Daily Archives: Friday, November 13, 2015

  • The Queen of Spades

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Thorold Dickinson (1949)

    I wanted to see The Queen of Spades for Edith Evans so of course I’m glad I did see it.  This is an impressive film in many ways but, for me, an eventually unsatisfying one.  Introducing it at a members only screening at BFI, Philip Horne from UCL spoke for much too long and in too much detail but one of the words he used to describe Thorold Dickinson’s film-making style has stayed in my mind – ‘rapidity’.   The images in The Queen of Spades move with a nearly disorienting speed and fluency:  most obviously in sequences where movement is the salient feature, such as couples dancing, but in less expected contexts too, as when Suvorin moves anxiously down a snowy street – under cover of darkness but unable to hide in the whiteness.  Otto Heller’s camera, like the film’s protagonist, seems never at rest.  Some of the gothic details of this psychological horror story – a ghostly presence is signalled by windows flung open, a curtain flapping, a gale blowing outside – are familiar but have unusual energy.  The picture was made on a small budget and production began at a few days’ notice:  it’s an incredible achievement.  But the dramatisation of an obsession naturally depends heavily on the actor playing the character in the grip of that obsession.  As Captain Suvorin, the embittered, penniless Russian officer who tries to earn his fortune playing cards, Anton Walbrook is accomplished and hard-working but he neither draws you into Suvorin’s desperate avarice nor makes you recoil from it.   Because you’re not involved with or repelled by him, watching the captain get his comeuppance is an uncomfortably dispassionate experience:  you know it has to happen and serves him right but it doesn’t feel like just desserts.

    The Queen of Spades, adapted by Rodney Ackland and Arthur Boys from a short story by Pushkin (also the source of operas by Tchaikovsky, among others), is set in St Petersburg in the early nineteenth century, when faro was all the rage, and vast sums were wagered on it.  (It takes its title from notoriously the unluckiest card in the pack.)  At the start, Suvorin watches other officers gambling but he never himself plays faro.  One night, he hears a story from one of his fellow officers about this man’s grandmother – an octogenarian countess who, as a young woman, lost a fortune then won it back, thanks to three cards.  Suvorin determines to meet the old Countess Ranevskaya and to find out the secret winning formula.  Anton Walbrook hasn’t the depth or the nimbleness of the film he’s in; what’s more, he’s best in the bits that inevitably matter less.  When Suvorin is keeping his own counsel, you sense something in reserve; when he expresses his anguished feelings, Walbrook’s more is less.  After getting into the Countess’s bedchamber and as he yells at her to tell him her secret, his acting is conventionally melodramatic.  He’s good when Suvorin first finds out what the three cards are and bellows euphorically into his bedclothes.  But even in the climactic scene, in which he plays what he knows will be a winning hand yet loses all, Walbrook isn’t particularly exciting (although Dickinson’s construction of the sequence is).

    Edith Evans made her debut in talking pictures here (her previous film appearance was in East is East in 1916).  Philip Horne told us that Evans – advised (by Alec Guinness) not to overdo things for the camera – underdid them to the extent that Dickinson struggled to get any sort of performance out of her at all.   Horne seemed a bit sniffy about Evans but, watching her as the ancient countess, you soon know you’re in the presence of a great screen actress.   Countess Ranevskaya walks with real difficulty – the awkwardness and slowness of her movement, the sense that it expresses the weight of her many years psychologically as well as physically, is brilliantly communicated.  When Suvorin implores the old lady to reveal her secret, Evans’s mixture of fear and contempt is astonishing.  Before the scene is out, the countess has suffered a fatal heart attack but the eye that we see is wide open and, through the magic of Edith Evans, is both dead and watching her uninvited guest.  The Countess doesn’t seem quite to have stopped breathing either:  at first I thought this was unintentional and real evidence of Evans’s inexperience on screen but of course it’s connected with that unclosing eye.  It anticipates the startling moment when Suvorin goes to the Countess’s funeral service and is terrified by the signs of life he’s convinced he sees when he looks into her open coffin.

    Yvonne Mitchell also made her screen debut here, as the Countess’s ward, who’s in love with Suvorin.  Mitchell has an attractive vulnerability but also a distinctive (in this company) reality, that’s shared by Mary Jerrold as the Countess’s loyal servant, who looks almost as old as her mistress.   Miles Malleson is, as usual, enjoyable, as a tipsy money-lender.  The cast also includes Ronald Howard, Michael Medwin and Athene Seyler.  Philip Horne quoted the composer Georges Auric as saying he didn’t realise until he composed the music for The Queen of Spades that he could write Russian music:  Auric’s score sounded pretty Hollywood to me.

    13 June 2011

  • The Lives of Others

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Das Leben der Anderen

    Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck  (2006)

    The Lives of Others isn’t a great film but it has great things in it:  an historically important subject, a finely written central character realised by an outstanding actor, and the best ending – with the most perfect closing line – of any movie of the first decade of this century.   This was the writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s first feature – he was only thirty-two when the film was released – and it’s an amazingly mature piece of work.  (It’s a mystery to me that he’s made only one movie since – The Tourist in 2010.)  The protagonist is the Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler, who comes to obey the dictates of his conscience rather than the orders of his superiors in the East German secret police.  Wiesler is played by Ulrich Mühe, who spent most of his life in East Germany and was politically and publicly active in speaking out against the Communist regime there.  Mühe died, aged only fifty-four, soon after The Lives of Others was released (at least he survived long enough to see its international success).  The film, in retrospect, represents a summation of both his personal experience and his professional career.  Mühe gives the performance of a lifetime in more ways than one.

    What’s not so great in The Lives of Others is the writing, acting and direction of those parts of the story which don’t directly involve Wiesler.   The film is a true political thriller, with plenty of suspenseful moments, but the drama of the relationship between the successful playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and the actress Christa-Marie Sieland (Martina Gedeck) plays out unsurprisingly, and Sieland’s actressy quality too often feels less an expression of the character than of Martina Gedeck.  There’s a lot of Gabriel Yared’s music and the subplot centred on the ‘Sonata for a Good Man’, although it’s crucial to the start of Wiesler’s change of heart, contains the film’s most conventional moment.  Dreyman is given the sheet music for the piano sonata by a black-listed theatre director, Albert Jerska (Volkmar Kleinert), who shortly afterwards hangs himself.  Perhaps Jerska did give Dreyman the sheet music simply in order for his grief- and conscience-stricken friend to play it on receiving the news of Jerska’s suicide – but this comes over as a bit of plotting that’s merely convenient to Donnersmarck.  The power relationships within the Stasi hierarchy are pretty obvious, although Ulrich Tukur is excellent as Wiesler’s superior Grubitz:  he makes this dislikeable but shrewd man a human being rather than merely a representative of the system.  There’s a good scene in which a young man tells a joke about Erich Honecker (and it’s a good joke) and pays the price.  The young man’s reappearance towards the end of the film is in the nature of a joke too.  After the authorities realise that he obstructed their investigation into Dreyman, Wiesler is demoted to a minor clerical job in the bowels of a government building.  He spends his days there steaming open letters and we see him at work – just as a co-worker tells him that the Berlin Wall has fallen.  This co-worker is the indiscreet joker.  There’s a streak of superficially effective symbolism running through The Lives of Others:  the affair between the repulsive government minister Hempf (Thomas Thieme) and the drug-dependent Sieland – artists being screwed by the East German establishment – is central to the story.

    Wiesler and Mühe are something else.  I remember hearing, at the margins of a committee meeting at work, a German history professor telling other committee members that The Lives of Others was a fiction, that there was no record of any reasonably senior Stasi officer doing what Wiesler did.  Ulrich Mühe creates a truth that transcends historical fact; and the symbolic aspect of Donnersmarck’s script is much richer in his writing of Wiesler.  A life that’s reduced to spying on others, as Gerd Wiesler’s is, epitomises the GDR modus vivendi more generally yet his psychology is made fully individual.  It’s Wiesler’s solitariness and the fact that he’s drawn to the relationship between Dreyman and Sieland – a relationship between two artists – that makes his conversion so fascinating.   (At one point, Wiesler steals a Brecht text from Dreyman’s apartment.)   Ulrich Mühe discloses Wiesler’s thoughts and feelings to the audience in a way that convinces us no one on screen will perceive what we perceive.  Wiesler knows how to keep a secret:  invading privacy is his bread and butter.   In the closing stages, we see – and Dreyman watches – Wiesler walking along the street with his trolley of mail to deliver.   Ulrich Mühe’s walk is a perfect example of how a great actor can embody and, at the same time, illuminate anonymity.   Mühe is reminiscent of Gene Hackman in this respect and Wiesler’s line of work and bleak existence naturally bring to mind Hackman’s Harry Caul in The Conversation.   The difference, of course, is that Wiesler becomes an unsung hero:  the happy – triumphant – ending of The Lives of Others has such an impact – I feel a thrill and the prick of tears just thinking about it now.  It’s right that Dreyman doesn’t speak to Wiesler at the end.  But we have the privilege of witnessing what happens when Wiesler goes into a store to buy Dreyman’s new book.

    29 April 2012

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