1956: Run For The Sun

Run For The Sun (Roy Boulting, 1956) 5/10

Anthologized in 1924, Richard Connell's short story The Most Dangerous Game has been the source material for countless films. Elements of Connell's work can be found in such diverse material as Cornell Wilde's The Naked Prey (1966) to 1977's Bond film Octopussy. Its premise is simple: man, the hunter, also becomes the hunted.

Inspired by the big-game hunting safaris enjoyed by affluent European and American travellers in the late 19th century, Connell inverted the scenario by twisting the rules of the game. Rather than having man hunting wild beasts in exotic locales, Connell wrapped his original story around the plight of a shipwrecked man, who becomes hunted by a savage and sinister Cossack.

In doing so, Connell created a work that twisted the colonial paradigm of the era, infusing it with the unfettered savagery and bleak humanity, Connell and his peers witnessed during the First World War. Hollywood first picked up on Connell's story in 1932 with its first official adaptation by Irving Pichel and Ernest Schoedsack for RKO. Thirteen years later at the end of the Second World War, RKO released a remake helmed by Robert Wise at RKO entitled Game of Death. Poorly received, Wise's work altered the hunter's background from a Cossack to a exiled Nazi. It is this strand that the second official remake of the story, 1956's Run For The Sun, undertakes as its focal point.

Released in 1956 by MGM, Run For The Sun was the lone American film made by British director Roy Boulting. Set in Mexico, the film centers on Mike Latimer (Richard Widmark), a reclusive Hemingway-esque writer living an anonymous existence in the fishing village of San Marcos. His short-lived exile is soon interrupted by tabloid journalist Katy (Jane Greer). Claiming to be a tourist stranded in the village waiting for friends, Katy strikes up a relationship with Mike, who is oblivious to both her profession and purpose. After prodding and probing him for answers about his failed relationships and inconsistent output, she takes his offer of a flight in his private plane back to Mexico City.

Swerving off-course, the plane crashes into the dense Mexican jungle. Far from civilization, the pair are relieved to find a group of European settlers, Browne a British plantation owner (Trevor Howard) and van Anders a Dutch archeologist (Peter van Eyck), operating a small farm in the thick forested region. Despite the gracious hospitality afforded to them, the pair are soon perturbed by the antics of their hosts. Rifts emerge due to the web of clandestine pasts and concealed identities in the tropical heat. Mike, in particular, begins to suspect the origins and war-time practices of the plantation proprietors; conversely Katy's less nefarious designs also come to the forefront. Fearing for their safety, the couple quickly mend their differences, as they head east toward the beach: racing for the sun in the name of survival.

Heavy on action, Run For The Sun is a brisk B picture on an A-budget. Obstinately a film about closeted personal histories, Run For The Sun is a visually flavourful romp; a Saturday matinee classic that probably would have easily entertained many a twelve year old boy in 1956. Secretive pasts swirl at the forefront of the film's exotic settings. The revelation of the characters respective backgrounds throughout the film, brings a sense of uneasiness to each individual. This restlessness emerges because has much to lose in the process of disclosure.

The unearthing of Mike's reclusive home disrupts the alcoholic, self-pity he has drowned in, since the failures of his last book and his last relationship. In leaving its destructive, but comfortable climes, Mike puts himself in a position to be emotionally hurt once again. By having her professional credentials revealed to the intensely private Mike, Katy knows she will likely lose not only Mike's trust, but also their blossoming relationship. Certainly the pair of Browne and van Anders have the most to lose in this ordeal. By having their treacherous Nazi origins unmasked, the duo open themselves up to lose everything: their money, their obscurity and possibly their lives.

In response to this threat, Browne and van Anders engage in hunting the American couple for sport: an act that typifies the physical and psychological cruelty Browne and van Anders represent and regularly enact on the local indigenous tribes. Yet, the manner through which director Roy Boulting explores their dilemma is primarily muted. For much of its ninety-nine minute running-time, Run For The Sun feels shorn of character development and insight.

At the expense of narrative, action is placed at a premium: yielding a nimble production that darts along, but fails to maximize its own potential. As a result, much of the film's suspense is blunted, as speed takes preference. Characters suss out each other's intentions far too easily. For example, the manner through which Boulting and screenwriter Dudley Nichols explore the wartime relationship between Widmark's Mike and Trevor Howard's Browne is particularly underwhelming. Greer's descent from independent career woman to middling damsel in distress is also astonishingly poor in lieu of the materials' potential.

Nevertheless in spite of its flaws, Run For The Sun is an entertaining, if not particularly memorable film. While Widmark plays his role by the numbers, Trevor Howard delivers a scintillatingly sinister effort as the Nietzsche espousing "hunter" Browne. Yet, perhaps the film's greatest star is cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, whose cinematography is the film's greatest reward, adding a humid frenzy to the classy MGM production values.

* Run For The Sun is available on R2 DVD through Optimum Home Video

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

1961: Last Year At Marienbad

Last Year At Marienbad (Resnais, 1961) 9/10

"Haven't we met before?"

It is a staple of dating culture: a cliched pick-up line designed to enhance the aura of association between two people. Through its inquisitive language, it expresses a tone which emphasizes rememberance, interpretation, connection and history. And yet it is this much ridiculed attempt at expressing a kinetic bond, which serves as the catalyst for one of world's cinema's most serious, complex and abstract films, Last Year At Marienbad .

In 1961, Last Year At Marienbad was released onto a changing world. Audiences and critics were split over its content and context. The film won the Venice Film Prize (The Golden Lion) and became the forebearer for similar enigmatic pictures during the decade such as Federico Fellini's 8½, Ingmar Bergman's Persona and Michelangelo Antonioni's films L'Avventura and Blow-Up. Theatre owners were noted to have displayed signs or handed out pamphlets informing their audience that the film they were about to see was of a revolutionary nature: a radical break with traditional forms of cinema. Yet, countless filmgoers walked out in droves, due to the seemingly cold and pretentious nature of French New Wave director Alain Resnais's second film.

Directed by Alain Resnais ( Hiroshima Mon Amour, Night and Fog) and scripted by French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Year At Marienbad was and is one of the most ambigious films to emerge from the Sixties. The interpretation over its meaning and essence is so varied that even Robbe-Grillet and Resnais were both to have drawn different conclusions about its significance. The film stars Giorgio Albertazzi as X a man who attempts to convince a (possibly) married woman named A (Delphine Seyrig) that the pair had an affair the previous year in the same baroque hotel-spa resort. Despite A's refusal to admit the pair had an affair the previous summer, X tries to resuscitate internal memories locked within her psyche; suggesting she pledged her love to abandon her lover/husband M (Sascha Pitoeff) and run away with X.

With its gorgeous black and white cinematography by Sacha Vierny, Last Year At Marienbad broke traditional cinematic logic by following the modern novel in its groundbreaking use of non-linear narratives, an unreliable narrator and an infusion of psychological complexity. Taking the elements of its plot into account, it is surprising that Hollywood has never erroneously tried to remake Resnais' film. However, it is likely that any Hollywood interpretation of the film would omit not only Vierny's dreamlike cinematography or Resnais' intellectual content, but also the film's chief focus on two individuals.

The psychological interactions between these two individuals is imperative to Resnais' film and the ambiguity that surrounds it. The three central critical debates regarding Last Year At Marienbad focus on this interplay. First, did X and A genuinely have an affair last year at Marienbad or some other spa resort? Secondly, is X simply a deviant who desires A and thus tries to concoct a counter-memory in her head? Or thirdly, is the entire film a dream or psychological experience transpiring within the head of either X or A?

Resnais' utilization of freeze-frames and supporting characters who are literally immobile enhances the film's individualization and psychological content. With Resnais' interest in the theoretics of history, one must wonder if the director was familar with works emitting from the Annales school such as l'histoire de mentalités or social historian Maurice Halbwachs and his doubts about the validity of memory due to its lack of impartiality. Halbwachs' argument suggests that memory is a flawed process, which is suspectible to changes of opinion, socio-political change and outside debate. This ability to subvert, distort or suppress memory is a theme examined by Resnais in his film.

In his conquest to steal A's heart from M, one could argue that X is simply playing upon A's personal weaknesses and frailties. Throughout Last Year At Marienbad the film utilizes imagery relating to games. Repeatedly X indulges in games of chance such as cards and matchsticks. There are paintings and floors shaped like chessboards that suggest X is utilizing A as a pawn in his erotic and intellectual game of seduction. The accentuation on mirrors advances the theory that X is simply projecting a counter-memory which suits his own passions and psycho-social desires.

There are also psycho-architectural references to doors, corridors and windows, which are either closed or open. In symmetry with the film's fluid camerawork and dialogue, X notes that sometimes these portals of memory are open or closed, when he is speaking to A: possibly musing on his ability to metaphorically penetrate her psyche with new ideas or concepts, or unearth buried memories. As a narrator X's own "memory" is possibly fallible. He repeatedly brings up the existence of clothing and paintings in A's bedroom, which she repeatedly denies. One could argue that the lack of evidence of their existence points to X's forged status as a charlatan, or X's attempts to conceal an embarrassing past.

The suppression of memory in Last Year At Marienbad is a topic recently discussed by feminist film historians. Their arguments center on the possiblity that A and X may have become acquainted the previous year and that a likely (sexually) traumatic experience between the two resulted in A suppressing her memories of their previous encounter. Another possible argument involving suppression that is rarely addressed is that X himself is simply a ghost.

Throughout the film there are repeated verbal references to "the past" and "forever;" the film also features a funereal solitary organ soundtrack; characters frozen in time like statues; as well as games which nobody can ever win- like an attempt to overcome death.While in the hotel's lavish garden, A notes that X is like "a phantom." The fractured wall along A and M's balcony that X purportedly hid upon suggests that perhaps X plunged to an accidental death, from which A has never recovered.

Other clues involve references made to a freak storm, which killed thousands within the region or Resnais' subtle emphasis on the inability to escape the hotel through references to labryniths and the fact the camera never goes beyond the forests at the edge of the hotel's grounds. Resnais' utilization of spatial concepts and mathematical approaches to time provides plausible evidence that time in the film is indeed frozen, as the hotel guests are in a permanent state of immobility through death. Furthermore, the haunting and floating nature of Vierny's camerawork and the emptiness within the cavernous hotel suggests that as well as X, perhaps A is dead also and the former is attempting to inform her of her present phantomorgasmic state.

Since its initial release in 1961 Last Year At Marienbad has divided critics, audiences and historians with its investigations into philosophical truth, memory and history. With its ambivalent nature, gorgeous cinematography, episodic editing and intense performances, Last Year At Marienbad is a film which openly defies concetre interpretation. In its abstract logic, critics have summized the film is a parody of Hollywood romantic melodramas or an anti-nuclear allegory. Yet, while for many the pretentiousness, icy personalities and liquid summarization of Resnais' film is a turn-off, others have found intrigue and suspsense in the interpretative openess of one of cinema's greatest and most complex jigsaw puzzles.

Last Year At Marienbad is available on R2 DVD through Optimum Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque