1964: The Night of the Iguana

The Night of the Iguana (Huston, 1964) 9/10

The last major entry in the cycle of Tennessee Williams' adaptations that permeated Hollywood from 1950 to 1966, The Night of the Iguana is a rich, sensual experience: a tropical fever dream of a film filled with crippling anxieties, devilish rogues and bittersweet redemption. Directed by famed Hollywood auteur John Huston, The Night of the Iguana is one of the finest translations of Williams' work on celluloid: a film that produced an iconic performance from Richard Burton and turned Puerto Vallarta from a remote village barracked by mountainous jungle into a bustling tourist destination.

Shot in stunningly sharp monochrome by Luis Buñuel cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, The Night of the Iguana centers on the moral and spiritual trials of the Reverend T. Lawrence Shannon (Richard Burton). Locked out of his Episcopalian Church for indulging his immoral appetites, the former Minister now spends his time working as a tour guide escorting tourists on religious pilgrimages, rather than guiding a flock of parishioners. Yet, even south of the border, his errant ways and bothersome habits continue to clutch at his soul.

His response to the lusty whims of a promiscuous minor named Charlotte (Sue Lyons) in particular cause a stir amongst the busload of middle-aged female Baptist school teachers. Despite his best efforts, Shannon is unable to abscond from her rash erotic impulses. Accused by Charlotte's infuriated chaperon Miss Fellowes (Grayson Hall) of seducing the teenager in his bedroom, the desperate Shannon cracks under the strain and diverts the tour from their base at a modern hotel in Puerto Vallarta to another locale, the Costa Verde Hotel: a folksy hilltop establishment on the outskirts of town owned by his highly sexualized, proto-hippie friend Maxine (Ava Gardner).

Yearning to stop Miss Fellowes from contacting the tour company in Texas, Shannon mistakenly hopes that he and Maxine can win over the tour's patrons at Costa Verde in order to spare him his measly job. Nevertheless, Shannon's predilections for the flesh and alcohol continue to haunt him in the cool mountain air. Soon "at the end of his rope," Shannon descends into madness and physical anguish: culminating in breakdown during a frenzied stormy night with only the assistance of his friend Maxine, the soothing words of traveling painter Hannah Jelkes (Deborah Kerr) and the poetry of her ailing eight-year old grandfather Nonno (Cyril Delevanti).

The Night of the Iguana is an intense portrait of human destruction. Bordering on a nervous breakdown, Burton's Shannon is a figure drowning in his anguished mistakes. Unable to truly connect with others for help, Shannon is a figure caught up in his own dissolution. As shown visually throughout the film, this strain takes on an almost torturously biblical route. In one memorable scene, a barefoot Shannon walks across broken shards of glass in order to resist the tempting Charlotte as taunts and teases him with her lusty flirtatiousness. Convinced the weight of God's fury is upon him, Shannon even tries to strangle himself with a gold crucifix, he procured from a pawnshop.

Yet, despite his weaknesses and failings, Shannon is still an intensely proud individual. After Miss Fellowes engages in a fact-finding mission in order to taint his credibility, Shannon rebukes her claims that he was defrocked with conviction and intensity. In response, Shannon expresses his tormented relationship with God at the source of his professional woes; highlighted by his unwillingness to view God as a childish and petulant figurehead. In his frank discussions with Hannah Jelkes, Shannon strives to correlate a genuine spiritual association with Him. This connection is partially frayed by the inability of others to understand Shannon's moral faux-pas as the strain of enforced perfection on a broken individual.

The women in The Night of the Iguana play an important part in Shannon's misery and search for purpose. Like her earlier and more infamous role as the title character in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Sue Lyons plays a teenager who tempts an older man. But unlike the lecherous Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Shannon earnestly wants to suppress his feelings. Lyons plays her role in The Night of the Iguana as a series of quick emotional outbursts; flitting from one frothy viewpoint to the next as each constituted an aspect of eternity.

Her chaperon, Miss Fellowes is an all together different creature. Unlike, the flirtatious Charlotte, Miss Fellowes is stiff and distant. Portrayed in the film as a closeted lesbian, her vocational need to protect Charlotte seems both connected to her highly moralistic character, but also her own interests in the girl. Her sharp tongued attacks are not only leveled at Shannon, but to his highly-sexed friend Maxine, who also poses a threat to the social character she aspires to represent.

Bouncy, yet bearing an undercurrent of contempt, Maxine is a highly independent woman. Sexually liberated even before the death of her husband Fred, Maxine is characterized by her earthy and carnal characteristics. Despite the censorship of the era, it quickly becomes apparent that Maxine regularly engages in a multitude of sexual activities with her two young Mexican cabana boys. Aging, yet still beautiful, Maxine feels alive and wanted through them. Yet, in spite of their presence, Maxine still desires Shannon, who has continually rebuffed her advances out of respect for Fred. Nevertheless, Maxine offers Shannon a sense of home and permanency that his troubled life is crucially lacking.

The final woman who offers Shannon comfort is the gentle painter Hannah Jelkes. Unlike Charlotte and Maxine, Hannah is a highly asexual creature. Contemplative and assured, she resists Shannon's advances because she believes in love for it what offers beyond its physical capacities. Traveling with her aging grandfather, the pair offer their art as payment for their lodgings and food. Unlike the proud Shannon, Hannah feels no shame for her destitution, because she is not bound to a world of materialism and money. Rather, she is complete in the world around her and thus tries to make Shannon understand his shortcomings and flaws.

The principal metaphor in the film emerges from their plainspoken conversations. Like the Iguana, Maxine's cabana boys have tied to a post in order to fatten up to eat, Shannon too has a noose around his neck. The weight of his religious commitments and his moral principles is too great a weight for his tortured soul to bear alone. Thus, Huston's film becomes a homage to companionship, to art and to ethereal beauty. The film's principal characters are each astutely acted. With his booming voice and theatrical disposition, Burton is perfect as the plagued priest. Ava Gardner is equally remarkable against-type as the primal Maxine, while Deborah Kerr adds a saintliness and calming resonance to the picture.

Featuring a series of superb performances and gorgeous on-location cinematography, John Huston's adaptation of The Night of the Iguana is a criminally overlooked and undervalued entry into his filmography and the filmic Tennessee Williams' canon. Unlike other "prestige pictures" of its day, The Night of the Iguana does not appear dated and bloated; in large part due to Gabriel Figueroa's cinematography and Huston's emphasis on capturing the emotional pitfalls and sensual primacy of Williams' work set to an exotic background.

At times a stunning achievement.

* The Night of the Iguana is released on DVD by Warner Home Video and is available in their excellent Tennessee Williams Film Collection box set

Other John Huston Films Reviewed:
Across The Pacific (1942) 3/10
The Unforgiven (1960) 7/10

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

1973: Tennessee Williams' South

Tennessee Williams' South (Rasky, 1973) 5/10

The theatre of Tennessee Williams is indelibly associated with the South. With its steamy passages and sweaty textures, the work of the famed American playwright has become crucially inseparable from the American south in its dialect heavy language, settings and themes.

In 1973, the Canadian Broadcasting Company released Tennessee Williams' South, an eighty minute documentary directed by Canadian documentarian Harry Rasky that aimed to analyze Williams' relation to the South: its geography, its culture and its people. The result was a curious amalgamation of interviews, theatrical performances and poetry readings that overall reinforces the mythology of Tennessee Williams, rather than de-construct his personal and literary biography.

Filmed over the course of a year, Tennessee Williams' South traces the roots of Williams' work in a series of interviews at the author's Key West residence and former New Orleans haunts. The film's recorded conversations between Rasky and Williams unearth elements about his influences and his relationship to the South. Describing himself as an "angry old man,"Williams conversely appears jovial throughout the majority of his interactions.

Despite frequently discussing the South as both a geographical place and a state of mind in his art, Williams readily stresses the importance of personal experience in his work. The dualistic influences of the experiential and the cultural penetrate into a host of unique influences from his Ohioan grandparents to his absent father, his schizophrenic sister to African-American culture. Although Rasky frequently tries to imbue a sense of Williams as the preserver of a broken Southern identity, the renowned writer is quick to stress his eccentric ways and his status as the head of his own unique country.

Subsequently, the authentic South in Rasky's film clashes with the "South" of Williams' work. As the progenitor of a personalized realm of broken Southern damsels and a frittered plantation culture, Williams' "South" is one of a fading aristocratic environment reluctant to change, a society gone with the wind. Nevertheless, there is little in Williams' central output emphasizing the spiritual and social plight of the Southern working-class or African-American populations who represented the real South. Williams' conception is thus one unique to his work, a fact that Rasky fails to centrally address throughout the documentary.

Instead Rasky attempts to incorporates elements of Williams' work that found their influence in his life. Rasky achieves this by fusing interviews and poetry readings with slices of Night of the Iguana, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and other plays to inject Williams' personality and biography onto his literary legacy. Featuring performances by actors such as Burl Ives, Jessica Tandy and Michael York, the theatrical bits are hit-and-miss. Dated in their approach, these pieces suffer from stiff performances (see, for example, John Colicos and Colleen Dewhurst's rendition of Night of the Iguana) and an overly textual approach that emphasizes Williams' words, over the performers' respective renditions.

Paralleling the efforts of the film's thespian interpretations, Rasky's film suffers partially due to its slavery to the script; its adherence to the Williams' legend. There are no critical insights into his relationships, his political opinions or his feelings towards cinematic representations of his work. Nor is there any genuine disassembling of the themes in Williams' oeuvre beyond the grandiose idea of "the South." Consequently, Rasky's benign and myopic questions fall into Williams' eager hands, producing a film that warmly addresses with panache the roots of Tennessee Williams, but fails to explore his broken branches and torn stems.

* Tennessee Williams' South is released on DVD by Warner Home Video and is only available in their excellent Tennessee Williams Film Collection box set.

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

1958: Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958) 7/10

"Big Daddy...What is it that makes him so big? His big heart? His big belly? Or his big money? (Brick Pollitt)

The theatre of Tennessee Williams is one of liars and failures, conniving creatures and tortured customers. Perhaps no other work in his oeuvre better represented and quantified these diverse characteristics than Williams' 1955 Pulitzer Prize winning play Cat On A Hot Tin Roof: a tawdry story built around the falsehoods of its characters and the complex socio-cultural environment they operate within.

Set in southern Mississippi, Cat On A Hot Tin Roof focuses on the destructive crises affecting the affluent Pollitt family and their divulgence over a tumultuous weekend. The film specifically centers on the fractious relationship between former athlete Brick Pollitt (Paul Newman) and his alluring wife Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor). Escaping a lifetime of poverty through marriage to the youngest member of the Pollitt clan, Maggie is perturbed by their failing marriage. Sexless and fraught with altercations, the couple's relationship reaches a nadir when they travel to Brick's family plantation to celebrate the birthday of his father known as Big Daddy (Burl Ives).

Rather than a celebratory event, Big Daddy's birthday quickly unravels into a specter of violence, drunkenness and collusion. Partially stemming from the rumour that Big Daddy is possibly dying of colon cancer, the party sours from a festival of life into a gala of connivance. Leading this scheming are Brick's solicitor brother Gooper (Jack Carson) and his acquisitive wife Mae (Madeleine Sherwood). Spawning five hellish brats, Gooper and Mae are eager to secure Big Daddy's illustrious fortune through any means possible; even through coercing Gooper's emotionally unstable mother Big Mama (Judith Anderson) into signing a series of contracts to ensure their ownership of Big Daddy's properties.

Holed up in his room with a broken ankle, the alcoholic Brick stews about the culture of lies, the family have structured itself upon. Guilt-ridden by the death of his "best friend" Skipper and distrustful toward materialism, Brick spirals into an inebriated stupor that threatens to tear apart not only his childless marriage to Maggie, but also his status in the Pollitt household.

Throughout Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, the theme of mendacity emerges as a key idea. Structuring their lives on false images and dreams, the Pollitt family sees the undoing of their individual acts of subterfuge during Big Daddy's birthday celebrations. During a stormy weekend, family members such as Brick and Big Daddy begin to see the unravelling of these lies through an earnest attempt to reconcile truth into their relationships. Big Daddy's curmudgeonly approach to others reveals a volatile desire to truly express his repressed contempt toward his wife, his ill-behaved grandchildren and Brick's wallowing into an alcohol-induced world of self-pity.

In contrast to his family's boisterous patriarch, Brick prefers to drown his resentment in liquor. His inability to express his pain and sorrow pushes him further away from his estranged wife and isolated family. Brick's anger is both recent and long-term. He virulently detests his father's idealization of love through the form of material transactions, but Brick also despises both his wife and himself for their role in Skipper's suicide. While Brick rancorously objects to his family's culture of lies, he neglects his own aggressive and frequent participation in this realm.

Brick and Skipper's past friendship is presented throughout Cat On A Hot Tin Roof in ambiguous terms, yet their is an underlying sense their relationship probably held homosexual qualities. As the recipient of a homosexual advance or perhaps a repressed homosexual himself, Brick vigorously attempts to deny the true extent of his emotionally intense bond to Skipper. In doing so, he creates voluminous fissures in his marriage to Maggie and isolates his feelings from others with disastrous consequences.

The distancing effects brought on by the repression of these feelings is smartly addressed by director Richard Brooks throughout much of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof. Frequently, Brooks places characters in stark opposition to one another, often shooting characters talking to one another faced in opposite directions. This particularly works well in several of the film's key speeches involving the emotionally cold Brick. Notably, much of the play's homosexual content was muted by the censors at the time. In spite of the enforced revisions, Brooks manages to admirably maintain the sense of equivocal uncertainty fermenting in Brick's soul.

Originally earmarked for the openly gay director George Cukor, the film was instead given to Richard Brooks after Cukor turned the film down. While Cukor would have more likely given the film a greater visual eloquence, the more action-orientated Brooks offered the film a biting, steamy flavour that ultimately won over critics and audiences. The film's success aided not only the careers of Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, but also Richard Brooks who would later go onto adapt another Tennessee Williams' play (Sweet Bird of Youth) also starring Newman and Madeleine Sherwood.

Brooding and snarling, Newman carved a niche for himself as a serious actor capable of skillfully playing the arrogant/angry young man: an archetype he would frequently revisit throughout the early stages of his career in films such as The Hustler, Hud, Sweet Bird of Youth and The Young Philadelphians. Despite losing her then third husband Mike Todd in a fiery plane crash during filming, Elizabeth Taylor continued working and produced one of the most sultry and dynamic performances of her career. Yet, the film's true show stopper was neither Newman or Taylor, but Burl Ives who reprised his Broadway role as the cranky larger-than-life patriarch Big Daddy. Played with cantankerous verve, Ives' performance provides the film's strong moral core, as well as the centre of much of its anger and sorrow.

Director Richard Brooks' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof remains one of the most enduring cinematic adaptations of Williams' work. Constructed with a moody mis-en-scene, Brooks gave Cat On A Hot Tin Roof the type of scorching, sultry atmosphere that has defined Williams work for audiences and critics alike. Unlike his second Williams' adaptation Sweet Bird of Youth, Brooks' first attempt at translating the Southern playwright was not as fatally destabilized by the censorship of the era. Rather, the film's tedious pacing is its only truly detrimental attribute; a factor that is nevertheless ultimately redeemed by its acute performances and evocative visual ornamentation.

* Cat On A Hot Tin Roof is released on DVD by Warner Home Video and is available in their excellent Tennessee Williams Film Collection box set

Other Richard Brooks films reviewed:
Sweet Bird of Youth (1962) 6/10

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

1962: Sweet Bird of Youth

Sweet Bird of Youth (Richard Brooks, 1962) 6/10

"Provocative Adult Entertainment." In 1962, Richard Brooks' second cinematic Tennessee Williams adaptation Sweet Bird of Youth truly embodied the three words emblazoned in the middle of its orange hued poster. Today, the topics discussed in Sweet Bird of Youth would appear tame to a modern audience, despite their immoral nature.

Yet in 1962, Williams' play was so risqué that when Brooks transferred Sweet Bird of Youth onto celluloid, he was unable to incorporate several topics found in Williams' play such as venereal disease and castration into the shooting script. The removal of these aspects may have changed the overall effect of the film in its conclusion; yet even without their inclusion into the film's final cut, Brooks' film still featured several taboo elements: some so controversial their existence was merely hinted at indirectly during the film.

Reprising his role on Broadway, the film stars Paul Newman as Chance Wayne: a young Floridian man desperate for success, but undeniably naive in his actions. Madly in love with Heavenly (Shirley Knight), the daughter of tyrannical Southern politician. Boss Finley (Ed Begley), Chance is informed by her father that he must acquire riches and fame in order to secure her hand in marriage. Leaving his job as a busboy at a Gulf Coast country club, Chance heads for the bright lights of New York and Hollywood to find his fortune in order to retrieve Heavenly from her father's potent grip.

Unbeknownst to Chance, his glorious vision is a fatefully flawed apparition. After years struggling to break into Hollywood as an actor, Chance has achieved little in the way of wealth or fame. The only notoriety he has accrued is through being an objectified instrument of pleasure for the wives of millionaires, the debutantes of "the horsey set" and lonely eccentrics. One such eccentric is fallen star Alexandra del Lago (Geraldine Page). Once one of Hollywood's greatest names, del Lago's latest notable escapades have less to do with her on-screen performances, but through her off-screen exodus from the preview of her latest film. Copiously addicted to drugs, alcohol and sex, Alexandra has become an agoraphobic wastrel desperate to nullify her public rejection, yet still living up to her reputation as a diva.

Believing he has found the key to his future success, Chance takes the emotionally unstable Alexandra with him to St. Cloud during a sunny Easter weekend. The religious nature of the weekend should offer all its participants a chance from redemption, cleanliness and resurrection. Nevertheless, the presence of sin and evil is well-noted. Despite confessing a sensitivity to Alexandra's plight, Chance desires to use her to fulfill his self-inflated ambitions whether it be through tender words or blackmail. Blinded by his need to impress Heavenly's father, Chance has failed to recognize the nature of his surroundings, whilst chasing his "phony dream." Nevertheless, reality and his past actions soon return to haunt him, as the follies of his ambitions and his failures become achingly clear.

At its core Sweet Bird of Youth is a film about failed dreams. Several of the film's principal characters engage in the creation of overly ambitious dreams, whose success is struck a fatal blow due to the constraints of reality. Whilst, initially inspired by Heavenly's plight, Chance's dreams morph into inflated, self-centered projects that have little chance to succeed. Lacking any genuine acting talent, Chance's only skills and attributes are purely corporeal and sexual. His in-roads into Hollywood have been through the exploitation of his youth not to sell films, but for jaded aging women to purchase youth through relationships with him. Yet, youth is a fleeting commodity and Chance in his imaginative gullibility notably fails to realize its true nature. His plans are bold and engaging, but are reliant on unlikely breaks that divert him from the original purpose of his project.

Youth is also a commodity traded by Boss Finley. Utilizing his hot-headed son (Rip Torn), Finley has amassed a small army of neo-fascistic thugs to terrorize his enemies. Despite, his Christian populist rhetoric, Finley has also used Heavenly's sexuality to secure powerful contracts, only to- as with Chance- exile these men from his state once they no longer have any socio-political value to him. In Sweet Bird of Youth Boss Finley's aggressive machismo and misogyny contrasts neatly with Chance's flaccid approach to Heavenly, whom he promises to abscond, but repeatedly fails to confront.

The theme of failure also abounds in Sweet Bird of Youth. Like the Rev. T. Lawrence Shannon in Williams' The Night of the Iguana, Chance struggles to understand his errors and seek an alternative path: instead he recreantly looks to exploit weaknesses in others (i.e. Alexandra del Lago) to writhe out of a problematic situation of his own doing. The downfall of her career has also left Alexandra del Lago in a situation, were unwilling to commit to rebuilding her reputation, the actresses sinks into a world of debauchery and sin. Yet, rather than attempting to amend these flaws directly, several characters in Sweet Bird of Youth use duplicitous means to either forget via sex and drugs or correct through violence, blackmail and fear-mongering.

Released by MGM in 1962, Sweet Bird of Youthwas a popular and critical success, which aided in cementing Paul Newman as a genuine Hollywood star. In the forty-six years since its initial release, Sweet Bird of Youth has dated in parts of its overcooked southern melodrama. Brooks' method of cutting to flashbacks is particularly poor: appearing more at home in a 1940's comedy with its swirling dissolves and similar devices. Slowly paced in parts Sweet Bird of Youth is slightly too baggy, often engaging in sub-plots that divert from the true essence of the film. Additionally, the removal of certain plot elements involving Chance and Heavenly's relationship from the play due to censorship, leaves the film's finale in a discomforting position that fails to recognize the emotional complexity of their past.

Nevertheless, Sweet Bird of Youth does feature some excellent performances in this morally acidic film. Newman is commendable as aspiring actor-cum-gigolo Chance Wayne. Geraldine Page's swings back and forth on a tumultuous emotionally pendulum as Alexandra del Lago and produces one of the film's highlights. Ed Begley's work as the nefarious Boss Finley won him an Academy Award, whilst Madeline Sherwood offers an electric performance as Finley's favourite prostitute, who becomes victim of an act of misogynistic violence that rivals Lee Marvin's coffee pot in The Big Heat and James Cagney's grapefruit in The Public Enemy

Controversial and corrosive, Sweet Bird of Youth is an enjoyable, but often turgid entry in the cycle of Tennessee Williams films Hollywood produced during the Fifties and Sixties. Despite a strong cast and edgy subject matter, Sweet Bird of Youth probably failed to fulfill its full potential on film. Certainly censorship was a critical factor, but also Brooks' direction, whilst at times laudable lacked the ability to translate Williams' intense emotionalism into the type of fruitful vehicle of pity, depravity and quasi-religious redemption Sweet Bird of Youth could and should have been.

* Sweet Bird of Youth is released on DVD by Warner Home Video and is available in their excellent Tennessee Williams Film Collection box set

Other Richard Brooks films reviewed:
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958) 7/10

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

1960: The Unforgiven

The Unforgiven (Huston, 1960) 7/10

John Huston's 1960 Western The Unforgiven was a film fraught with tragedy and dissolution both on and off-screen. Featuring a strong, reputable cast including Burt Lancaster, Audie Murphy, Lillian Gish and Audrey Hepburn in her only entry in the genre, The Unforgiven had the ingredients to be a box-office success, the film's lead star and co-producer Lancaster desired. Nevertheless from its inception, The Unforgiven was a work painted in shades of lament.

In the mid-Fifties and early Sixties, the Western had morphed into an important artistic vehicle for socio-political debate, particularly in the realm of race. The question of historical and present-day racism was subsequently addressed in film's such as John Ford's The Searchers, Anthony Mann's Cimarron and Don Siegel's Elvis Presley vehicle The Flaming Star.

For Huston, this project was also earmarked as a challenging allegorical piece designed to reflect America's contemporary racial disharmony. Instead, the film was disowned by its creator and its principal performers; the sorrowful filled victim of what Huston would later term as a "celestial vengeance."

By the time filming had completed, three crew members had perished in a plane crash and two miscarriages had been suffered. Additionally, Hepburn had seriously injured her back after falling from a horse, Audie Murphy had almost drowned on a nearby lake and Huston had been the victim of a knife attack. The myriad of delays coupled with the hefty wages of the star-filled cast prompted the termination of Lancaster's production company HHL. Failing to find an audience, the film was a commercial failure. Removed almost forty years from its initial release, The Unforgiven stands out as an interesting, overlooked and misunderstood film affected by the constraints of its time and the confrontation between art and commerce.

Located amongst the swirling sandy brush and the limbs of desiccated trees, the baked-mud walls of the Zachary ranch have demonstrated a tenuous permanency. Eking out a modest subsistence for years, the family fortunes finally appear to be on the upswing. Ersatz family patriarch Ben (Burt Lancaster) has returned from Wichita equipped with not only dreams of expanding their shared cattle business, but also with a modicum of western civilization: a small piano gifted through the muscular first-born's ability to win a bet through his strength.

Nevertheless social disaster soon strikes, as once dormant ghosts from the past return in the form of a one-eyed horseman (Joseph Wiseman) named Abe Kelsey. Spouting religious verse, blanketed in dust and baked into madness by the searing heat, Kelsey's mumbled ramblings appear to be little more than the words of a madman. In spite of Kelsey's mental fragility and susceptibility, his provocative mumblings about the racial origins of Ben's adopted sister Rachel (Audrey Hepburn) stir raw, primal emotions amongst the Zachary men, including Ben and his racist brother Cash (Audie Murphy).

As the Zachary boys try in desperation to track down Abe Kelsey, the influence of his ramblings permeates through the community. In an inversion of Ford's The Searchers, a local Kiowa tribe beseech the Zachary's to return the now adult Rachel to her people. Their methodology is one of peace and honour; even if their approach slants toward bartering for Rachel through the trading of horses, as if she were a mere commodity.

Concurrent with the Kiowa's requests, the Zachary's closet friends and trading partners also call for Rachel's reversion to the Kiowa in order to protect their own product: the threat of communal and entrepreneurial exile the high price for any corresponding inaction. Ben refuses to capitulate to either demands, even if by the film's finale, his reasoning is more incestuous than noble.

Supremely shot by Franz Planer, The Unforgiven is an often messy, yet interesting Western. Using the past as a distancing device, Huston aimed for The Unforgiven to be an outlet to explore racial conflict in 1960's America. But through a combination of off-screen mishaps and on-screen slovenliness, The Unforgiven never really fulfilled its potential. Based on a story by The Searchers author Alan LeMay, The Unforgiven similarly tries to address many of the racial and social concerns put forth in Ford's adaptation of the former. Unlike Ford's film, Huston's work fails to fully embrace these concepts, primarily due to the off-screen friction between Huston and the film's producer(s) and star.

Whereas Ford's protagonist Ethan Edwards is shown as an insensitive demonizing figure unable to adapt to the textured complexities of modern America, Huston's Ben Zachary is an atypical strapping hero by the film's final moments. Despite an early reverence for the peaceful Kiowa, there is little in the melodramatic story that serves to fully acknowledge the indigenous characters as multi-faceted beings. Bizarrely for a film devoted to an anti-racist message, the prolonged destruction of the Kiowa outside the Zachary household subtly depicts the Native Americans merely as superstitious, child-like creatures. In contrast, Lancaster's Zachary is portrayed in a positive manner as a family man desperate to protect his own interests; in spite of his incestuous desires for his half sister and his orders to shoot to kill upon an amicable party of Kiowa diplomats.

While Huston intended for The Unforgiven as an essay on racism, the overall effect is insipidly muted. This primarily stems from the muddled angles toward a serious examination of the topic throughout the film. The exigency held by Rachel in the film's final sequences is a particularly noticeable product of this problem: leaving the character involved in a twisted decision between nature or nurture. Ultimately, her choice is predicated through violence, rather than love as she decides between her biological and adoptive families: a facet that leaves Huston's flawed treatise cold and barren upon reaching its coda.

For contemporary audiences, The Unforgiven may work better as an examination of the tracts sociological racism built with the "pioneer spirit:" attributes plainly imbued by the callous Cash Zachary and subtly demonstrated by much of the community's xenophobic populace. Despite its notable contextual plot flaws and the miscasting of Hepburn, The Unforgiven is a peculiar and often compelling melodramatic Western. Featuring a brutish, against-type performance by Audie Murphy, a resilient Lillian Gish and an imposing Burt Lancaster, The Unforgiven is a misguidedly fissured film: an often captivating family melodrama that subsequently fails to dismantle the mythology of the West it yearns to correct.

* The Unforgiven is available on DVD through MGM Home Video

Other John Huston Films Reviewed:
Across The Pacific (1942) 3/10
Night of the Iguana (1964) 9/10

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

2008: The Dark Knight

The Dark Knight (Nolan, 2008) 9/10

"Some men just want to watch the world burn" (Alfred Pennyworth)

In The Dark Knight, the latest addition to English director Christopher's Nolan's revisionist take on the Batman series, there is a brief, but important conversation in a Gotham restaurant between Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) on the subject of security and history.

Underneath the glowing chandeliers and golden textured walls, Dent the crusading newly appointed district-attorney pontificates on Gotham's criminal underbelly, seizing the opportunity to express his solaced call for a return to an era when threats to democratic republicanism were thwarted through the instillation of power into the hands of a trusted and respected leader.

Before the brash public official can finalize his thesis on the matter, he is reminded by his girlfriend Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) that in Roman times, this protection of the republic resulted in its ultimate disintegration through the dictatorship of Julius Caesar. The balance between liberty and security echoes freely through the post-9/11 prism of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. More than a simple action film, Nolan imbues his project with a sense of social and philosophical debate rarely evident in the genre.

With The Dark Knight Nolan puts forth questions designed to mirror our modern societies and the ethical and existential implications faced by contemporary governments in an unstable age. It is a tale of not simply the external competition between good and evil forces, but also the internalized struggle of heroes and villains. It is a story of personal and public corruption, tragedy and crisis; a story demonstrating the tempting lust of power and its dissolute attributes. The result is at times an incredibly dark, vengeful and bleak film scurrying through the depths of the human soul.

Although the plot primarily focuses on the emergence of the Joker (the late Heath Ledger) and his stated claim to destroy Batman, its undercurrent is one deeply rooted in the Joker's appropriation of Nietzschean and Machiavellian philosophies. Whilst, the Joker openly states to an assortment of Gotham gangsters his willingness to kill Batman for a price, the Joker himself needs Batman to satisfy his own psyche; at one point informing Batman: "You complete me."

Unlike, Gotham's other criminals, the Joker is not motivated by material goods. A self-proclaimed "agent of chaos", the Joker's incentive is through the promotion and adoption of his anarchic and nihilist ideology of terror. Performed in a darkly humorous, yet philosophically intrusive and psychologically violent manner by Heath Ledger, the Joker is no longer the twisted campy trickster of Romero or Nicholson. Rather, he is an earnest observer of humanity: a figure whose terrorist actions are partially designed almost as scientific tests or sociological experiments to hypothesize on the moral fabric of the human race.

The ethical dilemmas posed by the Joker's actions also affect Batman, exposing the hero's flaws and limitations. The result is at times an almost quasi-religious contest between the forces of good and evil. Their relationship mirrors a scene from the New Testament between Jesus and the Devil in the desert. In the film, the satanic Joker taunts and plays with the flawed messianic Batman's soul in a push for him to break his vows, rules, oaths and commandments. This biblical thread can also be adopted in the Joker's attempt to convert Harvey Dent from a beacon of hope into a vindictive force of evil. In a rare move for a Hollywood action film, almost every principal character in The Dark Knight has their faith in humanity tested.

As a noted admirer of Film Noir [1], Christopher Nolan adopts the genre's tropes and insights into moral conflict with visual skill and aplomb. The decay of morality and the corruptibility of individuals through power, materialism and hate filters into almost every aspect of The Dark Knight. Even the film's protagonist is not spared, after all he too is human. The ramifications run deep in this dynamic inspection of the darkest capsulizations of individuals and societies. In Nolan's film, the price of success comes at the cost of loved ones, friendships and external perceptions.

In doing so, The Dark Knight also questions the role of the Caped Crusader himself. As Batman's mere presence appears to increase the proclivity of his criminal foes, his corresponding actions repeatedly and simultaneously undermine the democratically elected officials and the necessary legal and judicial forces designed to protect ordinary citizens. Batman's presumptuous subversion of this system espouses doubts into not only the legality of his vigilante role, but also his increasingly individualistic usage of extra-legal procedures.

Subsequently, Christopher Nolan's film along with Heath Ledger's stunning performance raises the bar for Hollywood action films. The Dark Knight is not merely a source of entertainment, but also a fountain of social debate spraying forth images and concepts resonating ideas topical and fresh to its contemporary audience. The Dark Knight is a contemplative gesture in an era of insensate big-budget filmmaking, which certainly will be remembered for generations to come.

[1] See Nolan's appearance in Film Noir: Bringing Darkness Into Light found as a bonus disc featured in Warner Brothers' Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 3

* The Dark Knight is released by Warner Brothers

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

1955: Picnic

Picnic (Logan, 1955) 7/10

In the 1950's, the influence of the Motion Picture Production Code regulating the content of American films was waning. Foreign imports, the advent of television, social changes and the establishment of independent theatres were among the factors aiding the dissolution of the code's influence throughout the mid-Fifties. Previously restricted in their sexual context and language, the 1950's saw through the release of several films displaying a new openness towards sexual relations and class.

Joshua Logan's 1955 adaptation of William Inge's Pulitzer Prize winning play Picnic is one such example of this movement. Set in rural Kansas, Picnic focuses on Hal Carter (William Holden), a muscular drifter sweeping into the sleepy backwater prairie town via a freight train like a sexual tornado. Desperate for work, Hal aims to track down college fraternity chum Alan Benson (Cliff Robertson), the heir to a fleet of grain silos that dominate the community's economic landscape. Nevertheless, Hal's arrival on the day of the local Labour Day picnic overturns the rigid class and sexual conforms rested within the town.

In particular, Hal's entrance affects a group of single women in a working-class household located near the railroad tracks. Whilst cleaning an elderly woman's yard for food, a shirtless Hal brings out the primal sexual emotions suppressed within the admiring women next door. The release of these inhibited feelings immediately unbalances the cloistered world the rural women reside in: unearthing a volatility and unhappiness previously buried in community life and future goals.

The emergence of a sense of personal fragility and impatience with life brooding throughout the picture coincides with Hal's appearance. Despite her looks and seemingly destined marriage to the wealthy Alan Benson, town beauty Madge Owens (Kim Novak) begins to question her life motives. Ill-educated, the soft-spoken Madge has been contoured by her single mother Flo (Betty Field) to marry Alan as soon as possible, before Madge's beauty and looks fade. With so much attention paid to her appearance, rather than her personality, Madge desires to find someone willing to talk to her as an individual, rather than as a distant goddess.

On the other hand, her bookish sister Millie (Susan Strasberg) is fed up of burying her head in dog-eared Flannery O'Connor novels. She envies Madge's extroverted characteristics and beautiful appearance. Desperate for acceptance and admiration from the opposite sex, Millie yearns to find true love as quickly as possible. An additional woman, the Owen's lodger and local middle-aged school teacher Rosemary Sydney (Rosalind Russell) is equally desperate for love, whether through her incompetent longtime beau stationary salesman Howard Bevans (Arthur O'Connell) or through another man. Feeling her age, Hal's arrival impresses in Rosemary a high-strung need to feel young and sexually vigorous.

Hal however simply wishes to settle down and find some security, at least for the immediate future. After failed stints in college, the army and other ventures, the former college football star yearns to do something meaningful with his life. Yet, through his status as a drifter and the emotions he unleashes, Hal unwittingly commits himself to a program of nomadism. His antics and liveliness are far too out of place in the unyielding and insular world he has briefly immersed into.

By unconsciously releasing these emotions, Hal indirectly tears and gnaws at the regional modes of decorum and restraint; cracking sexual and class conscientious mores. Rosemary and Flo are particularly affected: the former turning into a drunken and embarrassingly over-sexual being, the latter seeing her dreams of climbing the social ladder via her daughter's marriage crumble at every turn.

Upon its initial release, Picnic was seen as a dynamic, erotic and controversial piece of American filmmaking. Today, much of the film's upfront and raw sexuality appears tame. Additionally, Logan's once vaunted documentary-style footage of the picnic itself, now appears clunky, crude and wasteful in its overabundant images of crying babies, three-legged sack races and pie-eating contests that add little to the plot or the Midwest ambience. The film's melodramatic plot appears particularly overblown at times, especially in relating the swiftness of the events within a twenty-four hour period.

Yet, one could argue that Logan's film captured an undercurrent within Middle America during the Eisenhower years. A notable critical and commercial hit during its original run, audiences certainly reveled in the film's uncovering of a simmering sensual identity in a small rural community, as well as the desperation to escape from the placid stillness and unwavering patterns of life in rural life. Thus, the film's portrayal of the four women in the Owens' home is telling as each, prior to Hal's entry into town, is stranded and isolated from fulfilling their own ambitions and establishing their own identity separate from the expected socio-cultural standards of the period.

Kim Novak's muted performance as Madge displays a woman lacking any personality created from within herself; rather she appears as a composite of the expectations of others. Rosalind Russell's work as Rosemary vaults through a tidal wave of emotions, ascending and descending from highs and lows with a rapidity significantly entwined to her character's heart-breaking inability to accept a life without marriage. Along with Susan Strasberg and Arthur O'Connell with their respective portrayals of an introverted teenager and a bumbling salesman, Russell offers one of the film's strongest performances. William Holden's effort however is more troubling. Despite his talent, Holden at age 37 was too old to truly convince in the role, a fact the actor later himself admitted. Nevertheless, his combative performance offers a template for his far more successful work in David Lean's Bridge On The River Kwai two years later.

Transcending from smoldering sensuality to overblown histrionics, Picnic rests as an astute encapsulation of Hollywood cinema during the 1950's. Controversial in a conservative era, Picnic appears today more as a document of an era, than a progressive cinematic work. Picnic was one of Joshua Logan's first entries into the world of cinema after a prolonged period as a director on Broadway. Logan's primary experience in theatre lends the film a deep sense of theatricality that seeps into the work, resulting in some overdone performances and choppy editing by editors William Lyon and Charles Nelson. Thankfully, this is for the most part saved through some beautiful compositions by famed cinematographer James Wong Howe's and the film's melodramatic insights into sexuality in 1950's Middle America.

* Picnic is available on DVD through Columbia Home Video

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque