Il Bidone

One of the detours down which some critics tried to take us in the exploration of the films of Federico Fellini was in pursuit of their supposed Christian subtext. It started with La Strada - a title that means simply The Road, as in the aimless itinerant life of circus performers and street entertainers, always moving from one place to another, with fresh faces and people who haven't figured out the trickery and subterfuge behind their performances. But because of its ending, the simple title The Road was transubstantiated into The Way - as in The Way of the Cross. The strong man, Zampanò (played by Anthony Quinn) learns of the death of a woman he left behind on "the road." He abandoned her because she witnessed him accidentally kill another man, a clown with whom he had an outstanding score to settle, and she is so traumatized by it he feared she might expose him. Years later, after learning of the woman's sad death, Zampanò drinks too much wine and gets kicked out of a bar. It is late, and he makes his way to a beach where, alone and suddenly overcome with emotions he doesn't understand, he collapses in the sand, face down, weeping uncontrollably. The camera backs away, leaving him there.

Because of La Strada's richness and broad openness to interpretation, religious writers found a message at the end of the film that compelled them to use words like atonement, absolution, and salvation. Zampanò, overwhelmed with remorse for his abandonment of the girl, prostrates himself on the silent beach. It is his "dark night of the soul," his moment of reckoning, or whatever other cliché you want to call it. It was because of this interpretation (which is narrow, but perfectly acceptable), that one of my teachers, who was a nun, at the Catholic parochial school I was attending in 1971, screened the film at a PTA meeting one evening. I mark it as my introduction to a world of film in which I have been lost ever since.

But the end of Zampanò in La Strada, as compelling as its Christian critics found it, is the film's least effective part. For all his supposed genius at invention, it was as an observer of the lives of his characters, characters drawn from life, that Fellini was at his best. The last ten minutes of La Strada (and it's precisely ten minutes), after Zampanò abandons Gelsomina in the mountains, are beautiful in their details. He has joined another travelling circus, but his performances - without an assistant - are perfunctory and mechanical, the strong man going through the tired old motions of an act that no longer even interests him. But the moment Fellini begins to impose a design - a plot, in other words - it feels out of place, imposed as a kind of afterthought. Zampanò washes his face in the surf, sits down in the sand and ... What? He looks up at the sky and out at the ocean and suddenly he begins to cry. I think it is pure invention to argue that Zampanò is overcome with remorse in the scene. This imposition of plot limits the film's boundless metaphysical implications.

The wintry mountains in which Zampanò abandons Gelsomina appear again at the end of Fellini's following film, Il Bidone. It's Fellini's most neglected film, and while I wouldn't dare claim it is as great as I Vitelloni or 8½, it's still my favorite of his films. Once again, as with I Vitelloni, Fellini's title is an idiomatic word, meaning a scam, con or fraud. Its English title, when a distributor finally got around to releasing the film in the U.S. nine years after it was shown to mixed reviews at Venice in 1955, is The Swindle or The Swindlers, referring to the trio of men, Augusto, Picasso, and Roberto, who specialize in elaborate scams to divest farmers of their life savings. The beginning of the film is borderline surreal, but Fellini shows us the men (one older man, two young ones) donning their costumes for the darkly comic pantomime that ensues. Vargas, the boss, is there directing them. Carefully scouted beforehand ("watch out for the vicious dogs"), they arrive dramatically in front of an old house. Roberto (Franco Fabrizi), the chauffeur, gets out and Carlo (Richard Basehart) asks a woman peering out of the door to call off her dogs. He gets out of the car and announces that "Monsignor De Filipis" has come on serious business. Augusto steps out of the car. A second woman approaches him to kiss his ring. He makes the sign of the cross at her and turns toward the first woman. "Is there somewhere we can talk in secrecy?" the monsignor asks. They go inside, the door is closed. Augusto launches into a long and sad story about a lifelong criminal's deathbed confession. Hoping for absolution, he confessed that he killed a man and buried him along with a chest full of stolen treasure on the woman's farm. We cut outside to a field in which a lone tree stands. Following the directions on a map, Carlo takes eight paces from the tree and announces that the chest of treasure is exactly beneath the spot where he stands. Roberto begins to dig. About three feet down, he hands the shovel to the woman, who jumps into the hole and digs with enthusiasm. She stops, however, when the shovel turns up a skull and some bones. Carlo solemnly takes the skull aside, places it on a handkerchief and he and Augusto make the sign of the cross and pray. Meantime the woman has hit pay dirt - the treasure chest is unearthed. Back inside the house, Carlo inventories the contents of the chest - faux jewels and fake gold ingots - and estimates its value at six million lira - "more or less." Finally, Augusto reads from a letter the dying criminal's last request that masses should be performed for the salvation of his soul. Augusto sets the number at 500 (the dead man was a great sinner). Carlo states that every mass costs 1,000 lira. So, in exchange for the treasure, the woman has to come up with 500,000 lira in cash. She consults with her sister and together they leave. By the time they return it is getting dark. The woman has come up with only 425,000 lira, but Augusto accepts it. The transaction complete, the pantomime is over, and away the unholy band of thieves drive into the night. (If this scam sounds too ridiculous to be believed, I recommend reading Tullio Kezich's invaluable book Federico Fellini: His Life and Work (2006) about the real swindlers whom Fellini befriended before becoming a filmmaker.)

Nino Rota's musical score is engaging, expansive, and jaunty, in accordance with a caper movie like Mario Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street. But Augusto isn't enjoying himself. He goes through his motions like the old pro that he is, but he's getting tired of it all. In a later scene, a fellow criminal asks him how old he is. 48. He wants out of his line of work. Carlo has a wife (Giulietta Masina) and young child, but they don't know where he gets his money. He's a painter (his colleagues call him "Picasso"), and wants to make a respectable living. Augusto has a daughter, Patrizia, who is 18 and wants to be a teacher. Carlo saves himself in time, but Augusto is enlisted for one last caper. Nino Rota's music repeats the jaunty theme from the film's first scene, but it is somber now, almost lugubrious. Again organized by Vargas, who waits with a second car for his actors to carry out the swindle, Augusto and a different team act out the buried treasure scam on another poor farmer. 

Il Bidone turns out to be Augusto's story, and it's his tragedy. Returning to the farmhouse from the field with the "treasure chest," the group happen upon Susana, the farmer's daughter, afflicted with polio at age 9. Her father introduces her and she is led by her mother out of the room. Distracted, wearily reciting his lines for the divestment - certainly not the benefit - of the old farmer, who pulls all he's got in the world, 350,000 lira, out of his coat pocket, Augusto grabs the roll of cash. But before he can depart, the farmer's wife asks Augusto to come outside with her to bless her crippled daughter. And so we are subjected to one of the most painful scenes on film: a counterfeit priest's galling witness to a disabled girl's total devotion to her family, her patience, her strength, her truth, all of which mocks him in his fake finery, his empty holiness, his lies. She is 18 and has been paralyzed since she was 9. Dumbstruck by her terrifying goodness, Augusto wants to escape, but when he turns to go, the girl reaches for her crutches and pursues him, at last clutching his hand to kiss his ring. Filled with self-revulsion, he pulls his hand away from her and flees.

At their rendezvous with Vargas, the men remove their costumes and prepare to leave. But who has the money? Augusto has it, they agree. But Augusto says he doesn't have the money. He says he gave it back to the farmer's wife because he couldn't go through with it, that the crippled girl moved him to pity.

The release history of Il Bidone is unusual. It was first shown, on September 9, 1955, at the Venice Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Golden Lion, but didn't win. It was then released in Europe the following month, but it failed to attract an American distributor. It was only until nine years later, after the success of 8½ (an Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film), that the film was finally released in New York. At 92 minutes, it was the version I first saw forty years ago, and the one released on DVD by Image Entertainment in 2000. I learned several years after I first saw it that it was twenty minutes shorter than the version shown at Venice. Not knowing who made the cuts or when, I assumed they were made by the U.S. distributor. I have recently seen the restored version that was shown in Venice and it's 108 minutes. A title at the beginning tells the story:

La presenta edizione de "Il bidone" ricostruisce il film nella versione presenta in occasione della "prima" del 9 settembre 1955 al Festival di Venezia, di circa venti minuti più lunga della versione successivamente distribuita in Italia.

Evidently, its cool reception at Venice prompted Fellini to make several minor cuts and one major cut in the final scene for the version released in Europe (it was an Italian-French co-production). The cuts, however, failed to satisfy either Fellini or any American distributors. So, we should hesitate to call the restored version of Il Bidone the "director's cut," especially since the additional 16 minutes doesn't exactly improve on the version I've been watching for 40 years. In the restored version the final caper and its aftermath are four minutes longer (23 minutes) and, if anything, is even more unendurable. Nobody believes Augusto's story about giving back the 350,000 lira, and they demand he come up with it. He fights them, and finally runs down a gravel hill from the highway. In pursuit, the men throw rocks at Augusto, until one hits him in the head and he falls backward against a large rock. Searching in his clothes for the missing money, they find it in his pockets and in his shoe. Relieved but still angry, Vargas tells him that he'll never find work again, and he kicks him. But Augusto is apparently hurt and can't stand up. The men abandon him in the gully. Lying on his broken back, his cries of "Vargas! Vargas!" reminded me of Orson Welles as the corrupt cop, Quinlan, shouting the same name in penultimate scene from Touch of Evil, made three years later. Welles even resembles jowly old Broderick Crawford.

Il Bidone's drawn-out ending expands, alarmingly, on the implications suggested by the ending of La Strada. "It wasn't supposed to end like this," Augusto says to himself as he lies there on his back, now as paralyzed as Susana. Eventually Augusto rolls onto his stomach and begins to crawl up the slope toward the highway. Growing delirious, he mutters "Patrizia, my child." The scene transitions from day to night and back to day. Fellini makes much - too much - of Augusto's hands trying to grip the stony ground, still wearing his fake ring - the one Susana tried to kiss. Finally, Augusto hears a group of children passing on the road and crawls as far as he can, calling out to them to "Wait! I'm coming with you!" His head slumps to the ground, and Fellini's camera steals away, as dead leaves are blown around him. We are left with the conclusion that Augusto is dead. I wasn't expecting an uplifting ending - the film had been heading toward some disaster for the last third of its duration, but the ending that Fellini chose goes beyond moralistic, much more than just desserts. It didn't have to end like that.

I'm laughing at clouds

Just a personal confession in tribute to Stanley Donen (1927-2019). In 2011, I was watching a local access channel on my cable here on my Philippine island, a million miles from home (or so it felt at the time), and whomever was looking at DVDs that day, a security guard at the station perhaps, had chosen Singin' in the Rain, one of those films, of which there are only a handful, that are guaranteed to blow the dust off the dustiest soul. My surprise was unspeakable, and I watched and watched, feeling like every moment I was reliving a miracle. So familiar, but possessing a strangeness past familiarity - the visitation of an old ghost looking as young as the day it died.

Stanley Donen had been a dancer before he turned to directing dancers in On the Town in 1949. I just learned, reading his obit, that he came from Columbia, South Carolina, which is where I lived, on and off, from 1967 to 1988. In a Vanity Fair interview he said, “I saw Fred Astaire in Flying Down to Rio when I was nine years old, and it changed my life. It just seemed wonderful, and my life wasn’t wonderful. The joy of dancing to music! And Fred was so amazing, and Ginger [Rogers] – Oh, God! Ginger!” That's another link I share with him. In the mid-1930s, my father was in the Army stationed at Fort Ord in Southern California. He was in the military police and when he was judged the best in a personnel inspection, instead of a decoration, he was awarded a date with Ginger Rogers to a USC football game.

My favorites of his films are Two for the Road, the Peter Cook/Dudley Moore Bedazzled, and, believe it or not, Blame It On Rio, with Michael Caine, a film whose only misstep was the casting of the friend of Caine's daughter.

I watched Singin' in the Rain all the way up to the scene in which Gene Kelly walked Debbie Reynolds home in the rain. And as he turned from her door and began to dance and sing the title song, tears filled my eyes and I cried like a baby. I'm not sure why. Homesickness sometimes sneaks up on me, completely unawares. A piece of home visiting me here in the heart of darkness.

Thank you, Mr. Donen.

Rosetta

The filmmaking Brothers Dardenne, Luc & Jean-Pierre, have been around longer than their much-deserved fame. After creating their own production company, Derives, in 1975, they made dozens of documentaries for television and their first feature film - ironically called Falsch - with Bruno Cremer in 1987. But it was not until their third film, La Promesse (1996) that the Dardennes attracted international attention. To date they have made ten films, with an eleventh in production, and every one of them since La Promesse has won awards at international film festivals and inspired intense discussion among cinephiles.

Three years after La Promesse, the Dardennes finally arrived at their fourth film, Rosetta (1999). Intensely anticipated by everyone wanting to see if the brothers could reward the promise of La Promesse, Rosetta was a powerful and quite unsettling portrait of a young girl who has known nothing of winning in her life, who is buffetted from one defeat after another. From the very beginning of Rosetta, the moment she enters the frame, through a door at a factory, wearing a lab coat and a hair net, she is in a hurry. The camera can hardly keep up with her as she makes her way through a bustling factory to confront the person who got her fired her from her job. Whatever their reasons for firing her (and we can infer the reason), she won't accept it. She punches the man who tells her her "trial period" is over and that she has to go. She runs from the police who arrive to remove her. It's a common enough occurrence in every business in every society - the firing of an employee - and a potentially dangerous one, as long as there is no such thing as job security and the nightmare of unemployment hangs over everyone's head.

Rosetta is in a hurry to survive. Living with an alcoholic mother in a trailer park, we don't know whatever hard knocks preceded our introduction to her. All we know is that, as lousy as her life is, she has to fight to keep it from getting lousier. Some of us learn to hope for the best but to prepare for the worst. Rosetta expects the worst. When a young man named Riquet, who works at a waffle stand, arrives at her trailer park to tell her there's a job opening, she attacks him, thinking he got her address from the employment office. He's a decent enough guy, and he gives her a place to sleep and shower after she gives up on her mother for the nth time. But she is so untrusting, so unwilling to believe in anyone's goodwill, even if the goodwill is utterly impersonal, that she returns his friendship with betrayal.

Rosetta's life is such a never-ending disaster that one wonders if she is making it that way - that she is suffering from a mental illness of some kind. Her mother pushes her into a pond and she nearly drowns. Later, when Riquet falls into the same pond, rather than help him out, she runs away. Since no one helped her, she can't help him. It's Life, isn't it, that can't be helped. When she musters enough humanity to save him, and she discovers that he hasn't rejected her as a friend, she turns him in to his boss at the waffle stand, hoping it will help her own chances of replacing him. Riquet wants to know why, and pursues her on his motorbike. At the last, when he doesn't give up circling her on his bike, and she falls, crying, on the ground, he helps her to her feet. She looks at him, defiant to the last. The film abruptly stops there.

In his review of the film, Stanley Kauffmann raised a serious objection:

"The ceaseless fight for survival is in fact the firmest note in the picture. Since Rosetta never stops hating and fighting, no matter what happens, her struggle becomes a harsh tribute to inner strength... But this relatively unvaried tone takes its toll on the film. In La Promesse the spiritual degradation was much the same, even though the boy and his father were comparatively prosperous, but the film moved to some wisp of hope for the boy. Rosetta is trapped, trapped throughout. A closing dash of Technicolor uplift would have been an atrocity. (The change in La Promesse was organic, true.) But the lack of even a catastrophe at the end of Rosetta, let alone uplift, turns the film into a dossier, the chronicle of a case. Once again the Dardennes are, quite obviously, greatly moved by the people with whom they deal, and they present the girl with insistent candor. But this time they have treated their subject as if they were making a documentary; and since it is fiction, their film leaves us with a sense of incompleteness, which La Promesse certainly did not. One wry truth about art is that it needs a little arrangement in order to seem unarranged."

I'm not certain what Kauffmann wanted from Rosetta. The imposition of a design of any kind on the story would've been disastrous. Kauffmann, evidently, saw a kind of redemption in the closing moments of La Promesse that is missing from Rosetta. For reasons that, I think, are entirely spurious, the Dardennes' films are often compared to certain works of Robert Bresson. Rosetta was linked to Mouchette, which was based on a novel by Roman Catholic writer Georges Bernanos. Mouchette is beset with adversities similar to Rosetta's - the brutality or the total indifference of the world around her drive her to a fatal conclusion. And Bresson closes his film, as Mouchette drowns herself, with Monteverdi's Magnificat. The terms of the life that Rosetta must live are equally uncompromising. So how could the film compromise? Her mother pushes her into a pond and she almost drowns, but the thought of drowning herself would never occur to her, despite there being no light at the end of the tunnel that is her life. If there is anything to be learned from the film, it is the vanity of expecting to see a light in the first place.

But there is something more to Kauffmann's point about the "little arrangement" that art is supposed to provide to life, and it goes to the heart of the argument about naturalism in films. Here is Vernon Young, in his analysis of another naturalistic film, Umberto D.

"the film may easily be construed as an artless and unbuttered slice of life, a testimony of naturalism: ostensibly a method of expressing reality without inhibition, without overtones and as far as possible without style. Nothing could be further from the case. Like Shoeshine or Bicycle Thief, and with justification even more subtle, De Sica's Umberto D. - a masterpiece of compassion which he has dedicated to his father - might be termed supernaturalism if this compound had not been preempted for another kind of experience entirely. The fidelity of De Sica's attention to the plight of the man Umberto, realistic in its living details, is enriched by a host of modulations working under and through the story line, so delicately registered as to be imperceptible save to that second awareness evoked from most spectators without their being able to define it."

De Sica's artful resolution to the climax of Umberto D. (the old man distracted from his attempt at suicide by his little dog) satisfies viewers - as much as it's possible to be satisfied. Rosetta is 17, but she is as much beaten by life as Umberto - though she will never admit it. Riquet follows her half out of anger but half out of curiosity as well. Having finally landed a job, she comes home to find her mother passed out drunk on the ground near their trailer. She manages to get her inside and in bed, and then she phones her boss to tell him she won't be coming back to work. Why? Like Riquet, we are baffled by her choices, which always seem to be forced out of her. She strikes out at life before it can strike her. Watching her grapple so desperately but indefatigably with her life is a terrifying rebuke of all of our welfare states with their safety nets that are supposed to catch the ones among us who just can't manage to make it, no matter how hard they try. It is its portrait of Rosetta's strength, her ability to get knocked down and get back up again time after time, that is the film's great achievement.


(1) Stanley Kauffmann, "Two Teenage Girls," The New Republic, November 29, 1999.
(2) Vernon Young, "Umberto D.: Vittorio De Sica's Super-naturalism," The Hudson Review, Vol. VIII, No. 4 [Winter, 1956].

Shame

Beginning in 1960, when his stature as a preeminent film artist was at its height, Ingmar Bergman suddenly, somehow, felt trapped. So he threw away everything he had learned about filmmaking and he exiled himself to an island and began to make what critics called "chamber films" - like chamber music for a small number of instruments instead of an orchestra. He was like a caterpillar and the island was his chrysalis. Past 50, he expressed his mid-life crisis by trying to expand his formal range. Through a Glass Darkly, The Silence, Winter Light, Persona. I think he succeeded, here and there, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. He was like a composer who, having used music in a thoroughly and gloriously romantic style, expressing rich emotions, wanted to return music to the laboratory, where it could express nothing but itself. After Hour of the Wolf, which perceptive critics saw as a digression for Bergman, he felt emboldened to go after an unwieldy subject. From the impregnable safety of his island, he imagined terrors, and to illustrate them, he introduced them - if only when he said ACTION! followed hard upon by CUT! - to his island.

By the late 1960s, Bergman had already shown everyone what kept him awake at night. Death, God's silence (or His absence), the isolation of the individual, even creative bankruptcy. Before turning to the ultimate subject - the battle of the sexes, he made Shame, which tried to tackle war. Why war should worry a Swede, whose country sat out two world wars that defined the history of 20th century Europe, is a subject unto itself. I do not believe, as Vernon Young did, and stated in his book Cinema Borealis: Ingmar Bergman and the Swedish Ethos, that Sweden's neutrality disqualified Bergman from addressing the subject of war. But Young made a valid point - the notion that Shame introduces, that some sort of armed conflict would ever reach Sweden, especially a remote Swedish island (Shame was shot on Bergman's island of Fårö) in a thousand years is unlikely at best.

[Throughout its writing, Bergman called the film Dreams of Shame. After their capture by loyalists, Liv Ullmann whispers to Max von Sydow, "Sometimes everything seems just like a dream. It is not my dream but somebody else's that I have to participate in. What happens when the one who dreamt us wakes up and feels ashamed?"]

In the near future (1971), a married couple, Jan and Eva Rosenberg, both former musicians, live in an old farmhouse on an island. Waking very early, they prepare for a trip to the mainland by ferryboat. Before leaving, they notice a convoy of trucks towing howitzers pass by on the road. On the way, the wife stops to buy some freshly caught fish from a man she knows. Her husband sees her chatting with him and asks her when she returns to the car what they were talking about. The radio reports that an "enemy" invasion is possible. The husband, who seems a little neurotic, says, "They've been saying that for years now." She complains that their radio is never working. He says, "It's better not to know anything." The wife answers, "I'm sick of your escapism." But they are evidently happy together, if understandably worried.

From this tranquil beginning, with some ominous signs of trouble, Bergman draws us into an exploration of how war has somehow become domesticated, a fact of daily life - acceptable as long as it stays far enough away. But Bergman brings it home to the married former musicians to tear into their contented lives. We watch as the man and woman are differently affected by this literal invasion. They aren't combatants, but at various times they are demoralized, terrorized, physically assaulted, forced to compromise themselves in different ways, and to become refugees from the fighting. Their peaceful lives, originally far from the fighting (they had come to the island seeking refuge), are disrupted to the extent that they lose almost everything in order to survive.

Bergman lays the groundwork carefully, giving us two characters, played with absolute conviction by two of the greatest actors, Max von Sydow and Luv Ullmann, who we can care about deeply. Most films either fail to do this or don't even try. Why bother exposing characters to perils if the people involved in their creation have failed to make them identifiably human? But who is this "enemy" that invades this peaceful, idyllic island? Who and what do they represent? We are never specifically informed of either. War itself is the intruder in Bergman's drama - its cause or ideology are, for his purposes, irrelevant.

War is the ultimate destroyer of civilization. Depersonalizing, dehumanizing, demoralizing, brutalizing. It is indiscriminate. It doesn't care who you are. If you survive and want to escape, you find you that you must do things your own personal delicacy would never allow you to do. And the day to day, moment by moment witnessing of horrors creates a callousness, an indifference to further horrors. One of the things that goes into the training of combat soldiers is brutalization, being exposed to brutalities of lesser or greater magnitude that inure one to them and that enable the soldier to remember his training and go on fighting. Few films have examined more closely and carefully than Shame the effects of the brutalization of ordinary civilians.

Everyone the Rosenbergs encounter, even the conductor of their orchestra, who was drafted, finds the war such an inconvenience. Nowhere is there a sense of national peril, which might perhaps justify conscription or involve something as embarrassing as patriotism. Bergman emphasizes all of the pleasant things that war eclipses, like music and wine and lovemaking. Unfortunately, Bergman, by making the cause of the conflict totally ambiguous and failing to identify what exactly all the fighting is for, fails his brilliant actors and us. He takes the old pacifist stance: since neither side is in the right, I declare myself neutral. But neutrality, in this film, doesn't protect you. You will simply be killed without the knowing, even tentatively, what you were killed for. Your death is meaningless, absurd. You may as well have died in a car crash. Bergman deliberately makes the soldiers in their uniforms indistinguishable from one another. But if I can't tell the difference between one side or the other, how the hell did they? And I don't buy the "Kafkaesque" argument, which is invariably a cheapened interpretation of Kafka. As unjust as the war in Vietnam was, it was clear, from beginning to end, what it was about - after centuries of colonization, a tiny Southeast Asian nation struggled to determine what kind of society it wanted to be. The military intervention of the U.S. did nothing but delay the outcome - the establishment of a communist state - by twenty years. Predictably, Sweden was against the war. Americans learned the hard way that the quickest way of ending the war was to lose it. (The truly amazing thing is that we have learned the same thing in Afghanistan, but it took us twice as long to admit it.)

In 1968, Bergman decided to look beyond the personal traumas he had explored so determinedly in his previous films. With Shame, I don't believe him. He and his actors created two marvelously believable people, but, as finely made as Shame is, he failed to create a believable war. The low-flying fighter jets, the explosions (pyrotechnic effects) look expensive (for a Bergman film), the dead bodies that he doesn't give us a good look at, the incessant distant gunfire. All we really have to go on is the terror on the faces of Jan and Eva. Some soldiers rough them up a bit. And I find it strange that Bergman wanted to recreate scenes in a Swedish city that every European city outside Sweden and Switzerland had seen between 1939 and 1945. I can't believe that any Englishman, Frenchman, Italian, Russian, Pole, Czech, Dane or Norwegian older than 40 in 1968 was unfamiliar with the appearance of military vehicles on city streets. During World War Two, Sweden's cities were under blackouts at night only so Allied or German bombers wouldn't mistake them for enemy targets. 

There are some marvelous things in the film. Max and Liv. Seeing them together in Hour of the Wolf, A Passion, and in Jan Troell's The Emigrants convinced me long ago that they were the greatest on-screen couple. But because both directors were in love with her, Liv Ullmann was the ultimate beneficiary of Bergman's and Troell's work. One scene takes place in Shame in which Jan and Eva are eating fish and drinking wine and, shot entirely over Max von Sydow's shoulder, we are lavished with a prolonged look at Liv Ullmann's face. As much as I have to rely on subtitles, so much so that my eyes are drawn to them irresistibly, I had to turn them off and watch the scene again just to gaze at Ullmann's enraptured face. Look at how many times Von Sydow places his hand against her cheek (I counted five times). How could he resist? Viewed from certain angles, Ullmann has a somewhat plain face. Hers is not a typically beautiful face. But she is able, by the sheer force of her being, of her concentration (with a little help of Sven Nykvist and Jan Troell) to radiate extraordinary beauty in some scenes.

The film wasn't received well on its first release. At the time, for the first time, people watched a war unfold on the evening news. Bergman's staged pictures of war, taken by Sven Nykvist, had to compete with actual filmed atrocities, taken by nameless cameramen in Vietnam. And film violence, in Bonnie and Clyde and The Wild Bunch, was provoking debates about how it trivialized murder and desensitized audiences. Bergman was unpracticed at depictions of violence. Only once, in The Virgin Spring, had he dealt with murder directly, making fresh and immediate a tale from the distant past. In Shame, Bergman, his actors, and Sven Nykvist make violence much more personal and make it as shocking as it is likely to get - in a fiction film. But on the scale of shocks to which actual war footage was exposing TV viewers every day, Bergman's imaginary war was small potatoes.

Stray Dog

When it comes to that trickiest of factors called influence, divining why a great filmmaker conceives individual shots, scenes, or whole films can be a hazardous sport. Something as innocuous as a resemblance can offer tantalizing clues about a filmmaker's inspiration. For example, when I wrote about Roman Polański's Knife in the Water (1962) on this blog ten years ago, I traced the origins of Polański's story of two men and a woman on a sailboat to scenes in Plein Soleil (1960), René Clément's devilishly stylish film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley.(1) Polański had a much smaller budget (in communist Poland) and a smaller boat, but he made a much better film.

One of the least explored aspects of Japanese cinema is the influence of European and American films. Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves sent a shock wave through international cinema when it was released in 1948. Made with very little money with non-professional actors, it was precisely the incentive many young filmmakers needed to made their own forays in their local idioms. Satyajit Ray claimed it was De Sica who inspired his Apu Trilogy made in his native Bengal. And a few years before his period film Rashomon took the West completely by surprise, Akira Kurosawa made Stray Dog, a film set in contemporary Tokyo about a young cop's struggle to retrieve a stolen pistol. Though Kurosawa claimed that his influences were Jules Dassin's The Naked City and the roman policiers of Georges Simenon, the plot of Stray Dog was clearly borrowed from Bicycle Thieves, about a poor man with a wife and child whose new job is imperiled when his bicycle is stolen.(2)

The title is ambiguous. Under the credits Kurosawa shows us a panting mongrel dog - an unrestrained, potentially dangerous creature without an owner. But "stray" is likely not an accurate translation. The French title offers a clue: Le Chien enragé. The Enraged Dog - Mad Dog or even Rabid Dog are probably closer to the Japanese nora. Assuming the thief is the dog, Kurosawa portrays him as an extreme exception, an aberration, an insult to the norm. A "stray" is a nuisance. This thief is a menace.

The film wastes no time. It opens with Murakami, a young detective, a veteran of the war (Toshiro Mifune in only his third film for Kurosawa), who reports the theft of his standard issue Colt pistol. In Japan, then as now, no one can own a gun. Cops are allowed to carry them in the sometimes dangerous pursuance of their duties, and they are available on the black market - which was thriving in post-war Japan. How many bullets were in it? the man taking his report asks. All seven, Murakami says, and then he offers to resign. His offer is denied. Murakami will have to find his pistol. Kurosawa cuts to cops firing the Colt pistol at target practice. A voice-over tells us how "compact" the Colt is. We then watch as he places it in the right-hand pocket of his white linen jacket. It's a hot summer in Tokyo.

When Murakami is getting off a crowded bus, he feels his pocket and his pistol is missing. He sees a man across the road who runs from him. Murakami gives chase but loses him at a crossroads. The man who stole the pistol is Yusa, a veteran, like Murakami, of the war. But instead of the straight and narrow path taken by Murakami, Yusa has taken the other way, into the underworld of Tokyo. Murakami is teamed with another detective, an older man named Satō, played by Takashi Shimura. A common thread in Kurosawa, the master and the acolyte, is explored again in Stray Dog. 

Yaso's movements are easy to follow - everywhere a Colt bullet turns up in a crime. Kurosawa uses the detectives' pursuit of Yusa to explore the Tokyo of 1949, still under American occupation. When they enter the underworld, the "lower depths" of Tokyo, the film takes on a lurid, almost surreal hue. As Mifune learns the ropes from Satō, he also learns how a single misstep might have led him down the same road as Yusa. We are clearly meant to see a resemblance, albeit a superficial one, between the two ex-soldiers.

By the time Murakami captures Yusa, after he has tried to shoot Satō to death, Kurosawa's Dostoevskian theme at last emerges. Yusa knows he has fallen very far from grace and he must atone for his crimes. He lies side by side with Murakami in a meadow replete with flowers and the beauty of a world that Yusa had forsaken. He screams and writhes in apparent agony, and Murakami lies there beside him, amazed. Satō doesn't die of his wounds, congratulates Murakami and tells him to look forward to all their future cases together. Their bond is cemented, and the film ends on an upbeat note. But the nightmare vision of Tokyo's dark side is unforgettable. Kurosawa will take us back there in his great suspense film High and Low (1963), which expands on Kurosawa's view of the terrible duality of the modern world - the obscene gulf between the rich and the poor, the lucky and unlucky. There is no real choice in life for so many of us. We follow the path that presents itself to us, leading us into the darkness or into the light.


(1) "Polański and his co-scenarists, Jerzy Skolimowski and Jakub Goldberg probably got the idea for the script from the yacht scenes in René Clément's Plein Soleil, in which two men, one an experienced sailor (Maurice Ronet), the other not (Alain Delon), compete for the affections of a woman (Marie Lafôret). The woman belongs to the owner of the boat, who christened it ("Marge") after her. The boat in Knife in the Water is called "Christina." There is even a knife with which Delon in skillful."
(2) There is another roundabout reference to the influence of Bicycle Thieves. In his 2011 study, What Is Film Noir?, William Park detected the influence of neo-realism on the photographic style of The Naked City. Terrence Rafferty called Stray Dog "a kind of neorealist cop movie."

Gate of Hell

The Japanese film Gate of Hell opens with a brief history lesson, which shoves a Western audience - even one acquainted with the Heian era, when the capitol of Japan was Heian Kyo, later renamed Tokyo - even further away from the story. In the middle of a rebellion immortalized in paintings affixed to a gate that was later named Hell, an imperial palace is being overrun by rebels. A princess must be evacuated or face capture, so a volunteer is enlisted to act as a decoy disguised as the princess (wearing her resplendent kimono). One of her ladies-in-waiting, named Kesa, boldly steps forward. Leaving the palace inside a ox-drawn wagon, Kesa is escorted by a squad of samurai (who think it's the princess inside), but they are quickly overtaken by pursuers. One samurai, named Moritoh, fights them off valiantly, and single-handedly leads the wagon to the safety of a temple. Kesa has fainted from the shock of the fighting, and Moritoh has to waken her with water he spits in her face. She finally awakes after he transfers water directly into her mouth with his lips. 

The rebellion put down, Moritoh is praised as a hero and is allowed to choose his prize. Having learned the identity of the decoy princess, he names Kesa as his prize. Kesa is married, and Moritoh is told that he can't have her. But Kesa is what he wants regardless of her marital inconvenience, and he refuses to accept anything else. His demands are dismissed, but Moritoh will not be satisfied until Kesa is his.

I must have seen Gate of Hell in 1975, as part of a television series aired by PBS called The Japanese Film, hosted by Edwin O. Reischauer. Like every other film I saw in that series, it was revelatory of not just how the Japanese looked at themselves, but of an entire film industry that had been thriving in Japan since the 1920s. This is why audiences in Venice were so astonished in 1951 by Rashomon, one of a genre of films, like Gate of Hell, known in Japan as "jidai-geki," and why it won the Golden Lion. It showed the West that the Japanese film industry had fully recovered from the war. While Akira Kurosawa, who made Rashomon, was certainly thankful to the Venice jury, he later wished that perhaps they could've awarded a Japanese film set in the present, a "shomin-geki." He admired De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and hoped that Western audiences could see a film like it set in contemporary Japan. Of course, Kurosawa himself made such a film called Stray Dog, about a young cop whose gun gets stolen and his odyssey across a blistering Tokyo summer trying to retrieve it.

Unfortunately, the appetite for the more exotic Japanese films, and there were plenty of them, led to the unfortunate celebration of some films and filmmakers, like Mizoguchi, and the neglect of others. The only thing that made Gate of Hell exceptional was its use of the Eastmancolor process - a much cheaper (and much better) color process than the cumbersome and expensive Technicolor. For a full explanation of this revolution in color, I recommend Stephen Prince's essay for Criterion, "Gate of Hell: A Colorful History":

"It achieves ... a kind of hypernaturalism by accentuating color 
in sets and costumes that are facsimiles of the story’s twelfth-
century historical setting. Although the decor and lighting effects 
are naturalistic, they achieve a hieratic force through the always 
insistent color design. Based on a play by Kan Kikuchi, the film 
takes place mostly indoors, shot on studio sets that offered 
exactly the kind of controlled lighting that Kinugasa needed to 
emphasize the colors supplied by his costume designer and art 
director. Color filters on the off-camera lights simulated 
candlelight and moonlight, and high-intensity studio lights 
heightened the coloring of kimonos and armor, banners and 
heraldry."(1)

But Gate of Hell suffers from a central weakness that may or may not have been intentional - the casting of Kazuo Hasegawa as the samurai Moritoh. Hasegawa acted for Kinugasa before, beginning with the great silent film Crossroads [Jujiro] in 1928. He had been a matinee idol in the 1930s, noted for his good looks, but by the time Gate of Hell was released he was 45 and had put on some weight. The rather severe costuming in the fighting scenes early in the film required Hasegawa, like all the other samurai, to wear a period design hat with a chin strap that frames his chubby face unflatteringly. In the last scene, upon cutting off his topknot, he looks almost epicene. And I've always had the impression that Moritoh, for all his derring-do in the early scenes and his stalwart honorableness, not switching sides in the middle of a crisis, but stubbornly refusing to accept the fact that he cannot have Lady Kesa, is basically a big baby. 

Machiko Kyo is made to move in such a formal, sylized manner that she resembles a beautiful, but virtually inanimate, doll. But it was, of course, completely in keeping with the extreme demeanor of Heian court life. Of course, such a formalized world - the same world as Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji - was ideal for Japan's first exported film in color. To a large degree, the actors in Gate of Hell are nothing but exquisitely-appointed clothes horses, showing off the film's luxurious décor. 

I tried to imagine the story retold in a European setting during the Age of Chivalry, with the Art of Courtly Love and troubadours singing of extra-marital affairs with tragic consequences. But a wife's sacrificing herself for her husband because of the unwelcome importunities of a would-be lover is rather the opposite of our idea of romantic love.

Kinugasa (1896-1982) was a much bigger name in Japanese cinema in the 1920s, thanks to Crossroads and his earlier experimental film A Page of Madness, that was presumed lost shortly after its release until Kinugasa found it intact in a shed in 1971. By the time Gate of Hell was made, however, Kinugasa was considered safe enough to be entrusted with a major export production. Despite its winning the Palm d'Or at Cannes, it wasn't nearly as deserving of its success as a few other films made in 1953, including Kinoshita's Twenty-Four Eyes, or, indeed, Ozu's Tokyo Story. 

Visually resplendent on its first release in 1953, the cheaper color process it utilized caused it to fade terribly. The version I saw on video in the '80s seemed almost embalmed - flesh tones were pale blue or pale green. Lately (in 2011), some money and effort was expended on a restoration that has made it splendid again. Perhaps now we can see how the film's beautiful Eastmancolor images, far richer than Technicolor's, distracted critics from basic hollowness. Some of the more astute observers tried at the time to point this out. Having it restored is no reason to overrate it all over again.


(1) Gate of Hell: A Colorful History

The Dresser (Albert Finney)

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say:
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.



I watched the Kenneth Branagh edition of Murder on the Orient Express over the weekend. While it failed to give me any compelling reason for its existence, it did one nice thing for me - it reminded me of the first edition, made in 1974, directed by Sidney Lumet, and starring Albert Finney in the role of Hercule Poirot. Within minutes of watching Branagh's film (he directed it and played Poirot), I learned of the death of Finney, aged 82, and I found myself looking back on his career that is almost as long as my lifetime. But rather than rattle off my own list of favorites, I've been meaning to write something about the 1983 film The Dresser for the longest time, and the time has, alas, arrived. 

Ronald Harwood wrote the play, based on his experience as the dresser to the outsized actor/tyrant Donald Wolfit. The setting is England under the Blitz, when all able bodied men were in the war. There was no one left to play male roles in the theater except men unfit, for various reasons, to fight, and men well last their prime. A great old Shakespearean actor known in the film only as "Sir," around whom a company of actors - the Coronet Players - has been formed, is traveling around London, wherever a theater and an audience to sit in it has survived the V1 attacks. Sir, as his dresser Norman calls him, is drifting into dementia. He should've retired ages ago. He's a declamatory horror onstage, a ghost of theater past, when actors needed the lungs to fill the hall with their voices and therefore never ceased doing so. Just a few minutes into the film, we are treated to a scene in which Sir arrives with his company in tow at a train station where the train is leaving without them. In full-throated glory, he shouts STOP THAT TRAIN. The engineer, thinking that he's heard the voice of God, pulls the brake. Sir and the others climb aboard. 

But Sir suffers a breakdown moments later, handing out playbills to people in the streets. He hands one to a shell-shocked man whose house has been bombed and is being hosed down by firemen. "For the theater," he says to him. "I trust you will find comfort there." Norman finds him when he draws a crowd, stamping on his hat and bellowing to the heavens, "How much further do you want me to go?!" Norman collects him and brings him to a clinic where a doctor tries to give him a shot. "It's just to help you sleep," the doctor tells him, to which Sir replies, "Sleep? Sleep?! Glamis hath murdered sleep!" 

As everyone knows - except, it seems, Norman - Sir can't subject himself to the physical strains of performing for hours night after night. His mind, just like his body, is breaking down. He's the embodiment of Samuel Beckett's title, "I can't go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." But he's there to provide Londoners with much-needed distraction from the horrors of the Blitz, and his company of actors depend on him for steady work. So he goes on. Left alone to prepare for his performance, he mistakenly applies blackface when he's playing Lear. "I'd give anything to see the play," Norman says, applying cold cream. "You blacked-up, and Cordelia saying: 'You've begot me, bred me, loved me.'" In a deep Calypso accent: "'Well, you see, ducky, this King Lear, he been about a bit."

Preparing for King Lear, the longest of Shakespeare's marathons, Sir knows that his company is the real tragedy: "Thornton, toothless as Fool. Brown, lisping as Oswald. Oxenby, limping as Edmund. What have I come to? I've never had a company like this one. I have been reduced to old men, cripples and nancy-boys!" There are stories about actors playing Lear. Diana Rigg had one. She played Cordelia to Paul Scofield's Lear. To increase his stamina, before every performance he drank a honey elixir that made him flatulent. In the last scene, carrying the dead Cordelia in his arms, he farted at every step, while Rigg had to struggle to keep herself from "corpsing."

Eileen Atkins plays the director of the company, but Tom Courtenay, as Norman the dresser, is the one who makes everything work. But he depends far too much on Sir, and pushes him once too many. With the sound of explosions coming from outside and plaster falling from the ceiling, Sir rises to the occasion. The inspired performance done, to the ovations of a packed house, the old man, spent, sinks into his chaise in his dressing room - and dies. Albert Finney delivers a terrific performance, magnificently over-the-top. 

Finney was often lucky with his choice of film roles, working with Tony Richardson, Stanley Donen, John Huston, and Sidney Lumet. Peter Yates, who directed The Dresser (he also produced) is known to American audiences from the Steve McQueen vehicle Bullitt and the excellent The Friends of Eddie Coyle. He made a beautiful film here, one that Ronald Harwood intended as a tribute to a now extinct kind of acting, and to his unsung dresser. Yates manages to evoke the period with telling details: a period BBC radio broadcast, a ration book, a produce market filled with empty tables. 

Albert Finney was in his mid-40s when he took on the part, made up bald with an infelicitous comb-over. And he handles it commandingly. But, after all Sir's upstaging of everyone around him, it is Tom Courtenay's film. He played the role on stage, and the proximity of the camera magnifies Courtenay's brilliance. His tantrum when he finds his master dead (after reading in his will that he's left him nothing) turns heartbreaking when he cries out, "Where will I go? Where? I'm nowhere out of my element. I don't want to end up running a boarding house in Westcliffe-on-Sea! Or Colwyn Bay!" saying, finally, his ultimate tribute, "This isn't a place for death. I had a friend!" 

He that hath but a little tiny wit,
With a hey ho, the wind and the rain.

Little Criminals

If the name "Bulger" rings a bell to Americans, it's Whitey Bulger, the notorious Boston crime boss played by Jack Nicholson in Martin Scorsese's overrated film The Departed. To Brits, however, the name Bulger more likely conjures up a 2-year-old boy who was the victim of one of the most terrible crimes ever committed. On Feb 12, 1993, little James was with his mother in a busy shopping center in Bootle, near Liverpool. His mother lost sight of him for only a moment and he was gone. Two 10-year-old boys, John Venables and Robert Thompson, took him to an isolated spot and beat him to death, using bricks and an iron bar. They then placed his body on railroad tracks and left the area. A short time later a train cut his body in half, but forensics proved the train hadn't been the cause of his lethal injuries. During the search for the boy, CCTV footage revealed one of the boys leading James away by the hand through the shopping center. It was the last time James was seen alive.

The boys were arrested and charged with murder. The trial was conducted - just after the boys turned 11 - under unprecedented scrutiny for the trial of underage defendants. Angry crowds gathered and tried to attack the police van carrying the children to court. But Britain's legal system could do nothing to the two boys except sentence them to juvenile detention until they turned 18. In 2000, under the strictest security, Venables and Thompson were given new identities and returned to society under lifelong parole.

The reason why all these terrible details are being dredged up again is because of a film called Detainment made by Vincent Lambe that uses court documents to re-create the trial of Venables and Thompson. It's been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film, which Denise Bulger (now Fergus) is denouncing in the press as "disgusting." Critics of the film are also wondering about the necessity of going over the same awful ground again when, they say, it tells us nothing new.

I brought up the subject eight years ago in a post I called Juvenile Offenders in which I wrote: 'In law, the "age of majority" separates children from adults and is usually (and arbitrarily) the age of 18 (in Japan it's 20). But under criminal law, such a standard is not consistently observed or enforced. In the U.S., individual states can decide, depending on the severity of the crime committed, whether an offender can be tried as a "juvenile" under the Juvenile Justice System, or as an "adult"'.

It's quite surprising that AMPAS, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences should single out this particular short film for praise, since the treatment of the boys would certainly have been radically different in the States. They would most likely have been charged as "adults" for their crime, kept in juvenile detention until the age of 18, at which time they would've been transferred to a federal prison for the rest of their lives. That would probably be the only sentence that would satisfy Americans, some of whom would maybe even have called for the death penalty when the offenders turned 18. What would be the use, they would probably have argued, to incarcerate them (assuming there was no possibility of parole) for perhaps 50 or 60 years?

But the British have a different understanding of these matters, based on a broader - and much longer - experience of a civilized society. The boys' release was made after it was determined they were no longer a threat to society. Despite the fact that, since his release, Jon Venables has been jailed twice for violation of his parole due to child pornography in his possession, the system has been shown to have worked. The new film, however, has renewed the old "punishment versus rehabilitation" criminal justice argument. In two Guardian op-eds I've read (in the British press the Guardian has always been a progressive bastion), the issue is examined in detail. In one article, Gaby Hinsliff wrote about the changing nature of crimes committed by minors: "Children as young as nine have been found carrying knives. Gangs organising so-called 'county lines' operations, running drugs from the inner city deep out into rural towns, have been known to recruit from primary schools."(1) Such information is meant, I suppose, to educate those people who argue that no child should ever be in a prison cell.

Another article, published after Jon Venables was arrested a second time for possession of child pornography, pondered that

"Liberals like to believe in the perfection of the newborn
human as much as Christians do. It’s one of the irritations
of humanism. For them, environment is all. Condemners,
however, tend to be big on moral responsibility. This guy
had a much worse childhood than that guy, they’ll say, and
he did OK. They’re Old Testament. They love the idea of evil
and wickedness, of full human choice and the full human
choice of darkness. Even the word dyslexia, for them, is like
a red rag to a bull."

In my post from 2011, I wrote about a fiction film called Boy A (in their trial, Venables and Thompson were referred to as Boy A and Boy B), that sensitively examined the release of a boy from juvenile detention for a crime similar to the Bulger murder. The boy (played beautifully by Andrew Garfield) was provided with a new identity and a job, but whatever chances be may have had of leading a purposeful life were destroyed by elements of society (the media) that was determined to expose his true identity.

"My initial reaction to seeing the film, after my surprise
that it was made at all, was that such an uninsistent,
scrupulously neutral film could never have been made
in the U.S. - for one thing, since Americans are not nearly
as convinced of the rock-bottom decency of human beings,
they would never assume that anyone who committed a
crime such as the one committed by the two boys in the
film, could be redeemable in a million years. Or that a
minor should be protected by certain rights that make
him immune to prosecution as an adult no matter what
the crime was. Revenge is never very far from an
American's understanding of justice. So when a heinous
crime is committed, someone, no matter if they're children
or mentally incompetent, has to pay."

But something else is going on with the film Detainment that is downright infuriating - far more infuriating than that Vincent Lambe failed to "consult" James Bulger's parents. As Fintan O'Toole has just pointed out in The Irish Times, a petitioning campaign is ongoing at the change.org website demanding that the Oscar nomination be withdrawn and that the British Prime Minister apply pressure (whatever form that might be in) on the Academy, whilst Lambe is being demonized in the British press. This is especially odd because Detainment is an Irish film.

But O'Toole has come to the film's defense, both as an esthetically satisfying achievement and as a powerful moral statement:

"More than 2,000 years ago, the Roman dramatist
Terence, who as a former slave knew exactly what
it is like to be dehumanised, wrote: “I am human
and I consider that nothing human is alien to me.”
It is easy enough to say but very hard to feel. Much
that is human does feel alien – indeed, should and
must feel alien. Humans can do such terrible things
that we find ourselves wishing that there were
another species altogether lurking alongside our
own one. We reach for words that distance us
biologically from this evil genus: beasts, animals,
monsters. And we are both right and wrong to do
this. It is a necessary but falsely comforting fiction
and from time to time we have to be reminded
that this fiction is not real, that the monsters are
all too human.

"The real disturbance of Detainment is that once
you put Venables and Thompson on screen, played
by kids around the same age they were when they
murdered Jamie, you do something genuinely
terrifying: you humanise them. The film is not
sympathetic towards them. It does not excuse them.
It does not sentimentalise them. It merely shows
them: two children, one frightened and weepy,
one defiant and cold. But it shows them in the
flesh precisely as children – not beasts but little
humans.

And we are forced to ask: is this humanity alien to
me? I wish it were and I completely understand why
anyone would want to say that these creatures are
not us. But we know the truth that humans get
damaged early and that damaged humans are
dangerous humans. Lambe’s film is restrained,
serious and to me profoundly moral. He has done
something and it’s true."(3)

Whether the film Detainment wins an Oscar or not, I wonder how people in the country I now live in - the Philippines - would react to the story it retells. Legislation in this country has been proposed that would lower the age of criminal liability to 9. As barbaric as that may sound, it is simply the latest step by an old and ailing president in his murderous war on drugs that has caught the attention of the International Criminal Court. As I try to point out to Filipinos, a great majority of whom approve of the president's tactics, I have to contend with two views of their president - the local one that looks, at best, somewhat bewildered at his questionable use of power, hopeful of a positive outcome, and the view of the international press that is resoundingly disapproving of his avowed contempt for his country's own constitution as well as standards of legality and jurisprudence. Since it has become obvious to him that he can no longer prosecute his war on drugs with impunity, by "slaughtering" every drug offender, he is resorting to legal means, further crowding an already grossly overcrowded and overburdened justice system. But perhaps Filipinos believe that they are exceptional and that standards of civilized society don't apply here. Given their string of presidents in the past 50 years, two of which had to be driven from office through People Power uprisings, I honestly can't blame them.


(1) "Did we really need a film about the James Bulger murder?" by Gaby Hinsliff, The Guardian, 25 Jan 2019.
(2) "Society did right by James Bulger's killers" by Deborah Orr, The Guardian, 25 Nov 2017.
(3) "Jamie Bulger film a serious and moral piece of work" by Fintan O'Toole, The Irish Times, February 5, 2019.

This Masquerade

It's easily one of the most unforgettable moments in English literature:

It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen on the sand.  I stood like one thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an apparition.  I listened, I looked round me, but I could hear nothing, nor see anything; I went up to a rising ground to look farther; I went up the shore and down the shore, but it was all one; I could see no other impression but that one.  I went to it again to see if there were any more, and to observe if it might not be my fancy; but there was no room for that, for there was exactly the print of a foot—toes, heel, and every part of a foot.  How it came thither I knew not, nor could I in the least imagine; but after innumerable fluttering thoughts, like a man perfectly confused and out of myself, I came home to my fortification, not feeling, as we say, the ground I went on, but terrified to the last degree, looking behind me at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man.

It's from Daniel Defoe's The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, chapter XI. Later, Crusoe discovers, as he had previously suspected, that his island was being visited by native cannibals bringing their prisoners there to be killed and consumed by them. He rescues one such prisoner, and names him Friday, "which was the day I saved his life; I called him so for the memory of the time." Friday is represented by Defoe as a native, a "Carib" whose tribe practices cannibalism and worships a mountain god. But, at some point over the 300 years since the book's publication, Friday turned into a black man. One movie adaptation called Man Friday, starring Peter O'Toole (not the worst of the screen adaptations) even cast African-American actor Richard Roundtree in the title role. No one bothered to explain in that muddled film how or why a patently African man came to be a native of the Caribbean. To be clear, the man who Crusoe called Friday was a native of a Central American island. His complexion was probably dark, but he was a Native American, not an African.

In 1970, when I was attending a Catholic Parochial school in Columbia, South Carolina, an English teacher came up with the idea of staging a play made up of scenes involving characters from literature. Among the other characters in the play (none of which I can recall), a boy was chosen to play Robinson Crusoe, and because I was the last one to be cast in a role, the boy cast as Crusoe suggested that I could play Friday.

My 7th grade class was small, maybe 30 of us. I remember their names and faces. I remember three black girls in my class, but there were no black boys. My fellow classmates and I knew that our English teacher was not from the South, which wouldn't have mattered if the boy playing Crusoe hadn't mentioned that, since I was playing a "black" role, I could use burnt cork to blacken my face. The teacher immediately shot down the suggestion and ended the discussion. No blackface. I was somewhat worried that I was probably going to introduce the first white Man Friday to the stage. It never occurred to me what my three black classmates would've thought if I had worn black makeup in the play.

Rehearsals took place, which left me standing around watching most of the time because all I had to do in my scene was walk on and shake hands with the boy playing Crusoe. Since there was a musical accompaniment and a chorus that introduced the characters and the stories, none of us had any lines to speak. I had just a few seconds on stage in my scene, and a curtain call with the entire cast. When the performance took place, in front of our parents and the school faculty, everything went smoothly. I was dressed in an outfit of tattered shorts and a shirt, and after the performance my classmates and I joined our parents on the auditorium floor. Every person who approached me to comment on my performance said the same thing: "Wasn't Man Friday black?" My makeup (the burnt cork) was somehow conspicuous in its absence. And my teacher, who wanted merely to avoid the issue altogether, had instead unintentionally emphasized it. I remember my big brother, with whom I got along as most kid brothers do, laughed at me because I made the mistake of forgetting that my character was black, or that I wasn't committed to the role fully enough to put on black face.

That was in 1970. I was 12. In 1984 a young medical student had his photo taken with another person at a costume party. He was wearing blackface and the other person (some have speculated it was his date) was dressed in a KKK white robe and hood. The man (he was 25 years old) is now the governor of Virginia. To most white people (especially, I would say, in the South), racist insensitivities were less sensitive in 1984. In 1970 they were, if anything, much less sensitive. Contexts matter. The governor of Virginia went to some lengths to make himself look black in that photograph. It looks like he used black shoe polish. He was at a party with fellow medical students who all - evidently - thought it was funny. But if a teacher in a Catholic parochial school who was possibly not from the South (but why should that matter?) felt uncomfortable allowing a white boy to rub burnt cork on his face to make him look black in 1970, what the hell were those medical students thinking fourteen years later at that party? And how come it took so long for someone to locate that particular photo?

But if showing up at a party looking like that and then posing proudly for a photograph wasn't bad enough, the man in the photo's reaction to the resurfacing of the photo in the press last week made it worse by his confused and contradictory reaction to it. First apologizing for the pain that his unacceptable behavior had caused, within 24 hours he denied he was even in the photograph, even though it appears on his personal page in his college yearbook and has been there for 35 years. Then he apologized for wearing blackface at some other event at which he was presenting his impersonation of Michael Jackson. I'm not sure if there was a way that the Virginia governor could have "finessed" his way out of this shitstorm. Clearly, he couldn't think of a better way, although better ways certainly exist, to explain his 25-year-old self.

One way - perhaps the only way - he might have talked his way out of it (though it wouldn't have convinced everyone) would've been to use the same argument that George Orwell used in his examination of anti-Semitism in Britain:

"I defy any modern intellectual to look closely and honestly into his own mind without coming upon nationalistic loyalties and hatreds of one kind or another. It is the fact that he can feel the emotional tug of such things, and yet see them dispassionately for what they are, that gives him his status as an intellectual."

The difference is that the Virginia governor is held by some people to a much higher standard than an ordinary citizen. His participation in any racist behavior is never acceptable. (This argument is inapplicable to the current American president - a fact that even his supporters would gladly accept.)  The late Reverend Jimmy Swaggart got away with proven adultery by going on his syndicated TV show with tears in his eyes, saying, "I have sinned!" I somehow doubt that the governor could do it.