paulet

Redford seems to think every plot point has to be hammered home like a tent peg. At Mark van Doren's birthday picnic, his son Charles cuts to the center of a cake inscribed "Happy Birthday Father." A few scenes later he comes come in the middle of the night and eats the last slice while his dad, who thinks the quiz show is on the level and son Charlie is an upright man like him, rattles on about the trials of authorship. A scene in the HQ of a big corporation is introduced with a low-angle shot towards the top of a skyscraper. The four anonymous nuns, shown near the beginning to illustrate the universal popularity of "21," are back once more near the end, watching the Congressional hearings into the rigging of"21." I give the movie six stars, mostly for the acting--Johann Carlo as Toby Stempel is close to perfection--but Redford's direction drags it down from eight.

There's a pretty explicit theme of modernization--the story springboard is that a group of Upper Egypt boatmen pool their resources to buy a fast motorized barge--with the central character (Omar Sharif) coming of age in parallel, as he narrowly evades temptation and trickery; this was Nasser's Egypt, so it's probably fair to see this as a parable about combining economic development with social justice and shunning Western-style decadence. Unfortunately this means the plot resolution is Put the Blame on Mame--a sexy temptress stands in for the fleshpots of the West--but it would probably be unreasonable to expect a more original view of women. Nice camera work, lighting setups and editing; definitely worth seeing.

(POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD)

"Brute Force" is a prison drama, directed by Jules Dassin, who was soon thereafter blacklisted in Hollywood, went abroad, made "Rififi," married Melina Mercouri, made "Never on Sunday" etc. etc. "Brute Force" dates from 1947, a moment when the Stalinist line on the arts was taking a particularly sharp turn toward the crudest formulas--in that year there was a sharp debate in the CPUSA's cultural magazine, Masses and Mainstream, between the screenwriters Albert Maltz and John Howard Lawson (both of whom later served time in Federal prison as members of the Hollywood Ten) over whether art must always be viewed as a weapon in class struggle. (Maltz suggested maybe not, Lawson insisted yes; the dispute was eventually closed by a declaration from V.J. Jerome that Lawson was right, and Maltz was obliged to engage in "self-criticism" for his Browderite errors.)

So here's Burt Lancaster as prisoner "Joe Collins" (and if the assonance of that name is an accident then I am the Grand Duchess Anastasia.) In a back story we learn that he's serving time for organizing bank robberies (students of Stalin's biography, or legend, please note); now he's masterminding a mass escape. The prison warden (Hume Cronyn), made up to look uncannily like Goebbels, struts around his office in jodhpurs and a black Sam Browne belt; when he gets ready to torture a prisoner for information, though, he strips to the waist--no, I'm not making this up--and puts on a recording of Wagner.

Then we have Charles Bickford, editor of the prison newspaper and clearly cast as the voice of misguided reformism; he opposes the prison break, arguing that publicizing the warden's brutality will eventually win better conditions, but is cruelly betrayed, and comes to see the wisdom of Collinsism. Jeff Corey plays one of Lancaster's subordinates but shows his true colors in a key scene: when Lancaster asks the others what position they want to take up in the actual breakout, Corey answers "I'll go last, to cover our back," which sounds plausible until you realize that the others all give the only right answer, which is "Wherever you want me, Joe." Of course Lancaster immediately grasps that Corey is the traitor, presumably because he displays the capacity for independent thought, and so indeed it proves.

Wait, there's more. There is only one Black prisoner, whose job in the joint is to sweep the floors; known as Calypso (I *swear* I'm not making it up) he sings all his dialog in rhymed couplets. And there's the prison doctor, the spineless petit-bourgeois intellectual, who sympathizes with the prisoners but is bullied into inaction by the warden; he drinks and utters despairing commentary.

Pervading this tale is a misogyny so deep and unquestioned that the filmmakers would probably have been astonished to have it pointed out to them. Yet all the prisoners whose stories we learn are there essentially because of the perfidy, greed, lust, or other vices of women in their lives--all except for Joe, who in a scene calculated to induce whiplash smoothly exits a long black getaway car to a house with a white picket fence, where dwells his sweetheart--a crippled girl, in a wheelchair, her nether parts covered by a thick plaid blanket. He swoops her up in his strong arms and carries her about, doll-like, while she squeals with delight--she is, in other words, completely desexualized and infantile, the only kind of woman (the script seems to be saying) that a man can trust.

The square-up is the ancient device whereby dubious themes or images are cleansed in the last few minutes by some clumsy explanation: it was all a dream, or the lurid images had a sober educational purpose, or some such. But what's the square-up in a Stalinist parable? It's a noir dead end! The prison break goes off the rails, the warden gets his fiery come-uppance but the prisoners don't get out, the state cops retake control with great bloodshed, and the prison doctor gets the last word: "They didn't escape. No one ever escapes." In short Hollywood endorses this bleak Sartrean view by way of trumping the rest of the movie's pitch for the wisdom of Comrade Collins.

This wasn't bad, but I can't quite see what the critics are so excited about. The Resistance people never actually seem to *do* much, except smuggle themselves and a few downed Allied pilots out to England, or themselves back into France. No sabotage, no wildcat strikes, no attacks on Germans--the function of the Resistance seems to be simply to keep itself in being, and the people we see are incredibly heroic and self-sacrificing, apparently for no other purpose than this, which doesn't fit with my (limited) knowledge of what actually went on. But because of this, the movie spends a lot of time on the mechanics of their activity--switching cars to elude pursuit, parachuting out of airplanes or being spirited away by English submarines--which are actually kind of boring. (A shot of three people getting out of one Citroen and into another just doesn't have a whole lot of visual or narrative interest.) The other problem I had was that the heroism theme supports an obsession with death--the only time they actually kill anyone, it's people who have betrayed them, not actual German occupiers, and a final "crawl" tells us all the characters, without exception, would be killed before the Occupation ended. This struck me as sort of... unhealthy, though I guess those conditions don't exactly promote emotional balance and sanity.

The British historian E. J. Hobsbawm developed the idea of the "social bandit," the peasant youth who becomes an outlaw after his honorable resistance to some outrage by the landlord ends with a landlord henchman dead. He calls to others who share his anger at injustice to follow him to the hills where they will lead the outlaw life, stealing only from those whose wealth comes from oppressing the poor, respecting the peasants and righting wrongs on their behalf, and seeking to restore a former condition when the great and powerful behaved decently and treated the poor equitably. (This equitable treatment is also close to what E.P. Thompson called "the moral economy of the poor:" the Honest Loaf, the Fair Day's Wage for a Fair Day's Work--a slogan of early labor unions--etc.)

The social bandit *isn't* a revolutionary--he has no vision of a transformed society, because his horizons are too narrow. He wants the Good Old Days back. He doesn't have a social or political theory; he wants simple decency and justice. He isn't Joan of Arc, fighting to restore a legitimate King, he's much closer to Robin Hood, resisting the oppression of a King who's forfeited the loyalty of the people by not acting as a good King should.

Billie Jean is a social bandit. The events that launch her "career," the actions she performs, and above all her simple watchword "Fair is Fair" clearly put her in the category that includes the Brazilian Lampiao, the Sicilian Salvatore Giuliano, and others. Hardly surprising, since this teenage cult script was written by a formerly blacklisted old Lefty in his seventies, Walter Bernstein, who surely had read Hobsbawm and Thompson and found, I think, a very ingenious way to illustrate their ideas in a 1980's US setting.

This remarkable movie reminded me of early Eisenstein for the fluid, dynamic

movement of crowds--in the streets, in the movement of soldiers and bandits across the hilly terrain, and in the scene of the Portella della Ginestre massacre. The back-and-forth narrative structure must have influenced Costa-Gavras in the making of "Z." And Rosi's ability to get riveting performances from non-professionals (some of whom could not read scripts) is astonishing. The story line gets confusing, but I think that's because the situation was confusing--multiple betrayals and layers of

corruption and complicity--rather than a flaw in the script or editing. Visually exciting, too--the use of distancing overhead shots, the quiet menace of gunmen walking up a deserted, sun-baked street... memorable stuff.

Two scriptwriters are talking privately (they think) while, from across a coffee shop, an agent reads their lips, each speaker in turn, like HAL eavesdropping in "2001"... this is a movie about TV professionals trying to stay afloat as they feed the medium's insatiable appetite for material "dark... but not too dark... how dark depends on whether we get Sunday at 7 or Thursday at 10." Either you like this kind of insider-y stuff or you don't--I confess I have a weakness for it. And Illeana Douglas can do absolutely no wrong.

I thought this was claptrap, and pretentious, artsy claptrap at that. I

think the dolly shot on Bruce and Robin having a drink at a

restaurant set a record for excruciating slowness, but one earlier

shot--in which the frame is filled by a black and white newspaper

photo for what seems like a week--was even more maddeningly

static. And the closing "what eventually happened" graphic was an

amazing lapse in tone from fantasy (to be charitable) to

quasi-documentary.

The movie tries to tell two stories, related but distinct: the story of the Hollywood ten and the blacklist, and the story of how Herbert Biberman came to make "Salt of the Earth" after serving his sentence for contempt of Congress. It does a fair job of telling the second story--but only fair; it does a terrible, dumbed-down job at the first. And the same defects mar both of them.

Start with a trivial, nitpicky error: the name of the striking union in "Salt." It was in fact the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. The movie calls it International Minemill Union or something of the kind. Why does this detail matter?

It matters because Mine Mill (as it was known) was a real union, with a real history. Its roots were in the early 20th century Western Federation of Miners, a union once close to the IWW, which waged bitter struggles against the copper bosses and was ultimately destroyed. Mine Mill itself was founded as a CIO union which by 1952--when "Salt" was filmed--had been expelled from the CIO, along with the West Coast longshoremen and others, essentially for refusing to purge the Communists and endorse Cold War foreign policy.

In other words the union had a context, which included the Communist Party, which was (after all) what Biberman et al. were being punished for refusing to abjure. It wasn't fortuitous that he and the blacklisted writer and producer Michael Wilson and Paul Jarrico decided to film a Mine Mill strike story. It was part of the resistance of the Communist-influenced Left to being forced out of the labor movement and out of popular consciousness,

marginalized and demonized and rendered utterly ineffectual.

But in the movie the union and the strike seem to have sprung from nowhere, the union members and leaders are brave innocents who don't know about movies and the Cold War, and they're rescued from an FBI-led vigilante mob by--the New Mexico State troopers! (I knew something was terribly wrong when some people in the audience actually cheered the cops' arrival.)

And the Ten have no context either. All the political and legal strategic decisions seem to be made by an informal gathering at a writers' hangout where Dalton Trumbo--sorry, "Dalton Trumbo"--and Biberman make ponderous little speeches about Jefferson and the fascist danger. I don't doubt that those guys were capable of pomposity--I don't object that they're portrayed unflatteringly. But they were, in fact, CPUSA members, mostly of long standing, and that's not how decisions were made.

Nor were decisions made in the vocabulary of civil libertarianism. This vocabulary *was* deployed in public statements, but part of the problem (which, by 1949, at least three of the Ten--Lardner, Maltz, and Trumbo--were keenly aware of) was the disconnect between this Jeffersonian rhetoric and the actual ideas of Marxism-Leninism (not to mention the actual conditions obtaining in Stalin's USSR.)

Near the end, a vigilante accuses Biberman of echoing Marx; no, comes the answer, it's Jefferson. In the popular Front years the CPUSA had put forward the slogan "Communism is 20th Century Americanism." By 1952 the Popular Front was a distant memory, yet this movie "Biberman" seems to have out-Browdered Browder and dropped the Communism part altogether.

So the movie gives us, not the Ten, but the version of the Ten that the Party hoped would rally timid liberals to their aid. It was a fairly hollow construct 55 years ago; are today's audiences really so thick-headed that they won't see through it?

With cardboard heroes, a cardboard villain: Edward Dmytryk, who "named names" *after* serving his time, is presented as justifying his decision purely so he can go back to making movies. Now this may have been his real motive--certainly Lester Cole and Paul Jarrico, among others, believed it was. But it *wasn't* the motive he presented. He claimed that he had become disillusioned with Communism and couldn't see the point of sacrificing his career to a cause he had come to oppose. A rationale?--maybe. That's something people do, and audiences get to evaluate their sincerity or insincerity. But villains don't, as in the old Western formula, get off the stagecoach and immediately kick a puppy.

A friend of mine defended the movie on the ground that people know nothing about the Ten, so anything is better than utter ignorance. Leaving aside the question whether this cartoon history isn't, in fact, the same thing as utter ignorance, what people are we talking about? This movie is not going to find a big audience. Most of the people who saw it in the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival were, um, well stricken in years and politically knowledgeable (if not necessarily very bright, cf. their reaction to the State Trooper sequence mentioned above.) And dammit, it's unforgivably patronizing to take the attitude that "Of course we know better, but this pabulum is good enough for--" someone else.

Context, context, context. The prison mess hall is shown as racially integrated--in 1949! In truth Lardner and Cole successfully challenged the segregated chow line in the prison at Danbury but this was a quirky exception. But this anachronism, like the error about the union's name, gives the game away: this is a movie about history that doesn't respect history, or the audience's ability to comprehend it. Is that because the filmmakers were too busy congratulating themselves on their nobility for making the movie at all? Are they cynical, dumb, both? I don't think it matters much. I'm glad my friend Lester Cole wasn't depicted, because that would have caused me real pain.

A cool looking movie, in a very trendy way that I suspect will look unbearably old-fashioned in 10 or 15 years, but what terrible, terrible acting! The poetry just gets thrown away (when not actually butchered--Hawke refers to the "the undisover'd country *to* whose bourne no traveler returns," rather than "from whose bourne," and there are other howlers. At one point Ophelia can actually be seen glancing at the cue cards. Gertrude apparently takes to drink at one point--she staggers about--but this goes nowhere. The product placement--Marlboros, Pepsi, Blockbuster, American Airlines--would make me gnash my teeth if I could spare the enamel. Every scene is busy to the point of twitchiness, because none of the actors can be trusted to stand still and say the lines. I don't think this travesty will overcome fear or resistance on the part of viewers who don't know Shakespeare. Worthwhile art doesn't drop into anyone's lap, no matter how dumbed down it may be. People who are curious about "Hamlet" should read it, then see the Olivier or Mel Gibson versions. If Shakespeare hadn't been a great poet, only scholars would read him today; it's no service to him or the audience to sacrifice the poetry for an illusion of "accessibility."

I'm not British, but when I left the theater the phrase that came

irresistibly to mind was: "what an old load of codswallop!" Ten

minutes of portentous, wit-free dialogue about nothing particularly

real is followed by several minutes of choreographed imitation

fighting, likewise unreal; then again leaden dialogue, and again

cartoon fighting, over and over until at long last the thing limps to

an unconvincing conclusion. I've admired Ang Lee's films for their

close examination of character; I had thought this would combine

the usual martial arts nonsense with a real story about believable

people. Nothing of the kind, alas--just a very expensive video

game. Bits of it were pretty, as a Nature special on PBS is pretty,

but actors swooping around in the trees are not inherently any

more interesting than macaws doing likewise, and the macaws

have better motivation. This movie was as dumb, and as wildly

overrated, as "Gladiator," and that's saying a lot.

The script is based, more or less, on a novel by "James Helvick," pen name of Claud Cockburn, who was an influential Left journalist in the 30's and possibly a Comintern agent and/or a British Secret service agent. (An interesting guy, who wrote a couple of volumes of very amusing, utterly unreliable memoirs. His son Alexander is the Nation columnist; his sons Patrick and Andrew are also journalists; his unacknowledged daughter (born out of wedlock) Sonia, who died last month, was the mystery writer "Sarah Caudwell.")

Characters drawn from Cockburn's past appear, transmuted, in the screenplay. "Major Jack Ross", with his menacing advice not to worry, is in part based on a decayed English aristocrat whom Cockburn met in New York in the 20's, and "Mr. O'Hara", with his uncertain nationality ("O'Hara is a tiptop name among Chilean Germans") and ingratiating manner, seems to be drawn from Otto Katz, a Communist publicist of the 30's who was executed in the 1951 Czech purge trial (his "confession" implicated "the notorious British agent, Claud Cockburn").

Cockburn moved to Ireland (County Cork) after the Second World War, where he met and became friends with John Huston, the director of "Beat the Devil," who had earlier worked with Bogart on "Maltese Falcon" and "The African Queen." They got Truman Capote to do the screenplay, hired the damndest set of character actors-Peter Lorre, Robert Morley, Ivor Barnard-and two second-rank actresses-Gina Lollobrigida and Jennifer Jones-and headed for Italy, land of fun, frolic, and (not least) no US or UK income taxes.

The story is a chaotic mess. Some commentators refer to the movie as a satire on the international intrigue genre, but it isn't (in my opinion) coherent enough to be a satire of anything. There are persistent rumors that Huston, Capote, and possibly Cockburn made up each day's shooting script in the morning without much idea of where the story might be going; Bogart said "only phonies [he probably said 'queers'] like the movie," and it died at the box office.

Why do I like it? The characters, the acting-Jennifer Jones steals the picture, no small achievement-the pitch-perfect dialogue. (All the characters, including those with heavy Italian accents like the ship's purser and the chauffeur, speak English in syntactically flawless, indeed elegant, complete sentences.) It belongs to a class of quirky, language-drunk work-"Importance of Being Earnest," "The

Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse," S. J. Perelman-that some people like while other, equally intelligent and literate people stare at them in bafflement.

This movie shows the transformation of a young, brave rebel into a calculating Party apparatchik in Cold War Hungary. For anyone who views Communism as a tragedy, this is an unforgettable human illustration of how that tragedy happens

This is one of those postwar "shrink-anxiety" movies in which an >unscrupulous psychotherapist manipulates, blackmails, or robs >his patients. It's not bad of its type, though nothing out of >the ordinary. *But* it's the answer to a truly obscure trivia >question, because in an early scene, the villain and the heroine >have dinner in a restaurant where the band is playing "How >Little We Know", the Hoagy Carmichael song that Lauren Bacall >sang in "To Have and Have Not"!