The Great Performances: Pascale Ogier in Eric Rohmer's Full Moon in Paris (1984)

The Little Things

It's funny how sometimes a little moment will sneak itself into a movie and completely change the way we experience it. The film in question: Wellman's Across the Wide Missouri (1951), a visually stunning frontier tale shot almost entirely in the Rocky Mountains. The spectacle of the backdrop outsizes and upstages the drama at pretty much every turn, but this is undoubtedly more to do with the studio's butchery - they not only chopped an hour off Wellman's original cut, but retrofitted a voice-over narration that turns everything into a flashback - than it does with any paltriness of directorial vision. As is, at a mere 78 minutes, it's an interesting enough movie, and aside from the gorgeous photography, there is an unusual amount of careful attention paid to depicting the richness of Indian culture, and no less than three languages spoken at regularity throughout. There's also a bit of a playful streak present (uncharacteristic for later Wellman in my experience) punctuated by moments of stark cruelty: it contains without a doubt one of the most cold-blooded, out-of-left-field murders of a major character I've ever seen.

Anyway, the alluded to moment occurs around two-thirds of the way through the running time, during a scene between the fur-trapper played by Clark Gable and his wife (María Elena Marqués), a Blackfoot Indian he originally married to gain access to bountiful beaver land, but has since fallen in love with. He is telling her about the land he comes from (Kentucky), and teaching her how to say "bluegrass", and at the end of the scene he bends over the table she's sitting at to deliver a kiss. Wellman cuts to a shot from behind this kiss, placing the elbow of Gable (who was 50 when Across the Wide Missouri was shot) near the center of the frame as it bears the brunt of his body weight. As Gable is coming up from the kiss, his arm slightly but very noticeably begins to tremble under the strain. It's tough to tell whether or not Wellman intended to have a visual signifier of the aging process be the star of this scene, nonetheless the effect of the moment is undeniable: Gable's character, who up until this moment had been portrayed as nothing short of the essence of bluster and opportunism on two feet, becomes a bit rickety, a bit vulnerable, much more human. A few scenes later, after his wife tells him of her pregnancy, we can't help now but detect more than a hint of poignant desperation as he races around his little community feverishly delivering the news. And because he has from this moment become, in a way, a much different character, so too does the movie becomes a different movie, one not so much about a poacher who discovers tolerance and love, but about a man who can sense his own mortality, and who slowly begins giving into the quiet, vital impulse of ensuring that his house is in order for everything that will remain and come after him. It gives moments like the one below, with Gable staring at his wife and newborn through the doorway, a very sad, almost Fordian resonance - moments concerning everything but the moments themselves:

Capsule Reviews 12/2/11

Up the River (John Ford, 1930) - This early sound Fox comedy finds its strengths in leisurely pacing and breezy tone, and features entertaining early performances from both Tracy and Bogart (in their first and second film roles, respectively) as a pair of cons from very different backgrounds who befriend one another in the hoosegow and loosely glide around a plot involving love, scams and baseball. As was often the case with Ford comedies of the era, it relies heavily on vignette technique and is generally less concerned with matters of landscape and atmosphere, though dabs of expressionism seep through occasionally, such as in the excellent opening prison break sequence. The result is pleasingly winsome, loony comedy, far from Ford's forte but more than adequately rendered here, interspersed with the usual reflective Fordian touches, including a melancholic neighborhood hay ride (the best scene in the film), as well as heavy and affecting use of the parade-style music the director would return to so often throughout his career.


The Lost Patrol (John Ford, 1934) - A meager British patrol traipse aimlessly about the Mesopotamian desert during World War I after their commander is killed by an Arab sniper. The troop eventually reaches shelter in the form of a desolate oasis, setting into motion their slow, methodical eradication by the faceless death that surrounds them from seemingly every direction. Ford's vision for the material is lean, dreadful and hallucinatory; he clearly conceives of this increasingly unhinged community as a portrait of terror, and in everything from the rhythmic pattern of deaths to the arc of McGlaglen's "final girl"-esque character, the film can pretty accurately be labeled a proto-slasher, and it's easily the closest thing to a true horror film Ford ever made (the casting of Bela Lugosi in a particularly maniacal role is not happenstance). But the actual Fordian moments are few and far between, and writer Dudley Nichols' deathly banal dialogue and schematic scenarios hold it back from every really taking off. To top it all, Ford had wanted the movie completely musicless, but at the eleventh hour Max Steiner was commissioned by the studio to compose one of his truly abysmal Mickey Mousing scores; it completely saps the images and sequences of their emotional tension, and for that it was awarded the Oscar.


Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962) - In this micro-budgeted cult horror fave (the sole feature from industrial filmmaker Herk Havey) a young church organist survives a fatal drag race crash and treks off to Salt Lake City for a new job, hounded by terrible visions at every step. What is lacking in direction and veneer is more than made up for with a genuine sense of desolation, and a particularly firm grasp of one simple but oft-overlooked Horror truth: that creepy architecture and atmosphere are almost entirely dependent on the human presence. Only in the compressed nightmare logic of its final sequences does the movie give form to its most scattershot impulses and begin to resemble something of an authentic vision, but as an overall mood piece its effectiveness and eeriness if difficult to deny. The striking on-location photography (in and around Salt Lake City, in particular the creepy Saltair Pavillion) and unconventional casting of non-professional locals go a long way towards instilling the movie with its distinct, lasting character, and its influence over a certain kind of low-budget horror filmmaking - beginning with and epitomized by Romero's Night of the Living Dead - can still be felt strongly today.


The Ninth Configuration (William Peter Blatty, 1980) - The opening scene is in effect a litmus test of one's appreciation for what's to come: over Denny Brooks' bittersweet ballad 'San Antone', images of moons and spaceships and fog-shrouded gothic castles and grieving men fill the screen, a strangely stirring cornucopia of discordant emotions and tones that acts as a microcosm for the utterly unclassifiable two hours to come. Here Blatty adapts his novel Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane, the tale of a madman on a personal pilgrimage in an experimental military psychiatric residence, and it seems that for many critics the film stands as an exercise in the dangers of granting a writer privilege over the cinematic vision of his own material. However it is precisely Blatty's rough-hewn, personal urgency behind the camera that gives the movie so much of its mysterious power; one gets the sense that a more objective, surer hand would have resulted in a far less interesting result. A cast of formidable character actors and an award-winning screenplay have done nothing to salvage Configuration from obscurity over the years, and Blatty would go on to direct only one other feature, 1990's Exorcist III. If the latter stands as the more successful effort (indeed it's one of the better horror films of the 90s), it's because Blatty brought to it a more orderly, formalist approach that better served both his weighty concerns of faith and sacrifice, as well as his gestures toward the surreal. The seeds of a personal omniverse are scattered between the two movies, resulting in some interesting criss-crossing references, however they are united most prominently perhaps by Blatty's overt love for the patter of rain against a window.


The Killer Is Loose (Budd Boetticher, 1956) - After a single viewing I'm tempted to dub The Killer Is Loose both a small masterpiece, and perhaps the most undervalued entry in Boetticher's oeuvre. A cop (Joseph Cotton), while arresting a crooked bank clerk (Wendell Corey), accidentally kills the latter's wife. Years pass, and the psychopathic criminal escapes from prison to exact his revenge on Cotton and his wife, leaving behind a slew of bodies as he inches closer toward his ultimate targets. The thing that jumps out most is how harsh and tactile the violence here is: a prison driver is murdered by Corey for his vehicle, but his body isn't simply dumped out of the truck, the camera follows closely as it splashes raggedly, sloppily into a filthy ditch of mud; in the scene where Corey visits and eventually murders his former army sergeant (the best in the movie, a model of ominous, sustained tension), a body isn't simply shot and killed, it flails violently, with milk bottles shattering and kitchen cookware exploding. A fairly jarring depiction for its day, and one that clearly anticipates the stark, brutal mode of bloodshed found in Boetticher's later work. Corey is fantastic through all this as the deadpan, volatile killer, and in his possessed, post-murder proclamations of helplessness and his climactic excursion into cross-dressing, he acts as a walking perversion of the famous credo that proliferates the Ranown cycle: "A man can do that". There is also fascinating use of sound and off-screen space to heighten the ever-present sense of anxiety and to construct moments of pure portent: Corey staring up into the cloudless sky and being met with a large rumble of thunder after escaping prison is one of the most haunting moments in all of Boetticher. This was the last feature the great director would make before jumping into the Westerns that inarguably comprise the apex of his career, and if those films represent an unusually rarefied level of B-movie craftsmanship in the history of American cinema, The Killer Is Loose as their antecedent deserves at least a passing mention in the conversation. It's lean, expressive, gripping stuff, and I can't wait to sit down with it again.

"Just try not to think about it" - Lodge Kerrigan's Claire Dolan

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With its icy formalism, its laconic, flat dialogue delivery and despairing piano dribblings, Lodge Kerrigan's extraordinary Claire Dolan seeks to inhabit its protagonist's dire psychic milieu as intensely as his previous debut Clean, Shaven. That excellent first film utilized the meshing of a disconcerting editing style and abrasive sound design within a rigorous compositional framework to thrust the viewer into a subjective account of chaotic and self-destructive mental illness. Fragments of a story hover around the periphery, bits of character history is doled out, but Clean, Shaven remains much more a sensory experience than a narrative one.

And so it should again be said that if we are presented with a somewhat more traditional sketch in Kerrigan's followup, it is not because we are dealing with a lesser sense of headspace. Claire Dolan is a prostitute, has been for a long time, and in fact indications suggest that she inherited the profession she grew up around. In short, a human thoroughly entrenched in a system that operates on the currency of hollow gestures and sentiments. Words in her life have become meaningless, nothing more than deadened sounds of barter, cold poker chips. And the spaces around Claire, far from forgiving, are sleekly ominous modernist prisons that enclose, fragment and abstract her time and again with their reflections and frames within frames within frames. Cold neutral areas within which meaningless fucks and news about sick loved ones are delivered and carried out equally with the same cool nonchalance. Just as the filmic sounds and textures of Clean, Shaven were founded in Peter's hallucinations and erratic desperation, so too does the mise-en-scène of Claire Dolan account for, in the most precise and effective of ways, its title character's isolation, disenchanted communication, and the profound loneliness and sadness that defines her neutral march towards death.

Katrin Cartlidge's empty stare represents a soul slowly shaved down by the years, yet Claire finds solace in the sight of a child in a park. Children are redemptive forces in all of Kerrigan's work (an estranged daughter in Clean, Shaven; the proxy of one in 2004's Keane), and the idea of one here is enough to inject Claire's face and actions with fitful gleams of that which may only hesitantly be called longing. Her first impulsive attempt at escape early in the film is doomed from the start, but a child paves the way for a clean break, for a new life. But people don't change overnight, and Kerrigan, a trenchant, honest humanist, does not give us the pat ending we first suspect. In fact, if Kerrigan's other two movies can be said to resolve with ambiguities that feel conclusive, or tidy untidiness, then Claire Dolan, in its final fade out to white, offers up a deep uncertainty under the veneer of resolution. It's a tremendously complex and open ending, a loving look away, a tacit admittance of skepticism that, in its sheer lucidity, lacks in his other two films. It feels like the most honest, daring moment in any of his movies, the one that was simultaneously the most painful and gratifying to shoot. And the short coda that follows it, at first seemingly insignificant, now feels perfect and perfectly composed, both affirming and potentially shattering. What is clear is that as a mother, Claire Dolan has no less than the entirety of herself to give. How much of that remains, and whether or not it's enough, that's what we're left with.

(If the above thoughts seem rather scattershot, I apologize. I watched Kerrigan's three features only in the last week, but they have stuck with me a great deal and I've been thinking about them all, particularly Claire Dolan, quite a bit. This post was just an attempt to get some of my brief and immediate thoughts down in writing. I look forward to wrestling with these movies further for some time to come. Kerrigan is an excellent filmmaker.)

I'll Be Damned

These Are the Damned came a solid decade after Losey remade Lang's M, but it bears strong evidence that the German master never left the brain. You can look at the thoroughly Langian treatment given to the peaceful subterranean class of radioactive children - particularly in the way that Losey shoots their faces - for all the proof a reasonable person would need, but the smoking gun comes during a climactic scene where Losey seemingly beats Fritz to his own punch by a couple of years. Well, Fritz's doppelganger at least. The moment where Viveca Lindfors' character, artist and lover of a radical military scientist, awaits her impending and self-imposed annihilation (surely something the director who remade La Chienne would sympathize with) by continuing to create her eccentric art on a scenic cliff top overlooking the ocean is framed in much the same way one imagines that shot of Ulysses we see being filmed at the end of Contempt coming out. Actually, I like to think of it as a glimpse at the film the alternate Lang shot right before taking on the infernal project that provides the canvas for Godard's masterpiece.