Monthly Archives: December 2017

  • Mandingo

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Richard Fleischer (1975)

    ‘Expect the savage.  The sensual.  The shocking.  The sad.  The powerful.  The shameful … all that the motion picture has never dared to show before.  Expect the truth.  Now you are ready for Mandingo.’

    I took my seat prepared to experience everything the wordy poster for Richard Fleischer’s film advised.  Expectations were largely disappointed though the film is occasionally shocking and, all told, verges on shameful.

    Based on a ‘big, bold, best-seller’ of 1957 by Kyle Onstott, adapted for the screen by Norman Wexler, Mandingo centres on racist structures and atrocities in the antebellum South and the coming of age of Hammond (Perry King), the son of plantation owner Warren Maxwell (James Mason).  Hammond marries his nympho-dipso cousin Blanche (Susan George) but soon suspects that she’s had incest with her brother Charles (Ben Masters).  Hammond buys a black woman called Ellen (Brenda Sykes) as a sex slave and gets her pregnant.  He also buys, at greater expense, a Mandingo slave, Ganymede (Ken Norton), known as ‘Mede’, and trains him to be a successful and, from Hammond’s point of view profitable, bare-knuckle prize-fighter.  While the men are away from the plantation, the spiteful, drunken Blanche horsewhips Ellen, who falls downstairs and loses her baby.  When she receives a ruby necklace from Hammond, Blanche assumes she’s set for a reconciliation with him until, at dinner one night, she sees that Ellen, who is serving the meal, is wearing matching ruby earrings.  Blanche pulls off her necklace and chucks it in her soup. The next time that Hammond is away, she seduces Mede.  Warren Maxwell, getting impatient for a grandchild, locks Hammond and Blanche in a room together.  He seems to have achieved the desired result when Blanche announces she’s expecting.  A thaw in relations between her and Hammond lasts only until Blanche gives birth to a mixed-race baby, who is killed on doctor’s orders.  Hammond takes revenge on his faithless wife by poisoning her.  He then orders Mede into a cauldron of boiling water.  When Mede refuses, Hammond shoots him and, when he falls into the cauldron, uses a pitchfork to drown him.  An elderly slave called Agamemnon (Richard Ward), although he’s previously reproached Mede for Uncle Tomism, grabs Hammond’s shotgun and threatens him with it.  When Warren Maxwell arrives on the scene, branding him a ‘crazy nigger’ and demanding that he put the weapon down, Agamemnon shoots Warren instead and makes his escape.  Hammond weeps by his father’s dead body.  Mandingo ends, as it began, with Muddy Waters on the soundtrack, singing a bluesy song with music by Maurice Jarre.

    Mandingo exploits themes that are hackneyed but commercially reliable; American critics who’ve slated the film and made it notorious may also have helped ensure its box-office success.    Kenneth Robinson in the Spectator made the point that the contemptuous reception of the film in the US press was encouraging – on the dubious grounds that, not many years ago, any picture with a racial setting of this kind would have been taken seriously and even treated reverently.   It’s ironic, in relation to Robinson’s comments, that the people who made Mandingo seem to think they’re protected by the Hollywood tradition of using the iniquities of pre-Civil War plantation life to make morally serious comment.  The producer Dino De Laurentiis and Richard Fleischer want to pretend that a tough subject demands tough, uncompromising treatment.  But all this makes the picture sound hotter to handle than it is.  Every so often, Fleischer manages to leer.  A brothel door opens just wide enough to present a full-frontal nude employee; another prostitute gets so turned on by Mede that the towel covering her wobbling breasts slips off without her noticing.  For the most part, though, Fleischer handles the excitative aspects rather dutifully.  The sex is presented with a minimum of salacious flair.  The violence – whippings, fist fights, even the final carnage – is low on visceral effect.

    The characters are Southern potboiler stereotypes.  There’s the tyrannical but straight-talkin’ paterfamilias; the son who has a conscience of sorts but will (therefore) never be the man his father is;  the spoilt belle-bitch; the silent, suffering black man who, against his will, demonstrates an ability to give a white woman what her white husband can’t or won’t; the nice, relatively sexless black house staff.  The slaves have fancy, allusive names – as well as Ganymede and Agamemnon, there’s Lucretia Borgia (Lillian Hayman).   At moments, Richard Fleischer seems easily shocked:  James Mason’s character refers to an abolitionist as a ‘bastard’ and the word reverberates on the soundtrack as if to imply we should be shocked by such reactionary profanity.

    Susan George is quite powerful in Blanche’s nasty, petulant rages but overdoes the constant breathlessness.  Perry King gives a clear, competent performance as Hammond and Brenda Sykes does well in the underwritten role of Ellen – with her lovely, doomed features, Sykes manages to be touching without pushing for sympathy.  The heavyweight boxing champion Ken Norton is, in terms of physical qualifications, an obviously suitable choice for Mede but he’s not so good when he tries to act.  Mede’s offended stares at Hammond are plain inexpressive – they suggest no feeling of hurt, betrayal or humiliation.  Norton speaks in an unassured, actorish voice – he sounds too well spoken and is incongruous in a film in which plenty of the dialogue is hard to make it.  The other most clearly audible performer is James Mason, who manages to turn the climactic mayhem into comedy.  Mason’s Deep South accent, shaky throughout, switches unexpectedly into Afrikaner for Massa Maxwell’s crucial abusive jeer at Agamemnon.   I wish I could believe this was an intentional attempt to draw a racist parallel between the southern states of nineteenth-century America and present-day South Africa.

    [1970s]

  • The Magic Flute

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Trollflöjten

    Ingmar Bergman (1975)

    BFI screened The Magic Flute as a curtain-raiser to the Ingmar Bergman centenary retrospective that will run during the first three months of 2018.  As the audience took their seats – it was nearly a full house albeit in NFT2 – I wondered how many people were primarily aficionados of Bergman or of opera.  I was in the first camp to the extent of being keen to see a Bergman film in spite of its being an opera.  I can’t defend this philistinism but there’s no point denying it.  I’ve seen only two live performances of opera in my life – Britten’s Peter Grimes, when I was twelve years old, and Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West, when I’d just turned thirty.   The Peter Grimes was a school trip to the Grand Theatre in Leeds, one Wednesday evening in 1968.  I remember a female character, in a scene with Grimes’s boy apprentice, yelling ‘A bruise!’ and that the evening was very long – nothing more.  The Puccini, in December 1985, was probably the same venue.  All I recall of that one is screens at either side of the stage – intertitles regularly flashed up on them to give the production a vague, spurious silent-movie flavour.

    The dual inspiration for Bergman’s film is his love of The Magic Flute, rooted in a production that he saw at the Royal Opera in Stockholm when he (too!) was twelve, and his feelings for the Drottningholm Palace Theatre (also in Stockholm) – one of the few eighteenth-century Baroque theatres in Europe whose original stage machinery is still in use today.  Although Bergman’s introductory outdoor shots are of the Drottningholm’s exterior, the place, according to Wikipedia, ‘was considered too fragile to accommodate a film crew.  So the stage – complete with wings, curtains, and wind machines – was painstakingly copied and erected in the studios of the Swedish Film Institute’.  (The setting was designed also to ‘approximate the conditions of the original 1791 production’ of The Magic Flute in Vienna.)  Bergman doesn’t, for the most part, ‘cinematise’ the material.  He prefers to place Mozart’s opera within the framework of what he presents as an actual theatrical event.

    The first ten minutes or so of the film served to remind me why I lack the patience for opera.  During the overture, Bergman’s camera moves among the theatre audience.  He observes these faces then, because there’s plenty of overture still to get through, observes a good few of them again, although they don’t express anything different second time around.  This chimes with the maddening reiteration that seems essential to opera:  in order to accommodate the music, the performer often has to elaborate a mood or repeat behaviour long after you’ve got the point and want them to Move On.  There’s another difficulty with Bergman’s intro.  Some of the faces he selects are remarkable but their individuality is gradually upstaged by their collective ethnic diversity.  Bergman’s message is that anyone can enjoy opera, regardless of age, race or cultural background.  This is so obviously the case, in theory, that drawing attention to it in this way – and at length – amounts to a tiresome platitude.  Things may be (or have been) different in Sweden but the notorious expense of opera seats at the main London venues suggests this open-to-everyone message is patronisingly phony too[1].

    Once Bergman and Sven Nykvist move from the auditorium to the stage, however, The Magic Flute takes off.  I liked the film a lot, though I admit there’s a ‘considering it’s opera’ qualifier to saying this.  As someone who tends to find most stage acting primitive compared with halfway good screen acting, I can hardly bear to watch the performers in filmed opera (either televised stage productions or made-for-TV versions of opera I’ve occasionally come across).   Bergman was evidently well aware of this difficulty and perhaps uniquely well equipped to get round it.   He’s on record as saying that:

    ‘The most important thing for me was that the singers had natural voices, not schooled, but the kind of voice that comes straight from the heart.  There are synthetic voices that sound wonderful, but you can’t see from the singers’ faces that they are singing.  I want people who sing with their entire being.’

    Even that doesn’t guarantee passable acting on camera but Bergman’s experience of using actors’ faces in extreme close-up (and for mask-like effect) serves him well.  Josef Köstlinger (Tamino) and Irma Urrila (Pamina) have good looks suitable for their hero and heroine roles; though their faces aren’t notably mobile or eloquent, Bergman makes the most of them.  He concentrates especially on one face in the theatre audience – that of a young girl (Helene Friberg), whose reactions to what she sees on the stage develop into a virtual leitmotif.  Although the girl’s mixture of wonderment and impassivity is occasionally intriguing, this device is overworked but you do sympathise with her expression at one point, immediately after the happy ending for the story’s light-relief character.  The bird-catcher Papageno (Håkan Hagegård) has found his soulmate Papagena (Elisabeth Erikson); the pair anticipate the many offspring they’ll produce.   It seems right that the child’s face darkens as Papageno leaves the stage and Tamino and Pamina return to it to resume the trials that will prove their love – not only because this is a return to relatively serious business but also because this is clearly the last we’ll see of Papageno.

    My exposure to the form is so limited that it may not mean much to say this but I’ve never seen anyone perform an operatic role as appealingly as Håkan Hagegård does Papageno.  He combines fine baritone singing with first-rate characterisation.  His humour is unforced.  His face has a delightful warmth and animation.  As Papageno prepares to make a light-hearted suicide attempt, he trills on his bird-catcher’s whistle, more in hope than expectation that anyone will respond; the emotional registers of these trills are beautifully differentiated.  After Hagegård’s, the performance I liked best was Ulrik Cold’s commanding but nuanced Sarastro, the apparently evil high priest who turns out to be a force for enlightenment and progress.  The blacked-up face of Ragnar Ulfung as the Moorish villain Monostatos was hard to take – a pity Bergman didn’t record the reactions of the non-white faces in his on-screen audience to this casual racism.  It was interesting to discover that the Queen of the Night (Birgit Nordin)’s famous (gruesome) coloratura is not, as I’d always assumed, an expression of delight in her malicious powers but a disownment of her daughter Pamina.

    It may have helped my enjoyment somewhat that The Magic Flute is a singspiel – even though, when it comes to handling dialogue, Håkan Hagegård is in a different class from everyone else.  Emanuel Schikaneder’s lavishly preposterous libretto, as well as functioning as an extended plug for Freemasonry, demonstrates that love conquers death but Ingmar Bergman manages to stay pretty true to his trademark morbid preoccupations:  the set dressing includes plenty of skulls, at any rate.  Touches like this come so much more naturally to Bergman than his uninspired backstage comic touches:  during the interval between Acts I and II, we see the Queen of the Night sitting with her feet up, puffing on a cigarette under a ‘no smoking’ notice.  I looked at my watch only twice – on the second occasion in alarm because I’d thought time was nearly up but we now seemed set for a pitched battle between the forces of light and darkness.  False alarm:  the latter were summarily vanquished.  All told, the film runs 135 minutes and they pass amazingly quickly (considering …).

    21 December 2017

    [1] I didn’t even pick up that several of the faces in the audience belong not to ‘ordinary people’ but (again according to Wikipedia) to members of the film-maker’s family and crew – Bergman himself, his wife and son, the cinematographer Sven Nykvist, the choreographer Donya Feuer et al.

     

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