Glenn Heath Jr.
Any serious analysis of Last Year At Marienbad must come after multiple viewings, and since this is my first I can only provide incomplete and rambling thoughts on this strange, hypnotic masterpiece. The tracking shot has never been more mystifying and enigmatic, point of view often becomes purposefully strained and muddled, while the background artifacts take on deeper meaning as they begin to signify the emotional angst of the characters. The way shadows say more than light has never been duplicated in my mind, and this motif goes a long way toward showing Resnais’ early obsession with the fragmentation of time and space. One for the ages, but important in so many different ways for many different people.
In the crime films of Jean-Pierre Melville, trust becomes a rare and costly commodity. Structured gangster hierarchies are moot if it means monetary advancement or vengeance, while honor amongst thieves evaporates on a whim, usually leading to a bullet in the back. But Le Doulos takes this motif and makes it personal, setting its sights on a small, tightly knit group of French hoods who at once seem both incredibly close and uncaring toward each other.
Melville founds his entire film on the judgement of one character’s role as a police informer, only to pull a rug from under the notion half-way through. It’s a startling shift, one that enables the fluid and dark Parisian locale to seem even more deadly and uncertain. Shadows and screens mask men with guns, but their intentions are never clear until it’s too late. In this sense, Melville beautifully crafts each scene to subvert expectation, uncovering a honorable thread hidden beneath the many twists and turns of the plot. If Le Samurai explores the breakdown of classic codes in the modern age, and Army of Shadows dispels such codes in the face of massive evil, Le Doulos levels a brutal hammer at why such ideologies begin to crack in the first place, inevitably due to the miscommunications and misjudgments of the men dependent on them the most.
For July, The Film of the Month Club has selected Francisco Rosi’s Hands Over the City, a brilliant film obsessed with walls, textures, and facades. I’ve posted my thoughts on the film’s use of space here.
In Nicholas Ray’s The Savage Innocents, the blinding white landscape acts as a serene reminder of epic simplicity, and what will be lost when the evils of the white settlers begin to take root. Inuk (Anthony Quinn), Ray’s hero and central metaphor, lives a solitary life with only the pressing social obligation to marry a woman on his mind. In these early scenes, time and space are not defined, and the film experiments with the idea of being completely immersed in the daily routines and traditions of the Eskimo, albeit a stylized over-the-top Hollywood version. Ray sprinkles in some striking on-location shots of men sledding through the endless white blanket of ice and snow or in a canoe chasing a horde of Walruses on the open water, and these moments give the film a staggering sense of place. Unfortunately, when Inuk accidently kills a preacher, ironically because the man won’t sleep with his wife, the film becomes somewhat preachy and simplistic. Aside from one horrific sequence in the civilized camp, the relationship between Eskimo and Caucasian society gets relegated to interactions between the Inuk and a Trooper (Pete O’Toole) who’s been tasked to bring him back for trial. Ray hammers home the point that these two ideologies are so far apart communication becomes moot, yet these are the scenes where the film relies too heavily upon narrative convention. The Savage Innocents is an oddity of massive proportions, an anti-adventure film set in one of the world’s last frontiers.
As a Western swan song for Howard Hawks, El Dorado wonderfully illuminates a cozy sentimentality riding under the surface in much of the director’s oeuvre. Robert Mitchum and John Wayne play aging icons (the sheriff and gun for hire respectively) who join forces to protect a family of ranchers from an aggressive cattle baron, and their relationship revolves around traditional motifs of respect and competition. Echoes of Rio Bravo obviously abound, but El Dorado turns what could be a tense narrative into a no-pressure reunion of sorts, where the characters are in little real danger except for possibly missing out on spending time together. There’s a sadness in Mitchum’s eyes as he hobbles down the street with Wayne at his side, as if finally realizing how quickly time passes by in Hollywood’s idealized world of the West. El Dorado might not be any sort of masterpiece, but like Hatari!, it’s an entertaining romp through familiar situations with legends of the genre, led down the thoroughfare by a director devoted to the importance of professional friendships and friends that are professionals.
With his scathing masterpiece Advise and Consent, Otto Preminger indicts the whole Washington political machine with a great sense of subtlety and purpose. It’s one of the only Preminger’s I’ve seen, with maybe the exception of Laura, that doesn’t get bogged down at least for a while in deadly monotonous melodrama, and the end result captivates on a number of different levels.
Advise and Consent begins as a mosaic of the D.C. ecosystem, following Senators of both parties (Charles Laughton, Walter Pidgeon) as they prepare to debate the President’s confirmation of a new Secretary of State (Henry Fonda). Surface-level public procedure swiftly turns into back door wheeling and dealing, illuminating a brutal underbelly of devastating character assassinations, blackmail, and moral ambiguity.
But Preminger never hammers these harsh realities into stone with oratory speeches or grand actions of principle. His brilliant use of the tracking shot allows the narrative to flow along seamlessly behind the characters, one step from realization, yet unable to grasp the ramifications until it’s too late. Even though there’s one heavy in the film, the greatest villain of Advise and Consent remains the compromise of personal identity.
Both Fonda’s left-leaning nominee and Don Murray’s tragic Senator Anderson become victims when the consequences of the past come back to destroy the present. The Capital building acts as a breeding ground for these situations, an elegant bubble blocked from the rest of the world in order to keep the machine running. But the process works, or at least Preminger has faith that it does, and so the gripping finale provides a comeuppance for everyone involved. As a timely precipice on the compromises of Democracy, Advise and Consent will only become more relevant over time.
