Story circle

Believe it or not, this scene is before Shirley MacLaine's character dies.

Richard Linklater's Bernie (2012), enjoyable as it is --and it is enjoyable-- straddles contradictory conventions of genre in a way that feels unfairly confusing, at least in the immediate aftermath of viewing the film.

Some reviewers have made comparisons to the Coen brothers, presumably because of the quirky characters, the wide streak of black comedy with shads of slapstick and the small town setting.  But the film takes more from the book of Erroll Morris, especially Vernon Florida and Gates of Heaven, which consist almost entirely of old people taking in wide-angle close-up.  As Bernie begins to unspool, one assumes that Linklater has found local Texas actors who fit his vision and style and deftly give the illusion of speaking spontaneously as part of the dramatic convention of "based on a true story."

But the film's actual words are "What you're fixin' to see is a true story."  Not based on-- true.  And not "going to see" but "fixin' to see."  So the tone is set -- playful country, in fact kidding the very idea of country.    So is it true or not?  Well, it is, in that "fixin' to see" kind of way.  True with a little topspin.

Because to me, at least, it was not clear exactly how close Bernie stuck to the known facts until the end of the film, when we see the real Bernie and his erstwhile lady companion.  That conclusion raises the suggestion that the interviewees were the real people who knew the real Bernie.  Did they even know they were in a Jack Black movie?  A Pirandellian effect begins to spin out of the last few minutes of the film that research makes difficult to resolve.  (Most of the on-camera interviewees are indeed actors with substantial regional resumes.)

Perhaps confusing the issue is that Jack Black does a real acting job for perhaps the first time, at least in my filmgoing experience.  This character is not even a variation of The Jack Black Character, but developed from the real materials, just like with a real actor.  Yet his beautiful clear singing voice places a level of reality under the artifice that blurs the question evn more.

And although interviews Linklater has given have revealed that the film was shot digitally, to my eyes, at least from the print showing in our somewhat run-down neighborhood house, the film looks quite grainy, almost as if the entire thing had been shot 20 years ago around the time of Linklater's Dazed and Confused, with an unstable and washed-out palette.  (I look forward to seeing it on disc to see just how rough Linklater wanted the image to look.)

I guess your mom would say we're not laughing at the people of Carthage, Texas, we're laughing with them.  But I have to say, enjoyable as the film is, the rules are not always clear.

Under my head

A passel of young'uns snapping their whippers

As far as I can tell, the 2011 remake of Footloose is a pretty good for what it's meant to be, an excuse for tweeners to get out of the house and dream about how exciting it will be to be in high school.  (This sort of fantasy is always accomplished with the help of 27-year-old actors pretending to be 17.)  It is competently put together, with some moments of visual excitement which may be attributable to the skills of director Craig Brewer, who has made much more challenging films prior hereto (Hustle and Flowand Balck Snake Moan).  I am sure this was driven both by the paycheck and genuine affection for the original 1984 film, an affection I cannot feel, as I was already too old for the first film when that one came out.

Yet I see many films for which I am not the target demo, yet they reach me in some way.  I didn't mind Footloose, I didn't dislike it, yet I find it difficult to write anything about it because it felt like just a bunch of bits of film edited together so they would last an hour-and-three-quarters.  Nothing specific was communicated to me.  I know that was just me-- the film inspired both pleasure and displeasure from many, but I just felt a pleasant numbness.

What makes a film land or not land for any individual viewer?  I could say that I think the whole premise is phony and artificial -- that towns don't outlaw dancing, although specific religious sects do.  Director-co-writer Brewer tried to increase the plausibility factor by putting the fatal accident that triggers the repression at the front of the film (after a quite energetic title sequence), but a film like this is not meant to be believability, and such things almost damage the film.  I'm reminded of films that Laurel and Hardy made in the 1940s at the major studios, rather than the independent Hal Roach studio where they had done their best work.  The studios changed their make-up and lighting to be more natural and beelievable, and in the process destroyed much of what was charming about Laurel and Hardy.  They were always strange and fantastical characters, and to put them in the real world revealed them as aging, overweight men who seemed to be so simple that they should have been under medical supervision.  No longer golden fools dancing in the moonlight, they were old and pathetic.

Moreover, the film is not a musical.  Musicals I like.  Musicals I understand.  They have a special grammar and logic that appeals to me and bypasses the rational mind.  But Footloose wants to be rational.  The key, turning point scene consists of the villain and the hero making speeches.  Not singing, not dancing, but talking.  Talking about dancing.  But talking about dancing is not dancing.  This is an out-and-out confession that the filmmakers do not know how to make dance dramatic, or indeed even narrative.  Instead, dancing is appliqued onto a story of generation clash, and the same script could be used (and doubtless will be) for tagging, skateboarding or hang-gliding or whatever those wild kids want to get up to.  It would be unsurprising to see Tuesday Weld show up as a troubled teen.  In any event, the film is a romantic melodrama with comedy overtones and a lot of footage of young people dancing.  But not a musical.

The dancing, need I point out with overmuch emphasis (as Peter Cook said), is devoid of narrative content.  The boys and girls dance because they want to dance, because they are young, and because both in movies and the real world, dancing is a socially acceptable form of public foreplay -- almost communal foreplay.  Consequently, the single best sequence in the film is the "Let's Hear It For The Boy" montage in which the non-dancing comical sidekick gradually learns to dance, and with attitude and style.  That sequence alone gives me hope that Mr. Brewer will stop his flirtation with music and make a real full-out musical someday. 

Thus I think the best audience for this film are groups of happy 8 and 9 year olds watching the movie in large basement rec rooms watching the screen and aping the dance steps as they go along, although I shudder to think of the kiddie hip grinding that is likely to ensue.  Maybe the film should be issued in a karaoke dancealong version.

Ultimately the point is that there is no point in reading anything anyone writes about Footloose.  Because it is called Footloose, the name of a 1984 film, you know almost exactly what this is and you are capable of deciding whether you will like it or not, based on that fact.  That it is decent and professional is gratifying, but irrelevant, and people like me are irrelevant as spectators.

I hope it earns Mr. Brewer the privilege of making something closer to the heart -- his and mine.

Round and flat characters

Conventional wisdom has it that Toy Story 3 will win Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards this weekend, and that seems probable. Nonetheless, the animation community saw fit to award its high honor, the "Annie" to How To Train Your Dragon (2010) in 15 of the 24 categories in which it was nominated, including Best Animated Feature. It's impossible to know why; one suspects that the fact that Dragon was not a sequel, that it had some new design and a host of attractive and well-animated characters contributed to the victory.

Dragon is also to be praised for eschewing the usual Dreamworks smart-aleck pop-culture-reference tone that disfigures Shrek and many other DWA projects. The film is based on a 9-book series, so it would not be unreasonable to expect some follow-ups. At the time, way back in the Spring of 2010 (remember then?), there was so much chatter about 3D release versus 2D, particularly in the wake of Alice In Wonderland, but I saw the film flat and it seemed just fine. And more recently, with the release of Tangled, 3D seems to be an afterthought in the marketing.

Essentially the film marries two old story tropes -- we don't have to fight our perennial enemy; we can befriend them/it; and A Boy And His Dog. That said, the characters are more rounded, literally and figuratively than usual and the film has some interesting creative quirks. I particularly like that once Hiccup begins learning how to train Toothless and discovers that he is missing a side fin on his tail that helps maintain balance, he creates a (presumably) leather adaptation device. This makes Hiccup and Toothless both mutually dependent and mutually reliant, literally symbiotic, at least while in flight. Hiccup must be on Toothless' back, manipulating the fins with his feet to maintain balance in order for Toothless to fly; and of course, Hiccup, being a mere human, couldn't even begin to fly without Toothless. And the film has the grace never to state this point explicitly -- one simply sees the principle in action.

And happily, the other characters come around to a new point of view in ways and at times consistent with their personalities, which makes them what English teachers like me call, "rounded" characters. Which contrasts them strongly with the animated figures of The Secret of the Kells (2009) which was a contender in last year's Oscars.



There is some internal logic in employing this kind of design; the film revolves around the creation and protection of illuminated manuscripts, and the characters and their setting reflect the style of those Celtic books. The final image in this clip is in direct imitation of the decoration of the first letters on a page.

This is one of those stories about the fetishization of and attribution of magic powers to books, independent of whether any one reads them, thinks about them, or communicates their ideas to others. The physical book objects are possessed of mystical supernatural power. This is especially perverse, since the book in question is the bible, which was supposed to supercede the magical thinking of the time before. No matter, everyone just transfers their irrational magic thinking to the new beliefs, without any fundamental change in their belief system. God doesn't even get a mention in this film, lest anyone be offended.

The result is that the whole thing becomes so abstracted, it is difficult to tell what is it at stake, why or what anyone could do about it. It's like those Star Trek in which everyone is in terrible danger until the science officer says, "Let me reroute the Power Postule through the Infidibulous Watanabe," then pretends to push some buttons on the flat piece of plastic and everything is OK. I mean, what is it? Were we in trouble or not? Didn't we always know we could push some buttons? See what I mean in this clip. Can you tell what it is our hero is battling? Have you any idea what might defeat it?



Help! Help! I'm being attacked by abstract art!!

Secret of Kells it is not helped by extreme stylization of the figures, especially the monks and the abbott, making it nearly impossible to identify with them or to relate to them as human characters. Yes, they are wonderful design, but they are terribly inexpressive. Even in this scene, which is meant to present terrible human loss, it is so abstracted it becomes merely an empty homage to Seven Samurai.



Although the animation is far from limited, the drastic simplification of people and objects is reminiscent of cheap television animation. It feels more like a budget than an aesthetic statement.

So despite the railing against 3D and CGI animation and general descrying of the death of cell animation, it is possible for a cartoon to be too flat and too cartoony, especially when it is as ambitious as Secret of Kells.

The Voice of ...?

Shall We Kiss (2007) is to be applauded for rejecting a narrative bias that has become so deeply embedded in film as to go almost unnoticed. The implied answer to the title question is, of course, yes. Film and narrative prefer the road taken. And there is also an implicit assumption that new romances are preferable to old and perhaps troublesome marriages. Unless it is a film noir and a femme fatale, adultery is a good thing. Either you find a new, more suitable partner, or you return to your old partner renewed and refreshed. Perhaps filmmakers are trying to craft an argument to justify their own behavior to their spouses? Or is it that narrative wants to push characters to a place they haven't been before and where their behavior will be less predictable? (I will leave aside arguments that moral standards are breaking down because (a) this is not the blog for that sort of thing and (b) you'll find the same complaint in Plato and in Proverbs. Morals are Always Collapsing.)

Shall We Kiss bucks that inclination (pretty surprising for a French film), heading another direction by adding a layer of perspective, introduced by a storyteller and a listener. Unlike most storyteller frames, this one has something at stake -- the title question as applied to speaker and listener, and reflected in the tale being told.

This then, is a film that turns on its narrative as reflected in narration, a tool much underutilized in film today. There is a strong bias against narration in the American film industry. It is considered a crutch, a sign of weakness, of redundancy, of preference for word over picture. And used in a redundant or literary way, that position is quite right. But what such critics of narration ignore is the possibility of juxtaposing word AGAINST picture.

The narrator's voice actually precedes the introduction of synchronized sound. If one looks at the title cards of Biograph films around 1910-1911, one can read something like "Spurred by the treachery of the savage, the brave hunter exerts his utmost to preserve the sanctity of this flower of womanhood." That is, the cards often told the audience what was going to happen in the scene to follow, and is if concerned that the audience would not understand the implications thereof, would provide an overlay of both narrative and social interpretation. (Films of the era seem very anxious to assure the audience that social order, though perhaps temporarily disturbed, will be returned to its Right and Proper status. Or, as Louis Armstong replied when asked how things were, "Same as ever. White man still ahead.") From almost the inception, right through most of the Golden Era, American filmmakers did not trust the audience to get it right. If they understood the storyline, they might not understand what it MEANT. (That's why Dorothy has to tell you there's no place like home, or else you might think it's much cooler to stay in a place like Oz.)

Voice-over narration took a long time to arrive, and at first it was used to remind you that you were watching an Important Film Based on Great Literature. These kinds of films often started with a big book opening slowly, perhaps with tilt-down and dolly-in on the first page. "This is not the usual crap, folks, it's based on a real good book, and we can prove it. See, we're saying the first words of the book as you can see right here." Still, a mistrust of the audience.

But even that simple use of the voice-over opened the door to a more important idea -- the concept of distance and separation from the narrative that was about to unfold. Theater always takes place Right Now. Even if we are in ancient Athens, we are there Right Now because, see, there are the live actors right in front of us, talking right now. Film, by and large, apes that illusion. Even if the sequence of images and sounds is frozen, and we know it is, because there are films we watch over and over, the illusion is that this is all taking place in some sort of now. There is no past tense as the scenes unfold, which is probably why most synopses are written in a breathless present tense, like Damon Runyon without the baroque locutions.

Narration denies that. It says, "This is something that happened," not "this is something that is happening." At first that mode was only employed to say that this is set in the fabled past, or that this is a very important story you should know. Before long, Hollywood went Aesop and started turning stories into lessons, especially in What Not To Do. (This is always a good way to show depravity and immorality, by showing it in detail--fun, fun, fun--and then show people being punished for it. In fact, it's the basis of Cecil B. DeMille's entire career.) There was also the practical of covering time lapses and informing the audience of important changes and developments in a more efficient way than a title card (which suffers from differing reading speeds among the audience, leaving half frustrated at not being able to finish the card in time, and half bored waiting for the others to catch up.) I love the way Truffaut's unemphatic narration in Jules and Jim elides vast gaps in time, space and movements of the heart in a breathtakingly casual way, perfectly consistent with the tone and theme of the film. It's like a narrative torque wrench.

These uses of narration voice-over converged in the hard-boiled crime film (a genre that intersects with film noir), in which the detective shares his process and his outlook on the story as it unfolds. Of course, it is of the essence of the mystery story that facts and circumstances unfold in a non-chronological sequence. Thus there is the underlying narrative and the plot of the mystery laid on top -- that is, the story of how the crime is solved (and often, as in Chinatown, what the crime actually is.) The distancing effect of narration also provides room for humor, usually a wry irony only about a half-clik above sarcasm, but humor nonetheless.

This mode reaches its apogee with A Christmas Story, in which the narrator, author and screenwriter Jean Shepherd tells of epochal, earth-shattering events which are juxtaposed against scenes of an ordinary American childhood. The humor is not of mockery, but of gentle recognition that these little commonplaces feel enormous as we experience our own lives. The irony is one that we share as fellow humans, not one imposed by a sardonic author.

Emmanuel Mouret, writer-director-star of Shall We Kiss? has been compared to Eric Rohmer and Woody Allen, although neither his tone nor his visual style has much in common with either of those. Mouret sports neither nostalgia nor neuroses.* But there is the double vision of either the moralist or the humorist (natural enemies), which is the engine that makes this very slight film go. Indeed, I would argue that without the narration frame, one has little more than a minor variation of When Harry Met Sally, this one answering the central question: "can men and women be friends AND lovers?" in the negative.

(Side note - has anyone attempted a gay When Harry Met Sally? It would seem that the line between friend and lover would be even slippier when both parties share gender. Mine is an outsider's perspective, but it seems as though there might be some comic changes to be rung there. And no, I don't mean when the gay character is pathetically crushing on the straight character. That is a ridiculous straight fantasy, and in a lifetime spent in proximity with gay people, I've never known it to be happen. Being an oppressed minority makes most people pretty practical, and unlikely to waste their time chasing those who are not only unavailable, but likely to hurt you.)

The concept that the entire inner story of the film, which consumes at least 80% of its running time is told in order to explain a simple "no" offered in reply to the title question creates an unexpected suspense, i.e., will the answer change, as the telling of the story winds deep into the night, into the storyteller's hotel room, and as she assumes a semi-erotic pose while she tells the story. The fact that the listener is utterly satisfied by the story and a kiss which carries the implicit agreement to part forever -- that is, the kiss is meant as a simple pleasure sufficient unto itself, without the promise of future delights -- is a more impressive bit of legerdemain. Those who know French better than I claim that the French title, Un baiser, s'il vous plait ("A kiss, please) bears the implication of a kiss upon parting, which, if true, throws a lovely melancholy frame over the whole thing. And oddly, the melancholy of the outher story is much more satisfying than the fumbling consummation of the inner story.

All thanks to narration!
______
* I suppose playing the lead male role invites the Allen comparison and the preoccupation with the tiny physical details of a sexual encounter the Rohmer.

Bordwell on action editing

David Bordwell, the best shot-by-shot analyst of film in its history has another superb piece on his blog, this time about the trend I've complained about here frequently, specifically, the tendency toward disjointed and incoherent editing in action and fight sequences. Here's an excerpt:

During the 1990s several critics began to notice that filmmakers were doing something odd with action scenes.

Directors were consciously, even joyously, sacrificing clarity. When two characters were punching it out, the framing didn’t make it easy to know who was hitting whom, and how. Changes in angle and shot scale were sometimes so abrupt that you had little time to adjust. The cutting pace was so quick that you couldn’t entirely register the movement in shot A before shot B replaced it. Sometimes the spatial layout of the fight was confusing as well: too many close views, too few master shots. Later, the return of handheld shooting made many action scenes even more illegible., blurring and smearing them to the point that sound (as in the Bourne films) had to specify that a body has hit a window or a hand has busted a bottle. Now we have Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables, which might be a new summit in overbusy, incoherent, inconsequential action.

I wrote about this trend back in the 1990s, and I’ve returned to it on occasion since. Other writers, notably Todd McCarthy of Variety, noticed it too. He referred to the full-throttle editing and “frequently incoherent staging” on display in Armageddon (1998): “Bay’s visual presentation is so frantic and chaotic that one often can’t tell which ship or characters are being shown, or where things are in relation to one another.”

...The Michael Bay approach has become the principal way in which action scenes are shot. It isn’t absence of craft that leads to these aimless bouts. The filmmakers actively want the action to be hard, even impossible, to follow...They seem to think that making the action illegible is creative because it promotes realism.

...Realism, as usual, is simply a fig leaf for doing what you want. Virtually any technique can be justified as realistic according to some conception of what’s important in the scene...

Forget the realist alibi. What do you want your sequence to do to the viewer? Do you want it to pass along an impression of bustle and flurry? Or do you want to make the viewer wince, recoil, even mildly reenact the movements of the players? Then follow the Hong Kong tradition. Yuen Woo-ping once told me that his goal was to make the viewer “feel the blow.” To convey the effort and strain, the impact and pain: that’s something worth doing.

It’s something that the blur-o-vision tussles lack, but even fights that are more carefully filmed are strangely unmoving...

Bordwell then goes on to analyze, step by step, why the Hong Kong editing method works to convey the impact of a fight and the Michael Bay-Stallone method does not. Read the whole thing here.

Your past is waiting for you in your future

The Escapist (2008) may be the only prison break film which shares structural qualities with a romantic comedy, specifically (500) Days of Summer. That is, the beginning and the end of the story are deeply intertwined, and action and result seem to co-exist side by side.

It is hard to say what new could be done with a prison film, otherwise. It is a limited form, and for the first thirty years it would seem that virtually all of the story twists had been exercised. After that, prison break pictures were based on true stories as in Escape from Alcatraz and The Great Escape. Since then, pickings have been lean for the form, which has mostly upped the violence on-screen without any true developments in the genre.

Escapist has all the usual characters, the Brain, the Muscle, the Scrounger. It has the usual fake-outs and tricks. The only thing truly interesting is that the audience acquires the knowledge that the entire reason for the break is rendered moot even before it has begun, and that these yobbos are risking everything for nothing. The plot launches along three separate time lines and moves freely among them. Though disorienting at first, eventually it becomes revelatory, like a cubist picture in time.

Perversely, by rejecting the trappings of conventional suspense, director and co-writer Rupert Wyatt creates a riveting form of anti-suspense: not, "what will happen?" but "what will they do when they find out?" This structure drenches the entire story in irony, a tone natural to the prison break (which is usually feckless).

Plus there's Brian Cox. He seems to have experienced an Anthony Hopkins-type transfiguration, by which a yeoman actor becomes an acting deity. More power to him.

Behavior, compulsive and otherwise

During that blessed interregnum of the late 1960's and early 1970's when the grand pooh-bahs of the movie business admitted they had no idea what kind of movie to make, filmmakers were permitted to control the filmmaking process. Then came Jaws and Star Wars and concept films and guys like Syd Field started analyzing the scripts of gazillion-dollar films in order to duplicate them precisely and we have been living for the past 35 years in the era of highly structured narrative. "I'm a storyteller," says every maker of the next whiz-bang toy-based action film, "I love interesting characters and interesting stories." Bleeah. What they like is exactly what the distribution machine cranks out--noisy movies and high salaries...and formulaic stories.

Movies didn't have to go that way. Not until D.W. Griffith began to develop a brilliant grammar for narrative during 1910-1914 did American film become primarily storytelling. Displaying scenery, historic events, rare performing skills--all these held equal sway in film until Griffith (and perhaps the Europeans who preceded him slightly). John Cassavetes was widely feted in the late 50s and early 60s when he rediscovered the fascination of mere human interaction in his improvised actor-fests. Personally, I find Cassavetes's stuff hard to watch because I have no idea where we're going and therefore no idea what to pay attention to. But Cassavetes was an actor and seemed to think everything actors did was inherently interesting.

Robert Altman is to me, arguably, the king of the filmmaking era of the 70s, rejecting everything about the sausage-making studio style. It's not that he didn't know how to do that. He had spent 15 years toiling in television, tying up all the plot strands in 26 or 52 minutes (it was a long time ago) and leaving everyone unchanged, except the villains who went to jail. Maybe it was because of that long apprenticeship that Altman started tearing up the script, rounding up wonderful improvisatory actors, setting up an environment and a few simple goals and more or less seeing what happened. But the result was not accidental, unplanned or unstructured. Altman worked it all minutely, leaving himself open to the happy mishap. But the structure was deeply buried under a rich tapestry of real, recognizable human behavior.

You might guess I'm an Altman fan, so it's a little surprising that I didn't get around to his study of two compulsive gamblers, California Split (1974) until now. It immediately preceded his masterpiece, Nashville (1975) and parts of it seem to be rehearsing aspects of the latter film, especially the characters played by Gwen Welles in both films. Everything you read about this film mentions the cutting-edge sound design, but that is merely historical now, as the procedures used in the film are universal today, and so no longer remarkable.

What is remarkable is how little this film judges or condemns its characters. Yeah, they're compulsive, so what? A scene between George Segal and one of his creditors begins with all the usual cliches, but doesn't end with them, like Segal getting beat up or his fingers broken or his apartment trashed. He promises to pay and his loan shark is exasperated, but walks away exasperated. Segal and his pal Elliot Gould become enamored of two hookers, but none of the obligatory hooker-and-drunk-gambler scenes follow. In fact, the hookers aren't even present for the big gambling climax.

And what is the big climax? [SPOILER ALERT] They finally have good luck. A lot of good luck. They run up a big win. Then you know what happens next--they lose it all. But they are happy because they still have their friendship. Except they don't lose. They take their big win, walk into another room, split up the money, admit it doesn't feel that special (although they're glad to have a lot of money), take the money and walk away in two different directions, never to see each other again. Oh, and they settle their debts.

There is not one story conference that would sign off on an ending like that. But I can't tell you how satisfying it is. You gotta be there. That's true for all Altman films. There's no logical explanation for most of them. You just gotta be there.

Putting the pieces together

I was saying to a close friend that there is a form of drama in which the story has ended before the narrative begins, and that the narrative drive is all about the slow release of information. I was speculating that it began with British playwright Harold Pinter in the 1960's, and he astutely pointed out that it may have begun with Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, which was a little bit earlier than Pinter.

I've Loved You So Long (2008) belongs to this species; at least, in part. It tells of a woman who has been through terrible things and done a terrible thing and is now recovering from the consequences of all that, going through the awful process of re-joining us "normal" people. I confess I was interested in seeing the film because the lead, Kristin Scott Thomas, who is English, acted her role in French (her real-life husband is French). It makes sense for her character to be half-English, as it helps justify her taciturnity and self-possession.

There's a wonderful uncomfortable dinner scene in which the host expounds on filmmaker Eric Rohmer, maintaining that Rohmer is as important as classical dramaticst Racine. This is like an English-speaking person comparing Woody Allen to Shakespeare. I am happy to say that his friends (mostly French) all dismiss this inflated comparison. But it is an interesting choice, because Rohmer's characters talk and talk and talk about themselves and their relationships and their inability to do and say the things that will make them happy. Thomas's character also cannot relieve her unhappiness, but she refuses to talk about it or to demand anyone's pity.

I can scarcely remark on cinematic technique in the film--it appears relatively invisible. As is common in this genre, scenes are framed in medium and long shots, with two or more people in the shot so they can play the scene together without being interrupted by the director cutting from shot to shot. That, and the central character's reticence make the film like a good, brisk, dry French wine, rather than, say a robust, fruity Italian. What is truly remarkable is how packed the film is with incident and detail which make it consistently engaging and absorbing, even though there is scarcely any story as we usually conceive it.

And it is one of the best illustrations of the truth that real change is most often, incremental, often invisible when it is happening, but readily apparent when it has been completed. A good movie if you happen to be a grown-up or plan to be one someday.

Handling the truth

The premise that the protagonist possesses both knowledge and moral clarity is so deeply ingrained into the structure of narrative that every time it is challenged--and that is pretty often, especially in films of the 1960s and 70s--it can still be a shock. I still remember my astonishment, when I first saw Mozart's opera The Magic Flute and we got to the second act, when I realized ***SPOILER ALERT FOR AN 18TH CENTURY OPERA*** that all the good guys were actually bad guys, and vice versa, the "bad" guys were good and that the hero had been sent on a fool's errand.

So Decision at Sundown (1957), working that well-worn path, is still a surprise. Because Randolph Scott starts off the film wrong. He has a wrong goal, based on a wrong interpretation of the facts. This is Randolph Scott we're talking about. If Randolph Scott can be wrong, then food can kill you and the President can lie-- oh, wait a minute.

And in fact, the evil at the center of the story is far bigger than Randolph Scott's misplaced vengeance. Decision at Sundown is a "town" western, like My Darling Clementine and High Noon. Whereas most Westerns set a lone man against a vast landscape, "town" Westerns are about the arrival of civilization, and an examination of what we get from joining society in exchange for what we give up. And Sundown (it's the name of the town) is one of those "dirty little towns" in which one big baddie has sewn everything up including the law. What the people in town have given up is their integrity, their decency, their souls, for a little sense of security. (Should sound familiar for any American who was an adult in the spring of 2003.) Westerns are inherently suspicious of towns--the town in The Tall T is called Contention, and why? Because, as the station master says, "It's full of people, son."

The big boss, Tate Kimbrough (could people really be intimidated by a game named "Tate"?) is the guy Scott has come gunning for, albeit for the wrong reasons. Unusually for a Western, the film pivots around sex and sexual possession. Tate is going to get married today to a good girl, but he openly sleeps with the town floozy. (It's wonderful how much sex they could get into these low-budget programmer movies without anyone noticing.) Scott believes that Tate, who dallied with his wife when he was away fighting the Civil War, drove her to suicide. The truth, as Noah Beery, Jr. tries to tell him, is that Tate was one of many, that she was not a woman worth seeking vengeance for.

One even questions whether Randolph Scott is the central character. He spends most of the movie crouched in a livery stable, trying not to get shot by the corrupt sheriff. Although he does learn (or perhaps simply accept) the truth about his wife, he goes through no great character change, leaving the story as bitter and alienated as he entered it. You have not seen a Randolph Scott western until you've seen him at the end of the film, drunk, stinking, and spitting contempt on the townspeople who found their decency too late to save his friend.

This makes for an odd Western. It's not the usual man-against-the-landscape or man-against-evil force-set-against-the-landscape. One question why it needs to be a Western. But it needs to be an environment in which the rules are not yet set, where the only guidance as to the right way to behave come from the promptings of one's conscience. Choices are yet to be set in stone. One might be a sheriff or an outlaw--or switch back and forth, like Wyatt Earp. History and tradition have not set their heavy foot here, which is why Westerns as a form may have appealed to Europeans in days gone by.

This may be the only Western in which both hero and villain slink away in shame--because neither belongs in the about-to-be-civilized world of The Town.

Why I am not worried about the killer robots

Judging by Terminator Salvation (2009) we have nothing to fear from killer machines from the future. Clearly, computers are TERRIBLE at engineering. First of all, when creating robots they have adopted one of the worst features about human beings, which is that their central processing unit is all contained in one tiny area which is attached to the rest of the body by a skinny little passage, which is easily severed or broken. Most robot designers have the sense either to put the processing unit in an easily protected area or to distribute processing around the machine, or indeed distribute around several machines. Skynet, the evil network of machines from the future has clearly seen too many zombie movies and leave themselves open for the killshot.

Also, for surveillance vehicles they have copied the motorcycle, which is inherently unstable and easily overturned and otherwise disrupted. The only reason anyone invented a two-wheel motorized contraption is that it is fun, not because it is efficient, reliable or safe. It is none of those things, which is what motorcycle fans love about them. These evil computers from the future were clearly built and programmed by idiots. Or just maybe the movies about them are.

A few other things struck me while watching the movie. (In a movie like this, which is in structural terms just a musical in which explosions substitute for big notes and high kicks, you have plenty of time for your own thoughts.) Has the existence of the Jewish Holocaust permanently changed storytelling? Before the Holocaust, could we conceive of a completely implacable, irrational lethal foe which would come after you and kill you for no reason whatsoever except that you are who you are, and which cannot be stopped except by means which threaten the entire world? I would be interested if any sci-fi or fantasy fans could let me know if this story idea predates 1945.

Another thing--did they have to go to Schwarzenegger to get permission to use an image of his face from about 25 years ago to paste it onto an old Terminator? Or did his original contract cover that? (Use of likeness in perpetuity, etc., etc.) If that latter is the case, agents and lawyers are going to have to be a lot more careful about contracts for their actor clients.

Finally, as I was enjoying one of the little encounters in the movie between good guys and bad guys, one which incorporated its own beginning, middle and end, I was thinking about the old canard that what people like in their entertainment is stories. Clearly, this is not true. Let's take professional wrestling. What they LIKE is guys hitting each other with chairs and leaping off the ropes and pretending to get their legs bent the wrong way. But for some reason, they like these things a little BETTER if they're couched in a little story--bad guy wants revenge on good guy for beating him in a previous match, etc. The story isn't what makes it good, but it gives it context in which to enjoy one guy pummeling another.

Similarly in an action film, we like the explosions, gunshots and punches. But we know that a de-contextualized compilation of explosions would get boring. So we want a frame to set these things in. It's not that we enjoy story, per se. It's the flour in the cake. Not yummy, but essential for cake.

Another way to describe it is that story in film is like Russian nesting dolls. There's the great big overarching story--often mythic in scope. Inside that are the particular details of the character. Inside is each of three acts. Inside each act are several scenes, each of which has its own narrative arc. And a scene may have a discrete event within in it--a punch, a kick, a joke, a gag, a kiss, a leap, a high note--which provides a direct visceral pleasure, which is most satisfying to the audience when it's position within the nesting dolls is completely understood and enjoyed.

An addition to the pantheon (seriously)

If you have an hour and a half, sit down and watch this movie. I'm not kidding. It is the stunning The Cranes Are Flying (1957), directed by Mikhail Kalazatov and photographed by Sergei Urusevsky, the team the created I Am Cuba . I would place it in my list of the Top 5 movies filmed in black-and-white. (Don't try and nail me down on the others. The Long Voyage Home and Touch of Evil would be in there, for sure.)

If you don't have time to see the whole film, let me point out a few key sequences.

First, starting at about 24:46, the heroine is on a bus to say goodbye to her fiancee, who has volunteered to fight in World War II (in Russia, that was damn near suicidal). We start with her on the bus, then, without any fuss, follow her through the crowd in the street, and suddenly, as she bursts onto a street filled with tanks, the camera cranes up to take in the whole scene. There is no air of "showing off" about this shot--it's just what the story wants.

I also recommend the entire botched leave-taking, in which man and woman never meet. It begins at about 28:25. If Kalazatov had directed Gone With The Wind (and he would have done a hell of a job), it could be taken seriously as a film (David Lean must have been seriously jealous of this sequence).

Next is the death of the young man, Boris, which begins at 50:14. Boris is being sent back from the front to be disciplined for fighting. With him is the man he was fighting with, who Boris has been carrying for a while now. Suddenly, the sniper shot comes. Boris looks up and sees the sky recede. Then the forest begins to swirl before his eyes and the swirl merges with the swirling motion of the camera as he remembers running up the stairs to see his beautiful fiancee. The memory merges into a dream or a wish of a wedding, until Boris finally collapses into the swamp. Here Kalazatov's roots in silent film are evident, as the sequence rivals Murnau.

Finally, at 1:07:56, we see the heroine, filled with shame and regret for marrying the sexy but amoral brother of her fiancee, runs into the street, apparently outruns a train, apparently with the intent of throwing herself under the train in the manner of Anna Karenina, but instead rescuing a toddler who has about to wander into the path of a truck. Here Kalazatov shows himself a worthy son of Eisenstein, the father of Russian cinema. If you have time, stick with it for the darkly humorous scene that follows as a group of women cluck over what to do with this lost child in overlapping and simultaneous dialogue as they loom into the foreground, foreshortened with a short lens and then and just as quickly recede into the background, nearly spinning in hysterics as the heroine quietly bonds with the child.

But these are bravura sequences and do not justly represent the balance, the restraint, the poetry of so much of the staging, photography and acting of this film. It is virtually a perfect romantic melodrama, with a heartstopping tearjerker of a final scene.

Why did our college professors start us on foreign film with the impenetrable Bergman, the surreal Fellini, the languid Satijat Ray? We got the idea of foreign film as hard work. We should have started with The Cranes Are Flying, with a familiar type of story, albeit with deeper resonance and more genuine emotion than in most American commercial films, certainly those of its era, but with a bold and expressive vocabulary that had become dessicated and stultified in the American film factories. Then we would have seen the real kinship among humans that is celebrated and indeed fostered by the best of international film. And the beautiful Tatiana Samoilova would have been a movie star anywhere.

Really, see this movie.

Sundown for stupidity

As part of my ongoing effort to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of film history, I am trying to catch up on those Other Hollywood Musicals. The MGM canon is well-known from frequent tributes and scholarly appreciations. But few of those films were as popular in their own time as the innumerable Technicolor hoof-a-paloozas at 20th Century Fox, usually anchored around Alice Faye or Betty Grable; or in a later decade, around the splendid tonsils of Doris Day at Warner Bros. These are what most people of the 40s thought of as movie musicals, more than the arty Broadway-style epics with Gene Kelly and the other denizens of the "Freed Unit."

This week I looked at an example that was reportedly a major effort, taking a year to prepare. This is hard to imagine. The result is a silly, lazy romantic comedy, which, like many Depression and post-Depression romantic comedies is not about romance, but money. But the movie can't even take the trouble to stay interested in its own story. I was watching with a person of the generation for whom these films were made and even she thought the story was boring.

Conversely, there are a number of well-written and performed songs and dances which HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING. It's common today to say, "Oh well, that's the way musicals are (or were)." But personally I can't imagine having such contempt for an audience as to starve them of narrative, first by giving them a lousy and indifferent story, and then constantly interrupting that narrative with irrelevant performance pieces which become, in this context, irritating rather than exhilarating. The best one could hope for these songs and dances is that they would distract from the bad film surrounding them.

In retrospect it seems amazing how long it took the creators of musicals to realize that audiences crave narrative--even thin narrative. The much-vaunted Oklahoma has a story of pure tissue paper, but the show seemed revolutionary, because THEY NEVER STOPPED TELLING THE STORY. Evidently the generation raised on the last gasp of vaudeville still retained such a fascination with pure performance skills that these skills were thought to be in tension with narrative--after all, they had originally simply been disembodied performances. "Integration" was the big buzzword of the 1940s after Rodgers and Hammerstein emerged--simply meaning--stick with the story, stupid.

We see this today in martial arts films. Martial arts films are very much like musicals. You have some scrap of a story cobbled together in order to hold together the big entertainment pieces. in musicals, it's dances--in martial arts films, it's fights. (Both have choreographers, incidentally, showing the premium film puts on the action of the human body.) In the 1970s, martial arts films all had the same (revenge) plots and the same endless fights and--even more cliched--the endless training sequences. I contend that Jackie Chan broke through as the greatest superstar in martial arts ever for two reasons, (a) he brought humility and humor to the genre and (b) the martial arts were always in service to the story. He may someday be equalled (I'd have to see that), but he will never be surpassed as his type of filmmaker.

Other than as an historical curiosity, or interest in Betty Grable, who was such a good actress that she made it seem as though having great legs meant she had a pretty face (she didn't), I have no idea what the continuing value of Moon Over Miami is. Film preservation--the argument against.