Daily Archives: Tuesday, June 9, 2015

  • Hud

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Martin Ritt  (1963)

    Excellent when it concentrates on the characters, unfortunately inclined to sermonise, but all in all one of the best, most richly enjoyable American films of the early 1960s.   It’s very interesting to see now – as an early example of two, connected kinds of later film.   Hud decries the materialism and moral bankruptcy of mid-twentieth century America.  This isn’t one of its strengths but, in this respect, Martin Ritt’s movie is a pioneer:  once Vietnam, the Kennedy and King assassinations and the permissive society had taken hold of the American psyche later in the decade, these themes became familiar (and often tiresome).   The film is also one of the first ‘modern Westerns’:  the people live and work in places and jobs familiar from classics Westerns – but there’s a prevailing sense that the best days of the culture are behind it.     Hud is based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, who also wrote the source material for The Last Picture Show and, more than 30 years later, co-wrote the screen adaptation of Brokeback Mountain (the seminal first scenes of which, set in 1963, are contemporary with Hud).

    The piece is essentially a four-hander.  There’s Homer, the elderly, honourable cattle farmer;   Hud, his charming, don’t-give-a-damn son;   Lon, the orphaned son of Hud’s brother, who died in a car crash when Hud was drunk driving;  and Alma, their fortyish housekeeper.  All three generations of the men work on Homer’s farm – the central narrative thread is the discovery of foot-and-mouth and the eventual destruction of Homer’s herd.  The domestic details and description of small town Texas life are fascinating.  Alma’s kitchen, the café, the picture house, the pig-wrestling sequence – these capture the mixture of community, tradition and boredom at the heart of the characters’ lives.   Hud is much less satisfying when the characters, particularly Homer, speechify – telling each other what’s wrong with their approaches to life and with the country.    The writing in these bits is flaccid and obvious – in contrast to the terse, funny vernacular that gives the wary courtship of Alma and Hud a marvellous tension.  The stiff verbal explanations seem redundant anyway, given the visual power of Hud.   James Wong Howe’s framing of the wide, empty landscapes, the ranch, and the placing and lighting of the characters in these settings completely convey the spirit of the place and a sense of people left stranded by the passage of time.

    Melvyn Douglas, as Homer, is physically very impressive – the distinguished, weatherbeaten face and the obstinately upright carriage get across the old man’s intransigent, self-righteous nobility, his narrow-minded high-mindedness.  (As Sally said, No Country For Old Men would be a good name for this film too; it’s a notable coincidence that the McMurtry novel is called Horseman, Pass By – also a phrase from a Yeats poem.)  Douglas gives a fine performance as an unyielding windbag – even though Martin Ritt, the husband-and-wife writing team of Harriet Frank and Irving Ravetch and the actor himself seem to share Homer’s idea of himself as admirably principled.    As a result, Homer quickly becomes tedious – except for the moment when he sings along – full-bloodedly and with an assertiveness in which you sense his fear for the future – with ‘My Darlin’ Clementine’, when he goes to the cinema with Lon.   Brandon deWilde may have been cast in the latter role partly because of the resonance of his having played the child in Shane a decade or so earlier;   anyway, there’s a sadness about his presence here, because of that association, because the actor was dead in 1972 at the age of 30 – and, though it seems unkind to say so, because of the gulf between deWilde’s interpretative skills and those of the other three principals.   Even so, Lon’s earnestness – although it may be the actor’s rather than the character’s – is affecting;  Lon/deWilde somehow doesn’t fit easily into the scheme of things and this creates a sense that Homer, Hud and Alma all feel, in their various ways, bad about not doing enough to help him.

    The film’s most famous scene is the one in which the herd are slaughtered; it is impressive but, because it’s straining for symbolic power, the effect is rather to link the sequence with the less good parts of the dialogue.   What’s unarguably and enduringly brilliant in Hud are the performances of Paul Newman and Patricia Neal.    Newman had an unsurpassed ability to play glamorous blowhards and show you the vulnerability beneath the bravado in an unforced way, in a way that lets you both enjoy the strutting charm and feel the underlying desperation.   An exasperated shrug as he walks away from one of his father’s tirades is not only beautifully expressive – it also deflates Homer’s (and the script’s) rhetoric and humanises the scene.  In the same way, Newman transforms the cliché of Hud’s irresponsibility resulting in the death of his brother by showing – and making you believe – how it’s still eating at Hud.  This gives his cockiness a suppressive edge; and his feelings towards his nephew, for all Hud’s easy banter, are uneasy and unresolved.

    Newman’s likeability, in combination with Martin Ritt’s natural sympathy and skill with actors, saves the film from the pompous condemnation of Hud that the script’s set-up threatens.  Yet Hud’s physical approaches to Alma are still uncomfortable; and, when he tries to rape her, it’s actually more troubling because it’s Paul Newman.   The ambiguities in this sequence are compelling – not least because Patricia Neal doesn’t allow you to forget, even when threatened with sexual violence by him, of how strongly Alma is attracted to Hud.   Neal’s acting is an extraordinary example of letting the audience see a character’s feelings even though these are hidden to the other characters.  Hud goes out for the evening, Homer talks with Lon about the ways of women, Alma silently does the dishes – and holds the screen.  When Hud come on strong to her, and she flirts with him, Alma – used, sexy and witty all at the same time – is clearly insisting that her head rule her heart:  Neal creates a wonderful, dizzy rhythm as Alma keeps spinning towards Hud then reels herself back.   The performance is unshowy and doesn’t occupy much screen time; it’s remarkable that, in one of the Academy’s finer hours, she won the Best Actress Oscar.   The film also won Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor (Douglas) and Best Cinematography (black-and-white – but definitely not monochrome).   The rapidly melancholy and sparingly used music is by Elmer Bernstein.

    31 October 2008

  • The Member of the Wedding

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Fred Zinnemann (1952)

    Carson McCullers’ novel, The Member of the Wedding, set in a small town in the American South during 1944, is a brilliant, poetic exploration of the mystery and horror of the coming of self-awareness.  The protagonist, Frances ‘Frankie’ Addams, in her thirteenth year, is thrown by the unshakeable apprehension that she is she and will be until she dies.  Frankie’s sense of difference – she’s unusually tall for her age and still growing apace – and isolation is acute.  Her mother died giving birth to her; her father spends more time at his jeweller’s shop in the town than at home; now Frankie has become aware of her inexorable separation from the childhood routines that have represented security – conversations in the kitchen of the family home with the Addams’ black maid, Berenice Sadie Brown, and Frankie’s younger cousin, John Henry West.  Frankie, alone as never before, is increasingly fascinated by the possibility of connection with other people – at one point she tells Berenice that she wants to know everyone in the world.  She has an elder brother, Jarvis, who is serving in the military and about to be married.  The realisation comes to Frankie that Jarvis and his bride-to-be, Janice (although Frankie has met her only once, and recently), ‘are the we of me’.  Frankie decides that, when Jarvis and Janice get married, she will leave with them and the happy couple will become a threesome.

    Although it describes an event in the poet’s life that occurred just before her seventh birthday in 1918, Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘In the Waiting Room’, written in 1976, is strongly reminiscent of what the somewhat older Frankie Addams is experiencing:

    ‘… I felt: you are an I,
    you are an Elizabeth,
    you are one of them.
    Why should you be one, too?
    …

    I knew that nothing stranger
    had ever happened, that nothing
    stranger could ever happen.
    …
    Why should I be my aunt,
    or me, or anyone?
    What similarities
    …

    held us all together
    or made us all just one?’

    A stronger link exists with the work of Sylvia Plath, who much admired Carson McCullers. Rereading The Member of the Wedding this week brought to mind Plath’s almost explicitly autobiographical Ocean 1212-W (1962), in which the birth of her younger brother terminates the pelagic egocentric unity of the narrator’s childhood:

    ‘… I lay in a watery cradle … [then] one day the textures of the beach burned themselves on the lens of my eye forever. … I who … had been the centre of a tender universe felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones …’

    There’s a chasm between Frankie Addams’ previous summers and the one she is now living through.  McCullers’ novel begins as follows:

    ‘It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old.  This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member.  She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world.  Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.’

    These words chime (in my mind) with the memorable closing sentence of Plath’s short story, Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit (1955), even though its season is winter:

    ‘That was the year the war began, and the real world, and the difference.’

    In the early morning of Frankie’s brother’s wedding day, his sister perceives that:

    ‘… the sky was the dim silver of a mirror, and beneath it the grey town looked, not a real town, but like an exact reflection of itself …’

    Later in the novel, Frankie prepares, after the failure of her attempts to accompany the newlyweds on honeymoon, to leave town alone – she stares at train tracks that ‘gleamed silver and exact’.   Plath obviously used these words and images for the opening of the poem ‘Mirror’.

    Carson McCullers herself adapted The Member of the Wedding for the stage and the play, which opened in 1950, enjoyed great success:  it ran for 501 performances.   I had never before seen Fred Zinnemann’s film, released at the very end of 1952, in which the three principals from the Broadway production – Ethel Waters, Julie Harris and Brandon deWilde – reprised their roles.  The film, intelligent and absorbing but limited in comparison with the novel, was not a hit with audiences and it’s not difficult to see why.  If you know the book, the movie’s successes and failures in expressing its qualities are of real interest; if you don’t, the story that Zinnemann, working from a screenplay by Edna and Edward Anhalt, tells is liable to be, to say the least, puzzling.   It’s inherently difficult for film to recapture something like the repetitive routine of the kitchen chats in The Member of the Wedding; McCullers, on the printed page, manages to convey this even though she’s relating, for the most part, the conversations of one particular day.  Something Zinnemann might have done was use the soundtrack of a radio – in the novel this provides a nearly continuous background in the kitchen (and when the radio is switched off the silence is eloquent).  Alex North’s score, although good enough in other respects, is no substitute for this.

    The film also exhibits a familiar nervousness about adapting ‘talky’ material for the screen.  The tactful movement of Zinnemann’s camera guards against the scenes in the kitchen becoming static but he and the Anhalts succumb to the temptation to dramatise events as they occur and the effect is counterproductive.  The impact of the arrest and imprisonment of Berenice’s brother, Honey, and of John Henry’s death from meningitis is much greater in the novel, in which they are described retrospectively.  (That allows you to understand how Frankie has – and hasn’t – succeeded in assimilating her experience of these happenings.)  The crime in which Honey is involved and the news of John Henry’s grave illness are diluted in the film by being inserted as linear plot developments. The screenplay re-orders Frankie’s experiences outside her home and thus reduces the sense of her venturing into another world before the wedding; instead, you’re given the impression that her encounter with a soldier in the town is, like her short-lived attempt to run away from home, merely a reaction to her not getting her own way about joining Jarvis and Janice on their honeymoon.  Nevertheless, the Anhalts do retain plenty of Carson McCullers’ beautiful, witty dialogue and narrative – and (if they’re not simply repeating what McCullers had written for the stage adaptation) they do a creditable job of turning some of the narrative into dialogue.

    Ethel Waters is a noble, splendid presence but that presence is wrong for the role of Berenice.  In the novel, Berenice, although she’s hefty, is short of stature, and not without reason; the lack of height is a physical expression of gangly Frankie’s feeling of unstoppable separation from the woman who has been the most stable, reassuring presence of the girl’s childhood.  (It’s her growing spurt that has also caused Frankie’s father to tell his daughter that she’s too big to continue to sleep in his bed, which she’s always done until now.)  Ethel Waters is monumentally maternal.  When Berenice, with Frankie and John Henry cuddling up to her, leads them in singing the famous spiritual ‘His Eye Is On the Sparrow’, the power of Waters’ voice reinforces her comforting massiveness – the two children look to be nestling in the everlasting arms.  (The song seems a wrong choice anyway:  its lyric confirms the powerful sense of security radiated by Ethel Waters, when the atmosphere in the kitchen on this particular afternoon should be fraught with a sense of something ending, of uncontrollable uncertainty.)  Ethel Waters is also more benign than the persistently (though lovingly) contrary Berenice of the book:  Waters’ Berenice, although exasperated by Frankie’s flights of fancy and melodramatic volatility, is not a natural scold.   Waters is superb, though, in the very last scene of the film, in which Berenice – who knows, as the family prepare to move house, that Frankie will leave her behind – appears to have shrunk physically.  The effect may be thanks in part to how cleverly Fred Zinnemann photographs Waters but I think it’s also thanks to her own physical acting skills.

    Although it was her first film, Julie Harris was coming up twenty-seven when The Member of the Wedding was made.  It’s naturally difficult to avoid judging her portrait of a pre-pubertal child as quite-remarkable-considering, but here goes.  It may well not have been a problem on stage but there are times, as the camera comes in close, when Harris’s face is unmistakeably that of a young woman pretending to express a child’s artlessness.  But there are also times when, magically, her face really is that of a twelve-year-old.  Harris convinces with the raw voice she gives to Frankie, and with the gestures – dynamic, expansive but still angrily frustrated.  She also succeeds in making the tomboyish child androgynous to such an extent that, according to Pauline Kael, some viewers of the film on its original release were confused into thinking Frankie was a boy.  Casting an adult in the role of an unusually tall child doesn’t pay dividends as much as it might have:  Fred Zinnemann tends to shoot Harris to make her look smaller – as if that will also make her seem younger.   There is, though, at least one moment that’s enhanced by Harris’s actual height.  The film begins to suffer a loss of narrative rhythm once it moves outside the kitchen but the scene in which Frankie has to be dragged from the newlyweds’ car and stumbles to the ground, screaming and weeping, is really upsetting.  Because she’s played by a grown woman, Frankie here is an unignorable physical presence – this makes it impossible to minimise the incident, to dismiss Frankie’s despair as ‘merely’ childish.  Julie Harris’s performance is the most dependent on familiarity with the novel:  the character of Frankie is bound to be reduced without Carson McCullers’ description of all that’s going on inside her head.  But if you know the book then Harris’s interpretation of Frankie works extremely well.

    As John Henry, Brandon deWilde is more physically robust than you might expect (this is a ten year old playing a six year old) but he gets the boy’s eccentricity very well – and he’s funny mincing around the kitchen in Berenice’s hat and shoes.  It’s hardly surprising, given the sexually ambiguous aspects of both children, that The Member of the Wedding has attracted critical interest as ‘queer’ literature; and the theme runs deeper than Frankie’s crew cut and John Henry’s infant transvestism.  When the three conversationalists discuss how they’d like to change the world, Berenice recommends that everyone should have the same (light brown) skin colour, Frankie that boys should be able to change into girls and vice versa, and John Henry that people should be half-male, half-female.   The playing of the minor characters is adequate but no more than that:  the film’s supporting cast includes William Hansen (Mr Addams), Arthur Franz (Jarvis), Nancy Gates (Janice), James Edwards (Honey), Harry Bolden (T T Williams, Berenice’s current beau) and Dickie Moore (the soldier).

    2 November 2014

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