Tenet (2020), directed by Christopher Nolan. “Nolan has mentioned on occasion that he’d rather like to direct a Bond movie, and for much of its 2½-hour running time Tenet comes across as an 007 romp that’s been force-fed a course in temporal relativity and advanced nuclear physics” (Philip Kemp in Sight & Sound). Kemp pretty much says it all here. This is Bond in overdrive, over-stuffed, and over-kill. Everything is outsize here. And it is not less enjoyable for all that. Sure, the physics are beyond me, and the time pincer thing is wild, but basically what we have here is an operative out to save the world from a crazed villain out to destroy the world along with himself. Throw in Bond cars, Bond boats, a Bond girl, a Bond gadget expert, a Bond sidekick, and lots of Bond explosions and you have Tenet. This may be at the same time Nolan’s most ambitious film, and his most obvious film. Characters are mildly fleshed out. Well perhaps not. The visuals are, as expected, intriguing, if somewhat confusing as time and entropy work both forward and backward simultaneously. Some bullets do what we normally expect them to do and fly forward, and some do what they never do and fly back into the barrel of the gun from which they had (when?) emerged. The same is true of explosions and speeding cars – some appear to go in reverse (in the case of cars, I mean this literally) and some go as- what? – normal. As for the title, it has little meaning except for the fact that the word is a palindrome. In other words, the film is, after a fashion, a palindrome. Things in it end where they begin and begin where they end. As the Beatles have it: come together, right now, over me. 

Honest Thief (2020), directed by Mark Williams. Well sometimes you just have to dip into a small genre, in this case the old-guy-with-special-skills-Liam Neeson-making-mayhem-until-the-comfortable-ending genre. About this film, Christy Lemire accurately sums things up when she remarks: "Perfectly serviceable and utterly forgettable, “Honest Thief” nonetheless offers a few pleasing details to keep it from being a total slog." Now just what are these few pleasing details? First we have the dog, a cute canine who steals scenes without even a bark or a whimper. Then we have Annie (Kate Walsh) a feisty woman who stands by her man. And of course we have the reliably sturdy Liam whose skill in this one is blowing things up, not that he blows a lot of things up, but he can blow things up and we know this. If you enjoy this genre (other examples include The Grey, Taken and its sequels, A Walk Among The Tombstones, Unknown, etc), then this one just may satisfy.

 

Indian Horse (2017), directed by Stephen S. Campanelli. The film is based on the 2012 novel by Richard Wagamese, and it follows the trajectory of that novel faithfully. At the center of things here is a school and a hockey rink. The school is a Residential School run by the Catholic Church and the hockey rink is a makeshift affair in the school grounds. The action takes place from the mid 1950s to the late 1970s. What makes this story so powerful is the conjunction of hockey with freedom and imprisonment. Young Saul Indian Horse discovers he has a gift for playing hockey, a gift encouraged by one of the young male priests at the school. Hockey provides a release from the miseries brought on by life in the Residential School, and these miseries are manifold: loss of language, loss of culture, loss if identity, terrible food, no freedom, beatings, suicide, and more. Saul finds satisfaction and confidence while on the ice scoring goals. He proves to be so good that he eventually finds himself sought after by the Toronto Maple Leafs in the NHL. However, hockey also has its flip side, its dark side. This dark side comes not only with racist slurs and taunting, but also with unwanted embraces from one who should know better, should be better. In short, Saul’s life is twisted into confusion, alcoholism, and dislocation by his childhood experiences in the Residential School. The story is a powerful indictment of an ugly racist system put in place by a government bent on eradicating First Nations in Canada. The focus on hockey is brilliant in its awareness that that which can bring release may also bring imprisonment. Canada’s national game may also share Canada’s national shame.

 

I Care a Lot (2020), directed by J. Blakeson. I wanted to like this film because it sets out to examine a culture of narcissism, greed, bullying, and grift. In other words, it seems the perfect fit for the past four years. It also shows abuse of the elderly, something that should resonate. Oh, and it has that neo-noirish sensibility we have come to recognize in latter day films such as Gone Girl. In fact, this one has Gone Girl's icy femme fatale, Rosamond Pike, in the main role. She is, like all the other characters in this movie, unlikeable. And herein lies a problem. Spending two hours with these characters is a chore. I know that films can hold us with characters we do not especially like, but when the only likeable character in a film is the one who shoots the main character and who acts crazy, then you have a problem. This film definitely has its moments. Peter Dinklage and Rosamond Pike are interesting actors and even likeable when they play fairly likeable characters. Here they do not play characters who are at all likeable. But, as I say, the film does catch our cultural moment uncomfortably and nicely.

 How about a few westerns.

The Savage Horde (1950), directed by the prolific Joseph Kane. Kane was a regular at Republic Studios churning out westers with the likes of Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Rod Cameron, Forrest Tucker, and ‘Wild Bill’ Elliott. Elliot is the star of The Savage Horde, along with a gallery of familiar players from countless westerns: Earle Hodgins, Douglas Dumbrille, Marshall Reed, Hal Taliaferro, Noah Berry, Jr., Bob Steele, Grant Withers, Will Wright, and so on. Bob Steele is a villainous, sneering gunslinger and Earle Hodgins is the comic gun salesman; the two provide memorable performances. William Elliott is the sturdy and stoic hero; he is on the run from the cavalry because he has killed an army officer (in self defense, of course). He finds himself in the town of Gunlock where small ranchers are quarreling with the big boss rancher who wants all their cattle and land. This is familiar stuff, and the plot plays out predictably. It also plays out efficiently under the capable direction of Kane who handles the action well. The characters are well defined, and they even have some dimension. The transitions from location shots to sets and back to location shots in single scenes are better than we might expect for such low budget fare. All in all, this is a pleasant oater!

 

The Gunfighter (1950), directed by Henry King. One of the best-known westerns of the early 1950s, The Gunfighter has the brooding mood and darkness of a film such as The Ox-Bow Incident (1942). The story is simple. Gunfighter Jimmy Ringo (Gregory Peck) comes to town to see his wife and son after an eight-year absence. His old friend, Mark Strett (Millard Mitchell) is the town marshal who does not carry a gun and who wears just one spur. Anyway, Ringo is the object of curiosity and he also attracts young men looking to make a reputation. Most of the film takes place indoors, especially in the saloon where Ringo waits to see his wife and son. The sense of enclosure and entrapment is palpable. The focus is on character, not action, and the film has little gunplay. Noteworthy is the first confrontation between Ringo and a young spark looking to make his reputation. We see the young man draw, hear gunshots, then cut quickly to a shot of Ringo standing at the bar with a glass in one hand and a gun in the other. The young man lies on the floor. The film is distinguished by Arthur C. Miller’s cinematography, his careful use of light and shades of grey, and his deep focus. Miller worked with John Ford on The Long Voyage Home (1940) and How Green Was My Valley (1941); he won an Oscar for the latter film. This is the film referenced in Bob Dylan’s “Brownsville Girl.”

 

The Naked Dawn (1955), directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. Ulmer, the efficient director of intimate B-grade films, made only two westerns. This is the second. The first, for those who might like to know, is Thunder Over Texas (1934), a film he made under the pseudonym, John Warner. The Naked Dawn is one of the few colour films Ulmer made, and it looks fine. Francois Truffaut claims that it influenced his film, Jules et Jim. He does not specify in what way Ulmer’s film influenced him, but both films are about a love triangle, if this helps. In The Naked Dawn, Arthur Kennedy plays a Mexican bandit, Santiago, who happens across a small farmhouse with rather naïve newlyweds. Santiago befriends these young people, gets the young man in some trouble, attracts the young woman, and generally has a rousing time, playing the part with gusto. The plot owes something to films such as The Treasure of Sierra Madre and Lust for Gold and other films that deal with greed and desire.  It also may owe something to Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious in its insistence on interiors that reinforce the feeling of enclosure. Although a western, The Naked Dawn is less than clear regarding the time of the action. The motorized vehicles suggest a period as late as the 1930s. Anyway, I like the look of this film, Kennedy’s quite robust acting, and the efficiency of the directing.

 A couple of films by William Cameron Menzies.

Address Unknown (1944) directed by William Cameron Menzies.. This is a rare thing: an epistolary movie. Letters carry the plot; they are also central to the unfolding of character. The story takes place on the eve of the Second World War. Two friends and partners in the art business in San Francisco live comfortable lives and look forward to a marriage between the one friend’s son and the other’s daughter. First, however, one friend, Martin Schulz (Paul Lukas) is returning to his homeland, Germany, to conduct some business for the two partners. Accompanying him is his family and the daughter of his friend. The young woman, Griselle Eisenstein (K. T. Stevens), hopes to begin an acting career in Germany. Staying at home with the Eisenstein’s is Heinrich Schulz (Peter van Eyck), Martin’s eldest son. So begins the story that takes place both in Berlin and in San Francisco. In Berlin, Martin finds a new friend in the oily Baron von Friesche (Carl Esmond) who convinces Martin to cease correspondence with his American Jewish partner. Soon Giselle’s identity as a Jew (she had changed her name for the stage) becomes known and things grow dark, very dark. This is a chilling tale of authoritarianism and hatred of others who supposedly differ from those in control. It involves self-interest and cowardice. The film is short and blunt. Of course, it is also a feast for the eyes with art direction by Menzies and cinematography by Rudolph Mate who knows a thing or two about shadows and light.

 

The Maze (1953), directed by William Cameron Menzies. Menzies is one of the great set designers in the Hollywood Studio era. The Maze is his last film and lesser known than Invaders From Mars of the same year. The Maze will not disappoint viewers looking for atmosphere and gothic delights. The Scottish castle has oversize stairs, doorways, windows, tables, cavernous hallways, everything to make the characters look smaller than they are. No one speaks with a Scottish accent – well, almost no one. The lighting is suitably dark, enhancing the macabre feel to this strange tale. The maze is also nicely done, although we do not spend much time inside its tall thick greenery. Some find the end disappointing, but not me. Once the secret is fully revealed, what we have is a bizarre monster both absurd and wildly appealing (to me – reminds me of the Grimm story, “The Frog Prince”). Throughout much of the film, the hero, Gerald MacTeam (Richard Carlson), sits reading a book with the ominous title: Teratology. What he hopes to glean from this tome remains unknown, but we understand he looks for anything to explain the weird creature that has inhabited Craven Castle for over 200 years. The Maze is a stylish exercise in the gothic. The acting may be somewhat stiff, the narrative point of view may be slightly odd, the dialogue may be a bit stilted, but, man, the look of the film is stunning.

 Dylan at 80: It’s Not Dark Yet

Roderick McGillis

 

            For Bob Dylan – from one old guy to another with thanks for the memories

 

                                    Grant me an old man’s frenzy,

                                    Myself I must remake

                                    Till I am Timon and Lear

                                    Or that William Blake

                                    Who beat upon the wall

                                    Till truth obeyed his call

                                                (“An Acre of Grass”)

 

W. B. Yeats wrote “An Acre of Grass” in 1936, at the age of 71. His reference to William Blake might bring to mind a letter Blake wrote just four months before his death at the age of 70. Writing to George Cumberland in April of 1827, Blake wrote:

I have been very near the Gates of Death & have returned very weak & an Old Man feeble & tottering, but not in Spirit & Life not in The Real man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever. In that I am stronger & stronger as this foolish body decays.

After referring to politicians and those who conform to conventional beliefs, Blake says: 
“God keep me from the Divinity of Yes & No too The Yea Nay Creeping Jesus from supposing Up & Down to be the same Thing as all Experimentalists must suppose.” What captures my enthusiasm is the enthusiasm both Yeats and Blake bring to their old age. This is a defiant enthusiasm. Age may wither the limbs, as Blake asserts, but it need not weaken the creative energy of the artist. I say “may not” because we have examples of writers whose later work pales alongside the work of their youth. Who reads Wordsworth’s The Excursion or his sonnets on gypsies or on capital punishment these days? Or how about the later novels of Faulkner? Writers like Blake and Yeats stand out for the strength of their later work. 

            I say the same about Bob Dylan who turns 80 in May of 2021. In September, 1997, when he was 56, Dylan released the album Time Out of Mind. Since then, he has released five more albums of original songs, the most recent, Rough and Rowdy Ways, on June 19, 2020 when he was 79. These six albums comprise the work of Dylan’s senior years, and they offer cogent reflection on time and mortality in the spirit of both Blake and Yeats. These albums are nicely balanced by the six early albums that contain what became known as the “voice of a generation.” I exclude his first album simply because it contains mostly covers rather than original songs. Those six early albums, beginning with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1963 and ending with Blonde on Blonde in 1966, are the work of an artist intensely connected to the zeitgeist. These are the work of a young person wise beyond his years, a young person fiercely committed to the contemporary urgency of change and, yes, civil rights. And then, after the first three albums of protest, we have three albums that delight in verbal dexterity. Noteworthy perhaps is that Dylan issued six albums in just four years, whereas he issued the six later works over the course of twenty-three years. He may have slowed down, but he hasn’t lost the frenzy when the creative juices are flowing. 

You think I’m over the hill
You think I’m past my prime
Let me see what you got
We can have a whoppin’ good time

            (“Spirit on the Water” 2006)

The later songs differ from the songs of the 1960s, not so much in their folk and blues roots or even their Beat sensibility, but in the intensity of the later songs’ connection to the American songbook, in an expanded sense. The album Love and Theft (2001) is something of a survey of musical Americana, from Charlie Patton to Frank Sinatra. The later songs also have what Yeats calls a “frenzy.” By this I mean these songs express a fierceness that closes in on anger, and at times threatens violence. 

            In contrast to the early songs’ call for change – don’t criticize what you can’t understand – the later songs express a rage against the dying of the light. Take the theme of the urgency of change, for example. In the early songs we have of course the anthem, “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” From the later album, Together Through Life (2009), we have “I Feel a Change Comin’ On” which is more elegiac and inward than anthemic. The repeated line, “the fourth part of the day is already gone,” taken from the 9^th chapter of Nehemiah, rings a note of endings. Also on this album is the song, “It’s All Good,” co-written with Robert Hunter. Here is a song about the rottenness in the state of things. Dylan sings of “Big politicians telling lies,” “The widows cry, the orphan’s plea/Everywhere you look, more misery,” and still “It’s all good.” The irony here is bitter. Bitterness threads through these albums. These songs are acutely aware of mortality; it may not be dark yet, but it’s getting there. The change coming on has to do with death. In “Working Man Blues #2” from Modern Times, the singer notes that 

No man, no woman knows
The hour that sorrow will come
In the dark I hear the night birds call
I can hear a lover's breath
I sleep in the kitchen with my feet in the hall
Sleep is like a temporary death

This sleep may be small, but the Big Sleep is not far off. This same song may be about the working person, but it contains the anger and perhaps bitterness I am noticing as old age strengthens its grip. “Countless foes” set out to do harm, and they will “break your horns and slash you with steel.”  Also apparent is the elegiac mood captured in the sound of this song as well as in its lyrics: “the place I love best is a sweet memory.”

            A fine example of the intricacy and mystery of these late songs is “Black Rider,” from Rough and Rowdy Ways. The Black Rider of the title is an elusive figure that may represent one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse since one of these horsemen, commonly thought of as Famine, rides a black horse. Dylan’s song, however, does not identify the horse as black, but rather the rider. The blackness of the rider may indicate that this is the Devil or Death itself. In any case, the allusion is to the Apocalypse, the end of things. The end of things brings Revelation, an uncovering that reveals nothing more than a deepening of mystery. And the song is mysterious for sure. The singer addresses the Black Rider, and at one point says:

Black rider, black rider, tell me when, tell me how
If there ever was a time, then let it be now
Let me go through, open the door
My soul is distressed, my mind is at war
Don't hug me, don't flatter me, don't turn on the charm
I'll take a sword and hack off your arm

Whatever this may mean, it certainly has that conflicted feeling. The singer is troubled, or as he says “distressed.” He wishes to go through the door, a door that leads – where? Is this a cry akin to the cry of the old man in Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale:

Ne Deeth, allas, ne wol nat han my lyf.
Thus walke I lyk a resteless kaityf,
And on the ground which is my moodres gate,
I knokke with my staf bothe erly and late,
And seye, "Leeve mooder, leet me in!
Lo, how I vanysshe, flesh and blood and skyn!
Allas, whan shul my bones been at reste? (471-447)

This old man has been knocking on Heaven’s Door, but in vain.

            “Black Rider” is a song drenched in age. Like other songs on this album, it alludes to Roman times. Indeed, the Romans seem to have been on Dylan’s mind for some time, as his “Early Roman Kings” or allusions to Ovid in “Ain’t Talkin” testify (see Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters for Dylan’s allusions to classical literature). Here in “Black Rider” we have the startling lines:

Black rider, black rider, hold it right there
The size of your cock will get you nowhere
I'll suffer in silence, I'll not make a sound
Maybe I'll take the high moral ground
Some enchanted evening, I'll sing you a song
Black rider, black rider, you've been on the job too long

This verse contains at least three allusions, one of which is to the Roman poet Juvenal’s ninth Satire. Here, among other things, Juvenal takes note of aging and the debilities brought on by aging. This satire is a dialogue between the poet and Naevolus, a male prostitute who has fallen into a depression at his way of life. Naevolus laments that 

Fate rules human life, even those parts hidden beneath

The folds have their fate. Yet if the stars abandon you,

The immeasurable length of your mighty cock won’t

Help, even though Virro with drooling lips sees you

In the nude, and his host of flattering notes assails you

Endlessly  (Virro is Naevolus’s patron)

Dylan echoes these lines in his own lament at the Black Rider who haunts him and maybe taunts him too.

            Dylan’s verse, the final verse of the song, also alludes to two older songs: Roger and Hammerstein’s “Some Enchanted Evening,” and the traditional folk song, “Duncan and Brady.” Dylan has recorded versions of both these songs. The first, “One Enchanted Evening,” is a standard love song, but one that contains the lines: “Who can explain it, who can tell you why?/
Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.” Ostensibly about the mystery of love at first sight, the song holds in it the possibility of living alone; it also asserts the wisdom of accepting mystery. Life’s a mystery and that’s that. As for “Duncan and Brady,” the song recounts the shooting of the policeman Brady by the bartender Duncan; both have “been on the job too long.” The theme here is mortality and, yes, aging.

            Dylan’s late songs may focus on mortality and aging, but they do not have the overt despair we hear in Chaucer’s old man. Rather, they have a stubborn insistence on carrying on, in grinding on, as the singer puts it in “Pay in Blood.” Along with his namesake, Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan asserts, “Old age should burn and rage at close of day.” Just take a look at “Pay in Blood” from the 2012 album Tempest.

Well, I'm grindin' my life out, steady and sure
Nothin' more wretched than what I must endure
I'm drenched in the light that shines from the sun
I could stone you to death for the wrongs that you done

 

Sooner or later, you make a mistake
I put you in a chain that you never will break
Legs and arms and body and bone
I pay in blood but not my own

 

Night after night, day after day
They strip your useless hopes away
The more I take, the more I give
The more I die, the more I live

The song goes along for nine more verses. The three quoted above, are oblique, but they just might suggest an old person’s rage at age itself. The past may have had its wrongs, but the present has its chains, its aches and pains, its ever-present reminder of mortality, but these challenges only serve to make life more precious, more intensely felt. Life may be a grind, an endurance test, but the more it offers wretchedness, the more it gives life and life only. The constant refrain is, “I pay in blood but not my own,” reminding us that this guy will carry on in his frenzy of living taking advantage of others whose blood is there for the asking or for the taking. Dylan once sang about his thought-dreams that merited the guillotine, and concluded, “But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only.” It may be life, but does life merit respect? Here’s “Pay in Blood,” some forty-seven years later:

How I made it back home? Nobody knows
Or how I survived so many blows?
I been through hell, what good did it do?
You bastard! I'm supposed to respect you.

---

This is how I spend my days
I came to bury, not to raise
I'll drink my fill and sleep alone
I pay in blood but not my own

Once again, rage against the dying of the light. Dylan has remarked that he delights in chaos, and what else is a life lived but a life surviving chaos?

            Old age inevitably brings its challenges. Bette Davis tells us that getting old “ain’t for sissies.” This is the same Bette Davis who makes an appearance in Dylan’s “Desolation Row” (1966). Davis’s warning about old age makes for sober reflection. If one is going to grow old, and not many can avoid this, then one better be prepared to rail and rage and threaten. Dylan remains defiant, as these lines in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” demonstrate:

I got both my feet planted square on the ground 
Got my right hand high with the thumb down 

Once again, we have an allusion to Juvenal: “Now they give shows of their own. Thumbs up! Thumbs down! And the killers, spare or slay, and then go back to concessions for private privies” (Juvenal, Satire III). Dylan’s pirate signals thumbs down to the way things are, but he also sings of a place where, if you’ve lost your mind, you’ll find it there. And the thumb down itself is ambiguous. We may be quick to think this gesture means disapproval, but apparently scholars disagree as to whether in ancient Rome, at the gladiatorial contests, the thumbs down gesture meant “Kill him” or “Spare him” (https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/thumbs-up.html). The ambiguity serves Dylan well, and Key West may just be the place to sort out this ambiguity. Key West is a place of rest after a long journey.

The singer may rail and rage and threaten, but he also sings of hope, of something better than the den of iniquity we have here. Both Key West and the Scottish Highlands in an earlier song from Time Out of Mind, are places of rest, respite, release, and repair from the rigours of life.

Feel like a prisoner in a world of mystery
I wish someone'd come and push back the clock for me

Well my heart's in The Highlands wherever I roam
That's where I'll be when I get called home
The wind it whispers to the buckeye trees of rhyme
Well, my heart's in The Highlands
I can only get there one step at a time

“When I get called home” is a reminder of the fragility that is the human condition, and the singer is on his way there “one step at a time.” Things have changed, like that lucky old sun that is not what it used to be, and the horizon beckons.

The sun is beginnin' to shine on me
But it's not like the sun that used to be
The party's over and there's less and less to say
I got new eyes, everything looks far away
Well my heart's in The Highlands at the break of day
Over the hills and far away
There's a way to get there, and I'll figure it out somehow
Well I'm already there in my mind and that's good enough for now

These lines and others have an elegiac sound. 

Elegy runs through so many of the songs on these last six albums, but never so strongly as in “Murder Most Foul” from Rough and Rowdy Ways. This seventeen-minute song is an elegy for a nation. The assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 is the occasion that initiates the decline of a nation, and it is fitting that Dylan takes his title from Hamlet, the play that deals with something rotten in the state and the assassination of a King. This death signals the beginning of an end:

What's new, pussycat? What'd I say?
I said the soul of a nation been torn away
And it's beginning to go into a slow decay
And that it's thirty-six hours past Judgment Day

The repeated calls to “play” songs and films and artists as varied as Stan Getz and Dickey Betts, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, Stevie Nicks, and so on and so on serve to provide the elegiac chorus lamenting the death of the president. This chorus of film stars, singers, musicians and composers, gangsters, people real and people fictional, films and songs both familiar and obscure provides a cultural backdrop to a death that points out just how rotten things have been in a nation blessed with such a rich cultural production. The lament is all the stronger when one realizes just how rich American culture is. This culture embraces not only its own past, but also cultural aspects from abroad, from that ferry cross the Mersey to Billy Joel by way of Wordsworth and Herodotus (”Only the Good Die Young”). If one wonders why it took Dylan so long to lament the deaths of Kennedy and John Lennon (“Roll On, John” from Tempest), then just consider that “age cannot wither” these cultural figures, “nor custom stale” their “infinite variety.” Like Dylan himself, these cultural figures contain multitudes. Here’s Dylan from the song with that title:

You greedy old wolf, I'll show you my heart
But not all of it, only the hateful part
I'll sell you down the river, I'll put a price on your head
What more can I tell you? I sleep with life and death in the same bed

Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Age brings the realization that life and death are folded together, intricately connected, intimate bedfellows.

            Dylan’s penultimate album takes its name from Shakespeare’s final play, although it drops the definite article. The dropping of the article signals that this album is tempestuous, like life. Chaos reigns as it did on the Titanic, the subject of one of the album’s songs. Among other songs, “Narrow Way” sounds the aging singer’s defiance:

This is hard country to stay alive in
Blades are everywhere and they’re breaking my skin
I’m armed to the hilt and I’m struggling hard 
You won’t get out of here unscarred

It’s a long road, it’s a long and narrow way
If I can’t work up to you
You’ll have to work down to me someday

The song’s title carries an allusion to Matthew 7:14 where we read of the straight gate and narrow way that lead to life. Dylan casts this allusion in a chorus that quotes the Mississippi Sheiks song, “You’ll Have to Work Down to Me Someday.” Ostensibly, this song is about the singer leaving his lover who treats him badly, but it reverberates with the sadness of endings, departures, and separation, even if this separation “takes my life.” Dylan’s version carries a bitterness not in the original.

            Endings and departures are the subject of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In the play’s epilogue, Prospero takes his farewell in words suitable to the aging Dylan in these last albums.

But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

We have in these lines something of the assault we can find in Dylan’s songs. There is also a hint of the Dylan who hopes to please, hopes to find release from despair, and hopes for his listener’s indulgence.

            I began with W. B. Yeats’s “An Acre of Grass.” I end with the same poet’s “What then?”:

            ‘The work is done,’ grown old he thought,

            ‘According to my boyish plan;

            Lest fools gage, I swerved in nought,

            Something to perfection brought’;

            But louder sang that ghost, ‘What then?’

I swerved in nought is a fitting epitaph for Dylan’s career. And so thank you Bob Dylan for years of song, years of contemplation, years of rage, and years of hope. 

 

 

Thomas, Richard F. Why Bob Dylan Matters. New York: Harper Collins, 2017.

 Now for some Truffaut.

Shoot the Pianist (1960), directed by Francois Truffaut. A Hitchcokian delight, Shoot the Pianist plays with genre, blending gangster film, noir, comedy, romance, and psychological study. Charlie Koller (Charles Aznavour) may not have vertigo, but he is timid to a fault. And he manages to have two women killed, the first his wife who tosses herself off a five-story balcony, and the second the woman who wishes to bring Charlie back to his earlier self, the concert pianist, Edouard Saroyan. The film has the look of several noirs, including On Dangerous Ground and Nightfall, both having narratives that move the action from the city to the snowy countryside. The opening shot of the inside of a piano serves to set things in motion. We are going to meet a musician and learn something of his insides. He expresses himself through music; he has also made of his feelings something of a mechanical expression. Charlie’s music moves between highbrow (Chopin, Ravel, etc.) to jazz (he mentions Art Tatum and Errol Garner) to the tinkling dance music, just as Truffaut’s film moves or slides through genres. Perhaps the bit I like most is the bit picked up by Tarantino in Pulp Fiction, in the two hitmen who debate the features of MacDonald’s hamburgers. Here we have two thieves/murderers who talk incessantly about the features of women. This is a film that exudes charm.

 

The Soft Skin (1964), directed by Francois Truffaut. This one is about the routine life of a male academic, traveling about giving lectures, having the media follow him about, dropping names, giving out autographs to admiring young women, and having an affair with a flight attendant. Truffault is meticulous in following his characters, watching them push elevator buttons, dial telephones, move indicator levers in an automobile, fill a cigarette box with leftovers from another box, undo a silk stocking, and so on. What thrills in this cinematic exercise is Truffaut’s inventiveness, creating suspense in almost a Hitchcockian manner in a film about the tedium of modern life, dare I say modern academic life? The action is at times quite funny, at other times it communicates pathos. Truffaut is incisive in his depiction of a marital affair and its effects on those involved. The mixture of humour and pathos continues right to the end when our academic male finds out what it means to have the fury of a scorned woman confronting him. Hell indeed. This final shot (in more than one sense) suddenly reminded me that I had, in fact, seen this film before.

Two English Girls (aka Anne and Muriel, 1971), directed by Francois Truffaut. This film, like the earlier Jules and Jim, derives from a novel by Henri Pierre Roche, and the story involves three young people, in this case two women and one man, in a love triangle. The narrative moves carefully and delicately through complicated matters of the heart. The pacing suits the action set at the turn of the nineteenth century; at one point we see a picture of Charlotte Bronte hanging on the wall of the girls’ house in Wales, and this cues the rather quietly torrid emotional content of the film. Rendering things tangled are the relationships both national and individual. The young man (played by Jean-Pierre Leaud) is from France, the young women (Kika Markham and Stacey Tendeter) are from Wales. The two young women are sisters. The mothers of the three have been long time, but geographically distanced, friends. Suffice to say that, as things roll along, the three young folk find themselves in a tangled web of desire, attraction, and confusion. The tennis game played a few times throughout the film is a nice metaphor for the back and forth of emotions between the three. Anyway, what impresses me most about this film is not the rather supressed emotional life of three privileged people, but rather the cinematography of Nestor Almendros. The scenes shot in France especially reflect the palette and compositions of Impressionist painting. Much of the film is gorgeous. As for the story, well its slow burn does show intricacies of human emotional life that are informative and worthy of our attention.

 L'Inferno (1911), directed by Francesco Bertolini and Adolfo Padovan. Dante’s visit to Hell guided by Virgil gets the filmic treatment here inspired by the 19^th-century illustrations by Gustave Dore. The sets and costumes and designs are, mostly, eye-popping. As Dante descends deeper into Hell, he moves from circle to circle seeing more and more torment and anguish until he finally confronts Lucifer himself who is calmly but hungrily munching away on the body of a human reminding meow that well-known Goya work. At times, such spectacle works and works very well, at other times it falls flat as in the rushing in the a she-wolf played by a quite perky German Shepard. Although visually striking, the vision of a field of torsos imbedded in fire, legs flailing above ground, is amusing rather than terrifying, at least for modern viewers. I daresay viewers in 1911 would have found these images more terrifying than we might. The film tries to give us a sense of a journey, as we watch Dante and Virgil walk hither and yon, but mostly what we have is a series of tableaux, some imaginatively intricate and beautiful.  

Don’t Change Your Husband (1919), directed by Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille is best known as a director of big films, epics with that cast of thousands such as The Ten Commandments (twice), King of Kings, Cleopatra, Samson and Delilah, The Greatest Show on Earth, The Crusades, and so on. Here, however, he gives us a domestic comedy. The plot turns on infidelity and divorce, sensitive topics at the time. Young wife Leila (Gloria Swanson) is bored with her unromantic and rather slovenly husband, James Porter (Elliott Dexter). He dresses shabbily, drops cigar ash on the carpet, and insists on eating raw onions. He also makes a lot of money. His friend, slimy Schulyler Van Sutphen (Lew Cody) is out to seduce Leila. He succeeds. She leaves James, marries Schulyler, and discovers the second husband is worth than the first. He is a Lothario of the first degree. This is DeMille, after all, and the film boasts an elaborate fantasy sequence in which Leila imagines a quite different life than the one she has. The goings-on are froth and quite fun. The costumes are elaborate and baroque. Oh, those headpieces. The film offers a pleasant way to spend 70 minutes or so.

 The Big Parade (1925), directed by King Vidor. This is a long film that has something of the structure of the much later, The Deer Hunter in that it contains three acts and a denouement. The first act takes place just before and just after America declares war on Germany in 1917. Here we meet worker Slim, barman Bull, and wealthy wastrel Jim. The film focuses mostly on Jim. Once war is declared, these three enlist and find themselves in the same troop. Act 2 brings these three along with their compatriots to France and a small village where they engage in various hijinks that involve chewing gum and a large barrel. Jim, who has left a girlfriend and fiancé back home, now falls for a young French woman, Melisande. The two of them engage in an amusing courtship that for a time involves both Slim and Bull, and that also involves communication since neither Jim nor Melisande speak the other’s language. Much of this act is played for humour. Slim, by the way, chews tobacco, spits accurately, and looks amazingly like Mortimer Snerd. Act 3, which begins over an hour into the film, gives us the “big parade,” that is the marching of soldiers and guns to the front lines. Here the film takes a serious turn and we see the horrors of battle. Two of the three buddies die and the third, Jim, is wounded. Ultimately this wound causes the loss of Jim’s left leg. In the denouement, Jim returns home to a hero’s welcome, one he finds difficult to accept. He returns to France and finds Melisande who is ploughing a field behind a horse. For a long silent film (over 2 hours) The Big Parade does hold my interest, and of course its anti-war sentiment is welcome. I also like the friendship that forms between three fellows from such differing backgrounds (classes). Jim’s maturation is well done, and the acting of the three men is natural and convincing.  

The Invaders (1912), directed by Francis Ford and Thomas H. Ince (both uncredited). In 1912 western films were a dime a dozen, but this one is special. First the story: it tells of a treaty between the U.S. government and Native people, a treaty that is promptly broken by the White people. The Native chiefs do attempt to renegotiate, but to no avail. The result of this broken promise and refusal to budge is warfare and tragedy. Second, the Native people here are portrayed by actual Native people, apparently members of the Uglala Sioux people. They share the screen with their White counterparts on a pretty equal footing, and in each group we have a father/daughter relationship that has its growing pains. This shared focus with actors who look suitable for their roles gives the film an air of authenticity that works well. Oh, and being a silent film, it also gives us some romance, some pathos, and not a few exaggerated gestures. The brief and doomed friendship between the Native woman and the young Captain White is a precursor of Delmer Daves’s Broken Arrow (1950). The lead-up to the final battle plods along, but once the battle begins things move along at a furious pace.