Old Yorker

  • Birdman of Alcatraz

    Old YorkerFilm review

    John Frankenheimer (1962)

    John Frankenheimer was a fruitfully busy film-maker in the first years of the 1960s and 1962 was the high point of his activity.  In the course of the year, three Frankenheimer pictures were released:  All Fall Down, The Manchurian Candidate and, sandwiched between them, the biographical Birdman of Alcatraz, the story of Robert Stroud.   Born in 1890, Stroud was first imprisoned, for manslaughter, in 1909.  He was sentenced for twelve years; in 1912 the sentence was extended by six months because of acts of violence he committed as a prisoner (and other bad behaviour).  He was transferred to the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas when, in March 1916, in one of his fits of uncontrollable anger, Stroud stabbed to death a prison guard.  He was sentenced to death and ordered to await his execution in solitary confinement.  After years of legal wrangling, including two retrials, the sentence was confirmed in 1920, at which point Stroud’s mother appealed direct to President Woodrow Wilson and his wife.  The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.  The Leavenworth warden T W Morgan, disapproving of the reprieve, ordered that Stroud remain segregated from other prisoners for the duration of the sentence.   He was transferred from Leavenworth to Alcatraz in 1942, where he was segregated for a further six years then confined to a hospital wing for the next eleven.   In 1959 he was moved again, to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri.  In 1963, a young lawyer called Richard English, who had been part of John Kennedy’s presidential campaign three years previously, launched a campaign for Stroud’s release, which included meetings with senior officials of the Kennedy administration.  Robert Stroud died in prison on 21 November 1963, the day before the assassination of JFK and more than fifty-four years after he was first incarcerated.  According to Wikipedia (from which that potted biography derives), Stroud wasn’t allowed even to watch the film based on his life.

    It was during his long stint at Leavenworth that Stroud began to keep and breed birds, and teach himself ornithology.  (He wrote books on the subject and, on his death, some of his possessions were passed, via Richard English, to the Audubon Society.)    Perhaps Stroud’s sobriquet reflects simply that ‘Birdman of Alcatraz’ is snappier than ‘Birdman of Leavenworth’ – but it may mean something more.  Stroud wasn’t permitted to keep pets at Alcatraz so the title could be seen as an expression of the harshness of his punishment.   The film’s screenplay by Guy Trosper, based on the book of the same name by Thomas Gaddis (who appears as a character in the picture), is very sketchy on the character of Stroud.  While in Leavenworth, he’s visited by a bird-loving widow, with whom he agrees to go into business partnership (she markets his bird remedies) and whom he later marries, causing an irreparable rift with his mother.  It’s less than clear to what extent Frankenheimer and Trosper see Stroud’s very close relationship with his mother as a source of his sociopathic tendencies – or whether we’re supposed to believe (as it appears) that his propensity for violence vanished from the moment Stroud adopted his first bird in Leavenworth.   Birdman of Alcatraz is too long anyway (143 minutes) and much too long given the increasingly shallow psychological treatment of its subject.  There are a few ridiculous moments (as when someone is asked to look at one of Stroud’s early manuscripts and pronounces it very good before he can have read two sentences).  But within these (considerable) limits, Birdman is very well acted, in the main parts and the smaller ones, and sensitively directed by Frankenheimer.

    Burt Lancaster is such a strong physical presence that he can seem nearly archetypal.  As Stroud, Lancaster, when he’s looking at the camera, is often impressive (and he ages well).  He’s more surprisingly expressive in gently talking with and handling the birds.  Even if the passages describing the early development of Stroud’s love for the creatures tend to be a little easily heartwarming, they work well as natural history documentary – a sequence in which an egg hatches is especially strong – fortified by the impact on the protagonist.  When Lancaster speaks, though, you can, as usual, hear the actor thinking how to say the line.  And when he’s speaking the clumsy, plea-for-justice lines of the script, there’s no character at all – the performer is merely delivering a social commentary.  But while you’re left in little doubt that the people who made Birdman in Alcatraz think Stroud’s unending imprisonment outrageous, Frankenheimer and his actors deserve a lot of credit for giving the penitentiary officials more dimensions than you’d expect from a polemic about the viciousness of prison as an institution (especially if, as in my case, you’d seen Cool Hand Luke three days earlier).   This is particularly true of Karl Malden as the prisoner governor (renamed Howard Shoemaker) and two of the guards.  It’s a very strong moment when one of these guards, played by Neville Brand, gets angry with Stroud who, he says, never says thank you for anything.  The remark hits home and the pair develop a relationship of mutual respect verging on affection.   And the guard whom Stroud kills (the actor appears to be uncredited) is frighteningly convincing.   When Stroud gets mad, this man has real fear in his eyes but he knows he has to stick to the rules.

    As another prisoner, Telly Savalas seems over the top at first but you come to realise that he’s not – his playing is nuanced and empathetic.  I also thought initially that Thelma Ritter was miscast as the gallant Mrs Stroud:  the mother’s exchange with Mrs Wilson (Adrienne Marden), in which she pleads with the First Lady for her son’s life, seems phony.  But Thelma Ritter is fearless in showing Mrs Stroud’s extreme possessiveness as the other side of the coin whose obverse is loyal courage.  It’s not surprising that the significant female roles are few here but Betty Field does very well as the woman Stroud marries – there’s a lovely connection between her and Lancaster in their first scene together.  The reliable Edmond O’Brien is good as Thomas Gaddis.  There are times when Elmer Bernstein’s music is required to do more than should be expected of any dramatic score but it’s admirably resourceful.   The cinematography is by Burnett Guffey.

    22 April 2010

  • The Face of an Angel

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Michael Winterbottom (2014)

    A film about the creation of a film that doesn’t get made, both of them based on the murder in 2007 of Meredith Kercher, to whose memory The Face of an Angel is dedicated.  Is it a coincidence that Michael Winterbottom’s latest was released in Britain the week the Italian supreme court was to rule on the appeal, by Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, against their convictions for the Kercher killing?  (I saw The Face of an Angel on the day these convictions were, for a second time, quashed.)  Coincidence or not, it’s an irony that a film steeped in an atmosphere of glum soul-searching, on the part of the writer-director who is its main character, should lay itself open to accusations of exploiting the Kercher case to get some box-office impetus.

    Anyone who does go to The Face of an Angel wanting to know more of the facts of the Kercher murder and its lengthy aftermath will be disappointed.  This isn’t only because Winterbottom and the scenarist Paul Viragh move the scene of the crime from Perugia to Siena and rename the people involved.  Winterbottom and Viragh aren’t interested in constructing an account of exactly how Elizabeth Pryce, their Meredith Kercher figure, died.  When the protagonist Thomas Lang (Daniel Brühl) first talks with the journalist Simone Ford (Kate Beckinsale), whose book about the killing has sparked his interest in the Pryce case, she tells him he must fictionalise the material.  Edoardo (Valerio Mastandrea), a character less easily summarised than Simone but who has a strong penchant for moral pronouncements and may be the mouthpiece for Winterbottom and Viragh, tells Thomas that, nowadays, ‘we’ are interested not in ‘what a death means’, only in who was responsible for it.  When Thomas begins to suspect that Edoardo himself was involved in the killing of Elizabeth Pryce, he effectively vindicates this censorious dismissal of the whodunit mentality.  When Thomas’s suspicions are shown to be ill-founded, it’s as if the film audience, primed to expect a solution, is being ticked off too.

    There are two main problems with the approach taken by Michael Winterbottom and Paul Viragh (who also wrote the ambitious, over-complicated screenplay for Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (2010)).  First, the principal focus of the story, Thomas Lang, isn’t sufficiently interesting.  Second, the intersection of his struggle to dramatise the Pryce case as a morality tale with a structure inspired by The Divine Comedy, and Winterbottom and Viragh’s perspective, which includes Dantesque elements outside Thomas’s developing script, gives The Face of an Angel an aestheticised, self-indulgent flavour.  In view of the real-life source material (and the film’s dedication), this borders on the offensive.  The movie that Thomas is planning to make will be a comeback film, following the break-up of his marriage, which appears to have had an enduring depressive effect.  He may not have lost his child Beatrice (Ava Acres) in quite the way that Dante was separated from his childhood love of the same name but Thomas now communicates with his daughter only through brief Skype sessions.  In wrestling with his conscience and imagination, he has (a surfeit of) violently upsetting daydreams and nightmares.  Some of these imaginings are Dante-inspired – a gate, inscribed with ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’, inevitably makes an appearance.  Daniel Brühl’s look is so world-weary that he makes the words at the entrance to Hell tautologous.  Brühl is far from a bad actor but, sunk in misery, he’s monotonous here.  One immediately gets the message that Thomas is abysmally unhappy.  Daniel Brühl doesn’t express a lot more.

    As Dante was guided on his journey by Virgil and then Beatrice, so Thomas is conducted, under cover of darkness, through the backstreets and underbelly of Siena by Edoardo and Melanie (Cara Delevingne), a young English student in the city.  It’s Melanie who introduces Thomas to La vita nuova but, since thoughts of Dante are already in his mind, it’s surprising that he isn’t struck by the correspondence between his sight-seeing in Siena and Dante’s in Hell.  (There’s something of the same problem with Clarissa Vaughan in The Hours:  you tend to wonder how, given her level of awareness of Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa doesn’t notice that her day is following the same pattern as that of Woolf’s Clarissa.  Ignorance of resonance is a bigger issue in this case, though:  Thomas Lang is in the process of writing a script informed by The Divine Comedy.)  On the other hand, it’s typical of the prevailing gloom of The Face of an Angel that Viragh and Winterbottom depart from Dante in order to have Melanie, as well as Edoardo, guide Thomas through infernal Siena – whereas Virgil hands over to Beatrice only in Paradiso.  Although Melanie is central to the concluding section of the film, this paradise episode has the feel of a consoling postscript rather than a glimpse of Heaven.

    The Face of an Angel is more secure in the sequences that describe media coverage of Elizabeth Pryce’s murder; the subsequent court proceedings (Thomas Lang’s arrival in Siena coincides with the hearing of the first appeal lodged by the Knox-Sollecito equivalents); and the conversations among journalists and film people, preoccupied with who to cast as the dramatis personae in the real-life murder story, and with misgivings about the post-modern treatment that Thomas is concocting.  The critiques of press and movie business ethics are obvious enough but Michael Winterbottom handles these elements with confident efficiency.  The credited source for the screenplay is a book on the Meredith Kercher case called Angel Face:  the author, Barbie Latza Nadeau, is (or was), like the Kate Beckinsale character in the film, an American foreign correspondent in Italy.  Beckinsale and Cara Delevingne both do well.  Valerio Mastandrea sensibly underplays the overly significant and ubiquitous figure of Edoardo.  There’s particularly fine work from Peter Sullivan in the small role of Elizabeth Pryce’s father.  Sullivan’s reading at a memorial service for the dead girl deserves the reprise that Winterbottom gives it but the director repeats ad nauseam shots of the angelically beautiful features of Elizabeth (Sai Bennett) and the alluring but furtive expression on the face of Jessica Fuller (Genevieve Gaunt), aka Foxy Knoxy.

    27 March 2015

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