Lilith
Robert Rossen (1964)
In early Jewish mythology Lilith belongs to a family of female demons. In Jewish folklore of the first millennium AD she became the first wife of Adam – a woman created not from his rib but from the same earth as Adam. I guess there are women called Lilith but they are sufficiently rare, and the mythic connotations of the name sufficiently strong, that you watch this film expecting the central character, a patient at a Maryland mental hospital called Chestnut Lodge, to symbolise something. It’s clear that she does, although exactly what is less clear, until she explains to Vince Bruce, a young ex-marine who’s training as a therapist and who becomes obsessed with the beautiful, seductive Lilith:
‘I want to leave the mark of my desire on every living creature in the world. If I were Caesar I’d do it with a sword. If I were a poet I’d do it with words. But I am Lilith. I have to do it with my body.’
Robert Rossen adapted the screenplay from a 1961 novel by J R Salamanca. As you’d expect from this writer-director, this is an earnest piece of work and it’s intriguing for the first half hour or so. Rossen is at pains to avoid a conventionally lurid description of a mental institution. In the early scenes, he describes details of routine in the hospital and gets across the idea that life at Chestnut Lodge is normal life for the people there. Because mental illness in Hollywood is a technicolored pathology, the subtle lighting of Eugen Schüfftan’s black and white cinematography certainly helps in establishing Rossen’s sensitive, solemn approach. But it’s an approach that’s eventually pointless: Rossen is suppressing rather than transcending the clichés of his story.
The graphics in the film’s opening titles are based on a spider’s web – a familiar representation of the experience of mental illness. The script includes earnest discussions among the medical staff about schizophrenia – including (I think, although this sounds mad) something about human blood being injected into spiders and the spiders developing schizoid symptoms. But those graphics at the start foreshadow the bromides to come. It’s not too long before Rossen falls back on close-ups of hysterically grinning, cackling inmates and, by the end, he’s filling the screen with artfully composed group portraits of the faces of the mentally afflicted. The film itself is schizophrenic in the old, split-personality meaning of the word: there’s a fundamental conflict between Rossen’s attempts to realise the world of the institution and the metaphorical imperative of the material. Patients and staff go for a picnic to a local beauty spot. Lilith, a gifted artist as well as a baleful spellbinder, throws her paintbrush onto the steep, jagged rocks miles above the Potomac River. Stephen Evshevsky, her devoted admirer, goes fetch and finds himself hanging from the edge of the precipice, from where Vince rescues him. The only thought the sequence provokes is why the Chestnut Lodge authorities would organise a day trip for mentally unstable patients to a spectacularly hazardous location like Great Falls. A similar incredulity pervades another key sequence, when Vince and Lilith go alone together to an equestrian pageant where he takes part in some kind of competition and wins it, and Lilith is crowned his queen.
The clash between the realistic and metaphoric strains is centred on the character of Vince and on Warren Beatty. On the evidence of what we see on screen, Vince becomes completely and unignorably preoccupied with Lilith. Perhaps Bea Brice, a senior colleague at Chestnut Lodge, bats an eyelid but, if so, she’s the only one. And Beatty makes matters worse. Although his intuitive playing is sometimes a relief from what’s going on around him, his presence and acting style are wrong for this role. Beatty is so easily able to achieve emotional intimacy with his screen partners that he has Vince opening himself up to colleagues at Chestnut Lodge from too early a stage. While it’s very soon obvious that his obsession with Lilith is tied up with unresolved feelings about his mother (the First Woman), who also had a history of mental illness, Vince needs to be something of an unknown quantity for longer than he is. Beatty’s emotional transparency contradicts the gradual exposure of who Vince really is. Worse, because he’s conscientious in the role, he dutifully goes through the motions of trying to make the character inscrutable – as a result he becomes laboured and hollow. In the final moment of the film, Vince says to his colleagues, ‘I need help’ and the frame freezes. And the audience replies, ‘Yes, we knew that about ten minutes into the movie’.
Jean Seberg is wrong in a different way. Blonde women who are infinitely deep sexual mysteries are familiar both from Hitchcock and Bergman. As Lilith, Seberg has to do much more acting than the Hitchcock blondes – she has to be more than pictorially fascinating, and she occasionally is. But she doesn’t compare with Bergman actresses – Bibi Andersson, for example – either as an actress or an image; and Rossen’s lack of feeling for the rapturous elements of the material limits her further. Seberg seems to be doing the same smiling sphinx routine repeatedly. As the desperately polite, doomed Stephen, Peter Fonda is conscientious but not imaginative enough to do much with such a ropy idea of a character. Kim Hunter, as Bea Brice, does as well as anyone could with her thin role. The confusions of Lilith crystallise in a scene in which Vince is walking by the home of an old girlfriend (Jessica Walter), who invites him in to meet her husband Norman, played by Gene Hackman. You watch this scene between Hackman and Beatty thinking forward to their partnership as Buck and Clyde Barrow three years later but the dynamic between them even here briefly lifts the film to a different level. Hackman creates a rich character in a very few minutes – there’s such pent-up menace under his hectic, aggressive affability that Norman is a lot more disturbing than any of the inmates of Chestnut Lodge.
3 June 2012