Here's That Rainy Day

Maybe I should have saved those leftover dreams?
Funny, but here’s that rainy day.
Here’s that rainy day they told me about
And I laughed at the thought that it might turn out this way.
Where is that worn out wish that I threw aside
After it brought my love so near?
Funny, how love becomes a cold rainy day.
Funny, that rainy day is here.


Of all the days of the year that it had to choose from, a typhoon passed directly over my island on Christmas Eve – at 9 PM, no less. For two hours I listened to the approach and departure of one express train after another. At 11 PM it tapered off, with an occasional train swinging back to remind me of the storm’s power. I managed to drift off to a nervous night’s sleep after midnight, blowing out my candle and only using the battery-powered fibre-optic Christmas House that I bought in a fit of nostalgia 11 years ago as a much-needed nightlight.

A snowstorm would’ve been preferable. A snowstorm would’ve been welcome on Christmas Eve. Indeed, if it had been a powerful blizzard that dumped three feet of snow, with drifts burying cars, that paralyzed transport, cancelling flights and closing the airport, it would’ve been welcome on Christmas Eve. If the mayor told everyone to stay home, to not venture out, who needs to go anywhere on Christmas Day? And even if there were a power failure, as always happened whenever it snowed or sleeted in the South when I was a boy, it would call forth the image of a family huddled for warmth, perhaps before a blazing fireplace, sharing the priceless gift of being together.

Here, when the power fails, my electric fan stops working and, even at night, I begin to sweat. The only difference, now that I am acclimated, is that I no longer mind sweating as much as I once did. And early last Wednesday on Christmas morning, everyone ventured out to survey the devastation. Whole groves of banana trees had been felled; trees that had hung on to their branches were denuded of leaves. You could almost see a horizon. Houses you didn’t know were there appeared, missing their jungle cover. The sun was unobstructed and incredibly bright. The shade of the palm trees was no longer there. But if I showed you a picture, before and after the typhoon, you wouldn’t be able to see much difference. Natural disasters, that come in many guises in the Philippines, expose the fragile infrastructure to devastating damage. It seems at such times that the country is only held together with scotch tape and string.

I feel like I’ve blundered into the last stanza of Larkin’s “Here”:

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

Since my arrival in these climes of tropical weather, I have seen my personal record of successive days living without electricity broken three times. (My original record was three or four days, established, if memory serves me right, in 1971, when an ice storm knocked out the power in Columbia, South Carolina.) Here on my island in 2008, a typhoon called Frank knocked out all the power for nine days. Then, in 2011, an earthquake left me without power for 14 days. And then, as a sort of culmination, typhoon Haiyan, called Yolanda here, took it away for thirty-seven days. It would be wise, I suppose, to learn to live without electricity, since its absence brings about so much – what else can I call it but suffering? But that would require the unlearning of a lifetime of habits with which I am unable part.

If I wanted to describe to you what it’s like to have power restored, for a bare lightbulb on the ceiling to suddenly come to life and shine through the darkness (oh, what darkness!), I might allude to the experience of a prisoner of war, tunneling his way toward freedom, and after interminable days of labor and subterfuge, always on the point of being caught and finding all of his labors go to waste, he climbs out of the hole to find that he is outside the wire, that he made it. Now the run to freedom begins in earnest.

So here it is - the last day of the year. If I bothered about auspices, this moment is most auspicious. Alas, the circumstances couldn’t be less auspicious. One of the most common superstitions among these people who live in the dark (and who seem to like it there) is when the palm of your left hand itches, it means money is coming. But you mustn’t scratch it, or the money won’t come. Just like living here – having an itch you can’t scratch. As much of a skeptic as I strive to be, I find myself annoyed by such folk ways. Yet whenever my left palm itches, I sometimes stop myself from scratching it. It reminds me of Primo Levi, who once found himself in a situation - in Auschwitz – in which he came close to renouncing atheism:

This happened in the October of 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death. Naked and compressed among my naked companions with my index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the "commission" that with one glance would decide whether I should immediately go into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instant I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: you do not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a non-believer is capable. I rejected the temptation: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it. (The Drowned and the Saved)

I wouldn’t want my skepticism to be tested on the point of death. I don’t think I could be so resolute.

As for my resolutions, I hope to be wiser one year from today. If I can be richer, let my riches come in many forms. Out goes the bad old year. In comes the new.

Anna Karina

Anna Karina, who died Saturday, was the most recognizable face of the French New Wave, thanks to the roles given her by Jean-Luc Godard. (He wanted her to do a nude scene in Breathless, but she refused. "But I just saw you in a bathtub in a commercial," he argued. She wasn't nude, she countered, but covered in soap suds.) The lilt of those films, their youthful - if overweening - insouciance, their anarchic air of flaunting convention, is inimitable and by now a fixture of film history. Godard may not have been a master of his craft, but he was determined to demonstrate to everyone his contempt for official cinema. Karina's mad dash through the Louvre in Band of Outsiders with Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur is as iconic - if not nearly as moving or meaningful, because the film wasn't nearly as good - as Jeanne Moreau's run, wearing men's clothes, across a footbridge in Truffaut's Jules and Jim (it helped that both films were shot by Raoul Coutard, unarguably an artist).

Like Hanna Schygulla, who held a similar position in relation to Fassbinder, Karina broke free of Godard's control and enjoyed a career of her own - more lucratively, if far less critically acclaimed. (It wasn't a contest, but the argument over Godard's relative importance was laid to rest long ago. Truffaut won.) Funny how auteurists even now try to downplay her performance in Visconti's beautiful adaptation of Camus's The Stranger, simply because their dogma won't allow them to recognize the film's excellence. (It's so unlike every other Visconti film - which is probably why I love it.) Her performance, as Meursault's unfortunate girlfriend, was touching.

But she is being extolled, yesterday and today, for Pierrot le fou, Masculin Feminin and Alphaville, films as redolent of their time as Sonny Rollins's first recordings. It seems to me intensely sad that lately the only time people want to argue about the meaning of the word "cinema" is when a venerable filmmaker dares to question the validity of trashy superhero movies. (What made it far worse was when he explained what he meant to the halfwits who worship at the Marvel - or Disney's Star Wars - altar.) As long as people who take the subject seriously want to explore what real cinema is, they will find out soon enough how integral a part Anna Karina played in cinema's greatest decade, which was actually only about seven years, 1959-1966. I am sorry that the flesh and blood woman has passed, but her image, her lovely face and form, are as immortal as Garbo's, Monica Vitti's, and Setsuko Hara's. Vivre Karina. (Vivre cinema.)

Another Christmas

Watching the Robert Zemeckis movie The Polar Express for maybe the fourth time this past week, I was reminded of what James Agee wrote more than seventy years ago about the original Miracle on 34th Street:

Santa Claus (well played by Edmund Gwenn) comes to Herald Square and wraps up the millennium in one neat package. Clever, and pleased with itself, and liked by practically everybody; but since I have always despised the maxim "Honesty is the best policy," I enjoy even less a statement of the profits accruing through faith, loving kindness, etc. I expect next a "witty, tender little fantasy" presenting the Son of God (Sonny Tufts) as God's Customers' Man." (1)

Miracle is such a perennial holiday favorite that it has been remade at least twice, and yet it is little more than a cute love letter to our sanctimoniously secular, peculiarly American brand of consumerism, in which the meaning of Christmas has been hijacked by a cartoon figure made up of an unholy hodgepodge Saint Nicholas, his doppelgänger Santa Claus, a popular illustration by Thomas Nast, Currier & Ives, and the story "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" by Clement Clarke Moore. The distinction, I think, is crucial: while believers in Jesus are expected to take the story of his birth as gospel truth all their lives, belief in Santa is only expected from children. When they grow up, their faith is extinguished by their embrace of a factual, rational universe in which it is absurd to accept the existence of a jolly old man (even if he is a saint) who distributes gifts to all subscribing children around the world - in one night!

The Polar Express is easily the most expensive ($165m) and elaborate of a long line of holiday movies that are committed to convincing children (and the child who lies dormant within all of us grownups) that Santa Claus exists. There are some - non-Christian foreigners, mostly - who are so confused by our juxtaposition of Jesus and Santa that they have come to the conclusion that the former is the latter as a young man. Who knows but that this confusion will become prevalent in succeeding generations that never adopt a religion, let alone reject one? Not only is the deployment of The Polar Express' motion capture technique taken to somewhat scary - even creepy - extremes, but its incorporation of every cliché about Santa and his elves on the North Pole (which is a piece of frozen ocean that is constantly on the move) is a sign of its determination to transcend critical judgement.

A recent Guardian article addressed the curious tolerance of film viewers for otherwise execrable films that have anything to do with Christmas.(1) The new movie, Last Christmas, written by Emma Thompson, has proved to be as awful as Love Actually - that Christmas-viewing favorite among the British. Factors that would otherwise sink a newly-released film - bad writing, predictable plots, poor execution (acting, directing, editing, etc.) - somehow has no effect on a holiday-themed film. One proof of the strange immunity of holiday films to criticism is the fact that no one watches them at any other time of the year. They are an integral part of the process with which we try to induce what is mysteriously known as the "Christmas Spirit." We play old songs like "White Christmas" and "Jingle Bells" and festoon our homes inside and out with garish decorations and lights - all of it designed to put us in the mood for the season. If the Christmas Spirit means anything to me, it's about memories of Christmases past. In a powerful way, continuing to keep Christmas well is a commemoration but also a kind of séance in which the ones I have lost are represented in spirit. I continue to take part in the old rites because they cannot.

I already declared, years ago, my favorite Christmas movie, made by Frank Capra. But it isn't It's a Wonderful Life, which Capra made after the war and is a film that I would love to remake. My favorite Christmas movie is Meet John Doe, but it isn't about Christmas. The film ends on Christmas Eve in the snow with distant bells ringing, but it wasn't supposed to. A desperate man has come to city hall to fulfill a promise - to jump from its roof at midnight if people didn't start loving one another.

In a speech earlier in the film, the title character (whose real name is John Willoughby, played with aching conviction by Gary Cooper), tries to convince anyone who is listening (on the radio) that it's time to live up to the Christmas ideal:

I know a lot of you are saying to yourselves, "He's askin' for a miracle to happen. He's expectin' people to change all of a sudden. Well, you're wrong. It's no miracle. It's no miracle because I see it happen once every year. And and so do you -- at Christmas time. There's somethin' swell about the spirit of Christmas, to see what it does to people, all kinds of people.

Now, why can't that spirit, that same, warm Christmas spirit last the whole year around? Gosh, if it ever did, if each and every John Doe would make that spirit last 365 days out of the year, we'd develop such a strength, we'd create such a tidal wave of good will that no human force could stand against it. Yes sir, my friends, the meek can only inherit the earth when the John Doe's start lovin' their neighbors. You better start right now. Don't wait till the game is called on account of darkness. Wake up, John Doe. You're the hope of the world.

John Doe's mistake was probably trying to stretch brotherly love too far (and too thinly). Of course, the Christmas Spirit simply can't last. It was never meant to, even when Christmas was a pagan celebration to tell the gods of winter that, no matter how cold and dark and dead the world around us may seem (with the winter solstice a week from today), we are here with our lights and life and abundance to defy it.

In these terms and in the old spirit of Christmas, I wish all of my readers (all five of you) a lustrous and joyous Christmas.


(1) The Nation, August 30, 1947.
(2) "Turkey anyone? Why standards slip at Christmas when it comes to film," by Steve Rose, 2 Dec 2019.

Something To Remember Him By

The Oriental Theater on Randolph St.

And when I wouldn't take her downtown to the Oriental Theatre she didn't deny herself the company of other boys.


It was last Saturday. I was sitting in the sala (living room) of my small, dark apartment late that morning on my Philippine island. But it wasn't 85 degrees, with my front door open so I had enough light to read by. I had been transported to Chicago in February by Louie, the narrator of Saul Bellow's story, "Something to Remember Me By."

One day in early February, 1933, Louie, 17 and in high school, lives through a day so exceptional, so incredible that it reveals to him the workings of a hidden force in his life, the very principles of existence. This unforgettable day, which Louie relates in old age to his grandchild, "began like any other winter school day in Chicago - grimly ordinary." Just how ordinarily grim, Bellow makes extraordinarily clear:

Chicago in winter, armored in gray ice, the sky low, the going heavy ... The temperatures a few degrees above zero, botanical frost shapes on the windowpane, the snow swept up in heaps, the ice gritty and the streets, block after block, bound together by the iron of the sky ... The street ice was dark gray. Snow was piled against the trees. Their trunks had a mineral black look. Waiting out the winter in their alligator armor they gathered coal soot ... The days short, the streetlights weak, the soiled snowbanks toward evening became a source of light. 

But, like a threnody, there is Louie's dying mother, so near to death that each day holds the threat of him returning home in the evening to a father who will embrace him or strike him with his fists in his "Biblical rage." Louie has an after-school job delivering flowers. On this particular day his delivery takes him to the city's North Side, an hour's ride by streetcar. He's delivering lilies to a family in mourning. He is shown through to the kitchen, past a room empty but for the coffin. He looks at the corpse, a girl older than his girlfriend, now "all buoyancy gone, a weight that counted totally on support, not so much lying as sunk in this gray rectangle."

His delivery done, by now almost dark, Louie visits the office of Philip, his dentist brother-in-law, with whom he can travel home. Philip isn't there. So Louie looks for him next door in a doctor's office. On entering an examining room, he encounters a young woman, lying naked on the table, copper wires attached to her wrists. Without showing the slightest embarrassment, letting him see everything, the woman dresses slowly. In his reminiscence written a lifetime later, Louie writes: 

As the woman raised both her arms so that I could undo the buckles, her breasts swayed, and when I bent over her the odor of her upper body made me think of the frilled brown papers in a box after the chocolates had been eaten--a sweet aftersmell and acrid cardboard mixed. . . The cells of my body were like bees, drunker and drunker on sexual honey (I expect that this will change the figure of Grandfather Louie, the old man remembered as this or that but never as a hive of erotic bees).

Complaining of muscle spasms in her back, the woman asks Louie if he can help her down the stairs to the street. Forgetting Philip, the hour, and his distance from home, Louie proceeds with her to the street, where she then asks him to take her home. "At the moment, a glamorous, sexual girl had me in tow. I couldn't guess where I was being led, nor how far, nor what she would surprise me with, nor the consequences."

But it's a setup, a prank that leaves Louie with no clothes and not even the seven cents for the streetcar fare. He finds clothes, but they're nothing but a woman's dress, a quilted bed jacket and a knitted tam. He puts them on and goes back to the street. Still looking for Philip, Louie locates a druggist who might know where he is. Mistaking Louie for a girl, the druggist suggests a neighborhood speakeasy where Philip sometimes went. 

Finding the place is easy enough. Inside, "A sort of bar was set up, a few hanging fixtures, some tables from an ice cream parlor, wire-backed chairs." The barman, a Greek, listens to Louie's misadventure. He sympathizes and offers to give him fifty cents if he will carry a drunk customer home. Louie gets him there and even cooks his two little girls a supper of fried pork chops. He feels his defilement is complete as the pork fat spatters onto his arms. "All that my upbringing held in horror geysered up, my throat filling with it, my guts griping." He looks in on the drunk, finds some pants and, putting them on, simply tucks the dress down them. He grabs a handful of pennies off the drunk's nightstand and leaves. 

Louie makes it home and is relieved when his father hits him on the head, instead of embracing him, a sure sign that his mother hasn't died. On the streetcar home he had thought of all the things his people did when someone died. "After a death, mirrors were immediately covered. I can't say what this pious superstition means. Will the soul of your dead be reflected in a looking glass, or is this custom a check to the vanity of the living?"

The meaning of Louie's long day in February is something he seeks in his books, something metaphysical. Yet he doesn't notice the signs he encounters along the way: the lilies, the dead girl in her coffin, the naked woman and her frustrated promise of gratified desire, only to be stripped naked himself and forced to scramble across the city wearing a dress.

When Louie escorts the woman to her "home," she asks him "What are you going to be, have you picked your profession?" But Louie is thinking

I had no use for professions. Utterly none. There were accountants and engineers in the soup lines. In the world slump, professions were useless. You were free, therefore, to make something extraordinary of yourself. I might have said, if I hadn't been excited to the point of sickness, that I didn't ride around the city on the cars to make a buck or to be useful to the family, but to take a reading of this boring, depressed, ugly, endless, rotting city. I couldn't have thought it then, but I now understand that my purpose was to interpret this place. Its power was tremendous. But so was mine, potentially. I refused absolutely to believe for a moment that people here were doing what they thought they were doing. Beneath the apparent life of these streets was their real life, beneath each face the real face, beneath each voice and its words the true tone and the real message. 

The woman notices the loose pages of a book in Louie's pocket. "You would have thought that the book or book-fragment in my pocket was a talisman from a fairy tale to open castle gates or carry me to mountaintops." He spends all his money on books. When his clothes are stolen, it's the book-fragment that he regrets losing the most.

Bellow's stories are almost all about loss, and about the salvages his protagonists achieve at the end - sometimes at the cost - of their lives. And they are always reaching for some design, a reason for, some solution to, the astonishing adventures that Bellow relates. Refusing to believe that the calamities that afflict them can have no ultimate point, they sometimes apply the most far-fetched reasoning, from a deservedly obscure book they once read, to make sense of it all. 

Giving proportion to what is out of all proportion. Like Chicago itself: "The city was laid out on a colossal grid, eight blocks to the mile, every fourth street a car line." The cars are streetcars. An hour's ride from home to the North Side. Louie would read on the long passage because, he claims, "Reading shut out the sights. In fact there were no sights - more of the same and then more of the same. Shop fronts, garages, warehouses, narrow brick bungalows." Louie trying to interpose the knowledge he finds in books on the immovable spectacle, the undeniable spectacle of city streets in all their ugliness and multitudinous meaning is the story's final irony. Bellow uses metaphors that add to the solidity of the world, making the world more substantial than it already is. Devoting the power of language to conveying the richness of sensual experience is Bellow's ultimate truth.

And then there were none

Before I let go of November, I have one more duty to perform - saying goodbye to one more of my heroes. The critic John Simon died last Sunday, the 24th, at the age of 94. His obituary was published hard upon in the New York Times. It had been waiting in their obituary files for a long time, when it became clear that Simon wasn't going away expediently. It is a balanced obituary, if not exactly fair, that touches all the bases: Simon's origins, between the wars, in what was then Yugoslavia and is now Serbia, his fluency in languages, his education in English public (i.e., private) school, moving to the U.S. in 1941, finishing his itinerant education with a PhD from Harvard in Comparative Literature. When he reviewed the Peter O'Toole remake of James Hilton's Goodbye, Mr. Chips, he wrote with uncharacteristic emotion: 

I must confess that Goodbye, Mr. Chips moved me to tears. But I must also confess that I attended the Leys School in Cambridge, the subject of Hilton's novel, and that I was one of those new boys who at the start of every Michaelmas term tramped up Trumpington Road to have tea with the kindly old retired master who was the model for Chips. So I may not be an unbiased judge.

He was mentored by Jacques Barzun, Dwight Macdonald, and Robert Brustein. On the dust jacket of Simon's 1971 collection Movies Into Film is this blurb from Macdonald: "John Simon is still our best film critic. He's literate, readable and scrupulously toughminded in his judgements."

Quite by accident, Simon was my introduction to contemporary film criticism. (James Agee was the first real film critic I encountered, but he died exactly three years before I was born.) Compared to his colleagues whom I was reading with equal avidity (both of whom - Vernon Young and Stanley Kauffmann - he singled out for praise), he was more exacting, less compromising, and his writing, though grammatically perfect (he frequently savaged other critics for their grammatical and syntactical gaffes), was inelegant and preoccupied with sometimes arcane puns. His fluency in several languages often saw him performing the invaluable - though thankless - task of correcting the dreadful subtitles of the many foreign-language films available on American screens.

I sometimes disagreed with him, but I found him, more often than any other critic I was reading in the '70s and '80s, to be right in his judgements. Whether or not I was right only posterity can prove. With John Simon's passing, what some called the Heroic Age of American film criticism has come to a close.

Giving Thanks

The one in the back

Life cries for joy though it must end in tears.


On the eve of Thanksgiving, I have learned in the space of only a few hours that two of my heroes have died - Jonathan Miller and Clive James. I dedicated some space to them before here on this blog, Miller ten years ago in A Bitter Pill and James most recently in Clive James is Still Not Dead. I won't revise that last statement, now that they are both immortal.

I first became acquainted with Miller, like we all did, through Beyond the Fringe, the Edinburgh Festival revue that "went viral" in the early 1960s and propelled him and his three co-conspirators, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Alan Bennett onto international stages. Strangely, it was the better performers, Cook and Moore, who were the most famous, and who were the first of the quartet to go. Miller and Bennett were just as irreverent, when necessary, but their contributions were more cerebral. Bennett is now the last of the Fringes. Miller was a physician, one of the greatest champions of Britain's NHS, which is in real peril of "privatization" (aka profitization) now that the Tories are being handed their long-awaited license to kill it. He was also a theater, opera, film and television director. In the '60s he made what I consider to be the best film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.

Clive James

James's achievements are multifarious, including being one of the finest critics anywhere - on every subject. Diagnosed with leukemia in 2010, the only effect it seemed to have on him was to force him to think about death - for nearly a decade. His condition exacerbated his emphysema, so much so that he couldn't stand the long flight home to Australia. So he settled down to die in Cambridge. 

To choose just one of his many famous quotes, there is one that I can actually verify: “Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to jail, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects Rilke was a prick.”  

What better way to end than in what sounded like James's fond farewell poem (which he wrote two years ago):

Your death, near now, is of an easy sort.
So slow a fading out brings no real pain.
Breath growing short
Is just uncomfortable. You feel the drain
Of energy, but thought and sight remain:

Enhanced, in fact. When did you ever see
So much sweet beauty as when fine rain falls
On that small tree
And saturates your brick back garden walls,
So many Amber Rooms and mirror halls?

Ever more lavish as the dusk descends
This glistening illuminates the air.
It never ends.
Whenever the rain comes it will be there,
Beyond my time, but now I take my share.

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that. That will end the game
For me, though life continues all the same:

Filling the double doors to bathe my eyes,
A final flood of colors will live on
As my mind dies,
Burned by my vision of a world that shone
So brightly at the last, and then was gone.


Many thanks to them both. A somber occasion, but my Thanksgiving cornucopia is full to bursting.

Le Silence de la Mer

Le Silence de la Mer (1949), Jean-Pierre Melville's first feature-length film, has become legendary - so much so that the accounts of its making widely differ. Having been prevented by the rigid requirements of postwar French film production from breaking into the profession on the ground floor, Melville felt that, if he was ever to become a filmmaker, he had to declare himself an "amateur" and create a production company of his own. This is why he was such a hero of the Cahiers du Cinema critics. They, too, looked forward to becoming filmmakers, but without having to satisfy the qualifications of the industry.

After repeated efforts to gain the approval of Jean Bruller to make a film of his novel, which had become a best-seller in France after the war, Melville informed him that he would make the film without acquiring the official rights, but would submit the finished film for the approval of a tribunal of judges, all former members of the Resistance. If it failed to gain their approval, Melville vowed to destroy the negative and all positive prints of the film. Bruller agreed to Melville's proposal. However, examination of the film's shooting script, which fell into the possession of the Cinémathèque Francaise, reveals that Bruller was closely involved in the production.

Howard Vernon (born Mario Lippert, Swiss father, American mother) plays Werner von Ebrennac, and he has just the sort of classical ugliness that the role needed. When he looks entreatingly at Nicole Stéphane (born Baroness Nicole de Rothschild [1]), it's intended to make our flesh crawl. This German officer, whose ridiculous speeches about a "marriage" of Germany and France, gradually becomes hateful to himself. He emphatically quotes to his captive audience a speech from Macbeth (Act V Scene 2):

Now does he feel
His secret murders sticking on his hands;
Now minutely revolts upbraid his faith-breach;
Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love: now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant's robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.

He's trying to apply this speech by Angus to French president Laval, but he neglects to add the very next speech in the play (by Menteith) that bears directly on himself:

Who then shall blame
His pester'd senses to recoil and start,
When all that is within him does condemn
Itself for being there?

As he slowly learns what the German occupation of France is really about - the complete destruction of French culture, Hitler's revenge on Versailles - Ebrennac grows to despise his role in the occupation, and eventually volunteers for combat duty (though I wonder of what use a lame lieutenant would be at the front).

The turning point comes when the Frenchman has to visit the Kommandatur to turn in a routine fire report when Ebrennac sees the old man's reflection in the mirror. Ebrennac has a look of almost panicked guilt on his face, like he's been caught in the act - a Hitler functionary going about his daily routine of occupation and oppression. He bows to the old man and turns to leave the room.

What impact do the extreme strictures of Melville's budget have on the film? In other words, does his economy of means translate into an economy of ends? There are a few moments in which Melville covers a missing shot (of the Lieutenant's staff car, for instance) with a sound effect. Or when Ebrennac stands waiting for the arrival of a train that we never see. One could argue that the shots are unnecessary, but they call attention to themselves. To some extent, Melville was anticipating Bresson's elisions.

The scenes in which Ebrennac relates his visit to Paris on leave seem strange at first. Like a tourist travelogue, we see him standing against various Paris landmarks, cleverly intercut with newsreel footage of German soldiers in Paris. At one point a soldier in a newsreel salutes someone off camera and Ebrennac returns his salute. The fellow Wehrmacht officers he meets are suitably monstrous, with one of them telling him how Treblinka has become obsolete and how future death camps will accommodate the killing of 2,000 prisoners per day.

Melville handles the monotony of the narrative extremely well, developing a rhythm that captures the suffocating routine of life under the Occupation. Edgar Bischoff's music is overwherlming at times, but it reflects the great emotional undercurrent that the images can't show. For ordinary Frenchmen, the saying "life goes on" was especially galling from 1940-44. The decision was made by a traitorous French leadership that surrender was preferable to defeat in battle, to the physical destruction of France.

What a unique, one-off film; like all great films, a one-off. Made with no money - apparently. Shot in Bruller's own house outside Paris. Three characters (two of them aren't even named). I counted five interior sets. We never hear the voice of the niece - the one time she speaks, her uncle's narration drowns her out. Melville was a member of the Resistance, and no other film that I've seen, save Marcel Ophuls's Le chagrin et la pitié, captures something, the feel, of what it must have been like to be a Frenchman under German occupation.(2) The silent treatment that the old Frenchman and his niece give the Wehrmacht Lieutenant is a strange game at first - an odd condition, really. Carrying on their daily routines: him with his pipe, her with her sewing and knitting - carrying on as if nothing were wrong, nothing had changed: it was how all Frenchmen behaved - even those enlisted in the Resistance had covers, day jobs. It wasn't as if there was an active front, to which uniformed fighters marched away to war. The front was, as it were, everywhere. 



(1) The Baroness was instrumental in Melville's career, even after a car crash forced her out of acting. She turned to producing independent films by Georges Franju and Melville. Late in her life she was Susan Sontag's lover.
(2) Losey's Monsieur Klein effectively conveys nightmarish, Kafkaesque aspect of the Occupation.
[A personal note that intrigued me is when the Uncle tells us how he drinks coffee in the evenings because it helps him to sleep. Perhaps it's my own advancing age, buy I, too, find that coffee is an excellent soporific.]

Crossing Delancey

Now that I have Turner Classic Movies back in my life (don't ask me how), I had the pleasure of watching their late Saturday night movie - late Sunday morning for me - Crossing Delancey (1988). I had fond memories of the first time I watched it thirty years ago. I don't remember where I was when I saw it, though I was probably in Nevada on my first tour of duty in the Navy.

Crossing Delancey is billed as a romantic comedy, but it's thin on both. Immediately on being reminded that the film's leading character works at New York's "last privately-owned bookstore", I thought of You've Got Mail and what a relief it is to be deprived of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Instead we have Amy Irving and Peter Riegert, and instead of a plot stolen from Lubitsch's Shop Around the Corner, Crossing Delancey was adapted by Susan Sandler from her own play.

Isabelle works at the aforementioned bookstore, which is where she feels she belongs, among bohemian types, like a Dutch author, played by Jeroen Krabbé, whose marriage is complicated enough for him to show interest in Isabelle. He recites to her lines from the Chinese Book of Songs:

Ripe plums are falling
now there are only five
may a fine lover come for me
while there is still time

Ripe plums are falling
now there are only three
may a fine lover come for me
while there is still time

Ripe plums are falling
i gather them in a shallow basket
may a fine lover come for me
tell me his name

The Dutchman is only interested in Isabelle's plums, but she's oblivious of just how manipulative and smarmy he is. Meanwhile, Isabelle's grandmother, Ida, whom Isabelle calls her Bubbie (the Yiddish word Bubbe, or grandmother), has enlisted a matchmaker, a real horror played by Sylvia Miles, to find a nice Jewish boy for her. The matchmaker comes up with Sam (Peter Riegert) who inherited a pickle store from his father. He's down-to-earth and prosaic, and has been - unbeknownst to her - interested in Isabelle for awhile. According to the rules of romantic comedy, there's supposed to be some suspense involved about which man Isabelle will choose - although the plot has more to do with which life she will choose: a life of the mind, the arts (which Micklin Silver portrays as pretentious posturing) or a life in the real world of pickles, living up to the expectations of her Jewish family. Lost somewhere in the shuffle is Isabelle living a life of her own instead of the one outfitted for her by her Bubbie. There is no real conflict, however, as the Dutch writer is exposed as an ass (in one scene, Rosemary Harris tells him to go back to the Netherlands to his own language - sage advice) and Sam shows Isabelle what a fine dancer (and kisser) her is. 

What makes the formulaic bearable in this case are the actors. I will single out the two leads, Irving and Riegert, and one more - Reizl Bozyk as Bubbie. For an all-too-short time, Amy Irving was the darling of American film. She married the Brazilian filmmaker Hector Babenco (divorced 2005), who gave her the lead in his beautiful film Bossa Nova (2000). She gives a fine performance in Crossing Delancey as a big girl lost. By now it's hard to believe that Peter Riegert was a pledge in the Animal House (1979) fraternity. He made a much bigger - and memorable - splash in Bill Forsyth's Local Hero (1983). In Crossing Delancey he does a nice turn as a Jewish New Yorker. In fact, it's the parochial (if that is the word) Jewish world in which Crossing Delancey is solidly situated that gives it a flavor that is strong, if not exactly distinct. It's Reizl Bozyk, a longtime actor in the Yiddish theater, playing Bubbie, her first film role, that adds a ring of truth to an otherwise predictable story.

Some elements of the production seem too imposing, like the almost incessant music, supplied mostly by The Roches (Suzzy Roche plays Isabelle's friend Marilyn) and the otherwise distinguished American composer Paul Chihara. (Though I was puzzled by a late piano solo in the film that borrows considerably from Dave Grusin's theme from On Golden Pond.) But the shots of 1980s Manhattan supplied by Theo Van de Sande, including a handball game in real Manhattan afternoon sunlight, were nicely done, along with the clothes and the hair all now redolent of the time. There's a scene in a crowded deli in which Run DMC blasts from a boom box, only to be interrupted by an old woman in stage makeup who comes into the deli off the street and launches into "Some Enchanted Evening" to the now dumbstruck crowd, including Isabelle, closing with the lines,

Some enchanted evening, when you find your true love,
When you hear him call you across a crowded room,
Then fly to his side and make him your own,
Or all through your life you may dream all alone.
Once you have found him, never let him go,
Once you have found him, never let him go.

Joan Micklin Silver had an uneven career. I still like her 1979 film, Chilly Scenes of Winter, with Mary Beth Hurt and the late John Heard (and Peter Riegert). Without having seen it in almost forty years, it lingers pleasantly in my memory of when I was in college in my early twenties. How splendid that so many of the people I have mentioned in this review, Irving, Riegert, Silver, the Roches, are still around and still "active."

Speakable

With the new film Jojo Rabbit confusing critics and delighting audiences with its depiction of Adolf Hitler as the imaginary friend of a German boy whose mother is hiding a Jewish girl in her attic, I found a clip on YouTube in which the Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke commented a few years ago on the German film Downfall, that shows us Hitler's last days in his Berlin bunker. "First of all," Haneke told a Hollywood Reporter interviewer, "I have to say that I argued with Bernd Eichinger [the producer of Downfall] about the film. I found it both repulsive and dumb."(1) The interviewer had asked Haneke if a film about Hitler had the potential to "humanize" its subject and therefore cause people to sympathize with him.

When the film Downfall was released in the U.S., Stanley Kauffmann praised it for its cinematic qualities, but he was also puzzled by it:

Thus the very virtues of the film leave us disturbed and puzzled. Why was Downfall made? Was it an attempt to balance the world's black view of Hitler, to show that at least he was sincere and brave? It would have been stupid to alter the account, to film a comic-book cartoon of those last days with all the Nazi bigwigs as craven weaklings. But, since the film had to be made this way if at all, why was it made? What was the purpose in the minds of Eichinger and Hirschbiegel? 

Many, I hope, remember Hitler, A Film From Germany (1977) by Hans Jürgen Syberberg. It is not strictly a film about Hitler: rather, it is a visionary, philosophical fantasia about a felt need in Germany for Hitler, and about his creation. (In one scene the dead Hitler, clad in a toga, speaks to Germany from the grave of Wagner: "I was and am the end of your most secret wishes, the legend and reality of your dreams. . . . ") 

Syberberg called Hitler "the greatest film-maker of all time," asserting that Hitler created World War II for the same reason he commissioned Leni Riefenstahl to film the Nuremberg Party Congress, "in order to view the rushes privately every evening.... It is very interesting that the only objects to remain of the Third Reich are fragments of celluloid: nothing else exists--not the architecture of Albert Speer, nor the borders of the big German Reich of which Hitler dreamed--only the celluloid record of his existence, of the war." To that celluloid record, Downfall is a well-wrought, troubling postscript.(2)

Clive James, writing about film critics, used Downfall as an example of how some films are tests of our credulity:

Similarly, if you know too much about the movies but not enough about the world, you won't be able to see that "Downfall" is dangerously sentimental. Realistic in every observable detail, it is nevertheless a fantasy to the roots, because the pretty girl who plays the secretary looks shocked when Hitler inveighs against the Jews. It comes as a surprise to her. Well, it couldn't have; but to know why that is so, you have to have read a few books. No matter how many movies you have seen, they won't give you the truth of the matter, because it can't be shown as action.(3)

In the clip I mentioned above, the Hollywood Reporter interviewer asked Michael Haneke if he would consider making a film about Hitler. "No," Haneke replied. 

It's impossible for me to do that because of the idea of creating entertainment of this, turning this into entertainment, and that's why I have problems with Spielberg's film about the concentration camps, for example. The idea, the mere idea of trying to draw and create suspense out of the question whether out of the shower head, gas is going to come or water. That to me is unspeakable ... Anything that treats such a subject as entertainment is for me unspeakable.

How interesting that one particular scene from Schindler's List, in which dozens of naked women are crammed into a dark room that they don't know is either a shower or a gas chamber, stuck in Haneke's memory as it did. Did he find it "entertaining?" I'm an admirer of some of Haneke's films, but this is the man who admitted in another interview, "I once said to Isabelle Huppert that the ideal scene should force the spectator to look away." I would bet that Haneke couldn't bring himself to look away from Spielberg's "entertainment."

Is it unspeakable to have to remind ourselves occasionally (because we don't like to remember unpleasant truths) of what we are capable as a species when we allow ourselves - because it cannot happen without our consent - to be duped by a false prophet, when we surrender our will, when we follow a leader who promises us impossible things like mastery of the world or a return to the past?

Once more I turn to Primo Levi: "I do not find it permissible to explain a historical phenomenon by piling all the blame on a single individual (those who carry out horrendous orders are not innocent!)." 

As for Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary shown in Downfall to have been oblivious of Hitler's evils, Levi wrote:

In Hitler's Germany a particular code was widespread: those who knew did not talk; those who did not know did not ask questions; those who did ask questions received no answers. In this way the typical German citizen won and defended his ignorance, which seemed to him sufficient justification of his adherence to Nazism. Shutting his mouth, his eyes and his ears, he built for himself the illusion of not knowing, hence not being an accomplice to the things taking place in front of his very door.

For this reason, it is everyone's duty to reflect on what happened. Everybody must know, or remember, that when Hitler and Mussolini spoke in public, they were believed, applauded, admired, adored like gods. The ideas they proclaimed were not always the same and were, in general, aberrant or silly or cruel. And yet they were acclaimed with hosannahs and followed to the death by millions of the faithful.(4)

Only yesterday it was announced that the house in which Hitler was born will be converted into a police station. A synagogue would've been more fitting, but I'm sure that Austrian authorities have to be careful not to offend neo-Nazis' sensibilities.


(1) Michael Haneke disagrees
(2) "Last Acts," The New Republic, February 21, 2005.
(3) "How to Write About Film," The New York Times, June 4, 2006.
(4) The Reawakening, translated by Stuart Woolf (London: The Bodley Head, 1965).

Lost Innocence

God from afar looks graciously upon a gentle master. (Aeschylus, Agamemnon - the Browning version)


Reading a post recently on the Criterion web page devoted to Martin Scorsese, who just turned 77, I stumbled at the headline: "Wishing a very happy birthday to the incomparable Martin Scorsese! Here he is with Kent Jones in conversation about his 1993 romantic masterpiece THE AGE OF INNOCENCE." With all the deference I could summon on the occasion of the birthday of an old American filmmaker who has spent much of his life risking a great deal more than his vanity on projects that were guaranteed to fail, I cannot see how on earth anyone with any critical acumen could think that The Age of Innocence was a masterpiece, let alone a romantic one. I accept the fact that even Criterion, an enterprise devoted to the discovery, preservation and/or restoration of examples of film art from far and wide does so for profit and that not every film they submit to the Criterion Treatment is going to meet my own exacting standard of worthiness (looking through their catalog provides me with equal amounts of pleasure and pain). But The Age of Innocence? A film that, if he is as honest as I expect he is, even Scorsese should look back on with mixed emotions. And even after considering that he only remade Cape Fear to please his producers long enough to persuade them to let him make The Age of Innocence, it was a misstep for Scorsese - honorable and laudable for a filmmaker who was eminently entitled to a misstep.

Even if I were to accept that, at the age of 77, Scorsese is deserving of the title of Master filmmaker (how many former masters have there been? Scorsese is eager to inform us of his own choices for the title), that doesn't mean that every film he made is a masterpiece. I would be happy to argue that about 90% are not masterpieces, and had I the time and the inclination I could demonstrate why. But the problem has nothing to do with the application of critical standards. It's about the limitations of scholarship and how some of the greatest film scholars make the lousiest film critics. The two disciplines can rarely even touch each other, for quite basic and important reasons. Film scholarship and film criticism are distinct - and sometimes antithetical - pursuits. In the film Le fantôme d'Henri Langlois, Langlois himself stated:

Since like everybody else, I was full of silly prejudices I missed out on incredible things. Salome with Theda Bara was for sale. I thought, 'Fox, Theda Bara, American spectacle...who needs it?' Now the film is lost forever. It was probably quite good. From that point on, through trial and error, I saw that people, intent on triage, who think they have taste, me included, are idiots. One must save everything and buy everything. Never assume you know what's of value.

So, the moment that Langlois made a value judgement on material that he had the power to preserve or to consign to oblivion, he made an enormous mistake. Thanks to the efforts of archivists like Langlois and to scholars like Kevin Brownlow, whose magnificent books beginning with The Parade's Gone By, the idea that films of the past are deserving of preservation is popularly accepted. But film scholarship, which is the dedicated study of the who, what, when and where of films, has the responsibility to tell us everything we might need to know about any given film except the success or failure of its design. If it was intended to entertain, does it stand or fall? And if it was reaching for something higher, for art, for instance, does it make it or fall short?

A perfect demonstration of the difference in disciplines came about with the publication in 1966 of Donald Richie's landmark book, The Films of Akira Kurosawa. In his review of the book, Dwight Macdonald wrote of Richie:

His book on Kurosawa is comparable in scholarship, mastery of detail, interpretation and good writing to Richard Ellmann's biography of Joyce. I don't know any other study of a director's work that approaches its scope and intelligence ... He goes into technique so extensively that I should think the book would be useful as a practical exposition of film-making regardless of one's special interest in Kurosawa.

But this impressive praise (with which I wholly agree) is followed by the point Macdonald was getting to and where Richie's book comes up conspicuously lacking:

A masterpiece of scholarship, but not of criticism. Perhaps the very qualities that make it the former prevent it from being the latter ... There is almost no qualitative discrimination between the twenty-three films: all of them are valued on the same (high) level, which is untrue to life, artists being men, not gods, and therefore fallible.

But how was Richie going to attract interest to an all-too-human artist who reached his peak in 1954 with Seven Samurai, and then rode his roller coaster slowly - if circuitously - back down to earth?

Looking over the films of Scorsese's that I have seen, there is a clear distinction that can be made between those that succeeded in realizing the filmmaker's intentions simply by being coherent and resonant as statements, regardless of the relevance of the points he was trying to make, and the others that were made to satisfy one producer or another. At some point in the 1980s, Scorsese attained a mastery of technique that made it possible for him to say and do whatever he wanted with the medium. It's easy to distinguish his commercial work from his personal work. In the latter category you can find Mean Streets (1973), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), The Age of Innocence (1993), Kundun (1997), Gangs of New York (1992), and Silence (2016). Each of these films is intense in a way that most of Scorsese's films are - intensely conceived (at least in visual terms), intensely executed, and intensely framed into a whole. But even here, with his most personal, most individualistic works, problems arose, on every occasion, in the writing stages of each film. I have always had the conviction that Scorsese is a filmmaker most completely at odds with the commercial constraints of American film, but that he is happy to be known as an American filmmaker - partly because of his reverence for a tradition that I don't believe exists in American film. Had Scorsese been making films in Italy, like the filmmakers Rossellini and Visconti, whose work he most reveres, we would certainly have had a greater appreciation of his formidable abilities and have been spared unnecessary work like Cape Fear, Casino, and the films of his deplorable DiCaprio phase, like Shutter Island. Stanley Kauffmann wrote of Scorsese that "patently his films are the work of a man who lives in cinema as a bird lives in the sky. He has invested himself with the history of the art in a way that empowers him without making him an imitator." His work is, I think, the most telling chronicle of the extreme difficulties of a film artist in America.

Yes, masterpieces aren't possible without masters, but lonely is the master with all his masterpieces a long way behind him.

The Real End of the Great War

Primo Levi gave the title The Truce (La Tregua) to the second volume of his memoirs. It deals with the events in his life from his liberation from Auschwitz to his eventual arrival in his native city of Turin. The book's alternate title is The Reawakening, but it ignores the point that Levi was making with The Truce. In his Paris Review interview, Levi spoke about an incident that had an effect on his understanding of war:

Have you read my book The Reawakening? You remember Mordo Nahum? I had mixed feelings toward him. I admired him as a man fit for every situation. But of course he was very cruel to me. He despised me because I was not able to manage. I had no shoes. He told me, Remember, when there is war, the first thing is shoes, and second is eating. Because if you have shoes, then you can run and steal. But you must have shoes. Yes, I told him, well you are right, but there is not war any more. And he told me, Guerra es siempre. There is always war."(1)

The end of the war for Primo Levi, then, was only a temporary suspension of hostilities, a truce. This is an especially sobering reminder on this Day of Remembrance, marking 101 years since the armistice that ended the First World War, the "war to end all wars," as Europeans disingenuously called it. Another survivor of the war against fascism, a Pole, is represented in the fictional film The Real End of the Great War (Prawdziwy koniec wielkiej wojny - 1957). Juliusz Zborski is liberated from a concentration camp (2) physically and mentally enfeebled, unable to communicate beyond smiles and nods to everyone around him. His wife Róża, who had given him up for dead, is compelled to become his caretaker. The film opens like a horror movie - a woman (Róża) is disturbed by someone, or something, fumbling at the door handle of  her cluttered bedroom. She runs to the door and presses against it, speaking as if to a child on the other side to let her sleep. The noise stops and the woman turns to face us with tears in her eyes. She returns to bed, closes her eyes and we fade in to a 1938 New Year's Eve party where the woman, the camera taking her place, is dancing with a smiling handsome man. The dance finished, we return to the woman in bed. She turns out the light. And we realize that the person trying to open the door is Juliusz, the same man with whom Róża was dancing.

The following morning we are shown the sleeping arrangements: Juliusz is exiled to the sofa, and Róża sleeps in the bedroom behind a locked door. Róża has moved on, just as Poland did when the catastrophic war was over. Early in the film, when Juliusz runs an errand for the housemaid (who dotes on him), we are shown Warsaw in the process of recovery, with construction cranes prominent against a morning sky. Juliusz wanders, smiling, across a bustling construction site. He had been an architect before the war (the camera shows us the nameplate on the front door of his flat), and two men on the construction site recognize him and address him. He merely nods and smiles at them, and walks away. 

Before the war, Juliusz was also a man who loved to dance. The scene of him leading Róża in a dizzying waltz at the opening of the film is shockingly mocked in the film's first flashback to Juliusz in the concentration camp, with the camera spinning, this time from Juliusz' perspective. The prisoners are forced to hobble and twirl in a mad, exhausted imitation of dancing, while a conscripted band plays. And they must dance until they drop. Juliusz is the last one standing - dancing, as the guards stand around and laugh at him. The flashback is provoked in Juliusz when, at a party, a guest tries to dance with him. When she turns her attention to tuning the radio to a suitable station, Juliusz drops the glass platter he was holding and, to everyone's alarm, begins to spin on the spot where he stands, the room spinning and dissolving in flashback to the camp.

Róża is tentatively involved with a colleague, Professor Stęgień. She is still young and attractive, and she wants to be happy. Lucyna Winnicka, the actress who plays her in the film, was the wife of Jerzy Kawalerowicz, who directed. She would later appear, to international acclaim, in Kawalerowicz' Night Train and Mother Joan of the Angels. 

The Real End of the Great War never had a theatrical release in the U.S., probably due to its baleful subject. Because it never had an American distributor, the film couldn't find its way to home video. Way back when I was a dedicated and intrepid filmgoer, I was tantalized by a review written from Europe by Vernon Young that called it "a Polish masterpiece": 

Kawalerowicz is one of a nucleus of Polish film-makers which, mainly within the last four years [this was written in 1959], has produced a half-dozen films equal to any which have emerged from Europe since the rise of Italian neo-realism over a decade ago. The True [sic] End is the most deeply disturbing of those I have seen (and each of them disturbs, by either its crucial violence or its wounding sadness). Were it not for Kawalerowicz' dazzling virtuosity, I would be moved to acknowledge the film as virtually insupportable, since it conveys an ordeal so painful as to refute that vestige of belief which the most professedly disenchanted among us nourish in their hearts - the belief that there is a finally discernible compensation for the infliction of extreme suffering.(3)

I got on with my life without seeing the film, all the while keeping it, as I've grown older, on that ever-shrinking list of "films to see before I snuff it." I found it not long ago and I watched it over the weekend. I wasn't disappointed - it's everything I expected it to be. Kawalerowicz' triumph is in not passing judgement on any of the characters. Juliusz tries to reach Róża in any way he can. But he fails, and when he sees how complete his failure is, he takes the only way out that he knows. Róża is freed, but in the film's final shot, as she and the maid in their mourning dress walk past the waiting Professor Stęgień, she shows us her commitment to Juliusz. 

The three flashbacks are presented somewhat too expressionistically, almost as if Juliusz were changing into Mr. Hyde. But the camp scenes themselves are presented exclusively from Juliusz' perspective, dancing deliriously. Until the guards pick him up off the floor in the last flashback, an SS orgy with topless girls, and throw him through a window. Everything else in the film is presented with the utmost subtlety.

Vernon Young noticed the resemblance in the film's last scene to the last scene of The Third Man, with Alida Valli walking away from Harry's grave past Joseph Cotten:

She walks on by, as all those bloody leaves fall, and that, too, is an image that will remain ... When Europe stood aghast at what it had done to itself, that was the hour to make a film on the subject. Later, it was too late without overreaching. I think the only other film that expresses a phase of the tragedy as deeply is The True End of the Great War (Kawalerowicz) but its so unbearable one can't see it twice. Many I know couldn't sit it once.(4)

The obscurity of Real End of the Great War is unpardonable. It deserves a place beside the best films on the subject of the aftermath of war, which are actually very few in number. It invokes neither history nor politics in its portrayal of unheroic ordinary people suffering the after-effects of war.


(1) Primo Levi, The Art of Fiction No. 140, The Paris Review.
(2) There were 23 main German concentration camps in Poland, with hundreds of "subcamps".
(3) Vernon Young, "A Condemned Man Escapes: Five Films on the Subject," 1959.
(4) Vernon Young, "A Sad Tale's Best for Winter: On Re-seeing The Third Man," 1969