Monthly Archives: April 2016

  • The Face Behind the Mask

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Florey (1941)

    Released as a ‘B’ picture but that is a technicality:  The Face Behind the Mask is a powerful, well-directed melodrama.  Peter Lorre is Janos ‘Johnny’ Szabo, a Hungarian immigrant to America who arrives in New York brimming with hope for his new life.  On his first night in the city, the lodging house in which Janos is staying catches fire.  He suffers horrific facial injuries which prevent his getting employment, even though he’s not only a skilled watchmaker but is willing to put his hand to any gainful employment.  Janos decides that he can’t expect his sweetheart from Hungary, who was to have joined him in America, to be prepared to continue their relationship.  He writes to sever ties with her and is on the point of suicide when he encounters a struggling crook called Dinky, who takes a liking to him.  Janos joins Dinky in a gang of thieves and, through a combination of aptitude and near-nihilism, makes a success of lawbreaking, raising enough money to have a realistic latex mask created to cover his mutilated features.  Janos is both well off and mired in crime by the time he meets and falls in love with a young blind woman, Helen, who’s immediately attracted to his caring civility and gentleness.  She’s as unaware of his crimes as she is of his appearance.   Janos tries to break his criminal ties and start a new life with Helen.  One of the other gang members, resentful that Janos has usurped his position and wrongly believing that he has betrayed the gang to the police, organises a plot to kill Janos – a plot which kills Helen instead.  Janos plans and executes revenge on the gang.  They charter a plane to escape to Mexico.  Janos, in disguise, pilots the plane to the Arizona desert.  In the middle of nowhere, he lets out the plane’s fuel, dooming the gang and himself to certain death.

    Peter Lorre, although vitally eccentric, looks relatively normal and is uncharacteristically effervescent at the start.  It seems Lorre didn’t have a high opinion of The Face Behind the Mask yet he makes something genuinely tragic out of what happens, physically and psychologically, to Janos Szabo.  You barely get a glimpse of Janos’s mutilated face except in his horrified reaction to seeing it in a hospital mirror.  Thereafter Robert Florey shoots Lorre from behind or has his face obscured by shadow – until Janos gets his mask.  (The make-up for this, by the uncredited Ernie Parks, is remarkable.)  When he meets Helen, Peter Lorre gives you touching reminders of the sweet nature that was so in evidence when Janos first arrived on the ship from Europe.  It’s possible in retrospect to see links between the character’s fate and that of Lorre himself, as an immigrant of a different kind in Hollywood, where he mostly failed to avoid being cast as freakish oddballs.  You don’t feel this as you watch the film, though:  Janos’s inability to escape his face and subsequent entrapment in his life of crime are strongly individual and Lorre delivers a finely varied performance.  The strange serenity that he gives Janos once the man’s hope of happiness with Helen has gone is particularly arresting.  Knowing what he has to do, he proceeds calmly and shockingly.

    George E Stone is excellent as Dinky, a character who helps to ground the story in place and time.  Dinky is a criminal because he’s penniless and desperate enough not to mind what Janos looks like.  He remains loyal to Janos and, although beaten up by other members of the gang, is the only one of them who survives.  The gang heavies don’t fit so well – they look more like cops.  Don Beddoe is good as an actual cop, the friendly Irish-American Jim O’Hara, who plays an inadvertently fateful role in the story.  When he meets Janos shortly after the latter’s arrival in New York, O’Hara recommends that he find accommodation in the place that burns down.  Janos keeps O’Hara’s note, sent to him in hospital after the fire, in which the police lieutenant asks him to get in touch once he’s recovered.  (It’s the discovery of this note that causes the envious gang member to think Janos is a police informer.)   The tight screenplay is by Paul Jarrico, Arthur Levinson and Allen Vincent.

    3 September 2014

  • The Club

    Old YorkerFilm review

    El club

    Pablo Larraín (2015)

    The Club gets off to a fine start.  It would be even better in the unlikely event that you didn’t already know what the film was about.  Five people – four men and a woman, middle-aged or elderly, none of them remarkable to look at – are training a greyhound on a windswept beach.  Then the dog takes part in a race – it’s a low-key affair, with the traps set on a piece of common land and the race watched by a straggle of spectators.  The anonymity of these social rituals is oddly absorbing and must increase the impact of finding out who the greyhound’s owners are, if you’ve not heard about Pablo Larraín’s latest before seeing it.  There’s an early hint, though, that the film’s title may not refer to a community of dog-racing fans.   Larraín puts up on the screen at the start Genesis 1:4:

    ‘And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.’

    The setting of The Club is La Boca, a small Chilean beach town.  The four men with the greyhound are retired Catholic priests.  The woman is their housekeeper and an ex-nun.  The group live in a ‘safe house’, provided by the Catholic church, and their exile in La Boca is the result of the crimes they committed during their working lives.  The settled domestic routine is interrupted by two related events.  A fifth priest, Father Lazcano, joins the household.  He has been followed throughout his career, and now to La Boca, by a vagrant man who, as a child, was sexually abused by Lazcano.  This man, whose name is Sandokan, stands outside the priests’ house and describes, in a loud voice and distressing detail, the abuse that he suffered.  Lazcano puts a gun to his own head and fires it.  In the light of this suicide, Father García, a senior priest from the archdiocese in Santiago, arrives.  It’s not immediately clear whether García is a crisis counsellor or if his mission is less benign but his advent fundamentally unsettles the ménage à cinq, as does Sandokan’s continuing presence in the town.

    The use of the verse from Genesis comes to seem ironic.  In visual terms, dividing the light from the darkness is just what Pablo Larraín doesn’t do.  The Club is shot in glum, muted colours and the film has a grainy look.  (The cinematography is by Sergio Armstrong and the art director was Estefanía Larraín.)  The muddy visual scheme is morally suggestive too – of the limbo or netherworld that the priests inhabit.  In an interview in this month’s Sight & Sound, Larraín explains that:  ‘We tried to find a space where none of what you are seeing is clear’.  He goes on to rail against the increasing hegemony of high-definition imagery in contemporary cinema and to make a plea for there to be ‘a different look to each film’.  Larraín undoubtedly achieves a different look in The Club, as he did in his previous movie No, but the effect of this is increasingly frustrating.  Moral opacity is one thing.  Seeing the characters, in simple visual terms, through a glass darkly is another.

    There are interesting complexities in The Club.  The household is resentfully resistant to the prospect of change:  from their interviews with Father García, we get the impression that the priests feel they should also have been left alone to carry on with their earlier, criminal lives.  One of the most startling aspects of Sandokan’s revelations is his idée fixe that a priest’s word is divinely sanctioned, his instructions no less ordained by God when the priest is indulging his paedophilia.  Father Vidal – who adores his greyhound, extols homosexual love and is disgusted by women – is a challenging personality:  Alfredo Castro, behind a pair of spectacles, invests Vidal with a perfectly complementary greyness.  Marcelo Alonso’s García has a good enigmatic quality – it’s hard to tell if he’s deeply holy or wholly foxy.  But some of these elements don’t play out convincingly.  If Sandokan (Roberto Farías) holds benighted beliefs about the sanctity of the priesthood, why does he accuse Father Lazcano from the rooftops?  The pretext for this is that the drug-addict Sandokan is mentally disturbed but he shows relative self-control during most of what follows, until another outburst is needed by the plot:  Sandokan’s symbolic voice, calling the priests to account, violates the prevailing realism of the film’s setting and tone.  Why does Father Vidal think he can get a couple of cheerfully godless young surfers to take out the troublesome García (it’s clear by now he’s planning to close down the safe house)?  The answer seems to be so that these lads can eventually beat up Vidal, when they find out he’s a priest.

    This is part of a sudden onslaught of violent acts.  It’s more shocking because displays of violence have been absent from what’s gone before – even though physical abuse has developed as essential to the texture of the film, both through Sandokan’s descriptions of being abused and his grim anal penetration of a prostitute (Paola Lattus).  The outright violence includes the killing of all the town’s greyhounds and an assault on Sandokan, who’s suspected of responsibility for this.  I found this climax as puzzling as it’s distressing to watch.  It’s as if the priests’ wrongdoings are so heinous that Pablo Larraín needs an expression of appalling mayhem to match or purge them.  The priests haven’t all done the same wrong, though.  Father Ortega (Alejandro Goic) oversaw baby-snatching from unwed mothers, with the babies given to more affluent married women who wanted but couldn’t have children of their own.  The weirdly smiling housekeeper, Sister Mónica (Antonia Zegers), beat an African child whom she’d adopted.  While these things may be in the same league as Laczano’s exploitation of Sandokan, the priests’ complicity with the Pinochet regime, however unlovely that may be, isn’t viscerally outraging in the same way.  I don’t get the killing of the dogs, which is organised by García.  Tony Rayns’s admiring review of The Club in Sight & Sound is mostly cogent but he too is difficult to understand on this point.  Rayns describes what García does both as a response to Mónica’s threat to go to the press about the safe house and as ‘a berserk idea … simply to snatch away the pleasure the priests take in dog-racing’.  Wouldn’t the local press be interested in the canine slaughter?  Can’t the residents of La Boca – and, indeed, the priests – get replacement dogs?

    The Club is a serious-minded but unsatisfying film.  The priests and Mónica eventually succeed in preserving the status quo, to the extent that they continue living in the safe house.  There is, however, an important new resident.  Before taking his leave, García moves in Sandokan.  The latter warns there’ll be trouble if anyone interferes with his complicated regimen of drugs.  Tony Rayns describes the enlarged household as ‘a perfect huis clos that will damn everyone in it to lifelong torment’.  This ending is metaphorically apt – the priests must share their home with the living evidence of their misdeeds – but its force is undercut by other aspects of the screenplay (which Pablo Larraín wrote with Guillermo Calderón and Daniel Villalobos).  Why will Sandokan, in view of the insecurity of his life and his terrible delusions, hate having a roof over his head and co-habiting with men of God?   Sandokan may not be an ideal house guest but, from the secretive priests’ point of view, he may be less of a threat indoors than in the outside world.  Since a main point of the story is that they show no contrition for their past misdemeanours, why will his continuing presence torment them?  What’s to stop the priests, once García has returned to Santiago, from getting back into much of their old routine?

    The soundtrack includes music by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.  There were many typos in the English subtitles.

    4 April 2016

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