1969: Easy Rider

Easy Rider (1969, Hopper) 6/10

"You know this used to be a helluva good country. I don't know what's gone wrong with it" (George Hanson)

In southern slang an "easy rider" refers to a man who is financially supported by his prostitute girlfriend. Almost forty years later, the term has come to equate to other things: rebellion, motorcycles, counter-culture, drugs and so forth. The notions of spiritual bankruptcy and indolence attached to its initial colloquial meaning have all but disappeared from our modern vocabulary. Most audiences would connect the parlance with stretching out on one's motorcycle, rather than taking shortcuts at the expense of others and one's integrity.

Easy Rider is a film entrenched in myths. Passing through pastoral landscapes and arid strips of desert, the film is a cross-country journey between two men Wyatt a.k.a. Captain America (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) who search for America, or the more precisely the American Dream, and fail to find it anywhere. Fashioned as two modern outlaws, the film's anti-heroes begin their quest in Mexico, where they purchase cocaine sold onto a Los Angeles pusherman (Phil Spector) for profit.

Dipping into their funds, the pair acquire two motorbikes. Stashing the remaining money in their gas tanks, Wyatt and Billy head to Florida in order to "retire" after a brief stopover in New Orleans to celebrate Mardi Gras. Along the way, they meet farmers, communards, rednecks, prostitutes and a drunken ACLU laywer named George Hanson (Jack Nicholson). Camping on the outskirts of the string of southern towns they traverse through, the group take copious amounts of drugs, philosophize and come into confrontations with individuals unsympathetic to their nomadic, long-haired lifestyle.

Filmed in 1968, the picture sat in an editing room for almost a year, while Hopper tried to make sense of the four and a half hour rough cut he had assembled. Reputedly costing under $350,000, Easy Rider made $60 million dollars worldwide and changed Hollywood overnight. Or so popular memory has told us. In actuality, the groundwork for change had arguably been simmering since the mid-Sixties. The influence of French Nouvelle Vague directors such as Godard and Truffaut, as well as other Europeans like Michaelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini had already creeped into popular British films released in the United States such as Richard Lester's A Hard's Day Night and Antonioni's Blow-Up. The controversy over the latter film's sexual content was a key movement in the collapse of the Production Code.

The power of the studios prevented the type of laissez-faire narrative and editing structures popularized by Godard from being incorporated into American cinema until around 1967. For over a decade, the aging studio heads had believed a continuation of cinematic orthodoxy was key to wooing audiences. But the audiences had long left cinema for television and as a result the former was in a crisis. The studios scrambled to find the next "thing" to lure in young audiences. Thus prior to the release of Easy Rider the major studios had released Arthur Penn's 1967 Bonnie Clyde, John Boorman's Point Blank, Mike Nichols' The Graduate and Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odysseyto success with younger audiences. With their utilization of avant-garde cinematic techniques in editing, blatant anti-heroes and moral complexities these films certainly demonstrated that Hollywood was granting directors more freedom in order to fill their coffers.


But the most influential changes toward the creation of Easy Rider came from a smaller company outside the system. Most famously known for the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations starring Vincent Price, AIP were signficant in creating properties suited to the tastes of America's youth. Unafraid to import dubbed versions of European films such as Fellini's La Dolce Vita and Roger Vadim's Brigitt Bardot vehicle ...And God Created Woman, AIP had long tested the restrictive measures of the Production Code. Furthermore, through their "Beach Party" films starring Frankie Avalon, the studio garnered a receptive teen audience. Yet, perhaps their biggest contribution was in the resurrection of the biker sub-genre. With its roots in Lazlo Benedek's The Wild One was biker film used by Roger Corman's American International Pictures (AIP) to corner the youth market.

Still associated with rebellion, the biker films offered an exploitative counter-product to the placid histronics of Hollywood. Peter Fonda became the sub-genre's biggest star in films such as Roger Corman's 1966 Wild Angels. Fonda also starred in the emerging counterculture films the studio was producing such as 1967's Jack Nicholson-scripted The Trip. Nicholson himself had starred in the 1967 biker film Hells Angels On Wheels. The Trip can be seen as the starting point for Easy Rider in that it brought to together Nicholson, Fonda and Hopper: the former scripted the film, the latter two starred in it.

And while Nicholson only appeared in his star-making, Oscar nominated supporting role as George Hanson after Rip Torn abdicated, his contacts enabled the picture to be developed. Nicholson had developed and produced The Monkees psychedelic film Head. The man behind The Monkees and Head, Bert Schneider had created the show in part due to classic Hollywood nepotism. His father Abe was the head of Columbia Pictures and Bert was assigned to the studio's television division in order to stay out of trouble. When The Monkees became a cash cow, Abe agreed to release any films his son produced. Subsequently this gave Easy Rider major studio distribution, although the film's box-office numbers were fostered via word of mouth rather than studio marketing.

While Dennis Hopper has long claimed with the creation of Easy Rider he was attempting to make the first American art film, history proves him wrong. Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Boorman's Point Blank and John Schlesinger's 1969 film Midnight Cowboy were not only all released prior to Easy Rider, but they are also far more abstract and indebted to European filmmakers such as Resnais and Godard than Hopper's film. What truly was revolutionary about Easy Rider was perhaps not its content or narrative structure, which had already been the subject of various other films, but three key points.

First the film was able to blend the exploitative elements of the biker and counterculture sub-genres into a setting that was more realistic than in its predecessors. Secondly, although copious drug use had been seen in American films prior to Easy Rider such as 1959's Gene Krupa Story and 1955's The Man With The Golden Arm, Easy Rider was one of the first major American films to have its characters suffer no moral consequences because of this drug use. Thirdly, while young European-influenced, university trained filmmakers had already begun to work their way into Hollywood, the financial profits from Easy Rider made it easier for those filmmakers to develop their own pictures. For instance in 1967 Martin Scorsese had released his debut film Who's That Knocking On My Door? at a Chicago Film Festival, but it would only be after the release of Easy Rider that filmmakers like Scorsese and Coppola were given more leverage in Hollywood.

Steeped in the folkloric qualities of the Old West, the film posits itself as a modern western. With motorcycles replacing horses, gasoline stations substituting for trading posts and paved highways instead of dusty trails, Easy Rider procures a variety of elements from the Western genre. Utilizing the names Wyatt and Billy, the mythical auras attached to those names bore through with the reflective Wyatt always trying to serve the public good and the wild Billy selfishly nitpicking over inocuous issues.

Although in terms of editing the film is heavily influenced by Godard and Resnais, there are several sequences that could easily have been extracted from a John Ford or Howard Hawks western two decades earlier. Camping out on the outskirts of town next to Indian burial grounds and abandoned houses, the pair replicate an image of anti-conformity: two outlaws trekking across a topography filled with decay and greed. Remnants of ghost towns such as Sacred Mountain provide a brief rest from the vacant landscape surrounding them.

The theme of the American Dream is prominently displayed amongst the buttes and mesas. With his jacket and motorcycle prominently displaying the American flag, Fonda's Wyatt represents notions of American pop culture in his nickname (Captain America) and the Japser Johns-esque fetishization of the American flag. Yet, the dream Wyatt and Billy is a perverted one. Through their drug smuggling, the pair mistakenly assume they have bought freedom. Wyatt even throws away a gold watch symbolizing the release of further responsiblities and pressures. But as Nicholson's lawyer informs them, freedom is not equated with money or materials. Yet, it is this type of freedom, he informs is the cause of conflicts and violence. And it is this backward and racist conception of "freedom" that Wyatt, Billy and George encounter on their travels.

The real type of freedom Hanson alludes to is perhaps found in the two communities Fonda's Wyatt dearly admires at a distance. Their first encounter is with a New Mexican farmer. In a symbolic gesture of the times, while he mends a horse shoe, they repair a wheel on their motorcyle. With his young Hispanic wife and their brood, they are slowly reaping the pleasures of working their land. The same can be said for the hitchhiker who takes him to a commune on the outskirts of the desert. Impoverished, but connected the community has been fostered by like-minded youth who are blighted by the materialism of the city. Despite their inability to grow anything, their belief and spirit touches Wyatt. He admires their intellectual and communal freedom.

Conversely, Billy is unamused by their antics. His rebellious attitude is fabricated on reckless behaviour more than non-conformity. His attitude toward the commune is centered on the possibility of scoring more drugs and free love. His dream is found in a teardrop gas tank emblazoned with the American flag on it. Yet this not money earned not by painful labour, but by deception. In the late Sixties, cocaine was associated with paranoia and wealth and thus when Wyatt informs Billy that "We blew it," he is referring to their chance of real freedom.

Instead, by selling an affluent drug, the pair have conformed to the same goal as every middle-class American: to make a lot of money and then retire in a sunny locale. Billy doesn't seem to understand this. The theme of "selling out" is also related to the film's infamous LSD trip in a New Orleans cemetery. In return for driving the hitchhiker, Wyatt is offered in secret drugs to take with the right people at the right place. With death and decay still enveloped around them, Wyatt shares the drug with Billy and two prostitutes played by Karen Black and Toni Basil. The subsequent result is a "bad trip" in which the Christ-like Wyatt foresees his future in this twisted Garden of Gethsemane.

Severely dated at times, Easy Rider is an interesting capsule into late 60's American counterculture. Filmed in an improvisational manner, Easy Rider can often be endearingly beautiful such as Lazlo Kovacs' cinematography of Monument Valley, or utterly annoying as in Dennis Hopper's Billy. Dropping "man" as about as many times as his character drops acid, Hopper's Billy is a condescending and often vicious perma-stoned character. His paranoia constrasts with Fonda's gentle charm and Nicholson's career-shaping manic performance.

The film's unique editing structure is an ideal method for the snapshots of life, Hopper seeks out. The film's thematic symbolism focuses on ideas pertinent to the Vietnam-era culture: issues of violence, spiritual decay, death, selling out, freedom and non-conformity. Therefore, the savagery and cynicism imbuing Easy Rider is an ideal counterpoint to the naïvete of the counterculture movements, which were engrossed with the film. Yet, unlike Godard's Weekend, Hopper's film lacks the sardonic visual wit that thrusts Weekend or the films of Buñuel which Hopper claimed to be influenced by.

Thus, contrary to popular opinion Easy Rider appears more to be subtly attacking American counterculture than lauding it. The appraisal that even rebels have a cause to "sell out" for adds a sharp edge of realism to the proceedings. However, the agrarian lifestyle the film promotes as an alternative is more in-tune with anti-modernist conceptions during the era than a genuine solution. Within the simplicity of the agrestic commune filled with starved children and demoralized hippies engaging in childish sing-alongs and (in what has to be an allusion to Blow-Up) pantomime one can find all the spontaneous optimism and violent despair that the Sixties represented.

* Easy Rider is available through Columbia Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1960: Black Sunday

Black Sunday (Bava, 1960) 9/10

In 1960, two horror films were released which would change the shape of the genre. In Hollywood, Alfred Hitchcock released Psycho, a stripped bare evocation in which sinister individuals and actions emerge from safe and ordinary settings. In Europe, forty-six year old special effects pioneer and cinematographer Mario Bava cast an entirely different spin on the medium.

Whereas Hitchcock's film was imbued with psychological tension and a quotidian mis-en-scene, Bava's film was an atmospheric paean to 30's Universal horror and Britain's emerging Hammer Studios synthesis of sex and sadism. Utilizing a short story by legendary Ukranian author Nikolai Gogol entitled The Vij, Bava designed a period horror film in which visual aesthetics usurped the narrative as the film's crucial bearer of motifs, symbols and themes.

Beginning in the mid-17th century with the ritual burning of a Moravian princess Asa (Barbara Steele) and her brother Javutich (Arturo Dominici) for their indulgence in satanic and incestuous practices, Bava's film explores themes of broken families, deception and uncertainty. As punishment for their crimes, the pair are not only burned at the stake, but are given the infamous distinction of having the bronze Mask of Satan nailed to their faces. However, the event is falted by a storm, which prevents the dissolution of their evil souls.

Forwarding two centuries later, Bava's camera captures a pair of doctors travelling to a conference by carriage. When the wheel loosens from the carriage, the elder doctor Tomas Kruvajan (Andrea Checchi) tries to satisfy his curiousity in the dark arts by entering an abandoned crypt. There he and his assistant Dr. Andre Gorobec (John Richardson) unwittingly break a stone cross atop the coffin of the condemned witch Asa. With the cross now broken, the witch can now return to fulfill her promise to seek vengence on future generations of her family including the current nobles, including Katia (Barbara Steele) who bears a striking license to Asa.

Despite its low-budget status, Mario Bava creates a film brimming with visual flair. Masking his sets in atmospheric waves of fog and spectacular incogruent rays of light, Bava demonstrates his considerable skill as a cinematographer throughout Black Sunday . Using simple camera tricks involving the dimming of lights and exploring scenes in long, slippery movements, Bava is able to impress a non-existent epic status to his audience.

Via his camera, Bava supplies Black Sunday with an array of peculiar motifs. The two most noticeable ideas are the symbolism related to eyes and crucifixes. The film's infamous Mask of Satan offers its wearers only two solitary eye slits upon which their putrid irises are to gaze at the crucifixes which prevent their corporeal resurrection. During Kruvajan's attempt to injure a bat in the crypt, his temper results in the destruction of the protective cross. Later on, a priest reveals to Kruvajan's assistant Andre that the only way to destroy the ghoulish figures is through gouging their eyes with a stake: demonstrated in one of the film's most notorious visual shocks.

In several moments during the film, Bava's characters utilize crosses to save their souls from their zombified attackers, or in Katia's case would-be assassins. Repeatedly Bava also centers his camera on the fireplaces within the home of the elderly Prince Vajda (Ivo Garrini) to remind his audience of the failure of the 17th century witchhunters to burn Asa's body. The burning of one otherworldly character in particular who stumbles into the fire is done with a superb degree of menace.

The destruction of families is a key theme in Black Sunday. The sentencing and subsequent execution at the stake of Asa and Javutich by their brother is the first sign of this schismatic approach to family relations. Yet, as film historian Tim Lucas notes in his commentary for the film, the original Italian prints of Black Sunday note that Asa and Javutich are not only being executed for witchcraft, but also for incestuous relations. Asa's claim to seek revenge on future generations has resulted in bizarre events occuring on the day of her execution that have maimed or killed future family members.

Once resurrected from their eternal slumber, Asa and Javutich begin their quest to destroy their successors: often utilizing gullible third parties to do their bidding. The physical similarities between Asa and Katia allow for the former to try and deceive the film's mortal characters into believing she is the real Katia. Given the obtuse and awkward nature of Steele's Katia this is astutely realized by Bava in several lucid and perplexing sequences.

Through Steele's dual role as Asa and Katia, Bava is able to insert an aura of uncertainty into the viewer. The first time we see Katia is after Kruvajan breaks the stone cross across her ancestor's tomb. Adorned in black with two giant dogs, the viewer is initially tricked into believing she has immediately reconsolidated her corporeal self. The bewitching nature of Steele's Katia also adds an opaque nature to the film. The cryptic furrows of her brow and perplexed smiles often call into doubt her mortal existence due to Bava's doubling of his lead female protagonist.

Some scholars have claimed Bava intended these sequences to represent Steele's Asa emerging earlier into the picture, but their finalized presence imbues her character with a sense of hereditary iintrigue. In an era, when female horror villains were rare, Steele's portrayal of Asa is imbued with a sexual hunger and menace which would have been viewed as threatening to early Sixties audiences. Kruvajan's encounter with her is filled with a simultaneous sensation of attraction and repellence. Asa's punctured skin, lusty breathing and aggresive erotic necrophilia predates Linda Blair's Regan MacNeill in William Friedkin's The Exorcist by more than a decade.

In 1960, audiences were struck by two major concepts emerging from Black Sunday. The first is Bava's magisterial camerawork allowing for incredible layers of contrasted darkness and light, as well as an array of brilliant effects such as the supernatural carriage shot in slow motion to add a Murnau-esque feeling of fear and wonder. The ambigiuous and otherworldly nature of Barbara Steele also resonated as Federico Fellini quickly utilized her in his film 8½ the same year. The beauty of Bava's images harks back to the feel of early German Expressionists such as Murnau and surrealists such as Cocteau, as well as the more contemporary images pioneered by Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer Sven Nykvist.

The second idea audiences extracted from Bava's film was the malicious violence and visual sadism seen throughout Black Sunday. Whereas Hammer Studios utilized full-blooded colour to heighten gore, Bava's stark black and white is equally more terrifying. Upon its release in the United States, several of the more violent sequenes in Black Sunday were omitted, such as the blood-splatted hammering of the Mask of Satan onto Steele's face, the gouging of a character's eye, a human face doused in flames and a kiss between a wart-strewn corpse and an entranced victim. Remarkably, Bava's effects still hold up extremely well, despite their low-tech nature: as seen in the resurrectio carnis of Steele's decayed body using eggs, rice and jello.

Also released under the title The Mask of Satan, Black Sunday is one of the greatest horror films ever produced: a fantastic debut brimming with suspense, intrigue and inventive cinematography. Featuring a star marking turn by Barbara Steele, Black Sunday is one of cinema's most atmospheric and enigmatic films. A key influence on directors as varied as Tim Burton, Martin Scorsese and David Lynch, Black Sunday is an aesthetically gorgeous blend of fluid and angular black and white cinematography that whose visual splendour is an obvious template to films such as Burton's Sleepy Hollow and Lynch's The Elephant Man.

* Black Sunday is available in Anchor Bay's Mario Bava Collection Vol 1

Other Mario Bava Films Reviewed:
The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1962) 6/10
Black Sabbath (1963) 7/10
Knives of the Avenger (1966) 2/10

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1945: State Fair

State Fair (Walter Lang, 1945) 6/10

The State Fair is one of the quintessential embodiments of classic Americana. Fusing the joyful carefree nature of a carnival with an expansive competitve aspect, the State Fair is one of America's most notable annual traditions.

In an age of technological wonder and gadgetry it is surprising to note the surviving popularity of this beloved institution. In 2005, over a third of the state population of Iowa visited that year's State Fair: a tally of over a million people in a state with a population sitting under three million citizens.

On three occasions, Twentieth-Century Fox utilized Philip Strong's novel in a trio of films entitled State Fair. The first was directed in 1933 by the studio's prolific craftsman Henry King as a straight-up melodrama. The second was a lavish 1945 remake by Walter Lang (no relation to Fritz), which followed the basic setting and plot of the original, but infused a whimsical musical aspect scored by Rogers and Hammerstein.

The third and final adaptation was a disasterous 1962 musical version directed by José Ferrer and starring Ann Margaret, Bobby Darin adn Pat Boone. Shifting the action from Iowa to Texas, the popular cast which also included a return to the screen of Fox's biggest musical star Alice Faye after a sixteen year absence. But by 1962, the property had become antiquated: leading many scholars to wonder why Fox even bothered to remake the film once more.

In 1945 however, Fox were in a conundrum. Unable to film Broadway's most popular musical Oklahoma, the studio instead decided to do the next best thing: hire the musical's songwriters Rogers and Hammerstein to score a remake from the studio's vault. In the wake of MGM's successful musical Meet Me In St. Louis, Fox decided to rework State Fair as a musical. Corralling young ingenue Jeanne Crain and Noirish frontman and ex-accountant Dana Andrews into the roles of the film's two principal lovers, the film focuses on the exploits of the Frakes family: a close-knit farming family who each have their reasons for going to the State Fair.

While the family's patriarch Abel (Charles Winninger) and his wife Melissa (Fay Bainter) each aim to win various contests, the teenagers aim to find romance. Crain's Margy loses interest in her boring fiancé to be Harry Ware and soon falls head over heels for mouthy journalist Pat Gilberg (Dana Andrews); while her brother Wayne (Dick Haymes) woos singer Emily Joyce (Vivian Blaine) to compensate for the fact his longtime girlfriend Elenanor (Jane Nigh) is banned from attending the fair. Abel and his ailing prize boar Blue Boy fight for the prized "Blue Ribbon", as Melissa attempts to avoid the advances of a drunk judge and give a snooty rival her comeuppance.

State Fair is an overtly upbeat slice of Americana. Wedged somewhere in between Minnelli's 1944 Meet Me In St. Louis and Charles Walters' 1950 Summer Stock, State Fair is a breezy, pedestrian film, which sticks to the wartime attitude of reflecting upon simpler times. Through the State Fair love can be found, the moral ugliness of individuals can be uncovered and acclaim for life's persistent struggles can be rewarded. Or at least that is how it is interpreted in Lang's film.

Whilst the material evidently provides room to dissect this social microcosm of American culture little is done within the material. Instead provincialist attitudes about urbanites and artists are widespread. Had Fox decided to produce the film more than half a decade earlier, one could even argue the possibility of State Fair being an isolationist picture. Characters such as Andrews' reporter are viewed with an initial mistrust, due to their city ethics and lack of association with the flavours of country life; while transient singers such as Vivian Joyce are to be viewed with suspicion due to their inability to hone roots within the community or secure relationships with people such as Margy's naïve brother Wayne.

Like Meet Me In St. Louis it shows the response of a family toward a fair. In Minnelli's film, the World's Fair becomes the event which binds and inspires the family members to coalesce their community spirit. In Lang's picture, the fair embodies less an aura of progress, but more a less inhibited desire to avoid social evolution. Unlike, the Smith family in Meet Me In St. Louis, the people attending the fair appear eager to resist characters and movements which threaten the essence of their rural lives.

As with Summer Stock, the central female protagonist abandons a relationship with a wealthy, yet dull man of considerable community influence in order to find love with an educated, arrogant urbanite. For these rural women, the values of their parents generation no longer hold the same degree of sway. The unspoken rigid class identities seen at the fair between agrarian lower class Mrs. Frakes and her bourgeoise rival are not contested with the same undercurrent of temporal satisfaction.

Instead in State Fair, the grown children abandon their parent's quaint caravan in order to search for their happiness, rather than their parents. Unlike in George Marshall's woefully underrated The Mating Game the parents do not seem eager to siphon off their children, nor do their children appear willing to connect with any desires or plans their parents have for them.

Unremarkably, the film ends under the similarly contrived circumstances upon which it is established. The follies of romance and mistakes in judgment made by the teenagers could have ended under a neat setting: avoiding formulaic conclusions and providing a touch of melancholy to their parents' consistent disconnection from their teenage lives. Yet, any didactic or moralist implications is erased in an ending that subtracts all of their previous errors and starts things anew.

Walter Lang's State Fair is an enjoyable, yet uneventful slice of Americana and cinematic hokum. Despite its score by Rogers and Hammerstein which resulted in Oscar winning song "It Might As Well Be Spring", the musical qualities of State Fair are overall evidently flat and forgettable in comparison to other Rogers and Hammerstein scored musicals. This can be argued to their status as "songwriters for hire" in the case of this film unlike their other successful cinematic adaptations The Sound Of Music and Oklahoma! in which they wrote the songs and story.

With wartime restrictions clamping down on usable materials, Lang like Minnelli earlier is able to achieve an amazingly high visual standard in the film's production values and Leon Shamroy's cinematography. Yet despite the archiac nature of the material, it can be argued that the latter would have been arguably better served by the advent of Cinemascope half a decade later. The cast featuring Crain, Andrews, Blaine and Haymes is pleasant enough, but not revelatory. The studio system casting of Andrews in particular is interesting given his reputation as a Noir actor, but the limited capabilities of Crain and Andrews keep the performances like the film itself charming, but constrained.

*The 1945 version of State Fair is available through Fox Home Video in a DVD set including the 1962 edition

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1955: Rebel Without A Cause

Rebel Without A Cause (Ray, 1955) 7/10

Why do we do this? (Jim Stark)
You gotta do something. Don't you? (Buzz Gunderson)

On the surface, one had reason to be optimistic in mid-1950's America. The economy servicing post-war Europe was booming, the post-Stalinist thaw was stabilizing world affairs and with the emergence of credit, ordinary Americans were able to purchase goods previously unavailable to them.

Within this era the teenager was born: distinguished through products such as records and clothes tailor made for the applicable pre-eighteen age bracket. And with the increased affluence of their parents and the opportunity to acquire jobs in America's burgeoning tertiary industries, teenagers began to not only spend money, but also become an important socio-political influence in American pop culture.

Simmering under the surface of this prosperous society was a seething discontent among young adults. In post-war Europe, this discontent often emerged about the morality of their parents generation, but in the United States this resentment grew from a society flooded with crass materialism. Parents who had fought overseas, returned home to families they hardly knew. In response to their absence, children were lavished with material goods to compensate for the absence of parents who worked in the city, while their kids grew up in safe, yet dull and isolated suburbs.

This combination of acerbity and boredom produced a quiet undercurrent of bitterness demonstrated in acts of undisciplined behaviour such as vandalism, gang membership, fighting and so forth. In 1954 producer Stanley Kramer took America's looming obsession with juvenile delinquency to extremes with the release of his stolid and ridiculous film directed by Lazlo Benedek entitled The Wild One: a film focusing on a teenage biker gang led by Marlon Brando that terrorizes a quaint California hamlet.

A year later director Nicholas Ray, a veteran of hardboiled socially-conscious Noirs at RKO, decided to enter the fray with his film about teenage deliquents. But unlike Bendek, Ray rejected the possibility of creating yet another juvenile exploitation film. Instead Ray attempted to senstively investigate the reasons as to why teenagers rebel and thus his film is one of the first major indictments of America's unspoken middle-class malaise.

Produced by Warner Brothers, the same year that MGM would release Richard Brooks' similarly themed Blackboard Jungle, Ray's film abandons much of the moralistic tendencies of Brooks' film and instead infuses Rebel Without A Cause with a degree of sympathy toward his anti-heroes: Jim Stark (James Dean), Judy (Nathalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo). Released only a month after his tragic death, the film would elevate aspiring Method actor James Dean into a cult icon with evidently more swagger than his character possesses in Ray's film.

Beginning at a local police station, the film immediately informs the audience of the problematic lives of its three principal anti-heroes as Jim is detained for drunkeness, Plato is detained for shooting puppies and Judy is questioned for running away from home. As Ray quickly demonstrates the cause for much of the kids' problems lie in their broken and divided homes. The theme of parental alienation is strongly developed by Ray throughout the film: Plato's parents are divorced with his mother continually leaving home to visit a sister in Chicago and leaving her son with a housekeeper; Judy's father is frightened by his daughter's sexuality in a hinted incestuous relationship; Jim's problems perturb his middle-class parents so much that they repeatedly move to a new town to leave the past behind. Furthermore his scolding mother and emasculated father lack a firm stream of communication with their son and each other on how to discipline him.

This sense of alienation causes the teenagers to join substitute families. Judy enters into a cordial relationship with a gang of knife-wielding hoodlums led by Buzz Gunderson (Corey Allen) and Jim is later persuaded to participate in their "chickie run." Only through this fatal hazing ritual will Jim be granted social acceptance in a community and thus the affection he is lacking at home. For Plato's his sense of familial isolation is far more delicate. Without any parents at home, he aims to have Jim and Judy become his new family. Proclaiming to Jim that he wishes his friend was his father, the socially awkward loner Plato even procures an abandoned mansion in the Hollywood Hills for them to "play house."

Home is a place where the teenager's sense of confusion is heightened by their aloof parents. For Jim in particular, his father's emasculated role in the family structure angers and frustrates him. Interestingly while his father wears an apron, Jim appears to be more bothered by his father's decision to clean and cook for his mother, while she is away. Thus, it can be argued that given Jim's precarious social relationships that his father's lack of conformity to orthodox gender roles threatens not only his father's sexuality, but also Jim's heightened ability to procure friends. Given his hot temper when provoked and his mother's emphasis on preserving social reputations, perhaps Jim has resorted to violence not as a method of rebellious interaction, but in order to defend his father's respectability and standing the community.

The spectre of sexuality is also firmly addressed in Rebel Without A Cause. Within the film, Ray subtly addresses unspoken and secret acts of culturally unorthodox sexual behaviour within 1950's America. The unwillingness of Judy's father to show his teenage daughter public affection is noted in his violent slap when she attempts to kiss him. Combined with her confused opinions of him, there are possibilities that hint at an incestous relationship: a fact which bothered Production Code officials during censorship proceedings.

With her pouty red lipsticked mouth, Wood's Judy represents an antithetical response to codes of teenage sexuality. Her decision to hang around "bad boys" like Buzz provokes the possibility that she engages in some type of secret sexual relationship with him in order to garner the affection absent in her own life. Furthermore, her rendez-vous in the abandoned home with Jim hints at the possibility of a secret sexual affair between them whist Plato sleeps outside.

Plato's sexuality is also flamboyantly analyzed by Ray. Throughout Rebel Without A Cause, Plato is posited as a closeted homosexual. The first time he witnesses Jim after the police station is through a locker mirror, while combing his hair. Plato's charmed response and his picture of a matinee idol singer in the locker begin Ray's hints at Plato's homosexual crush on Jim. Lying to others about his non-existent friendship with Jim, Plato departs from Jim's home in a tense manner: desiring a kiss from Jim's lips, but only garnering his address for future reference.

The motif of the jacket becomes crucial with Plato. When a drunken Jim offers him the jacket at the police station, Plato refuses. But afterwards, this offering becomes viewed as a sexual enticement and thus when Plato later asks for the jacket and Jim obliges the former garners not only satisifcation from his cemented friendship, but also the possibility of a deepening intimacy between one another. Yet, such a friendship is falted by the tragedy which enfolds in Rebel Without A Cause that alters the character's earlier perceptions of death.

Consistently in Rebel Without A Cause the central characters respond to death in philosophical language. Perhaps because of the fear of nuclear implosion in the Cold War era, the teenagers are psychologically aware of death's presence at all times. When Judy famously asks Jim if he lives at a certain house, he responds "Who lives?" Through acts such as the chicken run, the film's characters are regularly toying with death. Suicide, hangings and the destruction of the universe are frequently alluded to throughout Rebel Without A Cause. During a school field trip to a local planetarium, the end of the universe alarms some students, but amazes others. There is an atmosphere of finality in Rebel Without A Cause that is consistently questioned, admired and dissected by characters who often view death as a far better substitute to the troubled and alienated lives they lead.

In Rebel Without A Cause the concept of rebellion is deconstructed by director Nicholas Ray. While the families of the film's troubled youths see no cause for rebellion within a prosperous and safe society, the director's report is through a quiet denunciation of the actual causes of teenage outbursts: the sense of isolation and frustration from society, family and community in return for extended material privileges. Although the actions and responses shown in Rebel Without A Cause are dated, the finely-tuned psychology and sensitive rendering Ray offers in his excellent and colourful Cinemascope still persists. The career-shaping performances allotted by Dean, Mineo and Wood are exacting in their melodramatic flavour in a film noted for its circumspect and cognizant approach toward teenage angst.

* Rebel Without A Cause is available through Warner Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

2006: The Wind That Shakes The Barley

The Wind That Shakes The Barley (Loach, 2006) 7/10

"'Twas hard the woeful words to frame to break the ties that bound us
But harder still to bear the shame of foreign chains around us
And so I said, "The mountain glen I'll seek at morning early
And join the bold united men," while soft winds shake the barley"

The above lyrical excerpt is taken from a 19th century Irish ballad entitled "The Wind That Shakes The Barley" written by Robert Dwyer Joyce. Commemorating the 1798 rebellions, the song's title additionally inspired British socialist director Ken Loach's 2006 Palme d'Or winner The Wind That Shakes The Barley. Set in the early 1920's, Loach's film explores the troublesome birth of Ireland's independence movement and its association to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) milita groups which sprang up in its wake.

Cillian Murphy stars as Damien, a medical school graduate, who along with a group of colleagues are subjected to humilating abuse by the "Black and Tan" regiments. Disapproving of the young men's decision to play hurling in a nearby field, the occupying army troops enforce legislation which disbars social gatherings by having the men strip and answer questions in English. Believing that one of the young men is mocking their authority by refusing to respond in the colonial tongue, the army murders the unilingual Gaelic speaker in a local barn.

Perturbed by the event, Damien becomes radicalized and abandons his medicinal work in the rural pastures of his village to join an IRA faction in town. Supplanting his academic education with courses in socialist rhetoric and guerilla tactics, Damien, his infamous brother Teddy (Padraic Delaney) and a group of other similarly minded men begin to terrorize the British forces. Using their hurling sticks as mock guns, the young men escape to the windswept hillside to learn their new trade. Despite their lack of equipment, their knowledge of the terrain and their ability to garner sympathy in local villages who provide them with food, shelter and refuge.

Yet, as the IRA moves from being an underground minority to a popular people's front, attitudes and alliances shift. Families become torn and the loyalties of irascible figures such as Teddy change from starving women and children to well-to-do shopkeepers. The sweeping agenda and sense of community which marks the first half of Loach's film is fractured and the philosophical nature of national and populist conflicts and the notion of independence itself is cleverly questioned.

Using fictional characters and settings within an authentic historical backdrop, Loach inserts a micro-social realist perspective on a macro-political event. At the heart of Loach's chronicle is the ambivalance of independence and the effects of splintered ideologies on a community. In the first half of The Wind Shakes The Barley , the fictional IRA members Loach focuses upon, yearn for an independent Irish state built on socialist principles. Yet, after IRA leader Michael Collins signs a treaty with the British to create an Irish Free State, the localized factions begin to splinter internally.

Under the terms of the Anglo-Irish treaty, the Free Irish State established, while economically autonomous was still bound to the British Crown. In the eyes of the faction's more radicalized members, Collins' decision to sign the treaty is a sell-out: abandoning the class-based republican ideologies espoused at the beginning of the conflict by figures such as Damien's brother Teddy. Yet, unlike Damien, Teddy sees the treaty as a stepping stone to future independence: a fact his brother openly disavows.

This produces the film's awkward melodramatic finale, in which families are split and communities left shackled with the continued presence of class hierarchies. Loach is able to brilliantly show the subtle shifts in public decorum and attitudes promoted by the IRA members. At first they are shown as a direct opposite to the vile savagery enacted by the "Black and Tans." Their communal spirit and devotion to the cause endears them to the public and unifies them during brutal scenes of torture in dank cellars.

In a moment repeatedly referenced throughout the film, the IRA guerillas even go so far as to assassinate one of their younger members who reveals the location of the group's weapons cache under duress. When Teddy decides to jettison from the hardline leftist spectre of the group, Cillian Murphy's Damien reminds him of the sacrifice in the name of a socialist, egalitarian Ireland: expenses such as burned homes, torture, assassinations, raped girlfriends and sisters and so forth.

The familial war that emerges between Teddy's pragmatism and Damien's idealism can be seen in the heated political debates which are the crux of the film. Angered at the conduct of the Black and Tans, Damien becomes embarassed when these groups are replaced by the official "Black and Greens" Irish Free militia. In one fitting scene a group of militia men burn the home of an elderly IRA sympathesizer despite the fact as she notes she had fed and sheltered the same men when they were committed patriots in the IRA.

Throughout The Wind That Shakes The Barley Loach consciously creates parallels between the Irish crisis for independence and the contemporary conflict in Iraq. Both nations contain a foreign military influence and each sprouted up armed paramilitary groups to try to oust the occupier. In another of Loach's more recent films Land and Freedom the director has investigated the failures of leftist organizations to consolidate their influence during civil wars and national crises.

In both Land and Freedom and The Wind That Shakes The Barley the schisms within the socialist bracket result in a fractured and incomplete attempt to graft a new country. Relating this to the ideological differences in Iraq, Loach's film thus demonstrates how civil wars are easily started once the political sub-culture enters the mainstream. As in Soviet Russia, groups like the Trotskyists wanted to further the revolution, while others such as the Stalinists wanted to build upon what they had achieved so far.

In England, several critics have charged Loach with idealizing the revolutionaries and the ensuing process which they are participants within. Yet such a viewpoint belies the quiet nature of his underlying critique. Sent over to colonial Ireland by the British government to enforce the empire's authority following the Easter Rising of 1916, the "Black and Tan" groups are portrayed as ignorant youths and arrogantly sadistic veterans of the Great War. Loach could have possibly made these figures more opaque, but over the course of his film he shows how the IRA emerge from a class-based guerilla force into a "Black and Green" militia group. This latter group engages in hypocritical acts as brutal as the "Black and Tans" before them.

Yet, Loach pinpoints this shift early on in a dynamic confrontation between a shopkeeper and an elderly peasant woman in the Irish courts. After charging the woman extortionate rates of interest, the court orders the man to pay the woman who owes him! Outraged, the man refuses to pay and interestingly nor do IRA members such as Teddy expect him to either. Shipping in guns from Glasgow, the bourgeois shopkeeper is a key fundraiser and thus the group's original class-based rhetoric disintegrates once Teddy attempts to ignore the decision upheld by the courts. Thus, there is a line of regression within the film, which is fully realized by the emergence of two divisive camps by film's end.

Shot in green-tinted hues by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, The Wind That Shakes The Barley feels less like a historical epic and more like a historical conversation. The political sparring within screenwriter Paul Laverty's dialogue allows for some wonderful debates, although it does inhibit Cillian Murphy's Damien in the film's last hour to little more than a polemical placard speaking Marxian rhetoric as though it were colloquial speech. Additionally, Jonathan Morris editing is far too slack in the film's final half hour and Loach's handling of the fraternal histronics between Damien and Teddy is awkward. Yet, there is something endearingly poetic within The Wind That Shakes The Barley. And while there is less time for romanticized heroes and more time granted toward politics, Loach's film is accessible in its production values, fine acting and melodramatic narrative. The result is arguably one of the most politically engaging, yet restrained historical films in the past decade.

* The Wind That Shakes The Barley is available on R2 DVD through Fox Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1948: Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist (Lean, 1948) 8/10

"Please Sir, I want some more" (Oliver Twist)

It is arguably the most iconic demand in British literature. A simple request made by a starving orphaned guttersnipe desperate to nourish his empty stomach. Relayed in David Lean's 1948 adaptation, the second of his Dickens' transfers, this scene is imbued with powerful resonance and shrouded in Wellesian imagery.

Contemporary audiences who recognize and associate Lean's name with illustrious, exotic epics such as Lawrence of Arabia, Bridge On The River Kwai and Dr. Zhivago will see the customary Cinemascope expansiveness of those films, replaced by claustrophobic close-ups and dystopic bedevilled imagery.

Starting in a grimy Dickensian workhouse, the runtish Oliver (John Howard Davies) is transferred to a local undertaker due to his dissenting behaviour at the dinner table. After being the target of abuse from the home's other servants, the boy escapes to London and is taking in by a group of street urchins and pickpockets lead by the Artful Dodger (Anthony Newley). The latter is in the employment of a trio of criminal adults Bill Sikes (Robert Newton), Nancy (Kay Walsh) and Fagin (Alec Guinness) who utilize orphaned boys to commit petty crimes and return with the loot.

But Oliver is unable to make the transistion to this life of crime: resulting in a botched attempt to pickpocket a gentleman outside a fruit stand. Assaulted by the ensuing mob, Oliver is aided by a wealthy elderly gentleman who takes him in; but fails to realize the extent to which Oliver's former associates want their prized asset back.

Like Lean's earlier films such as the Nöel Coward co-directed In Which We Serve, the George Bernard Shaw adaptation Major Barbara and This Happy Breed, Oliver Twist dissects concepts of Britain's rigid post-war class system. Transposing this argument into his Victorian setting, Lean is able to show the cultural trappings which repress and surpress working-class individuals. Lacking an academic education, Oliver is assigned a trade through the Christian workhouse in order to provide him an opportunity in life.

Yet, this technical education is entirely form-fitted for sweaty industrial labour. Nor, is it completed as Oliver soon enrolls into Fagin's pickpocketing program. Here, Oliver learns real survival skills that enable him to perform his new "trade" through criminal activity. Furthermore, his options for ascension within the underworld appear greater than in the glass ceiling society surrounding him. It is only after his adoption by a kindly upper-bourgeois elder that he receives an education capable of allowing him to transcend class barriers.

Within his analysis of the insulated class-based communities, Lean critiques the abusive interactions between adults and children. Throughout Oliver Twist, adults abuse their power against defenceless youths for profit. Francis L. Sullivan's rotund Mr. Bumble exemplifies this societial corruption. Charged in a position of responsibility for orphaned youths, Bumble regularly threatens them for the most basic insubordinate acts. Furthermore, Bumble along with a group of other adults attempt to financially gain from the mysterious mutterings of a dying woman associated with Oliver's deceased mother.

Yet, the most overt examples of child abuse in the film are at the hand's of the film's three working-class thugs: Fagin, Bill Sikes and Nancy. Taking advantage of their follower's destitution, the group operates uncustomary adult relationships with the children. Allowing them a fragile sense of empowerment in a repressive society through their clandestine thefts on the upper-class, the adults are equally vengeful toward their subjects: threatening them to extract information and berating them for failures. Yet, despite their abilities to engage in childish humour, the adults fail to recognize at times that their employed youth are still under twelve: a fact denoted by the children's cries when a lamp becomes extinguished in a dark hideout.

Surrounded by decaying buildings, the perfectly constructed sets by art director John Bryan enliven a world possibly all too familiar to Lean's audience. With countless antiquated Victorian homes still existing in London's East End during this period, there was arguably a sense of realism to the impoverished and pulverized world Oliver resides within.Yet, in a post-war Europe still tattered and broken from the horrors of war, British critics were dismayed at Lean's second Dickens adaptation.

Some complained the picture did not reach the calibre of Lean's earlier Great Expectations; others claimed the film encouraged pickpocketing among youths; while cinematically aligned other parties raged against Lean's decision to direct another Victorian novel whilst Neo-Realist filmmakers in Italy were discussing genuine poverty and urban decay. At the Venice Film Festival, the film did marginally better garnering the Golden Lion and upon its importation into the United States the film received strong reviews, but none of the award nominations Great Expectations had accrued.

In the United States, the film's release was delayed by four years due to complaints of anti-Semetism focusing on Alec Guinness' portrayal of Jewish criminal kingpin Fagin. Utilizing George Cruikshank's original illustrations, Guinness morphed into an almost unrecognizable figure replete with a gargantuan beaked nose, scraggily hair and a wart-strewn face. After excising almost twelve minutes from the film, the picture was released in America with an uncut edition released in 1970.

Guinness' Fagin is a remarkable creation: an example of his unrivaled ability to morph into an array of offbeat characters, a talent he later perfected in Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets. Ironically, despite the criticism from critics sympathetic to Zionist causes, British critics of the period slammed the film for supposedly downplaying the personalities and the sheer cruelty enacted by Fagin, Bill Sikes and Nancy: despite the film's infamous and artfully concocted bludgeoning of Nancy by a furious Sikes.

Scenes such as the latter are bathed in a sinister afterglow of German Expressionist influenced light and shadows and Wellesian close-ups. Beginning with the film's tempetuous opening-suggested by Lean's then-wife Kay Walsh- the director foreshadows a world of poverty and pain. Following a pregnant woman across a windswept moor, cinematographer Guy Green's black and white camera captures the blackened sky with tenacity and fervor. Shot using tight mid-shots and high angles, Lean's film is filled with other memorable sequences such as Oliver's trek up a flight of stairs, the mug of beer tossed at Newton's Sikes and the dimly-lit meetings between characters on London Bridge.

Honed with remarkable craftsmanship, David Lean's Oliver Twist is a textbook example of how to turn a literary masterpiece into a cinematic one. With superb performances by the aggressive Newton, Walsh, youngsters Davies and Newley and most notably Alec Guinness as Fagin, Oliver Twist features one of the most impressive acting ensembles assembled in British cinema history. Additionally, the astutely constructed sets by John Bryan and visuals by Guy Green are testament to a film as aesthetically pleasing as it is brilliantly acted.

One of the best British films ever released.

* Oliver Twist is available on R1 DVD through Criterion Home Video and on R2 in a "Double Bill" with Lean's Great Expectations through ITV

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

2006: Offside

Offside (2006, Panahi) 8/10

In 2005, during a World Cup Qualifier between Asian football powerhouses Iran and Japan, seven individuals died during a melee at Tehran's Azadi Stadium. When Iranian officials disclosed the names of the deceased to the general public, the identities of only six of the seven were revealed. News agencies speculated that the seventh death was that of a woman who had entered the Azadi Stadium disguised as a man.

The enigmatic nature of the seventh victim centers upon the complex nature of Iranian sports. In Iran, women are barred from attending live male sports. Until April 2006, the dream of female fans to view their favourite players such as Ali Karimi or Mehdi Mahdavikia beyond their living rooms was an illegal act. Yet, this pre-World Cup legislation designed to open up Iranian football to women, restricts attendance to married women: subsequently eliminating the participation of countless numbers of single women, teenagers, girls and elderly widows.

The absurd nature of this law is the crux of Jafar Panahi's film Offside: a verité style social critique disguised as a satirical comedy. Banned in his native Iran, Panahi's film is a carefully planed docu-comedy shot during Iran's penultimate World Cup qualifier against Bahrain in late 2005. Focusing on half a dozen women between the ages of 16-24, Panahi's film explores their attempts to gain entry into the illegal world of professional male sports. Disguised as soldiers, visually impaired teenagers and poster-bearing boys, the women each attempt to assimilate into the crowd and sneak into the Azadi.

Yet, Iran's Revolutionary Guard units have been informed to carefully monitor the spectators and extract any unwanted female fans from the over 100,000 individuals attending the game. Rounding them together in a rectangular prison constructed of crash barriers, the soldiers manage to find six women ranging from chain-smoking tomboys to shy introverts. Engaging in philosophical banter, the urbanite women mock and challenge their provincial captors: inquisitively dissecting the implications of their attendance and the discriminatory rhetoric their society upholds.

In Offside, Panahi cleverly creates a reflective microcosm. Setting almost the entire film within the Azadi Stadium, Panahi constructs a film as much a critique of social injustice, as it is a dynamic observation of the passions stirred by sport. Clad in Iranian colours and singing patriotic songs, Panahi's characters are unlikely dissenting figures. Their mere presence at the stadium is a sign of rebellion, despite their uncompromised adoration for their homeland. Thus, nationalist loyalties are not questioned in Panahi's film, but the women's collective disavowal of Iran's strict theocratic laws.

The arousal of these sentiments through sport is expertly achieved in Offside. Awash in jingoism, the majority of sports films miss the emotional resonance attached to games. Despite showing barely any footage of the Iran-Bahrain match, Panahi creates quite possibly the best film ever made about football. Restricting his footage to action unhinged from the mis-en-scene, Panahi allows sport to be the backdrop of the film, rather than a collection of morose intercuttings. When an elderly man arouses a fight on a bus headed to the stadium, Panahi avoids the obvious.

Rather than have the dispute be produced due to perjorative remarks about players, the man's mere decision to enter the stadium is an act of defiance. Not even age or ill health will prevent him. When the other passengers inform him of the benefits of watching the game on state television, the man describes the necessity of attending the match: musing on the communal nature of the event, the ability to speak his mind and the emotional brutality of the event itself. Addressing these concepts early in the film, Panahi is then able to utilize this template in relation to his female protaganists.

The aura of gender apartheid explored in Panahi's film is packaged in a humanistic tone, which is accessible and digestable. Panahi's subtleness enhances the picture through conversations brimming with the follies of human nature. Enclosed in their crash barrier pen, the six women are rounded up like cattle awaiting the verbal slaughter of the stadium's chief officer. Through their conversations with the soldiers, new perspectives are emitted. As one soldier openly remarks observing the six detained women is the last thing he wishes to engage in. Desperate to end his mandatory service in the army, the provincial young man dreams of returning home to harvest his mother's ailing farm. Other soldiers ring their jealous girlfriends or clamour for a glimpse of the action through the wrought iron gates next to the pen, inaccurately relaying the events to the information-starved prisoners.

Their sympathies with the women are closeted by their own needs. Failure to properly detain the women could endanger their future career prospects or extend their service. Using aggressive wit and logic, one of the women disputes the logic of the law: noting that Iranian women can attend films alongside men and that Japanese women were able to attend Iran's earlier qualifier with Japan. The soldier's awkward attempts to justify the laws fall flat, causing him to increasingly relate to his captives. The amusing hijinks of one soldier's attempts to escort another female to a male washroom delienates the baffling nature of the government's misogynistic policies: forcing the woman to wear an Ali Karimi poster around her head, while the soldier tries in vain to clear a graffiti-strewn washroom of its occupants. However, as Panahi observes in his poignant and expressive finale: sport is a unifier through which celebration bears no resentment based on sex, class, race or relgion.

By working within this absurd satirical edge, Panahi creates a film more memorable and brilliant than a simplified demonization. The political narrative underlying Offside exposes the threadbare properties soldering together a discriminatory set of laws: proposing new questions, while distinguishing ordinary Iranian citizens from the retroactive ideological constructs which ultimately surpresses them and their answers. Working within the Iranian New Wave's typical Neo-Realist influenced program, Panahi utilizes his non-professional actors and real locations brilliantly: compacting an actual live event into an almost real-time docu-comedy. Furthermore, he explores to great effect the democratizing qualities of sport, which can become forums for free speech, gender equality and classless interaction.

One of the best of 2006

* Offside is available on R2 DVD through Artficial Eye

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1947: Smash-Up

Smash-Up: The Story Of A Woman (Heisler, 1947) 4/10

In general studies of Hollywood history, Billy Wilder's 1945 film The Lost Weekend is often considered to be the first major Hollywood production to seriously tackle the destructive qualities associated with alcoholism. However, contrary to this popular opinion, Hollywood had previously explored this topic in films such as Victor Fleming's 1932 film The Wet Parade and Alfred Green's 1935 Bette Davis' vehicle Dangerous.

Yet, these socially conscious Prohibition-era dramas were rare instances of Hollywood's attempt to depict alcoholics as sick individuals, rather than jovial comedians in the vein of W.C. Fields. Following the release of Wilder's film for Paramount in 1945, Universal decided to tackle the subject through Stuart Heisler's 1947 film Smash-Up: The Story Of A Woman.

Often unfairly referred to as a female version of The Lost Weekend, Heisler's film starring über-melodramatic actress Susan Hayward eliminates the rough, realistic interiors of Wilder's film and adds a glamourous sheen noted in Stanley Cortez's polished cinematography. Hayward stars as Angie Evans, a nightclub star who abandons her career after settling down with aspiring radio crooner Ken Conway (Lee Bowman).

While Evans at first dutifully aids her husband's career, she sinks into a depression once Ken's career begins to skyrocket. Finding comfort in the bottom of a bottle, Evans starts to suspect her husband is cheating on her with his dull assistant Martha (Marsha Hunt) and acts outwardly under the influence to project these claims. Repulsed by her behaviour, Ken begins divorce proceedings, while the reckless Angie attempts to solder together the twisted and tattered remains of her life.

Smash-Up: The Story Of A Woman is a tawdry melodrama clothed in glittering gowns and rested in satin sheets. Set in high-rise luxury apartments, Heisler's film presents itself as an exposé of alcoholism as a classless disease. Living in their art-deco apartment, Angie lives amongst an abudance of luxury items. Yet, this cannot compensate for her sense of isolation, envy and mistrust. Despite, Ken's attempts to provide his wife with all her material desires, they do not substitute for the increasing absence of love within their marriage.

Juxtaposing his two central characters, Heisler creates a pictoral diagram that correspondingly shows the couple's careers and personal feelings always flowing in opposite directions. As the film flashbacks to our first meeting with Angie, we see through Heisler's efficient montage the rising spectre of her career, as she elevates to bigger and better clubs. Her reunion with her impovershed lover Ken notably demonstrates her willingness to submit to his charms. The first time Heisler reveals their relationship to the audience, it is noticeable that Angie immediately leaves the club to go home with Ken and that Ken is unable to afford the cab fare: perhaps illustrating a relationship based on physicality rather than true emotional connections.

Performing an array of flat Country and Western songs with his writing partner Steve Anderson (Eddie Albert), Ken elevates his career by singing standards attuned to his voice at Angie's suggestion. Thus, begins the accleration of Ken's career and the declination of Angie's. Staying at home to tender to their newborn child, Angie abandons her successful career in order to aid in the launch of Ken's stalled fortunes. In Hayward's character one therefore sees a foreshadowing of the sense of disillusionment which simmered under the surface of 1950's American culture. There, housewives forced out of their wartime jobs were often relegated to suburban estates planted on empty rural lots and expected to happily deploy their maternal instincts.

Like Angie, thousands of women turned to legalized narcotics and alcohol in order to stifle their bouts of depression. Ken's inability to emotionally assist his wife is symptomatic of an entire culture during the Eisenhower era; predicting the rise of a generation of men equipped with the mental tools of war, yet unable to deal with the emotional necessities of the post-war domestic front. While the social dilemmas of the post-war middle class would later be decadently exploited by German emigré Douglas Sirk in films such as Written On The Wind and All That Heaven Allows, Heisler's film is fixated on the nouveau riche. And thus with household staff attending to her and child's every need, Angie's desire to be a housewife is undercut by her false desire to attend to such matters and the superfluous nature of her staying at home.

With its extravagant mis-en-scene and its soapy plot, Smash-Up feels visually inequipped to deal with the Noirish undertones Cortez occasionally imbues onto the screen. Instead his swirling photography impassively projects an image of an extended bad dream: a concept resonated in the film's opening scene of a maimed Angie awaking from anaesthetic. Heisler's repeated use of Angie slurringly waking after another blackout, also heightens the notion that the Conway's glossy reality has been broken by her nightmarish drinking. Yet, Angie's scuttling attempts to piece together the past posits her as a Noir-like amnesiac: utilizing the fragmented clues to piece together a mental jigsaw.

Hayward's character is indelibly interesting as that she is permanently flawed. Lacking in self-confidence even prior to Ken's success, she often uses alcohol simply to garner the courage to perform onstage. The incessant clamouring for attention from female fans and Martha's adulterous overtures accelerate her alcohol intake. Such is her lack of faith in her abilities, her attempts to motivate herself to reclaim her family are crippled by her necessity for the bottle. This produces a lifestyle as deceptive as the lavish high-rise apartment she lives in.

Drowning her sorrows in whiskey, Angie becomes a self-destructive figure: one which Heisler proposes it both perpetrator and victim of her own folly. With Hayward's excessively histronic performance at the forefront, Heisler shows his protagonist as a femme fatale debilitated by her need for alcohol. With her wild accusations and vile behaviour, Angie becomes a malevolent figure destroying- to an extent- the lives of those around her. Yet, within the classic contours of the Hollywood melodrama, she is grafted an opportunity to redeem herself and thus repair the damage.

As a victim, on the other hand, Heisler shows the neglect of her absent-minded husband which seemingly drives her into a state. The miscast Lee Bowman simply adorns her with shimmering gowns, pearls and all the trappings of luxury in order to compensate for his absence and for the paucity of their early relationship. Yet, Heisler undercuts this notion by demonstrating the innate weakness of his protagonist from the beginning. Furthermore, the hyperactive nature of Hayward's performance necessitates Bowman to either play his character as a weak man or an equally aggressive figure. Instead he exudes the essence of a befuddled fall guy: unsure as to how he acheived fame and unwilling to associate with anyone else in the film.

Furthermore, unlike in Wilder's film, Smash-Up fails to capture the pure sense of desperation and helplessness conveyed in The Lost Weekend. While Wilder had Ray Milland suspensefully hide a bottle outside an apartment window, Heisler has Susan Hayward bemusingly searching for sugar in kitchen cabinets overflowing with booze. The subtle nature of Wilder's film is absent in Smash-Up: producing a schizophrenic picture brimming with Noirish conflict, but packaging its appearance in silk clothing and its outcome in bittersweet perversity.

Smash-Up: The Story Of A Woman is a prospectively interesting, but ultimately stolid film. With its myriad of hints at devious and illicit behaviour, the picture could easily have been crafted into a sultry Noir or a dirty seething melodrama: with an actress like Joan Crawford or Bette Davis aggressively contesting her fondness for drink, or perhaps Olivia de Havilland or Joan Fontaine engaging in clandestine binges. Heisler's film is somewhere in the middle. Its slow-baked pacing and aesthetic sheen are sub-MGM, but Hayward's performance is unmatched by her fellow cast members: allowing for the film to dither intoxicatingly into stagnation.

* Smash-Up: The Story Of A Woman is available on countless Public Domain DVDs

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1959: The Mating Game

The Mating Game (George Marshall, 1959) 7/10

Today, British author H.E. Bates is a forgotten figure in popular literature. Through the Forties and Fifties, he was responsible for composing several popular works of fiction, many of which were later made into films such as 1954's Purple Plain starring Gregory Peck. Bates also wrote the screenplay to David Lean's 1955 film Summertime starring Katharine Hepburn. Perhaps, Bates' most endearing works however are his Darling Buds Of May novels.

Set in rural Southeast England, The Darling Buds Of May was adapted onto television in the early 90's and became a popular platform for the show's future Hollywood star Catherine Zeta-Jones. Yet, this television show was not the first time that these ribald novels by Bates had been adapted. In 1959, MGM took the core elements of Bates' novels, transplanted them to the rural United States and re-tooled the format for George Marshall's The Mating Game

Starring Debbie Reynolds and Tony Randall, The Mating Game is a delightfully breezy romantic comedy: a slice of pure hokum which compensates for the contrivances of its plot with its playful physical comedy and innuendo-laden dialogue. Set in rural Maryland, the film features Reynolds as Mariette Larkin, a sprightly tomboy whose father Pop Larkin (Paul Douglas) is engaged in trouble with his neigbour, Wendall Burnshaw (Philip Ober) a local land baron. When the collectivist Larkin borrows his über-capitalist neighbour's prize pig to stud his hog, Burnshaw utilizes his political clout in Washington to have the I.R.S. search through Larkin's tax records.

The problem is Larkin does not have any: a matter which disturbs young, uptight tax collector Lorenzo "Charlie" Charlton (Tony Randall). Through his research Lorenzo, an aspiring lawyer, discovers Larkin has never filed a single tax return. Assigned to uncover Larkin's financial status, the urbanite Lorenzo enters an unfamiliar world of Christian-Socialist principles were church, community and family-not money- are paramount.

The Mating Game is a curious hybrid of mild sex comedy and slapstick. With its lavish production values, convoluted plot and likeable romantic undercurrents, The Mating Game could have easily been adapted as a musical had it been produced half a decade earlier. It is interesting to compare Marshall's film with Charles Walter's 1950 musical Summer Stock in which a group of students overrun Judy Garland's farm. Both films feature strong female leads, but while Garland was an efficient businesswoman, Reynolds' character here is a sexualized teenage girl. Garland's Jane is masculinized by her adoption of traditional male roles as breadwinner and provider; Reynolds' Mariette is a tomboy who wrestles with older boys in a sexualized manner. While Mariette initially believes these physical interactions to be innocuous and playful, it is significant that later on in the film, these same interactions taken on a violent spirit akin to rape and physical abuse.

Their relationships with men are not purely romantic in their intentions. Both utilize men to secure the future of their property. In Summer Stock, Garland woos an incompetent and passive-aggressive son of a community head in Orville; in The Mating Game, Reynolds tries to seduce a de-sexualized government agent in Randall's Lorenzo in order to protect the century old family farm. But while Garland's Jane abandons Orville for true love, Mariette is smitten by Lorenzo. Yet, her intentions are never fully clear. Her parents desire her to be with Lorenzo as he can provide for her a future, which they, nor the rugged farmhands she fools around with cannot.

He is equipped with an academic mindset, which they cannot fully understand, but readily appreciate. It is interesting to note that while Lorenzo eventually becomes engrossed with Mariette, her reasons for searching for him in Baltimore are altruistic, rather than self-serving. Furthermore, we never do see Lorenzo and Mariette marry and given her family's penchant for stalling Lorenzo's work, perhaps her attempts at enticing him are to ensure a favourable decision through sentimentality and sexual bribery.

Th undercurrent of sex is scattered throughout The Mating Game: there is the "play-fighting" between Mariette and the other boys; the phallic log, Randall sits upon while Mariette pursues him; the suggestive dialogue between Pop and Ma Larkin and so forth. For the Larkins sexual behaviour is a normal and healthy activity, while for Lorenzo it is a shameful act. Two interesting scenes demonstrate the perplexing attitudes to sex shown throughout The Mating Game.

The first involves an intoxicated Lorenzo stripped and left to fall asleep on Mariette's bed. When he awakes the next morning, he finds that Mariette has snuck in a few hours before and is lying next time. Believing he has engaged in intercourse with her, he is shocked to find a local priest and police officer in the downstairs parlour waiting to see him. With his conservative ideas, Lorenzo believes the pair are there to marry he and Mariette. Yet, the true nature of their visit is to thank Pop Larkin for his donation of an electric organ. The confused federal agent however suggests that Mariette is sexually loose and he would never conform to that behaviour.

The second scenes which expands on the latter, involves Mariette lying atop Lorenzo in a hay stack. Unbeknowst to the two lovers, the local farmhands are standing above them. Before engaging in fisticuffs, one of the farmhands informs Lorenzo that is his turn to be atop Mariette. Earlier in the film, Mariette corrects her mother on the prounciation of the word "orgy," while later on we see Lorenzo smelling a handful of hay taken from the same stack.

Given her previous sexually aggressive behaviour and the insinuation that the barn is a secret sexual rendezvous point, it is possible to argue that Mariette engages in clandestine escapades in the barn with the queue of young men attending at her feet. Coupled with her pursuance of Lorenzo, sex is arguably part of "The Mating Game" which Mariette freely engages in. Unlike with the local boys her infatuation with Lorenzo seems more at her parent's whispered behest, rather than her own.

Her free spirited ways are antithetical to the structured and disciplined ethos to life prescribed by Lorenzo. While Lorenzo espouses rhetoric regarding public ownership and government interaction, his words are false and contrived. When Lorenzo claims that his government car is public property, he is stunned to have the Larkins ask to borrow it. Similarly, when Mariette wishes to see Lorenzo's boss at the I.R.S., he informs her that she will have to file a claim. The face-to-face interaction, Mariette is used to does not apply in Lorenzo's world of paperwork, social networking and detached relationships. The materialism of Lorenzo's urban mindset is foreign to the openness and cooperative networks the Larkins operate within.

Lorenzo's attempts to find taxable income for the Larkins is a task engaged in vain. Still utilizing a bartering culture dating back generations, the Larkins engage in a quasi-socialist trading community. When the family wants an item, they simply trade their livestock or material goods which no longer hold value to them. Their farm is profitless as they simple swap produce for usable materials rather than cash. When another agent informs the family that the government will pay them to not grow certain crops, they are outraged and believe such actions are criminal. While for Burnshaw property, social contacts in Washington and hard currency represent power and wealth, the Larkins most valuable asset is a small pond, their social network extends around the church and their financial holdings amount to under two hundred dollars.

The Mating Game works through its efficient adoption of the Larkin's dated social mores. Imbuing the picture with a communal spirit and a light comedic sensibility, George Marshall turns a rather stilted concept into a delightful romp. There is no time for swooning melodramatics here, as the vastly underrated Douglas, along with Reynolds and Randall provide a warm humourous diversion to the traffic and calculated tactics of modernity as William Roberts' script jaunts along. Unlike in Summer Stock released almost a decade prior, there is an earthiness here which adds an air of authenticity to the proceedings. Although the film's finale is engineered with a hollow sense of truth, Marshall maximizes the potential of a thin plot with comic sexual overtones, jovial bucolic surroundings and a rich colourful brand of folksy Cinemascope.

* The Mating Game is currently unavailable on DVD

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1951: His Kind Of Woman

His Kind Of Woman (1951, Farrow) 5/10

"Whenever I have nothing to do and I can't think, I always iron my money (Dan Milner)
What d'ya do when you are broke? (Lenore Brent)
When I'm broke, I press my pants (Dan Milner)

Throughout her two decade career, controversy seemed to follow Jane Russell. Not for risqué behaviour, but rather as documented in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, the protruding extent of her cleavage. Unlike other similar popular sex symbols of the period, Russell's off-screen life was not filled with scandalous behaviour or psychological difficulties that blighted the private lives of Lana Turner or Rita Hayworth.

Signed to a seven-year contract with Howard Hughes in the early Forties, Russell's career infamously became linked to Hughes' attempts to demonstrate her physical attributes, rather than her acting talents. Yet, in films such as Howard Hawks' Gentleman Prefer Blondes, Russell proved adept at playing wisecracking, strong women unafraid to insert their views or stamp their authority upon a situation.

While her later career was fraught with a slew of forgettable films and flops such as Nicholas Ray's Hot Blood and Norman Taurog's The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown, her mid-period, particularly alongside imposing actor Robert Mitchum in a pair of oddball Noirs- 1952's Josef von Sternberg film Macao and John Farrow's 1951 His Kind Of Woman- demonstrated her ample skills.

In 1951, Howard Hughes earmarked His Kind Of Woman to be a showcase for Russell. An eccentric romantic-adventure-comedy draped in the chiroscuro clothing of Noir, His Kind Of Woman is a sprawling mess: as entertaining as it is infuriating. Set in Mexico, the picture involves Dan Milner (Robert Mitchum) as a down and out professional gambler, who is offered $50,000 by a group of his underworld colleagues to await orders. Along the way, Milner meets Lenore Brent (Jane Russell), a socialite-cum- chanteuse who is flying down with Milner to Morro's Island.

Despite its beginnings in typical urban Noir settings such as cramped apartments, dining cars, cavernous mansions and Mexican bars, the film jettisons to the un-Noir-like Frank Lloyd Wright inspired Art Deco surroundings of Morro's Island: a resort for wealthy eccentrics including ham actor Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price), a chess-obssesed writer in Martin Krafft (John Mylong) and a gambling insurance salesman named Winton (Jim Backus).

While others lap up the sun and the alcohol, the teetotal Milner finds out the true nature of his mission from Lusk (Tim Holt): a federal agent tracking the mysterious involvement of several of the hotel's guests in an attempt to bring exiled gangster Nick Ferraro (Raymond Burr) back into the United States.

His Kind Of A Woman is a misleading title. Despite the steamy air of mystery which follows her, Russell's Brent is not a typical Noir femme fatale. Her intentions are always benevolent and never concealed. Her reason for swooning with the nouveau riche is simply to solidify the trans-national relationship between her and longtime lover Cardigan. She never feels any ill will toward Milner, but rather goes out of her way to protect him: supplying him with weapons, securing assistance and so forth. Her passion for Milner stems out of Cardigan's disregard for her emotional platitudes in favour of hunting; unlike Milner whose veiled remarks and body language suggest the possibility of a relationship.

It is this interplay of characters which signifies the film's opening hour. The plot leisurely adapts to the tropical surroundings in the first half of HIs Kind Of Woman. There is little that genuinely thrills in His Kind Of Woman as the film's first hour is more of a laid back meditation on identity and personality. We learn about the existential nature of the characters themselves and why they are here? And who are they with? Yet, little of the film's plot reveals itself in these sequences beyond a few verbal skirmishes between an investigative Mitchum and the resort's heavy Thompson (Charles McGraw).

The film thus strongly infers a typical Noir theme of identity throughout. Mitchum's character knows little of why he is at the resort, but is desperate to consolidate a reason for his colleagues' hefty investment. Despite her acclaimed riches, Lenore Brent is not exactly the woman she appears to be, as a guitar player in the resort's band attempts to inquire into her veiled past. Ferraro's approach to identity is even more diabolical, as he wishes to take Milner's physical identity through the type of bizarre plastic surgery which Georges Franju would later make famous in his poetic horror film Eyes Without A Face.

Furthermore, nobody in His Kind Of Woman seems willing to self-analyze their personal crises. Rather they need the form connections with others in order to solve their discrepancies. This can be seen in the young couple, who are gambling away their life savings. After Milner intervenes at the silent wish of the young bride, the couple regain their finances. Cardigan is equally perplexing. While Lenore believes he has been divorced for several months, the actor's wife like something out of Fellini's 8½ stumbles back into his domain, whilst he is on vacation. Cardigan's reflexive and quizzical behaviour begins to find a purpose in his attempt to save Milner from Thompson and Ferraro.

As noted earlier, gambling is also a prevalent theme. Milner retorts that he only engages in games were the outcome has already been decided; yet he is known to have been repeatedly unlucky across Southwestern California: hence his desperate acceptance of the enigmatic $50,000. The theme of games and gambling extends to Krafft's solitary chess matches, Winton's aggressive tactics against a hapless newlywed and Mitchum's surreal insertion of a leather shoe into the winner's pot at a game of poker.

Cardigan's lust for hunting and fishing further expands the theme, yet it also takes on a symbolic turn in Russell's animalistic pursual of Price's bumbling actor and his attempt to turn a duel with McGraw's Thompson into masculine sport. Yet, women are excluded from this realm in which notions of male mental skill and intelligence are demonstrated. The film's female characters are more obsessed with money. Their intellectual acumen is used to preserve their financial state such as the young bride stopping her husband and both Lenore Brent and Helen Cardigan desperate to seek out Mark Cardigan.

Yet, the sultry, slowly cooked atmosphere of the film's first half gives way to jarring slapstick humour and acts of brutal sadism. Whereas the film's first half showcased the brilliant modes of sophisticated sex comedy Russell and Mitchum were capable of together, the film's latter half is devoted to an unsettling blend of devious violence and farce. The latter is filtered through Price's Shakespeare-spouting Cardigan and was expanded at the behest of producer Howard Hughes who adored Price and the Cardigan character. This queasy potpourri of humour which plays upon racial stereotypes and sight gags is more akin to Frank Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace than to Mitchum's great Noirs such as Out Of The Past.

Combined with the vicious nature of Raymond Burr's Ferraro, the film's last hour unbalances an already uneven film. The film's latter third was completely re-shot by director Richard Fleischer ( The Narrow Margin; Compulsion) at Hughes' behest and sits uneasily alongside the lazy, slow-building tension built by Farrow. Running at least half an hour too long, the film's final half stretches out Mitchum's torture scenes and Price's boggled rescue past their limit. These scenes extend notions of masculinity earlier explored through gaming in the film. Despite her persona as a tough brunette, Russell spends almost the last hour of the film locked in a closet. The only other available female character in Mrs. Helen Cardigan (Marjorie Reynolds) remains true to her feminine leanings and stays at home.

Cinematographer Alfred J. Wild applies his earlier tutelage under Gregg Toland in producing a low-angle shot, ceiling-filled maze of images that compliments both the film's somewhat Noirish leanings and its scope as a romantic-adventure. The scenes in which we first meet Russell in a Mexican cantina should be noted for the extreme lack of height in comparison to the voluptuous ceilings of scenes in a Hollywood mansion. Wild's cinematography along with the excellent, snappy banter between Mitchum and Russell are some of the few highlights to this aloof entry in Hollywood history. Although the film was surprisingly a hit, today it is often better known for Vincent Price's offbeat performance which defines the film's latter half. Yet, within the sex-dripped dialogue espoused by Russell and Mitchum, one can imagine how delicious the film could have been without studio interference.

* His Kind Of Woman is available through Warner Home Video in their Film Noir Collection V3 boxset

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1952/1995:Othello

Othello (Welles, 1952) 6/10
Othello (Parker, 1995) 7/10

William Shakespeare's early 17th century play Othello has been approached by scholars and critics as a meditation on several topics included race, jealousy, power and sexuality. On celluloid, these themes have been amplified, distorted and removed: creating a flurry of different takes on Shakespere's Mediterrenean domestic tragedy featuring thespians such as Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Emil Jannings and Laurence Fishburne in the title role.

There have been over a dozen adaptations of Othello filmed in countries ranging from Italy, the Soviet Union and Weimar Germany; utilizing the methods of silent cinema, Noir or re-invisioning the piece as a high school melodrama. Two of the most notable cinematic adaptations of Othello are the 1952 Palme d'Or winning version from Orson Welles and 1995's Oliver Parker adaptation: often commonly and mistakenly attributed to Kenneth Branagh.

In both films, the basic tenants of the Othello tragedy are told. Othello, a General working for the Venetian army secretly elopes with Desdemona. The marriage is a highly-contested affair. Scholars dispute whether Othello's status as a Moor signifies him as being of black or Middle Eastern descent, or simple a Muslim. However, in most cinematic readings of the play, the title character has been portrayed by a black actor or a white actor in dark make-up.

Such is Othello's status in Venice, that the marriage is allowed to continue and Othello goes to Cyprus to defend the island against the invading Turkish forces.Before Othello leaves Venice he names Cassio as his lieutenant: a decision which angers his ensign Iago who embarks on a course of revenge. Playing upon Othello's natural instability and jealous disposition, Iago craftily manages to convince Othello that Desdemona is engaged in an adulterous affair with Cassio: resulting in a tragic and blood-strewn finale.

Filmed on and off over the course of three years, Orson Welles' low-budget adaptation of Othello is a dark Expressionistic jumble. Due to the director's problems financing the picture, Welles would often resort to appearing in films such as The Third Man during filming; only to return later and have to hire new cast members as previous ones were forced to drop out due to other commitments. The result is a jagged and chaotic jumble of ideas and images: a "grand folly" in the words of critic Peter Travers.

Certainly, Travers' words and the assertions of Roger Ebert hold a degree of truth. In spite of a well-documented restoration, Welles' film suffers from a degree of problems pertaining to its messy history. Scenes shot in Morocco would have to be connected to those shot in Venice. The awkward nature of this process is evident in the repeated shots that fail to match. The film's rapid-fire editing and post-production dubbing is also unwieldy: overcomplicating one of the paciest adaptations of Shakespeare on screen.

Parker's film on the other hand is a slick mainstream piece, owing more to the hyperactive nature of Kenneth Branagh's Iago than hyper-kinetic visuals. Featuring a notable cast, Parker's film carries more brand name baggage than Welles' poverty row approximation. Yet, this does not necessarily equate to greatness. Like Welles, Laurence Fisburne seems miscast in the title role. While Welles is often a heavy capricious ham, Fisburne arrogantly scowls rather than broods in a role he never appears comfortable within.

Equally miscast is the role of Desdemona in each film. Suzanne Cloutier's limitations in Welles' version are inhibited by the director's decision to give her hardly any screen time, while French actress Iréne Jacob is routinely lost in translation. The most impressive performances in both films are those of the character of Iago, yet the differences between Michael MacLiammóir and Kenneth Branagh are striking. Irish stage actor MacLiammóir's Iago is a devious misanthrope, who obtains innate pleasure out of Othello's misery.

His motives are not just simply a response to Othello jilting him in favour of Cassio, but also are part of his encompassing baseness. MacLiammóir's Iago is truly sinister and efficacious at every level. Branagh on the hand plays Iago as a saucy, bi-sexual rogue: a devious rapscallion that's part Errol Flynn-part Donald Sutherland. His motives are unclear, as Parker's adapation eliminates much of the play's motivation. Instead, his version becomes more about Iago fashioned as a lewd Venetian prankster with a coded desire for Othello .

Parker's film follows the unoriginal template for cinematic Shakespeare in simply filming characters speaking. This lethargic approach is spiced up by his emphasis on Othello's internalized thought patterns, which detail his vivid erotic imagination. Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the bawdy sexuality of Parker's film seems to follow Branagh around every bend. Although Branagh's Iago transmits the dangerous sexual images into Othello's mind, he is responsible for the film's cheekiest laughs, which reveal his sexual orientation: the best of which is a scene in which Iago reluctantly exchanges sex with his wife Emilia for Desdemona's handkerchief.

In Welles' film, this sequence is more classically stolid: an unusual perspective given the flair of Welles' approach. There are several delights to be found within the maelstrom of visual ideas within his Othello. The film's brilliant opening sequence harkens back to Citizen Kane in which a dead Othello is escorted on a bed through the hills of Cyprus. Then like an archetypal Noir, the film then reverts to the past to examine how the crime was committed and what motives were utilized. Despite the jarring nature of his camera movements and editing techniques, Welles is able to insert some wonderful moments into his film.

The most notable of which is the film's famous sequence in which Othello believes he is hearing of Desdemona's unfaithfulness. In Parker's version this scene is shot with Fishburne hiding in a cell to signify the trap which he is already locked in; in Welles' film, the Moor listens to Cassio and Iago talking on a windswept rooftop. With the sounds of seagulls and waves crashing muffling the echoed voices of Cassio and Iago, Welles emphasizes the distorted nature of language. Whereas Parker's Othello has always been trapped via race or mental instability (i.e. epilepsy), Welles' Othello has a degree of choice in the matter: his jealousy provokes his actions and thus his failure to elucidate seals his fate.

Part of this is due to Othello's smitten attitude to Desdemona in Welles' film. While at first we are told that Desdemona gobbled up Othello's tales with "a greedy ear," Cloutier's Desdemona seems to lose her appetite for the Moor once they arrive in Venice. Perhaps this is due to the brief timespan of their courtship, as it now Othello, with ears pressed against a stone wall, who is devouring stories of Desdemona with an equally "greedy ear."

In Welles' filmography, the aura of enchantment and magic is a strong theme in films ranging from F For Fake to Macbeth. Our first image of Othello is dressed in clothing that appears more suitable for a magician than a soldier. Ironically, this first meeting is when Othello is being charged with "enchanting" Desdemona with black magic. Yet, it is arguably Iago who is the true magician in Welles' film: turning the charming General into an automaton through is magical use of words. While Iago poisons the mindsets of the title character in both films, Branagh's Iago appears to be simply fulfilling his duty by exploiting Fishburne's tragic flaw. McLiammóir on the hand is sating his own lust for devilish entertainment by exploiting not only Othello, but a host of other characters such as Roderigo with his knave tongue.

The massacre which finalizes Othello is also completed in dissimilar programs. In Parker's version, Fishburne's engages in a voodoo-like ceremony: a paganistic ritual designed to condemn Desdemona for her actions. In Welles' film, Othello wolfishly hunts down Desdemona in the blackness of night. His reason is not simply to conceal his embarassment, but also intriguingly to not let Desdemona maim the hearts of any other men.

Lying in a funereal position, Cloutier's Desdemona seems resigned to her fate. While Jacob fights to live, Cloutier seems prepared to die. Welles' Othello strives to "put out the light" by placing Desdemona in an eternal sleep. His Othello would not seem out of place in a 1930's Universal horror film in a cavernous castle. Yet, his method of death is a symbolic one: suffocating his new bride in her handkerchief as though it were a white veil in a perverted and destructive marriage.

While Iago's back-stabbing ruckus in Parker's film results in a highly contrived bed of death, Welles' film has Iago wreaking havoc across the island: causing an outburst at a Turkish bath and attacking a defenceless Roderigo under the floorboards. The sheer lack of light in Welles film produces a finale of exquisite beauty; as cell-like imagery cascades across the faces and bodies of those whose fate has been sealed through the sheer evil which enacted it.

* Orson Welles' Othello is available on R2 DVD through Second Sight Home Video. Oliver Parker's version of Othello is available through Turner Home Entertainment

Other Orson Welles Films Reviewed:
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) 9/10

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque