war, and we can expect things to take a sour turn. They do. War is hell. The filming location is in Dagestan (bordering the Caspian Sea), and shots of the village and surrounding mountainous terrain are impressive. The rocky environs are bleak, underscoring the harshness of life and the bitterness of war. As anti-war films go, this one works well. We get to know these people well, if not intimately. This is a worthy film, although it skirts the ugliness of war somewhat. 

 

Adoption (1975), directed by Marta Meszaros. This film communicates an intimacy rare in film. It consists of close-up shots of faces, mostly the faces of women, ordinary women. We have workers in a wood factory caked with sawdust, the girls from the Children’s Home, and of course the two principal characters, Kata (Katalin Berek) and Anna (Gyongyver Vigh). Kata is a 43-year-old widow who is having an affair with a married man. She has decided that she wants a child, but her lover Joska will not hear of this. As for Anna, she keeps running away from the Children’s Home, and she wants to marry her boyfriend, Sanyi (Peter Fried). Kata becomes something of a surrogate mother to Anna, allowing Anna and Sanyi to tryst at her place, and helping the two lovers convince Anna’s parents to consent to their wedding. The relationship between Kata and Anna, then, has something to do with motherhood, and Kata becomes convinced she can be a good parent. Once Anna is married (a marriage that Meszaros hints will not be successful), Kata sets out to adopt a child. The film deals with child abuse, emotional stress, parenthood, and relationships, both those between lovers and those between friends. The film is shot in a lightly misty black and white, giving the people and their actions a delicate feel. The focus is on the lives of women, their strength and resilience in a patriarchal Hungary. If there is any influence here, it is to the French New Wave, and Kata’s lover, Joska is played by Laszlo Szabo, an actor who appears in at least five films by Jean-Luc Godard. I also think of Cassavetes’s Faces (1968). The feel for human desires is palpable in this remarkable film.

 

A couple of recent films: The Velvet Underground and The Tragedy of Macbeth. The Velvet Underground (2021), directed by Todd Haynes. This documentary captures the spirit and the style of its subject in a stunning manner. Rather than a behind the scenes look at a band, this film is an exploration of an art movement, an explosion in the New York City art world of the 1960s and 70s, especially the former decade. The split screen, and multiple split-screen echoes the Warhol films that are an essential part of that 1960s art scene. Even the close-up interviews with various people close to the band have a colour reminiscent of the time and place. This is a film to go alongside Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), Velvet Goldmine (1998), and of course I’m Not There (2007). 

As for Macbeth (2021), directed by Joel Coen, this is a film that offers a feast to the eyes, a homage to such film makers as Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, and Jean Cocteau. The lighting and cinematography are fabulous. The acting is fine. Denzel Washington’s Macbeth communicates a world weariness appropriate for the character, and Frances McDormand’s Lady Macbeth is subtle and very effective. My only disappointment is that the line, “What, you egg? Young fry of treachery,” is gone from the script. Obviously, they did a bit of trimming. In any case, both these films are well worth seeing. Oh, and the witches in Macbeth, especially the one who speaks, are extremely effective.

 

Salt of This Sea (2008), directed by Annemarie Jacir. When I lived in Reading, England, I knew a man and his family who were Palestinians from Syria. This man became a friend. He told me of his family who had, prior to 1948, lived in Palestine. Upon the establishment of Israel, however, this family and many other Palestinian families, had their homes confiscated by Israeli forces and turned over to Israeli people. My friend had papers stamped with the word “stateless,” as I recall. In any case, this film deals with the after-effects of that time of dislocation for some. It is a polemic, and as a polemic it carries intensity. As a dramatic film, however, Salt of This Sea falters. It begins well with the arrival of a young Palestinian woman from Brooklyn to Israel. This woman, Soraya (Suheir Hammad), has ostensibly come just “to visit.” Her actual intention is to find her ancestral home. From this opening at the airport the film moves on to become a love story (of sorts), a tour of various places such as Ramallah, Jaffa, and Jerusalem, a heist story, a road movie, and a two for the road film. The film’s intentions are clear and even laudable, but as a film of just over 100 minutes, it takes on too much. Perhaps the most telling part of the movie comes when Soraya visits the home of her grandfather. The present occupant is a young Jewish woman who is kind enough to invite Soraya and her two male friends into this house. The visit results in Soraya demanding that the current occupant acknowledge that the house belongs to her, Soraya, and that the Jewish woman can stay because Soraya allows her to stay. We have here a knot difficult, if not impossible, to unravel. This is a film that will divide viewers. It works best, I think, when the camera gives us shots of oranges or gates or walls or streets or panoramas of the countryside. Such shots communicate with more subtlety than much of the human interaction does.

The Ascent (1977), directed by Larisa Shepitko. This is Shepitko’s last film, and it is intense. This is a Russian film with much of the sensibility we have come to associate with Russian literature and film. It is an anti-war film to set alongside such films as Paths of Glory and All Quiet on the Western Front. Filmed in winter, The Ascent gives us a screen filled with white, the white of snow and sky. The story involves two Soviet partisans who are trying to find food for the ragged band of people they have left in the snowy forest somewhere in Belarus. Danger in the form of German soldiers lurk all about. At the outset, one of these partisans, Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin) appears to the stronger of the two. The other man is a teacher of mathematics, Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov), and he receives a wound early in the action. As the film proceeds, Sotnikov emerges as the stronger of the two, refusing to provide information after he and Rybak are captured by Germans. Rybak, on the other hand, collapses. The film is about survival, sacrifice, betrayal, and patriotism. The most impressive aspect of the film for me is the cinematography, the snow-filled vistas and the intense close-ups of faces (something we might think of as a specialty of Soviet cinema from the beginning), and the fluid camera working in such harsh conditions. Things do not end well for the partisans, reminding me of the fate of the three soldiers in Kubrik’s Paths of Glory. Both films use black and white cinematography to emphasize the coldness, the sharpness, the flatness, and the starkness of war. The title might indicate an attempt to show the fate of the people at the end as a spiritual ascent, and we have images, especially that of Sotnikov’s still face, that clearly invoke iconicity (icon in the original sense).

 "An Endless Variety in Language": The New Mother

A student asked me just after class whether I liked Lucy Clifford's story, "The New Mother."  I replied briskly that I did, and when the student wanted to know why I should like such a dismal little story, I replied once again briskly that it was thought-provoking.  I meant, of course, that the story is shocking and that its very shock-value prompts us to ask questions about the story.  But leaving class, I was troubled that I had not answered the question in a satisfactory way.  Sure, it is possible to "like" that which is not pleasant; this is one of the nifty things about art: we can like that which in real life would not be likeable at all.  But does this accurately account for liking a story such as "The New Mother," and what is there about the story to like?

I'll begin with the negative: the story contains much for any reader to dislike.  First, the obvious message about good behaviour, obeying parents, and accepting duty is rather heavy-handed.  Second, the message that bad behaviour may be a result of peer pressure and the desire for the satisfaction of curiosity takes a downright unpleasant form.  The little gypsy girl taunts Blue-eyes and Turkey and nudges them deeper and deeper into bad behaviour, and then she never does allow them to see the little peasant man and woman.  Indeed, perhaps the little man and woman never existed in the first place, and the gypsy child is a small female version of Mephistopheles or Lucifer.  The departure of the mother is disturbing, and so too is the "new mother" that appears to take her place.  The end is stark and bleak and unforgiving.  These children are babes in the woods at the end, and we know what happened to the babes in the woods.  Should we conclude that this is an example of the kind of brutal didacticism popular in the heyday of the so-called Moral Tale?  Is this story quite simply a warning to young girls to behave themselves or suffer the consequences?  If it is, then for me it would be a particularly unlikable and even unsavoury story.

But I do like it.  So what is there about this story to like?  I'll approach a couple of things here: 1) the psychological story of absences, and 2) the initiation this story offers readers into the complexity of reading itself.  This second point, simply stated, is: the story is about how we read, how we interpret.  Interpretation depends upon what the little gypsy girl in the story refers to as "an endless variety in language" (205).

First things first, and so I begin with absences.  The first thing I notice about this story is its insistence on things absent.  The two girls, Blue-eyes and Turkey, have names that derive from absence, Blue-eyes for her father who is absent at sea and Turkey for the wild turkey that is absent in the forest.  The fair in the village takes place the day before the girls arrive and so it too is absent.  They find no letter waiting for them at the post office, and this absence underlines the absence of the father.  When they tell their mother that they aspire to be naughty--to absent goodness from their lives, she replies that if they do this, then she will absent herself and leave a substitute mother in her place.  The plot turns on precisely these absences. The story is replete with absences of one kind and another.  The little man and woman in the peardrum are always absent.  I connect this absence with the psychic life, and to do so is to raise the spectre of desire.  Desire, by its very nature, seeks that which it does not have.  What the little girls have in the beginning of the story is comfort and security, a loving mother and protective home; they are sheltered and cut off from the dangerous world beyond their ken.  Yet their father is absent, at sea.  Desire on the part of the mother and her two older daughters to receive communication from the father sets the story in motion.  Then desire for the things the fair offers, for sight of the little man and woman, for the sound of the peardrum, for the little woman's secret, for the knowledge whether they have been naughty enough to satisfy the gypsy girl dominates the girls' lives.  They desire that which they cannot have.  And what they cannot have is that which they desire.  

The story is a small Lacanian drama.  Here two young girls living in harmony with their mother reach a stage in their lives when desire for that which is beyond the parameters of mother and home initiates a fall from unity with that mother.  The little village girl is dark and mysterious, seeming to appear and disappear as if by magic.  She is the 'other,' a person who, by virtue of her very otherness is both sinister and attractive.  And she harbours two little people who dance and comport themselves suggestively.  Whatever these little people represent, they clearly suggest something transgressive, that which the children's mother disapprove of, and that which the two young girls desire.  The behaviour called for by the gypsy child subverts the calm of early connection with the mother.  It disconnects the girls from their mother.  The gypsy child convinces the girls that they lack something, that their lives are without fulfillment.  Having been convinced of this, the girls set about trying to fill that lack, to accomplish fulfillment.  What the story reveals, however, is that the thing the girls think is necessary for their fulfillment is non-existent in the first place.  That which they desire is an absence, and therefore desire can never find satisfaction.  What's more, once the acceptance of desire as something devoutly to be wished is set in motion, once the children leave the mirror stage as it were (remember that they throw the mirror out the window and it crashes on the ground (206)), they lose contact with the mother they had known.  They find only separation.  The girls are doomed to a life of separation and frustration and fear.  An absent father and an absent mother mean a wilderness future for these girls.  All they can do is "long and long, with a longing that is greater than words can say, to see their own dear mother again" (213).  This is a longing that is doomed to remain frustrate.

Before I leave this Lacanian longing, I note the relative absence of males in this story.  The father is at sea; a little man with a wide-brimmed hat proves absent; and the man with the dancing dogs lurks in the background, appearing before the girls meet the gypsy child and then later playing a flute as his two dogs slowly waltz round and round.  What do we make of this grotesquerie?  One thing seems likely: the absence of the girls' father makes the whole series of events possible.  Their desire is to reach out to the father, and the little man accompanied by a little woman in the peardrum box is a reminder of male-female relationship.  This couple compels the young girls' interest.  Then we learn that the man with the dogs is somehow connected to the gypsy girl.  The question that occurs to me is: does this man represent the master of the revels, the power in the background, the one who controls things?  This is a parodic father and his two dogs are parodic children under his control.  Perhaps the story is even more darkly pessimistic than I at first thought: disaster can happen when fathers are absent (I think too of Sendak's Outside Over There), and disaster results when fathers control children.  The Law of the Father ensures desire's dance will keep us unhappy and isolated from that which has kept us safe: the mother.  The "new mother," after all, is a decidedly phallic mother with her long and wooden and powerful tail.  In this story fathers win the day, but the result for women is dire.

So far, this shapes up to be a dreary story about the inevitable tragedy of human existence.  But another reading is possible.  The story delivers one surprise after another, most often linguistic surprise.  This is a story of reversals.  And the reversals more often than not derive from misunderstanding, from misinterpretation if you will.  Examples are numerous: the peardrum has strings, but it is actually played by turning a handle, not strumming or plucking the strings; the gypsy girl appears to be crying, but she is cheerful; she says she is rich, but she looks poor; shabbiness is respectable; unkindness is being naughty without including your sister in the naughtiness; goodness is akin to a crime; and of course the most dramatic reversal is the "new mother" herself because she reverses (perhaps "inverts" is more precise) the good mother.  Each of these reversals has something to do with a failure of interpretation on the part of the girls, a failure which is deeply related to language itself and the failure of language to be transparent.

The dark stranger the girls meet in town is vague and ill-defined; at first they think "it was someone asleep," then they think it is a poor sick woman in need of food, and finally they see that it is a "wild-looking girl" who seems "very unhappy" (195).  They are wrong on all counts, except for the apparent fact that this is a female.  Their interpretation fails; they misread what they see.  The reason for this misinterpretation has something to do with a failure of precise connection between signifier and signified.  The gypsy girl as signifier does not offer a clear and transparent signified.  I keep calling her a "gypsy," but the story nowhere states this.  The girl remains vague and mysterious, like language.  As a signifier, she may point to many signifieds: child, gypsy, peasant, urban street arab, disenfranchised poor person, demonic force, daughter of the devil, Mephistopheles in child drag, absence itself, tempter, enemy, and so on.

Like language in its infinite variety, I might add.  Note several instances of slippage between signifier and signified.  "A little shabbiness is very respectable," says the gypsy child (197).  If this is so, then what do the words "shabbiness" and "respectability" mean?  Are respectable people shabby?  And what constitutes a "little shabbiness," as opposed to a lot of shabbiness?  Such questions remain open.  Or what do we make of the gypsy child's assertion that her shabbiness is "quite lucky"?  Just what does "lucky" mean here?  Is shabbiness a matter of luck?  At another point in the story, the two girls claim that they "are very fond of crying" (199).  Is this true?  And if it is, then why should crying be something they like?  If this is not true, then the girls deliberately use language to obscure a truth.  A simple and clear example occurs when the two girls urge the gypsy child to "go on" singing, and she replies, "I'm going," as she walks away (202).  Clearly the connection between signifier and signified is arbitrary, unpredictable, and slippery.

Twice in the story, the narrator alerts us to the failure of understanding.  When the mother explains to her daughters just how love works to dispel unkindness, the girls reply: "We don't know what you mean" (200).  A little later, the gypsy child tells the girls that language has an infinite variety, and the narrator informs us that, "the children did not understand" (205).  What the two girls cannot do is interpret; their grasp of language remains rudimentary and simple.  Why can't we be naughty and still love mother, they think.  Why can't naughtiness be something simple--like words.  But words are not simple, the story indicates, and the girls are left at the end on the outside looking in.  The darkness has drawn down and become impenetrable; this is inevitable in a world in which words are beyond human understanding.  But the story as I conceive it here is not simply dreary and pessimistic; it is an object lesson in reading.  The reader has the opportunity of understanding how language can work to isolate and obfuscate.  Readers learn yet another Lacanian lesson: everything depends upon the letter.

 A change of pace. Last words on George MacDonald

George MacDonald, A Valedictory

 

 I began work on George MacDonald in 1970 when he was a relatively obscure figure from the Victorian period. We had Joseph Johnson’s 1906 study, C.S. Lewis’s influential Anthology (1946), and Robert Lee Wolff’s The Golden Key (1961). Shortly after I began my studies came work by Robert Reis, Muriel Hutton, Colin Manlove, Rolland Hein, Stephen Prickett, and David Robb. I met all of these people, with the exception of Richard Reis and Rolland Hein. I also met George MacDonald Davies, MacDonald’s godson, and somewhat later William Raeper, John Docherty, Bob Trexler, and John Pennington. All of the people I met in the MacDonald community were warm, friendly, and unfailingly kind and supportive. I think this speaks to MacDonald’s deep influence. In any case, since my work on MacDonald slowed down, and then stopped, much work by many minds has raised the profile and increased our knowledge of MacDonald’s life and work. I think we appreciate him as a writer of prose more than we once did. We now have many scholars working on MacDonald’s life and writing. I could mention several names, but I will just note that MacDonald has moved both those inside the academy and those who work independently. He is a writer who elicits passionate response. Just think of the academic journal North Wind and the independent journal created by Barbara Amiel, Wingfold. In short, MacDonald is a writer who unites people far and wide, professionals and non-professionals. His is a rare and important voice.

Most of us have a book or books that are formative, that somehow motivate us in important ways. Meeting such books can come at any time. For example, I recently read Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (2023), and the book not only impressed me with its incisive exploration of our cultural moment, but it also appealed to me simply because what Klein has to say fits so neatly into my sense of value, my ideology, if you will. It may seem strange to hear, but this book reminded me of when I met another book that proved to be formative in my life. I refer to George MacDonald’s Lilith (1895), a book by a writer who lived in another time and another place, but whose vision struck me as essential when I first encountered his mysterious fantasy. This encounter happened in the fall of 1968 in a movie theatre in Toronto. I was there to watch Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and this proved appropriate not only because Kubrik’s film takes us to another world, but also because my quest to learn about George MacDonald began just then. I can remember feeling I had come across what a “kindred spirit.” Lilith was strange, but strange in the way the mythopoeic works of William Blake are strange. What I did not know at the time is that MacDonald was an admirer of Blake and used one of Blake’s drawings for Robert Blair’s The Grave, a drawing known as “Death’s Door” (1808), for his bookplate. In any case, what struck me then is the kinship between imaginative visions of Blake and MacDonald, visions that are the product of what MacDonald calls “the fantastic imagination.”

            “The most sublime act is to set another before you.” This aphorism from Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell,” seems to me to fit MacDonald’s vision. The aphorism, “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees,” reminds me of MacDonald’s belief that each reader who reads a story will “read its meaning after his own nature and development” (“The Fantastic Imagination” 316). Perhaps the only difference between these two visionaries is that MacDonald’s sense of a person’s “nature and development” is that these may evolve or devolve. But, clearly, Blake’s call for a marriage of Heaven and Hell is a call to a coming to completion of all things in a unity, not uniformity, of being.

            “The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended.” MacDonald writes in his essay “The Fantastic Imagination.” This pretty much sums up my initial impression of both Blake’s mythic work and MacDonald’s Lilith. These writers nudge us toward clarity of vision by first activating feeling. In his essay, “The Fantastic Imagination,” MacDonald stresses the importance of a work of art first activating feeling that then prompts thought. But what connects MacDonald and Blake is that word “vision.” I take this word to mean a comprehensive understanding of things, an ability to make connections that may, at first, not appear connected. Both writers have the ability to take us to places we have not been before while at the same time making these places uncanny, doppelgangers of reality, if you will.

            When MacDonald discusses how the imagination works by first moving our feelings which then promote thought, he acknowledges that a genuine work of art will strike one person differently from the way it strikes another person. We call this interpretation, and the interpretation of art is expansive, open, full of possibilities. As MacDonald says, a work of art may mean many things. What matters is the creative relationship between the reader and the book. Let me offer an example. The opening paragraph of Chapter XVIII of Lilith sees Vane, just after his encounter with Lord and Lady Cokayne, walking in a forest. His companion is the moon; she is ”dark and dented, like a battered disk of old copper” (273). She looks dispirited, and Vane imagines her saying, “Is this going to last forever.” In the previous chapter, the Raven, sitting in a beech tree, advises Vane that some words, all and ever are two of them, are too big for him and for Vane. Now Vane imagines the moon wondering if her situation is forever. He appears to have forgotten that some words are too big for him, and most likely for the moon too. In any case, Vane and the moon walk together for a while, “she the dull shine, and I the live shadow.” Vane is just about to discover the emaciated body of a woman who will turn out to be Lilith. I might also add that moon and shadow offer a binary that gives us male and female, light and dark, high and low. I will return to binaries a bit later.

            For now, let me notice that this first paragraph is a brief account of two travellers, strangers both in a strange land. The moon portends the ensuing encounter between Vane and Lilith. The short narrative lets us know that Vane is conscious of having a companion, here the distanced moon that Vane imagines as a female companion. The short bit also allows MacDonald to echo his first fantasy, Phantastes, thereby suggesting the connectedness of his work. Indeed, connectedness is a thematic thread throughout Lilith. This short paragraph also connects with the reader, in this case me, allowing me to play with interpretive possibilities. Vane’s companion here is female, reflective, virginal, mutable, and continually on the move. She connects to the various female figures Vane meets, Eve, Mara, Lilith, Lona; she suggests that these females constitute one figure, a malleable constantly changing figure. She is here connected to an old copper disk, copper being a metal that turns up several times in the Old Testament, sometimes connected to judgement. Vane mentions the moon as travelling companion just prior to his coming across Lilith. Lilith has connections with the moon in the Zohar, especially with the waxing and waning of the moon. Waxing and waning is a suitable description of the Lilith Vane is about to encounter.

            As soon as the second paragraph begins, Vane spies “Something on the ground” (273), something white and “cold like that which was once alive, and is alive no more.” This is the emaciated Lilith who turns out not to be dead, but to be clinging to life and in need of succour and care. The following couple of chapters carefully recount how Vane cares for this emaciated woman, using a nearby hot stream to warm her and grapes to give her sustenance. This lengthy episode serves to enlighten Vane. He learns that a person needs company to be fully a person. Two people are the beginning of a company, and a goodly company is what makes for humanity. Dare I say, “it takes a village” before humans can understand who and what they are. Vane puts it like this: 

I saw now that a man alone is but a being that may become a man – that he is but a need, and therefore a possibility. To be enough for himself, a being must be an eternal, self-existent worm! So superbly constituted, so simply complicate, is man; he rises from and stands upon such a pedestal of lower physical organisms and spiritual structures, that no atmosphere will comfort or nourish his life, less divine that that offered by other souls; nowhere but in other lives can he ripen his speciality, develop the idea of himself, the individuality that distinguishes him from every other (279-280).

We see the necessity for a community, a human family, throughout Lilith, in the Little Ones and most ecstatically in the “glorious resurrection-morning” near the book’s end. 

            Vane celebrates this resurrection-morning with the following description:

            The children went gamboling before, and the beasts came after us. Fluttering butterflies, darting dragon-flies hovered or shot hither and thither about our heads, a cloud of colours and flashes, now descending upon us like a snow-storm of rainbow flakes, now rising into the humid air like a rolling vapour of embodied odours…. I walked on the new earth, under the new heaven, and found them the same as the old, save that now they opened their minds to me, and I saw into them. Now, the soul of everything I met came out to greet me and make friends with me, telling me we came from the same, and meant the same. (414)

All is interconnected, children, beasts, insects, and all are friends. The synaesthesia here – embodied odours, snow-storm of rainbow flakes, smell, sight, touch all intertwined – communicates MacDonald’s sense of wholeness, unity rather than uniformity. All is connected, and each is distinct. What we have here is a call for an end to conflict and the beginning of a truly human community, a city on a hill (Matt. 5:14).  That Vane finds himself back in his earthly house simply reinforces the need for an endless ending, an ending always in the making, a community always taking shape.

            In other words, an ending that is not an ending. Paradox gives us a doubling, and doubling is at work throughout Lilith. From the outset, we have this world and the mirror world, the mirror signaling doubling, then Vane and his father. The old Librarian doubles as a Raven. Once Vane finds himself in the world beyond the mirror, he discovers a series of doubles: the Little Ones and the Bags, Mara and Lilith, Eve and Lilith, Adam and the Great Shadow, Bulika and the city on the hill, two leopardesses, grey cats and wolves, sun and moon, dark and light, self and other, reason and imagination, waking and dreaming, and so on. What Naomi Klein calls a “culture crowded with various forms of doubling” (11) is at work here in Lilith. We live in a world of doppelgangers, news and fake news, actual selves and virtual selves, theories and conspiracy theories. Sorting out the actual from the fake has become more difficult. In any case, way back in the late nineteenth century MacDonald was grappling with doubles and sorting out just what is real and what is not. Vane concludes his account with the comment that once he finally wakes, he will “doubt no more.” For the time being, he will live with doubts and uncertainty, with doubles ever present: does he wake or sleep?

Uncertainty is valuable because it indicates an ongoing quest for certainty, and certainty claimed without prior uncertainty, without prior grappling with issues and possibilities, results in stasis. Stasis is what the Bags offer. Let me return to Klein who focuses on “branding,” the modern way of placing an end-stop to questing. The brand, Klein remarks causes humans to “lose their capacity for internal dialogue and deliberation, and find themselves only able to regurgitate slogans and contradictory platitudes” (66). In other words, branding gives us a form of doubling that is unhealthy, us and them, the Bags and the Little Ones. What MacDonald envisions is a form of doubling that is expansive, more than doubling. Take for example, the doubling of female figures in Lilith. We not only have Eve and Lilith, the two wives of Adam, but also Lilith and Lona, mother and daughter, Lilith and Mara and Lona and Eve all four aspects of the feminine. The Raven is a librarian and also Adam. Earthworms are butterflies and souls. Endings are beginnings and everything in between.

Lilith focuses on the individual’s search for understanding and connectedness. But MacDonald’s book is not without its political suggestiveness. Bulika is a city ruled by a dictatorial Queen; its citizens are fearful and secretive. The Bags too are a brutish citizenry. As for the Little Ones, they are as yet fully formed as a civilization, in need of the careful eye of Lona. As we move toward the apocalyptic ending, we move closer to a vision of an acceptable civilization, a city that offers safety and succour to all, a city in which doubling becomes tripling and quadrupling and so on. A sanctuary city indeed.

 

Works Cited

 

Klein, Naomi. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Canada: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.

MacDonald, George. A Dish of Orts. London: Sampson Low Marston & Co, 1895.

--------. Phantastes and Lilith. Grand Rapids, MI: WM. B. Eerdmans, 1964.

 Time for a few more films.

Voodoo Man (1944), directed by William Beaudine. This hokum is quite entertaining. Bela Lugosi is Dr. Marlow who lives in an out of the way house where the basement is home to a few female zombies. The nutty doctor has these women as subjects for his attempt to restore his dead wife to life (she has been dead 20 years, but looks as fresh as a daisy). Helping him is gas station owner by day/voodoo chanter by night Nicholas (George Zucco), and two dim-witted helpers, Toby (John Carradine) and Grego (Pat McKee). Carradine hams it up delightfully. Of course, we have a young couple caught up in the dark goings on. Ralph (Tod Andrews) is a Hollywood script writer who is just about to marry Betty (Wanda McKay). First Ralph meets Sally (Louise Curry) when the two of them are on their way to Twin Falls for the wedding. Sally finds herself abducted by Toby and Grego, and Ralph finds himself in the midst of a mystery. Where did Sally go? Soon Betty is involved and Dr. Marlow has eyes for her, thinking she will be the one whom he can use to bring his wife back to life. Through a voodoo ritual, Betty’s mind and will to live may be transferred to Marlow’s wife. If this all sounds preposterous, it is. Nutty. But everyone from the young couple to the zombie women to Zucco’s babbling voodoo man to the sheriff and his sidekick performs suitably. In short, the film is predictable, unbelievable, and short. Oh yes, Bela distinguishes himself in a role that calls for him to look at his victims with piercing eyes.

 

Night of the Hunter (1955), directed by Charles Laughton. A favourite film of mine, Night of the Hunter is Laughton’s only foray into directing, and what he produced is magnificent. (Stanley Cortez, the cinematographer here, also photographed Welles’s The Magnificent Andersons.) A fairy tale this is, and a Grimm affair with the children set upon by an evil “Old Harry” figure in the person of wily Reverend Powell, Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum). They find refuge with the elderly wise woman, Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish), who is something if an avenging angel. What distinguishes the film, aside from the performances, is the otherworldly, expressionistic photography, the shadows and lighting and compositions. For example, the Harper house into which Powell insinuates himself is angular and seemingly too small for its inhabitants. Its triangular walls and cluttered basement suggest enclosure and constraint. The underwater scene of Willa Harper (Shelley Winters) as she sits drowned in the old car is luminous and creepy and weird. Much of the film is creepy and weird. The plot hardly matters here; it is the familiar fairy tale story of children, here brother and sister like Hansel and Grethel, who find themselves in the clutches or near clutches of evil Harry Powell, preacher who sports, famously, the words Love and Hate on his eight fingers, hate being suitably on the left or sinister hand. Harry’s account of the struggle between Love and Hate is one of many great moments in this masterful film. The whole thing is as haunting as the ditty, “Leaning, leaning/safe and secure from all alarms/leaning, leaning,/leaning on the everlasting arms” that weaves its way throughout the film. Harry Powell seems an appropriate character for our own times, a man without a conscience, a duplicitous and callow grifter and murderer.

 

Dementia (1955), directed by John Parker and Bruno VeSota. Like The Thief (1952), Dementia is an experimental film without dialogue; it is, in effect, a silent film. It is also a film that explores the psyche. We follow The Gamin (Adrienne Barrett) during her peregrinations one night, or is she simply dreaming. Dream and reality fuse here. Anyway, we follow The Gamin through dark and shadowy city streets, alleyways, nightspots. A graveyard, hotel rooms, and a rich man’s flat. Early in the film she purchases a newspaper that has the headline “Mysterious Stabbings.” The Gamin carries a switchblade. In the cemetery interlude, we see action that suggests her mother was unfaithful to her father, her father shot her mother, and The Gamin stabbed her father. To complicate the psychological drama, the actor who plays The Gamin’s father also plays the Police detective (Ben Roseman). The film delights in Freudian gestures. For example, when is a cigar nor a cigar, or a piece of chicken not a piece of chicken? And the all those musical instruments doing double duty and signs of the times and sexual signs. One amazing scene gives us a castration (Orlac anyone). You will have to see the film for this to make sense. Anyway, the film channels Bunuel and Welles and clearly has the mark of noir. A second version of this film was released as Daughter of Horror, with a voice over narration by Ed McMahon.  

Invisible Avenger (1958), directed by James Wong Howe, Ben Parker, John Sledge. Why it took three people to direct this one-hour cheapie, I will never know. And one of these people is the esteemed cinematographer James Wong Howe. Anyway, in this one Lamont Cranston, aka The Shadow (Richard Derr), and his assistant and teacher in the mystic arts Jogendra (Mark Daniels) are out to help an exiled president from Santa Cruz find his way back home and prosecute a successful revolution. The exiled politician also has an evil twin brother. The acting and the action are what you would expect from a low budget film. Wan. Mr. Cranston disappears before the eyes of adversaries, Mr. Jogendra hypnotizes people from a distance, Cranston and Jogendra talk to each other through thought transmission, and both of them generally befuddle the bad guys. The Shadow delivers his line about evil lurking in the minds of men, and cackles convincingly. All in all, this film provides mindless entertainment for an hour’s ride on the indoor bike.

 

Dancing with Crime (1947), directed by John Paddy Carstairs. Part of a cycle of films know as Spiv (underhand activity) films, Dancing with Crime is familiar as it looks much like American gangster films of the 1930s. We have the jazz music, the nightclub scenes, the gritty city streets, the men in trench coats, the common man, here taxi driver Ted Peters (Richard Attenborough), caught up in criminal activity and doing a bit of sleuthing, Helping Ted is his girlfriend Joy (Sheila Sim) who takes a job at the Palais de Danse in order to try and find evidence of the crooks’ wrongdoing. The Palais is owned by Mr. Gregory (Barry Jones); in reality Mr. Gregory is mastermind of a criminal operation. The postwar atmosphere of London is here impressively presented. The interior and exterior scenes are very well set up and managed. The action (e.g. fight scenes) are impressively mounted, although perhaps a tad unconvincing in one instance. Richard Attenborough makes for a likeable hero. Mr. Gregory’s second in command Paul Baker (Barry K. Barnes) gives perhaps the best performance as an icy yet suave villain. 

 

Mysterious Mr. Nicholson (1947), directed by Oswald Mitchell. The mysterious VLS (‘vivre le sport’), aka Mr. Nicholson (Anthony Hulme), has a double who has made it look as if Mr. Nicholson has committed a murder. Nicholson is, as happenstance would have it, a former Robin Hood thief who operated in Paris. He is now in London trying to put his criminal past behind him, and now he finds himself the centre of police attention. What’s a fellow to do but set out to find out who the real murderer is and why. To be quite blunt, the most memorable part of this low budget mystery thriller is the lengthy dog act that the two main characters watch at the Music Hall. The many dogs, large and small, cavort and somersault and act cheeky and fail not to gain our sympathies. As for the rest of the film, with the other mysterious fellow, Pedrelli, well it moves along amiably enough, if predictable. Oh, you may have noticed that I did not provide the actor’s name for Pedrelli. You can easily guess my reason, just as it is easy to grasp who this fellow is in the film. Another film to pass the time on the indoor bike.

A Life at Stake (1955), directed by Paul Guilfoyle. This is a rather heated little noir about an architect who falls in with a married woman and arranges a business partnership with her, and as it turns out with her wealthy husband Gus, played by Douglas Dumbrille. As things progress, the architect, Edward Shaw (Keith Andes), finds himself enthralled by the married woman, Mrs. Doris Hillman (Angela Lansbury), a woman who likes to swim in the nude and draw men into her web. Soon Shaw wonders if this woman is on the up and up or if she is out to get money from his life insurance. And is the husband part of this plot to scam the architect into signing a life insurance policy to ensure the business deal? What a web we weave. Oh, and Mrs. Hillman has a sister, Madge Neilan (Claudia Barrett). Is she too part of the nefarious plot to bilk the architect? There is plenty going on in this potboiler of a noir. We have the hot relationship between Doris and Edward, the cool anger of the husband Gus, the suspicious happenings such as the brakes failing on a car, the spritely charm of the sister Madge, the police who doubt Edward’s claims that he is going to be murdered, the mountain cabin where a person just might fall to his or her death, the thousand-dollar bill that Edward has framed, the plans for a trip to Las Vegas, and so on. As lower end noirs go, this one is pretty good, even if Keith Andes is a bit wooden. He spends much of his time without a shirt, and he has a deep voice. What I suggest by this is anyone’s guess.

The Hoodlum (1951), directed by Max Nosseck. This Poverty Row cheapie is a showcase for bad boy Lawrence Tierney. As Vincent Lubeck, the hoodlum of the title, Tierney complains about growing up next to the city dump. By the end, his long-suffering mother (Lisa Golm), angrily asserts that he, Vincent, is the smell, he is the stink. During the short running time, Vincent, smashes things, courts a woman who works in a bank so he can get information, impregnates his brother’s fiancé (a rather daring thing for films to discuss at the time), carries out a bank heist, and shoots a few people. He is bad through and through. This crime-doesn’t-pay little noir passes the time, but other than Tierney, the film does not offer a lot that we have not seen before. As for Tierney, brother of Scott Brady, he has no trouble performing the bad boy part.

 

Gangster Story (1959), directed by Walter Matthau. This is the only film Matthau directed. It is a low budget thriller with a preposterous storyline. Hoodlum Jack Martin (Matthau) escapes from police custody, and after things cool a bit, he sets out to rob a bank by calling the police and asking for police presence at the bank because they are shooting a movie there and a police presence would make things look more believable than they otherwise would. The police arrive to find Martin outside the bank, no cameras, no crew, no other actors. Martin tells the three policemen that they are rehearsing a scene. The bank manager arrives in a car, gets out, and enters the bank. Martin follows and holds the manager at gunpoint until he opens the vault at 8:00. No other bank personnel are there. Can you believe this? The rest of the film has more rather strained action. The acting is not the best, by any means. The film has the look of a 1950s television cop drama. As for Martin, he finds himself on the run and to get away from his pursuers, he enters a library where me meets a bespectacled (of course) librarian. They have a conversation about books; clearly, Martin has never read one. Anyway, they become a couple, as unlikely as this is. Things proceed in a predictable way until the final shootout. The film is mercifully brief, running just 65 minutes.