Monthly Archives: June 2015

  • From Here to Eternity

    Old YorkerFilm review

     Fred Zinnemann (1953)

    The Pearl Harbor attack may be the film’s most obvious qualification for ‘epic’ status and it’s very well done.  But what’s so impressive about From Here to Eternity is that it fuses – in the physical scale of the action and the relationships between the people in the story – momentous and intimate elements.  It’s this combination that makes it a film that’s outstanding both because it’s first rate and because it’s unusual – an epic without bombast.   The James Jones book was 861 pages in the first hardback edition; Daniel Taradash’s admirable compression of the novel brings the film in just short of two hours.  The screenplay is expertly structured.  There may be the odd moment where the dialogue is too explicit; there are many more instances of writing that’s impressively concise and, because the lines are eloquent and in character, compellingly believable.   When Private Robert E Lee Prewitt tells Alma Burke (professional name, in the club where she works as a hostess, ‘Lorene’) that he loves the army and she retorts that it doesn’t love him, Prewitt’s response is that, ‘A man loves a thing, that don’t mean it’s got to love him back’.  (This is a very rich line.  Alma is in love with Prewitt and he loves her as much as, with the army to love too, he can.)   The conversations between Prewitt and his fellow soldier Angelo Maggio are consistently strong – blending casual and meaningful remarks, revealing character without being obviously expository.  The closing exchange between Alma and the army wife Karen Holmes on board the ship taking them away from Hawaii is similarly excellent in what it shows and what it keeps hidden.  In all these sequences, the acting – under Fred Zinnemann’s acute, sensitive direction – is perfectly judged and has great tensile strength.

    From Here to Eternity is superlatively and imaginatively cast.  Frank Sinatra’s performance as Maggio is justly famous – his desperate verve and humour transform what could have been a mawkish role and make the quietness of Maggio’s death affecting.  As Alma, Donna Reed is so ordinarily attractive that she’s very real; it’s a remarkably empathic piece of acting, without a trace of condescension to the character.  There aren’t that many people in the story yet Zinnemann creates what feels like a large canvass because the characterisations, even in the minor roles, are so ample (thanks to the likes of Jack Warden, in one of his first screen appearances).  Even Ernest Borgnine, who plays the brutishly sadistic staff sergeant Judson, works well here.  As the furiously disappointed wife of the army captain (Philip Ober), Deborah Kerr is cast against type:  no one on the Oahu army base believes in the semblance of ladylikeness that Karen Holmes presents to the world.  Kerr’s bitter emotionality is powerful – she suggests a hysteria that’s controlled only because Karen has become so jaded.   In the prologue to her affair with Milt Warden, her husband’s first sergeant, Karen stands in her kitchen, dismissing and desiring Warden in the same look, the same breath:  the tension is electric.  Except for parts of the long dialogue with Richard Burton in Night of the Iguana, this is by far the best acting I’ve seen from Deborah Kerr.  Her playing usually has a stop-start quality – she conveys one feeling then starts on another; in this film, she’s in an emotional groove.

    Burt Lancaster looks the part as Warden and is persuasive in expressing his divided feelings.  What Lancaster registers through his face has much more resonance, however, than what he conveys when he speaks – his readings are often witty but you can hear him thinking them out.  His movements too occasionally seem too defined (the circus gymnast coming out?).  A surging sea breaking over rocks was a familiar enough Hollywood indicator of sexual congress in the days of the Hays Code.  So the famous scene in which Warden and Karen go for a midnight swim and make love on the beach and the waves still come crashing in is almost comically tautologous – but not quite, because Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr are so convincingly, in her case desperately, greedy for each other.

    Although he knew the music would be dubbed, Montgomery Clift learned to play the bugle for the role of Prewitt so that his movements would be accurate.  The way that he relates to the instrument is so privately impassioned that you believe completely that he’s producing the sound too.  Without jettisoning his famous sensitivity, Clift is physically convincing as a fighting man – a wiry soldier and a highly-rated army boxer.   He’s wonderful in the sequence in which Prewitt tells how a punch he threw accidentally left another man – a friend – blinded.  (It’s his refusal to go back in the ring that causes Prewitt to be victimised by Captain Holmes, who sees the success of the regimental boxing team as the next step to further promotion.)  Clift does an amazing job of conveying a man of strong will but limited intelligence (‘a hardhead’ as Prewitt is called by more than one of his colleagues – an epithet that’s made to seem very right by the boniness of Clift’s skull).  As Prewitt plays taps for the dead Maggio he’s not the only one in tears; Clift’s gesture, as he silently hands the bugle back at the end of the tribute, is beautifully expressive.   When he hears about the Japanese attack, Prewitt, who’s gone AWOL after killing Judson in revenge for Maggio’s death, tries to return to the army base under cover of darkness but is shot dead by a sentry.

    It’s a fine and daring bit of direction on Zinnemann’s part that he makes Prewitt’s death and the immediate aftermath anti-climactic:  Warden praises Prewitt (‘He loved the army more than any soldier I ever knew’) but in death Prewitt quickly becomes anonymous – that is until the piercing exchange between Alma and Karen on the departing ship.  The two women have never met before; Alma has no reason to think Karen knows who she’s talking about as she embroiders the memory of Prewitt.  Karen does know, though.  These are the final lines of the film:

    ‘Alma:  He was awarded the Silver Star.  They sent it to his mother.  She wrote me she wanted me to have it.

    Karen:  That’s very fine of her.

    Alma:  They’re very fine people.  Southern people … He was named after a general.  Robert E Lee … Prewitt.

    Karen:  Who?

    Alma:  Robert E Lee Prewitt.  Isn’t that a silly old name?’

    Prewitt, the man who wants to give his life to the army but is determined to be his own man, is a major character in American film drama.  Montgomery Clift’s interpretation of Prewitt turns him into a great one – the equal of Brando’s Terry Malloy in the following year’s On the Waterfront.

    Fred Zinnemann is one of my favourite directors not least because of what he does with types of film I don’t normally like – with the western in High Noon, with a war film here.   I love things like the opening sequence when Prewitt arrives at the Oaha base to which he’s been transferred:  there are very few people about and every creak of the doors and squeak of the floors registers – the sequence imparts the tang of arriving in unfamiliar surroundings, the way that first impression will soon be swallowed up in others but will never leave you.   (The sound is marvellous throughout – from this first scene to the noise of the soldiers’ breakfast things in the moments leading up to the climactic Japanese raid.)  The switchblade fight between Prewitt and Judson in a dark street is brilliantly staged.  Both figures disappear from view before the wounded Prewitt emerges into a street light and the camera moves to show the corpse of Judson.  Throughout this sequence, in which Prewitt’s life changes irrevocably, the same music is playing from the nearby club.   Zinnemann lets you pick up things that matter without drawing attention to them – Karen’s photograph that sits implacably on her husband’s desk, the calendar on the wall behind that shows 6 December.  As the ship disembarks, the women throw leis into the water, Karen telling Alma that if they go to shore the person who threw them will return to Hawaii; if they float out to sea, you’ll never return. This final image is very strong:  the leis don’t look to be heading for shore (emotionally you know they can’t be) but their movement on the waves is tantalising.

    The film deserved its Oscars for cinematography (Burnett Guffey), editing (William A Lyon) and sound (John P Livadary) as much as the major prizes it won (Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor (Sinatra), Supporting Actress (Reed) and Adapted Screenplay).   The score (by George Duning and Morris Stoloff) and the song ‘Re-enlistment Blues’ (which James Jones wrote with Fred Karger and Robert Wells) also play their part in making From Here to Eternity one of the most richly satisfying of all Hollywood dramas.

    30 September 2010

  • The Artist

    Old YorkerFilm review

     Michel Hazanavicius (2011)

    This is a special film:  that’s largely because, as Sally said, it’s a one-off.  One of the charms of The Artist is not so much that they don’t make them like this anymore (and aren’t going to resume).  It’s rather that they never did.  The references in Michel Hazanavicius’s script to other Hollywood pictures are various in genre and chronological range.   The story evokes, in different ways, A Star is Born and Singin’ in the Rain:  George Valentin, a silent film idol, falls on hard times once talkies take over but is adored by a younger woman, Peppy Miller, who becomes a superstar when audiences can hear as well as see her.   Valentin (Jean Dujardin) has made his name in Douglas Fairbanks-like swashbucklers.  There’s a montage of breakfast table scenes of Valentin and his wife (Penelope Ann Miller) that’s taken from Citizen Kane (although they don’t tell the story of a marriage to anything like the same extent) – some of the shots outside and inside Valentin’s increasingly forsaken LA home also bring Xanadu to mind.  They probably allude to other silver screen mansions too – I’m sure there were many visual references that I missed.   Ludovic Bource’s music is either a mixture of pastiche and themes from other movies – or pastiche throughout:  if it’s the latter, it’s intriguingly sophisticated.  In his interview with James Bell in the January 2012 Sight and Sound, Hazanavicius was likeably candid that he wasn’t going be purist about his frame of reference – as well as in admitting that one of The Artist‘s most admired sequences, when Peppy (Bérénice Bejo) goes into an embrace with the tuxedo hanging in Valentin’s dressing room, is borrowed from Seventh Heaven, and that Frank Borzage therefore deserves the credit.

    There’s a squareness in the verbal jokes that ranges from the triumphantly apt (in the opening sequence we see the on-screen Valentin being tortured but refusing to give in to his captors’ commands to ‘Talk! Talk!’); to the shrewdly cheesy (‘If only they could talk!’ says a woman about Valentin’s dog); to the simply crude (an intertitle announces ‘I want to be alone’ as if this had to be done at some stage).   The recklessness of his quotation makes Hazanavicius’s passion for old Hollywood feel all the richer.  The Artist communicates a love of bygone forms of cinema in a way that Hugo fails to do:  Hazanavicius’s love is almost certainly more superficial than Scorsese’s but it’s transmitted more strongly and directly to the audience.

    Hazanavicius worked successfully in French television for some years before his first feature film Mes amis (1997), which starred his brother Serge (one of the few good things in I’ve Loved You So Long).  Michel is best known in France as the director of  two spy thriller spoofs, both of them box office hits – OSS 117:  Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006) and OSS 117:  Lost in Rio (2009).  These two films starred Jean Dujardin and the leading lady in the earlier one was Bérénice Bejo, who is now Michel Hazanavicius’s wife.   Dujardin and Bejo are reunited in The Artist and it is a glorious pairing.  Both are perfectly physically cast as the film archetypes they’re incarnating; both are equally able to express themselves to a modern audience.  There’s a particular fascination in being able to see the private face of people embodying screen icons of a kind whose performing face is the only one you would expect to be in evidence.   The two actors are actually closer together in age than you’d guess – he’s thirty-nine, she’s thirty-five – but Dujardin’s Valentin, with his burly good looks (including gleaming white teeth and a pencil moustache), appears to be verging on middle age even when he’s at the peak of his screen success.  Bejo is slender and incredibly pretty – easily convincing in twenties outfits and as a thirties star.  They have great chemistry throughout:   their closing tap dance number is elating because it supplies a happy ending and because they’re such a good partnership – and so amusingly different from each other.

    Dujardin is a big bloke:  you see the effort that goes into his being light on his feet but that makes his achievement all the more winning.  Bejo is relatively weightless but her dancing throughout is vividly energetic.   Dujardin has incredible charm and warmth and Bejo a delightful vitality.  What’s so wonderful about their performances and Hazanavicius’s capturing of them is that these qualities radiate from the screen – in a way that seems to connect you to the audiences of getting on for a hundred years ago, who bathed in the glow of effulgent screen stars.  There is a third standout member of the cast – a nine-year-old Jack Russell called Uggie, who plays Valentin’s (unnamed) dog.  Uggie initially brings to mind Asta, the wire-haired terrier best known for his roles in The Thin Man films, but he’s a very different kind of performer.  Asta was beautifully urbane; Uggie’s enthusiastic, extrovert performance almost epitomises the appeal of The Artist and makes him very well suited to the role of Dujardin-Valentin’s best friend on and off screen.  James Cromwell, as Valentin’s scarcely less loyal valet-chauffeur, and John Goodman, as an anxiously mercenary studio boss, give good support to the leads.  Malcolm McDowell appears briefly in the early stages as the man next to Peppy in a queue of auditionees for bit parts.

    The Artist works through a combination of dynamism, clever, self-aware shallowness, and the emotional truth of the performers; the film’s main weakness is that Valentin’s decline and depression are too protracted.  There isn’t enough complication or inventiveness in the plotting to prevent a loss of momentum at this stage.  (Indeed, the film seems almost to be making fun of the simplicity – to put it kindly – of the storyline:  everyone’s problems are solved when Peppy remembers, at the eleventh hour, that Valentin can dance.)  Uggie saves the day in more ways than one when Valentin starts a fire at his house by burning (nearly) all the reels of film that he keeps there:  the dog sprints off to get a policeman and proves his owner’s salvation, just as he used to do in Valentin’s pictures.  Most of the time, though, The Artist is greatly entertaining and Hazanavicius’s playing with sound and silence especially ingenious.   The relatively few sequences without music have a real weight to them; the two interruptions of sound work perfectly – in a nightmare (in which only Valentin can’t speak) and the final tap-dance-until-you’re-out-of-breath sequence.  This culminates in the only two words we hear from Jean Dujardin (‘Wiz pleasure’).  Hazanavicius and his cinematographer Guillaume Schiffman construct many fine images but the finest must be when Valentin and Peppy meet and talk on a staircase and, once they’ve parted, the camera pulls back to reveal not just him descending and her ascending but other figures moving up and down the snakes and ladders of Hollywood fame.

    A very secondary pleasure to be had from The Artist is that Sight and Sound seems unsure how to react to it.   In his editorial, Nick James described it as a ‘satire’ of silent pictures; the introduction to the main piece by James Bell calls it a ‘loving tribute’ to the genre.   That it genuinely is both these things doesn’t alter the sense you get from the S&S pages that the film’s hybrid nature – at various levels – is a little unsettling to their writers.  It’s about cinema history so, in principle, they can’t fail to be in its favour; yet it’s a crowd-pleaser – not so good.  An accompanying piece by Bryony Dixon about the myths of silent screen stars who failed to make the transition to talkies seems to be as vexed by Singin’ in the Rain as by The Artist – and misses the point that there almost certainly were real-life Lina Lamonts and, even if there weren’t, the possibility of there having been is a fine comic idea.  (Dixon’s contribution also seems to miss the point that in The Artist George Valentin is brought low not by a lousy voice but by his arrogant assumption that talking pictures will be a flash in the pan.)  The actual review of the film in S&S is by Tony Rayns, the East Asian cinema expert.  Judging from this review, Rayns has as much difficulty reading French actors as I do Japanese ones (except in Still Walking).  He ends his piece by comparing The Artist with ‘Ernie – the Fastest Milkman in the West’ the novelty chart-topper of exactly 40 years ago.  This damning indictment doesn’t really work for fans of the Benny Hill song like me (and, according to Desert Island Discs, David Cameron).

    7 January 2012

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