Film review

  • The Desperate Hours

    Old YorkerFilm review

    William Wyler (1955)

    In this exciting, increasingly gruelling crime drama, three escaped convicts occupy a middle-class family home in suburban Indianapolis, holding the family hostage.  The hours of the title mount up – the gang means to leave as soon as money arrives to fund their getaway but the plan goes wrong – yet the action never drags.  William Wyler’s film, which runs 113 minutes, doesn’t feel a moment too long.

    Working with a screenplay by Joseph Hayes (adapted from his own novel and subsequent stage play), Wyler deftly outlines the household, finishing breakfast at the start of just-another-day – white-collar worker Dan Hilliard (Fredric March), his homemaker wife Eleanor (Martha Scott), their twentyish daughter Cindy (Mary Murphy) and much younger son Ralph (Richard Eyer), who’s nevertheless old enough to object to being called Ralphie and to resist kissing his dad goodbye as he leaves for school.  In her father’s eyes, Cindy is too young to be thinking of marriage; as far as she’s concerned, the only snag is that Chuck Wright, an attorney in the law firm where she works, hasn’t popped the question yet.  Once Dan and Cindy have driven off to the city, Ellie Hilliard starts her housework.  She has the radio on.  A news report of the prison break is an economical means of imparting information about the escapees and showing how far removed their world is from that of Mrs Hilliard, oblivious to what the radio newsreader is telling her.  Until the convicts ring her doorbell.

    The three criminals are Glenn Griffin (Humphrey Bogart), his kid brother Hal (Dewey Martin) and their accomplice Simon Kobish (Robert Middleton).  Four years ago, the elder Griffin shot and killed a policeman in the Indianapolis area.  Taking Glenn into custody, Deputy Sheriff Jesse Bard broke his jaw.  It’s Bard (Arthur Kennedy) who now organises a state-wide manhunt for the Griffin brothers and Kobish.  Glenn calls his girlfriend in Pittsburgh, giving her the Hilliards’ address and instructing her to drive over post haste with money (the Hilliards don’t keep much cash in the house).  She’s expected by midnight; when she’s pulled over for a traffic violation, the trio’s departure is seriously delayed. Events in the meantime enable Bard and his team to pinpoint the fugitives’ hideout.

    Not all the family is housebound for the entire duration of their ordeal – Glenn has his reasons for letting Cindy go on a date with Chuck (Gig Young) that evening and Dan return to the office the following morning.  The well-plotted screenplay also features other visits to the house and excursions outside it, all of them effective.   Ralph’s teacher (Beverly Garland), concerned by his absence from school, pays a call.  When Hal Griffin eventually decides to walk out on his brother, he hijacks a car whose terrified driver (Joe Flynn) is relieved to be left standing on the roadside as Hal drives off alone.  Another, more pivotal hijack ends grimly.  Refuse collector George Patterson (Walter Baldwin) arrives at the house on his regular round.  There’s an unfamiliar vehicle in the garage where the refuse is stored and he looks curiously at the number plate.  (A shot through the kitchen window, of the convicts watching him discover the truck they’ve stolen, is among the highlights of Lee Garmes’s stealthy camerawork.)  Patterson is on screen only a few minutes but it’s long enough to make his murder, at the hands of Kobish, upsetting.

    Hayes’s dialogue is consistently excellent – not only Glenn’s hardboiled one-liners (‘Crying department’s upstairs, lady’, ‘Do as I say, and junior gets to vote’) but also the more serious pronouncements (in the climax, when Dan draws a gun on Glenn and the latter scoffs, ‘You ain’t got it in you, Pop’, the man of the house replies, ‘I got it in me:  you put it there’).  Wyler keeps illustrating the normal life that continues beyond the confines of the Hilliards’ home – their commuter neighbours returning in the evening, the office routines in Dan’s workplace where his uncharacteristic brusque urgency worries his secretary (Helen Kleeb).  Wyler generates suspense even in making clear that the escaped criminals are on the front page of the local newspaper:  the papers are usually folded so that only half the headline is legible.  The extent of the action in the outside world pushes credibility to the limit but the film’s momentum pushes doubts on this score to the back of your mind.

    I’m guessing that the scenes outdoors are one major difference between The Desperate Hours as a play and a film.  A certain difference is the age of Glenn Griffin, a twenty-five-year-old in the Broadway version, where Paul Newman played the role.  (Karl Malden was the paterfamilias.)   Although it’s not quite impossible to accept Humphrey Bogart and Dewey Martin (twenty-four years Bogart’s junior) as brothers, the casting necessarily reshapes Glenn from young hoodlum into embittered old lag.  This works well, though – Bogart more than looks the part.  He was terminally ill at the time he made The Desperate Hours (his penultimate film).  His evident frailty gives the villain of the piece a persistent vulnerability.

    Bogart is admirably partnered by the great Fredric March, who captures the mixture of determination to protect his family, fear and resourcefulness that drives his character.  March crucially suggests a mind always alert to what needs to be done and said (and not said) – a quality that Glenn Griffin sees, and respects, in Dan Hilliard from an early stage.  As candid, plucky Ralph, ten-year-old Richard Eyer at first seems a thoroughly familiar all-American-boy-in-a-hostage-situation – snub-nosed kin to the kid in the previous year’s Suddenly.  As the film goes on, and Ralph begins to see that his father’s grace under pressure may serve better than recklessness, Eyer becomes more nuanced.  (In the small role of Ralph’s sparky playmate, Louis Lettieri scores a bullseye with each one of his few lines.)  On the distaff side of the family, Martha Scott and Mary Murphy are thoroughly unsurprising but they do enough to dramatise a contrast at the heart of the film – between the Hilliard women’s house-proud fragrance and the coarse disorder of their unwanted guests.

    Needless to say, IMDb and Wikipedia both describe The Desperate Hours as a film noir.  On the face of it (the movie’s look and atmosphere), this seems like another example of the term’s elastic use to cover any black-and-white Hollywood picture of the early post-war era in which crime (or even legal misbehaviour) plays a major part.  Yet the connection film historians have made between American noir and Cold War anxieties gives credibility to the IMDb/Wikipedia definition:  the invasion of the Hilliards’ home by an alien force is a dominant element of Wyler’s movie.  The convicts damage or destroy decor in vengeful anger or, occasionally, through sheer clumsiness.  The film’s attitude towards them borders on the offensively snooty but it’s impressively thoroughgoing.

    Robert Middleton’s Neanderthal Kobish is the most visceral aspect of this – he’s grossly overweight, swarthy, probably smelly, definitely not house trained.  He doesn’t need to manhandle either of the women; his very physical proximity to them verges on violation.  ‘My wife’s not your servant,’ Dan protests at an early stage; it’s one of his few unwise remarks to Glenn Griffin, who amusedly replies, ‘I always wanted a servant’ and proceeds to make the most of his opportunity.  When his teacup’s empty, he demands a refill by striking a spoon insistently against the china; Ellie arrives to collect his cup and he deposits a cigar butt in it.   Glenn’s attitude backfires, however, when the Hilliards’ way of life starts to appeal to Hal.  ‘You taught me everything …,’ he tells his elder brother, ‘except how to live in a house like this’.

    Even parts of The Desperate Hours that seem unpromising pay off eventually.  For a while, the police action feels mechanical beside the goings-on chez Hilliard but livens up once Griffin’s girl is caught speeding and as Bard starts to close in on the gang’s whereabouts.  Gig Young looks to have a thankless task playing Chuck Wright; the script repeatedly evades the issue of what he and Cindy talk about when they’re out together, and of why Chuck doesn’t presses for an explanation of her tense, taciturn manner.  But Young, one of the finest supporting actors of his Hollywood generation, makes bricks out of straw – even the way he adjusts the armrest between the front seats of Chuck’s car is expressive.  By the end of the film, Cindy’s suitor has earned his stripes and won her father’s confidence – in the final shot, with the baddies vanquished and the Hilliards free to resume being a happy family, Dan beckons to Chuck to join them inside the house.  Gig Young has earned his stripes too.

    24 May 2021

  • Quo Vadis, Aida?

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jasmila Žbanić (2020)

    The writer-director Jasmila Žbanić dedicates Quo Vadis, Aida? to the 8,372 victims of the Srebrenica massacre and those they left behind.  Most of her hundred-minute film dramatises events just before the Bosnian Serb army’s genocide of Bosniak Muslim men and boys, which is the climax to the picture.  Early on, gunfire in the town kills a woman outside her home; Žbanić momentarily shows the corpse and, beside it, the food the woman was preparing still cooking on a hotplate.  These shots are untypical:  one of the many striking features of Quo Vadis, Aida?, despite the casualty figures in Srebrenica and the lethal threat that pervades the film’s narrative, is how few dead bodies appear on camera.   That seems to reflect more than discretion on the film-maker’s part.  It’s as if Žbanić withholds the visual evidence of carnage as a way of suggesting that the magnitude of some horrors is beyond apprehension.

    That’s not to say she doesn’t create images that are shocking in their atrocity.  When the Bosniak males are eventually herded into a building, the camera moves up to near the ceiling; machine guns nose through small partitions there to open fire on the crowd below.  (Žbanić quickly cuts to the street outside, where kids scarper as the shooting starts.)  In the film’s epilogue, some years into the future, women walk round a large indoor area – it could even be where the killings took place – in which exhumed remains are displayed with a view to identification:  skulls and bones, fragments of clothing, pairs of shoes.  It’s a terrible spectacle – a vast, macabre lost property office.  The sequence is wordless but not quite silent.  Every so often, a wail is heard as someone out of shot recognises a loved one.

    The title character, Aida Selmanagić (Jasna Đuričić), is a school teacher, now working as an interpreter for the United Nations.  Aida is in nearly perpetual motion, mental and physical.  On the rare occasions she’s sitting down, she’s always thinking – translating at a fraught meeting of the Dutch UN protection force and Srebrenica’s mayor (Ermin Bravo), or deciding her next step in trying to protect her husband Nihad (Izudin Bajrović) and their two adult sons, Hamdija (Boris Ler) and Sejo (Dino Bajrović).  Much of Aida’s energies is devoted to trying to shield her family.  Žbanić pulls no punches in showing her heroine – an authentic heroine – doing her utmost to exploit her UN position to that end.  At the same time, Aida conscientiously translates for the crowd of refugees, which includes her friends and neighbours, the script she’s given by Serbian forces and UN personnel.  Her repetition of the words serves to emphasise their falsity or hollowness.

    It’s not unusual for reactions to dramas dealing with grave themes to be automatically respectful, the subject matter eclipsing the matter of how it’s been handled:  bringing the material to the screen is all that counts.  But with a film that describes actual momentous events, there’s also the possibility that its dramatic qualities, for similar reasons, may be under-appreciated.  Despite the critical praise, that may have happened in this case:  it’s hard to explain how Oscar (and BAFTA) voters could have judged superior Thomas Vinterberg’s mostly fatuous Another Round unless they felt Quo Vadis, Aida? was a quasi-documentary reconstruction rather than a fully-fledged drama.  Jasmila Žbanić’s handling of the massed ranks of Srebrenica citizens outside or within the UN shelter is much more than a logistical feat, though.  She doesn’t opt, as film-makers faced with a similar challenge have often opted, for singling out a handful of representative ‘characters’ and leaving the bulk of the extras undifferentiated.  Thanks to the cinematographer Christine Maier’s brilliant lighting, each face in the crowd here is clearly defined, made individual.

    Žbanić makes fun of Ratko Mladić (Boris Isaković) without making light of him.  The leader of the Serbian forces is laughably vain (an army cameraman is on hand to record his every move and pronouncement).  At the negotiating table, however, the Dutch UN contingent is no match for the blithely thuggish Mladić and his henchmen.  As the commanding UN officer Thom Karremans, Johan Heldenbergh wears a moustache droopier than his real-life counterpart’s (according to the photo of Karremans on his Wikipedia entry), and which announces his impotence.  The ineffectuality of Karremans’s deputy Rob Franken is more startling, thanks to Raymond Thiry’s keen-eyed, imposing presence in the role.

    The townspeople are allowed to nominate three of their number as ‘negotiators’.  With only two names forthcoming, Aida persuades Franken to let Nihad, former head of a secondary school in Srebrenica, join the other two.  It’s stipulated that one of the trio must be a woman, and she is Charmila (Jelena Kordic Keret), who has – or had – a job in the financial sector.  On arrival at the venue where the meeting with the Serbian forces and the UN will take place, Charmila is subjected to a much more protracted body search than either of her colleagues.  The film conveys succinctly how misogyny leaves Bosniak females worse and better off than males.  The women are scorned and humiliated; it’s not worth the trouble of murdering them.

    At the start, the camera’s focus travels deliberately, from right to left, to show the four members of the Selmanagić family sitting together at home.  From this, Žbanić moves straight into the crisis of July 1995 and the action is nearly unrelenting.  Until the final leap forward to the years-later aftermath, there’s a single, well-judged interruption to the propulsive, linear storytelling – a flashback to a party where Aida and near contemporaries are taking part in a kind of comical, middle-aged beauty contest.  In the conclusion to this sequence, a succession of people dancing at the gathering stop to gaze into the camera – we recognise faces already seen in very different circumstances, in negotiations or as refugees.  Earlier on at the party, one of Aida’s students humorously calls out, ‘Bravo, teacher!’ to her.  He’ll soon reappear as a member of the Bosnian Serb army.

    Žbanić uses a similar technique in the epilogue that occupies the last ten minutes or so of screen time and which sees Aida return to Srebrenica.  Her resourceful attempts to save her menfolk were finally unavailing.  Nihad, Hamdija and Sejo all died in the massacre.  Aida is among the women looking to identify remains (and succeeding).  Before that, she visits what used to be the Selmanagićs’ home, where the new tenant (Edita Malovcic) hands over a collection of photographs of Aida’s family left in the apartment and introduces her little boy.  It’s a well-acted scene (like all others in this film) but its poignancy is almost upstaged by the sting in the tail supplied by the man Aida notices on the stairs on her way out.  This is Joka (Emir Hadžihafizbegović), the most menacing of the soldiers she encountered in the UN compound and now a resident of the same apartment block.  In the film’s closing scene, Joka and his wife are seen again, watching a children’s concert at the school where Aida has returned to work.  The spectators also include Charmila and others familiar from the main narrative.  The routine being performed on the stage involves hand movements whereby the kids alternate between looking at the adults in the audience and shielding their eyes.  Aida sits in the background and smiles at the performance, not without effort.

    20 May 2021

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