This is among the small number of Godard’s films that received commercial success. But the film is by no definition “popular.” It sets out to be anything but popular, if by popular we mean a film that attracts a wide audience, deals with familiar storylines in familiar ways, and makes a lot of money. WEEKEND does none of these things. It attracts a limited audience, deals with familiar storylines in unfamiliar ways, and made not a lot of money. It fits, perhaps, the Russian formalist idea of “defamiliarization.” This is not precise, but it does twig us to the film’s desire to reconfigure our sense of reality. WEEKEND gives us something we had not expected – even now 40 years after it was made. It tests the limits of what film – narrative film – can do. It combines action with contemplation, movement with stillness, word and image, sound and silence, music and noise, sense and nonsense, realism and fantasy, past and present, and montage and mise en scene.
Godard invokes both Lautreamont and Lewis Carroll, important 19th century precursors of surrealism, and he makes his point even clearer by invoking 20th century surrealists such as Breton, Bunuel, and Bataille. Surrealism challenges reason and progress based on class division. It attacks sentimental bourgeois beliefs that mask a rapacious self-interest. It attacks an art that is driven by realism, and the sense that reality can be known. It challenges common sense. One of the two protagonists in the film (Roland) remarks that he is in a rotten film because he only meets crazy people. These crazy people test the limits of realism and ask us to reconsider what is real. Another layer of the film suggests that as long as we accept enlightenment values of utilitarianism, we are bound to descend into barbarism. The film foregrounds the chaos and carnage and uncaring lack of community in modern life. Tom Thumb and Emily Bronte represent a past that was at least thought-provoking, but our protagonists burn poor Emily. The surrealist edge to WEEKEND is both a sign of its satire of popular art and, paradoxically, its attempt to attract the popular mind. Remember one of the writers invoked is Lewis Carroll, author of the children’s classic ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND. Surrealism was attracted to Carroll because of his combination of play, nonsense, satire, childhood, and a celebration of the body as both physical and spiritual.
At one point in the film, the protagonists come across a troup of Italian actors. These actors remind us of Grand Guignol, as well as Commedia del arte – forms of art that foreground violence and the carnivalesque. Godard’s film celebrates, while at the same time it castigates, the grotesque lower bodily strata. It finds humour in the grotesque.
And yes, Godard’s film is a popular film. One reason for this is its insistence on populism, pornography, popularity, and pop. I mean by populism that the film is interested in class and the conflict between classes, and although it seems resolutely neutral in its presentation of the classes as corrupt, it also has sympathy, if it has any sympathy, with the populist classes (see especially the scene in which we listen, along with those in the film, to Mozart). I mean by pornography that the film is interested in pornographic displays to a degree that would make Bataille take note. The opening sequence and later when the cook break eggs over the woman’s opened legs and then inserts a fish in the same place are pornographic in the sense that they distance sex from us, place it as a performance that tests the limits of our patience and our imagination. This is pornography that does not set out to arouse in the usual sense, but rather to challenge our jaded sense of morality. Surrealism was interested in pornography as an expression of the futility and decadence of a system we call capitalist. I mean by popularity that the film does seek an audience; it does not simply defy its audience to accept it. It draws us in, especially by its comic moments. It is a funny film, even when the comedy turns abruptly to something horrific. Surrealism employed a dark humour, a comedy of the grotesque. And finally, I mean by pop that the film has a connection with the Pop Art movement we associate with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenberg, and others in the 1960s. It has what today we might call “product placement (e,g, Shell Oil truck, advertisements for Esso, a variety of cars, mention of Gitanes, and a Hermees’ handbag), but Godard uses such brand names and their signs not to ‘sell” them, but rather to undermine them. He empties such signs of meaning by investing them with negative meaning. Surrealism has a tendency to move us to the surface of things. In short, this is a film that debunks popularity of a variety of kinds. Perhaps I should also add popular psychoanalysis. Early in the film, an inter-title sets up the word “analysis” as “ANAL YSE.” Throughout the film, Godard takes an interest in shit, the anus, garbage, waste, detritus, offal – the stuff of decomposition.
But analysis itself is invoked in the opening scene in which the woman tells of her sexual encounter with a man and a woman. What we observe is a bizarre analysis, reminding us of both the psychiatrist’s “talking cure” and of classic painting in which we see fully-clothed males and semi-clad or nude females. This opening allusion to psychoanalysis returns near the end of the film with the words “Totem” and “Tabou” flashed on the screen – a reference to one of Freud’s works.
But my point is too easy. The notion of pop works another way. Take, for instance, the mention of such popular films as JOHNNY GUITAR and THE SEARCHERS. The revolutionary group in the woods uses these titles for their two-way radio names. Mention of these two Hollywood westerns reminds us of Hollywood and commercialism, non-canonical works, popular film genre, and film’s ability to reach a wider audience than most art forms. Both JOHNNY GUITAR and THE SEARCHERS are films that offer the viewer formal beauty, a formal beauty that we might compare to the formal beauties of painting or music. The co-opting of these titles by the revolutionaries suggests the inadequacies of the films to civilize. If art is supposed to make those who admire it urbane, then something has gone wrong here. The revolutionaries also use BATTLESHIP POTEMPKIN and THE ATONEMENT OF GOSTA BERLING (a 1923 film by Mauritz Stiller and Greta Garbo’s first important film) in conjunction with JOHNNY GUITAR and THE SEARCHERS to suggest the way film brings together both highbrow and lowbrow. Film is perhaps the second democratic art. And yet here film titles serve the purposes of a cannibalistic group of barbarians who live in the woods and eat their enemies. What good is art in a world like this?
Finally, we have Godard’s insistence that the popular is political. Whatever this film may have to say about art and modernity, it clearly has much to say about the state of modern life. It takes familiar plot lines from popular cinema – the road movie, the murder movie, the musical, the historical movie, the movie about revolution – and uses these to plot the decline of western civilization. WEEKEND begins with the modern capitalist state, then moves back through a sort of military democracy, until it arrives at a revolutionary state in which barbarism seems the fate of humanity. We move from scenes of human brutality that are funny (the first scenes of road rage), to scenes of carnage that we pass over in a desensitized manner (our protagonists do not appear to see the carnage and later they take things from the dead without a shred of hesitation), to scenes difficult to watch because they show the slaughter of animals (a chicken and a pig). While Godard is showing the decline of humanity and civilization, he is also manipulating the viewer into a position from which he or she can only be shocked. Why are we not as horrified by the deaths of people in car crashes as we are in the slaughter of animals for food? The movement of the plot is retrograde, backwards, towards decline and degeneration. And yet the movement to cannibalism merely makes clear the condition of the human condition under capitalism – under capitalism, the oppressor devours the oppressed. The captains of industry are vampires sucking the life-blood of the workers.
Another aspect of the popular is the car. The car is perhaps the ultimate image of modernity and capitalism. It has a long history in the cinema as a kenotype (a “new form,’ in contrast to the archetype, which is an old form). Its connection in this film with money, with escape or the impossibility of escape, with sex and death, with gridlock, with class, with industrialism and the machine, with brutalism, with rage and anxiety, with all the symptoms of modern malaise, and with apocalypse is clear. The car is a petit objet a; that is, it represents the thing that organizes desire, and yet it is illusory. The car is a fantasy, a symptom of our desire for fulfillment, and an indication that fulfillment is always receding, just like the road ahead that quickly becomes the road behind. It represents a futile attempt to fill in for the emptiness of life, in the way that money too does the same thing. What price do we have to pay to go through all these things twice? The wrecked cars and the cars ablaze remind us of the Real that threatens to destroy the delicate and vulnerable reality we try to create around ourselves.
One final note here: the inter-titles in the film (“Film found on a dump heap;” “End of Film – End of World,” and so on) are reminiscent of Situationist pronouncements. “Beginning is Flamboyance, especially in film” is another statement that reminds us of the Situationist’s interest in spectacle. Spectacle, according to the Situationists, replaces reality. We are surrounded by spectacles that only pretend to be real; real life has retreated. Only an art that decries modernity’s interest in and creation of spectacle can be revolutionary. Only an art that abolishes the notion of art as a separate and rarified activity, can be real art. In other words, art is a people’s art (i.e. popular). I think we can argue that WEEKEND both presents a spectacle and is critical of spectacle. For example, all the scenes of crashed and burning cars remind us of a staple of the spectacular in Hollywood films from very early on – the car crash. WEEKEND, however, does not show us the crash, only the aftermath. The point is to debunk the spectacle and to point out the unfeeling horror of what we see. I know that Guy Debord did not champion Godard’s A bout de soufflé (1959; trans. Breathless), but Godard obviously knew about Debord and by 1967 he (Godard) had assimilated the whole tradition from Dada, Surrealism, and Situationism.
A moment in the film reminds me of the world in a grain of sand, a Romantic vision of nature as art. This is when Emily Bronte holds a pebble and the camera moves close to it while she speaks of the pebble’s age and significance. What we look at is a natural form that has affinity with a Henry Moore sculpture. The rock reminds us of the beauty we overlook, ignore and step on every day.
WEEKEND invokes Marx, Engels, and Mao. But does so, not in any coherent or programmatic manner. Godard clearly dislikes American imperialism, and a capitalism that he equates with Fascism, but this does not mean that he champions what we might perceive to be Fascism’s opposite: Communism. The Maoists in the film are cannibals. The film is more apocalyptic, than straight ahead political. When the two garbage men speak of the evils of imperialism and the oppression of multinational exploitation of Africa, they speak in front of a huge pile of garbage. Irony is the mode here. Is what they say a bunch of garbage or are they speaking about the garbage created by the injustices of the imperial powers, especially America? Like 'Les Chants de Maldoror' by Lautreament, WEEKEND contemplates human cruelty and brutality in a world seemingly without transcendental truth. The film refuses to offer a vision of revolutionary hope in its diegesis; however, it does offer a revolutionary hope in its form. This is art as action; this is art as analysis in every sense of the word. It analyses capitalist society, and it analyses contemporary hysteria.
And so this film is both popular and anti-popular at the same time.
Mise en scene
Literally “putting in the scene.” Mise en scene has to do with space (where does the action take place?), as opposed to montage, which has to do with time (how many shots make up a scene and how much time do they occupy both within the diegesis and without the diegesis?). Film, like just about any of the arts, has to take account of both time and space. WEEKEND is careful to set the space of the action – in a country road, in a forest, in, on, and around a garbage truck, in a farmer’s yard, and so on. I’ll look at one instance, the initial scene in which the woman tells her story about a sexual encounter to her lover. This scene is insistently placed in one space in a room by a bright window, and the camera moves in and out from the characters slowly as the woman tells her story. The two characters do not move about; they remain in their positions vis a vis the camera, he in the background and she slightly above him in the foreground. As she recounts her story, the effect is almost that of voice-over because despite the camera’s unwavering focus on the two people (the scene has no cuts or pans away from the two characters), we cannot see either of them clearly. The reason for this has to do with lighting. Godard uses back lighting in this scene; that is, the light for the scene comes from behind the two characters rather than from in front of them or even above them. The effect of back lighting (also used in CITIZEN KANE) is to cast the characters in shadow. We see them not quite, but almost, as silhouettes. These people live shadow lives, not quite real. They inhabit the Platonic cave, not seeing the light behind them.
But the back lighting has another, even more important effect. In front of us occupying much of the screen space is a woman wearing only a bra and panties. The viewer will (naturally?) want to see this woman, and see her clearly. But we cannot see her clearly. And so perhaps we strain trying to make out her figure as best we can. If we assume that the viewer tries to penetrate the shadow to see the characters, and we recall just what the woman is saying, then we can hardly avoid the uncomfortable fact that we are positioned as voyeurs trying to spy on this scene of sexual confession. We are, in effect, made complicit with the perversions (sado-masochistic activities) of the characters we hear about in the woman’s story. Godard has complicated the usual filmic gaze. By usual filmic gaze, I mean the usual position for the viewer of a film is as the owner of the gaze, that look that owns what it sees because it is not looked back upon. We see the beautiful woman on the screen; she is there displayed for our appreciation and pleasure. She does not look back knowingly; she does not know she (or he, at times) is the object of someone’s gaze. And yet we know that she (or he) is aware of the gaze, and in this awareness there is, in effect, a returned gaze. But because of the unease with which we must look at this scene straining to see the characters clearly, we are thrust back on ourselves, made to contemplate just what is going on. We are placed within the mise en scene, we are that camera with its roving eye trying to get a closer look at these two people to savour both the woman’s semi-clad body and to probe the man’s reactions.
I take this scene to be a particularly effective example of what Slavoj Zizek describes as the effect of pornography:
[pornography’s] perverse character lies not in the obvious fact that it “goes all the way and shows us all the dirty details”; its perversity is, rather, to be conceived in a strictly formal way. In pornography, the spectator is forced a priori to occupy a perverse position. Instead of being on the side of the viewed object, the gaze falls into ourselves, the spectators, which is why the image we see on the screen contains no spot, no sublime-mysterious point from which it gazes at us. It is only we who gaze stupidly at the image that “reveals all.” (Looking Awry 110)
In the case of the scene in WEEKEND, however, nothing is revealed except the viewer’s stupidity, as he or she strains to see what is not revealed. As she or he strains, she also listens (perhaps lasciviously) to what the woman says. Her account “tells all.” But of course in telling all, it tells nothing. What is missing in all of this is emotion. We have motion, but no emotion. Pleasure without emotion – is this the pornographic experience?
Sound works in a similar way in this scene. When I say the viewer “listens” to what the woman says, I am not precise. Her words are constantly in danger of being drowned out by the ominous and loud music of the soundtrack in this scene. Without the subtitles, we would have difficulty hearing what she is saying, and we would have to strain to hear her, just as we have to strain to see her. Both sound and lighting force the viewer to become conscious of the filmic quality of this scene, of the voyeuristic nature of viewing and overhearing.
Montage
Different effects derive from montage. Godard uses montage in the scene of the mother’s death near the end of the film. Just as the mother is killed, the film cuts to a shot of a skinned rabbit and we see blood spilled over this gruesome carcass. The combination of shots informs us what happens to the mother without showing us what happens to the mother. What we do see intensifies the ugliness of the act. We see an act played out in time, foreshortened and rendered metonymic. Perhaps a more telling use of montage is in the scene in which the two garbage collectors eat their sandwiches, and one speaks for the other in sequence. As we watch each one in turn eat his sandwich, we hear the other one speaking in voice-over as the film gives us a series of montage shots. What we get is a collapsing of time in these shots, both the time within the film and the time of imperial activity over the past century or so. History comes in a series of interconnected shots connected by the voice we hear over the scenes. Whereas the mise en scene keeps us in the space of the protagonists as they make their journey, the montage allows for a rearranging of time. Montage can layer time, show more than one action taking place simultaneously, but not at the same time.
Tracking Godard’s film or finding the Godardian chronotope
But things are not that simple in a Godard film. Take for example the mise en scene. More than once in the film, we have scenes in which our protagonists encounter people from the past (e.g. St. Juste, and Emily Bronte). In other words, the film does not simply invoke characters from the past (Lewis Carroll, Andre Breton, etc.), but it also gives us the past in the present. In other words, the mise en scene is implicated in time as well as space. What Godard does is fuse mise en scene and montage. He does this most obviously and most brilliantly in his use of tracking shots.
WEEKEND contains one of the most famous tracking shots in cinema (others are in Welles’s A TOUCH OF EVIL and Antonioni’s THE PASSENGER, and perhaps Hitchock’s FRENZY); certainly it contains the longest or most likely the longest tracking shot. Godard’s camera tracks along a country road for ten minutes (a long time in filmic terms), and as it does so it manages to fuse mise en scene and montage. Obviously, the placing of the scene is clear. The camera follows the film’s protagonists as they make their way through a long traffic jam, past cars, trucks, and even a sailboat. We see many small vignettes, people playing ball, playing chess, reading, arguing, eating, and so on. These vignettes are often framed by the poplar trees that line the road, and such framing works as a montage slicing what we see into pieces of time as people occupy themselves while waiting for the traffic to begin moving again. Crossing all these vignettes are our protagonists who refuse to wait for the traffic to move and just drive on rudely. They effectively take control of both space and time (fusing montage and mise en scene). We have the chronotope of the road, a picaresque plot with ironic twist. Our protagonists are their own antagonists. They take to the road as if it was their own, and find trouble along the way.
We have another instance of the flamboyant tracking shot in the Mozart scene. Here the camera tracks one way in a circle and then the other way in a reverse circle. This tracking shot contrasts with the insistently linear tracking shot of the traffic jam. In the latter instance, the linearity leads nowhere, except perhaps to death. In the circular tracking shot we have the camera remaining centered on the music of Mozart. It moves around the yard passing a variety of people, most of whom we would call members of the proletariat. Our bourgeois protagonists lounge against a post yawning and looking bored, but the working people are rapt. The music speaks to these people. And whatever it says, it keeps a circumference. The true art is for everyone; it does not separate.
The tracking shot suggests fluidity of experience, connectedness. It sees things as part of a continuum. In a film that consists of fragmented scenes and fragments of words and phrases and disconnected people, the tracking shot works to oppose fragmentation and separation.
What WEEKEND “tracks” is humanity’s decline, its slide into barbarism. The scene when we hear Mozart on the piano contrasts the slide with momentary hope for the embrace (the circular tracking) of art and humanity. As a film, it uses just about everything a film can use: camera positions, the range of shots from close-up to distance shots, perspective, montage, mise en scene, inter-titles, music, sounds, dialogue, voice-over, back lighting, tracking, framing, monologues, costumes, references to literature, and so on. The film aspires to the condition of pure cinema by assimilating the other arts. It challenges the viewer to take part in the dialogue the film begins. This is dialogic art. And one of its many ironies is the fact that the protagonists know they are in a film (This is a rotten film; all the characters are crazy), and yet act as if they were not in a film. They do not, in short, take part in the dialogue the film initiates. They are not interested in communicating or in pursuing ideas. They are the capitalist subjects, subject only to their desire for money.
Revolutionary Cinema
One of the most insistent themes in WEEKEND is revolution. We have the many references to the French Revolution (Liberty, Fraternity, Equality), references to Marx, Engels, and Mao, and of course the revolutionary group at the end of the film. We are told that the worker needs to be as brutal as the bourgeoisie to get results. We learn that freedom is violence. And yet, we see that violence is hardly freedom in any attractive sense. Maybe we see that revolutions only perpetuate the cycle of violence and brutality that the history of civilization chronicles. A revolutionary cinema is a cinema that promotes detachment from the cycle of violence. The only cycle worth pursuing is the cycle the camera performs while we listen to Mozart. The only true revolution is art itself.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919)
This film is usually discussed as an example of Expressionism in the cinema.
Expressionism was first used in 1911 at an art exhibition in Berlin.
It uses exaggeration and distortion to express ideas and emotions.
Its sympathies are with pre-industrial society.
It is anti-naturalistic, fantastic, and open to impulses that are anti-rational (i.e. the unconscious)
In other words, Expressionism is the kind of art that might threaten authorities.
Take CALIGARI as an example: the basic plot concerns control and power, the control of a father figure over a son. Obviously, I speak metaphorically here, but the film brings us into metaphor in the first shot. We see two men, one younger than the other, seated in what looks like a bower, a garden, with strands and wisps of plant life draped over their bodies like webbing. We have an insistent use of the iris. These ‘signs’ inform us that we are entering a space in which things might not be what they appear to be. In short, what we see is metaphoric. If this is true, then what follows will most likely extend the metaphoric aspect of the film. In the world of metaphor, fathers and sons may represent various things (superego and ego, for example). Here the father may represent a number of things: the past controlling the present (Caligari is, we learn, a historical figure), the fatherland controlling its citizens by keeping them in a somnambulant state, the madman controlling the psyche and driving it to carry out unspeakable acts, the director controlling the inmates of an institution, the director manipulating actors and technicians in film making.
Let’s stop here for a second. The film makes it clear that Caligari is a mountebank, a charlatan, someone who proffers quack medicines from a platform, a conman. In other words, he is not a simple representative of the controlling power of the state. In fact, he is an outsider, someone associated with a traveling carnival. He objects to the way the state, through its petty clerks and bureaucrats, deals with people like him. And so the town clerk ends up dead. From a social and political perspective, Caligari represents something threatening and criminal. He works in silence, at night, in sinister and covert ways. In short, he has someone else do the dirty work for him. And who is this someone? Who is Cesare? Where does he come from? Why is he somnambulant? Why won’t someone find him a cure? Clearly the film does not take an interest in such questions. Cesare just is the way he is, and in some ways he is representative of the rest of us. He sleepwalks through life. But he does have a heart or conscience as his reaction to the girl indicates. His facial makeup with the dark eyes reminds me of the Pierrot, although a sad Pierrot and not a comic figure. He is the fool, the clown, the set upon, the madman. At the end of the film when things seem to have turned around, and after he is supposed to have died, we see him in the institution holding a posy and looking wistful and melancholy.
Where does this take us? Back to Caligari. He comes to us through the story of Francis, In Francis’s story, Caligari is the mad scientist, the evil force that threatens to shatter innocence and drive people insane through his machinations. In other words, the story begins as Francis’s narration, but we quickly see (literally) that the story we are receiving is not Francis’s, in the sense that it is what Francis actually experienced. For one thing, the story contains too many things that Francis could not have known – Caligari’s trip to the town clerk, for example, or his knowledge of Cesare’s reaction to Jane. And by the end, we come to see that the whole narrative has been contained within the confines of a mental institution, Francis is a troubled patient in the asylum, and the Caligari figure turns out not to be Caligari but rather the kindly (apparently) director of the asylum. And so the film ends (or just about ends) with the revelation that the entire story has been the figment of a deranged mind. Francis, whatever his problem, is paranoid and libidinous. We might reflect that in the story he tells, Cesare represents his own libidinous impulses, his desire for Jane. This might explain Cesare’s costume with the slinky black leotards that do not leave much for the imagination, and Cesare’s obvious libidinous attraction to Jane.
But we might remember that this is a film in which things are not what they seem to be. The final iris moving in to the good doctor as he tells us that he can cure Francis leaves us with a question: how will he effect this cure? All we have seen during the film are images of insane people either confined by straight jackets or isolated in cells where they are bound or chained or people allowed to walk in a confined space, along streets that look like corridors, or in the institution where they meander like prisoners in their daily exercise. Can we be sure that what we have seen at the end is any more actual than what Francis’s story has told?
But we can go back to “things are not what they seem to be.” From another perspective, things are exactly as they seem to be. This film is most famous for its sets, those strangely abstract and twisted views of streets or rooms or the circus or the asylum. And we notice little things such as how the twisted designs, the sharp angles, and abstract lines become stronger and more insistent as the film goes along. In other words, we notice more derangement, more hysteria, more paranoia reflected in the sets as the film moves toward its conclusion. We notice that the rooms of the two students, Alan and Francis, differ in the degree of their loopiness. Francis’s room is far more rounded and out of kilter, perhaps even resembling something of the crookedness of Caligari’s own little shack. In other words, the sets signal the emotional turmoil and the psychic disorder that characters who are mentally unstable manifest in their actions. And if I am right to see that the intensity of the derangement of the sets increases as the story goes along, then we might see the story as reflecting the disintegration of a mind, a descent into madness. The floor of the institution courtyard is a stylized mandala, a symbol of the integrated mind, only here off kilter, like the minds of the inmates.
The idea of descent brings me to the carnival. Before I focus on carnival, I note the opening shot of the town. The artist’s conception of the town is reminiscent of medieval conceptions of the pyramidal design of the cosmos, with the top standing for heaven, the middle for purgatory, and the bottom as Hell. I am thinking of the kind of otherworld cosmology we see in Dante. So let’s take this observation to the set designed to show the entrance to the carnival. Here we see the backdrop of various carnival tents and rides, the rides being of the carousel kind reflecting the circular movement of a mind stuck in constant return of the repressed. In front of this is the pathway that descends into the carnival, a pathway whose direction is accentuated by the railing in the middle ground that moves decidedly upward and the people on the path move downward. Then on the right of the frame we have an organ grinder with his monkey. At one point early in the film, we see Caligari stop and watch people give money to the organ grinder. One person in particular catches Caligari’s attention – a very short person. The very next shot shows a dwarf in the circus grounds carrying a standard. What is this all about? Anyhow, the way into the carnival is down, a descent -- into hell?
The obvious contrast to this descent into the carnival is the ascent to the police station. The stairway into the police station is unnaturally steep, and once inside we see ridiculously tall chairs upon which the two policemen sit, reminding us of the even more absurdly tall chair the town clerk sits upon in an earlier scene. The message seems to be that the city bureaucracy is removed from the reality of people’s lives. In other words, we have the top of the social order where city officials work and we have the bottom of the social order where carnival barkers and circus people make a living. In between, we have the students and shopkeepers and landladies and business people of the town. From another perspective, of course, the tall chairs and steep stairs keep reminding us that what we are seeing is not “real.” The absurdity of the sets reflects the unbalanced nature of the mind conceiving this story.
But let’s consider the carnival a bit more. This film inaugurates something of a genre: the circus film. We have many examples from Chaplin’s CIRCUS to W.C. Field’s YOU CAN'T CHEAT AN HONEST MAN, NIGHTMARE ALLEY, THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH, and CIRCUS WORLD. Perhaps the most bizarre example is Tod Browning’s FREAKS. In general, the circus presents us with another world, a sort of heterotopia that may represent the world as “greatest show on earth” or as “nightmare” or something in between. In other words, the circus is a space where normal reality is exaggerated. Circus has something similar in it to “carnival,” that festival that turns everything upside down. In carnival, he or she who would be last is first, he or she who is on the bottom is now on the top. Carnival, like the circus, offers a space where we are free of the usual social constraints. This is probably why the town clerk in THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI is so dismissive and disapproving of Caligari’s request for a permit. He perceives the circus act—the display of a somnambulist -- as of dubious value and honesty. The clerk hands him off to minions. Carnival is leveling. It breaks down social class divisions. In this film, however, the circus is a space that threatens to overwhelm that which lies outside this space. It is the locus of horror. Not only does Caligari display a somnambulist, but he also presents his somnambulist as a fortuneteller. Our young friend Alan has the temerity (stupidity?) to ask how long he will live, and Cesare portentously tells him that he will die at dawn. The circus, then, is the source for the insanity that overruns the town. Does this film make a connection between circus and asylum? Does this film have anything to say about abnormality? The circus is a place for performance as the organ grinder and his monkey demonstrate, and in the scenes of the asylum we see that this too is a place for performance. The patients (inmates) are seen performing in various ways, one man obviously expounding or speechifying. Cesare performs, but we see that his performance is a command performance in that he performs at the command of his master, the sinister Dr. Caligari. We might extrapolate from this and note that everyone “performs” in some way. The town clerk performs his duties as town clerk. The two young men perform the way young men are supposed to perform, reading books, longing for experience, and lusting after women. Everyone performs in some way. When does performance become unacceptable? Well obviously Cesare’s performance is socially unacceptable; we don't like people to go around murdering other people. Caligari’s actions are also unacceptable and they get him certified and placed in an institution bound by a straight jacket. Francis’s performance has also been deemed unacceptable and we find him confined in an institution. This is a film about socially unacceptable people. Like circus films generally, Caligari focuses on people who do not fit nicely into the social norm. Society commands and demands normalcy; society places those who deviate from the norm in confinement.
An aside: I wonder if the circus is also the place where desire finds temporary satisfaction. We know that both Alan and Francis love the same woman, and after they walk her home Francis acknowledges that both he and Alan love Jane. He then urges that no matter which man she chooses, the two men will remain friends. Earlier at the circus, after Alan has asked his question concerning how long he will live, and after he has received his answer, we have two close-up shots, one of Alan whose face registers fear and trembling, and one of Francis whose face registers ecstasy as if he has just heard sweet words. Now right after the two men say goodnight we cut to the scene of Alan’s murder. We never do see who kills him; we just see the shadow of the death scene on the wall. Alan’s face registers horror and disbelief just before he dies. Who is the murderer? It is fitting that we see the death only as a shadow since this is a film that deals with reality only as a shadow world, a world of unreality. Reality has little or no substance in this film.
The great thing about this film is that it drives directly to the source of deviance – it takes us down into the mind and its desires. In other words, this film acknowledges (especially through its sets) the unconscious. If Freud lies behind the psychology of this film, then we might find the id, ego, and superego working (and I note the three openings before the stairs in the institution courtyard). We might also guess that everything from the opening frames until at least the revelation of Caligari’s ‘’true’ identity are an out issue of Francis’s mind. In other words, everything in the narrative he tells is an aspect of his own mind. We might have a clue to this at the beginning when Jane floats through the garden and Francis tells the man sitting with him that she is his “betrothed.” She appears oblivious to the two men. Here’s a prospective bride who does not even acknowledge the existence of her prospective groom. She is, in effect, his ideal-I, his fantasy. Then within his narrative we can see his desire at work, his desire to come out from the confines of his room, get rid of a rival, confront the father figure, defeat him, and claim his bride. Within his fantasy, however, the superego and id are at war; his desire for Jane is reflected in Cesare’s abduction of her and his fear of his own desire is reflected in the bizarre superego figure of Caligari. What chance does a poor ego have when such powerful forces of repression and un-repression are at work? This film is about the return of the repressed, the driving force of desire that will have its sway even unto destruction and dissolution.
But what of the good doctor’s “cabinet.” The cabinet is the coffin-like container that closes over Cesare when his master puts him to rest. (Cesare is, by the way, a puppet, a manikin, a rag-doll, as in the scene in which Caligari sits by him while his alter-ego is out stalking Jane.) The cabinet itself is a closet, a coffin, a bed, a crib, a container. It might represent the mind opening and closing. We see Caligari slyly open it on more than one occasion; for example, he opens it for Jane when she makes her way into he circus looking for her father; Cesare awakes, stares at her, and scares her away. The opening and closing of the doors of this cabinet draw our attention to just how many doors we have in this film: doorways in and out. The door to Caligari’s shack. The doorway into the town clerk’s office. The doorways in the asylum. The elongated and tapered door to the Director of the Institution’s office. Doors are thresholds indicating movement either inward or outward, either to confinement or to liberation. They indicate passage, the passage from one place or state to another. The mind is a doorway leading, in this film, to lunacy, to a paranoid release of repressed desire. The only way to keep anti-social desire repressed and safe is either by having a healthy and balanced psyche or by going insane. The insistent emphasis on doors reminds us of ways in and of ways out. The mind is a threshold between inner and outer. The psyche must negotiate its balance and health by locating an equilibrium of self and other. What we see in CALIGARI is an imbalance; the self is incapable of equilibrium.
Another point to make about the “cabinet” is that it represents masculine space. I especially like the scene in which the Dr. first “wakes” Cesare, and Cesare emerges from the upright cabinet. The scene reminds me of the emergence of the Mummy from its casket in Karl Freund’s THE MUMMY (1932). But I also note the phallic aspect of this cabinet and of Cesare. Cesare is a walking phallus; his weapon of choice (a long knife) accentuates the phallic implications. Compare this phallic space with the feminine space of Jane’s home, a place in the one location we see aside from her bedroom that looks like a large blossom or bowl with petals in the background, reminding us of the female equivalent of the male phallus. When Cesare enters Jane’s bedroom, he finds easy entrance through a window whose bars offer little impediment to him. These two spaces – the cabinet and Jane’s sitting room – give us spatial conventions for masculine and feminine that continue to our own day. We might also compare the rooms of the two men with Jane’s bedroom.
And what of this film’s influences? Comments on Blackboard have done a great job of tracing this film’s influence all the way from James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN to films by Tim Burton (EDWARD SCISSORHANDS comes to mind). Many of the conventions of the horror film turn up in this film from the woman threatened by a monster, to a mad scientist, to ghoulish sets, to the use of shadows. The film owes much to Gothic tradition and to German Romanticism, especially the work of E.T.A. Hoffmann (see his story, “The Sandman” that Freud analyses in his famous essay on “The Uncanny”). It contains the Gothic sense of dissolution, a darkness drawing down, a place where the terrifying monsters of the mind become actualized. It contains the Gothic sense of a world in which innocence is under threat and the forces of order are undermined. It contains the familiar fear of the young that an older generation will stifle them, control them to the point of degeneration.
Finally, the film uses flashback near the end to trace Caligari’s obsession with power. While Francis and the doctors and orderlies of the Institution read about the historical Caligari and then read the Director’s Cases and Notes, the film flashes back to the Director’s interest in Caligari, and then the arrival at the Institution of the somnambulist, and the Director’s temptation. Then we see the Director become Caligari as the screen shows us how his obsession with the historical Caligari overwhelms him. Then we return to the frame – the scene of Francis sitting in the bower narrating his story to the other man who had earlier told a story about spirits. The film seems neat enough: a madman narrates a story in which he explains his deranged sense of what has happened to himself and his “betrothed,” and then we discover that this story is a fantasy. Or is it?
Eisenstein refers to CALIGARI as “this barbaric carnival of the destruction of the healthy infancy of our art, this common grave for normal cinema origins, this combination of silent hysteria, particolored canvases, daubed flats, painted faces, and the unnatural broken gestures and actions of monstrous chimaeras.” And yes, CALIGARI does wrench film into another dimension, one we should celebrate. Yippee.
Expressionism was first used in 1911 at an art exhibition in Berlin.
It uses exaggeration and distortion to express ideas and emotions.
Its sympathies are with pre-industrial society.
It is anti-naturalistic, fantastic, and open to impulses that are anti-rational (i.e. the unconscious)
In other words, Expressionism is the kind of art that might threaten authorities.
Take CALIGARI as an example: the basic plot concerns control and power, the control of a father figure over a son. Obviously, I speak metaphorically here, but the film brings us into metaphor in the first shot. We see two men, one younger than the other, seated in what looks like a bower, a garden, with strands and wisps of plant life draped over their bodies like webbing. We have an insistent use of the iris. These ‘signs’ inform us that we are entering a space in which things might not be what they appear to be. In short, what we see is metaphoric. If this is true, then what follows will most likely extend the metaphoric aspect of the film. In the world of metaphor, fathers and sons may represent various things (superego and ego, for example). Here the father may represent a number of things: the past controlling the present (Caligari is, we learn, a historical figure), the fatherland controlling its citizens by keeping them in a somnambulant state, the madman controlling the psyche and driving it to carry out unspeakable acts, the director controlling the inmates of an institution, the director manipulating actors and technicians in film making.
Let’s stop here for a second. The film makes it clear that Caligari is a mountebank, a charlatan, someone who proffers quack medicines from a platform, a conman. In other words, he is not a simple representative of the controlling power of the state. In fact, he is an outsider, someone associated with a traveling carnival. He objects to the way the state, through its petty clerks and bureaucrats, deals with people like him. And so the town clerk ends up dead. From a social and political perspective, Caligari represents something threatening and criminal. He works in silence, at night, in sinister and covert ways. In short, he has someone else do the dirty work for him. And who is this someone? Who is Cesare? Where does he come from? Why is he somnambulant? Why won’t someone find him a cure? Clearly the film does not take an interest in such questions. Cesare just is the way he is, and in some ways he is representative of the rest of us. He sleepwalks through life. But he does have a heart or conscience as his reaction to the girl indicates. His facial makeup with the dark eyes reminds me of the Pierrot, although a sad Pierrot and not a comic figure. He is the fool, the clown, the set upon, the madman. At the end of the film when things seem to have turned around, and after he is supposed to have died, we see him in the institution holding a posy and looking wistful and melancholy.
Where does this take us? Back to Caligari. He comes to us through the story of Francis, In Francis’s story, Caligari is the mad scientist, the evil force that threatens to shatter innocence and drive people insane through his machinations. In other words, the story begins as Francis’s narration, but we quickly see (literally) that the story we are receiving is not Francis’s, in the sense that it is what Francis actually experienced. For one thing, the story contains too many things that Francis could not have known – Caligari’s trip to the town clerk, for example, or his knowledge of Cesare’s reaction to Jane. And by the end, we come to see that the whole narrative has been contained within the confines of a mental institution, Francis is a troubled patient in the asylum, and the Caligari figure turns out not to be Caligari but rather the kindly (apparently) director of the asylum. And so the film ends (or just about ends) with the revelation that the entire story has been the figment of a deranged mind. Francis, whatever his problem, is paranoid and libidinous. We might reflect that in the story he tells, Cesare represents his own libidinous impulses, his desire for Jane. This might explain Cesare’s costume with the slinky black leotards that do not leave much for the imagination, and Cesare’s obvious libidinous attraction to Jane.
But we might remember that this is a film in which things are not what they seem to be. The final iris moving in to the good doctor as he tells us that he can cure Francis leaves us with a question: how will he effect this cure? All we have seen during the film are images of insane people either confined by straight jackets or isolated in cells where they are bound or chained or people allowed to walk in a confined space, along streets that look like corridors, or in the institution where they meander like prisoners in their daily exercise. Can we be sure that what we have seen at the end is any more actual than what Francis’s story has told?
But we can go back to “things are not what they seem to be.” From another perspective, things are exactly as they seem to be. This film is most famous for its sets, those strangely abstract and twisted views of streets or rooms or the circus or the asylum. And we notice little things such as how the twisted designs, the sharp angles, and abstract lines become stronger and more insistent as the film goes along. In other words, we notice more derangement, more hysteria, more paranoia reflected in the sets as the film moves toward its conclusion. We notice that the rooms of the two students, Alan and Francis, differ in the degree of their loopiness. Francis’s room is far more rounded and out of kilter, perhaps even resembling something of the crookedness of Caligari’s own little shack. In other words, the sets signal the emotional turmoil and the psychic disorder that characters who are mentally unstable manifest in their actions. And if I am right to see that the intensity of the derangement of the sets increases as the story goes along, then we might see the story as reflecting the disintegration of a mind, a descent into madness. The floor of the institution courtyard is a stylized mandala, a symbol of the integrated mind, only here off kilter, like the minds of the inmates.
The idea of descent brings me to the carnival. Before I focus on carnival, I note the opening shot of the town. The artist’s conception of the town is reminiscent of medieval conceptions of the pyramidal design of the cosmos, with the top standing for heaven, the middle for purgatory, and the bottom as Hell. I am thinking of the kind of otherworld cosmology we see in Dante. So let’s take this observation to the set designed to show the entrance to the carnival. Here we see the backdrop of various carnival tents and rides, the rides being of the carousel kind reflecting the circular movement of a mind stuck in constant return of the repressed. In front of this is the pathway that descends into the carnival, a pathway whose direction is accentuated by the railing in the middle ground that moves decidedly upward and the people on the path move downward. Then on the right of the frame we have an organ grinder with his monkey. At one point early in the film, we see Caligari stop and watch people give money to the organ grinder. One person in particular catches Caligari’s attention – a very short person. The very next shot shows a dwarf in the circus grounds carrying a standard. What is this all about? Anyhow, the way into the carnival is down, a descent -- into hell?
The obvious contrast to this descent into the carnival is the ascent to the police station. The stairway into the police station is unnaturally steep, and once inside we see ridiculously tall chairs upon which the two policemen sit, reminding us of the even more absurdly tall chair the town clerk sits upon in an earlier scene. The message seems to be that the city bureaucracy is removed from the reality of people’s lives. In other words, we have the top of the social order where city officials work and we have the bottom of the social order where carnival barkers and circus people make a living. In between, we have the students and shopkeepers and landladies and business people of the town. From another perspective, of course, the tall chairs and steep stairs keep reminding us that what we are seeing is not “real.” The absurdity of the sets reflects the unbalanced nature of the mind conceiving this story.
But let’s consider the carnival a bit more. This film inaugurates something of a genre: the circus film. We have many examples from Chaplin’s CIRCUS to W.C. Field’s YOU CAN'T CHEAT AN HONEST MAN, NIGHTMARE ALLEY, THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH, and CIRCUS WORLD. Perhaps the most bizarre example is Tod Browning’s FREAKS. In general, the circus presents us with another world, a sort of heterotopia that may represent the world as “greatest show on earth” or as “nightmare” or something in between. In other words, the circus is a space where normal reality is exaggerated. Circus has something similar in it to “carnival,” that festival that turns everything upside down. In carnival, he or she who would be last is first, he or she who is on the bottom is now on the top. Carnival, like the circus, offers a space where we are free of the usual social constraints. This is probably why the town clerk in THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI is so dismissive and disapproving of Caligari’s request for a permit. He perceives the circus act—the display of a somnambulist -- as of dubious value and honesty. The clerk hands him off to minions. Carnival is leveling. It breaks down social class divisions. In this film, however, the circus is a space that threatens to overwhelm that which lies outside this space. It is the locus of horror. Not only does Caligari display a somnambulist, but he also presents his somnambulist as a fortuneteller. Our young friend Alan has the temerity (stupidity?) to ask how long he will live, and Cesare portentously tells him that he will die at dawn. The circus, then, is the source for the insanity that overruns the town. Does this film make a connection between circus and asylum? Does this film have anything to say about abnormality? The circus is a place for performance as the organ grinder and his monkey demonstrate, and in the scenes of the asylum we see that this too is a place for performance. The patients (inmates) are seen performing in various ways, one man obviously expounding or speechifying. Cesare performs, but we see that his performance is a command performance in that he performs at the command of his master, the sinister Dr. Caligari. We might extrapolate from this and note that everyone “performs” in some way. The town clerk performs his duties as town clerk. The two young men perform the way young men are supposed to perform, reading books, longing for experience, and lusting after women. Everyone performs in some way. When does performance become unacceptable? Well obviously Cesare’s performance is socially unacceptable; we don't like people to go around murdering other people. Caligari’s actions are also unacceptable and they get him certified and placed in an institution bound by a straight jacket. Francis’s performance has also been deemed unacceptable and we find him confined in an institution. This is a film about socially unacceptable people. Like circus films generally, Caligari focuses on people who do not fit nicely into the social norm. Society commands and demands normalcy; society places those who deviate from the norm in confinement.
An aside: I wonder if the circus is also the place where desire finds temporary satisfaction. We know that both Alan and Francis love the same woman, and after they walk her home Francis acknowledges that both he and Alan love Jane. He then urges that no matter which man she chooses, the two men will remain friends. Earlier at the circus, after Alan has asked his question concerning how long he will live, and after he has received his answer, we have two close-up shots, one of Alan whose face registers fear and trembling, and one of Francis whose face registers ecstasy as if he has just heard sweet words. Now right after the two men say goodnight we cut to the scene of Alan’s murder. We never do see who kills him; we just see the shadow of the death scene on the wall. Alan’s face registers horror and disbelief just before he dies. Who is the murderer? It is fitting that we see the death only as a shadow since this is a film that deals with reality only as a shadow world, a world of unreality. Reality has little or no substance in this film.
The great thing about this film is that it drives directly to the source of deviance – it takes us down into the mind and its desires. In other words, this film acknowledges (especially through its sets) the unconscious. If Freud lies behind the psychology of this film, then we might find the id, ego, and superego working (and I note the three openings before the stairs in the institution courtyard). We might also guess that everything from the opening frames until at least the revelation of Caligari’s ‘’true’ identity are an out issue of Francis’s mind. In other words, everything in the narrative he tells is an aspect of his own mind. We might have a clue to this at the beginning when Jane floats through the garden and Francis tells the man sitting with him that she is his “betrothed.” She appears oblivious to the two men. Here’s a prospective bride who does not even acknowledge the existence of her prospective groom. She is, in effect, his ideal-I, his fantasy. Then within his narrative we can see his desire at work, his desire to come out from the confines of his room, get rid of a rival, confront the father figure, defeat him, and claim his bride. Within his fantasy, however, the superego and id are at war; his desire for Jane is reflected in Cesare’s abduction of her and his fear of his own desire is reflected in the bizarre superego figure of Caligari. What chance does a poor ego have when such powerful forces of repression and un-repression are at work? This film is about the return of the repressed, the driving force of desire that will have its sway even unto destruction and dissolution.
But what of the good doctor’s “cabinet.” The cabinet is the coffin-like container that closes over Cesare when his master puts him to rest. (Cesare is, by the way, a puppet, a manikin, a rag-doll, as in the scene in which Caligari sits by him while his alter-ego is out stalking Jane.) The cabinet itself is a closet, a coffin, a bed, a crib, a container. It might represent the mind opening and closing. We see Caligari slyly open it on more than one occasion; for example, he opens it for Jane when she makes her way into he circus looking for her father; Cesare awakes, stares at her, and scares her away. The opening and closing of the doors of this cabinet draw our attention to just how many doors we have in this film: doorways in and out. The door to Caligari’s shack. The doorway into the town clerk’s office. The doorways in the asylum. The elongated and tapered door to the Director of the Institution’s office. Doors are thresholds indicating movement either inward or outward, either to confinement or to liberation. They indicate passage, the passage from one place or state to another. The mind is a doorway leading, in this film, to lunacy, to a paranoid release of repressed desire. The only way to keep anti-social desire repressed and safe is either by having a healthy and balanced psyche or by going insane. The insistent emphasis on doors reminds us of ways in and of ways out. The mind is a threshold between inner and outer. The psyche must negotiate its balance and health by locating an equilibrium of self and other. What we see in CALIGARI is an imbalance; the self is incapable of equilibrium.
Another point to make about the “cabinet” is that it represents masculine space. I especially like the scene in which the Dr. first “wakes” Cesare, and Cesare emerges from the upright cabinet. The scene reminds me of the emergence of the Mummy from its casket in Karl Freund’s THE MUMMY (1932). But I also note the phallic aspect of this cabinet and of Cesare. Cesare is a walking phallus; his weapon of choice (a long knife) accentuates the phallic implications. Compare this phallic space with the feminine space of Jane’s home, a place in the one location we see aside from her bedroom that looks like a large blossom or bowl with petals in the background, reminding us of the female equivalent of the male phallus. When Cesare enters Jane’s bedroom, he finds easy entrance through a window whose bars offer little impediment to him. These two spaces – the cabinet and Jane’s sitting room – give us spatial conventions for masculine and feminine that continue to our own day. We might also compare the rooms of the two men with Jane’s bedroom.
And what of this film’s influences? Comments on Blackboard have done a great job of tracing this film’s influence all the way from James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN to films by Tim Burton (EDWARD SCISSORHANDS comes to mind). Many of the conventions of the horror film turn up in this film from the woman threatened by a monster, to a mad scientist, to ghoulish sets, to the use of shadows. The film owes much to Gothic tradition and to German Romanticism, especially the work of E.T.A. Hoffmann (see his story, “The Sandman” that Freud analyses in his famous essay on “The Uncanny”). It contains the Gothic sense of dissolution, a darkness drawing down, a place where the terrifying monsters of the mind become actualized. It contains the Gothic sense of a world in which innocence is under threat and the forces of order are undermined. It contains the familiar fear of the young that an older generation will stifle them, control them to the point of degeneration.
Finally, the film uses flashback near the end to trace Caligari’s obsession with power. While Francis and the doctors and orderlies of the Institution read about the historical Caligari and then read the Director’s Cases and Notes, the film flashes back to the Director’s interest in Caligari, and then the arrival at the Institution of the somnambulist, and the Director’s temptation. Then we see the Director become Caligari as the screen shows us how his obsession with the historical Caligari overwhelms him. Then we return to the frame – the scene of Francis sitting in the bower narrating his story to the other man who had earlier told a story about spirits. The film seems neat enough: a madman narrates a story in which he explains his deranged sense of what has happened to himself and his “betrothed,” and then we discover that this story is a fantasy. Or is it?
Eisenstein refers to CALIGARI as “this barbaric carnival of the destruction of the healthy infancy of our art, this common grave for normal cinema origins, this combination of silent hysteria, particolored canvases, daubed flats, painted faces, and the unnatural broken gestures and actions of monstrous chimaeras.” And yes, CALIGARI does wrench film into another dimension, one we should celebrate. Yippee.
Samuel Fuller Auteur: PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET
“You cannot force people to love one another, to think in the same way. You cannot make them, and I’m delighted. I love confusion, I love conflict, I love argument. If the whole world believed the same thing – imagine a world inhabited only by women or men, it would be terrible. Even if you’re right, you have no right to impose your way of thinking on me.”
(Sam Fuller qtd in Garnham 117-118)
1. PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET (1952)
-this is Fuller’s sixth feature as a Director
-he wrote the script from a story by Dwight Taylor, but Fuller himself says, “Once again this was my original.” He completely rewrote the original story idea.
-the film is ostensibly an early 50s anti-Communist film. Hollywood made many of these films at the time, some obvious such as John Fellows’s BIG JIM MCCLAIN, and some less obvious such as Don Siegel’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS.
- the story is a somewhat melodramatic account of a one-time prostitute and a low-life pickpocket falling in love.
-where to place the film in terms of genre? What to say about its style? What to say about its characters? What to say about its various images? What to say about its vision of life? What makes it a “personal” film?
Genre: PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET is a small programme feature that fits into the genre the French critics labeled “cinema noir” or black cinema. The term “cinema noir” serves several purposes.
Cinema Noir:
First, the word “noir” refers to the fact that these low budget films were shot in black and white.
Second, these black and white films were “noir” because much of the action takes place at night, and the streets of the city are dark and deeply shadowed. As well, interiors are often dark and shadowed. Darkness pervades these films.
Third, “noir” refers to the significance of the dark streets and interiors. By “significance” I mean the vision of human life is generally dark and bleak in these films. These are films in which a sort of social Darwinism is at work – survival of the fittest where fittest means, the one most able to manipulate the system or overpower others. Characters live lives of claustrophobia, trapped in the naked city.
Fourth, “noir” may refer to both a style and content. The style is evident partly in the use of black and white, back lighting and localized lighting, and stark contrasts, especially in the use of shadows. But style also refers to an insistent camera – I mean by this a camera that situates itself askew, not quite anamorphically, but certainly at noteworthy angles.
-in PICKUP, we note that the camera more often than not looks at the actors either from above or from below, but relatively rarely from eye level. It also moves close to faces, sometimes uncomfortably close. We can see beads of perspiration or the discolouration of skin because of bruises or cuts. The close-ups in Fuller’s films point forward to the operatic close-ups in the films of Sergio Leone. Fuller also uses fades where one image remains on the screen for a few seconds while a second image is superimposed on it. The overlap suggests the strange cause and effect rhythm of his world.
-as for lighting, we have many very dark scenes in this film. A few times we see a face and perhaps a form emerging out of the darkness like an ominous shadow or darksome figure, reminding us of the night’s dangers. The world, and especially the world at night, hides many threats and secrets. In this film, we have the running motif of “shadowing,” people being followed and watched.
-content: “noir” usually takes for its setting the city. The city itself is a character in these films; it is harsh and brutal. The concrete streets and buildings reflect the hardness of life itself. Themes of betrayal, murder, mystery, intrigue, and the cheapness of life itself return in film after film. Corruption is also always evident. Sometimes it is difficult to tell the bad guys from the good guys. The world is, in effect, a masculine world in the sense that the films focus on men, usually single men, who inhabit a dark underworld (in both the criminal and spiritual senses). Women in the noir world are usually either long-suffering innocents who need the strength of a man to protect them or they are variations on the femme fatale, women as tough as men who draw unwary men to their doom (Fuller’s women are not the stereotypical noir women, as we will see).
-even when noir films end “happily,” we can sense the fragility (maybe even the falseness) of such endings. The noir world is deeply flawed, closer to tragedy than to comedy. The shooting of Candy in PICKUP is a case in point. It is a shock when the apparent main female character appears to be killed. This scene looks forward to the end of Fuller’s FORTY GUNS where the hero shoots his own lover in order to get the bad guy who is holding the woman as a human shield. Fuller likes to shock, and to overturn expectations and conventions.
-the noir leading man – not a hero in any traditional sense – usually finds himself trapped in the city. The city becomes a labyrinth. At the heart of this labyrinth is the minotaur, the monster, death itself. The noir hero finds himself surrounded by death and sometimes even facing and experiencing death. Dying well becomes a focus of these films.
-the trapped man unable to extricate himself from a web of intrigue is not only a noir feature. Hitchcock’s films obsessively return to this motif (39 STEPS, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, etc.), but Hitchock’s trapped man is an innocent. The noir hero is never innocent. He is part of the sleaze, part of the city’s detritus (see Aldrich’s magnificently sleazy KISS ME DEADLY).
-innocence is, for the most part, absent from noir. Another way of putting this is to say that noir films rarely have a clear binary of bad/good. In PICKUP, for example, we have the police and the feds in conflict with the Commies. We might think the binary goes like this: Police and Feds are good/Commies are bad. But Fuller complicates this by placing Candy and Skip between the two institutional forces (representatives of two forms of government). Twice in the film we have the line about “waving the flag,” both times spoken derisively. The police with their panopticon tactics are hardly more admirable than the commies with their underhand and violent ways. Both the police and the Commies are night creatures, watchers, and willing to do what it takes to accomplish their ends (twice Skip has been arrested and at least on one of these occasions he was brutalized by the cop, Tiger).
Style: as I say above, style has to do with camera angles, set-ups, and lighting. Noteworthy are low and high angles, and also establishing shots that work thematically. Think of the bird’s-eye shots of cops getting out of cars or high angle shots of characters crossing streets or the establishing shot of Skip’s shack on the water. The camera serves to remind us of a fate that quite literally hangs over the characters. They are being observed and tracked and not simply watched in a neutral manner. Or think of the twice-used establishing shot of the subway careening through the night (see Subway below).
-by “fate,” I refer to the way the plot unfolds: one rather causal act leads to a series of events that include murder and near murder. Skip “innocently” steals from a woman’s purse on the crowded subway car; this is something he has done countless times before. But this time is different from previous times. The woman is oblivious to the robbery, but both she and, consequently, Skip are observed by the authorities. What follows is a series of events inevitable once the initial act has occurred. Candy discovers that she has been robbed; the police lose track of Skip. And so Moe comes on the scene. Moe informs on Skip, and so the inevitable trail of crime follows. The only thing that interrupts the necessary fate (death to all who cross either the Commies or the police) is a redeeming act, an act of love. One such act is Moe’s refusal to tell Joey where Skip lives. Another such act is Skip’s retrieval of Moe’s body so he can give her a proper burial. A third example of a redeeming act is Candy’s lie to the cops that Skip has fooled the commies and is, in effect, helping the police. She nearly dies for this act of kindness.
Characters:
Captain Tiger (Murvyn Vye) is a cop on a mission to clean up the low-life in his city.
Skip (Richard Widmark) is a professional pickpocket and a loner. He lives by his wits and by his delicate hands. Candy says that he has the hands of an artist. How did he become the person he is? “Things happen,” he says. His redeeming act is burying Moe.
Candy (Jean Peters) has been Joey’s girl. Clearly, she is the kind of woman who is willing to use her sexuality to get what she wants or needs. She has not had a very savory life.
Moe (Thelma Ritter) is an informer who pretends to be a tie salesperson. She makes most of her money by selling information, information she gathers on her rounds selling ties on the streets. She wants enough money to have a proper burial plot with headstone. If she died and was buried in Potter’s Field, “it would kill her.”
Joey (Richard Kiley) is a petty thug, caught up in what he calls “big business,” not criminality. He is trapped by his deal with the Commies.
Where these people have come from is not stated, but clearly they have all lived lives on the edge. They have not come from a wealthy New Jersey suburb. They are products of the hard city streets. They survive by their wits, using any means available to them.
Images:
Subway: inside it is crowded, close, filled with small stories we will never know about. The opening scene establishes the themes of claustrophobia, surveillance, criminality, happenstance, and fate. Outside, the fast-moving subway signifies lives lived on a fast track to death.
Shack: isolation. The shack sits on water, an indication of the less than stable foundations of life, or at least the life of a guy like Skip. His life is rudimentary, without electricity or the comforts of home. Here in a huge modern city, we have a guy who lives in a shack without running water or electricity.
Neckties: the necktie is a nice visual pun. So much that these people do amounts to an invitation to a neck-tie party. The ties also remind us of etiquette, decorum, the façade of fine dress.
Newspapers: Fuller went to work for a newspaper at the age of 15. His films are “ripped from the headlines.” The sensational is the stuff of a certain kind of journalism, and Fuller’s films delight in the sensational. The film opens with Skip using a newspaper to conceal his theft. The paper is a cover only; he doesn’t really read it. The same is true when he goes to the Library to read microfilm. He pretends to read the newspaper.
Ropes and Pulleys: such as the rope that Skip uses to pull up his carton of beer. Like the necktie, the rope reminds us that if you give someone enough of it, he or she will hang himself or herself.
Film Strip: the much sought after item. This is the treasure
Purse: how many times does Skip rifle Candy’s purse? The purse is a place to keep things safe, but it proves to be completely vulnerable.
Windows, alleyways, shadows: people peer from windows, lurk in shadows, hide in alleyways. These places remind us of surveillance, the ever-seeing eye of the enemy.
Life:
Harsh, brutal, and short.
A Hobbesian view of life. Life lived in the belly of the whale.
The alleys and windows and shadows hide the enemy. For Fuller, the most formative experience of his life was his stint in the infantry during World War 2; his unit was the Big Red One. We might say that all Fuller’s films are war films (he made several films about war). Life is a battlefield in which trust is precious and also rare; it must be earned.
Moe and Skip have, perhaps, the defining relationship. Each is prepared to do just about anything to get what they want, to survive. Skip knows Moe informed on him, but he also know that this is how she survives. He cannot blame her for making her living anyway she can in this miserable world.
Violence: Fuller has said that he hates violence, but his world is a violent place. He hates violence, but he acknowledges the fact of violence. And in his films, violence has a visceral impact. Fights are brutal; we see blood and bruises. Violence, like patriotism, is the last refuge of the scoundrel (Joey), and the final resort of the person who needs to survive (Skip). Their fight at the end of the film is brutal. Skip uses his delicate hands to pound his enemy because he needs to protect what has become dear to him (both his own life and Candy’s). We might also connect the violence in this film, and in Fuller’s films generally, with his Americanism.
National Myth: Fuller is a very American director. By this, I mean that he is interested in what makes America America. In PICKUP, we have the obvious theme of the Communist menace. Consequently, we have America and the Cold War, America defending itself from its enemies. And so we have one ideology (Communist) threatening another ideology (American – however we define this). If we take Skip as the central character, then we have an American who thinks not of his flag, but of getting along in life. The police and FBI cannot convince him to help them by playing the patriotic card. Skip could care less about governments and authorities. We might say the same about Moe and Candy and even Joey. These people are not interested in patriotism; they are interested in making a buck or surviving or getting a cemetery plot. These Americans are American precisely because they follow, in a sort of manner, the implications of the second Amendment to the U.S. constitution. They are suspicious of government; they are interested in “freedom,” freedom from control. To live outside the law, you must be honest, and these people are in this way honest. This is the myth of America as a land of opportunity and freedom, with the caveat that this is just a myth. In actuality, America is a land fraught with surveillance and fear and injustice and brutality. This is Cormac McCarthy territory, or the world as Huck Finn saw it. The American hero is the wanderer, the loner, the man adapted to his environment, like Skip is to his.
Fuller made war films and westerns both because he was experienced in war and interested in history, and also because he was aware of violence as pervasive in his own country and its history. In Fuller’s world, people are separated by such things as gender, class, position, economics, race, and politics.
(Sam Fuller qtd in Garnham 117-118)
1. PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET (1952)
-this is Fuller’s sixth feature as a Director
-he wrote the script from a story by Dwight Taylor, but Fuller himself says, “Once again this was my original.” He completely rewrote the original story idea.
-the film is ostensibly an early 50s anti-Communist film. Hollywood made many of these films at the time, some obvious such as John Fellows’s BIG JIM MCCLAIN, and some less obvious such as Don Siegel’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS.
- the story is a somewhat melodramatic account of a one-time prostitute and a low-life pickpocket falling in love.
-where to place the film in terms of genre? What to say about its style? What to say about its characters? What to say about its various images? What to say about its vision of life? What makes it a “personal” film?
Genre: PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET is a small programme feature that fits into the genre the French critics labeled “cinema noir” or black cinema. The term “cinema noir” serves several purposes.
Cinema Noir:
First, the word “noir” refers to the fact that these low budget films were shot in black and white.
Second, these black and white films were “noir” because much of the action takes place at night, and the streets of the city are dark and deeply shadowed. As well, interiors are often dark and shadowed. Darkness pervades these films.
Third, “noir” refers to the significance of the dark streets and interiors. By “significance” I mean the vision of human life is generally dark and bleak in these films. These are films in which a sort of social Darwinism is at work – survival of the fittest where fittest means, the one most able to manipulate the system or overpower others. Characters live lives of claustrophobia, trapped in the naked city.
Fourth, “noir” may refer to both a style and content. The style is evident partly in the use of black and white, back lighting and localized lighting, and stark contrasts, especially in the use of shadows. But style also refers to an insistent camera – I mean by this a camera that situates itself askew, not quite anamorphically, but certainly at noteworthy angles.
-in PICKUP, we note that the camera more often than not looks at the actors either from above or from below, but relatively rarely from eye level. It also moves close to faces, sometimes uncomfortably close. We can see beads of perspiration or the discolouration of skin because of bruises or cuts. The close-ups in Fuller’s films point forward to the operatic close-ups in the films of Sergio Leone. Fuller also uses fades where one image remains on the screen for a few seconds while a second image is superimposed on it. The overlap suggests the strange cause and effect rhythm of his world.
-as for lighting, we have many very dark scenes in this film. A few times we see a face and perhaps a form emerging out of the darkness like an ominous shadow or darksome figure, reminding us of the night’s dangers. The world, and especially the world at night, hides many threats and secrets. In this film, we have the running motif of “shadowing,” people being followed and watched.
-content: “noir” usually takes for its setting the city. The city itself is a character in these films; it is harsh and brutal. The concrete streets and buildings reflect the hardness of life itself. Themes of betrayal, murder, mystery, intrigue, and the cheapness of life itself return in film after film. Corruption is also always evident. Sometimes it is difficult to tell the bad guys from the good guys. The world is, in effect, a masculine world in the sense that the films focus on men, usually single men, who inhabit a dark underworld (in both the criminal and spiritual senses). Women in the noir world are usually either long-suffering innocents who need the strength of a man to protect them or they are variations on the femme fatale, women as tough as men who draw unwary men to their doom (Fuller’s women are not the stereotypical noir women, as we will see).
-even when noir films end “happily,” we can sense the fragility (maybe even the falseness) of such endings. The noir world is deeply flawed, closer to tragedy than to comedy. The shooting of Candy in PICKUP is a case in point. It is a shock when the apparent main female character appears to be killed. This scene looks forward to the end of Fuller’s FORTY GUNS where the hero shoots his own lover in order to get the bad guy who is holding the woman as a human shield. Fuller likes to shock, and to overturn expectations and conventions.
-the noir leading man – not a hero in any traditional sense – usually finds himself trapped in the city. The city becomes a labyrinth. At the heart of this labyrinth is the minotaur, the monster, death itself. The noir hero finds himself surrounded by death and sometimes even facing and experiencing death. Dying well becomes a focus of these films.
-the trapped man unable to extricate himself from a web of intrigue is not only a noir feature. Hitchcock’s films obsessively return to this motif (39 STEPS, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, etc.), but Hitchock’s trapped man is an innocent. The noir hero is never innocent. He is part of the sleaze, part of the city’s detritus (see Aldrich’s magnificently sleazy KISS ME DEADLY).
-innocence is, for the most part, absent from noir. Another way of putting this is to say that noir films rarely have a clear binary of bad/good. In PICKUP, for example, we have the police and the feds in conflict with the Commies. We might think the binary goes like this: Police and Feds are good/Commies are bad. But Fuller complicates this by placing Candy and Skip between the two institutional forces (representatives of two forms of government). Twice in the film we have the line about “waving the flag,” both times spoken derisively. The police with their panopticon tactics are hardly more admirable than the commies with their underhand and violent ways. Both the police and the Commies are night creatures, watchers, and willing to do what it takes to accomplish their ends (twice Skip has been arrested and at least on one of these occasions he was brutalized by the cop, Tiger).
Style: as I say above, style has to do with camera angles, set-ups, and lighting. Noteworthy are low and high angles, and also establishing shots that work thematically. Think of the bird’s-eye shots of cops getting out of cars or high angle shots of characters crossing streets or the establishing shot of Skip’s shack on the water. The camera serves to remind us of a fate that quite literally hangs over the characters. They are being observed and tracked and not simply watched in a neutral manner. Or think of the twice-used establishing shot of the subway careening through the night (see Subway below).
-by “fate,” I refer to the way the plot unfolds: one rather causal act leads to a series of events that include murder and near murder. Skip “innocently” steals from a woman’s purse on the crowded subway car; this is something he has done countless times before. But this time is different from previous times. The woman is oblivious to the robbery, but both she and, consequently, Skip are observed by the authorities. What follows is a series of events inevitable once the initial act has occurred. Candy discovers that she has been robbed; the police lose track of Skip. And so Moe comes on the scene. Moe informs on Skip, and so the inevitable trail of crime follows. The only thing that interrupts the necessary fate (death to all who cross either the Commies or the police) is a redeeming act, an act of love. One such act is Moe’s refusal to tell Joey where Skip lives. Another such act is Skip’s retrieval of Moe’s body so he can give her a proper burial. A third example of a redeeming act is Candy’s lie to the cops that Skip has fooled the commies and is, in effect, helping the police. She nearly dies for this act of kindness.
Characters:
Captain Tiger (Murvyn Vye) is a cop on a mission to clean up the low-life in his city.
Skip (Richard Widmark) is a professional pickpocket and a loner. He lives by his wits and by his delicate hands. Candy says that he has the hands of an artist. How did he become the person he is? “Things happen,” he says. His redeeming act is burying Moe.
Candy (Jean Peters) has been Joey’s girl. Clearly, she is the kind of woman who is willing to use her sexuality to get what she wants or needs. She has not had a very savory life.
Moe (Thelma Ritter) is an informer who pretends to be a tie salesperson. She makes most of her money by selling information, information she gathers on her rounds selling ties on the streets. She wants enough money to have a proper burial plot with headstone. If she died and was buried in Potter’s Field, “it would kill her.”
Joey (Richard Kiley) is a petty thug, caught up in what he calls “big business,” not criminality. He is trapped by his deal with the Commies.
Where these people have come from is not stated, but clearly they have all lived lives on the edge. They have not come from a wealthy New Jersey suburb. They are products of the hard city streets. They survive by their wits, using any means available to them.
Images:
Subway: inside it is crowded, close, filled with small stories we will never know about. The opening scene establishes the themes of claustrophobia, surveillance, criminality, happenstance, and fate. Outside, the fast-moving subway signifies lives lived on a fast track to death.
Shack: isolation. The shack sits on water, an indication of the less than stable foundations of life, or at least the life of a guy like Skip. His life is rudimentary, without electricity or the comforts of home. Here in a huge modern city, we have a guy who lives in a shack without running water or electricity.
Neckties: the necktie is a nice visual pun. So much that these people do amounts to an invitation to a neck-tie party. The ties also remind us of etiquette, decorum, the façade of fine dress.
Newspapers: Fuller went to work for a newspaper at the age of 15. His films are “ripped from the headlines.” The sensational is the stuff of a certain kind of journalism, and Fuller’s films delight in the sensational. The film opens with Skip using a newspaper to conceal his theft. The paper is a cover only; he doesn’t really read it. The same is true when he goes to the Library to read microfilm. He pretends to read the newspaper.
Ropes and Pulleys: such as the rope that Skip uses to pull up his carton of beer. Like the necktie, the rope reminds us that if you give someone enough of it, he or she will hang himself or herself.
Film Strip: the much sought after item. This is the treasure
Purse: how many times does Skip rifle Candy’s purse? The purse is a place to keep things safe, but it proves to be completely vulnerable.
Windows, alleyways, shadows: people peer from windows, lurk in shadows, hide in alleyways. These places remind us of surveillance, the ever-seeing eye of the enemy.
Life:
Harsh, brutal, and short.
A Hobbesian view of life. Life lived in the belly of the whale.
The alleys and windows and shadows hide the enemy. For Fuller, the most formative experience of his life was his stint in the infantry during World War 2; his unit was the Big Red One. We might say that all Fuller’s films are war films (he made several films about war). Life is a battlefield in which trust is precious and also rare; it must be earned.
Moe and Skip have, perhaps, the defining relationship. Each is prepared to do just about anything to get what they want, to survive. Skip knows Moe informed on him, but he also know that this is how she survives. He cannot blame her for making her living anyway she can in this miserable world.
Violence: Fuller has said that he hates violence, but his world is a violent place. He hates violence, but he acknowledges the fact of violence. And in his films, violence has a visceral impact. Fights are brutal; we see blood and bruises. Violence, like patriotism, is the last refuge of the scoundrel (Joey), and the final resort of the person who needs to survive (Skip). Their fight at the end of the film is brutal. Skip uses his delicate hands to pound his enemy because he needs to protect what has become dear to him (both his own life and Candy’s). We might also connect the violence in this film, and in Fuller’s films generally, with his Americanism.
National Myth: Fuller is a very American director. By this, I mean that he is interested in what makes America America. In PICKUP, we have the obvious theme of the Communist menace. Consequently, we have America and the Cold War, America defending itself from its enemies. And so we have one ideology (Communist) threatening another ideology (American – however we define this). If we take Skip as the central character, then we have an American who thinks not of his flag, but of getting along in life. The police and FBI cannot convince him to help them by playing the patriotic card. Skip could care less about governments and authorities. We might say the same about Moe and Candy and even Joey. These people are not interested in patriotism; they are interested in making a buck or surviving or getting a cemetery plot. These Americans are American precisely because they follow, in a sort of manner, the implications of the second Amendment to the U.S. constitution. They are suspicious of government; they are interested in “freedom,” freedom from control. To live outside the law, you must be honest, and these people are in this way honest. This is the myth of America as a land of opportunity and freedom, with the caveat that this is just a myth. In actuality, America is a land fraught with surveillance and fear and injustice and brutality. This is Cormac McCarthy territory, or the world as Huck Finn saw it. The American hero is the wanderer, the loner, the man adapted to his environment, like Skip is to his.
Fuller made war films and westerns both because he was experienced in war and interested in history, and also because he was aware of violence as pervasive in his own country and its history. In Fuller’s world, people are separated by such things as gender, class, position, economics, race, and politics.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Samuel Fuller – THE BIG RED ONE (1980)
Just another war move or a Samuel Fuller movie? The claim is that the 114-minute version released in 1980 is just another war movie with a studio-added musical score and voice-over, whereas the 160 minute film recently “reconstructed” from lost footage is a Samuel Fuller film. Be this as it may, we have the 114-minute version before us. And this gives us enough to see certain of the Fuller trademarks.
1. The film begins with an opening sequence that is stark and starkly allegoric. In this sequence, Fuller invokes ALLQUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT and World War 1. The sergeant, Lee Marvin, sees and hears a German soldier coming out of the fog. Marvin kills the man near a tall crucifix that stands in the middle of no-man’s-land. The scene is bleak and brutal and ironic. We soon learn that the war is actually over and that the German soldier was announcing the end to combat. Fuller allows his camera to close in on the figure of Christ on that tall cross. Christ’s face is haggard and his eyes are hollow. Here is an image of desperation and despair. The Christ on this cross sees nothing; instead, he is a reminder of the cruelty of the human species.
2. A band of soldiers who somehow survive the entire war, from 1942 until 1945. They begin in North Africa, go on to Sicily, Italy, Normandy and Omaha Beach, France and Belgium, and finally Czechoslovakia where they liberate one of the death camps. The story is more representative than actual.
3. Fuller’s constant theme of survival. Life’s a battleground and war is Fuller’s constant metaphor for life itself.
4. The use of children to remind us of innocence. The helmet with woven flowers is a Fuller touch – hokey and sentimental. Then later, we have Lee Marvin befriending a scared child from the death camp, carrying him on his shoulders an hour or so after the child has died, and then burying him. As in THE NAKED KISS, children are innocent, children are exploited by adults, and children are a sign of human vulnerability and weakness.
5. Action and no long speeches.
6. The five protagonists are Fuller’s cowboys, American GIs who follow orders, fight because they have to fight (using the bodies of fallen soldiers to hide behind when necessary), struggle to survive, live for the most part without women, and liberate that which needs to be liberated.
7. A reminder that humans are nuts. The scene in the mental hospital tops off Fuller’s theme of human insanity. In war, who is sane and who is insane. A great Fuller moment is when one of the patients in this institution takes a machine gun, begins to shoot his fellow patients, and repeats over and over – “I am sane, I am sane.” Well in this world, he is. The sane ones are the ones shooting guns. Once again, Fuller’s irony is not subtle.
8. The ending that rounds to its beginning, complete with the German announcing the end of the war, the tall crucifix, and Marvin killing his enemy four hours after the end of combat. But this time the German may live. And so Fuller offers hope, but faint hope.
9. Death pervades Fuller’s world. Marvin says to the German soldier at the end, that if he doesn’t live, he’ll beat him to death. This line is reminiscent of Moe’s assertion in PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET that if she does not get the money for a good plot and headstone, she thinks it will just kill her.
10. Once again, we have little in the way of back story. We know about the Sergeant’s experience in the first war, but that’s all. Who is he? What did he do before and between wars? He seems to live for war. And the four young guys are equally without much in the way of back-story. We have some idea of ethnic background, but not much. Fuller’s characters live in the moment, struggling to survive in a dangerous world.
11. The crudity of Fuller’s treatment of “symbol.” Guns in this film are obviously Freudian. The tank turret gun looks phallic. But if we did not get the connection, then Fuller is going to make sure we do. And so he has his soldiers use condoms to keep their rifles dry when they make a beachhead.
The Big Red One is the First Infantry, formed in 1919. Fuller fought in this unit during World War 2, and this film is both his memory of battle and his idea of the war. Roger Ebert has said that the film is neutral when it comes to war, that it is apolitical. According to Ebert, the film is neither for nor against war; it simply records the battle experiences of its five protagonists. I’m not so sure. It seems to me that we have enough material here to mount a case against war. The opening and closing scenes, for example, suggest the absurdity of war. One minute a soldier will kill an enemy; the next minute, the same soldier will try to save that same enemy because the war is over. An enemy is an enemy in war, not in peace. We also have both the Americans and Germans making a distinction between murder and killing. Soldier kill, but they do not murder. If soldiers do not murder, then what does Griff do near the end of the film when he corners a German soldier in one of the incinerators? He empties his magazine into the German, and then begins on another one given to him by the sergeant before he finally stops. Is this action any less demented than the insane person shooting and yelling, “I’m sane, I’m sane”? War may be hell, but it is also insanity. In a scene restored to the recent longer version, we have a child shot by a sniper as he is held in the arms of the sergeant. Scenes like this or the scene with the German officer hiding behind the figure of Christ on the cross must surely communicate the absurdity of war. Or take the scene on Omaha beach when the soldiers are trying to oust a German machine gun nest by planting tubular explosives near the German line. The sergeant sends out at least four (more, I think) soldiers to move the tubes closer. As one falls, shot by the Germans, the sergeant sends out another one. Finally Griff makes it. Griff (Mark Hamill) is the coward of the unit, but he’s the guy who succeeds here. Why? No reason. He is just the one who makes it. War holds no rhyme or reason; it is absurd. For Fuller, life is absurd.
The actors in Fuller’s films are, as often as not, forgettable. This film boasts Lee Marvin who was a well-known actor, but the others are relatively unknown (Mark Hamill had been in STAR WARS and its two early sequels, but he was hardly a “star”). The actors are, however, young. Fuller wanted, I think, to stress just how young these guys were. War takes the young more often than it takes the middle-aged or the old. And the soldiers come and go anonymously. The soldiers we follow point out that they do not even know the names of replacements that arrive and then are killed. In Fuller’s world, death is everywhere. Fuller’s battle scenes are frenetic – lots of noise, dust, falling bodies, confusion. He anticipates Spielberg’s SAVING PRIVATE RYAN by about 20 years when he shows the shores of Omaha Beach running red with blood. The shot of the soldier’s arm and wristwatch nicely counterpoints life and death – the soldier’s life has come to an end, the watch continues to record ongoing time.
As we might expect with Fuller, this war film does not have a hero – no John Wayne or Robert Mitchum or Tom Hanks here to save the day. These are just 50-cent-a-day dog soldiers doing what they have to do to stay alive. That they manage to stay alive has as much to do with luck as it does with their training or professionalism. Hawks’s heroes are professionals; Fuller’s are just average Joes trying to get along.
1. The film begins with an opening sequence that is stark and starkly allegoric. In this sequence, Fuller invokes ALLQUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT and World War 1. The sergeant, Lee Marvin, sees and hears a German soldier coming out of the fog. Marvin kills the man near a tall crucifix that stands in the middle of no-man’s-land. The scene is bleak and brutal and ironic. We soon learn that the war is actually over and that the German soldier was announcing the end to combat. Fuller allows his camera to close in on the figure of Christ on that tall cross. Christ’s face is haggard and his eyes are hollow. Here is an image of desperation and despair. The Christ on this cross sees nothing; instead, he is a reminder of the cruelty of the human species.
2. A band of soldiers who somehow survive the entire war, from 1942 until 1945. They begin in North Africa, go on to Sicily, Italy, Normandy and Omaha Beach, France and Belgium, and finally Czechoslovakia where they liberate one of the death camps. The story is more representative than actual.
3. Fuller’s constant theme of survival. Life’s a battleground and war is Fuller’s constant metaphor for life itself.
4. The use of children to remind us of innocence. The helmet with woven flowers is a Fuller touch – hokey and sentimental. Then later, we have Lee Marvin befriending a scared child from the death camp, carrying him on his shoulders an hour or so after the child has died, and then burying him. As in THE NAKED KISS, children are innocent, children are exploited by adults, and children are a sign of human vulnerability and weakness.
5. Action and no long speeches.
6. The five protagonists are Fuller’s cowboys, American GIs who follow orders, fight because they have to fight (using the bodies of fallen soldiers to hide behind when necessary), struggle to survive, live for the most part without women, and liberate that which needs to be liberated.
7. A reminder that humans are nuts. The scene in the mental hospital tops off Fuller’s theme of human insanity. In war, who is sane and who is insane. A great Fuller moment is when one of the patients in this institution takes a machine gun, begins to shoot his fellow patients, and repeats over and over – “I am sane, I am sane.” Well in this world, he is. The sane ones are the ones shooting guns. Once again, Fuller’s irony is not subtle.
8. The ending that rounds to its beginning, complete with the German announcing the end of the war, the tall crucifix, and Marvin killing his enemy four hours after the end of combat. But this time the German may live. And so Fuller offers hope, but faint hope.
9. Death pervades Fuller’s world. Marvin says to the German soldier at the end, that if he doesn’t live, he’ll beat him to death. This line is reminiscent of Moe’s assertion in PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET that if she does not get the money for a good plot and headstone, she thinks it will just kill her.
10. Once again, we have little in the way of back story. We know about the Sergeant’s experience in the first war, but that’s all. Who is he? What did he do before and between wars? He seems to live for war. And the four young guys are equally without much in the way of back-story. We have some idea of ethnic background, but not much. Fuller’s characters live in the moment, struggling to survive in a dangerous world.
11. The crudity of Fuller’s treatment of “symbol.” Guns in this film are obviously Freudian. The tank turret gun looks phallic. But if we did not get the connection, then Fuller is going to make sure we do. And so he has his soldiers use condoms to keep their rifles dry when they make a beachhead.
The Big Red One is the First Infantry, formed in 1919. Fuller fought in this unit during World War 2, and this film is both his memory of battle and his idea of the war. Roger Ebert has said that the film is neutral when it comes to war, that it is apolitical. According to Ebert, the film is neither for nor against war; it simply records the battle experiences of its five protagonists. I’m not so sure. It seems to me that we have enough material here to mount a case against war. The opening and closing scenes, for example, suggest the absurdity of war. One minute a soldier will kill an enemy; the next minute, the same soldier will try to save that same enemy because the war is over. An enemy is an enemy in war, not in peace. We also have both the Americans and Germans making a distinction between murder and killing. Soldier kill, but they do not murder. If soldiers do not murder, then what does Griff do near the end of the film when he corners a German soldier in one of the incinerators? He empties his magazine into the German, and then begins on another one given to him by the sergeant before he finally stops. Is this action any less demented than the insane person shooting and yelling, “I’m sane, I’m sane”? War may be hell, but it is also insanity. In a scene restored to the recent longer version, we have a child shot by a sniper as he is held in the arms of the sergeant. Scenes like this or the scene with the German officer hiding behind the figure of Christ on the cross must surely communicate the absurdity of war. Or take the scene on Omaha beach when the soldiers are trying to oust a German machine gun nest by planting tubular explosives near the German line. The sergeant sends out at least four (more, I think) soldiers to move the tubes closer. As one falls, shot by the Germans, the sergeant sends out another one. Finally Griff makes it. Griff (Mark Hamill) is the coward of the unit, but he’s the guy who succeeds here. Why? No reason. He is just the one who makes it. War holds no rhyme or reason; it is absurd. For Fuller, life is absurd.
The actors in Fuller’s films are, as often as not, forgettable. This film boasts Lee Marvin who was a well-known actor, but the others are relatively unknown (Mark Hamill had been in STAR WARS and its two early sequels, but he was hardly a “star”). The actors are, however, young. Fuller wanted, I think, to stress just how young these guys were. War takes the young more often than it takes the middle-aged or the old. And the soldiers come and go anonymously. The soldiers we follow point out that they do not even know the names of replacements that arrive and then are killed. In Fuller’s world, death is everywhere. Fuller’s battle scenes are frenetic – lots of noise, dust, falling bodies, confusion. He anticipates Spielberg’s SAVING PRIVATE RYAN by about 20 years when he shows the shores of Omaha Beach running red with blood. The shot of the soldier’s arm and wristwatch nicely counterpoints life and death – the soldier’s life has come to an end, the watch continues to record ongoing time.
As we might expect with Fuller, this war film does not have a hero – no John Wayne or Robert Mitchum or Tom Hanks here to save the day. These are just 50-cent-a-day dog soldiers doing what they have to do to stay alive. That they manage to stay alive has as much to do with luck as it does with their training or professionalism. Hawks’s heroes are professionals; Fuller’s are just average Joes trying to get along.
Samuel Fuller: SHOCK CORRIDOR (1963)
“I am impotent…and I like it.” Psycho (Neyle Morrow)
Okay, it is time for me to confess: I don’t much like the films of Samuel Fuller. I don’t like war films, I don’t like films in which actors yell at each other most of the time, I don’t like films that veer towards misogyny, I don’t like films that have no likeable characters, and I don’t like films that are Republican in their politics. But we don’t have to like that which we find interesting, and I find Fuller interesting, very interesting. Furthermore, he is useful as a test case for the notion of the auteur. Arguably, Fuller is closer to film makers such as Roger Corman and Jack Arnold than he is to directors such as Arthur Penn or Mike Nichols. Fuller makes B movies, movies on the cheap. And, as I have said before, he makes “sensation films.” His themes flirt with taboos such as pedophilia, incest, insanity, exploitation, and miscegenation. He sets out to shock his viewers. His many references to high art and intellectual content – Euripides, Dickens, Hamlet, Freud, Il Pagliacci, etc. – might pass over the B movie audience. In other words, Fuller’s films are a mixture of the high and the low, of the pulps and highbrow references. But in the last analysis, Fuller’s name comes with Writer, Director, Producer credits much of the time.
What do we make of SHOCK CORRIDOR?
It contains the familiar Fuller touches:
Newspapers: the plot is quite simple. Johnny Barrett ((Peter Breck) is a reporter with visions of greatness. He plans to win a Pulitzer Prize by scooping the story of a murder that has taken place inside a mental hospital. In order to get the story and find the murderer, he plans to have himself committed as an inveterate sex offender, a man whose incestuous desire for his sister makes him dangerous. He goes into the hospital with the approval of his boss at the newspaper. The point has to do with the obsession of the reporter with fame and the willingness of the newspaper editor to use any means to get a sensational story – to sell papers. The bottom line is money and fame. Herein begins another of Fuller’s indictments of America.
America as insane: this theme is expressed fully in SHOCK CORRIDOR. “The movie's central symbol is the asylum's main corridor, ironically called "The Street" by the guard-like staff. You don't have to have the blues to see it's one lonely avenue. It's starkly clinical. Lined with hard, wooden park benches. Interrupted with big water heating units. The harsh lighting beats down over all, emphasizing the sense of black and white, sane and insane. There is no grey area of compromise or understanding. There are no plants, no hint of growth or life or nurturing. There is no art, no imagination, no meanings, no sign of intellectual curiosity. The Street is the centre of the asylum, and Fuller blatantly elevates it to represent Main Street, USA” (Rick McGrath).
Johnny meets three patients, witnesses to a murder, and these three patients constitute the spine of the film. They are America in all its ugliness, beauty, and contradictions. First is Stuart (James Best), the southerner who has been in Korea and a prisoner of the Communists. Before going to Korea, Stuart had been brainwashed by his family to think of his own country as corrupt and alien. He was ripe for brainwashing by the Communists. He serves his captors by brainwashing other American prisoners. Then he is brainwashed in reverse, and turns his back on the Communists. He returns to America where he finds that he is a pariah. He ends up in the metal hospital where he spends his time re-enacting the Civil War, the war that revealed a crucial split in American ideology. Unable to deal with the painful reality that his country is flawed, Stuart has retreated into psychosis.
Then we have Dr. Boden (Gene Evans). He has gone mad (note: MAD = mutually assured destruction, what will happen when a nuclear war breaks out), from working on nuclear arms projects. This is Fuller’s comment on the madness of the Cold War and its arms race. From working with the physics of nuclear equations, Dr. Boden has retreated to the mind of a six-year-old. He now doodles and draws portraits.
Finally, and most shockingly, we have Trent (Hari Rhodes) who presents a cogent and brutal comment on race relations in America during the era of Civil Rights. This is the most painful and shocking episode in a shocking film. Before we see Trent, we hear him hollering from behind a large sign that castigates African Americans. The words we hear from behind the sign are ugly and racist. Fuller sets us up for a surprise when we see the sign lower to reveal behind it the face of a Black man. This is the person spouting words of hate and bigotry – and against his own people. Fuller’s America is so screwed up, so insane, that a Black man can turn against his own race. We later learn why this has happened. Trent was the first Black person to enter a Southern University (echoes of James Meredith in Mississippi). The pressures on him were so great that he flipped – literally- turning against the whole Civil Rights movement, and even thinking he has begun the Ku Klux Klan movement. He makes hoods from bed sheets, and he leads a mob against another Black person in the hospital. The vision of America here is angry. We are reminded of lynching and other racially motivated ugliness. At one point, Trent shows Johnny another patient who sits with his arm extended. Trent reaches behind Johnny and raises the extended arm in a gesture reminiscent of a Nazi salute; then he says the man is the Statue of Liberty. Statue of Liberty, Nazi salute – the connection is disturbing. The points seems to be both that American is fascist and that ‘Liberty” is a statue only, not a reality. Earlier in the film, in a scene in the newspaper office, we can see a front page of a newspaper framed and hanging on a wall. This front page announces the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty. Liberty is complicit with institutional power of overseeing, and this liberty results in madness.
The redeeming act: this film is pretty bleak. Unlike other Fuller films, this one does not contain what I would call a redeeming act. However, it does offer examples of redemptive possibility, the most powerful of which is the friendships that seems possible between Johnny and the three people he interviews. I might even add the relationship between Cathy and Johnny because of Cathy’s apparently deep feelings for Johnny. Love does not conquer all in Fuller’s world, but nevertheless it does exist. If we have a redeeming act in this film, then perhaps it is in the “sleep” scene. Remember the scene in which Il Pagliacci (Larry Tucker) feeds Johnny sticks of gum and encourages him to chew because if he chews enough he will get tired and sleep will follow. The scene has the feel of a father/child interaction in a strange Fullerian way.
Passion over reason: once again, Fuller’s characters are overwhelmed by their passions. Desire outweighs reason in Fuller’s characters. Obviously, Johnny’s desire for a Pulitzer Prize drives him beyond reason. Cathy’s desire for Johnny encourages her to go along with his half-baked plan. The patients in the hospital are insane because of either reason pushed into madness (the atomic work of Dr. Boden) or desire gone crazy (desire for a sense of belonging in Stuart). In the case of Trent, we have Enlightenment sentiment (“all men are created equal,” as the Declaration of Independence states) gone crazy. All men may be created equal if they have white skins and if they accept an ideology compatible with the American Dream. The most bizarre expression of desire gone mad is in the “Nympho” scene. Here Fuller’s misogyny surfaces in a scene that is supposed, I think, to say as much about Johnny as it does about the women. In a world gone mad, even sexuality goes crazy.
Fuller and sexuality: sexuality in Fuller is often connected to violence, either physical or mental violence. In SHOCK CORRIDOR, the focus of this theme is Johnny who is willing to put his fiancé through hell to get what he wants. His dreams, with the 14-inch and scantily-clad Cathy superimposed on his bed while he sleeps, inform us that he is obsessed with sex, but not in a very healthy way. Even his concocted story about sibling abuse suggests his kinky sexual attitudes. Is this guy too far removed from Grant in THE NAKED KISS? I don’t think so. His sexuality connects with his paranoia. And while I have this word paranoia here, I might note that Fuller’s sense of America is of a place redolent of paranoia. This is historically accurate since the 50s and 60s are deep with Cold War anxiety, fear of nuclear war, fear of infiltration by the Communists, fear of psychic breakdown in the American nation (remember Dr. Frederic Werthan and 1954’s Seduction of the Innocent). Fear is so great it may drive a person over the edge, as it does Johnny and many of the patients we meet. Before leaving the topic of sexuality, I might also note that Fuller connects sex with exploitation. Many of the women in his films are hookers or ex-hookers, or near hookers. Cathy in SHOCK CORRIDOR, for example, is an exotic dancer. She makes her living exposing her body to the male gaze.
The big symbol: the corridor itself. But also the shock treatments. This is a film that relentlessly takes us to inner space. The corridor is the corridor of the mind. The metaphor had appeared before in film, for example, in Hitchcock’s SPELLBOUND (1945). This is a shock corridor because it is a shocking space, a space where the id has free rein, although the warders try to contain it. In this corridor, Johnny’s unconscious begins to take over his conscious mind. The shock has to do with psychiatric treatment that uses electricity to jolt the patient. But we might also recall electricity and its uses in many Universal horror films (the most famous is FRANKENSTEIN 1931). In these films, electricity is supposed to bring life from lifelessness; it is a life force. But we also see that it creates monsters. Electricity generates wild and uncontrolled life – like fire. And so Johnny becomes more monstrous and incapable of functioning in “normal” society after his shock treatments. And then we have that audacious scene near the end when the corridor becomes infused with electricity and rain – a great thunderstorm of the mind.
War also turns up as a symbol. We know Fuller’s interest in war and life as a battlefield. In SHOCK CORRIDOR, the war metaphor is apparent in Stuart’s obsession with the American Civil War, and his desire to help General Lee. Life along the corridor is a battlefield, as the mob action when they turn on the Black patient indicates. We might also include Johnny’s experience with the sexually charged women – sex itself is a kind of warfare.
Lighting and camera work: we have the usual use of “noir” lighting (harsh lighting and “symbolic” shadows, the usual angled shots from above or below characters, the usual insistence on the close-up to intensify emotion (both the character’s and the viewer’s), and the usual superimposed shots and dissolves to help carry theme. The shots of Cathy on Johnny’s bed while he sleeps are typical Fuller sensation. Fuller’s style is often compared to that of cinema noir, and he does have his nourish moments – especially in films such as PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET and UNDERWORLD USA. Both THE NAKED KISS and SHOCK CORRIDOR show the influence of the expressionistic style of noir. But of course Fuller is not simply attempting to mimic a style we now associate with a “genre” called cinema noir. If this is how we judged him, then he would not score particularly well. But Fuller is Fuller – an auteur with his own strong vision. We may not like his vision, but it is discernibly his. His films register his unique sensibility. We might have difficulty knowing who directed films such as OUT OF THE PAST, THE BIG COMBO, THE RACKET, CROSSFIRE, or even THE POSTMAN ONLY RINGS TWICE – all examples of noir. Cinema noir does have a style that we can see in films by different directors. And yes, some directors who may be auteurs (Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang are the obvious ones) made noir films. But none of them made films like those of Samuel Fuller. Rather than focus on noir, I would choose expressionism as a foundation for Fuller’s films. The mise en scene of SHOCK CORRIDOR often echoes that of the most famous example of expressionism on film, THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919). I refer to those moments in the film in which we can see line drawings on the walls. Some of these drawings are representational (e.g. the drawing of Il Pagliacci above Pagliacci’s bed), and some are abstract. Although the echo to Caligari is faint, it is nevertheless clear. This is an environment that reflects the twisted minds of its inhabitants. A side note: Fuller’s invocation of Il Pagliacci serves to highlight the operatic excess of his film. Opera is, to a large extent, the art of excess. It deals with high passion and melodrama – the stuff of Fuller’s films.
Women: Cathy, Candy, Kelly – these three Fuller women are exploited by men. Each has had a checkered past. Each has a great capacity for love and self-sacrifice. Each has a certain toughness.
Murder: Fuller’s world is always fixated on death. Here the motivation for the plot is Johnny’s desire to expose a murderer. He accomplishes his mission, but to what end? The murderer confesses, but the detective goes insane. The connection is difficult to escape: murder is maddening. The murder here connects with the sexual theme in that the murderer, Wilkes (Chuck Roberson), committed the murder to cover up his sexual exploitation of the women patients. Sex – murder – death – insanity: these are connected. This is America. Perhaps the irony in all this has to do with Fuller’s casting. We know that Fuller had planned to make a film, TIGRERO, with John Wayne as star. Nothing came of this project except a late documentary using some of the colour film that we see in SHOCK CORRIDOR. In SHOCK CORRIDOR, the colour footage of Japan, of tribal activity, of nuclear explosions, serve to communicate the madness of Stuart, Trent, and Dr. Boden. The genius here is that the wild mental flights of the three madmen are in colour, whereas the reality of the hospital and of modern life is black and white. The colour footage from Brazil was shot by Fuller as preparation for TIGRERO; the colour footage of Japan comes from Fuller’s 1955 film, THE HOUSE OF BAMBOO. But when we reflect on the unusual casting of Chuck Roberson as Wilkes, we perhaps have a clue to Fuller’s full intent in SHOCK CORRIDOR. Chuck Roberson worked for Fuller as stunt coordinator on many films beginning with I SHOT JESSE JAMES (1949), but Roberson was also the long-time stunt double for John Wayne. Although he played bit parts in many films (often uncredited), Roberson was not an actor; he was first and foremost a stunt person. He had trained under Yakima Canutt, the Dean of stunt people. The viewer who knows who Chuck Roberson is knows that he raises the name John Wayne, and we know that by 1963 John Wayne was synonymous with American heroism. And so Fuller has Roberson play the murderer and exploiter. Is this Fuller’s comment on just how deeply corrupt America is? If I am right, then what I am suggesting is not that Fuller is anti-American. Far from it. He is quintessentially American in his desire to expose the insane aspects of corporate America, the America associated with corrupt institutions and fascistic heroism. He is the champion of independence, small business, the underdog and the oppressed. [Note: TIGRERO means ‘jaguar hunter.’]
Heroes: once again, we have a film without any clear hero. Fuller’s characters are, to a large extent, losers. They are, perhaps, impotent. Like the nation itself, these people have lots of bravado and even hardware, but these externals of competence mask internal dysfunction. Fuller’s vision is strongly influenced by his experience as a soldier in the Second World War, and this war did much to discredit a certain tradition of heroism. I refer to the notion of the Romantic hero, the strong man categorized by Nietzsche as the “superman.” Nazi Germany took this idea to its extreme. I am suggesting that Fuller critiques the notion of the hero in a manner not too distant from that of Hitchcock in the film ROPE. If heroes exist, then they are the dogged soldiers of THE BIG RED ONE, the pickpockets and hookers who survive in a dangerous world, the insane who are happy in their impotence, the children who may offer hope for a new generation..
Conclusion: Samuel Fuller is sometimes called an American original. Be this as it may, he is an auteur in that his signature is writ large over the films he made. Fuller’s films are consistent in style and theme. His vision of life as nasty, brutal, and short is clear. His filmic ideas are those of the tabloid journalist. His characters struggle to survive.
Okay, it is time for me to confess: I don’t much like the films of Samuel Fuller. I don’t like war films, I don’t like films in which actors yell at each other most of the time, I don’t like films that veer towards misogyny, I don’t like films that have no likeable characters, and I don’t like films that are Republican in their politics. But we don’t have to like that which we find interesting, and I find Fuller interesting, very interesting. Furthermore, he is useful as a test case for the notion of the auteur. Arguably, Fuller is closer to film makers such as Roger Corman and Jack Arnold than he is to directors such as Arthur Penn or Mike Nichols. Fuller makes B movies, movies on the cheap. And, as I have said before, he makes “sensation films.” His themes flirt with taboos such as pedophilia, incest, insanity, exploitation, and miscegenation. He sets out to shock his viewers. His many references to high art and intellectual content – Euripides, Dickens, Hamlet, Freud, Il Pagliacci, etc. – might pass over the B movie audience. In other words, Fuller’s films are a mixture of the high and the low, of the pulps and highbrow references. But in the last analysis, Fuller’s name comes with Writer, Director, Producer credits much of the time.
What do we make of SHOCK CORRIDOR?
It contains the familiar Fuller touches:
Newspapers: the plot is quite simple. Johnny Barrett ((Peter Breck) is a reporter with visions of greatness. He plans to win a Pulitzer Prize by scooping the story of a murder that has taken place inside a mental hospital. In order to get the story and find the murderer, he plans to have himself committed as an inveterate sex offender, a man whose incestuous desire for his sister makes him dangerous. He goes into the hospital with the approval of his boss at the newspaper. The point has to do with the obsession of the reporter with fame and the willingness of the newspaper editor to use any means to get a sensational story – to sell papers. The bottom line is money and fame. Herein begins another of Fuller’s indictments of America.
America as insane: this theme is expressed fully in SHOCK CORRIDOR. “The movie's central symbol is the asylum's main corridor, ironically called "The Street" by the guard-like staff. You don't have to have the blues to see it's one lonely avenue. It's starkly clinical. Lined with hard, wooden park benches. Interrupted with big water heating units. The harsh lighting beats down over all, emphasizing the sense of black and white, sane and insane. There is no grey area of compromise or understanding. There are no plants, no hint of growth or life or nurturing. There is no art, no imagination, no meanings, no sign of intellectual curiosity. The Street is the centre of the asylum, and Fuller blatantly elevates it to represent Main Street, USA” (Rick McGrath).
Johnny meets three patients, witnesses to a murder, and these three patients constitute the spine of the film. They are America in all its ugliness, beauty, and contradictions. First is Stuart (James Best), the southerner who has been in Korea and a prisoner of the Communists. Before going to Korea, Stuart had been brainwashed by his family to think of his own country as corrupt and alien. He was ripe for brainwashing by the Communists. He serves his captors by brainwashing other American prisoners. Then he is brainwashed in reverse, and turns his back on the Communists. He returns to America where he finds that he is a pariah. He ends up in the metal hospital where he spends his time re-enacting the Civil War, the war that revealed a crucial split in American ideology. Unable to deal with the painful reality that his country is flawed, Stuart has retreated into psychosis.
Then we have Dr. Boden (Gene Evans). He has gone mad (note: MAD = mutually assured destruction, what will happen when a nuclear war breaks out), from working on nuclear arms projects. This is Fuller’s comment on the madness of the Cold War and its arms race. From working with the physics of nuclear equations, Dr. Boden has retreated to the mind of a six-year-old. He now doodles and draws portraits.
Finally, and most shockingly, we have Trent (Hari Rhodes) who presents a cogent and brutal comment on race relations in America during the era of Civil Rights. This is the most painful and shocking episode in a shocking film. Before we see Trent, we hear him hollering from behind a large sign that castigates African Americans. The words we hear from behind the sign are ugly and racist. Fuller sets us up for a surprise when we see the sign lower to reveal behind it the face of a Black man. This is the person spouting words of hate and bigotry – and against his own people. Fuller’s America is so screwed up, so insane, that a Black man can turn against his own race. We later learn why this has happened. Trent was the first Black person to enter a Southern University (echoes of James Meredith in Mississippi). The pressures on him were so great that he flipped – literally- turning against the whole Civil Rights movement, and even thinking he has begun the Ku Klux Klan movement. He makes hoods from bed sheets, and he leads a mob against another Black person in the hospital. The vision of America here is angry. We are reminded of lynching and other racially motivated ugliness. At one point, Trent shows Johnny another patient who sits with his arm extended. Trent reaches behind Johnny and raises the extended arm in a gesture reminiscent of a Nazi salute; then he says the man is the Statue of Liberty. Statue of Liberty, Nazi salute – the connection is disturbing. The points seems to be both that American is fascist and that ‘Liberty” is a statue only, not a reality. Earlier in the film, in a scene in the newspaper office, we can see a front page of a newspaper framed and hanging on a wall. This front page announces the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty. Liberty is complicit with institutional power of overseeing, and this liberty results in madness.
The redeeming act: this film is pretty bleak. Unlike other Fuller films, this one does not contain what I would call a redeeming act. However, it does offer examples of redemptive possibility, the most powerful of which is the friendships that seems possible between Johnny and the three people he interviews. I might even add the relationship between Cathy and Johnny because of Cathy’s apparently deep feelings for Johnny. Love does not conquer all in Fuller’s world, but nevertheless it does exist. If we have a redeeming act in this film, then perhaps it is in the “sleep” scene. Remember the scene in which Il Pagliacci (Larry Tucker) feeds Johnny sticks of gum and encourages him to chew because if he chews enough he will get tired and sleep will follow. The scene has the feel of a father/child interaction in a strange Fullerian way.
Passion over reason: once again, Fuller’s characters are overwhelmed by their passions. Desire outweighs reason in Fuller’s characters. Obviously, Johnny’s desire for a Pulitzer Prize drives him beyond reason. Cathy’s desire for Johnny encourages her to go along with his half-baked plan. The patients in the hospital are insane because of either reason pushed into madness (the atomic work of Dr. Boden) or desire gone crazy (desire for a sense of belonging in Stuart). In the case of Trent, we have Enlightenment sentiment (“all men are created equal,” as the Declaration of Independence states) gone crazy. All men may be created equal if they have white skins and if they accept an ideology compatible with the American Dream. The most bizarre expression of desire gone mad is in the “Nympho” scene. Here Fuller’s misogyny surfaces in a scene that is supposed, I think, to say as much about Johnny as it does about the women. In a world gone mad, even sexuality goes crazy.
Fuller and sexuality: sexuality in Fuller is often connected to violence, either physical or mental violence. In SHOCK CORRIDOR, the focus of this theme is Johnny who is willing to put his fiancé through hell to get what he wants. His dreams, with the 14-inch and scantily-clad Cathy superimposed on his bed while he sleeps, inform us that he is obsessed with sex, but not in a very healthy way. Even his concocted story about sibling abuse suggests his kinky sexual attitudes. Is this guy too far removed from Grant in THE NAKED KISS? I don’t think so. His sexuality connects with his paranoia. And while I have this word paranoia here, I might note that Fuller’s sense of America is of a place redolent of paranoia. This is historically accurate since the 50s and 60s are deep with Cold War anxiety, fear of nuclear war, fear of infiltration by the Communists, fear of psychic breakdown in the American nation (remember Dr. Frederic Werthan and 1954’s Seduction of the Innocent). Fear is so great it may drive a person over the edge, as it does Johnny and many of the patients we meet. Before leaving the topic of sexuality, I might also note that Fuller connects sex with exploitation. Many of the women in his films are hookers or ex-hookers, or near hookers. Cathy in SHOCK CORRIDOR, for example, is an exotic dancer. She makes her living exposing her body to the male gaze.
The big symbol: the corridor itself. But also the shock treatments. This is a film that relentlessly takes us to inner space. The corridor is the corridor of the mind. The metaphor had appeared before in film, for example, in Hitchcock’s SPELLBOUND (1945). This is a shock corridor because it is a shocking space, a space where the id has free rein, although the warders try to contain it. In this corridor, Johnny’s unconscious begins to take over his conscious mind. The shock has to do with psychiatric treatment that uses electricity to jolt the patient. But we might also recall electricity and its uses in many Universal horror films (the most famous is FRANKENSTEIN 1931). In these films, electricity is supposed to bring life from lifelessness; it is a life force. But we also see that it creates monsters. Electricity generates wild and uncontrolled life – like fire. And so Johnny becomes more monstrous and incapable of functioning in “normal” society after his shock treatments. And then we have that audacious scene near the end when the corridor becomes infused with electricity and rain – a great thunderstorm of the mind.
War also turns up as a symbol. We know Fuller’s interest in war and life as a battlefield. In SHOCK CORRIDOR, the war metaphor is apparent in Stuart’s obsession with the American Civil War, and his desire to help General Lee. Life along the corridor is a battlefield, as the mob action when they turn on the Black patient indicates. We might also include Johnny’s experience with the sexually charged women – sex itself is a kind of warfare.
Lighting and camera work: we have the usual use of “noir” lighting (harsh lighting and “symbolic” shadows, the usual angled shots from above or below characters, the usual insistence on the close-up to intensify emotion (both the character’s and the viewer’s), and the usual superimposed shots and dissolves to help carry theme. The shots of Cathy on Johnny’s bed while he sleeps are typical Fuller sensation. Fuller’s style is often compared to that of cinema noir, and he does have his nourish moments – especially in films such as PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET and UNDERWORLD USA. Both THE NAKED KISS and SHOCK CORRIDOR show the influence of the expressionistic style of noir. But of course Fuller is not simply attempting to mimic a style we now associate with a “genre” called cinema noir. If this is how we judged him, then he would not score particularly well. But Fuller is Fuller – an auteur with his own strong vision. We may not like his vision, but it is discernibly his. His films register his unique sensibility. We might have difficulty knowing who directed films such as OUT OF THE PAST, THE BIG COMBO, THE RACKET, CROSSFIRE, or even THE POSTMAN ONLY RINGS TWICE – all examples of noir. Cinema noir does have a style that we can see in films by different directors. And yes, some directors who may be auteurs (Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang are the obvious ones) made noir films. But none of them made films like those of Samuel Fuller. Rather than focus on noir, I would choose expressionism as a foundation for Fuller’s films. The mise en scene of SHOCK CORRIDOR often echoes that of the most famous example of expressionism on film, THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919). I refer to those moments in the film in which we can see line drawings on the walls. Some of these drawings are representational (e.g. the drawing of Il Pagliacci above Pagliacci’s bed), and some are abstract. Although the echo to Caligari is faint, it is nevertheless clear. This is an environment that reflects the twisted minds of its inhabitants. A side note: Fuller’s invocation of Il Pagliacci serves to highlight the operatic excess of his film. Opera is, to a large extent, the art of excess. It deals with high passion and melodrama – the stuff of Fuller’s films.
Women: Cathy, Candy, Kelly – these three Fuller women are exploited by men. Each has had a checkered past. Each has a great capacity for love and self-sacrifice. Each has a certain toughness.
Murder: Fuller’s world is always fixated on death. Here the motivation for the plot is Johnny’s desire to expose a murderer. He accomplishes his mission, but to what end? The murderer confesses, but the detective goes insane. The connection is difficult to escape: murder is maddening. The murder here connects with the sexual theme in that the murderer, Wilkes (Chuck Roberson), committed the murder to cover up his sexual exploitation of the women patients. Sex – murder – death – insanity: these are connected. This is America. Perhaps the irony in all this has to do with Fuller’s casting. We know that Fuller had planned to make a film, TIGRERO, with John Wayne as star. Nothing came of this project except a late documentary using some of the colour film that we see in SHOCK CORRIDOR. In SHOCK CORRIDOR, the colour footage of Japan, of tribal activity, of nuclear explosions, serve to communicate the madness of Stuart, Trent, and Dr. Boden. The genius here is that the wild mental flights of the three madmen are in colour, whereas the reality of the hospital and of modern life is black and white. The colour footage from Brazil was shot by Fuller as preparation for TIGRERO; the colour footage of Japan comes from Fuller’s 1955 film, THE HOUSE OF BAMBOO. But when we reflect on the unusual casting of Chuck Roberson as Wilkes, we perhaps have a clue to Fuller’s full intent in SHOCK CORRIDOR. Chuck Roberson worked for Fuller as stunt coordinator on many films beginning with I SHOT JESSE JAMES (1949), but Roberson was also the long-time stunt double for John Wayne. Although he played bit parts in many films (often uncredited), Roberson was not an actor; he was first and foremost a stunt person. He had trained under Yakima Canutt, the Dean of stunt people. The viewer who knows who Chuck Roberson is knows that he raises the name John Wayne, and we know that by 1963 John Wayne was synonymous with American heroism. And so Fuller has Roberson play the murderer and exploiter. Is this Fuller’s comment on just how deeply corrupt America is? If I am right, then what I am suggesting is not that Fuller is anti-American. Far from it. He is quintessentially American in his desire to expose the insane aspects of corporate America, the America associated with corrupt institutions and fascistic heroism. He is the champion of independence, small business, the underdog and the oppressed. [Note: TIGRERO means ‘jaguar hunter.’]
Heroes: once again, we have a film without any clear hero. Fuller’s characters are, to a large extent, losers. They are, perhaps, impotent. Like the nation itself, these people have lots of bravado and even hardware, but these externals of competence mask internal dysfunction. Fuller’s vision is strongly influenced by his experience as a soldier in the Second World War, and this war did much to discredit a certain tradition of heroism. I refer to the notion of the Romantic hero, the strong man categorized by Nietzsche as the “superman.” Nazi Germany took this idea to its extreme. I am suggesting that Fuller critiques the notion of the hero in a manner not too distant from that of Hitchcock in the film ROPE. If heroes exist, then they are the dogged soldiers of THE BIG RED ONE, the pickpockets and hookers who survive in a dangerous world, the insane who are happy in their impotence, the children who may offer hope for a new generation..
Conclusion: Samuel Fuller is sometimes called an American original. Be this as it may, he is an auteur in that his signature is writ large over the films he made. Fuller’s films are consistent in style and theme. His vision of life as nasty, brutal, and short is clear. His filmic ideas are those of the tabloid journalist. His characters struggle to survive.
Samuel Fuller: THE NAKED KISS (1964)
Film as battleground; film as sensation; film as headline
What does one say about this film?
Okay, Fuller often receives the sobriquet – “primitive.” His cinema is often called primitive because of its crude effects. If Fuller writes with the camera, as he says he does, then he writes a kind of narrative we might think of as “pulp.” Characters, action (plot), and style are “in your face,” unsubtle. Fuller’s most insistent genre is the war story, the story of men in battle. He used to fire a pistol on the set to begin filming. He was a filmmaker who more often than not focused on men. His world is a world in which men control things, men struggle for position and power, and men fight for survival. Men are often predators, as Skip was in PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET and as Griff is in The Naked Kiss. Skip wandered the subway looking for his prey, a suitable victim of theft; Griff lurks by the bus station eyeing new girls in town. Man as predator is evident in THE NAKED KISS; both Griff (the policeman) and Grant (the wealthy “owner”) prey on those weaker than themselves, Griff on women who need a job and will set up as bon-bons for Miss Candy, and Grant on children. Then we have the pimp (procurer) from whom Kelly extricates herself at the beginning of the film.
Beginning and the Gaze
The first scene of The Naked Kiss begins prior to the credits and moves right through the credits. The first minutes of the film are disturbing and frantic. We see a man and a woman struggling; he knocks off her wig and we see that she is completely bald; she bashes him with a shoe finally knocking him unconscious; she sprays some water on him; she rifles his pockets taking $75.00 she says he owes her and leaving other bills scattered about. Then she gets up and goes into the bathroom where she stands a looks into the mirror. The camera becomes the mirror and we see her staring – no gazing – directly at us, bold and contained. The title appears, also in bold letters: THE NAKED KISS. As the credits pass on the screen, we continue to see the woman as she places a wig on her bald head and makes herself up, all the time gazing at us. Credits end, she leaves, the man revives and scrambles to pick up the scattered bills, and the camera comes to rest on a small table where we see some of the bills and a desk calendar with the date July 4, 1961. It is Independence Day, folks. Fuller is never very subtle.
The Gaze: okay, what to make of that first scene. The opening struggle with its frantic camera movements announces a film that will be a struggle. We may have an uneasy time watching this film. The fight is physical, and it is between a man and a woman – and the woman appears to win. This is not how things usually play out in movies, especially Hollywood movies. We’ve been warned.
But then we have the gaze. By gaze, I mean a particular kind of look, a look that owns. The gaze is the look of ownership, the look of desire and control. Laura Mulvey, quite some time ago, theorized that in cinema the viewer gazed upon the screen, and this viewer was as often as not a male and this male gazed upon the female. In other words, women in film were the objects of the male gaze. And it is true that in much western art that depicts women, the women do not return the gaze; they look to the left or right or wherever, but rarely directly at the viewer. Exceptions do exist, and these are noteworthy because when the object of our gaze looks directly back and returns the gaze, this look can make us uncomfortable. We now become the object of the gaze, the one under scrutiny. To return the gaze is to challenge us, to remind us just how desirous we are to control others, to take pleasure from another, and how uneasy we are when we become the pleasure of someone else without agreeing to deliver this pleasure. And so, Fuller confronts us with a woman who returns the gaze. She takes control, as she has just done in the struggle with her procurer. She is tough. She won’t just remain passive and accept the gaze of others. And as this woman gazes at us, she also looks at herself; she is, after all, looking in a mirror. She takes a good look at herself and decides she does like what she sees (and did not like what she saw…). We watch as she prepares to make a change in her life. This opening scene prepares us for the “murder” that takes place near the end of the film.
As we watch this woman beneath the credits, she places a wig on her baldhead. We learn later why she is bald in this scene, but at the outset we do not know why. Her baldness is a jolt because it is so unexpected for a woman in 1964. Her head is as bald as this film – bald and bold. But her baldness also conjures up concentration camps in which women had their heads shaved as a sign of diminishment and control and de-sexing. This woman’s baldhead informs us that she has been a prisoner, and she has: a prisoner of a certain lifestyle and presumably of her pimp. We later have the women in Candy’s Bon-Bon house – Hatrack, for example – who are also prisoners to a place and a life. As The Naked Kiss begins, we see a woman about to turn her back on the prison life. (Remember: Fuller is never subtle and so his invocation of a certain type of prison may or may not be acceptable.)
Shift to August 1963 and Grantsville
After this opening scene, the film shifts to a shot of a town street with a banner across it declaring a charity event to help the local Children’s Hospital. And as we move into this town we have images of children. Children are, in effect, the subject of this film. We have skipping children, hale and healthy, and handicapped children using crutches and wheelchairs. Ultimately, we know that everyone in Fuller’s world is “handicapped.” This is a town focused on children. As Kelly, the woman we saw in the first scene, arrives on a bus, she catches the eye of local men, and she herself notices the children, stopping for a moment to admire an infant in a baby carriage. The leering men and the innocent children form a frame for Kelly – the men being the people she wants to place at a distance and the children being the people she now desires to help. She wants to stop being a prostitute and begin being a mother (or at least a nurturing female). She has come to a town that has children and prostitutes, the innocent and the experienced.
Kelly begins her life in Grantsville by plying her old trade; she sleeps with the policeman, Griff. He is a cynical bastard who tries to send her to Candy’s house of ill repute across the river. She turns to the local children’s hospital instead. Here she charms everyone with her dedication and her firm but effective way with the children; see, for example, the scene in which she is fixing a toy as a young boy on crutches struggles up to her and she looks straight at him and asks: “Well, do you want a medal?” This boy becomes her special favourite.
And so Kelly becomes a fixture at the hospital, and she also meets and begins an affair with Grant, the local wealthy man whose family has “owned” this town. Grant takes an especial interest in Kelly, an interest that grows even stronger after she tells him about her former life. Grant says he will take her anywhere she wants to go; she picks Venice and Grant proceeds to show her home movies of Venice. If we don’t suspect something funny by now, we are not attending to this film. It is peopled with oddities. Griff the policeman is gruff enough; Grant the dispenser of gifts from abroad is oily; Candy the Madame from across the river is cynical and selfish; the people of Grantsville are generally a faceless collection of stooges – the Borg before its time; even the children are easily manipulated. Although Fuller does not develop the theme closely, he does invoke earlier 1950s films such as HIGH NOON (D. Fred Zimmerman) and SILVERLODE (D. Allan Dwan) that deal with the weakness of the collective, the tendency of towns to follow a corrupt leader and fail to stand up for what’s right.
The film falls into three parts: the opening scene, the middle part when Kelly becomes a Mother Teresa who will marry, and the final part in which Kelly faces a murder charge. The middle period contains Fuller’s usual gamut of close-ups, angled shots, and twisted action (such as Grant’s home movies). The famous set piece here is the musical interlude in which the children sing a song about Mommy, accompanied by Kelly. Here we have Fuller’s vision of America as a multicultural “We Are the World,/We are the Children” sing-a-long. This is hokey. Why does Mommy have tears in her eyes? What the viewer does not yet know is the real reason why Mommy has tears in her eyes – even the children are corrupted in this corrupt place. Corruption runs deep in Main Street America. Fuller’s America is a long way from that of Harold Lloyd. The musical interlude fits smack in the middle of melodrama. And yes, melodrama is the stuff of Fuller’s vision.
(A side note on melodrama. The word “melodrama” comes from the Greek for “song drama.” And the scene before us is “song drama,” if ever a scene was one. What characterizes melodrama is sensationalism and extravagance – emotional excess. Characters in melodrama are usually extremely good or extremely bad. Melodrama is often now associated with soap opera, a kind of narrative that thrives on the unsubtle; it manipulates the audience shamelessly. The interrogation scene near the end of THE NAKED KISS strikes me as a clear example of melodrama; the actors don’t talk, they shout, and the emotional quotient of the scene is as high as it can get. We either fall for the excess or we find it false and strident. In any case, Hollywood cinema in the 1950s used melodrama a lot, perhaps most famously in the films of Douglas Sirk. Cinema noir had used melodrama at times. I think at its best, noir does not fall into melodrama – I think of such films as LAURA, KISS ME DEADLY, THE BIG COMBO, DOUBLE INDEMNITY, DETOUR, PUSHOVER, THE SCAR, FORCE OF EVIL, THE BIG KNIFE, THE BIG HEAT. But undoubtedly, noir does use melodrama – although noir and melodrama are not synonymous. Douglas Sirk’s films are melodrama but not noir. Melodrama is emotional excess; noir is a visual style that reflects a Hobbesian vision of the world.)
Back to the musical interlude. This scene is so over the top that it amounts to parody. How can we take it seriously? The tears in Mommy’s eyes are for the absurdity of this vision in a world that contains such broken people as the ones who people this film. Fuller’s sense of the absurd is nowhere more evident than here.
Not long after this comes the revelation. In a scene noteworthy both for its impact and for its tact, Fuller allows us to share Kelly’s shock of recognition. She tells us later that when she first kissed Grant, she felt the “naked kiss” of a pervert. I think if we rethink the film, we will realize that when we first see Grant on the screen (a scene in which he talks with Griff and then lifts a young child in his arms), we will have felt something similar. From the beginning, Grant has seemed weird. Yet both Kelly and we, the viewers, do not allow our instincts to distance ourselves from Grant until the moment of recognition. Now the camera shoots quickly close-ups of Kelly, Grant, a little girl, and we then see the child run from the room. Close-ups of both Kelly and Grant follow as he “confesses” why he wants to marry Kelly – from his perspective both of them are abnormal. The shots remind us of the opening shots of Kelly’s gaze. Here is a gaze competition. Grant wants to hold Kelly; Kelly wants to stand her ground. The two face off. The scene ends in a manner close to the opening scene; she hits him, not with a shoe, but with a telephone receiver. She kills him.
The final part of the film contains the interrogation scene, the scene in the jail when Candy comes and lies about Kelly, the shots of the children outside the jail window, the outside “line-up” of children, and finally the clearing of Kelly. Outside the courthouse stand many of the town’s citizens, that faceless bunch of spineless conformists. Kelly makes her way through this crowd. She leaves town, stopping to chuck a baby before we see her disappearing down the street and away from a banner that mentions the Charity affair for the hospital and the date January 1964. Kelly has been in town approximately 5 or 6 months. Whew.
And so a film that began as the story of a prostitute who wants her independence becomes a film that confronts the painful theme of pedophilia. Fuller, as always, deals with the sensational. Near the end of the film we even have sensational headlines flashed on the screen to remind us of Fuller’s interest in the media. By linking prostitution, pedophilia, police corruption, and public passivity and ignorance, Fuller shows us just how complicit we all are in the ills of society. If society is sick, and in Fuller’s vision it is, then it is sick because of its failure to see. Signs of sickness (including the sensational headlines of newspapers) are all around us, but we do not see them. Fuller forces us to see. And this is what makes his films so uncomfortable. Even that scene that I have called the musical interlude forces us to see that the musical conventions in Hollywood films are both artificial and masking and thereby complicit in the general air of corruption in American society.
Kelly as American hero
A final word on this film: Fuller’s hero is a loner, a flawed person whose saving grace is independence and inner strength and who has a commitment to something outside the self. In this case, Kelly’s commitment is to the children. In Fuller’s world, even such a laudable commitment can come a cropper. Kelly, like the lone gunman who arrives in town to clean it up, leaves at the end, leaving behind a place perhaps better for her having been there, but not necessarily. And she leaves for where? We do not know what lies ahead for this person. She lights out for the territories, for empty space, for another town, another adventure, another confrontation with corruption. What is, perhaps, striking about this is that Kelly (an androgynous name, as the film tells us) is a woman. Isn’t this audacious in 1964?
Oh, and we might note that in Grantsville, the local cinema is playing a film called SHOCK CORRIDOR. SHOCK CORRIDOR was Fuller’s previous film (1963), and once you have seen it, you will realize just how demented the people in Grantsville really are. Even Kelly’s landlady is rather loopy. She still talks to her husband who died twenty years before in the war, and she still keeps a bust of him upstairs with his coat and hat. Oh, she’s a lovely lady, but she is also loopy and she is also a sucker for Mr. Grant’s charms.
As SHOCK CORRIDOR informs us, Fuller’s metaphor for America is lunacy. This is a metaphor that would become more general as the 1960s move along (think of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, for example). The lunatic fringe suddenly becomes society’s center.
What does one say about this film?
Okay, Fuller often receives the sobriquet – “primitive.” His cinema is often called primitive because of its crude effects. If Fuller writes with the camera, as he says he does, then he writes a kind of narrative we might think of as “pulp.” Characters, action (plot), and style are “in your face,” unsubtle. Fuller’s most insistent genre is the war story, the story of men in battle. He used to fire a pistol on the set to begin filming. He was a filmmaker who more often than not focused on men. His world is a world in which men control things, men struggle for position and power, and men fight for survival. Men are often predators, as Skip was in PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET and as Griff is in The Naked Kiss. Skip wandered the subway looking for his prey, a suitable victim of theft; Griff lurks by the bus station eyeing new girls in town. Man as predator is evident in THE NAKED KISS; both Griff (the policeman) and Grant (the wealthy “owner”) prey on those weaker than themselves, Griff on women who need a job and will set up as bon-bons for Miss Candy, and Grant on children. Then we have the pimp (procurer) from whom Kelly extricates herself at the beginning of the film.
Beginning and the Gaze
The first scene of The Naked Kiss begins prior to the credits and moves right through the credits. The first minutes of the film are disturbing and frantic. We see a man and a woman struggling; he knocks off her wig and we see that she is completely bald; she bashes him with a shoe finally knocking him unconscious; she sprays some water on him; she rifles his pockets taking $75.00 she says he owes her and leaving other bills scattered about. Then she gets up and goes into the bathroom where she stands a looks into the mirror. The camera becomes the mirror and we see her staring – no gazing – directly at us, bold and contained. The title appears, also in bold letters: THE NAKED KISS. As the credits pass on the screen, we continue to see the woman as she places a wig on her bald head and makes herself up, all the time gazing at us. Credits end, she leaves, the man revives and scrambles to pick up the scattered bills, and the camera comes to rest on a small table where we see some of the bills and a desk calendar with the date July 4, 1961. It is Independence Day, folks. Fuller is never very subtle.
The Gaze: okay, what to make of that first scene. The opening struggle with its frantic camera movements announces a film that will be a struggle. We may have an uneasy time watching this film. The fight is physical, and it is between a man and a woman – and the woman appears to win. This is not how things usually play out in movies, especially Hollywood movies. We’ve been warned.
But then we have the gaze. By gaze, I mean a particular kind of look, a look that owns. The gaze is the look of ownership, the look of desire and control. Laura Mulvey, quite some time ago, theorized that in cinema the viewer gazed upon the screen, and this viewer was as often as not a male and this male gazed upon the female. In other words, women in film were the objects of the male gaze. And it is true that in much western art that depicts women, the women do not return the gaze; they look to the left or right or wherever, but rarely directly at the viewer. Exceptions do exist, and these are noteworthy because when the object of our gaze looks directly back and returns the gaze, this look can make us uncomfortable. We now become the object of the gaze, the one under scrutiny. To return the gaze is to challenge us, to remind us just how desirous we are to control others, to take pleasure from another, and how uneasy we are when we become the pleasure of someone else without agreeing to deliver this pleasure. And so, Fuller confronts us with a woman who returns the gaze. She takes control, as she has just done in the struggle with her procurer. She is tough. She won’t just remain passive and accept the gaze of others. And as this woman gazes at us, she also looks at herself; she is, after all, looking in a mirror. She takes a good look at herself and decides she does like what she sees (and did not like what she saw…). We watch as she prepares to make a change in her life. This opening scene prepares us for the “murder” that takes place near the end of the film.
As we watch this woman beneath the credits, she places a wig on her baldhead. We learn later why she is bald in this scene, but at the outset we do not know why. Her baldness is a jolt because it is so unexpected for a woman in 1964. Her head is as bald as this film – bald and bold. But her baldness also conjures up concentration camps in which women had their heads shaved as a sign of diminishment and control and de-sexing. This woman’s baldhead informs us that she has been a prisoner, and she has: a prisoner of a certain lifestyle and presumably of her pimp. We later have the women in Candy’s Bon-Bon house – Hatrack, for example – who are also prisoners to a place and a life. As The Naked Kiss begins, we see a woman about to turn her back on the prison life. (Remember: Fuller is never subtle and so his invocation of a certain type of prison may or may not be acceptable.)
Shift to August 1963 and Grantsville
After this opening scene, the film shifts to a shot of a town street with a banner across it declaring a charity event to help the local Children’s Hospital. And as we move into this town we have images of children. Children are, in effect, the subject of this film. We have skipping children, hale and healthy, and handicapped children using crutches and wheelchairs. Ultimately, we know that everyone in Fuller’s world is “handicapped.” This is a town focused on children. As Kelly, the woman we saw in the first scene, arrives on a bus, she catches the eye of local men, and she herself notices the children, stopping for a moment to admire an infant in a baby carriage. The leering men and the innocent children form a frame for Kelly – the men being the people she wants to place at a distance and the children being the people she now desires to help. She wants to stop being a prostitute and begin being a mother (or at least a nurturing female). She has come to a town that has children and prostitutes, the innocent and the experienced.
Kelly begins her life in Grantsville by plying her old trade; she sleeps with the policeman, Griff. He is a cynical bastard who tries to send her to Candy’s house of ill repute across the river. She turns to the local children’s hospital instead. Here she charms everyone with her dedication and her firm but effective way with the children; see, for example, the scene in which she is fixing a toy as a young boy on crutches struggles up to her and she looks straight at him and asks: “Well, do you want a medal?” This boy becomes her special favourite.
And so Kelly becomes a fixture at the hospital, and she also meets and begins an affair with Grant, the local wealthy man whose family has “owned” this town. Grant takes an especial interest in Kelly, an interest that grows even stronger after she tells him about her former life. Grant says he will take her anywhere she wants to go; she picks Venice and Grant proceeds to show her home movies of Venice. If we don’t suspect something funny by now, we are not attending to this film. It is peopled with oddities. Griff the policeman is gruff enough; Grant the dispenser of gifts from abroad is oily; Candy the Madame from across the river is cynical and selfish; the people of Grantsville are generally a faceless collection of stooges – the Borg before its time; even the children are easily manipulated. Although Fuller does not develop the theme closely, he does invoke earlier 1950s films such as HIGH NOON (D. Fred Zimmerman) and SILVERLODE (D. Allan Dwan) that deal with the weakness of the collective, the tendency of towns to follow a corrupt leader and fail to stand up for what’s right.
The film falls into three parts: the opening scene, the middle part when Kelly becomes a Mother Teresa who will marry, and the final part in which Kelly faces a murder charge. The middle period contains Fuller’s usual gamut of close-ups, angled shots, and twisted action (such as Grant’s home movies). The famous set piece here is the musical interlude in which the children sing a song about Mommy, accompanied by Kelly. Here we have Fuller’s vision of America as a multicultural “We Are the World,/We are the Children” sing-a-long. This is hokey. Why does Mommy have tears in her eyes? What the viewer does not yet know is the real reason why Mommy has tears in her eyes – even the children are corrupted in this corrupt place. Corruption runs deep in Main Street America. Fuller’s America is a long way from that of Harold Lloyd. The musical interlude fits smack in the middle of melodrama. And yes, melodrama is the stuff of Fuller’s vision.
(A side note on melodrama. The word “melodrama” comes from the Greek for “song drama.” And the scene before us is “song drama,” if ever a scene was one. What characterizes melodrama is sensationalism and extravagance – emotional excess. Characters in melodrama are usually extremely good or extremely bad. Melodrama is often now associated with soap opera, a kind of narrative that thrives on the unsubtle; it manipulates the audience shamelessly. The interrogation scene near the end of THE NAKED KISS strikes me as a clear example of melodrama; the actors don’t talk, they shout, and the emotional quotient of the scene is as high as it can get. We either fall for the excess or we find it false and strident. In any case, Hollywood cinema in the 1950s used melodrama a lot, perhaps most famously in the films of Douglas Sirk. Cinema noir had used melodrama at times. I think at its best, noir does not fall into melodrama – I think of such films as LAURA, KISS ME DEADLY, THE BIG COMBO, DOUBLE INDEMNITY, DETOUR, PUSHOVER, THE SCAR, FORCE OF EVIL, THE BIG KNIFE, THE BIG HEAT. But undoubtedly, noir does use melodrama – although noir and melodrama are not synonymous. Douglas Sirk’s films are melodrama but not noir. Melodrama is emotional excess; noir is a visual style that reflects a Hobbesian vision of the world.)
Back to the musical interlude. This scene is so over the top that it amounts to parody. How can we take it seriously? The tears in Mommy’s eyes are for the absurdity of this vision in a world that contains such broken people as the ones who people this film. Fuller’s sense of the absurd is nowhere more evident than here.
Not long after this comes the revelation. In a scene noteworthy both for its impact and for its tact, Fuller allows us to share Kelly’s shock of recognition. She tells us later that when she first kissed Grant, she felt the “naked kiss” of a pervert. I think if we rethink the film, we will realize that when we first see Grant on the screen (a scene in which he talks with Griff and then lifts a young child in his arms), we will have felt something similar. From the beginning, Grant has seemed weird. Yet both Kelly and we, the viewers, do not allow our instincts to distance ourselves from Grant until the moment of recognition. Now the camera shoots quickly close-ups of Kelly, Grant, a little girl, and we then see the child run from the room. Close-ups of both Kelly and Grant follow as he “confesses” why he wants to marry Kelly – from his perspective both of them are abnormal. The shots remind us of the opening shots of Kelly’s gaze. Here is a gaze competition. Grant wants to hold Kelly; Kelly wants to stand her ground. The two face off. The scene ends in a manner close to the opening scene; she hits him, not with a shoe, but with a telephone receiver. She kills him.
The final part of the film contains the interrogation scene, the scene in the jail when Candy comes and lies about Kelly, the shots of the children outside the jail window, the outside “line-up” of children, and finally the clearing of Kelly. Outside the courthouse stand many of the town’s citizens, that faceless bunch of spineless conformists. Kelly makes her way through this crowd. She leaves town, stopping to chuck a baby before we see her disappearing down the street and away from a banner that mentions the Charity affair for the hospital and the date January 1964. Kelly has been in town approximately 5 or 6 months. Whew.
And so a film that began as the story of a prostitute who wants her independence becomes a film that confronts the painful theme of pedophilia. Fuller, as always, deals with the sensational. Near the end of the film we even have sensational headlines flashed on the screen to remind us of Fuller’s interest in the media. By linking prostitution, pedophilia, police corruption, and public passivity and ignorance, Fuller shows us just how complicit we all are in the ills of society. If society is sick, and in Fuller’s vision it is, then it is sick because of its failure to see. Signs of sickness (including the sensational headlines of newspapers) are all around us, but we do not see them. Fuller forces us to see. And this is what makes his films so uncomfortable. Even that scene that I have called the musical interlude forces us to see that the musical conventions in Hollywood films are both artificial and masking and thereby complicit in the general air of corruption in American society.
Kelly as American hero
A final word on this film: Fuller’s hero is a loner, a flawed person whose saving grace is independence and inner strength and who has a commitment to something outside the self. In this case, Kelly’s commitment is to the children. In Fuller’s world, even such a laudable commitment can come a cropper. Kelly, like the lone gunman who arrives in town to clean it up, leaves at the end, leaving behind a place perhaps better for her having been there, but not necessarily. And she leaves for where? We do not know what lies ahead for this person. She lights out for the territories, for empty space, for another town, another adventure, another confrontation with corruption. What is, perhaps, striking about this is that Kelly (an androgynous name, as the film tells us) is a woman. Isn’t this audacious in 1964?
Oh, and we might note that in Grantsville, the local cinema is playing a film called SHOCK CORRIDOR. SHOCK CORRIDOR was Fuller’s previous film (1963), and once you have seen it, you will realize just how demented the people in Grantsville really are. Even Kelly’s landlady is rather loopy. She still talks to her husband who died twenty years before in the war, and she still keeps a bust of him upstairs with his coat and hat. Oh, she’s a lovely lady, but she is also loopy and she is also a sucker for Mr. Grant’s charms.
As SHOCK CORRIDOR informs us, Fuller’s metaphor for America is lunacy. This is a metaphor that would become more general as the 1960s move along (think of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, for example). The lunatic fringe suddenly becomes society’s center.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Revisionary Westerns? The Wild Bunch, Once Upon a Time in the West, Unforgiven
Evolution of genre
- primitive phase
- classical phase
- revisionary phase
- parodic phase
Primitive phase: see THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY and possibly a host of silent and early sound westerns that confused genre expectations. Perhaps the most infamous are PHANTOM EMPIRE (1935) and THE TERROR OF TINY TOWN (1938).
Classical phase: represented by the westerns of John Ford, Henry King, Raoul Walsh, and others. This phase sets the conventions, and works with these in a celebratory manner. Themes of justice, honour, and protection appear in film after film. RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY serves as an example, as do the films by Ford and Hawks. ‘Myth” is a word that applies to the classic western. This western functions as an expression of the ‘mythic west.’ This is the west presented as a geography of freedom and enterprise. It celebrates America as the land of the free, as the land peopled with strong and independent people, especially men. In the classic western, women play relatively small roles. The land is open and ready for settlement, as if it were a “virgin land.”
-conventions include: a high mimetic hero, a quest of some sort, a valuation of the natural, a masculinity associated with strength, responsibility, judgment, honour, loyalty, resolve, courage, and self-reliance/independence. The hero more often than not chooses the companionship of horse or sidekick to that of a woman; he chooses the life of a wanderer instead of the domestic life. He chooses duty over desire. The good guys are always small ranchers or pioneers or newspapermen, and they find themselves threatened by representatives of Big Business. The classic western supports small business – a classic form of capitalism that frowns on monopoly. Monopoly often finds itself allegorized in the figure of the gambler, or at least the gambler who cheats. This is a figure of corruption who turns a game of chance into a rigged system. The open market is compromised by the marked cards or ace up the sleeve. Corruption and cheating in the classic western are signs of civilization’s failures. Civilization fails when one person can monopolize land or business. We have come a long way from this vision of capitalism.
The hero protects the very people who represent the hero’s obsolescence. The hero is different from the average person because he can make a difference. His action results in betterment.
Revisionary phase: reassessment of conventions and themes. ‘Revision’ suggests a re-seeing, a seeing from another angle or perspective. It also suggests a revising; a revisionary work revises what we have come to take for granted, asking us to see again for the first time familiar conventions. Defamiliarization is a term from literary studies that may apply here. What has become all too familiar is given a new look, made new, as it were.
Another way of describing revisionary westerns is for us to say that these are westerns that debunk the myths of the west that the classic phase films construct. Instead of heroes, we get anti-heroes. Instead of noble deeds, we get petty action and dubious motivation. Instead of romantic landscapes, we get closed spaces, crowded spaces. Instead of perfunctory killing, we get brutal death. Instead of sartorial neatness, we get scruffy and dirty clothing, greasy hair, unshaven faces, and dust everywhere. Instead of a world that is thoroughly masculine, we meet strong women who sometimes are the equal of men. At the very least, we meet women who have independent lives.
Casting might also mark the revisionary western. Actors we have come to know as a certain kind of character, take roles unusual for them. An example might be Joseph Mankiewicz’s THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN (1970), in which both Henry Fonda and Kirk Douglas play to and against type. The obvious example in the films I consider below, is the casting of Henry Fonda as the cold-blooded Frank in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. We also have the case where the anti-type becomes the type – I am thinking of Eastwood’s man with no name character in his first westerns for Leone, and then in several of his later westerns.
Parodic phase: revisionary work continues to take a form seriously. It may turn familiar conventions on their heads, but it does so not to trivialize a form or genre, but rather to reinvigorate the form or genre. The parody, on the other hand, may or may not trivialize. I think films such as THE VILLAIN (1979), THE THREE AMIGOS (1986), RUSTLER'S RHAPSODY (1985), maybe even RIDE 'EM COWBOY (1942) are examples of parodies that trivialize. They do not take the western seriously; they debunk the myth of the west. On the other hand, the parody that we find in the Italian western can celebrate as much as it burlesques – see for example, MY NAME IS NOBODY (dir. Tony Valerii/prod. Sergio Leone). One thing is certain, the parody western has fun with the genre by rendering its conventions in an exaggerated manner.
-the phases that a genre is supposed to go through appear chronological, and for the most part I guess they are. But it is crucial to note that each of these phases can occur at any time. In other words, we can have parodic westerns from the beginning – and we do. Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Harold Lloyd, Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, and others made comedy/parody westerns. We might also find revisionary westerns in the classic period. One obvious example is Ford’s THE SEARCHERS, but we might go back 10 years to King Vidor’s DUEL IN THE SUN (1946) for another example.
Question: are THE WILD BUNCH, ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, and UNFORGIVEN classic westerns, revisionary westerns, or parodic westerns?
Answer: ultimately, the question for me is: what position vis a vis the western myth does a film take? If the answer is that the film ends with a feeling that the west and its iconic figure – the cowboy hero – are somehow great beyond the common order of men, then the film participates in the classic western’s “myth-building,” rather than myth dismantling.
-THE WILD BUNCH: Pike, Dutch, and the Gorch brothers take that heroic walk at the end of the film, a walk reminiscent of the gunman’s walk (the title of a film, by the way – GUNMAN'S WALK 1958). Given the epic proportions of the film, and the echo of the Greeks dragging Hector’s body around the walls of Troy, and the iconic backdrop to the action, we can have little doubt that these guys are the last of a noble breed. Elegy, as always, elevates. It lets us know that we are the poorer for what we have lost.
-ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST: need I say more? This film has a conflicted relationship with the western – for obvious reasons. It derives from a leftist culture at variance with the central concern of the western – individualism. The final panoramic crane shot lets us know two things: 1) the days of the individual (people like Harmonica and Cheyenne) are over, and 2) what matters in the future is not the railroad moguls (men like Morton who are “crippled” by their greed), but rather the collective, the workers, the men to whom Jill brings water, the men who might pat her on the behind, but who don’t mean anything by this gesture (ha!). But this film too cannot resist the elegiac content, as clear in the sound track as in what we see. Men like Harmonica and Cheyenne are the stuff of myth, and as the stuff of myth they are celebrated. Harmonica’s motive is revenge (a familiar theme in westerns), but we know that he is on the side of right, and he knows he is not a man for the future (“I gotta go.”). Cheyenne says Harmonica has “something to do with death.” Cheyenne’s motive is less clear, but we know that he is a man’s man, a fellow who rides with a gang who all wear the same kind of coat. He is a sign of the working together that will be important in the future, even though he will not be a part of this future. The scene in which Harmonica measures out the station, and the men begin to build it is important because it shows us the way to the future (the building of a town and civilization), and it also shows us how out of place in this future men like Harmonica and Cheyenne are. They quite simply do not look like carpenters.
The Italian western often has a political edge – more often than not Marxist (see Corbucci’s THE COMPANEROS 1970 or Sergio Sollima’s THE BIG GUNDOWN 1966 or Leone’s DUCK, YOU SUCKER 1971). The political content may be seen as revisionary of the American western that is more often than not conservative or only obliquely political.
The Italian western is also operatic or baroque. By this I mean that it delights in excess. It moves in the direction of camp. The music is an obvious aspect of this operatic quality. Then the films have baroque touches – Woody Strode’s sawed off Winchester in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, the harmonica in the same film, Sabata’s arsenal in the ‘Sabata’ series, Ringo’s golden pistol in the film of the same name, Django’s gattling gun that he drags around the west in a coffin in Corbucci’s DJANGO (1966), and other crazy stuff like a rifle inside a banjo or a pony whose farts are like “cherry blossoms.” The ritualistic and drawn-out gun duels are an obvious extension and hence parody of the American western. And yet these same gun duels very much participate in the mythic west and take it seriously. Such content veers toward parody of the American western, but a parody that celebrates rather than deflates. We get what I might call serious parody. And so I conclude that the Italian western (generally) both parodies and celebrates the American western. Revisionary parody, maybe.
-UNFORGIVEN: the western just cannot seem to get away from its own myth, here the myth of the lone gunman who cleans up a rotten place and leaves it for others to populate. This film consciously accepts the myth of the classic western while at the same time it attempts to re-see the classic western. Like RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, it has three main protagonists, two of whom are aging gunfighters and the third is a young untried, but cocky, kid who will learn the truth about killing during his travels with his two aged partners. But unlike RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, UNFORGIVEN foregrounds race. In RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, the main characters eat in a Chinese restaurant, but not much is made of this. The restaurant is a reminder of changing times. In Eastwood’s film, the two aging gunfighters are a black man and a white man. The black man has a Native American wife. Nothing obvious is made of this racial mix. It is taken for granted. Then we have English Bob who is hired by the railroad to shoot Chinese people. As he enters Big Whiskey in the stagecoach, English Bob mockingly pretends to shoot two Chinese men he sees walking in the town. Little Bill asks him if he has run out of Chinese to shoot. Such gestures are, in one way, small. But in another way, these gestures to race are large. They remind us that the west was not peopled only by whites or only by whites and Native Americans who provide canon fodder. And they remind us that racism was alive and well in the west, and they remind us that the west was peopled by a variety of people.
Age is an issue in both RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY and UNFORGIVEN, but it becomes more of an impediment in the latter film. William Munny (Eastwood) can’t shoot the way he once could. Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) no longer has the will to shoot at all. Munny cannot mount his horse easily, although we know this is partly his lack of practice and his horse’s lack of practice. Even the young gunsel, the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) can’t shoot well because his eyesight is poor. These guys may be professionals or may have been professionals at one time, but now they are a rag-tag trio who work rather inefficiently.
That is until the end when Munny reverts to his younger self after the news that Little Bill (Gene Hackman) his killed friend. He becomes a killer again to avenge his friend who has been cruelly murdered. He takes to the bottle and regains both the nerve and the steady hand and eye of his younger crazier days. Here is where the film takes its classic turn.
Before I comment on this classic turn, I note the revisionary examination of violence. In the early westerns, we have violence. But this violence is more often than not bloodless and painless. We may have spectacular falls from horseback or from roofs, but we rarely hear gasps of pain or thuds of bullets into flesh. We rarely see grimaces on the faces of those shot. We hear a gunshot, then we see someone fall down. That’s it. Then Peckinpah came along and slowed the action down, allowed us to see the impact of a bullet upon flesh, and the opening of the body and the release of blood in an arc of anguish. Eastwood shows the brutality of gun violence both orally and visually. First we have a story such as the one Munny recalls to Ned; remember, he says, the time he shot some drover in the mouth, and his teeth came out the back of his head. This guy did little or nothing, and yet he dies this horrid death. Then we have the shooting of the young cowboy who was with his partner who cut the prostitute. This shooting leads to a drawn out scene that allows us to know the pain of a stomach wound. The scene draws on an earlier one in Howard Hawks’s EL DORADO, another film about age, pain and associated violence. The beatings Little Bill gives both English Bob and William Munny are also meant to suggest the ugliness of violence. The terrible nature of this violence registers on the faces of those who witness the violence. Late in the film, Little Bill whips Ned in a scene that registers the pain of violence both in the grimaces on Ned’s face and the blood running down his back, and also in the faces of the townspeople who stand outside the jail listening to what is happening inside. Finally, we have the scars on William Munny and on the prostitute, Delilah. These are reminders of the physical effect of violence – its lasting mark on both the body and mind.
But violence has its heroic and romantic side. It is an aspect of the myth of the west. We see this in the presence of W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), the western writer who chronicles the exploits of English Bob, aka The Duke (or the Duck) of Death. Beauchamp is a writer of dime novels, popular fiction that romanticizes the west and makes the figure of the gun fighter a popular hero. Ned Buntline is perhaps the most famous of these writers; Buntline chronicled the exploits of Buffalo Bill and was, for a time, the wealthiest author in America. The film means to expose such writing for what it is: fiction parading as history, sensationalism and a pack if lies. The kind of heroic violence chronicled in the dime novel is held up to scrutiny when it is contrasted with the actual violence of people like Little Bill and William Munny. At the end, Beauchamp slinks out of the saloon without his interview with the wild William Munny. He does not have a new gunfighter to follow about. But the film is not so simple. What Beauchamp does is turn history into myth, and the film does something the same with William Munny. And Munny himself speaks his own myth.
For most of the film, William Munny is an aging pig farmer who used to be a killer and a drunk – or a drunken killer. Now he is a family man, a widower who vows to remain true to his wife’s memory. As a gunfighter, he is bumbling and ineffective. He can no longer shoot a pistol with any accuracy, and he is no great shakes with a Sharpes Rifle either. His ability as a horseman is questionable too. But when it comes to avenging a friend, William Munny is as efficient and cold as they come. He enters the saloon and dispatches the bad guys one by one. Once the smoke has cleared, W. W. Beauchamp begins to question him, but Munny will have none of this. He takes his own myth under his own control. He tells those waiting for him outside the saloon that he is coming out and that if anyone tries to shoot him, he will kill them, then he will kill their wives, then their friends, and then he will burn down their homes. He enters the street, mounts his pale horse (see. Revelations 6:8 – and he who sat upon the pale horse was Death), and rides into the night. No one dares shoot at him. He defeats his enemies, ultimately, by the force of his myth. Like Odysseus in Homer’s epic, Munny is a scourge. He comes to rid a place of its bad element.
The mythic dimension to William Munny is clear from his horse and his words. But we also have this final scene played out in a thunderstorm, at night, in pouring rain. As so often in film, an opening scene echoes in a final scene. In UNFORGIVEN, the final scene echoes the opening scene which is also in the rain. In the opening scene, it is Little Bill who arrives like thunder to deal with the two cowboys who have cut the prostitute. Little Bill is a version of Munny. At the film’s end, Munny enters the saloon as a loud clap of thunder sounds. He is, in effect, a force of nature, a scourge of the gods. He comes from the thunder itself. And he comes to cleanse, to wash away the evil in Big Whiskey. Here is the heroic and enigmatic character Eastwood has played in such films as PALE RIDER (1985) and HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER (1973). In all three films, Eastwood plays a semi-mystical character – one reminiscent of Shane in George Stevens’s 1953 film. In UNFORGIVEN, note the opening and closing shots. Both are elegiac in lighting (as is the film itself in its use of autumn and winter settings). The opening shot gives us the sense of a place out of time, and the closing shot accentuates this feeling by having the clothes on the line, and the figure of the man disappear from sight, just disappear. We read that William Munny may have ended up in San Francisco as a dry goods dealer. But this is the stuff of rumour and hearsay, a way to underscore the mysterious nature of this powerful force. William Munny exists in a state of limbo, neither of this world nor the next. He is what he is because of a bottle of whiskey (Eastwood’s insistence on the whiskey and on the empty whiskey bottle near the end of the film brings into focus all the drinking we have seen in earlier films, especially THE WILD BUNCH). He is William Munny the Killer only when he is drinking. When sober, he is William Munny dry goods dealer or hog farmer. The point is that the mythic William Munny lives outside normal, sober, quotidian reality.
Finally elegy again. UNFORGIVEN contains a dedication to Sergio and Don, that is Sergio Leone and Don Siegal, both directors who worked with Clint Eastwood in his early days, and both directors who made westerns. They are also both dead when UNFORGIVEN is released in 1992. Eastwood’s invoking of both Leone and Siegal signals the past, the tradition, the connection with both directors and a form that is passing, that has seen its day. Eastwood has always known that the lone figure on horseback, the protector of the innocent and defender of the poor and disenfranchised, the man loyal to the code of honour and friendship exists only in myth, not in reality. And so we have two William Munnys, the one who is father and provider, and the other who is an inebriated killing machine. The former is hardly of interest; the latter captures our imaginations, just as he has captured the Schofield Kid’s imagination. What the kid learns is that imagination is not life. Life is raw and fearful; myth is quick, nimble, and beyond reach.
Property and Literacy:
-before we leave the western, I note the recurring themes of property and literacy. In UNFORGIVEN, for example, we have clear references to property in the prostitutes. Skinny Dubois (Anthony James) claims he has a paper that indicates he owns the prostitutes; they are his property. Little Bill, of course, has a house (“I don’t deserve this. I’m building a house.”). The two cowboys who cut the prostitute bring horses (property of a sort) to pay for their crime. Property in westerns is a burden. Someone is always trying to take it away or to gain control over it. The cowboy hero is, as often as not, without property. When William Munny has property, he is in the dirt with the hogs; when he rides free from property, he rides into myth.
As for literacy, we see this in the figure of W. W. Beauchamp, a writer not just of letters (both Little Bill and William Munny make this mistake), but of books. In all the westerns we have seen, letters in the form of writing (most often writing on buildings or on signs, but sometimes in letters or newspapers indicates a new time, a change from a frontier existence to a modern urban existence with its technological changes.
Question: can a film be all three (classic, revisionary, and parodic) at once?
The Western and the Samurai Film
-THE WHITE, THE YELLOW, AND THE BLACK (aka SAMURAI), directed by Sergio Corbucci (1975). This is a terrific comedy western from Corbucci. It stars Tomas Milian, Eli Wallach, and Giulio Gemma.
1. Historical material:
-both the samurai film and the western locate their action at the end of an era – the closing of the frontier in America and the end of the clan system in late 19th century Japan.
-both have mythic dimension, but the samurai genre stretches its mythic content to the extreme. For example, an element of the supernatural can pervade the samurai film, but rarely (and rarely successfully) does the supernatural pervade the western.
-the samurai film is, in some ways, a response to the post-atomic moment in 1945.
2. The hero:
-the lone hero who wanders a land in search of injustices to combat.
-the maimed hero – one-armed samurai or blind samurai (e.g. Zatoichi). This aspect of the samurai film is not prevalent in the American western; however, it does inform the Italian western (e.g. BLINDMAN dir. Ferdinando Baldi 1971 or THE GREAT SILENCE dir. Sergio Corbucci 1968). One early American film that does draw on the maimed hero tradition of the samurai film is John Sturges’s BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (1955). This is a modern day western. (Note: Sturges also directed the more famous western based on a samurai film, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN 1960.)
-aversion to guns in samurai films. The samurai hero disdains the gun. The gun is anti-traditional, a sign of encroaching industrialization and mechanization.
-the duel: two swordsmen must fight, although neither is necessarily evil. These fights taker place in private, often in an open field – something the Italian western picks up. The American western more often than not has its duels in public (see Sam Raimi’s THE QUICK AND THE DEAD, for example or Henry King’s famous film, THE GUNFIGHTER.
-honour and the conflict between inclination (desire) and duty (responsibility)
-from Stuart Kaminsky’s AMERICAN FILM GENRES (1974): “The western hero has a great sense of self; the samurai has a great sense of subordination of self” (54).
-western hero is alone (mostly), but the samurai is alone only because he has been cut off from a master.
-pride and shame: the western gunman is often wary of his own prowess (see for example, SHANE or THE GUNFIGHTER); the samuarai is proud of his ability with a sword. There is, perhaps, more art in being a samurai than in being a fast gun.
-the samurai film presupposes a knowledge of a great many fictional and historical characters. The American western has some of this, but to a much smaller extent.
Ritual:
-both samurai films and westerns are ritualistic. However, the rituals in the western are often broken (“Put an A-men to it,” in THE SEARCHERS or the bad guys’ willingness to cheat in a duel or Cole Thornton’s ruse in EL DORADO). Rituals in the samurai films are, for the most part, adhered to.
THE SEVEN SAMURAI (1954)
Why end with this film?
1. Kurosawa has stated that he admired the American western films, especially those of John Ford.
2. THE SEVEN SAMURAI has the epic proportions of the western, although it is far less interested in the land than in the people who share the land.
3. The film uses techniques we see elsewhere: the slow motion violence of Peckinpah, the frenetic cutting also of Peckinpah, the noble close-up for both the heroic characters and for the peasants, ritual in battles, funerals, food, etc., themes of friendship and honour, visual cues to themes such as the water wheel, the flowers, the forest undergrowth, the rain, fire, the guns, deep focus to create a full mise en scene, fast tracking shots of horses racing through the forest or across the landscape.
4. Unlike the western, THE SEVEN SAMURAI does not personalize the villains. They remain without character, nearly faceless. They say little other than grunts and yells. They are a force of nature that the peasant has to contend with.
5. Unlike horses in the western, horses in this film are merely functional. If they serve to signify anything (I speak as a western viewer), then they signify necessity itself. They are a sign of an energy which is inevitable, natural, and powerful. The scene in which Mifune rides the horse through the covered bridge, and then has to chase the horse is both a comic moment and also a reminder of failure, perhaps a premonition of the end. This character is associated with nature; he captures a fish bare-handed; he rolls about the earth when he is drunk; he tries to ride the horse; he has kids follow him. He is a doomed character.
6. The samurai take up the cause of the peasants for food and lodging, not for money or glory or even for justice.
7. THE SEVEN SAMURAI, like THE WILD BUNCH, has a rhythmic quality both in the story with its rhythms of calm and action and in the technique in which we see the camera weave establishing shots with medium and close-up shots. One example of the work the camera does is in an early scene in which one of the peasants wants to kill the bandits any way he can, but the other villagers refuse to accept his hot-headedness. From a crane shot, we see him leave the group and walk away from the foreground. He slumps to the ground. We cut to a shot closer to ground level in which we see the slumped figure in the foreground with the group of villagers behind him. The camera lens flattens the visual field so that we see the figure in the foreground not so much isolated from the group as blending with the group. What follows is his re-integration into the group.
8. Careful framing that gives each shot a pictorial look.
9. Sound: the film uses sound carefully. Music is sparing, but important. Natural sounds – wind and rain, the sound of fire, the chopping of wood, the pounding of hoofs – all these intensify the emotional impact of the film.
10. The international nature of filmic art.
11. Because I like it. I like the characters. For me, this is a film of faces. Much of what the film communicates is through faces. I read that the dialogue in the film is often nearly indecipherable, and that the subtitles cannot capture this quality. We have seen this before in Godard’s WEEKEND. I especially like the peasant faces, and of course the face of Toshiro Mifune.
- primitive phase
- classical phase
- revisionary phase
- parodic phase
Primitive phase: see THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY and possibly a host of silent and early sound westerns that confused genre expectations. Perhaps the most infamous are PHANTOM EMPIRE (1935) and THE TERROR OF TINY TOWN (1938).
Classical phase: represented by the westerns of John Ford, Henry King, Raoul Walsh, and others. This phase sets the conventions, and works with these in a celebratory manner. Themes of justice, honour, and protection appear in film after film. RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY serves as an example, as do the films by Ford and Hawks. ‘Myth” is a word that applies to the classic western. This western functions as an expression of the ‘mythic west.’ This is the west presented as a geography of freedom and enterprise. It celebrates America as the land of the free, as the land peopled with strong and independent people, especially men. In the classic western, women play relatively small roles. The land is open and ready for settlement, as if it were a “virgin land.”
-conventions include: a high mimetic hero, a quest of some sort, a valuation of the natural, a masculinity associated with strength, responsibility, judgment, honour, loyalty, resolve, courage, and self-reliance/independence. The hero more often than not chooses the companionship of horse or sidekick to that of a woman; he chooses the life of a wanderer instead of the domestic life. He chooses duty over desire. The good guys are always small ranchers or pioneers or newspapermen, and they find themselves threatened by representatives of Big Business. The classic western supports small business – a classic form of capitalism that frowns on monopoly. Monopoly often finds itself allegorized in the figure of the gambler, or at least the gambler who cheats. This is a figure of corruption who turns a game of chance into a rigged system. The open market is compromised by the marked cards or ace up the sleeve. Corruption and cheating in the classic western are signs of civilization’s failures. Civilization fails when one person can monopolize land or business. We have come a long way from this vision of capitalism.
The hero protects the very people who represent the hero’s obsolescence. The hero is different from the average person because he can make a difference. His action results in betterment.
Revisionary phase: reassessment of conventions and themes. ‘Revision’ suggests a re-seeing, a seeing from another angle or perspective. It also suggests a revising; a revisionary work revises what we have come to take for granted, asking us to see again for the first time familiar conventions. Defamiliarization is a term from literary studies that may apply here. What has become all too familiar is given a new look, made new, as it were.
Another way of describing revisionary westerns is for us to say that these are westerns that debunk the myths of the west that the classic phase films construct. Instead of heroes, we get anti-heroes. Instead of noble deeds, we get petty action and dubious motivation. Instead of romantic landscapes, we get closed spaces, crowded spaces. Instead of perfunctory killing, we get brutal death. Instead of sartorial neatness, we get scruffy and dirty clothing, greasy hair, unshaven faces, and dust everywhere. Instead of a world that is thoroughly masculine, we meet strong women who sometimes are the equal of men. At the very least, we meet women who have independent lives.
Casting might also mark the revisionary western. Actors we have come to know as a certain kind of character, take roles unusual for them. An example might be Joseph Mankiewicz’s THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN (1970), in which both Henry Fonda and Kirk Douglas play to and against type. The obvious example in the films I consider below, is the casting of Henry Fonda as the cold-blooded Frank in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. We also have the case where the anti-type becomes the type – I am thinking of Eastwood’s man with no name character in his first westerns for Leone, and then in several of his later westerns.
Parodic phase: revisionary work continues to take a form seriously. It may turn familiar conventions on their heads, but it does so not to trivialize a form or genre, but rather to reinvigorate the form or genre. The parody, on the other hand, may or may not trivialize. I think films such as THE VILLAIN (1979), THE THREE AMIGOS (1986), RUSTLER'S RHAPSODY (1985), maybe even RIDE 'EM COWBOY (1942) are examples of parodies that trivialize. They do not take the western seriously; they debunk the myth of the west. On the other hand, the parody that we find in the Italian western can celebrate as much as it burlesques – see for example, MY NAME IS NOBODY (dir. Tony Valerii/prod. Sergio Leone). One thing is certain, the parody western has fun with the genre by rendering its conventions in an exaggerated manner.
-the phases that a genre is supposed to go through appear chronological, and for the most part I guess they are. But it is crucial to note that each of these phases can occur at any time. In other words, we can have parodic westerns from the beginning – and we do. Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Harold Lloyd, Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, and others made comedy/parody westerns. We might also find revisionary westerns in the classic period. One obvious example is Ford’s THE SEARCHERS, but we might go back 10 years to King Vidor’s DUEL IN THE SUN (1946) for another example.
Question: are THE WILD BUNCH, ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, and UNFORGIVEN classic westerns, revisionary westerns, or parodic westerns?
Answer: ultimately, the question for me is: what position vis a vis the western myth does a film take? If the answer is that the film ends with a feeling that the west and its iconic figure – the cowboy hero – are somehow great beyond the common order of men, then the film participates in the classic western’s “myth-building,” rather than myth dismantling.
-THE WILD BUNCH: Pike, Dutch, and the Gorch brothers take that heroic walk at the end of the film, a walk reminiscent of the gunman’s walk (the title of a film, by the way – GUNMAN'S WALK 1958). Given the epic proportions of the film, and the echo of the Greeks dragging Hector’s body around the walls of Troy, and the iconic backdrop to the action, we can have little doubt that these guys are the last of a noble breed. Elegy, as always, elevates. It lets us know that we are the poorer for what we have lost.
-ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST: need I say more? This film has a conflicted relationship with the western – for obvious reasons. It derives from a leftist culture at variance with the central concern of the western – individualism. The final panoramic crane shot lets us know two things: 1) the days of the individual (people like Harmonica and Cheyenne) are over, and 2) what matters in the future is not the railroad moguls (men like Morton who are “crippled” by their greed), but rather the collective, the workers, the men to whom Jill brings water, the men who might pat her on the behind, but who don’t mean anything by this gesture (ha!). But this film too cannot resist the elegiac content, as clear in the sound track as in what we see. Men like Harmonica and Cheyenne are the stuff of myth, and as the stuff of myth they are celebrated. Harmonica’s motive is revenge (a familiar theme in westerns), but we know that he is on the side of right, and he knows he is not a man for the future (“I gotta go.”). Cheyenne says Harmonica has “something to do with death.” Cheyenne’s motive is less clear, but we know that he is a man’s man, a fellow who rides with a gang who all wear the same kind of coat. He is a sign of the working together that will be important in the future, even though he will not be a part of this future. The scene in which Harmonica measures out the station, and the men begin to build it is important because it shows us the way to the future (the building of a town and civilization), and it also shows us how out of place in this future men like Harmonica and Cheyenne are. They quite simply do not look like carpenters.
The Italian western often has a political edge – more often than not Marxist (see Corbucci’s THE COMPANEROS 1970 or Sergio Sollima’s THE BIG GUNDOWN 1966 or Leone’s DUCK, YOU SUCKER 1971). The political content may be seen as revisionary of the American western that is more often than not conservative or only obliquely political.
The Italian western is also operatic or baroque. By this I mean that it delights in excess. It moves in the direction of camp. The music is an obvious aspect of this operatic quality. Then the films have baroque touches – Woody Strode’s sawed off Winchester in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, the harmonica in the same film, Sabata’s arsenal in the ‘Sabata’ series, Ringo’s golden pistol in the film of the same name, Django’s gattling gun that he drags around the west in a coffin in Corbucci’s DJANGO (1966), and other crazy stuff like a rifle inside a banjo or a pony whose farts are like “cherry blossoms.” The ritualistic and drawn-out gun duels are an obvious extension and hence parody of the American western. And yet these same gun duels very much participate in the mythic west and take it seriously. Such content veers toward parody of the American western, but a parody that celebrates rather than deflates. We get what I might call serious parody. And so I conclude that the Italian western (generally) both parodies and celebrates the American western. Revisionary parody, maybe.
-UNFORGIVEN: the western just cannot seem to get away from its own myth, here the myth of the lone gunman who cleans up a rotten place and leaves it for others to populate. This film consciously accepts the myth of the classic western while at the same time it attempts to re-see the classic western. Like RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, it has three main protagonists, two of whom are aging gunfighters and the third is a young untried, but cocky, kid who will learn the truth about killing during his travels with his two aged partners. But unlike RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, UNFORGIVEN foregrounds race. In RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, the main characters eat in a Chinese restaurant, but not much is made of this. The restaurant is a reminder of changing times. In Eastwood’s film, the two aging gunfighters are a black man and a white man. The black man has a Native American wife. Nothing obvious is made of this racial mix. It is taken for granted. Then we have English Bob who is hired by the railroad to shoot Chinese people. As he enters Big Whiskey in the stagecoach, English Bob mockingly pretends to shoot two Chinese men he sees walking in the town. Little Bill asks him if he has run out of Chinese to shoot. Such gestures are, in one way, small. But in another way, these gestures to race are large. They remind us that the west was not peopled only by whites or only by whites and Native Americans who provide canon fodder. And they remind us that racism was alive and well in the west, and they remind us that the west was peopled by a variety of people.
Age is an issue in both RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY and UNFORGIVEN, but it becomes more of an impediment in the latter film. William Munny (Eastwood) can’t shoot the way he once could. Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) no longer has the will to shoot at all. Munny cannot mount his horse easily, although we know this is partly his lack of practice and his horse’s lack of practice. Even the young gunsel, the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) can’t shoot well because his eyesight is poor. These guys may be professionals or may have been professionals at one time, but now they are a rag-tag trio who work rather inefficiently.
That is until the end when Munny reverts to his younger self after the news that Little Bill (Gene Hackman) his killed friend. He becomes a killer again to avenge his friend who has been cruelly murdered. He takes to the bottle and regains both the nerve and the steady hand and eye of his younger crazier days. Here is where the film takes its classic turn.
Before I comment on this classic turn, I note the revisionary examination of violence. In the early westerns, we have violence. But this violence is more often than not bloodless and painless. We may have spectacular falls from horseback or from roofs, but we rarely hear gasps of pain or thuds of bullets into flesh. We rarely see grimaces on the faces of those shot. We hear a gunshot, then we see someone fall down. That’s it. Then Peckinpah came along and slowed the action down, allowed us to see the impact of a bullet upon flesh, and the opening of the body and the release of blood in an arc of anguish. Eastwood shows the brutality of gun violence both orally and visually. First we have a story such as the one Munny recalls to Ned; remember, he says, the time he shot some drover in the mouth, and his teeth came out the back of his head. This guy did little or nothing, and yet he dies this horrid death. Then we have the shooting of the young cowboy who was with his partner who cut the prostitute. This shooting leads to a drawn out scene that allows us to know the pain of a stomach wound. The scene draws on an earlier one in Howard Hawks’s EL DORADO, another film about age, pain and associated violence. The beatings Little Bill gives both English Bob and William Munny are also meant to suggest the ugliness of violence. The terrible nature of this violence registers on the faces of those who witness the violence. Late in the film, Little Bill whips Ned in a scene that registers the pain of violence both in the grimaces on Ned’s face and the blood running down his back, and also in the faces of the townspeople who stand outside the jail listening to what is happening inside. Finally, we have the scars on William Munny and on the prostitute, Delilah. These are reminders of the physical effect of violence – its lasting mark on both the body and mind.
But violence has its heroic and romantic side. It is an aspect of the myth of the west. We see this in the presence of W. W. Beauchamp (Saul Rubinek), the western writer who chronicles the exploits of English Bob, aka The Duke (or the Duck) of Death. Beauchamp is a writer of dime novels, popular fiction that romanticizes the west and makes the figure of the gun fighter a popular hero. Ned Buntline is perhaps the most famous of these writers; Buntline chronicled the exploits of Buffalo Bill and was, for a time, the wealthiest author in America. The film means to expose such writing for what it is: fiction parading as history, sensationalism and a pack if lies. The kind of heroic violence chronicled in the dime novel is held up to scrutiny when it is contrasted with the actual violence of people like Little Bill and William Munny. At the end, Beauchamp slinks out of the saloon without his interview with the wild William Munny. He does not have a new gunfighter to follow about. But the film is not so simple. What Beauchamp does is turn history into myth, and the film does something the same with William Munny. And Munny himself speaks his own myth.
For most of the film, William Munny is an aging pig farmer who used to be a killer and a drunk – or a drunken killer. Now he is a family man, a widower who vows to remain true to his wife’s memory. As a gunfighter, he is bumbling and ineffective. He can no longer shoot a pistol with any accuracy, and he is no great shakes with a Sharpes Rifle either. His ability as a horseman is questionable too. But when it comes to avenging a friend, William Munny is as efficient and cold as they come. He enters the saloon and dispatches the bad guys one by one. Once the smoke has cleared, W. W. Beauchamp begins to question him, but Munny will have none of this. He takes his own myth under his own control. He tells those waiting for him outside the saloon that he is coming out and that if anyone tries to shoot him, he will kill them, then he will kill their wives, then their friends, and then he will burn down their homes. He enters the street, mounts his pale horse (see. Revelations 6:8 – and he who sat upon the pale horse was Death), and rides into the night. No one dares shoot at him. He defeats his enemies, ultimately, by the force of his myth. Like Odysseus in Homer’s epic, Munny is a scourge. He comes to rid a place of its bad element.
The mythic dimension to William Munny is clear from his horse and his words. But we also have this final scene played out in a thunderstorm, at night, in pouring rain. As so often in film, an opening scene echoes in a final scene. In UNFORGIVEN, the final scene echoes the opening scene which is also in the rain. In the opening scene, it is Little Bill who arrives like thunder to deal with the two cowboys who have cut the prostitute. Little Bill is a version of Munny. At the film’s end, Munny enters the saloon as a loud clap of thunder sounds. He is, in effect, a force of nature, a scourge of the gods. He comes from the thunder itself. And he comes to cleanse, to wash away the evil in Big Whiskey. Here is the heroic and enigmatic character Eastwood has played in such films as PALE RIDER (1985) and HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER (1973). In all three films, Eastwood plays a semi-mystical character – one reminiscent of Shane in George Stevens’s 1953 film. In UNFORGIVEN, note the opening and closing shots. Both are elegiac in lighting (as is the film itself in its use of autumn and winter settings). The opening shot gives us the sense of a place out of time, and the closing shot accentuates this feeling by having the clothes on the line, and the figure of the man disappear from sight, just disappear. We read that William Munny may have ended up in San Francisco as a dry goods dealer. But this is the stuff of rumour and hearsay, a way to underscore the mysterious nature of this powerful force. William Munny exists in a state of limbo, neither of this world nor the next. He is what he is because of a bottle of whiskey (Eastwood’s insistence on the whiskey and on the empty whiskey bottle near the end of the film brings into focus all the drinking we have seen in earlier films, especially THE WILD BUNCH). He is William Munny the Killer only when he is drinking. When sober, he is William Munny dry goods dealer or hog farmer. The point is that the mythic William Munny lives outside normal, sober, quotidian reality.
Finally elegy again. UNFORGIVEN contains a dedication to Sergio and Don, that is Sergio Leone and Don Siegal, both directors who worked with Clint Eastwood in his early days, and both directors who made westerns. They are also both dead when UNFORGIVEN is released in 1992. Eastwood’s invoking of both Leone and Siegal signals the past, the tradition, the connection with both directors and a form that is passing, that has seen its day. Eastwood has always known that the lone figure on horseback, the protector of the innocent and defender of the poor and disenfranchised, the man loyal to the code of honour and friendship exists only in myth, not in reality. And so we have two William Munnys, the one who is father and provider, and the other who is an inebriated killing machine. The former is hardly of interest; the latter captures our imaginations, just as he has captured the Schofield Kid’s imagination. What the kid learns is that imagination is not life. Life is raw and fearful; myth is quick, nimble, and beyond reach.
Property and Literacy:
-before we leave the western, I note the recurring themes of property and literacy. In UNFORGIVEN, for example, we have clear references to property in the prostitutes. Skinny Dubois (Anthony James) claims he has a paper that indicates he owns the prostitutes; they are his property. Little Bill, of course, has a house (“I don’t deserve this. I’m building a house.”). The two cowboys who cut the prostitute bring horses (property of a sort) to pay for their crime. Property in westerns is a burden. Someone is always trying to take it away or to gain control over it. The cowboy hero is, as often as not, without property. When William Munny has property, he is in the dirt with the hogs; when he rides free from property, he rides into myth.
As for literacy, we see this in the figure of W. W. Beauchamp, a writer not just of letters (both Little Bill and William Munny make this mistake), but of books. In all the westerns we have seen, letters in the form of writing (most often writing on buildings or on signs, but sometimes in letters or newspapers indicates a new time, a change from a frontier existence to a modern urban existence with its technological changes.
Question: can a film be all three (classic, revisionary, and parodic) at once?
The Western and the Samurai Film
-THE WHITE, THE YELLOW, AND THE BLACK (aka SAMURAI), directed by Sergio Corbucci (1975). This is a terrific comedy western from Corbucci. It stars Tomas Milian, Eli Wallach, and Giulio Gemma.
1. Historical material:
-both the samurai film and the western locate their action at the end of an era – the closing of the frontier in America and the end of the clan system in late 19th century Japan.
-both have mythic dimension, but the samurai genre stretches its mythic content to the extreme. For example, an element of the supernatural can pervade the samurai film, but rarely (and rarely successfully) does the supernatural pervade the western.
-the samurai film is, in some ways, a response to the post-atomic moment in 1945.
2. The hero:
-the lone hero who wanders a land in search of injustices to combat.
-the maimed hero – one-armed samurai or blind samurai (e.g. Zatoichi). This aspect of the samurai film is not prevalent in the American western; however, it does inform the Italian western (e.g. BLINDMAN dir. Ferdinando Baldi 1971 or THE GREAT SILENCE dir. Sergio Corbucci 1968). One early American film that does draw on the maimed hero tradition of the samurai film is John Sturges’s BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (1955). This is a modern day western. (Note: Sturges also directed the more famous western based on a samurai film, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN 1960.)
-aversion to guns in samurai films. The samurai hero disdains the gun. The gun is anti-traditional, a sign of encroaching industrialization and mechanization.
-the duel: two swordsmen must fight, although neither is necessarily evil. These fights taker place in private, often in an open field – something the Italian western picks up. The American western more often than not has its duels in public (see Sam Raimi’s THE QUICK AND THE DEAD, for example or Henry King’s famous film, THE GUNFIGHTER.
-honour and the conflict between inclination (desire) and duty (responsibility)
-from Stuart Kaminsky’s AMERICAN FILM GENRES (1974): “The western hero has a great sense of self; the samurai has a great sense of subordination of self” (54).
-western hero is alone (mostly), but the samurai is alone only because he has been cut off from a master.
-pride and shame: the western gunman is often wary of his own prowess (see for example, SHANE or THE GUNFIGHTER); the samuarai is proud of his ability with a sword. There is, perhaps, more art in being a samurai than in being a fast gun.
-the samurai film presupposes a knowledge of a great many fictional and historical characters. The American western has some of this, but to a much smaller extent.
Ritual:
-both samurai films and westerns are ritualistic. However, the rituals in the western are often broken (“Put an A-men to it,” in THE SEARCHERS or the bad guys’ willingness to cheat in a duel or Cole Thornton’s ruse in EL DORADO). Rituals in the samurai films are, for the most part, adhered to.
THE SEVEN SAMURAI (1954)
Why end with this film?
1. Kurosawa has stated that he admired the American western films, especially those of John Ford.
2. THE SEVEN SAMURAI has the epic proportions of the western, although it is far less interested in the land than in the people who share the land.
3. The film uses techniques we see elsewhere: the slow motion violence of Peckinpah, the frenetic cutting also of Peckinpah, the noble close-up for both the heroic characters and for the peasants, ritual in battles, funerals, food, etc., themes of friendship and honour, visual cues to themes such as the water wheel, the flowers, the forest undergrowth, the rain, fire, the guns, deep focus to create a full mise en scene, fast tracking shots of horses racing through the forest or across the landscape.
4. Unlike the western, THE SEVEN SAMURAI does not personalize the villains. They remain without character, nearly faceless. They say little other than grunts and yells. They are a force of nature that the peasant has to contend with.
5. Unlike horses in the western, horses in this film are merely functional. If they serve to signify anything (I speak as a western viewer), then they signify necessity itself. They are a sign of an energy which is inevitable, natural, and powerful. The scene in which Mifune rides the horse through the covered bridge, and then has to chase the horse is both a comic moment and also a reminder of failure, perhaps a premonition of the end. This character is associated with nature; he captures a fish bare-handed; he rolls about the earth when he is drunk; he tries to ride the horse; he has kids follow him. He is a doomed character.
6. The samurai take up the cause of the peasants for food and lodging, not for money or glory or even for justice.
7. THE SEVEN SAMURAI, like THE WILD BUNCH, has a rhythmic quality both in the story with its rhythms of calm and action and in the technique in which we see the camera weave establishing shots with medium and close-up shots. One example of the work the camera does is in an early scene in which one of the peasants wants to kill the bandits any way he can, but the other villagers refuse to accept his hot-headedness. From a crane shot, we see him leave the group and walk away from the foreground. He slumps to the ground. We cut to a shot closer to ground level in which we see the slumped figure in the foreground with the group of villagers behind him. The camera lens flattens the visual field so that we see the figure in the foreground not so much isolated from the group as blending with the group. What follows is his re-integration into the group.
8. Careful framing that gives each shot a pictorial look.
9. Sound: the film uses sound carefully. Music is sparing, but important. Natural sounds – wind and rain, the sound of fire, the chopping of wood, the pounding of hoofs – all these intensify the emotional impact of the film.
10. The international nature of filmic art.
11. Because I like it. I like the characters. For me, this is a film of faces. Much of what the film communicates is through faces. I read that the dialogue in the film is often nearly indecipherable, and that the subtitles cannot capture this quality. We have seen this before in Godard’s WEEKEND. I especially like the peasant faces, and of course the face of Toshiro Mifune.
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