Old Yorker

  • The Spider and the Fly

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Robert Hamer (1949)

    This unusual crime story was released the same year as Kind Hearts and Coronets, Robert Hamer’s most celebrated (though I don’t think his best) film.  In The Spider and the Fly, working with an original screenplay by Robert Westerby, Hamer is repeatedly impatient to change direction into a kind of picture different from the one you thought you were watching.   Can’t he keep his mind on the job or is this a deliberate tactic to throw the audience?  For much of the time, I thought the former.  By the end of the film, I’d changed my mind.

    Well-born Philippe Ledocq (Guy Rolfe) is a master thief and cracksman.  Fernand Maubert (Eric Portman) is the Paris chief of police.  Maubert is sure Ledocq’s responsible for a series of recent bank robberies but the suave criminal always has an alibi – the latest theft sees his accomplice, Madeleine Sancaize (Nadia Gray), with whom he’s in some degree of romantic relationship, take the rap.  Madeleine is not in prison for long before Maubert decides to release her.  In doing so, he warns her not to see Ledocq again; at the same time, the police chief is developing his own romantic attachment to Madeleine.  Maubert’s idea of detective work is strikingly intellectual.  He and Ledocq like each other personally and have several sociable, civilised conversations that don’t bring the wrongdoer any closer to justice.  George Cole, in the small role of Maubert’s by-the-book assistant, is amusingly puzzled by his boss’s melancholy, reflective attitude to nailing criminals.  In the course of its first half-hour or so, The Spider and the Fly gets you interested in the characters – especially the thoughtful, lonely Maubert (Eric Portman captures both qualities very well) – but it seems increasingly inert as a crime thriller.

    Then Maubert gets a tip-off that Ledocq is carrying out a robbery.  This prompts an exciting action sequence as Ledocq and his accomplice Jean Louis (John Carol) attempt to make their escape, from the top of the bank building.  This was one of the first films on which Geoffrey Unsworth was credited as cinematographer (another interesting mystery story, The Clouded Yellow (1950), was another); and Seth Holt was the editor.  Their combined efforts make the rooftop getaway almost unbearably tense.  The thieves are nicely contrasted, too.  Both are scared; while Jean’s a trembling wreck, Ledocq betrays his fear silently, in his facial muscles and the few, discreet drops of sweat that form on his brow.  He escapes to Madeleine’s apartment and asks her to give him an alibi, which she does.  The detective is frustrated again but not for long.  Although Jean Louis doesn’t survive the evening, his presumably twin brother Arthur (he’s played by the same actor anyway), who is Ledocq’s accomplice on his next job, is persuaded by Maubert to shop the gentleman thief.  Ledocq is arrested and convicted.  The Spider and the Fly began in 1913 and the significance of the exact year now becomes clear.  Ledocq’s five-year jail sentence starts just as World War I gets underway.

    The narrative jumps forward to 1916, when Maubert has a senior role in French counterintelligence and the war minister (Edward Chapman) charges him to get hold of a list of German spies in France, which the French government knows to be hidden in a safe in the German embassy in neutral Switzerland.  Maubert has the ideal candidate for the job.  With the minister’s permission, Maubert offers Ledocq the assignment, along with immediate release, a pardon for his crimes and the possibility of seeing Madeleine again.  Ledocq also asks to be formally decorated on successful completion of his commission.  The request is granted, he and Maubert travel to Bern, and – in another gripping episode – the secret documents are successfully obtained.  Just as you wondered earlier where the thriller element had disappeared to, now Madeleine seems to have faded from the scene, only to make a stunning return.  When the newly decorated Ledocq arrives at her flat, Maubert is already there.  He’s looking deeply unhappy – not because he thinks that Ledocq, as well as finding that crime pays, is going to get the girl but because the list of German spies turns out to include the name of Madeleine Sancaize.  She now exits the film, arrested for treason.  The closing scene takes place on a railway station.  Maubert happens to be there, accompanied by the war minister’s aide (Maurice Denham).  The latter is sure he recognises Ledocq as one of a crowd of soldiers departing on a train to fight at Verdun.  Maubert says the aide is wrong but knows he’s right and locks eyes briefly with Ledocq, who is about to die for his country.  The irony, of course, is that, if he’d had stayed in prison for his full term, Ledocq would have survived the Great War.  Hamer doesn’t overstress this, making the irony all the more potent.

    The French setting of the story is satisfying in two ways.  First, much of the location shooting for The Spider and the Fly actually took place in Paris.  Second, Hamer and his cast commendably resist cod Frenchifying of their characters.  Eric Portman and impressive Guy Rolfe (whom I don’t remember seeing before, though I guess I must have) convince you they’re French even though they sound straightforwardly English.  The only thoroughly exotic presence is Madeleine; since Nadia Gray, giving her character an apt blend of obduracy and charm, emigrated from her native Romania when in her mid-twenties, this is perfectly natural.  Another good early scene takes place in a bar, where Maubert watches Belfort (Harold Lang), a recently released convict, immediately revert to his former trade as a pickpocket; Maubert watches Belfort rob a man before instructing him to return the man’s wallet, which he does.  Belfort, owing Maubert a favour, will come in handy later as an informant.

    21 January 2025

  • A Complete Unknown

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James Mangold (2024)

    Catching part of James Mangold’s Walk the Line (2005) on TV the other week reminded me how much I like the film despite its dreary biopic cliches, and why.  It’s a dual biography, of June Carter as well as Johnny Cash, and both are splendidly portrayed (by Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix).  The whole story tends towards the happy ending of June agreeing to marry Johnny; it’s a happier ending because we already know that the marriage endured.  There’s lots of good music too, as there also is in Mangold’s A Complete Unknown, but this Bob Dylan biopic, starring Timothée Chalamet, lacks other things that Walk the Line had, romantic momentum among them.  To the extent that Mangold means to present Chalamet’s Dylan as enigmatically inaccessible – the film’s title, echoing the phrase in ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, makes this clear enough – there’s no reason why romantic momentum should feature strongly.  Yet the screenplay, by the director and Jay Cocks, is hardly more imaginative than the Walk the Line script Mangold wrote with Gill Dennis:  A Complete Unknown still depends heavily, for example, on dramatising the main character’s love life – Dylan’s affairs with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) – and it does so in a thoroughly conventional way.  The same applies to the crude, cartoonish presentation of Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman (Dan Fogler) and other mercenary music industry figures.  To deliver on the ambitious approach to a biopic protagonist that his movie seems to profess, Mangold needed to ground it in a much more imaginative narrative than he supplies.

    Not that Bob-Dylan-the-enigma is an original screen concept anyway.  Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There (2007) was premised on Dylan’s elusiveness, realised by Haynes having different actors incarnating different aspects of Dylan’s persona – none of these incarnations was called Bob Dylan – during his already long career.  The acknowledged source material for Mangold and Cocks’ screenplay, Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric!, sounds to have a very specific subject; and A Complete Unknown‘s timeframe is short, 1961 to 1965.  As context, Mangold trots out, via black-and-white television screens, the usual big news events of the period:  the Cuban Missile Crisis; the March on Washington (with Timothée Chalamet inserted into the footage for Dylan’s appearance there); the Kennedy assassination.  The film’s supposed climax is the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965 – specifically what Elijah Wald’s subtitle to Dylan Goes Electric! labels the ‘Night That Split the Sixties’.

    Before Dylan goes ahead with his electric guitar performance, despite the pleas of Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) and others on the Newport committee, he and Joan Baez duet ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’.  Bob and Sylvie Russo (aka Suze Rotolo: according to Wikipedia, the real Bob Dylan asked the filmmakers not to use Rotolo’s real name) appear to have split up some time ago but he chooses the occasion to persuade her to get on his motor bike with him and come along to Newport.  This means that, as Bob and Joan are singing, Sylvie can stand in the wings, reduced to tears by the unignorable strength of connection of the pair onstage:  ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ is suddenly telling the story of what’s happening on screen as obviously as many a number did in the traditional movie musical.  I felt sorry for Elle Fanning (a good actress):  Mangold repeatedly cuts back and forth between the stage and Sylvie looking upset until she (Sylvie but perhaps Fanning too) can’t take any more and runs off in distress.  To prolong the cliché, Mangold has Dylan follow Sylvie and try in vain to talk her out of exiting his life for good.  This episode is meant to be the hors d’oeuvre to the notorious electric set.  The latter is staged so lamely that it becomes a standard-issue biopic illustration of the daring artist scandalising their audience.  This means there are close-ups of three or four people in the Newport crowd chucking verbal abuse and physical objects Dylan’s way, clumsy and futile attempts by the organisers to mute the sound, and so on.

    Timothée Chalamet is a rather shallow actor, which makes it more galling to read rumours that he insisted on being addressed as Bob during the shoot in order to stay uninterruptedly in character.  (At least when there were similar stories about Daniel Day-Lewis you could rely on the results making the actor’s demands seem worth it.)  Chalamet’s portrait makes sense of the film’s conception of its subject but his singing and guitar-playing are more impressive than his interpretation of Dylan in non-musical parts of the story.  What Chalamet does as Dylan the performer is a considerable feat of mimicry – he seems (to these admittedly non-expert ears) to have the original’s nasal whine down to a tee.  What’s more, his intense focus on getting the vocals right means that Chalamet on stage seems to be in a world of his own, which corresponds to  Dylan’s self-absorption and suggests his creative single-mindedness.   When Dylan isn’t performing or in the process of composing songs, however, the effect of not being allowed inside his character is very different.  Chalamet sometimes seems merely to be striking attitudes: because that’s something he’s done before on screen (with less justification), it’s hard not to see the attitudinising here as a tendency of the actor rather than a facet of the man he’s playing.

    All the actors do their own singing and seem to do it very well, Monica Barbaro and Edward Norton especially.  Barbaro’s voice isn’t as rich as Joan Baez’s but it’s lovely to listen to.  Norton’s Pete Seeger is infinitely benign and that warmth comes through in his singing as well as his speaking voice – no mean achievement.  In what in this film is the small role of Johnny Cash, Boyd Holbrook also gives an enjoyable performance on and off stage.  It’s a pity that, later on, Cash keeps reappearing just to support Dylan when no one else seems prepared to: when he hands over his own acoustic guitar for Bob to do a folk song as an encore at Newport, it’s one encouragement too many, even if it did really happen.  The narrative starts with Dylan – at this stage a complete unknown in terms of recognition too – visiting Woody Guthrie, his idol, in hospital, when Guthrie’s friend Seeger is also at his bedside, and Bob impresses them both with the ‘Song to Woody’ he’s recently composed.  Scoot McNairy is magnetic as the ailing, nearly mute Woody although, after another couple of short scenes between him and Pete, Mangold forgets about Guthrie until the closing sequence, a postscript to the Newport kerfuffle, when Dylan visits him again.  This seems to be for bookending purposes only.

    The only saving grace of the ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ bit comes when, as she sees Dylan about to join her on stage, Joan Baez gives him the finger, turning so that the Newport audience can’t see what she’s doing.   (This was also the only time I laughed throughout the film.)  It’s not long into their relationship that Baez says to Dylan one morning, ‘You’re kind of an asshole, Bob’ and he tonelessly replies, ‘I guess’.  That exchange sums up James Mangold’s film rather more neatly than it should.  Whatever anyone thinks of Bob Dylan, few will deny he’s a hugely consequential figure in twentieth-century music.  For all the performing talent in evidence, A Complete Unknown feels inconsequential.

    21 January 2025

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