2007: The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner (Forster, 2007) 7/10

Since its publication in 2003, Afghan-American author Khalid Hosseini's The Kite Runner has been a critical and commercial favourite of book clubs, due to its topical look at Afghani history and politics. Directed by Marc Forster (Finding Neverland; Monster's Ball), The Kite Runner is a emotionally inductive affair that rides upon a wave of nostalgia and the poignant remnants of a fractured childhood relationship.

Traversing between 1970's Kabul and contemporary San Francisco, The Kite Runner focuses on Amir (Zekiria Ebrahimi) a reticent and apprehensive boy from an affluent, westernized family. When not writing stories in his room, Amir spends most of his days playing with his friend Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada). Under the curious caste-like cultural circumstances within Afghanistan, Hassan and his family have long acted as household servants for Amir's secularized and widowed intellectual father Baba (Homayoun Ershadi). Thus, while their time spent together includes outings watching classic Hollywood films and flying kites, the pair also must engage in a split relationship that involves Hassan's docile servitude toward Amir.

Despite his moody outbursts, Baba is a loving individual who treats Hassan as though he is his own son; perhaps even viewing the brash and assured boy as a figure more akin to his own masculine image. Yet, tragedy soon strikes as Hassan is viciously attacked by a sexually sadistic teenager. Rather than informing his father of the event, Amir responds in anger towards Hassan: shunning his friend and engaging in a series of manipulative acts that ensure the split of their long-standing friendship.

Within Kabul's vibrant walls, an undercurrent of intolerance and violence begins to ferment with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, resulting in Baba and Amir's flight from Afghanistan to America. It is here that Forster's film shifts gears and what initially became a study of the loss of childhood innocence and friendship, instead emerges as a study of cultural dislocation and a rather vapid tale of personal redemption. Forster's hefty application of binary opposites steadily loosens the cultural and historical complexity of Hosseini's narrative as characters sink into simplistic stereotypes of good and evil.

The chronological elaboration of Amir's character is particular telling. Despite his guilt and ultimate redemption, Forster's film never offers an extensive insight into Amir's psychological consciousness. The culpable nature of his acts- resigning Hassan to his eventual fate- are not provided a greater insight. As the film moves across time and space, it is surprising to note that Amir's contrition is steadily posited away from the central narrative. Subsequently, this eliminates the entangled ramifications within his character as Amir's moments of cowardliness are pushed further into the background, rather than being a central catalyst in the foreground plot.

Consequently, The Kite Runner steadily embosses a syrupy sentimental vibe imbued with layers of nostalgia. Thus, the nascent opportunities for Forster to attempt a Neo-Realist interpretation of childhood give way to eventual images of happy families and undeserved emotional resolution. Through Forster's perspective pre-Soviet invasion Kabul bears the hallmarks of a paradisal community. Yet, such a viewpoint undermines and neglects the real historical ethnic and class divisions within Afghanistan, in addition to the exterior social conflict surrounding the insulated world Forster creates for Amir and Hassan. Disturbingly, the vast majority of the film's characters appear blithe toward the socially and economically restrictive template of their lives.

Even when the film returns to contemporary Afghanistan, Forster's rendition of history is skewed: placing Afghanistan's tragic present as a consequence of Soviet imperial expansionism, rather than a product of a myriad of sources. The ensuing historical gap in Forster's film hurts his transition from past to present in showing Afghanistan's post-Cold War emergence as a "failed state." Furthermore, the film's forays into the action-film genre are a mystifying artistic selection, whilst the attempts at crafting a viewpoint from that of the outsider in America lacks cohesion to the film's opening third.

Yet, despite Forster's attempts at emotional manipulation, the film is an often fulfilling experience in part to due its fine acting from its two young stars, a scintillating supporting role by Shaun Toab as Baba's associate Rahim Khan and an exquisite performance from Iranian actor Homayoun Ershadi as Baba. Additionally, Forster makes ample use of the film's locations- shot in China as a substitute for war-torn Afghanistan- as well as its extensive use of a foreign language to convey the story . In doing so, Forster is able to imbue the picture with a greater sense of realism and native authenticity.

But as with his earlier film Finding Neverland, Forster is unable to relinquish his willful incursions into sentimentality. Rather than allowing the performances of his actors to emotionally connect with the audience, Forster's film supplies unprescribed doses of evocative music alongside David Benioff's melodramatic script to tug at our heart strings, rather than assertively thumping both the audience and the manipulative main character in the gut.

* The Kite Runner is released by Paramount Vantage

Copyright 2008 8½ Cinematheque

2007: Zodiac

Zodiac (Fincher, 2007) 10/10

There is more than one way to lose your life to a killer (Zodiac Poster Tagline)

American director David Fincher is one of contemporary cinema's most perplexing talents. His films are often artfully constructed, yet he has been noted for his fondness for mainstream fare such as Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. His career began in music videos and- has continuted to be involved with- commercials, yet his films overtly use the cinematic medium to its fullest, rather than to create extended pop videos.

His oeuvre has currently been defined by two characteristics: first, a dark aesthetic prowess embodied in astute cinematography and a taste for psychologically menancing and often violently gruesome subject matter. From The Game through Seven and Panic Room, Fincher has demonstrated a cunning ability to create films that artfully menace both the audience and his high calibre actors with suspenseful chills and morbid curiousities.

The second notable facet of Fincher's career has occurred off-screen. For all his talent and precision in creating gems such as Fight Club and the aforementioned projects, Fincher has had a hit and miss connection to the audience. Seven, Panic Room and The Game all raked in hundreds of millions, whereas Fight Club and Zodiac tanked at the box-office. And while the former notably became a best-selling cult classic after its release on DVD, one can only believe that the public response to Zodiac will be less vocal, yet equally passionate amongst its supporters.

Despite its critical acclaim, Zodiac was a major flop domestically; breaking even due to the ever-important overseas markets. Certainly several factors played into the film's commercial failure. The almost three-hour running length turned off countless viewers asininely unwilling to sit through Fincher's work, which also limited the amount of times the film could be run. The studio's decision to release a film with potential for mass critical acclaim at the beginning of March, rather than the Fall award season was equally damning to the film's commercial potential. But then again, grosses and popularity does not automatically equate brilliance.

Brilliant however is an appropriate euphemism to describe Zodiac: a jazzy riff of a film that winds through dark alleys, smoky factories, cluttered apartments and decrepit basements with obessive intrigue and innate destruction. With Zodiac, Fincher has created a mature and fully realized project that will probably always remain a forgotten classic when bookended against his other films. Yet, a contemporary classic it is: a film with countless potential to be acclaimed the year's best film a decade from now.

Based on two books by former San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Robert Graysmith, the film documents the hunt for the elusive killer through the eyes of three principal characters: Chronicle cartoonist Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), Chronicle crime reporter Paul Avery (Robert Downey Jr) and San Francisco police officer Dave Toschi (Mark Ruffalo). Through a series of encrypted letters in the aftermath of a slew of gruesome crimes, the mysterious individiual simply known as "The Zodiac" terrorizes The Bay Area for almost a decade. Armed with their own respective interests into the case, the three men each desire to solve the riddled identity of the killer, yet at a cost to their own personal and private lives.

Filmed with neo-noirish sensibilities, Fincher creates a masterly and detailed portrait of San Francisco and California in the late Sixties through the Seventies. Spending eighteen months researching, interviewing and investigating the case, director David Fincher and screenwriter James Vanderbilt created a dialogue-driven film structured in fact, yet coolly enveloped in mythology, intrigue and personal loss.The period flavour is astutely captured by referencing the styles and cinematic approaches used in films ranging from San Fransisco based action films such as Dirty Harry and Bullitt to 70's political thrillers like All The President's Men and The Conversation, as well as the photography of Stephen Shore.

Hauntingly shot in digital cinematography by Harris Savides, Fincher is able to convincingly utilize CGI to create a forgotten analog world of Noirish tropes, spacious offices and amateur sleuthdom. Through this environment, Fincher uses Graysmith's work and the research he and Vanderbilt undertook to establish a thematic aura of obsession. Toschi, Graysmith and Avery each become gripped on discovering the true identity of the killer at the expense of their personal and private lives.

The lust to solve the case takes each man to the edge. Like the Zodiac, they court the media and lose the sanctum of privacy governed by their badge or pen strokes. Their faces become exposed to the media and subsequently their personal downfall hastens. The extroverted Avery retreats into an alcohol induced solitude to ease his demons, only for alcoholism to quickly envelop him.

Toschi can no longer decide whether he wants a principal suspect to be the Zodiac simply to end the case, or to find satisfaction in unravelling the riddle. Toschi's partner William Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) asks for a transfer to prevent himself from becoming too attached to the case. Like Toschi, Graysmith wants his main suspect to be the killer at all costs; in his case to simply to release himself from the marital and professional strife his obsession has brought into his home.

The stressful, tension-filled hours of disappointment and desire are perfectly captured in Fincher's astute pacing, allowing the audience to soak up the atmosphere. Although Fincher's film tends to lean toward the conclusion's of the Zodiac's identity as in Graysmith's book, the director produces a fair and balanced film. His protagonists are not glorified, but rather are viewed as victims of their own self-induced tragedies brought upon by their obsessions. Furthermore, the director grounds his story deep in fact to produce a gritty texture and realistic mood. There is an everyday ordinariness to the proceedings. There are no action sequences, no political critiques or unneccessary and stereotypical glances toward Haight-Ashbury drug culture and hippiedom.

Instead, Fincher avoids cliches and happy endings to create a swath of darkness. When moments of suspense do arrive, they are usually created through situations in which the characters are trapped by their increasingly dangerous personal involvement into the case. This unsettling realm is enhanced by an excellent cast and crew featuring a nervy performance by Jake Gyllenhaal, a distrustful effort by Mark Ruffalo, a somber Anthony Edwards and a marvellously unkempt Robert Downey Jr. If the film does have a weak point in the casting is that the baby-faced Gyllenhaal seems too young to be a divorced father, but his nerdy awkwardness produces a superb counterpoint to Downey's cocky Avery and Ruffalo's unrelenting Toschi.

Filmed with an unnerving spectre of bleakness, Zodiac is an intelligent, meticulously constructed epic thriller. Structured with elegant digital cinematography and gaunt production design, Fincher creates a sphere of destructive compulsions and dearth infatuations. The result is a film not bound by contemporary cliches of the recent past, but rather it is attunted and gratefully indebted to a filmic language of yesteryear: an era when thrillers needed no pre-fabricated solutions, but rather captured the destitute realities of puzzles that forever remain unsolved.

* Zodiac is availble on a bare-bones DVD through Paramount Home Video. An edition featuring the director's cut, director and cast commentary as well as extras regarding the unsolved case is to be released in 2008.

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1968: Barbarella

Barbarella (Vadim, 1968) 1/10

Who seduces an angel? Who strips in space? Who conveys love by hand? Who gives up the pill? Who takes sex into outer space? Who's the girl of the 21st century? Who nearly dies of pleasure? (Promotional Tagline)

In April, 1968 director Stanley Kubrick released 2001: A Space Odyssey: an ingenious blend of celestial special effects and avant-garde narrative constructs. Planned and constructed over a number of years, the film's meticulous visuals are still some of the most remarkable and durable creations ever captured on celluloid. Time has fared well for Kubrick's creation. Six months later, another noted sci-fi film was released. Yet, unlike Kubrick's futuristic vision, time has not been kind to Roger Vadim's 1968 film Barbarella. In fact, time has been rather spiteful.

For all her successive achievements in films such as Sydney Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, Alan J. Pakula's Klute and Hal Ashby's Coming Home, Jane Fonda has never been able to live down her most infamous performance as the title character in her then-husband Roger Vadim's 1968 film Barbarella. When recently asked where her head was when she agreed to play the title role of Jean Claude Forest's adult graphic novel, Fonda responded "I don't know- up my armpit."

Barbarella is arguably Jane Fonda's filmic "Hanoi Jane" moment: an error in retrospect and a blight on her career. And while her outspoken political views and notorious photograph perched upon a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun still bewilderingly anger Vietnam veterans, Barbarella has somehow shockingly become her most famous role.

Directed by French filmmaker Roger Vadim, Barbarella must have been a Sixties teenage nerd's cinematic "wet dream:" a ridiculously campy and trashy softcore sci-fi spoof filled with sexual innuendo, entendres and psychedelic imagery; essentially a sexed-up Star Trek parked outside an intergalatic bordello-cum-opium den. In the film, Jane Fonda stars as Barbarella, a 41st century century agent for the Republic of Earth asked by the President of Earth to track down missing scientist Duran Duran (Milo O' Shea) who is threatening the peaceful balance of the galaxy.

To the tune of the film's catchy psychedelic-lounge soundtrack, Barbarella begins with the film's infamous zero gravity strip. It is here that Vadim outlines the limited perspectives of Barbarella: a tongue-in-cheek film of risque images and bawdy space humour. Yet, the imagery produced in Claude Renoir's cinematography is hardly sexy or humourous. Instead the film is often offensively backward with feminist activist Fonda surprisingly playing a character that is neither strong nor rounded.

Instead Barbarella is a product of a mechanized future in which emotions and interactions are repressed through pills and robotic language. The inhabitants of other worlds are mocked for their savagery. Yet, this "living in a primitive state of neurotic irresponsibility" is inherently sexualized, rather than fashioned through technological sources. Such is the development of the human race that intercourse is performed through narcotics, rather than intimate interaction. But while, Vadim could have suggested this as part of a larger problem of social detachment, instead he milks it for petty laughs.

After being rescued from a group of vile children, Barbarella's saviour, a man wearing a suit that appears to have once been a Wookie, asks her for sexual compensation. Yet, instead of using pills, the man pleasures sexually innocent Barbarella with genuine, "savage" intercourse. Naturally Barbarella enjoys it so much, that throughout the rest of the film, she struggles to keep the flimsy strands of her space lingerie on: exchanging pleasure for good deeds from Pygar (John Philip Law) a blind angel in a bird's nest and undressing in front of a half-brained revolutionary.

Yet, Barbarella's heterosexuality is always maintained, despite threats from Anita Pallenberg's bisexual tyrant The Black Queen. Pallenberg's repeated suggestions to sleep with Barbarella, become like the other running gags in the film, a tiresome bore. Vadim's continual attempts to illustrate the greatness of old-fashioned attitudes backfires in the film's liberalized sexuality. While espousing the rhetoric of "free love," Vadim also positions Barbarella as an ignorant nymphomaniac.

Despite being charged with a position of responsibility, Barbarella lacks intellectual acumen and personal independence. Continually throughout Barbarella, the title character spends more time wooing space creatures and emphasizing the extensiveness of wardrobe than planning a cunning operation to save the universe. Because of this, she repeatedly requires the assistance of men or masculinized women to aid her plight. In fact, the universe is saved not through her skill, but rather through male incompetence. Additionally, the film's metaphoric notion of "the pill" seems to dwell on an idea of a female character abandoning the real "pill" and returning to an atmosphere most suited to her lasvicious cartoon anti-feminism: the home.

These misogynistic attitudes continue in the routine instances of torture performed on the title character. The first involves a group of young children sending their mechanical dolls to attack her; the second has Barbarella placed in birdcage surrounded by hundreds of bloodthirsty Parakeets; and the third is a ridiculous organ-shaped erotic torture device that orgasms its victims to death. Each of these seem to place an emphasis on the persecution of women. Beginning in early childhood by learning maternal skills through dolls, women are restricted in their future social roles. The bird cage can be substituted for the domestic sphere with its minimal movement and lack of ability to roam, while the sexual torture performed by a sadistic male can be equated to notions of a woman's lack of sexual freedom.

Yet, the entire Barbie doll image Barbarella conjures up negates all of these with her perfectly primmed hair, wanton clothing and Valley Girl expressions. In a galaxy supposedly so refined and balanced that weapons have become museum artefacts and social harmony has been established, the images Barbarella represents and the attitudes she espouses belong in the dark ages. One even expects Fonda's character to inform the President of Earth to not "ask me, I'm just a girl." The blend of highbrow and countercultural ambitions the film routinely alludes to also fails through this methodolgy. This infuriating mix of art and trash in Barbarella is evident in its utilization of Dali-esque surroundings and Seurat's "Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jette" along with shag-carpet lined spaceships and fur lingerie.

Produced by Italian mega producer Dino de Laurentiis, the film was a huge critical and commercial failure: essentially destroying the kitschy career of Roger Vadim and cementing Fonda as a late '60's sex symbol. Barbarella is arguably the most garish and vulgar piece of filmmaking produced during the late Sixties. Featuring antiquated models, matte paintings and disingenuous sets, Barbarella breathes a rusty air: a stale oxygen encoded in its haphazard plot and tedious dialogue that seven screenwriters including Forest, Vadim and famed wordsmith Terry Southern worked on.

A wicked synthesis of pornographic gluttony and 50's sci-fi settings, Barbarella fails were Federico Fellini's equally trippy and depraved 1969 film Satyricon succeeded. In Satryicon the grotesque characters are treated with distain and the otherworldly settings are filtered through conceptions of baseness.

Unlike in Fellini's Satryicon, Vadim's camera never allows the film's absurd surrealism to feel authentic. Instead Barbarella is trapped in a sleazy farcical homage that is retrograde in its approach and loose with its intentions. Buried under its layers of misogynistic and crass humour is a thematic anti-modernist message that slips out of focus.

Earlier in his career, Vadim was noted for extracting sexually intruiging performances from a slew of internationally renowed leading ladies. In the late '50's he brought Brigitte Bardot to international prominence in ...And God Created Woman and later Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau and Fonda. Yet, one cannot help think that Bardot would have been far better suited to the trashy, sex-drenched atmosphere Vadim's paean to equally rickety '50's B movies.

Under its present formula, Bardot's voluptuous figure could have easily filled out the pencil thin singular dimensons of a character Fonda appears reluctant and unable to play. Instead Fonda meanders with wooden expressions in response to such servile material. Such is the nature of Vadim's sex dirge that the cool swagger David Hemmings stood for in Antonioni's Blow-Up vanishes in his portrayal of a clumsy, leather and chain clad revolutionary.

Similarly, the menacing vampiric chic of Keith Richards' ex-Anita Pallenberg evaporates in an instant through the film's sprawling lack of focus. Even famed French mime Marcel Marceau, in a rare speaking role, becomes redunant as the faunish Professor Ping: a character representative of the film's lack of depth and range.

And it is this lack of intellectual, artistic or emotional sense that ultimately destroys Barbarella. Rather than create a powerful, countercultural woman able to relate the feminist rhetoric of the Sixties into the 41st century, director Roger Vadim creates an exploitative, cheap sexpot. Although adapted from Jean-Claude Forest's adult graphic novels, one wonders why Vadim didn't infuse notions of 20th century female social struggles and empowerment into the picture instead of sexually and intellectually regressive concepts of womenhood. An ugly and tasteless embarassment that surely must have offended second-wave feminists, it is easy to see why Jane Fonda has repeatedly attempted to distance herself from the project ever since.

But then again what were '60's audiences supposed to expect? After all she's only a girl.

* Barbarella is available through Paramount Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

2006: Babel

Babel (2006, Iñarritu) 7/10

In his famous publication The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968, film critic Andrew Sarris remarked that the career of legendary Hollywood director William Wyler was "inflating without expanding." Building his name via a series of sophisticated melodramas, Wyler's trademark refinement was abruptly replaced by the swollen pomposity of films such as Ben Hur. In 2006, one could utilize Sarris' summarization of Wyler's career to describe the present stagnation of gifted Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Iñárritu's latest film, the Academy Award-nominated Babel is a globalized meditation on human nature, interconnected relationships and cross-border miscommunication. Telling four intertwined stories, Babel is a film as consciously self-important in contemporary cinema as Wyler's Ben Hur was over four decades prior.

The first story centers on two young adolescents in rural Morocco who are given a rifle by the father to ward off jackals threatening his livestock. Desperate to ascertain the weapon's range, the boys fire upon a passing tourbus in the valley below. Beginning as schoolboy naivety and carelessnes, the boys' gunplay turns adolescent stupidity into a fiery international conflict. Amongst the group of European and American tourists in the bus are feuding couple Richard (Brad Pitt) and Susan (Cate Blanchett), whose marriage is crumbling due to Susan's bouts with depression.

Back in the United States, the couple's children are being watched over by Amelia (Adriana Barraza): a Mexican illegal immigrant who wishes to return to her homeland to see her son's wedding. The effects of a tragic accident half the world away squander these hopes: resulting in Amelia taking action into her own hands by taking her employers' young children alongside her nephew (Gael Garcia Bernal) into Mexico.

The film's final story involves a deaf-mute Japanese schoolgirl named Cheiko (Rinko Kikuchi). At a loss after her mother's suicide, Cheiko is unable to vent her frustration to the world and her emotionally incompetent father. Thus, she begins to resort to crude tactics such as exposing herself to her male peers and romantic infatuations in order to try and obtain the love and affection she desperately yearns for.

The overall thematic approach to Babel can be summarized in a powerful scene in which Barraza's Amelia scours the Mojave desert searching for help. Amongst the sand and brush, she is a mere speck in a physically imposing world in which little details can effectively alter many lives. One cannot discount Iñárritu's ambition in creating Babel: a film aiming to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the modern world and the individual acts of selfishness that corrupt it. Yet, in its illusory grandeur, Babel loses its potency in an overlong pastiche of aesthetic ideas and contextual themes.

At the core of these problems is the film's intertwined episodic narrative structure. Operating with differing time and spatial constructs, Babel overcomplicates itself. By placing the scenes involving Pitt and Blanchett in a scattered construction, Iñárritu aims to provide an everlasting emotional power to the film's finale. Yet this power is betrayed by the unnecessary complexity of the film's editing and the weakness of the film's connected parables.

As independent narratives the four stories in the film work quite nicely in documenting ideas of familial and social betrayal, pain and destruction. But linked together in a series of frayed connections, much of this emotional velocity quickly dissipates. The ties binding the Japanese sequence- easily the film's most visually interesting and emotive piece-feel false, contrived and hurried. Similarly, the reasons behind the characters pain appear more self-inflicted than part of a grand social malaise. Each of the characters makes a decision in the film, which leads to their anguish: it is their responses to this anguish, which are Babel's greatest asset.

In arguably the best performance in a supporting role in 2006, Rinko Kikuchi creates a character filled with the thematic qualities of misinterpretation and failed communication Iñárittu wants to impress upon his audience. But the emotional seriousness of Babel is never captured with as much delicacy as in this small story in Tokyo. Instead, the strictness of the emotion forced upon the audience, while nowhere near as clumsy and over-the-top as in Paul Haggis' Crash, still feels rigid despite some excellent performances by Kikuchi and Cate Blanchett in particular.

The film's key thematic concepts are easily noticeable. Miscommunication causes American officials to believe the two Moroccan boys and their father are terrorists and that Amelia is a kidnapper; while on a familial level Cheiko is unable to confer her feelings to her father; while Richard and Susan struggle to converse with one another. Yet, from these themes we see the devastation, anguish and pain. Thus Iñárritu's thesis is simplistic in that the failure to connect breeds suffering and isolation: exemplified in Cheiko's alienation from others and the association with foreignness felt by Richard in a rural Moroccan village. Yet the fulfillment of Iñárritu's statement could be more solidified through an alternative approach.

In attempting to create such as an artistic statement, Iñárittu's film barrages its objectives in a manner that is visually stunning, but creatively awry. Certainly, there are possibilities within the film's narrative structure to tell the story as it is, but the outline and direction employed in Babel sabotages much of the film's final weight; inflating a picture, whose intentions require it to be more grounded and less repetitous. One could even argue the picture oversteps its limits by at least twenty minutes to half an hour.

Beginning with his 2000 debut Amores Perros, Iñárritu has fashioned a visually distinctive filmography exploring themes of human interaction and miscommunication in his subsequent projects: 2003's 21 Grams, 2006's Babel and a short film for the 2002 September 11th omnibus 11'09'01. Working alongside writing partner Guillermo Arriaga, Iñárritu has emerged as one of world cinema's brightest prospects: enticing some of cinema's biggest contemporary talents including Sean Penn, Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael Garcia Bernal to appear in his films.

But while filming his latest film Babel, the relationship between Iñárritu and Arriaga disintegrated over artistic ownership of their Academy Award nominated globetrotting triptych: fracturing the possibilities for future films. Yet, one of the critical rebukes to Iñárritu and Arriaga's métier has been the lack of contextual progression in their collaborations. Despite being one of world cinema's most visually innovative artists, Iñárritu has remained fixated in an invariable unchanging narrative and thematic structural framework.

Certainly this type of creative restraint is not uncommon among contemporary cinema's auteurs: M. Night Shyamalan for instance has operated within a constant sub-Hitchcockian framework. Yet, what separates an accomplished director from an influential artist is the ability to expand and develop one's craft and art. In the 1970's Martin Scorsese was renowed for his stylish update of the gangster genre. Desperate to expand his repetoire, Scorsese tackled other areas such as an ill-fated Noirish musical ( New York, New York), surrealist comedy (After Hours) and a 19th century literary adaptation (Age Of Innocence). While Scorsese's experiments were not always successful, they enabled the American director to cultivate his cinematic tastes and abilities.

Filled with promise, Babel demonstrates that Alejandro González Iñárritu is arguably one of the most visually assured directors on the planet. Yet, in order to remain fresh, Iñárritu needs to attempt to step out of his aesthetic comfort zone and engage in riskier, small-scale projects. British directors Michael Winterbottom and Danny Boyle have used the freedom to experiment within low-budget projects to cultivate their aesthetic tastes: an approach to filmmaking which offers opportunities to expand one's creative cache, rather than inflate it.

*Babel is available on Paramount Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1952: The Greatest Show On Earth

The Greatest Show On Earth (DeMille, 1952) 3/10

"This is not the history of the circus...We will tell the story of the circus and its people in relation to all other people" (Cecil B. DeMille)

The traditional circus is a dying art form. With its roots in ancient Rome, the circus evolved into its archetypal format in the late 18th century in imperial Britain. With the British Empire expanding its reach across the globe, alluring foreign goods and art forms were imported into Northern Europe from central Asia and Africa. Along with silks and spices, there also arrived wild animals such as elephants and lions, as well as human performers such as acrobats. Whereas previously these types of acts and animals would be restricted to royal courts and menageries, by the late 19th century the circus offered these rarely seen specimens to a larger audience.

In the immediate postwar era, the circus still held a brand of exoticism and showmanship that ordinary people would rarely be able to afford to experience otherwise. In the days before relatively affordable long-distance travel, nature channels or publicized animal and human rights groups, the circus was a travelling medium that provided access to beasts and performers to thousands in small and mid-sized communities, who were unable to see such things outside of the local Bijou, or perhaps a local zoo. In the mid-80's, the circus became intellectualized through the highbrow performance art of Quebecois group Cirque de Soleil and thus much of its vaudevillian humour and humiliated animal spectacles disappeared along with the miles of sawdust and carnival atmosphere.

Yet, prior to the early Sixties, film still had a great affinity for the circus. In 1941 alone there were three circus films: Disney's animated classic Dumbo, the noirish Humphrey Bogart vehicle Wagons Roll At Night and Road Show. In 1928, Charlie Chaplin's second feature The Circus was released, which evidently inspired Federico Fellini's 1954 film La Strada. Fellini would also direct another circus-based film The Clowns, while fellow European director Ingmar Bergman would direct 1953's Sawdust and Tinsel. In 1932 Tod Browning focused on Freaks and in 1936, the Marx Brothers were At The Circus. Both Elia Kazan in 1953 and Carol Reed in 1956 directed films about acrobats: former acrobat Burt Lancaster flew high in Carol Reed's Trapeze, while Frederic March dangled as the Man on a Tightrope. Even into the 1960's, the circus was still popular in film as noted by the success of 1962's Billy Rose's Jumbo and 1964's Circus World .

Yet, perhaps the most bombastic and notorious of all circus films is Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 Academy Award winning film The Greatest Show On Earth. Alongside 1930's Cimmaron and 1956's Around The World in 80 Days , The Greatest Show On Earth is annually judged by critics as one of the most undeserving Best Picture winners of all time. Although their assertion is justified, it should be noted that 1952 was not exactly a watershed year in Hollywood. Films such as John Ford's homage to Ireland The Quiet Man, George Cukor's Hepburn-Tracy film Pat and Mike, Vincent Minnelli's The Bad and The Beautiful and Fred Zinneman's liberal western High Noon are some of the more notable exceptions to a year, which was arguably overshadowed by better fare from overseas such as Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru, Anthony Asquith's adaptation of The Importance Of Being Earnest, Rene Clement's Forbidden Games, Vittorio de Sica's Umberto D and Orson Welles' Othello.

Contemporary scholarly debates on The Greatest Show On Earth's dubious acquisition of 1952's Best Picture award tend to primarily focus on DeMille's legacy in Hollywood as the creator and distributor of tawdry, oversized and racist films such as Cleopatra, Union Pacific and The Cheat. And therefore like John Wayne in True Grit, DeMille was bestowed the award based on his lifetime achievements in Hollywood, rather than for the actual quality of his 1952 effort. Yet, this angle of the debate seems to neglect two important alternative components. First, America was still gripped by McCarthyism and thus The Greatest Show On Earth with its conservative messages and emphasis on family entertainment was a much safer choice than the rabble-rousing anti-McCarthyist High Noon or the feminist tendencies of Pat and Mike. Furthermore, the Academy has generally been a conservative organization by nature, which champions its longest-serving allies. Thus, it would hardly make sense for the Academy to bestow an award on Vincent Minnelli for his acidic take on Hollywood in The Bad and The Beautiful when The Greatest Show On Earth characterized all the salient details of bloated spectacle the Academy prefers.

The film stars Betty Hutton as Holly, a trapeze artist whose position is threatened by the acquisition of the erratic and reckless The Great Sebastian (Cornel Wilde). Noted for his playboy lifestyle and willingness to take unnecessary risks, Sebastian is hired by circus manager Brad Braden (Charlton Heston) as a method to prop up the circus' dwindling audiences. Desperate for the stoic Brad's affection, Holly begins to take increasing risks in the air which ironically flutter the heart of the lusty Sebastian, rather than Brad; while in the film's other romantic triangle "Elephant Girl" Angel (Gloria Grahame) also attempts to endear herself to Brad, but is stalked by her co-worker Klaus (Lyle Bettiger) a sadistic elephant trainer. The film also stars James Stewart as Buttons, a mysterious clown who refuses to take off his make-up, while tough-guy Lawrence Tierney, DeMille mainstay Henry Wilkcoxon and an endless parade of real-life clowns such as Emmett Kellly also star in underwritten roles which are haphazardly strewn throughout the film's narrative.

In 1952, DeMille was virtually untouchable with critics and audiences. His films raked in millions at the box-office and won acclaim from critics of the period. With the rise of professional film criticism in France in the 1950's, DeMille's films have since lost their lustre as audience tastes and retrospective responses have changed. Today, audiences are more likely to be endeared to the caustic brutality of Billy Wilder, whose films such as Sunset Boulevard and Ace In The Hole were deemed vulgar and tasteless at the time. Thus, it is perhaps with bitter irony that the title for DeMille's picture was rumoured to have been given to him by a befuddled Billy Wilder, whose tepid response to viewing the film on Paramount's lot was to cautiously chime "You certainly have created The Greatest Show On Earth."

It is also interesting to note that prior to DeMille's involvement, another figure with a taste for epic spectacle, Gone With The Wind producer David O. Selznick was desperate to produce a project about the circus. Such was DeMille's stature in Hollywood at the time, The Greatest Show On Earth became the project that the stars of the day wanted to work on in 1952. In an attempt to ward off prospective rivals such as Marlene Dietrich and Hedy Lamarr, Betty Hutton was rumoured to have sent DeMille a flower arrangment worth a $1000 dollars; James Stewart, at the height of his critical and commercial popularity, contacted DeMille immediately to plead for the film's most psychologically complex role of Buttons, despite the fact it is one of the film's smaller roles. Real-life acraphobe Cornel Wilde put his fears aside in order to play the high flying Sebastian, while a virtually unknown Charlton Heston was made a star overnight.

Yet for all its star power and visual pomp and pagentry, the film is awfully hollow. Of its 154 minute running time, nearly two-thirds is dedicated to documentary-style circus footage augmenting the film's rickety narrative. The thin nature of this interior scaffolding is too frail to bolster the film's lavish tastes and brash drapery. In relation to the film's lack of psychological and intellectual depth, it should come to no surprise that DeMille advocated for the creation of a screenplay that could be comprehended and understood by his eight year old grandson. Furthermore, DeMille's expensive acquistion of the rights to use the name and imagery associated with the medium's most famous circus- Ringling Bros.- and his emphasis on showing circus performances through a static lens evokes the idea that perhaps DeMille's intention was simply to bring the circus to the masses: to those people for whom the travelling circus never visited. Thus, for the price of admission, audiences were obtaining access to both an abridged love story and a full circus perfomance.

DeMille's idea of exposing the backstage realities of an art form was not something new in Hollywood; after all Billy Wilder and Joseph Mankiewicz had respectively both looked at the behind closed doors antics of Hollywood and the theatre two years prior in Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve. What is notable about DeMille's film, however is that The Greatest Show On Earth represents a long-standing belief in Hollywood that celebrity and visual spectacle can compensate for a convoluted narrative. The "to-end-all" genre films of the early Sixties such as How The West Was Won and It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World are classic Hollywood examples, while 2005 Best Picture Winner Crash is a contemporary example.

The concepts most intriguing to DeMille are those embodying authority, gender and power. As Brad Braden, Charlton Heston with his stern mannerism and sawdust filled heart fulfills his role as a masculine authority figure. Like Moses (ironically also portrayed by Heston) in The Ten Commandments Brad refuses to let romance or personal relationships stand in the way of his purpose. His quest is simply to keep the circus in the black and to ensure the safety and quality of his performers. He thus represents the type of man, DeMille would have been accustomed to in his youth: a character ripped out of a Boys Own magazine who refuses to let others sway him from his chosen objectives. Thus, if for Howard Hawks masculinity is categorized by your profession, for DeMille genuine masculinity correlates to your ability to fuflill your gender role within your profession through a socially conservative approach to life.

And thus while James Stewart's Buttons hides his masculinity behind his painted visage, Klaus represents a violent masculinity and Cornel Wilde displays an impression of hyper-masculinity through his endeavours of courage and the flesh, they each do not represent the essence of masculinity that Brad evokes in his apparent coldness. Each are too irresponsible in their own way (Buttons with his past actions; Sebastian and Klaus with their present) to delienate the type of assured authority Brad addresses, nor do they bear any genuine responsibility for their actions until the film's denouement.

As in other DeMille pictures, women are portrayed as either lusty tempresses or pervayers of morality. Yet, The Greatest Show On Earth in accordance with other aspects of 1950's popular culture displays mixed messages about the role of women in society. On the one hand, the female performers are lauded for their individual craft and skill, yet conversely they are shown as requiring a man and a steady relationship to fulfill their femininity. When the Great Sebastian arrives Holly is downgraded from the center ring, yet rather than voluntarily giving up her position, she instead fights for her right to compete alongside Sebastian. Notably, her reasons for fighting back are not for the benefit of her art, but rather to force Brad into a jealous fit, which will result in their marriage. Similarly, Gloria Grahame's "Elephant Girl" Angel resists the overtures of her masochistic boss Klaus for Brad's love; but like the annoying Holly, her means are to advance a romantic relationship.

Heston's evocation of masculinity is also found in his "never-quit" spirit. Throughout the film, he refuses to acquiesce to the dilemmas which threaten the circus such as dwindling profits, Klaus' sadistic methods, a near-mortal injury to Sebastian or a costly train derailment. DeMille's emphasis on the mechanics of the circus through footage showing the construction of the big top and the loading of equipment and animals onto trains relates to this idea of strict quasi-militaristic regimentation that Brad earnestly strives for. The utilization of military language and overtones in his voiceover shows the circus as a contemporary army of capitalism: expressing the individuality of performance, educating Americans about other cultures and providing an antithesis to the highbrow gymnastics finessed by the Moscow Circus, which ironically would later be popularized in North America by Cirque de Soleil.

Unlike in his superior remake of The Ten Commandments four years later, DeMille's voiceover seems more condescending than authoritative: a relic from an era of Victorian ideals of power, showmanship and regality. Furthermore, the film's performances are equally patronizing. The German-born Klaus is overtly related to Fascism in his attire and mannerisms; Gloria Grahame is a boorish Big Top Ann Landers; Cornel Wilde's Great Sebastian is a nascent French ham; Charlton Heston's Brad has about as much personality and warmth as an ice cube; Betty Hutton's Holly is a loud and acrimonious flirt; Lawrence Tierney's character is completely unneccessary; James Stewart's Buttons is drenched in overt mystery and is not funny, while the film's best and funniest character, the famous clown Emmett Kelly is completely wasted by DeMille's excessive nature.

For all its faults, the potential for success is engrained into The Greatest Show On Earth. With its fugitive on the run sub-plot and its romantic love triangles, the material is there. The sympathetic light shone on James Stewart's Buttons and his past is an intriguing angle that is never exploited for maximum impact. But rather than exploit the material or his thematic approaches, DeMille concentrates on the vividness of the circus. Drowning within this almost three hour swollen mammoth is a skinny eighty minute melodrama that is not particularly memorable or thrilling: the lethargic presentation and monotonous delivery by Bob Carson's Ringmaster is quite possibly the best evidence for this argument. Additionally one has to wonder whether DeMille intended the trainwreck to be a metaphor for the entire film itself.

A spectacular failure.

* The Greatest Show On Earth is available through Paramount Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1951: Ace in the Hole

Ace in the Hole (Wilder, 1951) 10/10


“Bad news sells best. ‘Cause good news is no news” (Charles “Chuck” Tatum)

"Fuck them all! It is the best picture I ever made" (Billy Wilder)

In 2003, New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was forced to resign from his esteemed American employer after he was caught fabricating evidence about the Beltway sniper shootings. Blair’s breach of journalistic principle smeared the New York Times’ reputation for accuracy: briefly inducing a public debate about media practices and the distortion of the truth for profit. Ironically the same publication fifty years earlier denounced Viennese director Billy Wilder for the creation of what Times film critic Bosley Crowther called a “preposterous” character: an immoral and opportunistic journalist who misleads the nation with his reporting of a mining accident in rural New Mexico.

In a brilliantly savage and astringent lead performance, Kirk Douglas stars as Charles “Chuck” Tatum, an ace reporter whose intoxicating behaviour has led to his dismissal from every major news publication from New York to Chicago. Arriving in a broken down convertible in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Tatum offers his services to editor Jacob Q. Boot (Porter Hall) for a fifth of his New York salary. Boot agrees on the condition that the openly alcoholic and reckless Tatum maintains his sobriety and adheres to the paper's chief policy: ”Tell The Truth.”

Believing in his own hype, Tatum expects his newly acquired Alburquerque position to last no more than a few weeks; before being once more snapped up by a large Eastern paper. One year later however, the increasingly agitated Tatum is still attached to his desk in a sweaty New Mexico office. Desperate for his break, Tatum begrudingly accepts his latest assignment: a report on an annual rattlesnake hunt in the baking desert. Along the way, he and the paper’s junior photographer Herbie (Bob Arthur) stop at a local gas station were the windswept monotony of the summer is broken by a wailing police siren heading toward a Native American cliff dwelling.

Following the police car, Tatum learns that the gas station’s propertier Leo Minosa (Richard Benedict) is trapped in a collapsed cave in a failed attempt to steal some burial pots. Climbing into the sacred cave in order to interview and photograph the local entrepeneur, Tatum sees that Leo’s legs are trapped under a mass of debris: rendering his escape from the mountain impossible without a rescue squad. Sensing his good fortune, Tatum builds a story around a Native American curse, a trapped war hero and Lorraine (Jan Sterling) his grieving wife.

According to the engineers who arrived on the scene however, the removal of Leo from the crevice is little more than a sixteen hour operation involving the butressing of the failing walls. Dismayed at this fact and dreaming of glory and financial gain, Tatum works in tandem with a corrupt sherriff (Ray Teal) and a servile former truck driver-turned-contractor to use an alternate drilling method, which will take days rather than hours to complete. Luckily, for Tatum, Leo’s cynical Baltimore-born wife equally wants her husband to remain trapped in the cave. Bored and trapped in their diminutive outpost, Lorraine tells Tatum of her hunger to head East and her desire to quench her sexual thirst for him.

Slightly intrigued by her sexual advances, Tatum quickly realizes that Lorraine’s planned desertion of Leo will hurt the appeal of his articles. With his stories producing a media frenzy, the remote outpost is quickly beseiged by tourists who fill the coffers of Leo and his parents small store and subsequently fund Lorraine’s temporary loyalty to her husband. Yet, as more vacationers enter the Minosa property, the quiet and somber desolation is replaced with vivaciousness. Sightseers begin paying a fee to visit the area, while the S&M Entertainment Company erects a carnival and a train service shuttles in more visitors; as the area turns into a media circus driven by profit and greed, rather than the desire to save a dying man.

Ace In The Hole is arguably the most caustic and cynical film ever to come out of the studio system. Wilder took his idea from a real life cave-in, which Douglas mentions in the film. In 1925, cave explorer Floyd Collins was trapped in a Kentucky mine for eighteen days. Before Collins’ death- almost three weeks after his intial entry into the mine- his story was told by a local reporter, who eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for his riveting accounts. Collins’ fateful foray was even fictionalized into a best-selling novel “The Cave” by “All The Kings Men” author Robert Penn Warren. Yet, as writer, producer and director, Wilder- unlike other Hollywood producers- was less interested in the human interest story, but the possibilities of the explotation of a human interest story. Fresh off his acclaimed Sunset Boulevard, Wilder was ready to continue with his interest in the more sadistic and immoral elements of human nature: greed, lust, betrayal and murder.

But in an era when critics held great sway and audiences expected even the most sinister of protagonists to acquire a degree of moral growth, Ace in the Hole was a bitter pill to swallow. Critics of the period derided Wilder’s treatment of their profession; while audiences were unable to accept the personal motives of one of cinema’s most repellant protagonists in Douglas’ Charles Tatum, nor the masses jocund lust for such a depressing story of turning tragedy into entertainment. Yet in an era when the private destructive streaks of fallen pop stars and minor celebrities become tabloid fodder and gossip channel filler, one can see that Wilder’s film was merely not in bad taste as his critics concluded, but simply far ahead of its time.

Flawlessly acted and directed, Ace in the Hole is a scathing, yet brutally honest delight: a gritty alternative to present-day Hollywood in which yesteryear's forum of images and ideas has now been replaced by a visually and contextually vacuous contingent of moribund plots and critical dormancy . Lauded at the Venice Film Festival and popular throughout Europe, the picture was Wilder’s first critical and commercial flop, which reduced his standing at Paramount as the film lost money despite a name change (Big Carnival) and radical attempts to briefly release the film on television. Whether, the screen was silver or small, audiences turned away in numbers: shunning Kirk Douglas’ star power and Wilder’s acidic vision.

Contrary to popular belief, Wilder’s sardonic approach to life was not a rarity in 1951. In the 1940’s Preston Sturges had created a bitter portfolio of films such as Sullivan’s Travels and Unfaithfully Yours; Orson Welles had directed two particularly abrasive films in 1942’s The Magnificent Ambersons and 1948’s The Lady From Shanghai, while Welles himself had appeared as the charming, yet immoral Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s 1949 film The Third Man. Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux and Hitchcock’s Rope both featured sinister characters comparable to Welles’ Lime. In Mark Robson's 1949 film Champion Kirk Douglas played a brutal pugalist, the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1950 was won by Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s biting All About Eve and even Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ In the Rain is a masterpiece of alkaline perceptions and bittersweet sentiments.

And of course in 1950, Wilder himself had written and directed Sunset Boulevard: a film which bears striking similarities to Ace in the Hole. Both films featuring failed writers down on their luck who arrive at their respective unlikely destinations via a malfunctioning convertible. Each character attempts to use this improbable situation to get their careers back on track. For Gillis’ his job re-writing Norma Desmond’s infantile script is meant to provide him with the resources to pay off his creditors and perhaps through his job moonlighting at Paramount on a screenplay, he can revive his career. For Tatum, his job in Albuquerque is simply an attempt to revive his reputation and start anew back East.

However for both immoral protagonists, they are unable to escape this situation. Each becomes tied down to the financial and material gains extracted from their jobs, as well as the unwanted guilt which comes with it. Joe Gillis realizes he has a “long term contract, with no options” as Norma’s ghostwriter-cum-gigolo who is distraught by his attempts to leave her side; Tatum knows that his career rests on Leo’s fate, which produces sparse and pithy outbursts of emotional responsibility. Additionally, both mortally expire at the hands of the unwanted women who they have used for financial gain in return for sexual favours.

More so than Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole also delves into the cult of celebrity and the perversity of human entertainment. Thanks to Tatum’s “way with words,” a small community springs up in the Mojave wasteland around the Minosa family trading post. On their way to a lakeside cottage, the grounds' first batch of visitors inform Tatum and Lorraine that they are simply passing through and wish to visit the cliffs for thirty minutes since the experience will be educational for their small children. Yet almost a week later, the family are still there: collecting Indian souvenirs, riding the Ferris Wheel and trying to promote the father’s insurance company.

The community spirit fostered in this event is as suitabilyconnected to the concept of celebrity as Tatum’s desire to maintain Leo’s struggle. By embarking on a journey to Escadero, the participants can claim their kinship with Leo, while failing to understand or appreciate his struggle. At the film’s finale, when travellers begin to cry their false tears represent a loss of the entertainment associated with this circus, rather than any pity for Leo. His plight is the catalyst for their journey, but not their reason for remaining longer than half an hour in an infertile area

It is in this barren state, that codes of morality disintegrate. Trapped and alone, Leo worries for “grieving” wife Lorraine. Yet, Lorraine is unmoved by Leo’s situation and only remains at her in-laws home in order to reap the financial benefits of the media circus and woo Tatum, as he spends boozy hours bartering contracts for his exclusive story. In Lorraine’s restaurant, the corrupt local sheriff brokers a partnership with Tatum for favourable sentiments in his articles: informing Tatum that the region’s only contractor owes his position to the sheriff’s baseless tactics. Meanwhile, as the media-hungry crowds outside begin to swell, Leo’s Hispanic parents and the local Native American tribe hold vigils and ceremonies for Leo. These attempts of goodness however are chastized by the racist and inept officers, as well as Lorraine who objects to Tatum’s insistence of going to a vigil/photo-op as “kneeling bags my nylons.” Thus, Wilder’s film becomes a critique of Western morality: prophetically showing a culture which kneels at the altar of celebrity and feeds off the rotting carcass of the human spirit for little more than fifteen minutes of fame.

One of the best American films from the 1950's

* Ace in the Hole is currently unavailable on DVD. Although Criterion is rumoured to be releasing a R1 edition in late 2007.

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque

1950: Sunset Boulevard

Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, 1950) 10/10

Before Billy Wilder’s 1950 masterpiece Sunset Boulevard there had been very few “backstage” critiques of Hollywood and film culture. William Wellman’s 1937 A Star is Born along with Buster Keaton’s 1928 slapstick comedy The Cameraman are some of the more acknowledged pieces prior to this period, which utilized Hollywood as its backdrop. Yet, unlike the latter two films, Sunset Boulevard represented a more scathing and fastidious position toward Hollywood, particularly in the divide between the Old Hollywood of the silent era and the New Hollywood of the sound era. The effect of Wilder’s film was clearly evident in the immediate creation of other “Hollywood backstage” films such as :Vincente Minelli’s 1952 film The Bad and the Beautiful; Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1954 film The Barefoot Contessa; Robert Aldrich’s 1955 picture The Big Knife; George Cukor’s 1954 remake of A Star is Born and Stanley Donen-Gene Kelly’s 1952 musical Singin’ in the Rain, which further ridiculed Hollywood’s silent era in a less spiteful manner.

Sunset Boulevard is the fullest and most dynamic example of Billy Wilder’s career filled acidic cruelty and satirical spite. Along with John Huston, Wilder was a director chided by influential American critic Andrew Sarris for his overarching cynicism. Yet, an examination of Sarris influential and exceptional American “auteur bible” The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968. demonstrates his distaste for directors whose work holds a defeatist or pessimistic outlook. In his classification of “who is and is not an auteur”, Sarris unconsciously endorses a cinematic language that requires and hones a redeeming factor in which the central characters can be cleansed of their sins and start anew. Such characteristics are prevalent in the work of Fritz Lang, which despite his distrustful attitude toward authority, always maintains a Christian element of salvation and repentance.[1]

Sunset Boulevard however is a rare Production Code era film that has no fuzzy ending or elements of remorse amongst its principal characters. Rather it is an astringent and downbeat critique of the antithetical forces of Old and New Hollywood. In the process, no-one is spared any mercy, whether they are lowly opportunist Joe Gillis (William Holden) or eminent director Cecil B. DeMille (playing himself). In the process, Wilder creates a film that embraces a multi-genre approach: the satiric and slapstick forms of comedy; psychological and monster horror characteristics; melodramatic dramas; and the mad criminals of crime capers. Minus the western and the musical, the dominant genres of the silent period are all here, while the World War II era progeny of Film Noir is added in the utilization of its themes, concepts and lighting.

The film begins with the camera peeling back from the gutter: a helpful element of foreshadowing representative of the film’s principal characters. The first is Joe Gillis (William Holden): a B-movie screenwriter from Ohio who is being hunted by the Repo Men for back payments on his sporty convertible. The second is Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson): a legend of the silent screen desperate to return to the spotlight and fulfill the wishes of “millions” who demand her return to the silver screen. The third is Max (Erich von Stroheim), Norma’s sad and conniving butler with a dark past. Each is at a low in their careers: stuck in a metaphorical gutter, which they hope by combining their forces with others, they can aid the resurrection of their individual careers.

After a shot reminiscent of a Warner Brothers gangster flick with an array of police cars hurdling down Sunset Blvd, we are introduced to Joe Gillis: drowned and floating in the pool of an enormous Hollywood mansion built by one of those “crazy people in the crazy twenties.”
The “crazy” individual in question is Norma Desmond, who first meets Joe in his flight from the Repo Men. A blown tire has fatefully driven him onto her estate. She thinks he is a mortician for her pet monkey; he recognizes her as a forgotten silent film star.

In their sparring chit-chat, Desmond hears that Gillis is a screenwriter and would like his assistance in assembling her lifelong work: a film about Salome, the daughter of Herod Philip who received John the Baptist’s head on a plate. Naturally, Desmond plans to star as Salome, despite being more than thirty years too old for the part, and hopes to obtain Cecil B. DeMille as director. In his head, Gillis concocts a plan to swindle Desmond out of money in order to pay off his debts and return to Ohio.

Yet, unbeknownst to Gillis, he is the one who is being used. As Max will reveal later in the film, Norma Desmond uses men for her own sexual gratification. Her materialism and vanity is apparent in the grandiose opulence of her home and her line of Norma Desmond photographs. Significantly, the only films shown at her home are Norma Desmond silent pictures. She is a figure distinctly from the silent era. Her actions and movements are wildly over-the-top in stark contrast to Joe Gillis’ New Hollywood subtleness. With its wheezing organ and cavernous walls the home is reminiscent of a Universal Horror film: a fact made even more prescient in Norma Desmond’s claw-like fingers and expressive make-up. Her home has become her own world: a representation of herself, which has become a safe-zone from a period that has abandoned her. Here, Chaplin is replicated, Valentino is reminisced and “The Waxworks” featuring silent stars such as Buster Keaton and Hal Warner play cards: it has become a shrine to the silent era and an abode for the dead and the forgotten.

When Gillis steps into this world, he turns it upside down. His virility and youthful energy are increasingly utilized less for screenwriting and more as a plaything for Norma. The effect is typified in a New Years celebration in which despite a sophisticated dinner and expensive orchestra, the only guests are Gillis and Norma Desmond. Yet, Wilder’s cruelty is often in the latter half of the film replaced by sympathy. Despite her narcissistic demeanour, Norma can be at times warm and appealing toward Joe Gillis. She buys him gifts, pays his bills and cultures him. Materially she offers Joe anything he wants, yet she cannot offer him the type of relationship he desires. The source of Norma’s fan letters is revealed in Max’s intricate plot to continue her stardom and prevent her from further suicidal “bouts of melancholy”: a blow made even more crushing when Norma is invited back to Paramount Studios not to make Salome with DeMille as she believes, but rather to borrow her antique car for an upcoming period piece. Even DeMille is not spared in this heart-breaking scene in which for fifteen minutes Norma regains her stardom, as he equally appears foolish and out of touch with the modern era.

Wilder does provide Gillis with an outlet to break free from Norma in the form of a script writing job with Betty Schaefer (Nancy Olson). Yet, Gillis’ adulterous adventure with Betty turns out to be ruinous. It is also significantly one of the rare moments when the characters do exert moments of guilt and regret; yet it is only as a minute response to their own selfish greed. Ideas of fate and chance are abound in Sunset Boulevard. And its fate that Holden’s character reluctantly accepts not as a Hollywood scriptwriter, but as Norma Desmond’s solitary member of what “On Sunset Boulevard” author Ed Sikov refers to on the Paramount DVD commentary as ‘a male harem: a bordello of one.’

Sex was a taboo subject in 1950, yet Sunset Boulevard is dripping with ideas of sex throughout its 110 minute running time. The theme of power is a crucial element to Sunset Boulevard. Here power is manifested into the ability to control one’s sexuality. In the case of Joe Gillis he is unable to do so and thus is as much an emasculated servant as Max, without the uniform. Norma’s forceful clout as a star and material power allow her to obtain anything she wants, including Joe Gillis. After abandoning Norma’s genuine romantic advances at the New Years Party, he clearly ends his chances at having a relationship built on love and cooperation. His return after Norma’s suicide demonstrates his own capitulation. Although guilt holds some sway in his decision, Gillis’ lust for money draws him back to Norma Desmond, which results in Gillis prostituting himself even further.

Wilder gives the film an additional element of spite in his utilization of realistic locations such as Paramount Studios, figures and semi-autobiographical elements, most notably in the tense relationship between von Stroheim and Swanson, which was a touchy subject in itself considering their failed project Queen Kelly (the silent film shown in the picture at the suggestion of von Stroheim) effectively ended von Stroheim's career behind the camera.
Another director may have not tried to push his actors to the edge in a story with such personal undertones, yet Wilder’s ability to do so results in a subservient tension between the pair throughout the film. Yet, this tension not only represents the conflict between von Stroheim and Swanson, but also the conflict between the characters of the decayed and exaggerated mannerisms of Old Hollywood and the ungrateful, yet realistic tones of New Hollywood. The end-product is some of the most dynamic performances and cinema ever put to celluloid.

[1] See Fury or Metropolis for such examples

* Sunset Boulevard is available through Paramount Home Video

Copyright 2006 8 ½ Cinematheque.