Contrasts

By Pauline Kael

“Star Wars, Episode IV: A New Hope,” 1977.

Photograph by Lucasfilm Ltd. / Everett
The loudness, the smash-and-grab editing, the relentless pacing
drive every idea from your head; for young audiences “Star
Wars” is like getting a box of Cracker Jack which is all prizes.
This is the writer-director George Lucas’s own film, subject to
no business interference, yet it’s a film that’s totally
uninterested in anything that doesn’t connect with the mass
audience. There’s no breather in the picture, no lyricism; the
only attempt at beauty is in the double sunset. It’s enjoyable on
its own terms, but it’s exhausting, too: like taking a pack of kids
to the circus. An hour into it, children say that they’re ready to
see it all over again; that’s because it’s an assemblage of spare
parts—it has no emotional grip. “Star Wars” may be the only
movie in which the first time around the surprises are
reassuring. (Going a second time would be like trying to read
“Catch-22” twice.) Even if you’ve been entertained, you may feel
cheated of some dimension—a sense of wonder, perhaps. It’s an
epic without a dream. But it’s probably the absence of wonder
that accounts for the film’s special, huge success. The
excitement of those who call it the film of the year goes way past
nostalgia to the feeling that now is the time to return to
childhood.

Maybe the only real inspiration involved in “Star Wars” was to

set its sci-fi galaxy in the pop-culture past, and to turn old-
movie ineptness into conscious Pop Art. And maybe there’s a
touch of genius in keeping it so consistently what it is, even if
this is the genius of the plodding. Lucas has got the tone of bad
movies down pat: you never catch the actors deliberately acting
badly, they just seem to be bad actors, on contract to
Monogram or Republic, their klunky enthusiasm polished at
the Ricky Nelson school of acting. In a gesture toward equality
of the sexes, the high-school-cheerleader princess-in-distress
talks tomboy-tough—Terry Moore with spunk. Is it because the
picture is synthesized from the mythology of serials and old
comic books that it didn’t occur to anybody that she could get
The Force?

Most of the well-known writers who have tried to direct movies

have gone at it briefly and given up in frustration. Cocteau was
an exception; Marguerite Duras is another. She has been
writing scripts since 1959 (“Hiroshima, Mon Amour”) and
directing her own scripts since 1966, and the control in her new
film, “Le Camion”—“The Truck”—suggests that she has become
a master. But there’s a joker in her mastery: though her moods
and cadences, her rhythmic phrasing, with its emotional
undertow, might seem ideally suited to the medium, they don’t
fulfill moviegoers’ expectations. Conditioned from childhood,
people go to the movies wanting the basic gratification of a
story acted out. Many directors have tried to alter this
conditioning, breaking away from the simplest narrative
traditions, and they’ve failed to take the largest audience with
them. Duras doesn’t even get near the mass of moviegoers,
though somehow—God knows how—she manages to make her
own pictures, her own way. Hers is possibly the most
sadomasochistic of all director relationships with the audience:
she drives people out of the theatre, while, no doubt, scorning
them for their childish obtuseness. At the same time, she must
be suffering from her lack of popularity. Her battle with the
audience reaches a new stage in “The Truck,” in which the split
between her artistry and what the public wants is pointed up
and turned against the audience. She brings it off, but she’s
doing herself in, too. And so it isn’t a simple prank.

There are only two people in “The Truck”: Marguerite Duras

and Gérard Depardieu. They sit at a round table in a room in
her home, and never leave it. Small and bundled up, her throat
covered, her unlined moon face serene, half-smiling, Duras
reads aloud the script of a film in which Depardieu would act
the role of a truck driver who picks up a woman hitchhiker. He
would drive and ask a question or two; the woman would talk.
Depardieu doesn’t actually play the truck driver: this actor,
whose physical and emotional weight can fill up the screen, is
used as a nonprofessional. He merely listens trustingly, a
friend, a student, as Duras reads. Hers is the only performance,
and there has never been anything like it: controlling the whole
movie visibly, from her position on the screen as creator-star,
she is so assured that there is no skittish need for makeup, no
nerves, quick gestures, tics. The self-image she presents is that
of a woman past deception; she has the grandly simple manner
of a sage. Unhurriedly, with the trained patience of authority,
she tells the story of her movie-to-be about the woman
hitchhiker—a woman of shifting identities, who drops clues
about her life which are fragments and echoes of Duras’s earlier
works. This woman, a composite Duras heroine, strews a trail of
opaque references to Duras’s youth in Indo-China (the daughter
of two French teachers, Marguerite Duras spent her first
seventeen years there), and when the hitchhiker talks to the
truck driver about her disillusion with the politics of revolution,
and says that she has lost faith in the proletariat, that she
believes in nothing anymore—“Let the world go to rack and
ruin”—she speaks, unmistakably, for Duras herself. “The Truck”
is a spiritual autobiography, a life’s-journey, end-of-the-world
road movie; it’s a summing up, an endgame. The hitchhiker
travels in a winter desert; she’s from anywhere and going
nowhere, in motion to stay alive. Reading the script, Duras
speaks in the perfect conditional tense, beginning “It would
have been a film—therefore, it is a film.” And this tense carries a
note of regret: it suggests that the script is to be realized only by
our listening and imagining.

Her seductive voice prepares us for the unfolding of the action,

and when there is a cut from the two figures at the table to a big
blue truck moving silently through cold and drizzle in the
working-class flatlands west of Paris, we’re eager to see the man
and woman inside. But we don’t get close enough to see anyone.
The truck crawls along in the exurbanite slum, where housing
developments and supermarkets loom up in the void, Pop
ruins. Its movement is noiseless, ominously so; the only sound
is that of Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations, and the images and
music never quite come together rhythmically. With nothing
synchronized, the effect is of doomsday loneliness. Quiet is
Duras’s weapon. The Beethoven is played softly, so that we
reach toward it. The stillness provides resonance for her
lingering words—those drifting thoughts that sound elegant,
fated—and for the music, and for the cinematographer Bruno
Nuytten’s love-hate vistas of bareness and waste, like the New
Jersey Turnpike in pastels. The foreboding melancholy soaks so
deep into our consciousness that when the director yanks us
back to the room, you may hear yourself gasp at the effrontery
of this stoic, contained little woman with her mild, Chairman
Mao deadpan. When we were with the truck, even without
seeing anyone in it we felt that “the movie”—our primitive sense
of a movie—was about to begin. And it’s an emotional wrench, a
classic rude awakening, to be sent back to Square One, the
room. The film alternates between sequences in the room and
sequences of the rolling truck, always at a distance. Each time
she cuts to the outdoors, you’re drawn into the hypnotic flow of
the road imagery, and though you know perfectly well there will
be nothing but the truck in the landscape, you half dream your
way into a “real” movie. And each time you find yourself back
with Duras, you’re aware of being treated like a chump, your
childishness exposed.
Buñuel played a similar narrative game in parts of “The
Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” parodying the audience’s
gullibility by involving us in scary ghost stories and then
casually interrupting them. But that was only one of his games
and he wasn’t onscreen himself pulling the rug out from under
us, the way Duras is, returning to her narration, all dulcet
modulations, as if she thought we’d be delighted to listen. The
audience reacts at first with highly vocal disbelief and then with
outbursts of anger, and walkouts. Even those of us who are
charmed by her harmonious, lulling use of the film medium and
in awe of her composure as a performer are conscious that we
have, buried under a few layers, the rebellious instincts that
others are giving loud voice to. They’re furious in a way they
never are at a merely bad, boring movie, and this anger is
perfectly understandable. But it’s high comedy, too: their
feelings have been violated by purely aesthetic means—an
affront to their conditioning.

When “The Truck” opens at the New York Film Festival this
week, there’s likely to be a repetition of the scene in May at
Cannes. After the showing, Marguerite Duras stood at the head
of the stairs in the Palais des Festivals facing the crowd in
evening clothes, which was yelling insults up at her. People who
had walked out were milling around; they’d waited to bait her.
It might have been a horrifying exhibition, except that the
jeering was an inverted tribute—conceivably, a fulfillment. She
was shaken: one could see it in the muscles of her face. But
Robespierre himself couldn’t have looked them straighter in the
eye. There can’t be much doubt that she enjoys antagonizing the
audience, and there is a chicness in earning the public’s hatred.
“The Truck” is a class-act monkeyshine made with absolutely
confident artistry. She knows how easy it would be to give
people the simple pleasures that they want. Her pride in not
making concessions is heroic; it shows in that gleam of placid
perversity which makes her such a commanding camera
presence.
She can take the insults without flinching because she’s
completely serious in the story of the despairing hitchhiker. In
her method in “The Truck,” she’s a minimalist, like Beckett,
stripping her drama down to the bones of monodrama, and her
subject is the same as his: going through the last meaningless
rites. (“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”) What “The Truck” doesn’t have
is Beckett’s bleak, funny commonness. Beckett sticks to low-
lifers, and his plays are the smelly vaudeville of the living dead,
the grindingly familiar slow music of moronic humanity. Duras
is bleakly fancy, with a glaze of culture. She’s all music, too, the
music of diffuseness, absence, loss, but her spoken text is
attitudinizing—desultory self-preoccupation, mystification. Not
pinning anything down, she leaves everything floating allusively
in midair. This is, God help us, a vice women artists have been
particularly prone to. Who is this hitchhiker on the road of life?
Ah, we are not to know. Indefiniteness is offered as superiority
to the mundane, as a form of sensuousness. It’s a very old
feminine lure—presenting oneself as many women, as a
creature of mystery, and, of course, as passive and empty,
disillusioned and weary. Dietrich used to do it in sequins,
feathers, and chiffon. Duras clothes it in Marxist ideology, and
puts forth her disaffection as a terminal, apocalyptic vision:
Nothingness ahead. Some of her remarks (“Karl Marx is dead,”
and so on) have a tinny, oracular ring. (You wouldn’t catch out
Beckett making personal announcements.) The hitchhiker’s
declaration that she no longer believes in the possibility of
political salvation is meant to have shock value; the world—i.e.,
Paris—is being told what Marguerite Duras’s latest stand is.
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

Lies and Truth in the Era of Trump

There are some people who are too French for their own good.
True film artist though she is, Marguerite Duras has a
sensibility that’s infected with the literary culture of
a précieuse, and partly because of the development of movies
out of the common forms of entertainment, this sensibility
exposes itself on the screen much more than it does on paper.
Faced with the audience’s impatience, Duras fights back by
going further, defiant, single-minded. There’s something of the
punitive disciplinarian in her conception of film art; “The
Truck” is a position paper made into a movie. It’s accessible,
but it’s accessible to a piece of yourself that you never think to
take to the movies. Let’s put it this way: if you were studying for
a college exam and knocked off to go see “The Truck,” you
wouldn’t feel you were playing hooky. Duras makes us aware of
our own mechanisms of response, and it’s tonic and funny to
feel the tensions she provokes. Her picture has been thought
out with such supple discrimination between the values of
sound and image that one could almost say it’s perfectlymade:
an ornery, glimmering achievement. At the opposite extreme
from popcorn filmmaking, it’s a demonstration of creative
force—which doesn’t always cut as clean as that laser sword in
Alec Guinness’s hand.

Right from the beginning of the film “Short Eyes,” directed by

Robert M. Young from Miguel Piñero’s adaptation of his play
about life in a men’s house of detention, you hear the play
coming through the documentary surface. The film was shot
entirely in the Tombs, and the details of cells and showers and
of trays being emptied are completely convincing, yet the
illusion that this is “life” never takes hold. Each time someone
has a line, there’s a cut to him; it’s as if the director had pointed
to the actor and said, “It’s your turn now, go.” Many of the
actors (an overlapping group of ex-convicts, ex-addicts, and
professionals) appeared in the stage versions, and you
recognize the rhythm of well-practiced stage readings. And
some of these actors love their lines too much; they’ve been
revving up, stiffening their faces, holding their breath. Piñero
dances through his own role—the hairy little hipster Go Go, a
ratfink wearing a cross and a yarmulke. Piñero knows how to
breathe as if he weren’t acting, and his lines have a pulse—
watching him, we can tell how the script was meant to sound.
But the scenes involving him are brief, and rushed; we barely
grasp that he has planted a weapon in the bunk of another
prisoner (played by Curtis Mayfield) before the men take their
reprisals, and he’s gone from the movie. Still, “Short Eyes,”
hung up somewhere between photographed play and prison
documentary, has an obsessive interest, and when the child-
molester, Clark Davis (Bruce Davison), one of the few men in
the cellblock who aren’t Hispanic or black, delivers a
confessional monologue about how he got started when he was
fifteen with one of his little sister’s friends and how he has gone
on, with acquiescent eight-year-olds who will do anything for a
quarter, the film gets us by the throat, choking off petty
reservations.

Born in Puerto Rico, Piñero was brought to New York at the age
of four; within a few years his father deserted the family, and by
the time Piñero was eight he was stealing milk and bread to
help feed the younger children. The police started to pick him
up when he was eleven; he had been a shoplifter, mugger,
burglar, addict, and drug pusher and was serving a five-year
sentence for armed robbery when he joined a theatre workshop
in Sing Sing, where he began to work on this play. Paroled, he
was twenty-seven when it was first performed publicly, by a
group of former convicts and addicts, in 1974 at Riverside
Church; it went on to win two Obies and a Drama Critics Circle
award.

“Short Eyes” is an insider’s view of prison life. Piñero doesn’t

sentimentalize the men as victims. His is a reverse
sentimentality, a cocky insistence that they got caught doing
what they wanted to do. This insider’s “realism,” a neo-Cagney
bravado, is much more entertaining than the usual liberal-
humanitarian version of prison life; the prisoners flaunt their
vices and never ask for sympathy. Their tough talk is the prison
equivalent of locker-room boasting, and perfectly believable;
what other form of cool could they have? Piñero, however,
pushes bravado as truth: he has one of the men deliver an
applause-jerking speech about being a dope fiend not because
he’s black or suffering from a “personality disorder” but
because he likes the stuff, and there are other speeches about
how the men are “responsible” for themselves. This comes from
a playwright who at the completion of shooting on the film was
picked up, with another member of the cast, driving the wrong
way on a lower-East Side street in a stolen taxi, and was
indicted for grand and petit larceny, robbery, and possession of
marijuana and a dangerous weapon. A more self-destructive
hellion’s gesture would be hard to find; if he’s convicted, he
could be sent up for twenty-five years. Of course, people are
responsible for what they do, no matter what they’ve been
through. But what does that actually mean in terms of those
who have been damaged from childhood—in some cases, from
infancy? What’s underneath Piñero’s defensive, macho oratory
is what gives the film its strength: the pain that is the bedrock
of the prisoners’ lives.

The plot centers on the revulsion that men in prison feel toward
child-molesters—“short eyes.” (Child-molesting is said to be the
one crime for which a man in prison is ostracized. It’s at the
bottom of the scale; armed robbery is at the top.) Dostoevsky
grappled with the horror of sexual passion for children; the
Fritz Lang film “M” touched on it; “The Mark” flirted with it.
The intensity of “Short Eyes” derives mainly from its getting
close enough for us to feel some heat. But we’re not flung into
the furnace. The men’s revulsion is taken for granted, without
our seeing that they react to child-molesters with such
profound, murderous hatred because of their fear that they’re
capable of this sexual debasement. We need to see that Clark
Davis, the child-molester, has given in to something the other
prisoners haven’t sunk to and that this may be the last barrier
for some of them—the only proof of their self-control. If he were
rash or crazed, if he had dark, thick blood in him—if he were a
man like the others—then maybe we’d see that their sexual
conflicts and miseries belong to the same world as his. But
Clark Davis is a miserable whiner. A cartoon of white-collar
cowardice, he’s everything Piñero feels superior to; he’s no
more than a trivial whitey to be squished.
Bruce Davison’s previous screen work (he was the student hero
of “The Strawberry Statement,” had the title role in “Willard,”
and was the nephew in “Mame”) doesn’t prepare one for his
subtly objective performance as the molester; he’s playing a
conventional weasel, but he gets inside that weasel. His facial
movements are so small and tense that he suggests the tininess
of Clark’s petty-clerk soul—so small that you even begin to
think he couldn’t have done any physical damage to the little
girls. Clark brings a pale chill into the prison. This is his first
arrest, and his fear is like a shiver he can’t let out. His antennae
give him all the wrong signals, and he doesn’t even know how to
plead for his own life: he asks to be spared for the sake of his
wife and child. Davison’s guardedness, his constricted voice, the
suggestions of calculations that can’t help failing are all prissily
exact. Even in his confessional speech—the only lines he’s got
that haven’t been written from the outside, that have been felt,
imagined—he doesn’t leap out of the character (though it must
certainly have been a temptation).

Yet by making Clark Davis repugnant for reasons other than his
crime Piñero diverts the script from its great subject and, at the
end, is left flailing about, looking for ironies and meanings to tie
the movie together, so that it will “say” something. The ideas
haven’t been worked out, and the film even has a stock figure of
goodness and decency—the prisoner Juan, called Poet (José
Perez), who appears to be the author’s fantasy of himself. Juan,
Clark’s father-confessor, is a hip version of the kindly wardens
and loving priests in old movies. But with sensational material
like this, disorganization is preferable to a slick, false structure.
And parts of this movie seem as good as they could possibly be.
When Longshoe Murphy (Joe Carberry), a white prisoner,
taunts Clark, referring to his “nice cheap summer suit,” the
condescension in the word “cheap” is worthy of Tennessee
Williams at his peak. When Murphy gets stoned, he looks
uncannily like the last photographs of Hart Crane and he has a
passage of dialogue in which the language has broken down.
Nothing in it is quite literal or rational, and yet the meaning is
eerily clear to us. Whether Joe Carberry is acting stoned or this
 is stoned acting, it has a beatific quality, and the movie just
eases into it. Piñero’s humor, which spurts up freely, is often
surprisingly gentle in this feral atmosphere. An older man, Paco
(Shawn Elliott), corners a slender, boyish prisoner (Tito Goya)
and propositions him, forcefully. But the scene turns around:
what looked as if it would lead to violence is actually a love idyll.
Paco is really a petitioner; he wants the boy to want him—it’s
just that he doesn’t know how to express love except with
threats. And the boy, known as Cupcakes, is a dish; only semi-
reluctant, he has the whole cellblock turned on by his Bianca
Jagger androgyny.

Young, the director, isn’t overbearing, he doesn’t lean on the

finest bits. (It’s in the least inspired material that the actors
seem to be yelling “Bingo!”) The director’s one big attempt at
ensemble playing—a musical number—recalls the inevitable
spirituals sung in the early “big-house” movies; we know too
well what we’re supposed to feel. But the violent moments are
handled with a restraint that intensifies our terror; sometimes a
few quick cuts show us all we need to see. During the attack on
Go Go near the beginning, the suffering has just the right
immediacy, and at the climax of the film the timing of the cut to
Murphy’s face—a vengeful God at his instant of decision—
couldn’t be improved on; the effect is so economical it’s pure.
These are the scenes that really count, because if the danger,
the pain, the cruelty weren’t convincing, the movie would seem
a fraud. It’s far from a fraud; it may even be the most
emotionally accurate—and so most frightening—movie about
American prisons ever made. Yet “Short Eyes” doesn’t stay in
the mind. Its potency is in its words. They’re live, raw, profane.
But a movie that is primarily words tends to evaporate. ♦

 Pauline Kael wrote for The New Yorker from 1967 until her retirement, in
1991.

Read more »
The Wizard of Hollywood
By Russell Maloney

Margaret Hamilton and Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz,” 1939.

Photograph courtesy Everett

Fantasy is still Walt Disney’s undisputed domain. Nobody else can

tell a fairy tale with his clarity of imagination, his simple good taste,
or his technical ingenuity. This was forcibly borne in on me as I sat
cringing before M-G-M’s Technicolor production of “The Wizard of
Oz,” which displays no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity.
I will rest my case against “The Wizard of Oz” on one line of
dialogue. It occurs in a scene in which the wicked witch is trying to
persuade Dorothy, the little girl from Kansas, to part with a pair of
magic slippers. The good witch interrupts them, warning Dorothy not
to give up the slippers, whereupon the wicked witch snarls, “You
keep out of this!” Well, there it is. Either you believe witches talk like
that, or you don’t. I don’t. Since “The Wizard of Oz” is full of stuff as
bad as that, or worse, I say it’s a stinkeroo.

The vulgarity of which I was conscious all through the film is difficult
to analyze. Part of it was the raw, eye-straining Technicolor, applied
with a complete lack of restraint. And the gags! Let me give you just
one. Dorothy is telling the Wizard about the fate of the wicked witch.
“She just melted away,” Dorothy says. “Liquidated, eh?” the Wizard
comes back, quick as a flash. He’s a card, that Wizard; you ought to
hear him ribbing the boys in Dave’s Blue Room some morning. Bert
Lahr, as the Cowardly Lion, is funny but out of place. If Bert Lahr
belongs in the Land of Oz, so does Mae West. This is nothing against
Lahr or Miss West, both of whom I dearly love. I don’t like the Singer
Midgets under any circumstances, but I found them especially
bothersome in Technicolor.

“The Old Maid” has many virtues. It is a faithful transcription of a

well-written, though far from brilliant, play. It is a costume piece in
which the feeling of the period goes deeper than the clothes worn by
the actors; it is impossible to imagine the action taking place in a
different time or locality. The characters are well conceived, they
react credibly, and they actually develop as the action progresses. The
story is adult, insofar as it is concerned with something beyond
getting a certain girl into the arms of a certain man. But how dull it is!
Written and directed with no variety or change of pace, “The Old
Maid” just trudges sensibly along to its inevitable conclusion, and
then stops. This is not to say, however, that Bette Davis’s
performance in “The Old Maid” will not win her the Academy Award
for 1939. All that renunciation, all those tight-lipped, understated,
half-lighted scenes with the jealous sister and the illegitimate
daughter—it’s in the bag, folks.

The charge of dullness cannot be laid against “When Tomorrow

Comes.” James M. Cain, who concocted the story, has tossed into the
Irene Dunne-Charles Boyer-Barbara O’Neil triangle quite a few
surprises. Miss Dunne is a waitress in a chain restaurant who
successfully engineers a strike—the first time, to my knowledge, that
the labor question has been so taken for granted in a full-length
commercial production. Even after this warning, I bet you won’t
believe your ears when Mr. Boyer says, “I have a union card,” and
Miss Dunne shrewdly asks, “C.I.O. or A.F. of L.?” Then there is a
lovely, demented wife—beautifully played by Miss O’Neil—and a
hurricane which forces the lovers to spend the night in the organ loft
of a flooded church. Then there is a scene in which Mr. Boyer, who
plays a famous concert pianist, pounds out great, crashing chords
during a thunderstorm, and there’s—oh, what isn’tthere? See it, by all
means. ♦

Underground Man
By Pauline Kael

Robert De Niro in “Taxi Driver,” 1976.

Photograph Courtesy Everett
“Taxi Driver” is the fevered story of an outsider in New York—a man
who can’t find any point of entry into human society. Travis Bickle
(Robert De Niro), the protagonist of Martin Scorsese’s new film, from
a script by Paul Schrader, can’t find a life. He’s an ex-Marine from
the Midwest who takes a job driving a cab nights, because he can’t
sleep anyway, and he is surrounded by the night world of the
uprooted—whores, pimps, transients. Schrader, who grew up in
Michigan, in the Christian Reformed Church, a zealous Calvinist
splinter (he didn’t see a movie until he was seventeen), has created a
protagonist who is an ascetic not by choice but out of fear. And
Scorsese, with his sultry moodiness and his appetite for the pulp
sensationalism of forties movies, is just the director to define an
American underground man’s resentment. Travis wants to conform,
but he can’t find a group pattern to conform to. So he sits and drives
in the stupefied languor of anomie. He hates New York with a
Biblical fury; it gives off the stench of Hell, and its filth and smut
obsess him. He manages to get a date with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a
political campaigner whose blondness and white clothes represent
purity to him, but he is so out of touch that he inadvertently offends
her and she won’t have anything more to do with him. When he
fumblingly asks advice from Wizard (Peter Boyle), an older
cabdriver, and indicates the pressure building up in him, Wizard
doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Travis becomes sick with
loneliness and frustration, and then, like a commando preparing for a
raid, he purifies his body and goes into training to kill. “Taxi Driver”
is a movie in heat, a raw, tabloid version of “Notes from
Underground,” and we stay with the protagonist’s hatreds all the way.

This picture is more ferocious than Scorsese’s volatile, allusive

“Mean Streets.” “Taxi Driver” has a relentless movement: Travis has
got to find relief. It’s a two-character study—Travis versus New
York. As Scorsese has designed the film, the city never lets you off
the hook. There’s no grace, no compassion in the artificially lighted
atmosphere. The neon reds, the vapors that shoot up from the streets,
the dilapidation all get to you the way they get to Travis. He is
desperately sick, but he’s the only one who tries to save a twelve-and-
a-half-year-old hooker, Iris (Jodie Foster); the argument he invokes is
that she belongs with her family and in school—the secure values
from his own past that are of no help to him now. Some mechanism of
adaptation is missing in Travis; the details aren’t filled in—just the
indications of a strict religious background, and a scar on his back,
suggesting a combat wound. The city world presses in on him, yet it’s
also remote, because Travis is so disaffected that he isn’t always quite
there. We perceive the city as he does, and it’s so scummy and malign
we get the feel of his alienation.

Scorsese may just naturally be an Expressionist; his asthmatic

bedridden childhood in a Sicilian-American home in Little Italy
propelled him toward a fix on the violently exciting movies he saw.
Physically and intellectually, he’s a speed demon, a dervish. Even in
“Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” he found a rationale for restless,
whirlwind movement. But Scorsese is also the most carnal of
directors—movement is ecstatic for him—and that side of him didn’t
come out in “Alice.” This new movie gives him a chance for the full
Expressionist use of the city which he was denied in “Mean Streets,”
because it was set in New York but was made on a minuscule budget
in southern California, with only seven shooting days in New York
itself. Scorsese’s Expressionism isn’t anything like the exaggerated
sets of the German directors; he uses documentary locations, but he
pushes discordant elements to their limits, and the cinematographer,
Michael Chapman, gives the street life a seamy, rich pulpiness. When
Travis is taunted by a pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel), the pimp is so
eager for action that he can’t stand still; the hipster, with his rhythmic
jiggling, makes an eerily hostile contrast to the paralyzed,
dumbfounded Travis. Scorsese gets the quality of trance in a scene
like this; the whole movie has a sense of vertigo. Scorsese’s New
York is the big city of the thrillers he feasted his imagination on—but
at a later stage of decay. This New York is a voluptuous enemy. The
street vapors become ghostly; Sport the pimp romancing his baby
whore leads her in a hypnotic dance; the porno theatres are like
mortuaries; the congested traffic is macabre. And this Hell is always
in movement.

No other film has ever dramatized urban indifference so powerfully;

at first, here, it’s horrifyingly funny, and then just horrifying. When
Travis attempts to date Betsy, he’s very seductive; we can see why
she’s tantalized. They’re talking across a huge gap, and still they’re
connecting (though the wires are all crossed). It’s a zinger of a scene:
an educated, socially conscious woman dating a lumpen lost soul who
uses one of the oldest pitches in the book—he tells her that he knows
she is a lonely person. Travis means it; the gruesome comedy in the
scene is how intensely he means it—because his own life is utterly
empty. Throughout the movie, Travis talks to people on a different
level from the level they take him on. He’s so closed off he’s other-
worldly; he engages in so few conversations that slang words like
“moonlighting” pass right over him—the spoken language is foreign
to him. His responses are sometimes so blocked that he seems wiped
out; at other times he’s animal fast. This man is burning in misery,
and his inflamed, brimming eyes are the focal point of the
compositions. Robert De Niro is in almost every frame: thin-faced, as
handsome as Robert Taylor one moment and cagey, ferrety, like
Cagney, the next—and not just looking at the people he’s talking to
but spying on them. As Travis, De Niro has none of the peasant
courtliness of his Vito Corleone in “The Godfather, Part II.” Vito held
himself in proudly, in control of his violence; he was a leader. Travis
is dangerous in a different, cumulative way. His tense face folds in a
yokel’s grin and he looks almost an idiot. Or he sits in his room
vacantly watching the bright-eyed young faces on the TV and with his
foot he slowly rocks the set back and then over. The exacerbation of
his desire for vengeance shows in his numbness, yet part of the horror
implicit in this movie is how easily he passes. The anonymity of the
city soaks up one more invisible man; he could be legion.

Scorsese handles the cast immaculately. Harvey Keitel’s pimp is

slimy, all right, yet his malicious, mischievous eyes and his jumpiness
are oddly winning, and Keitel has more resources for building tension
than just about any other actor on the screen. Jodie Foster, who was
exactly Iris’s age when she played the part, is an unusually physical
child actress and seems to have felt out her line readings—her words
are convincingly hers. Cybill Shepherd has never been better: you
don’t see her trying to act. She may actually be doing her least acting
here, yet she doesn’t have that schoolgirl model’s blankness; her face
is expressive and womanly. There’s a suggestion that Betsy’s life
hasn’t gone according to her expectations—a faint air of defeat. The
comedian Albert Brooks brings a note of quibbling, plump pomposity
to the role of her political co-worker, and Leonard Harris, formerly
the WCBS-TV arts critic, has a professionally earnest manner as
Palantine, their candidate. Peter Boyle’s role is small, but he was right
to want to be in this film, and he does slobby wonders with his scenes
as the gently thick Wizard, adjusted to the filth that Travis is coiled up
to fight; Boyle gives the film a special New York-hack ambience,
and, as the cabby Doughboy, Harry Northrup has a bland face and
Southern drawl that suggest another kind of rootlessness. Scorsese
himself is sitting on the sidewalk when Travis first sees Betsy, and
then he returns to play a glitteringly morbid role as one of Travis’s
fares—a man who wants Travis to share his rancid glee in what the
Magnum he intends to shoot his faithless wife with will do to her. As
an actor, he sizzles; he has such concentrated energy that this
sequence burns a small hole in the screen.

As a director, Scorsese has the occasional arbitrariness and preening

of a runaway talent; sometimes a shot calls attention to itself, because
it serves no visible purpose. One can pass over a lingering closeup of
a street musician, but when Travis is talking to Betsy on a pay phone
in an office building and the camera moves away from him to the
blank hallway. It’s an Antonioni pirouette. The Bernard Herrmann
score is a much bigger problem; the composer finished recording it on
December 23rd, the day before he died, and so it’s a double pity that it
isn’t better. It’s clear why Scorsese wanted Herrmann: his specialty
was expressing psychological disorder through dissonant, wrought-up
music. But this movie, with its suppressed sex and suppressed
violence, is already pitched so high that it doesn’t need ominous
percussion, snake rattles, and rippling scales These musical nudges
belong back with the rampaging thrillers that “Taxi Driver”
transcends. Scorsese got something out of his asthma: he knows how
to make us experience the terror of suffocation.

Some actors are said to be empty vessels who are filled by the roles
they play, but that’s not what appears to be happening here with De
Niro. He’s gone the other way. He’s used his emptiness—he’s
reached down into his own anomie. Only Brando has done this kind
of plunging, and De Niro’s performance has something of the
undistanced intensity that Brando’s had in “Last Tango.” In its own
way, this movie, too, has an erotic aura. There is practically no sex in
it, but no sex can be as disturbing as sex. And that’s what it’s about:
the absence of sex—bottled-up, impacted energy and emotion, with a
blood-splattering release. The fact that we experience Travis’s need
for an explosion viscerally, and that the explosion itself has the
quality of consummation, makes “Taxi Driver” one of the few truly
modern horror films.

Anyone who goes to the movie houses that loners frequent knows that
they identify with the perpetrators of crimes, even the most horrible
crimes, and that they aren’t satisfied unless there’s a whopping
climax. In his essay “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer suggested
that when a killer takes his revenge on the institutions that he feels are
oppressing him his eruption of violence can have a positive effect on
him. The most shocking aspect of “Taxi Driver” is that it takes this
very element, which has generally been exploited for popular appeal,
and puts it in the center of the viewer’s consciousness. Violence is
Travis’s only means of expressing himself. He has not been able to
hurdle the barriers to being seen and felt. When he blasts through, it’s
his only way of telling the city that he’s there. And, given his ascetic
loneliness, it’s the only real orgasm he can have.
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

The New York Public Library’s Collection of Weird Objects

The violence in this movie is so threatening precisely because it’s

cathartic for Travis. I imagine that some people who are angered by
the film will say that it advocates violence as a cure for frustration.
But to acknowledge that when a psychopath’s blood boils over he
may cool down is not the same as justifying the eruption. This film
doesn’t operate on the level of moral judgment of what Travis does.
Rather, by drawing us into his vortex it makes us understand the
psychic discharge of the quiet boys who go berserk. And it’s a real
slap in the face for us when we see Travis at the end looking pacified.
He’s got the rage out of his system—for the moment, at least—and
he’s back at work, picking up passengers in front of the St. Regis. It’s
not that he’s cured but that the city is crazier than he is. ♦
 Pauline Kael wrote for The New Yorker from 1967 until her retirement, in
1991.

Read more »

Open and Shut

By Terrence Rafferty

Spike Lee and Danny Aiello in “Do the Right Thing,” 1989.
Photograph by Universal / Courtesy Everett

In his first scene in “Do the Right Thing,” Spike Lee wears a Chicago
Bulls jersey with a big “23” on it—Michael Jordan’s number.
Mookie, the character Lee plays, is no superstar: he’s an ordinary
young man who lives with his sister in a Bedford-Stuyvesant
apartment, works—just hard enough to hang on to his job—at the
pizzeria at the end of his block, and gets along pretty well with
everybody. Amiable Mookie as the divinely inspired Jordan—who
plays basketball so brilliantly that it sometimes looks as if he didn’t
need his teammates at all—is a bit of a joke. It’s Spike Lee who’s the
one-man team here: he’s also the writer, the producer, and the director
of “Do the Right Thing,” and, as the most prominent black director in
the American movie industry, he probably feels as if he were sprinting
downcourt with no one to pass to and about five hundred towering
white guys between him and the basket. Lee has all the moves. Since
graduating from N.Y.U.’s film school, in 1983, he has managed to get
off three improbable shots, all lofted over the outstretched arms of the
movie establishment—three movies, made and distributed, about
black experience in America. The first, the buoyant and imaginative
sex comedy “She’s Gotta Have It,” seemed to come out of nowhere:
made independently, speedily, and on the cheap, it just streaked past
all the obstacles, scored big commercially, and earned Lee the chance,
almost unprecedented for a black filmmaker, to make entirely
personal movies with major-studio backing. On the evidence of “Do
the Right Thing,” Lee is all too conscious of both the responsibility
and the power of his position. (Later in the movie, Mookie changes
into a Dodgers shirt with Jackie Robinson’s number on it.) He seems
willing to do anything—to take on huge themes and assume the
burden of carrying them both in front of and behind the camera. He
just won’t accept being ignored. He turns himself into the whole
show, acting like Superman because he refuses, absolutely, to be an
Invisible Man.

In “Do the Right Thing” this apparently fearless young moviemaker

has, in Hollywood terms, cut to the chase. His two previous films (or
three if we count—and we should—his splendid hour-long N.Y.U.
thesis film, “Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads”) tried to
dramatize what American movies weren’t showing us about the real
lives of black people in this gruelling, reactionary decade; to find, if
possible, a visual style specific to that experience, not borrowed from
Hollywood or Europe; and to make it all so funny and vivid that
everyone would have to pay attention. That’s more than enough
ambition to sustain a filmmaker through an entire career, but Spike
Lee’s no ordinary artist. Eager to keep things moving, to force the
tempo of the game, he has decided to go for it right now, to catch us
off guard—again—by rushing head on at the biggest, most dauntingly
complex subject imaginable: racism itself. Who’s to stop him? He’s
got the talent, the passion, the crew, the cast, and the money. But he
stops himself: the gigantic theme ultimately exposes his weaknesses,
overshadows his strengths. In the end, he takes what looks like a big
risk, goes for the killer shot, and blows it.

By now, everyone must know that “Do the Right Thing” is about
racial tensions in a black neighborhood on a punishingly hot day; that
the focus of the action is the pizzeria where Mookie works, Sal’s
Famous, which is apparently the last white-owned business on the
block (there’s a Korean market across the street); and that the movie’s
climax is a full-scale riot sparked by a monstrous act of police
brutality. The film’s tortured message has been debated in the pages
of the Times and Newsweek and the Village Voice, and on “Nightline”
and “Oprah”; the movie has become, by virtue of both its explosive
subject and its rather slippery point of view, a real cultural event, and
if you haven’t seen it yet you might almost feel that you no longer
need to. Despite the interpretative deluge in the media, you do need to
see it for yourself. It’s a very unusual movie experience—two hours
of bombardment with New York-style stimuli. You feel your senses
alternately sharpened and dulled, as on a sweltering midsummer day,
when the sights and sounds of the city are dazzlingly clear
individually yet somehow unassimilable as a whole, overwhelming,
brain-fogging, oppressive. Lee is nimble-witted, and he’s always on
the offensive; he stays in your face until you’re too exhausted to
resist. You have to watch your reactions closely or he’ll speed right
past you, get you to nod assent to an argument you haven’t fully
realized he was making. Most American movies just want to knock
you senseless immediately and get it over with; “Do the Right Thing”
tries to wear you down, and its strategies are fascinating.

In form, “Do the Right Thing” is a multi-character, portrait-of-a-

community movie. When this sort of picture is done skillfully, it can
be exhilarating: Renoir’s “The Crime of Monsieur Lange,” Altman’s
“McCabe & Mrs. Miller,” and Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” come to
mind. The pleasure of community movies is their open-endedness, the
(relative) freedom they allow us to observe the particulars of
relationships in small, self-contained social units; they seem unusually
responsive to the ambiguity and variety of experience. For
longstretches, Lee’s movie is enjoyable in this way. Characters are
introduced, and while we wait to find out what they’ll have to do with
each other we can take in an abundance of atmospheric details—the
lack of air-conditioning in the apartments, the way the sunlight looks
sort of hopeful at the beginning of the day and then turns mean, the
street wardrobe of T-shirts, bicycle shorts, and pristine Nikes—and
listen to the casual speech of the neighborhood’s residents, learn to
hear in its varied rhythms how people who have lived too close for
too long express their irritation and their affection. As we get our
bearings, the movie has an easy, colloquial vivacity, and a sensational
look. The superb cinematographer Ernest Dickerson (who has worked
on all Lee’s movies) gives the images a daring, Hawaiian-shirt glare:
if the light were just a touch brighter, the colors a shade bolder, we’d
have to turn away, but Dickerson somehow makes these clashing
sensations seem harmonious. Lee’s script seems to be trying to do
something similar, but, despite its ingenuity, it doesn’t succeed. As
the long, sticky day goes on and the exchanges between the characters
get edgier, nastier, more elaborately insulting, we begin to feel
something ominous creeping in, which at the time we may take to be
our realization that racial violence is inevitable, but which later on we
may identify as our intuition of a different kind of disharmony—the
jarring incongruity of Lee’s “open” manner and his open-and-shut
argument.

When the smoke clears—from the screen and from the insides of our
heads—there are only two characters who really matter in “Do the
Right Thing”: Mookie and his boss, Sal (Danny Aiello), who go one-
on-one at the end. The rest of the characters are there to represent
something or to move the plot along. There’s an old drunk known as
Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), who gets no respect from the younger
people on the block but retains a certain wobbly dignity, and the
sharp-tongued, independent-minded Mother Sister (Ruby Dee); they
stand for the older generation, whose cynical, “realistic” attitude
toward living in a white society may have kept them from finding
ways out of their poverty but may also have helped keep them alive.
The next generation is represented by a trio of middle-aged gents who
sit on the corner in kitchen chairs and provide, for anyone who wants
to listen (only themselves, as it turns out), a running commentary on
everything from neighborhood events to the melting of the polar ice
caps. They’re completely useless—their major occupations are
drinking beer, boasting about sex, and coming up with new ways of
calling each other “fool”—but their confident, vigorous inanity is very
winning. Lee lets their routines run a little longer than they need to,
just because the three actors (Paul Benjamin, Frankie Faison, and the
wonderful Robin Harris, who plays the one called Sweet Dick Willie)
get such sizzling comic rhythms going; these are the movie’s loosest
scenes. As examples of younger women, Lee supplies a responsible
one, Mookie’s sister Jade (played by Lee’s sister Joie Lee), and a
wilder one, his girlfriend Tina (Rosie Perez), who also gets to stand
for unwed mothers and Hispanics. The young men consist of three
mad-prophet figures: Smiley (Roger Guenveur Smith), a stuttering
weirdo, who hawks photos of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X
shaking hands; Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), a rap fan, who walks the
streets with a mammoth boom box (it takes twenty D batteries),
playing Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” over and over; and
Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), a loudmouthed “political” type,
who wants to boycott Sal’s because the pictures on its “Wall of Fame”
are all of Italians. The whites are Sal’s sons: Pino (the overbearing
John Turturro), who’s a virulent racist, and Vito (Richard Edson),
who isn’t. (Vito just looks passive and dim, actually.)

The thinness of the characterization isn’t a big problem for the first
hour or so, while the tone is still mostly light and comic. Lee is
showing us types, but at least he gives us a lot of different ones
(Hollywood movies rarely seem aware of any diversity in the black
community), and their encounters are often funny. It’s only later,
when the whole crowded movie reduces itself to the symbolic
confrontation between Mookie and Sal, that his approach lets the
audience down. At its most basic, Lee’s intention in “Do the Right
Thing” is to demonstrate how in the context of a racially polarized
society the slow accumulation of small irritations—the heat, some
casual slights, bits of anger left over from old injuries, the constant
mild abrasions of different cultural perspectives rubbing against each
other—can swell to something huge and ugly and lethal. It’s a solid
idea for a movie—to show us the everyday texture of racial
misunderstanding. But Lee wants to go further, to prove the
inevitability of race conflict in America, and he can’t do it, because no
filmmaker could: movies aren’t very good at proving things. The
obvious inspiration for the story is the appalling incident in Howard
Beach, Queens, in 1986: three young black men, stranded by car
trouble in that very white neighborhood, were attacked outside a
pizzeria by a bunch of youths armed with baseball bats; one of the
victims, Michael Griffith, ran in front of a car while trying to escape
and was killed. From this tragic event Lee has retained the charged
iconography—the pizza parlor and the baseball bat—and changed
everything else, with a view to making its significance larger, more
general. He wants to create an event that can’t be explained away as
an isolated incident. And he’s not about to let us believe that racism
comes only in the form of teen-age thugs.

So in “Do the Right Thing” it isn’t Sal’s vicious son who precipitates
the violence but Sal himself—a man who, despite a fairly limited
imagination, isn’t an obvious racist. For most of the movie, Sal is a
sympathetic figure: he’s proud of the place he owns and proud of
having fed the people of the neighborhood for twenty-five years, and
he won’t listen to Pino’s suggestion that he sell the pizzeria and get
out of Bed-Stuy. (“I’ve never had no trouble with these people,” Sal
says.) But in the end he becomes the enemy, and Mookie—the most
easygoing and most rounded of the young black characters—becomes
his adversary. By pitching his battle between the two most likable
characters in the piece, Lee makes room in his story for the big
statement: that in this society blacks and whites, even the best of us,
are ultimately going to find ourselves on opposite sides. It’s like a
political rationalization of his aesthetic practice: eventually, everyone
reverts to type. The final conflict begins at the very end of this long,
hot day, as Mookie and Sal are trying to close the pizzeria for the
night. They stay open a few minutes longer to serve slices to a group
of neighborhood kids, and in walk Buggin’ Out and Radio Raheem;
Buggin’ Out starts yelling at Sal again about the absence of black
faces on the wall, and Raheem’s radio, turned up to earsplitting
volume, is playing “Fight the Power” (which is also the movie’s
theme song). After the day he’s had, Sal can’t take it anymore, and
goes berserk; he launches into a tirade, during which the word
“nigger” slips out, smashes Raheem’s radio with a bat, and a fight
breaks out. When half a dozen cops (all but one of them white) arrive,
they go straight for Raheem, and subdue this large, strong-looking
man with a choke hold, which kills him. The cops drive away, and the
neighborhood people are all gathered outside Sal’s, stunned by the
tragedy. Mookie, who has been standing next to his boss, crosses the
street to join his neighbors, picks up a garbage can, hurls it through
the pizzeria’s window, and the riot begins. Sal’s is destroyed, as
retribution for the death of Raheem.

In part, this powerful climax—and it is powerful—seems to come

from Lee’s sense, as a filmmaker, that he needs a conflagration at the
end, a visually and emotionally compelling release for the steam that
has been building up throughout the film. His model is clearly the
Scorsese of “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver,” but in Scorsese’s films
the final bursts of violence are generated entirely from within, from
the complex internal dynamics of the communities and individuals
we’ve been watching. Lee’s climax only seems to have that sort of
terrible inevitability. In order to believe it, and to find the characters’
behavior in these disturbing scenes wholly comprehensible, we have
to accept a proposition that’s external to the terms of the movie, an
abstract notion of the kind that no movie can truly demonstrate: that
we’re all bigots under the skin. Lee prepares us for this with a
sequence in which various characters—Italian, Korean, Hispanic, and
black (Mookie)—shout racial and ethnic slurs directly into the
camera. Sal’s exasperation with Buggin’ Out and Raheem, after he
has spent twelve hours standing next to pizza ovens on a ninety-eight-
degree day, doesn’t seem a particularly racist response—until he says
“nigger.” (Being driven out of your mind by blaring rap music doesn’t
have to have anything to do with race. At that volume, Def Leppard or
Philip Glass would have the same effect.) Raheem certainly doesn’t
deserve his fate, but without that inflammatory racial epithet Lee
would have a tough time convincing any audience that Sal deserves
his.
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

Lies and Truth in the Era of Trump

Does Lee really believe that, as he says in his published production
diary, “sooner or later it comes out”—that any white person, pushed
hard enough, will betray his contempt for blacks? Does he believe, for
that matter, the tired notion that anger brings out
people’s true feelings? And does he also think that lashing out at Sal
because he’s white and owns a business and is therefore a
representative of the racist power structure of the American economy
is a legitimate image of “fighting the power”? If you can buy all these
axioms smuggled in from outside the lively and particular world this
movie creates, then “Do the Right Thing” is the great movie that so
many reviewers have claimed it is. But if you think—as I do—that not
every individual is a racist, that angry words are no more revealing
than any other kind, and that trashing a small business is a woefully
imprecise image of fighting the power, then you have to conclude that
Spike Lee has taken a wild shot and missed the target. He ends his
movie with a pair of apparently contradictory quotations—one from
Dr. King, advocating peaceful change, and one from Malcolm,
advocating violence (in self-defense). The juxtaposition suggests an
admission that he doesn’t know all the answers, but the movie,
perhaps inadvertently, gives the lie to this confession of ambivalence.
The imagery of the riot overwhelms the more incidental truths about
human relations in the rest of the film, and Lee pays the price of all
the little feints and evasions necessary to give his movie a socko
ending: the half-truths add up, too. By the end, when Sal and Mookie
are standing toe to toe in front of the burned-out shell of the pizzeria,
and Mookie accepts his back wages, and more, from his employer,
Lee actually seems to be saying that although Sal may not be the
worst oppressor around, someone’s got to pay; the implicit message to
the small businessman is “Too bad it had to be you, but what did you
expect?” I think audiences, black and white, have the right to expect
something more thoughtful than this from one of our best young
filmmakers.

The “power” isn’t guys like Sal, even though they benefit, modestly,
from the biases of the economic system; they’re just guilty by
association, responsible for the deaths of young blacks like Raheem
only in the most theoretical, distanced way. Although Lee must know
this, he’s clearly willing to sacrifice some political clarity for the sake
of movie-style power. In order to make himself heard, he has chosen
to adopt the belligerent, in-your-face mode of discourse that has been
the characteristic voice of New York City in the Koch years. Spike
Lee’s movie isn’t likely to cause riots (as some freaked-out
commentators have suggested), but it winds up bullying the
audience—shouting at us rather than speaking to us. It is, both at its
best and at its worst, very much a movie of these times. ♦

Childe Orson
By John C. Mosher

Joseph Cotten, Orson Welles, and Everett Sloane in “Citizen Kane,” 1941.
Photograph courtesy Everett
The noise and the nonsense that have attended the release of “Citizen
Kane” may for the time being befog the merit of this extraordinary
film. Too many people may have too ready an inclination to seek out
some fancied key in it, after the silly flurry in our press, and to read
into the biography of its leading character extraneous resemblances to
persons in actual life. There is a special kind of pleasure to be found
in such research, and the success of the most commonplace movie
often lies in the simple fact that it suggests one’s neighbors, or the
scandalous people who took the house on the corner one year, or the
handsome bootlegger who used to call every week. “Citizen Kane”
can hardly suggest the ways and habits of neighbors, at least to most
householders, but it may remind some of revelations in Sunday
supplements. To others, I suppose, it will all seem more like Mars—
just Mr. Orson Welles and his Mars again.

Since movies hitherto have commenced with a cast list and a vast
directory of credits, we are promptly jolted out of our seats when
“Citizen Kane” ignores this convention and slides at once into its
story. For introduction, there is only a stylized and atmospheric hint
of background, of shut high gates and formidable fencing, and this
formal difference seems revolutionary enough to establish Mr.
Welles’ independence of the conventions. This independence, like
fresh air, sweeps on and on throughout the movie, and in spite of
bringing to mind, by elaborately fashioned decoration, a picture as old
in movie history as “Caligari”, the irregularity of the opening sets a
seal of original craftsmanship on what follows. Something new has
come to the movie world at last.

Mr. Welles is not merely being smart, clever, or different. By the

elliptical method he employs, he can trace a man’s life from
childhood to death, presenting essential details in such brief flashes
that we follow a complex narrative simply and clearly and find an
involved and specialized character fully depicted, an important man
revealed to us. With a few breakfast scenes, the progress of a marriage
is shown as specifically as though we had read the wife’s diary. By a
look and a gesture, electricians high above a stage describe the sad
squawks an opera singer is giving below them. The use of an
imaginary “March of Time” provides an outline which allows us to
escape long exposition. Scenes in the great man’s Xanadu never drag,
never oppress one with useless trimmings, yet we get an immediate
comprehension of the unique, absurd establishment, with its echoes
and its art collection, and the one gag allowed (“Don’t talk so loud.
We’re not at home”) becomes just a reasonable statement.

Sometimes I thought there was too much shadow, that the film
seemed to be performed in the dark. Mr. Welles likes a gloom. He
blots out the faces of speakers and voices come from a limbo when it
is what is being said and not how people look that is important. Only
once or twice, at times like these, does the film seem mannered. For
the most part we are too absorbed in the story and its characters to
observe any tricks, too swiftly carried on by its intense, athletic
scenes.

Dorothy Comingore, George Coulouris, and Joseph Cotten are on the

list of the fine players, but clearly it is Orson Welles himself, as Mr.
Kane, the great millionaire publisher, the owner of Xanadu, the
frustrated politician, the bejowled autocrat, the colossus of an earlier
American era, who is the centre and focus of all the interest of the
film. By a novelist’s device, we learn of this man through the
comments of the few who have been close to him, the second wife’s
being the most sensational—that second wife whom he drives into the
grotesque mortification of an operatic career for which she has no
talent. The total impression, though, is not of something entirely
monstrous. Mr. Kane does not come out of all this a melodrama
villain. I think it is a triumph of the film, and proof of its solid value
and of the sense of its director and all concerned, that a human touch
is not lost. Sympathy for the preposterous Mr. Kane survives. Indeed,
there is something about him which seems admirable. I can imagine
that various rich gentlemen who own newspapers may find the
characterization only right and proper, and claim that their sensitivity,
like Mr. Kane’s, has been misunderstood by their intimates, and
others may recognize many a Mr. Kane among their competitors.

With every picture now, Marlene Dietrich grows more and more a
comic. I mean it in the most delightful and flattering sense, for the
lady is very droll indeed, and charming also, in “The Flame of New
Orleans.” René Clair has the direction of her here—the business of
revealing her as a wicked siren of a century back, out to mulet the rich
boys of the bayous. Both the director and the star clearly have a fine
time of it. Her polite rendition of a drawing-room ditty about a
maiden’s blush is one of the bright movie tidbits of this spring. The
story is one of those brittle, tricky items, candidly ridiculous, but its
control proves that M. Clair has managed to salvage his own talent
and leave the mark of his skill upon his first Hollywood film. Men,
though naturally kept busy in the film, are rather kept in the
background. We find Roland Young anxiously scurrying about as an
eligible bachelor, and Bruce Cabot is here, too, as an eligible sailor.
The sailor manages, I noted, to revivify that spark we used to
recognize in the Marlene of the heartbreak days. Now the spark serves
merely as part of the holiday fireworks.

Even Gale Sondergaard (formidable female that she is), Basil

Rathbone, Hugh Herbert, Brod Crawford, and Bela Lugosi don’t
manage to make a good mystery out of “The Black Cat.” The shade of
Edgar Allan Poe, chancing in on the picture, would probably be the
only spectator to remain startled or surprised by the plot after the first
few minutes. Quickly the film shows itself to be the usual kind of
thing about an old house with secret passages, sliding panels,
disappearing figures, reaching hands, and the like. Greedy relatives
and insane menials scheme and maneuver. There are murders and a
goodly number of Hugh Herbert squeals, and cats and kittens. ♦

Hitchcock on Hitchcock
By Whitney Balliett
Cary Grant in “North by Northwest,” 1959.
Photograph courtesy Everett

“North By Northwest,” Alfred Hitchcock’s new study of the vagaries

of the nervous system under pressure, is the brilliant realization of a
feat he has unintentionally been moving toward for more than a
decade—a perfect parody of his own work. (He is not alone on this
peculiar self-maligning eminence, which is already crowded with
such diverse and distinguished people as Picasso, Louis Armstrong,
Hemingway, and Orson Welles.) Indeed, Hitchcock demonstrates
himself to be a master parodist, for the picture, which he produced
and directed and which was written by Ernest Lehman, first flawlessly
reproduces all of his celebrated mannerisms, and then methodically
puffs them all out of shape with a swaggering look-at-me
exaggeration. (This exaggeration is helped immeasurably by two
things: The picture lasts for a bloated two and a quarter hours, and it
has been shot in cheerful color for a wide screen, devices that make
the sinister figures on hand look like red-cheeked baby giants.) Thus,
the story, which involves a successful Madison Avenue advertising
man who is mistaken by enemy spies for a dangerous United States
agent, is a hopelessly attenuated round of mistaken identity, cloak-
and-dagger doings, sympathetic but helpless friendly agents, a double-
dealing woman, and so forth. Cary Grant, who plays the ad man and
is an old member of the Hitchcock stable, delivers his Hitchcock
Grant—tight-lipped, tight-eyed, flippant, amorous—as he never has
before; so much of the film has been photographed in familiar
places—the streets of New York and Chicago, the lobby of the Plaza
Hotel, inside Grand Central Station, at Mount Rushmore National
Memorial—that one tends, because of the effect of innumerable
shocks of recognition, to forget the story for its background; the
endless chase sequences seem to chase each other; and, finally,
Hitchcock’s love of planting the grotesque in a commonplace setting,
as if he were dropping water bombs out of a hotel window on a
crowded sidewalk, is relied upon with such frequency—an official is
stabbed in the back at the United Nations, Grant is hustled out of the
Plaza lobby by two gunmen—that by the time the climax of the film
is reached, atop Mount Rushmore, one is actually gratified when
someone hurtles off George Washington’s nose to his death.

There are two memorable scenes, in which Hitchcock really goes after
himself. In the first, Grant, keeping a rendezvous at a crossroads on a
deserted Illinois prairie, is pursued up and down a hot, rustling
cornfield for ten or fifteen minutes, like a halfback having a
nightmare, by a crop-dusting plane armed with a machine gun. And,
in the second, he is forcibly made drunk on a quart of bourbon, put in
a stolen sports car, and headed for a rocky cliff and a boiling sea
below. The curious thing about this last scene is that it supposedly
takes place in Glen Cove, Long Island, a sandy, flattish place where
the Sound rarely gets more ruffled than the sailboat pond in Central
Park. The locale does recall, however, the French Riviera, which long
ago inspired some of Hitchcock’s best work and which,
understandably, he may feel nostalgic about now. In addition to
Grant, the cast includes Eva Marie Saint as the troublesome woman,
James Mason as the chief enemy agent, and Leo G. Carroll as a
puffing, elderly Secret Service man. Everyone keeps a remarkably
straight face throughout.
“The Scapegoat,” a slow, wilted English-American picture—even its
black-and-white photography looks faded—is based on a novel by
Daphne du Maurier that dwelled pleasantly on the predicament of a
dull, kindly English schoolmaster when he is tricked in to taking over
the life of his double, a selfish, impoverished French count, whom he
runs into in Paris. The movie’s sole pleasure lies in watching Alec
Guinness, who plays both men, and Bette Davis, who appears as the
count’s aging, bedraggled mother. Guinness repeatedly matches his
quiet half-moon smiles and comfortable, sea-dog gait with Miss
Davis’s baking stares and heavily powdered speech habits, which
suggest that she is portraying a college housemother who has seen
better days. It’s a dead heat. ♦

“Mistah Kurtz—He Dead”

By Veronica Geng
Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now,” 1979.
Photograph courtesy Everett

Viewed as a conventional updating of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of

Darkness”—like one of those attempts to make “Crime and
Punishment” meaningful by setting it in the United States in the
nineteen-fifties or to make a movie about interracial marriage
universal by using the plot of “Othello”—“Apocalypse Now” looks
like not much more than a cannibalization. For better and for worse,
the movie confirms the idea that a work of art consists of local
particulars. To use somebody else’s work of art as a skeleton, you first
have to turn it into a skeleton. Where “Apocalypse Now” is least
successful (the last half hour), it seems to have been made by people
who have read Conrad with their teeth. Where it is amazingly
successful (the first two hours), it takes least from Conrad—or, rather,
it takes subtly and delicately, for form and inspiration. The journey
upriver through a place of evil (in Conrad, a dark continent ravaged
by ivory-mad white traders; in the movie, Vietnam) is a beautiful,
classical structure. Francis Coppola’s direction breaks it, with long,
fluid set pieces of horror, into equivalents of the long, fluid
paragraphs of the speech of Conrad’s Marlow telling “one of [his]
inconclusive experiences.” The movie is inconclusive not in the sense
that it is meaningless but in the sense that it refuses to interpret itself
as it goes along. Coppola at his best does not let us remove ourselves
one safe step from what is happening on the screen to the meaning of
what is happening on the screen. Coppola has the “weakness”—as
“Heart of Darkness” ironically calls it—of Marlow: “the weakness of
many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their
audience would best like to hear.” Audiences seem uncertain about
how to respond to “Apocalypse Now.” Perhaps they come in with too
much awe or cynicism; or perhaps because Coppola has spent thirty
million dollars they expect what he spent it on to be doing all the
work. Both times I saw the movie, there were nervous titters, more or
less respectfully suppressed, every time it moved into a surprising
tone. I reacted this way the first time through, and now think I was
wrong to mistrust my laughter. I don’t know what “Apocalypse Now”
is in its entirety (and I am not sure Coppola does), but for most of the
way it is the blackest comedy I have ever seen on the screen, taking
its spirit and tone not from Conrad but from—this is the shortest way
to say it—Michael Herr.

Herr’s reporting from Vietnam (collected in his book “Dispatches”)

shows us a war that justifies Baudelaire’s statement “The comic is one
of the clearest Satanic signs of man”: people living through Vietnam
as pulp adventure fantasy, as movie, as stoned humor, as a collage
that Herr once saw in a helicopter gunner’s house, on a wall near a
poster of Lenny Bruce—a map of the western United States with
Vietnam reversed and fitted over California. Other reporters brought
back pieces of the same picture, but “Apocalypse Now” seems
indebted to the special intensity of Herr’s vision of the heart of the
Vietnam War’s darkness as “that joke at the deepest part of the
blackest kernel of fear.”

Herr also wrote the movie’s narration. It is spoken as a voice-over by

Martin Sheen, as Captain Benjamin Willard, and expectations that
Willard will be someone like Marlow may account for the first waves
of nervous tittering. His first words in the movie are “Saigon. Shit.”
Willard talks in the easy ironies, the sin-city similes, the weary,
laconic, why-am-I-even-bothering-to-tell-you language of the pulp
private eye. “I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a
divorce. . . . I’m here a week now, waiting for a mission, getting
softer. . . . Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission.
And for my sins they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room
service. . . . How many people had I already killed? There were those
six I knew about for sure. . . . Charging a man with murder in this
place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500. . . . Cut
’em in half with a machine gun and give ’em a Band-Aid. It was a
lie.” (Herr’s style in “Dispatches” is not innocent of a certain amount
of macho attitude-striking, but he clearly knows you don’t write the
way Willard talks and mean it. And he shows a flair for parody in a
mock dispatch from an old-guy reporter: “. . . like your kid or your
brother or your sweetheart maybe never wanted much for himself
never asked for anything except for what he knew to be his some men
have a name for it and they call it Courage.”) Our first look at Willard
is the classic opening of the private-eye movie: his face seen upside
down, a cigarette stuck to his lip, under a rotating ceiling fan (all this
superimposed on a dreamlike scene of helicopters brushing across the
screen, a row of palm trees suddenly bursting into flame), and then the
camera moving in tight closeup over his books, snapshots, bottle of
brandy, cigarettes, Zippo, and, finally, obligatory revolver on the
rumpled bedsheets. This guy is not Marlow. He is a parody—maybe a
self-created one—of Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s L.A.
private eye.

The scene where Willard gets his mission—to travel upriver to

Cambodia and kill Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando)—has pulp
overtones, too. The studied business with dossiers and tapes; the
comic-strip-inset closeup of a photograph being passed from hand to
hand; the B-movie readings of lines derived from Conrad (G. D.
Spradlin, a fine actor, as the general: “His ideas . . . methods . . .
became . . . unsound”) and of lines that could only come from a B-
movie (Spradlin again: “Out there with these natives, it must be a
temptation to play God”); the sinister, silent, vaguely Oriental-looking
civilian (Jerry Ziesmer) who finally delivers the most evasive bit of
bureaucratic jargon—it is all so carefully poised between real men
and the trash-adventure-fiction sources of their posturing that we
don’t know which came first, or in which category to respond. When
the young colonel (Harrison Ford), whose nervous throat-clearing
shades slightly toward the comic, says that Kurtz’s Montagnard
followers worship him to the point where they “follow every order,
however ridiculous,” the word “ridiculous” is so off that it starts
another wave of tittering. (Listen, you Montagnards, I know this is
going to sound really silly . . .) You can almost see the line in a
dialogue balloon above Ford’s head. The movie is getting the feel of a
“Sgt. Fury” comic book with almost no distortion. When we hear
Colonel Kurtz’s voice on tape—“I watched a snail crawling along the
edge of a straight razor. That’s my dream”—it sounds like a
description of the scene, in more ways than one. The pace of the scene
is painfully slow. It is the pace of Willard’s perception of whatever is
not war; and how very slow that is we cannot know until we
experience the speeding intensity of what follows.

With the first of its war scenes, “Apocalypse Now” becomes a horror
comedy. It is what “Dr. Strangelove” might have been after the bomb
fell, except that the comedy is not exaggerated and detached from
suffering in a way that tells us we may safely laugh; it is realistic, and
it exists simultaneously with realistic horror rendered with the
physical brilliance and amplitude of “2001.” The horror is not drained
off, as it is by the easy absurdism of “The Deer Hunter,” into a
symbolic game; and the comedy is not drained off, as it is by the
wordplay of “Catch-22,” into a cute craziness. Robert Duvall’s
Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (a “Strangelove” name if there ever was
one; it would not surprise me to learn that it jumped out at the
screenwriters from the page in “Dispatches” that mentions Kilgore,
Texas), who leads an Air Cavalry attack on a Vietnamese village, is
balanced on a razor edge between “Strangelove” ’s Buck Turgidson
and a real man emulating Patton. Kilgore is not, like Turgidson, a
caricature; he is someone who has internalized a caricature. His
surrealistic excesses are generated not by the demands of comedy but
by demands from inside a realistic character. Kilgore is a mutant.
These war scenes, in their horror and comedy, and their relentless
beauty, get at something Michael Herr described: “Maybe you
couldn’t love the war and hate it inside the same instant, but
sometimes those feelings alternated so rapidly that they spun together
in a strobic wheel rolling all the way up until you were literally High
On War, like it said on all the helmet covers.”

There are three such extraordinary sequences in the movie,

progressing from deadly efficiency controlled by Kilgore’s authority
to chaos controlled by no one. They are not parallels to passages in
Conrad but reimaginings of what he described as “imbecile rapacity,”
as “an inextricable mess of things decent in themselves but that
human folly made look like the spoils of thieving,” and as “black
shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish
gloom . . . in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair.” In
the third of these sequences, in an incident almost identical to one
reported by Herr, a black Marine (Herb Rice) with a ghostly
unchanging stare and a kind of psychic aim uses a hand-decorated
grenade launcher to kill a Vietnamese who is some distance from the
bunker. In Herr’s account, the Vietnamese is screaming with pain,
trapped and wounded on the wire surrounding the outpost; in the
movie, he is taunting the Marines with obscenities. In this
transformation of mutual suffering into revenge—and in a fourth
scene, the so-called puppy-sampan scene, in which Willard takes the
view that when you start something, you have to finish it, however
brutally—I thought I detected the tooth and claw of John Milius (who
wrote the screenplay with Coppola, and who was responsible for the
screenplays of “Jeremiah Johnson,” “The Life and Times of Judge
Roy Bean,” and, with Michael Cimino—director of “The Deer
Hunter”—“Magnum Force”). But Milius’s adulation of violence and
will seems to have mostly been held to its proper place by Coppola.
Willard is not Marlow: his narration does not have a deep historical
perspective, and it is spoken in a psychological state as numbed as the
one he is in on the screen. He is not even Marlowe: he is not above
the garish evil that surrounds him. Where Willard is pitiless,
“Apocalypse Now” is not. The men on the boat, whom we get to
know (Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, and Larry
Fishburne), keep the movie from spiralling off into the impersonal,
and we suffer for everyone in it. Though this is a matter of instinct, it
seems to me that “Apocalypse Now” earns every second of its display
of evil, because it has coherence, truthfulness, and conviction—up to
a point.

The point is Kurtz. By the time Willard reaches Kurtz, Coppola has
not made a movie version of “Heart of Darkness;” he has made his
own movie—one in a class with Lina Wertmüller’s “Seven Beauties,”
not just in its somewhat different use of comedy and horror but in its
refusal to go for generalizations instead of particulars. Kurtz, the
biggest, fattest temptation to generalization in English literature, has
no more place in Coppola’s movie than Raskolnikov or Othello. Yet
he is the only character Coppola takes literally—right down to his
name—from Conrad. Maybe Coppola thought he could show us not
just evil but Evil. Maybe he could not think of any other reason to
send Willard upriver. Most likely, he just fell in love with the
romantic idea of Kurtz, Kurtz, Kurtz of the voice, the “bewildering,”
“illuminating,” “exalted,” “contemptible” voice, and with the idea of
Brando as Kurtz. The movie begins to parade big ideas, to partake of
Kurtz’s grandiosity. Coppola is not content with having shown us
Herr’s “joke at the deepest part of the blackest kernel of fear;” he
wants to show us Conrad’s “meaning,” which is not inside Marlow’s
tale “like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it
out only as a glow brings out a haze.” Marlow calls Kurtz “that pitiful
Jupiter.” Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro’s camera reveres Brando’s
shaved skull, defined by a crescent of light, the way “2001” reveres
the solar system. And the movie collapses, as “2001” does, in a final
attempt to show the unshowable. “2001” at least acknowledges the
impossibility of showing it in a normal way. “Apocalypse Now”
falters in conviction, making me feel the way I would have if “2001”
had ended with some stock green men and Brando, in his Jor-El
makeup, as the king of Jupiter.

Reviewing a movie version of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” James

Agee wrote that he could not understand why Gray’s depravity should
“culminate in a couple of visits to a dive where an old man plays
Chopin.” It is no easier to understand why Kurtz’s career should
culminate in a poetry reading. In Conrad, Kurtz’s reading poetry is an
ironic detail, mentioned in an aside by one of his admirers (whom the
movie turns into a stoned photojournalist, rather hammed by Dennis
Hopper); the movie coarsens the reference by staging it as a big
cultural number. Perhaps Milius and Coppola could not write
dialogue that would show off the famous Kurtz-Brando voice half so
well as T. S. Eliot, but this should have told them something about the
pretentiousness of their approach to Kurtz. Coppola might at least
have instructed Brando to read from Eliot as ineptly as he elsewhere
pronounces “primordial” (it comes out “primord’l”), to suggest the
maudlin falsity you hear when criminals quote poetry. If the movie
has an anti-Marlow, why not an anti-Kurtz? When Willard, having
slain the monster, sits down, covered with blood, at Kurtz’s
typewriter, I almost wanted him to start typing and the camera to
close in on the page: “Kurtz was sleeping the big sleep now.” ♦

Bonanza for Bette

By John McCarten
Gary Merrill and Bette Davis in “All About Eve,” 1950.
Photograph by 20th Century Fox Film Corporation / Everett

“All About Eve” is an account of how a young actress progresses

from obscurity to fame. In this it is similar to a good many films that
have gone before it, but Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who wrote and
directed the picture, has been so ingenious in his treatment of the
subject that he has come up with a thoroughly entertaining movie. In
place of the usual heroine of this kind of thing—a bright-eyed girl
who doesn’t doff her Mary Jane pumps until she’s called upon to take
over from somebody like Helen Hayes on Broadway—Mr.
Mankiewicz has substituted an alarming little schemer, willing to
indulge in anything from adultery to blackmail to realize her theatrical
ambitions, and in following her about he discovers an amusing bunch
of people, all of them witty, if not overly wise. As the Eve of this
enterprise, Anne Baxter is always interesting to watch, even when her
claws are showing a trifle too obviously. Among those she scratches
up most furiously are a playwright’s wife of infinite patience, and an
actress so unstable that her own true love describes her as more than
slightly paranoiac. As the wife, Celeste Holm moves ingratiatingly
through a role that isn’t very taxing; as the actress, Bette Davis finally
has a part that permits her to demonstrate, in her high-voltage style,
that when her talents are applied to something worth while she can
really bring a great deal of authority to bear. Purportedly a woman of
forty in love with a younger man, Miss Davis, often in unflattering
makeup, jumps from comedy to pathos to hysteria with utter
confidence, and she winds up by transforming a most difficult
character into a lady who, however shrilly emotional, commands the
sympathy of one and all.

With Miss Davis and Miss Baxter running in tandem through much of
“All About Eve,” the gentlemen in the film have as hard a time
making themselves conspicuous as male commuters at a white sale.
Of them, I guess George Sanders comes nearest to encroaching upon
the ladies. He’s supposed to be a venomous drama critic, but I doubt
whether any of the boys in the play-reviewing line could ever behave
as horridly as he does. For those of you who remember Mr.
Mankiewicz’s “A Letter to Three Wives,” I’m happy to report that
Thelma Ritter, who was so funny in that one, is on hand in “All About
Eve.” Just as funny, too.

In “The Breaking Point,” we have a solid melodrama based on Ernest

Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not.” The locale of the story has
been shifted from Florida to California, and a lady undreamed of by
Mr. H. has been added to the dramatis personae, but otherwise Ranald
MacDougall, who is responsible for the current screenplay, hasn’t
fiddled around too much with the spirit of the original. This time,
Hemingway’s boatman does his adventuring down Mexico way,
having no luck trying to smuggle a parcel of Chinese into the U.S.,
and falling foul of a group of crooks heading away from a race-track
stickup. He also has an interlude with the lady who got into the piece
through the courtesy of Mr. MacDougall, but it doesn’t jar the
continuity at all. As the boatman, John Garfield is excellent, and he
gets fine support from the others in the cast, among them Patricia
Neal, Phyllis Thaxter, Juano Hernández, and Wallace Ford. Michael
Curtiz is to be commended for his direction.

“Two Flags West” tells what happens when a band of Southern

prisoners volunteer to help the Union Army fight the Indians, back in
the days of the Civil War. As you might expect, the Yankees and
Rebels don’t hit it off too well, and they both have a hell of a lot of
trouble with the Indians. Hardly on the subtle side, the picture does
contain as much action as the traffic will bear. Joseph Cotten, Jeff
Chandler, and Cornel Wilde are among the chaps in blue and gray,
and Linda Darnell is around to stir them up. ♦

Sheet Music

By Anthony Lane
Anna Paquin in “The Piano,” 1993.
Photograph by Miramax / Courtesy Everett

“The Piano” is set in the nineteenth century and stars Holly Hunter as
Ada, a fierce Scottish mute with a shadowy past, now engaged to a
man named Stewart (Sam Neill), whom she has never met. That,
however, is the least of her problems; of more immediate concern is
the fact that he lives in New Zealand and she and her daughter, Flora
(Anna Paquin), must go and join him there. For most movies, this
would be a chance for a few maritime scenes—creaking ropes, salty
skin, maybe the odd brigand. Not this one: all we see of the journey is
the dark rushing hull of a boat, shot from below, splitting the water.
The writer and director, Jane Campion, herself comes from New
Zealand (where most of her “An Angel at My Table” took place), and
seems in a hurry to arrive and get her plot going on home soil. What
happens there, on the other hand, is so rich in strangeness that the
whole movie feels like a voyage: the characters are jammed together
and swept along by unmanageable forces toward a destination that
they cannot imagine. Even the country around them looks like the
bottom of the sea.

Ada and Flora come ashore on a barren beach, with their few
possessions—cases and trunks and a crate with Ada’s piano inside. If
anything, the instrument appears to possess her; she reaches through
the wooden slats to press the keys, as if checking that it’s still alive.
This means little to her future husband, who turns up with a party of
Maori helpers and announces that the piano is too hefty to be lugged
home. Stewart strikes you as the quiet type, practical rather than cruel,
although you can be sure that character is as changeable as climate in
a place like this. Before meeting his bride, he rather sweetly pauses—
in the middle of a rank and rotting forest—to comb his hair. But look
at the crease of worry running down his forehead: here is a man
bulging with unspoken troubles—a true Victorian, toiling away at the
extremes of empire yet loath to explore the chambers of his own
heart.

His right-hand man is Baines (Harvey Keitel)—a white man who

spends his time among the Maoris, and has even etched his features
with their tribal tattoos. Baines is supposed to act as a link between
locals and colonizers, but in truth he seems stranded in a twilight of
his own making, the noble recluse who understands the laws of
society and therefore sees no reason to spend his life obeying them.
You suddenly see where Keitel’s career has been heading all these
years: where does that feral face belong, if not in this mist and mud?
Even his accent—a mad brew of assorted Celtic burrs, spiced at one
point with what sounds like Newcastle vowels—is weirdly
appropriate, and when you see his exposed body, the muscles full and
weary with middle age, you sense some of Keitel’s (and Campion’s)
impatience with the glamour of cinema, and their need to provoke us
with bare facts. Like Hawkeye in “The Last of the Mohicans,” Baines
unsettles and seduces without even trying, his wildness affording
others a glimpse of all that is brutal in their own natures: he lets them
into the secret of themselves.

Ada responds to him, as we knew she would; people in this movie

tend to hurtle into the arms of fate, like Thomas Hardy characters
exiled to another hemisphere. Baines buys the piano from Stewart in
exchange for land and fetches it from the beach. Ada is supposed to
give him lessons, but the agreement grows into an erotic barter:
“There’s things I want to do while you play,” he says. “If you let me,
you can earn it back.” And so, as her fingers scale the keyboard,
Baines lies enraptured underneath, tracing a hole in her stocking. The
trade quickens: soon her arms are naked, then all of him, then all of
her. First Flora and then Stewart peer in at the tangle of limbs, and the
plot tumbles onward with terrible logic. Ada has become like Beatrice
in “The Changeling,” her repulsion suffused with desire: instead of
doing anything to retrieve her piano—to get her voice back, as it
were—she will do anything to have Baines.

Holly Hunter digs deep into the role, which is no surprise; what is
amazing is that she took it in the first place. I can’t think of many
Hollywood stars who would have gone out on a limb like this.
Imagine ringing up Barbra Streisand, say, and trying to sell her the
part: “O.K., we’re talking greasy hair here, Barbra. And hoop skirts.
Except when you’re doing full nudity. Oh, and one other thing. No
lines. . . . Barbra? Hello?” Ada is vastly self-possessed yet free of
vanity, and Hunter rises to the challenge with scary compulsion: in
one sharp closeup, she stares straight at you, and through you, and
jerks you back in your seat. With her leached white face and dark lips,
she looks like the beleaguered heroine of an early silent, with one big
difference: she needs no man to come and rescue her. If Hunter had
quailed, “The Piano” would have rung hollow and ugly, presenting us
with a woman who finds vitality through sex in a hut—Lady
Chatterley Down Under. But Hunter looks dead set in her sensations:
recapturing old ones, lapping up new ones, knowing full well where
they are likely to lead.

In the most searching twist of the film, Ada turns her carnal inquiries
upon her husband, who lies there burning with awkwardness: he has
sought intimacy for so long, and now she brings more than he can
bear. Here is stirring proof, if any were needed, of a woman in
command, and it throws him into revolt. So much for the healing
power of love. Through Campion’s mischievous eyes, romantic
overtures are more convulsive than heartwarming, and they stand the
social order on its head. “The Piano” is full of people reaching out to
each other, with unnerving results; more often than not, they simply
confirm their solitude. Mother and daughter communicate in sign
language, but of a kind you have never seen before: choppy and
violent, like a miniature kung fu, baffling onlookers with a furious
defense of privacy. (Occasionally, we get subtitles to help us out, but
they seem beside the point.) At the beginning and the end of the
movie, we listen to Ada’s own thoughts: “I have not spoken since I
was six years old.” It’s a dark and compassionate conceit: what better
use could be found for that exhausted cliché, the voice-over, than to
give it to the voiceless?

From a distance, “The Piano” seems too preposterous for words; but
then, as Ada knows all too well, words merely get in the way. Some
of the finest movies brush close to absurdity, after all, unrolling
emotions that are only inches away from caricature. If you were to see
it on video in a few years’ time, “The Piano” would probably look
obvious and overwrought, but up on the big screen it barely gives you
time to think, let alone have doubts. You just want to look. Campion’s
first feature, “Sweetie,” grew horribly arch as camera angles vied with
the dialogue to be as skewed and offbeat as possible. But there is no
indulgence behind the oddity of “The Piano”: every scrap of it is
blown along by gusts of feeling. When the camera steals up behind
Ada, we seem to be delving into her brain, sharing her vision of the
landscape beyond; you wouldn’t have thought the back of someone’s
head could be so expressive, but a confident director can persuade you
of anything.

There are moments when it all becomes too much, when you start to
flag under such tireless compression—the Maori scenes, especially,
are almost insultingly swift and oblique. “The Piano” is like a highly
advanced brand of cinema-by-numbers: everything matches up; every
detail—from the tearing of a lace gown to the piano itself—is
awarded its correct metaphorical weight. The movie flatters viewers
by inviting them to read it—to pick up all the signs and symbols and
arrange them into an elaborate pattern. It could be argued that the film
is about claustrophobia, of course, but does that mean that the
structure of it should cage you in as well? You can’t help wishing,
just occasionally, for something—a gesture, a joke—to escape the
intellectual game plan of the movie and zip past your eyes for the sake
of sheer pleasure, or for no reason at all. What relief there is comes
from Anna Paquin’s shrewish and sensible Flora—we could be
watching the childhood of Miss Jean Brodie. “The Piano” really needs
her; it has all the virtues of great cinema except relaxation.
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On the other hand, it easily outstrips most of what we see these days,
and any niggling is merely an attempt to pitch one’s admiration at the
right height. So clever and watertight a film may well be forbidding,
but it also picks you up and moves you, and the performers breathe it
full of life. Jane Campion peels back the past and finds it shockingly
alive, in no need of resuscitation. The story worms further into the
guts of Victorian experience than most historical dramas, because it
aims at the most neglected aspect of that age, and the most alarmingly
modern: its surrealism. What other epoch was so explosively polite?
You stare at the early scenes on the beach, with the light on the water
like mother-of-pearl, and the stiff black figures standing there with
umbrella and piano, and suddenly the picture clicks into place: this is
the world of Edward Lear. The sad sage who viewed the world upside
down (because it distressed him the right way up) would have
recognized this forsaken strand, with its funny jumble—all it needs is
the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò. And, like Jane Campion, he would have
known that a stiff petticoat is not just a petticoat but an emergency
tent: you can rig it up, creep inside, and light a lamp, as Ada and Flora
do. (Costume drama with a vengeance.) Indeed, if you try to tie “The
Piano” down as a costume picture, or as a love story, or as gothic
horror, it slips its moorings and drifts away. All these elements are
present, in acute and concentrated form, but they coil together and
drive the film into the realms of high melancholic nonsense. If
Edward Lear ever dreamed about sex, it must have looked like this. ♦