Monthly Archives: September 2016

  • The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lewis Milestone (1946)

    There’s a famous scene in Dark Victory (1939) in which the doomed protagonist, played by Bette Davis, climbs a flight of stairs.  The music for the film was composed by Max Steiner.  Legend has it that Davis insisted to the director, Edmund Goulding:  ‘Either I’m going to climb those stairs or Max Steiner is going to climb those stairs but I’ll be damned if we’re going to climb those stairs together’.  A grand staircase is central to the opening scenes of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and the actors on it have competition from not only Miklós Rózsa’s overexcited music but also the visual and sound effects of the major Hollywood storm raging outside.  Yet the big impression made by this hyperbolic overture makes sense: what happens to the three principal characters on the night of the storm, when they’re still teenagers, governs the rest of their lives.

    The opening events of the story take place in 1928, in Iverstown – a Pennsylvania factory town named for the place’s major employer, the Ivers family.  The three teenagers are the orphaned Martha Ivers (Janis Wilson), who lives under the guardianship and the thumb of her rich aunt (Judith Anderson); Sam Masterson (Darryl Hickman), a penniless, streetwise boy who’s about to leave town; and Walter O’Neil (Mickey Kuhn), the conscientious, rather dreary son of Martha’s tutor (Roman Bohnen).  After Martha’s initial plan to run away with Sam is thwarted, they make a second attempt, with the assistance of Walter, until the aunt realises what’s afoot and interrupts their escape.  For good measure, she sets about Martha’s adored pet cat with a walking cane, as Sam slips out of the dark house unnoticed.  (The storm has caused a power cut.)  Infuriated, Martha grabs the cane and uses it to hit her aunt, causing her to fall down the staircase to her death.  Martha insists to Mr O’Neil that an intruder was responsible.  Walter, who witnessed what happened, keeps mum.  His father subdues his own suspicions and confirms Martha’s story to the police.

    Seventeen or so years later, Sam Masterson (Van Heflin), now a roving gambler, has a minor accident on the Iverstown road and returns to his home town to get his car repaired.  Sam looks up the place where he used to live, which is now a boarding house.  He gets into conversation with a young woman sitting on the steps outside.  She is Toni Marachek (Lizabeth Scott), newly released from jail and killing time before she catches a bus out of Iverstown.   She and Sam go for a drink, and Toni doesn’t get her bus:  shortly afterwards, she’s picked up by the police for violating the terms of her probation by having failed to return to her home town.  Sam decides to petition the district attorney for Toni’s release.  The DA is currently standing for re-election and Sam has seen from posters that he’s none other than Walter O’Neil (Kirk Douglas).  Sam also learns that Walter is married to the former Martha Ivers (Barbara Stanwyck), who has put the money she inherited from her aunt to good use.  Martha heads up what’s now a thriving business empire.  The O’Neils’ marriage is not a happy one.  Martha married Walter under pressure from the latter’s father, who threatened to reveal to the police how Martha’s aunt really died.  In spite of his elected office, Walter knows that Martha despises him just as she did when they were teenagers.  Years after the aunt’s death, the police arrested one of her former employees on suspicion of being the ‘intruder’ at the mansion during the storm:  Martha and the O’Neils, father and son, gave evidence to convict this man and send him to his death.   Both Martha and Walter are under the misapprehension that Sam saw what happened on the staircase (in fact he’d already left the premises) and suspect that he’s returned to Iverstown to blackmail them.  Otherwise, their feelings about him are very different:  as the anxious, jealous Walter realises, Martha’s teenage passion for Sam is rekindled the moment she sees him again.

    Robert Rossen’s dialogue is drily witty and particularly enjoyable for its associative quality – stuff about hotel rooms, Gideon Bibles and Lot’s wife, for example.  Rossen’s script derives from a story written directly for the screen by John Patrick, called ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ – which draws attention to the film’s slightly puzzling title:  what’s so strange about Martha’s love?   At just under two hours, the picture takes a little too long to work through its romantic and suspenseful permutations, to pay out the wages of sin to Martha and Walter, and to confirm Sam as the one who got away – but this noir melodrama is absorbing.  The title character is a combination of femme fatale and successful businesswoman and, because Barbara Stanwyck was famous for playing both types, highly convincing.  I’m no expert in film noir but what seemed to me unusual about Martha Ivers was its explicit explanation of what turns an innocent girl into a formidable designing woman.  The teenage Martha is variously wronged by her vicious aunt and lashes out at her for good reason.  The ordinary-looking face of Janis Wilson stays with you and gives a vulnerable, poignant substrate to the adult Martha.  That’s important because, impressive as Stanwyck is, her Martha is less individual than some of her other characters, at least in the fatale aspect.  She’s more striking as the hard-headed, pragmatic businesswoman and as a wife whose only feeling for her husband is contempt.  The two things fuse in a sequence in which Martha dresses Walter’s injured hand, after he’s made a clumsy, failed attempt to get rid of Sam – Stanwyck is stunningly matter-of-fact and cold-hearted here.

    Walter O’Neil was Kirk Douglas’s first screen role.  Of course it’s impossible to see him in it as the film’s original audience did, and not to think that Douglas is seriously miscast as an alcoholic weakling who bores his wife stiff.  It’s especially hard to agree with Sam when he sees Walter’s re-election posters and remarks to Toni, ‘Don’t you think he still looks like a frightened little boy?’  Besides, there isn’t a believable connection or (as there is with Janis Wilson and Barbara Stanwyck) dramatic disconnection between the teenage and adult versions of Walter.  Even so,  Kirk Douglas is more subtly compelling than you might expect:  there are moments when, remarkably, he succeeds in looking physically weak.  The best performance in Martha Ivers comes from Van Heflin.  When Sam Masterson first arrives back in Iverstown, the melodramatic pressure eases and the tempo changes:  this is thanks not only to Lewis Milestone’s direction but also to Heflin’s dictating the rhythm.  As he first talks and gets to know Toni, the viewer gets to know Sam  and gets interested in him:  Heflin’s undemonstrative but expressive acting supplies the human heart of the story.  He’s also highly entertaining. To prepare for playing a gambler, he learned a coin trick and developed a great shadow movement with the fingers of his right hand.  (This movement is so striking that eventually it’s imitated by a man who briefly finds himself in Sam’s company.)   Lizabeth Scott is best in her early scenes with Heflin.  She has a beautiful face and a distinctive husky voice but she’s not able to animate her lines or her character to anything like the extent that Stanwyck, Douglas and Heflin do.  You rarely get a sense of the raw, urgent need that’s surely an essential part of Toni Marachek.  In the short time she’s on screen, Judith Anderson is expert as the deservedly ill-fated aunt.

    1 September 2016

  • The Tin Drum

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Die Blechtrommel

    Volker Schlöndorff  (1979)

    The prologue to this screen adaptation of Günter Grass’s 1959 novel The Tin Drum takes place in 1899, in rural Kashubia.  A peasant woman called Anna Bronski sits in a field that looks onto a bleak, nearly empty landscape.  She roasts on a makeshift fire a few of the potatoes she has dug from the earth.  An arsonist called Joseph Koljaiczek, on the run from the law, rushes towards Anna and begs her to hide him under her capacious skirts.  This unusual first meeting of the couple results in the birth of a baby girl, Agnes.  A year later, the police track Joseph down:  he’s sitting, with Anna and Agnes, in a different part of the same glum countryside.  Joseph once more evades capture – this time he plunges into a lake rather than under skirts – but he’s never seen or heard of again.  He may have drowned; family legend has it that he emigrated to America and made a fortune there.  These facts (or fictions) are recounted in voiceover by the film’s narrator.  This is Agnes’s son Oskar, born in 1924 in Danzig (present-day Gdańsk).  Oskar’s paternity is open to question:  Agnes has two lovers – a German grocer called Alfred Matzerath, whom she marries; and Jan Brodski, a Polish post office worker, who is also Agnes’s cousin.  At birth, Oskar has the mind and volition of an adult – he’s dubious about emerging from the womb at all.  Conversation in the room where Agnes is in labour tips the balance in favour of coming into the world:  clairaudient Oskar learns that, on his third birthday, he’ll receive the gift of a tin drum.  When the big day arrives, he gets the drum but also decides that enough is enough.  He doesn’t want to grow up.  Alfred has left the cellar door open and Oskar throws himself down a steep flight of steps.  No bones are broken but Oskar doesn’t grow another inch.  He also develops an instant, unshakeable attachment to the tin drum and the unusual talent of a scream so piercing that he can use it to shatter glass – and cause havoc – at will.  He make use of this talent whenever he’s angry or threatened.

    Grass’s novel, the first book of his ‘Danzig trilogy’, has been described as a surrealistic black comedy, and a political parable seen through a magic-realist lens.  The novel’s timeframe extends to the mid-1950s, by which time the narrator Oskar is a patient in a mental hospital.  The film, with a screenplay by Volker Schlöndorff, Jean-Claude Carrière and Franz Seitz, ends in 1945, at the point of the German surrender and its immediate aftermath.  At first, Oskar’s willed infantilism doesn’t seem an inevitable expression of his time and place.  His equivocation at the threshold of life could simply be the rational reaction of a precociously developed intelligence.  His uneasy fascination with the primal scene is remarkably vivid (from within a wardrobe, he watches his mother and Jan having intercourse; on another occasion, he assumes correctly they’re doing the same thing when he can’t actually see them) but not necessarily exceptional.  Oskar’s mentality isn’t immediately that of a budding Nazi or Nazi victim but his immature aspect and extraordinary characteristics connect increasingly with the historical and geographical setting.  Oskar’s father might be German or might be Polish, like Danzig itself.  The city, where Günter Grass was born in 1927, represented a kind of lebensraum blueprint and Volker Schlöndorff dramatises this powerfully.  Once the story reaches the late 1930s, Oskar’s propensity for breaking glass can’t fail to resonate with Kristallnacht.   In an early scene on the streets of Danzig, Oskar and other children at play march about chanting, ‘Burn the witch, black as pitch’.  A later scene, which takes place during World War II, describes a party at which Nazi officers, in their cups, are being entertained by the troupe of performing midgets which Oskar has joined.  The sequence ends with the whole company moving in a weirdly martial conga, singing the same children’s song.

    The Tin Drum, which shared the Cannes Palme d’Or with Apocalypse Now in 1979 and the following year became the first German picture to win the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, has two outstanding features.  They are David Bennent, who plays Oskar, and a persistent and distinctive physicality, expressed chiefly through the sights and sounds of people having food and sex, and the preparations for these.  Schlöndorff makes both forms of consumption intimidating and, in the case of the eating, horribly alive.  The film’s menu has a humble starter of charred potatoes but moves on to conger eels that reach shore in the severed head of a horse, and which are even more alarming when their own heads are removed before cooking and their bodies continue to wriggle.  Later on, there’s an aphrodisiac of sherbet powder mixed with spittle.  What lies beneath fabric is a strong motif too:  after that opening scene in which a man goes inside a woman’s skirts, we see Oskar, at his third birthday party, crawling under the tablecloth, where his mother and ‘Uncle’ Jan are playing footsie.  Schlöndorff and his cameraman Igor Luther do a fine job of following up this image, as gross adult legs career in close-up down the cellar stairs to reach the body of Oskar lying at the foot of them.

    The narrative works best in the movie’s first half, where it takes the form of a succession of startling, often funny vignettes.  Some of the sequences in the 1939-45 period are less satisfactory.  For the most part, they seem not as sharp as the earlier ones (at 142 minutes, The Tin Drum is slightly too long); a larger problem is the sex scenes involving Oskar.  (These caused considerable controversy at the time the film came out.)  After Agnes’s death, Alfred employs a girl called Maria to help out in the grocery and subsequently marries her.  Maria is seduced by Oskar and becomes his mistress.  In the story, Maria and Oskar are more or less the same age but this isn’t true of the people playing them:  Katharina Thalbach is twenty-five, while David Bennent is eleven.  It’s hard to see how Volker Schlöndorff could have avoided this difficulty, without suddenly compromising the prevailing physical frankness of the film.  But it is a difficulty.  The strong, emphatic playing of the main adult actors – Angela Winkler (Agnes), Mario Adorf (Alfred) and Daniel Olbrychski (Jan) – is well orchestrated. The cast also includes Charles Aznavour as a Jewish toymaker (Oskar needs his drum replacing every now and then).  Aznavour’s countryman Maurice Jarre supplies an imaginative and effective score.

    I saw the film on its original release, not again until now.  Although I reckon once every thirty-five years or so is often enough, The Tin Drum remains an impressive piece:  it’s important to remember how unusual it was, at the time it appeared, for a mainstream German movie to address the national pathology and traumas of the Nazi period.  It’s impossible to watch the film now without being reminded that in 2006 Günter Grass admitted to having been a teenage member of the Waffen-SS during World War II.  On a sillier level but still hard to ignore:  there are moments, while he has a pudding-basin haircut, when you think the large-eyed, pale-faced Oskar, if he had grown up, might have turned into Angela Merkel.

    31 August 2016

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