The Show Goes On

‘From a certain point there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.’ Franz Kafka

Retirement to a tropical island paradise is a familiar dream to many Americans, especially retired or separated servicemembers. As a disabled veteran, even with a very small pension, I was able to retire to the Philippines at the tender age of 49. No less familiar to the more faithful readers of this blog are the details of what followed. The terms of my retirement became completely involuntary when a fellow American – a fellow American veteran – stole my passport less than a month after my arrival. 

There is a chilling transition in the Tom Hanks movie called Cast Away in which a man named Tom Noland who survived a plane crash in the ocean has washed ashore on a small island in the South Pacific. After struggling to survive for several days he locates shelter in a cave. Trying to knock out a rotten tooth with an ice skate, he knocks himself unconscious. The screen dissolves from Noland’s fire inside the cave to a rockpool on a sunny day and the words FOUR YEARS LATER appear. A fish swimming in the water is suddenly speared and the camera tilts up to show us Noland, who now looks like Robinson Crusoe, standing several yards away on a rock. 

FOURTEEN YEARS LATER, I am closing out another year in the Philippines. A year ago I planned on not being here. I should have been home by now, but circumstances, once again, got in the way. The circumstances present a somewhat different approach to a country’s deportation of aliens. In the US, which has a sizeable population – in the millions – of the undocumented, deportations, whether voluntary or involuntarily, involve the detainment of aliens and their being boarded on one-way flights back to their country of origin. The length of their stay – or overstay – in the US isn’t an issue. Since they came to the US in a financially disadvantageous position, the paying of fines and/or past visas is overlooked. The only object is their removal from US territory. 

In the Philippines the process is, by comparison, draconian. Aliens are deported from the country, and thenceforth blacklisted by the bureau of immigration, preventing them from ever re-entering the country. But before the deportation takes place, aliens are required to pay penalties for every year of their overstay in the amount of 35,000 pesos per year. Since my overstay, due to the extenuating circumstance of having my passport stolen shortly after my arrival, and of not having a sizeable enough income to acquire a replacement passport, has lasted 14 years, the total amount of my overstay penalties is half a million pesos. 

That may sound like a lot of money, but it’s only $10K. The policy may also sound, to us, like extortion, but it’s worth remembering that this is not a developed country that has much experience with immigration – the incoming kind, that is. The Philippines has a great deal of experience, probably greater than any other nation on earth, with outgoing immigration. Their economy depends on an undisclosed, but probably enormous, influx of cash remittances every month sent by overseas Filipino workers. 

I hired a good lawyer last March, recommended to me by a mutual friend, to negotiate with the Bureau of Immigration on my behalf. He organized an appeal for a waiver of the overstay penalties. Because of pandemic restrictions in Manila, the process didn’t get started until September. And it was only after the appeal was filed in October that the lawyer gave me a ballpark figure of the full amount of my debt. Being a lawyer, alas, he didn’t tell me that my appeal didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Manila. I waited two months for the news, and at the beginning of December I was informed, via a ZOOM call, that the waiver had been denied. (In fact, I wasn’t told it had been denied until I asked.) The reason they gave for denying my appeal was the extended length of my overstay. Never mind the fact that I don’t have ten grand at the moment, but the debt must be paid. 

Once paid, I will have a choice between a voluntary deportation (an involuntary one involves arrest and detainment for an indeterminate period), which will also mean I’ll be blacklisted from ever returning to the Philippines, or extending long enough to acquire an SRRV – a special resident visa that will allow me to come and go as I please. The “special” visa costs another $3K. 

The blacklisting is a curious custom here. The list of people blacklisted by Philippine Immigration includes actors like Michael Caine who devoted a chapter of his autobiography, What’s It All About, to “My Worst Location” – when he acted in a movie called Too Late the Hero that was filmed in Luzon Province. His less than flattering picture of his experience prompted the touchy Philippine government to order Caine blacklisted. 

As for myself, more than one of my friends and family members has asked me why I would ever be interested in returning to a country that extorts visitors who are trapped by misfortune. Another friend who is familiar with the Philippines asked me why I would want to leave and why I would want to return to the States, which he says is a “shit show.” Never mind that paradise by any definition is hell if there is no way out. But so what if my homeland is a shit show – it’s MY shit show. And if, as some people believe, there is going to be a fight, then I want to be in on it. 

But this is my life, not a case study. Ultimately (in about a year), I will pay the penalties that I owe the Bureau of Immigration. By then I will have figured out whether I want to never come back here or get the special visa. Until then I have some advice for anyone thinking about travelling to a tropical paradise: secure your passport and your return ticket in an impregnable safe and never trust an expat.

The Shop Around the Corner

To perceive Christmas through its wrapping becomes more difficult with every year. There was a little device we noticed in one of the sporting-goods stores—a trumpet that hunters hold to their ears so that they can hear the distant music of the hounds. Something of the sort is needed now to hear the incredibly distant sound of Christmas in these times, through the dark, material woods that surround it. E. B. White, “A New Package of Energy”

The 81-year-old movie The Shop Around the Corner* is easily one of the least insufferable of the many that are always screened at Christmas – even though it uses Christmas only as a background to its sweet climactic scenes, giving MGM’s set decorators, under the direction of Cedric Gibbons, another chance to show off their considerable skills with chichi. 

The director was Ernst Lubitsch, who had been the most successful director in Europe before he was coaxed by America’s Sweetheart, Mary Pickford, to come to America in 1922 to make movies with her as the star. By the time he made The Shop in 1939 (he insisted on waiting for Margaret Sullavan until she was available), Lubitsch was Hollywood’s leading confectioner. Of all the many foreign filmmakers who moved to Hollywood, either for money or for refuge from war, Lubitsch was by far the most successful, largely because he made films whose aim was to entertain. Considering the number of films, the vast majority in fact, that fail to accomplish this by no means simple ambition, this is saying a great deal. 

Alfred Kralik and Klara Novak work in a leather goods shop in  Budapest. They tell their co-workers (Kralik tells Pirovitch and Klara confides in Ilona) that they each have a pen friend of the opposite sex who is so much more cultivated and refined than the usual sort of people (like Kralik and Klara). Halfway through the film the pen friends plan to meet in a café, until Kralik is fired and can't go through with the meeting. He stands outside the café with Pirovitch hoping to at least see the girl and he discovers that his pen friend is Klara. This love story exists completely on paper – letters passed between two people – until the very end of the film when Kralik fools Klara into believing her pen friend is a Mr. Popkin, balding, with a pot belly, who stole his best line from Victor Hugo, and it’s what makes the film enchanting.  

James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan had a chemistry between them that made them co-stars in four films, including the nearly forgotten The Mortal Storm, released five months after The Shop. Though they look awfully young in The Shop, during shooting Stewart was 31 and Sullavan 30. The film is quite innocently beautiful and has inspired considerable critical logorrhea. Damning with fulsome praise, David Thompson was so moved by the film that he came up with a metaphor he admitted even he didn’t understand: “The Shop Around the Corner may be as sweet and light as an Esterhazy honey ball – whatever that is.” 

A truly great film always yields something new with every viewing, and when you’ve seen a film as many times as I’ve seen The Shop, you begin to look for things you didn’t notice at first. Underneath all the charm and cheeriness and aromatic nostalgia for an old Budapest is something rather topical for our moment. The nightmare of wage slavery, of tyrannical bosses, of unemployment, of the illusion of job security – all of the objectionable aspects of life under capitalism. 

Alfred Kralik has been working in the shop for 9 years, since he was Pepi the errand boy’s age. Yet he’s still only a clerk. When he considers marriage to his pen friend, and asking Mr. Mataschek for a raise, he consults Pirovitch, an older clerk with a wife and children, if he can manage to support a family on a clerk’s salary. 

Kralik: Pirovitch, do you mind if I ask you a personal question? 

Pirovitch: Go ahead. 

Kralik: It’s very confidential… Supposing a fellow like me wants to get married. How much does it cost you to live, you and Mrs. Pirovitch, leaving out the children. 

Pirovitch: Oh, why fool yourself? (he laughs) 

Kralik: Let’s say temporarily – how much it cost? 

Pirovitch: Well, it can be done. And very nicely. Naturally, you cannot be extravagant. 

Kralik: Well, supposing a fellow gets an apartment of three rooms – dining room, living room, bedroom. 

Pirovitch: What do you need three rooms for? You live in the bedroom.

Kralik: Where do you eat? 

Pirovitch: In the kitchen. Get a nice big kitchen. 

Kralik: Where do you entertain? 

Pirovitch: Entertain? What are you, an ambassador? Who do you want to entertain? Listen, if someone is really your friend, he comes after dinner.

This exchange paints a vivid picture of the pinched lives of newlyweds at the very end of the Great Depression. The only difference today is that both spouses have to work. 

When Matuschek suspects his wife of being unfaithful – and of her being unfaithful with Kralik – he becomes an irascible, tyrannical boss. His employees are defenseless against his temper tantrums, which calls into question the very terms that made them so defenseless and Matuschek’s presumed right to be tyrannical. 

But Lubitsch gives us a rather Dickensian happy ending when the boss is foiled in a suicide attempt and at last learns the value of life and friendship. On Christmas Eve his store makes a lot of money and he gives every one of his employees a bonus. Frank Morgan plays Matuschek in exactly the same tone he used to play the Wizard of Oz, changing from a supernatural monster into a kind old teddy bear. He gives out the bonuses exactly as he gave the Scarecrow a diploma, the Tin Man a heart-shaped clock and the Cowardly Lion a medal. In his shop he delivers a speech to his employees: 

This morning when I received the little Christmas tree that you all sent me, I was deeply moved. I read your little note over and over and it made me very happy that you missed me and hoped that I’d be coming back home soon again. You’re right. This is my home. This is where I spent most of my life.

The speech is meant to be heartwarming, I suppose. But it’s actually sad and quite chilling, especially considering how Mataschek’s wife had to seek attention from another man who didn’t spend as much time in the shop. 

One of the stories coming out of Mayfield, Kentucky in the aftermath of the tornado was how employees at a candle factory making candles for Christmas were told by supervisors when they tried to leave the warehouse as the tornado approached that if they left they would lose their jobs. I was reminded of this report when I watched the scene in which Mr. Mataschek tells his six employees that they have to stay late to decorate the store windows. He loses his temper and berates them – but changes his tone entirely when a customer enters the store, and illustrating everything you need to know about capitalism. The one who has the money makes the rules. 

You could argue that Lubitsch wasn’t interested in changing the world. He wanted simply to observe it and derive from the everyday lives of his characters the lineaments of art. Unedifying entertainment at its richest. At this, Lubitsch was a past master, and The Shop Around the Corner makes the word masterpiece clean again. 

*You’ve Got Mail, the Nora Ephron remake, is one of my late sister’s favorite movies, but it is only mentionable as an illustration of How Have the Mighty Fallen. Whose era would anyone rather live in, when all we can come up with is Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan? Ephron’s version improves on the original in only one respect – it isn’t a Christmas movie.

My Abortion Story

I’m a man, divorced, and I have never fathered a child – none of which prevents me from believing unshakably in a woman’s right to an abortion. There have been a few occasions in my life when I considered becoming a father. The closest I ever got to the opportunity was when I came home on leave from the Army in 1998 to a wife who had told me she wanted to have a child. 

I was stationed in South Korea and for weeks prior to my leave I lightened up on my drinking and went to the Army aid station to request a sperm count. The only reason that I did it was because in the three years of our marriage neither my wife nor I had used any birth control. My wife suggested that I was “shooting blanks,” if not in those exact words. 

But then my mother had a stroke the day before my departure from Korea and she died a few days after my arrival in Aurora, Colorado. I’m not sure if this had any effect on my wife’s decision, but she informed me that she didn’t want to go through with a pregnancy in my absence, since I had to finish my tour in Korea without her. We were divorced – childless – in 2002. 

After leaving the Army and separating from my wife, I met a young woman on the fourth night of a 30-day vacation in the Philippines. From then on, we were inseparable until I flew home to Des Moines. She was a waitress in a club called The Jungle whence I had gone one mid afternoon. The loud music hadn’t started yet and there were no other customers, which allowed the two of us a space to talk. As was usual in those clubs, she was allowed to leave early provided I paid what used to be known as a barfine. It’s compensation to the club for what revenue they stood to lose without a waitress – or a dancer, for that matter. 

As soon as I paid the barfine, the girl changed clothes and we were out on the street together just before nightfall. We bar hopped together for awhile and I discovered that she enjoyed drinking as much as I did. The difference was she weighed a hundred pounds and she got drunk rather quickly. While I enjoyed being with her, she formed an attachment to me that took me by surprise. Since the time allotted to us was limited by my return ticket, the progress of our liaison from A to Z had to be accelerated. While I believed that our relationship, such as it was, had run its course by the morning of my departure, I soon realized that, for her, it extended well beyond the end of my vacation. When she accompanied me in the hotel limo to the airport, I will never forget our parting on the curb. After a goodbye embrace, she got back in the limo and as it drove away from me, her anxious face appeared in the rear window as she watched me recede, standing alone with my bags on the sidewalk. 

We promised to stay in touch via email, and we did. After a few months had passed, we got around to the subject of having children. I told her what my ex-wife had told me, that I was shooting blanks – I was impotent. To this she quickly corrected me, telling me it wasn’t true, that just a few weeks after my departure, she discovered she had become pregnant – but that she had “taken care of it.” Alone, and not knowing if she would ever see me again, she had got an abortion. So, in the space of two sentences, she had informed me that she had been pregnant with what would’ve been my only child, and that she had ended her pregnancy. 

She had no way of knowing what effect her news had on me. While it had surprised me – and not surprised me – to realize that my ex-wife had told me a malicious lie and that I was perfectly capable of fathering a child, and that I actually had, and that a girl I barely knew and would never see again had come the closest I had ever come to making me a father – only to arrive at the conclusion that she couldn’t go forward with it, I was left astonished and saddened.  

I went back to the Philippines two years later for another 30-day vacation. While the girl and I had stayed in touch, she was nowhere to be found in the town where we had met. I later learned that she had met a man from Austria, that they were married and living in Linz. The last time I heard from her was on New Year’s Eve 2003, when she told me she regarded her marriage to the Austrian fellow to be “on paper only,” and that she would always love me. 

Despite the sad ending of my liaison with this young foreign woman whom I had no reason to disbelieve had carried for a few short weeks what would’ve been my only child, I have nothing but respect for her decision, and that even if I had known ahead of time of her plan to end the pregnancy, it was her decision to make. No one has the right to take that decision away from any woman. I should add that abortion is a criminal offense in the Philippines and that the girl’s abortion had legal on top of medical risks. I will never forget her for our brief time together and for her courage in deciding on an abortion.

Lina Wertmüller

Today in Rome a funeral is being held for Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmüller von Elgg Spanol von Braueich-Job, better known simply as Lina Wertmüller. She died on Thursday at the age of 93. Her name, like the full titles of her films, is like a treatise.(1) Rome was also where she was born in 1928 to an aristocratic Swiss family. As often happens to aristocrats in Italy, however, she was a lifelong leftist. Of the twenty-four films she wrote and directed from 1963 to 2004, I’ve been lucky enough to see nine. 

She first gained notice as assistant to Fellini on 8 1/2, and enjoyed a brief but extraordinary creative burst in the '70s that resulted in four films that are superb by any but the most obtuse standards: Mimì metallurgico ferito nell'onore (The Seduction of Mimi-1972), Film d'amore e d'anarchia, ovvero 'stamattina alle 10 in via dei Fiori nella nota casa di tolleranza...' (Love and Anarchy-1973), Travolti da un insolito destino nell'azzurro mare d'agosto (Swept Away-1974)), and Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties-1975). 

These four films are bristling with ideas - about men and women, about history, about politics - that are idiosyncratic as well as manifestly serious. Some critics, political naïfs, claimed her politics were "schematic" and her films like pamphlets. Wertmüller is, in fact, a far more interesting politically committed filmmaker than Ken Loach because her politics is a long way from being doctrinaire. Her best film, Seven Beauties, remains controversial, and was attacked for its appropriation of an otherwise untouchable subject, Nazi labor camps, in a serious and inventive examination of the lengths to which one not very likable or admirable man will go to survive. In his attack on the film, Bruno Bettelheim, eminent child psychologist and camp survivor, took offense at Wertmüller's supposed suggestion that surviving the camps required a betrayal of one's humanity.(2) Wertmüller's point, I think, was that her film is about one man's betrayal of his own humanity. The burlesque manner of that betrayal - scraping together his last bits of libido to make love to an obese and sadistic woman, betrays Wertmüller's design and exposes her very impure protagonist as the monster that he knows he is. 

Because her films were more interested in people than just women, Wertmüller was of no use to feminist critics, who accused her of reinforcing stereotypes. And because she so swiftly went into decline after answering the dreaded call of Hollywood (A Night Full of Rain-1978), it was all the easier to downplay her importance. Her work lost much of its vitality and urgency in the '80s and she only regained commercial attention once with the uncharacteristically sentimental Ciao, Professore! (Io speriamo che me la cavo-1992). If nothing else, the pointless remake of Swept Away (2002), with an utterly unalluring Madonna and Adriano Giannini, son of Giancarlo made the original seem all the more like a masterpiece. 

I think Wertmuller was a candidate for neglected because her films concentrate on often unsympathetic male characters and the women who are drawn to them - and because of Wertmuller's refusal to approve of their actions. The hero of Seven Beauties (I use the word “hero” purely in its rhetorical sense) is a former pimp who survives a German concentration camp by summoning the strength to copulate (there is no better word for it) with the obese female camp commandant. The hero of Swept Away is a stupid Neapolitan deck hand whose superior strength and skill allows him to dominate a particularly useless rich woman with whom he is stranded alone on an island. The hero of Love and Anarchy is a foolish, spotty-faced provincial whose sole chance at being an anarchist hero is through an absurd and hare-brained plot to assassinate Mussolini. Because Wertmuller has a jaundiced view of human beings, her complex, powerful films are difficult for critics to pigeonhole. Her star rose and set in a painfully short arc in the mid-70s. No sooner had we been surprised by the appearance of The Seduction of Mimi in 1976 than we were disappointed by the big-budget, all-star Blood Feud in 1980. 

Until the invention of video, films were permitted very brief shelf-lives. If no one recalls Lina Wertmuller's films, it's the fault of film critics, not audiences. 

(1) Her full name is so long that in their obit Variety misidentified it as Arcangela Felice Assunta Job Wertmüller von Elgg Espanol von Brauchich. 

(2) "If ["Seven Beauties"] is to be taken for mere entertainment, I must state my disgust that the abomination of genocide and the tortures and degradations of the concentration camp are used as a special, uniquely macabre titillation to enhance its effectiveness. . . . I also believe that "Seven Beauties" is a somewhat uneasy, indirect, camouflaged—and therefore more dangerous, because more easily accepted and hence more effective—justification for accepting the world that produced concentration camps; it is a self-justification for those who readily accepted that world under these conditions and profited from it." Bettelheim, "Wertmüller, Lina 1928–" Bettelheim took his own life in a nursing home in 1990 by pulling a plastic bag over his head.

Take This Cup

I cannot save anything but what I can do is write about what I think and feel and the anguish of seeing a world that could already have resolved a large portion of its humanitarian problems, but which not only has not solved any, but which, in fact, aggravates many of them.... The Romans used to say that man is the wolf of mankind. What would they say were they alive today? 

José Saramago 

I have taken issue with the Gospels before – their inconsistencies, their confabulations, and their peculiar prejudices. Christianity is a religion of converts, which explains why so much is made of baptism and why some insist on being born again. Once convincing the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah had failed, the only way the first Christian leaders could keep their sect alive was by turning to converting the Gentiles – all manner of people in 1st century Palestine worshipping a panoply of gods. From that turning point, Christianity was on the road to becoming a world religion, whether that was part of the original plan or not. 

But the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem led directly to a horrific slaughter of infants whose numbers vary wildly, according to which source in consulted. An account of what was officially called “the massacre of the innocents” can be found in Matthew's Gospel. The significance of the event is reflected in its observance on December 28 as a holy day on the Roman Catholic calendar known as The Feast of the Massacre of the Innocents. The actual number of infants killed by Herod’s soldiers is stated in a Syrian text to have been 64,000, while a Byzantine liturgy counted 14,000. Clearly, these numbers are absurdly exaggerated, and only begs the question of why they should have been. 

In an extraordinary novel by the Portuguese writer José Saramago (1922-2010), The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,* the number arrived at was just twenty-seven. Among the arguments that Saramago presents in the novel is that Joseph, the husband of Mary, overhears a group of soldiers in Jerusalem who, under the orders of King Herod, are on their way to Bethlehem to find and kill every child under the age of three. What Joseph does with this intelligence seals his fate and that of his first son, Jesus. As an angel explains to Mary several years after the event, 

the carpenter could have done something, he could have warned the villagers that the soldiers were coming to kill their children when there was still time for parents to gather them up and escape, to hide in the wilderness, for example, or flee to Egypt and wait for Herod's death, which is fast approaching. 

Instead, Joseph tells no one, the children are killed, and he, Mary and Jesus escape to Nazareth unscathed. Thereafter Joseph is visited by a recurring dream in which he is one of Herod’s soldiers and is on his way to kill his own son. Years later, Joseph is captured by Roman soldiers under suspicion of participating in a rebellion and is crucified. By then 14 years old, Jesus leaves home and, on finding Joseph’s body, begins to have a recurring dream of his own in which Joseph is coming to kill him. 

Saramago’s account of Jesus’s maturity and of the miracles he performs loosely follows the commonly accepted chronology, except that Saramago introduces Jesus’s own skepticism of his fate. He introduces a character named Pastor to whom Jesus apprentices as a shepherd, despite his suspicion that Pastor is a demon. 

Then in the novel’s longest chapter, Jesus rows a fishing boat alone to the middle of the Sea of Galilee (which is actually a lake) when an impenetrable mist descends on it. When the mist clears around his boat, Jesus notices God sitting in the prow. After conversing with Him a short while, Jesus hears the sound of someone behind the mist swimming towards the boat. It is Pastor, and he climbs aboard the boat, sitting between Jesus and God. Pastor is, of course, the Devil, a former beloved angel whom God cast out of heaven. In a conversation both strange and humorous, God informs Jesus quite matter-of-factly of his future mission, that he is to announce to the Jews that he is His son and that he will be put to death for it – but that his sacrifice will attract even Gentiles to embrace God. Jesus asks him what will follow, and God gives him a macabre account of all those, including his current followers, who will meet violent deaths in His name. 

God sighed, and in the monotonous tone of one who chooses to suppress compassion He began a litany, in alphabetical order so as not to hurt any feelings about precedence and importance... 

God then launches into an appalling account of martyrdoms. After several dozen decapitations, eviscerations, bludgeonings and stabbings, 

have you had enough, God asked Jesus, who retorted, That's something You should ask Yourself, go on. So God continued... 

At the end of his list, and after relating to Jesus all of the wars to be waged, and seeing how appalled Jesus is, God says 

You are not to blame, your cause demands it. Father, take from me this cup. My power and your glory demand that you drink it to the last drop. I don't want the glory. But I want the power. 

Surprised by these glimpses of the future, Pastor makes a proposal to God.

I've been listening to all that has been said here in this boat, and although I myself have caught glimpses of the light and darkness ahead, I never realized that the light came from burning stakes and the darkness from great piles of bodies. It shouldn't trouble me, for I am the devil, and the devil profits from death even more than You do, it goes without saying that hell is more crowded than heaven. No one knows better than You that the devil too has a heart. Today I use it by acknowledging Your power and wishing that it spread to the ends of the earth without the need of so much death, and since You insist that whatever thwarts and denies You comes from the evil I represent and govern in this world, I propose that You receive me into Your heavenly kingdom, my past offenses redeemed by those I will not commit in future, that You accept my obedience as in those happy days when I was one of Your chosen angels, Lucifer You called me, bearer of light, before my ambition to become Your equal consumed my soul and made me rebel against You... if You grant me that same pardon You will one day promise left and right, then evil will cease, Your son will not have to die, and Your kingdom will extend beyond the land of the Hebrews to embrace the whole globe, good will prevail everywhere, and I shall stand among the lowliest of the angels who have remained faithful, more faithful than all of them now that I have repented, and I shall sing Your praises, everything will end as if it had never been, everything will become what it should always have been. 

But God selfishly refuses Pastor’s proposal. 

I neither accept nor pardon you, I much prefer you as you are, and were it possible, I'd have you be even worse. Because the good I represent cannot exist without the evil you represent, if you were to end, so would I, unless the devil is the devil, God cannot be God. 

“Is that Your final word,” Pastor asks. “My first and last, first because that was the first time I said it, last because I have no intention of repeating it.” Pastor shrugged and said to Jesus, Never let it be said the devil didn't tempt God.” 

So Jesus rows back to the shore only to find out from his followers that he has been on the lake forty days. Jesus goes through with God’s plan and the story ends as it always has - except that, instead of Jesus saying "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do", as he is dying, he says "Men, forgive Him, for He knows not what he has done." 

The narrator of the novel is both knowing and unknowing, modern and ancient. He even intrudes at one point with a postmodernist editorial: 

When critics discuss the rules of effective narration, they insist that important encounters, in fiction as in life, be interspersed with others of no importance, so that the hero of the story does not find himself transformed into an exceptional being to whom nothing ordinary ever happens. They argue that this narrative approach best serves the ever desirable effect of verisimilitude, for if the episode imagined and described is not, and is not likely to become or supplant, factual reality, there must at least be some similitude. 

The novel, which is one of the most powerful indictments of Western history in what is now called the Common Era (C.E), but used to be Annis Domini (A.D.), is filled with the breathing details of a story that is at once all-too-familiar and exceedingly strange. When Joseph is visited by his dream for the first time, hiding in the cave where Mary had given birth to Jesus, from Herod’s soldiers, he fearfully awakes: 

Yet the night, calm and remote from all living creatures, showed that supreme indifference which we associate with the universe, or that other absolute indifference, the indifference of emptiness, which will remain, if there is such a thing as emptiness, when all has been fulfilled. The night ignored the meaning and rational order that appear to govern the world in those moments when we can still believe the world was made to harbor us and our insanity. 

*O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo, 1991. English translation by Giovanni Pontiero, New York: Mariner Books, 1994.

Shoot the Piano Player

In a 1971 interview with Charles Thomas Samuels, François Truffaut got rather defensive when Samuels asked him why he usually adapted trash novels to the screen: 

I have often been asked to direct great novels, like Camus' L'Etranger, Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes, Celine's Voyage au bout de la nuit, and Du cote de chez Swann. In each case my admiration for the book prevented me from making it into a film. Jules and Jim was an exception because it was so little known, and I wanted to increase its popularity by calling to it the attention of a large audience. However, despite what you say, I have never used a trash novel or a book I did not admire. Writers like David Goodis (author of Down There, the basis for Shoot the Piano Player) and William Irish (source for The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi Mermaid) have special value, and they have no counterparts in France. Here detective story writers are rotten, whereas in America writers as great as Hemingway work in that field. But because so many books appear each year in the States, these detective story writers are usually ignored. Ironically, this liberates them. Made humble by their neglect, they are free to experiment because they think no one is paying attention anyway. Not expecting to be analyzed, they put into their books anything they choose. But let me tell you something. After seeing Shoot the Piano Player and liking it, Henry Miller was asked to write an introduction for a new edition of Down There and therefore had to read the book. He then phoned me to say that he suddenly realized that whereas my film was good, the book was even better. So you see, I don't film trash. (1)

Truffaut contradicts himself here. If he wouldn’t adapt Camus or Proust because “[his] admiration for the book prevented [him] from making it into a film,” what stopped him with Goodis and Irish – especially if, as he contends, they “have special value”? Arguably, Truffaut did film trash novels. What he did with them is all that matters. I know this is the very heart of the “auteur theory,” which Truffaut was instrumental in codifying, but he would shoot holes through his famous theory with his later work. 

Bizarrely, but not surprisingly, Truffaut veered sharply away from his highly personal, emotionally rich debut feature film, Les 400 Coups into a deliberately artificial exploration of a demi-monde populated by damaged men and women, dominated by criminals. Shoot the Piano Player opens with a man being chased down a dark street by a car. He is Chico Saroyan (Albert Rémy), looking for the bar in which his brother Edouard (Charles Aznavour) plays piano. Edouard now goes by the stage name Charlie Koller, and by helping his brother evade the bad guys he embroils himself and a woman who loves him in a deadly plot. Léna (Marie Dubois – a stage name created for the actress by Truffaut) plays a waitress in the bar where Charlie plays the piano. She’s in love with him, and she also knows his secret, that he is the former concert pianist Edouard Saroyan, living in obscurity since the death by suicide of his wife. 

The opening scene in the film follows the novel’s but only so far. Then Truffaut’s poetry transforms Goodis's “hard boiled” writing (quite a few grades below Hemingway, who was the obvious model) into a recognizably human drama. A long conversation between two men in the film’s first scene as they walk along a street at night sets the tone for what’s to come: an artist took an initial setup from a pulp novel – a character literally on the run from an odd pair of killers – and fleshed out the stereotypes to create fully fledged characters in whose fates we take personal interest. Simply by managing to transcend his trash literary material only once, with Shoot the Piano Player Truffaut made a film that is at once a pastiche and a highly personal statement about men and women and about love. It has moments that are undeniably clumsy, like a comically bad shootout at the film’s climax. It also introduces devices that Truffaut used to better effect in his next film, Jules and Jim. But Piano Player reminds me far less of a divertimento, one perhaps played by the celebrated concert pianist Edouard Saroyan, than of an exquisite jazz ballad, a bittersweet torch song played by Charlie Koller and his combo.

I got hold of a copy of the Goodis novel, Down There (retitled Shoot the Piano Player when the film created renewed – and utterly undeserved – interest in it). I read the first few pages and found the writing is serviceable but dead on the page. 60 years after he made it, Truffaut’s film is still as refreshingly alive as ever. I’ve said this before about certain films of the late 1950s and early ‘60s, but the fearless artistry with which Piano Player was made, comparable to recordings by jazz artists of the era like Wes Montgomery and Erroll Garner (Garner is even mentioned in a voice-over in the film), is all the more exhilarating today for being long gone. Nobody makes films the way Piano Player was made any more. 

What Truffaut and Godard accomplished in their earliest works was to pay hommage to genre films by completely exploding genres. In Shoot the Piano Player, it isn’t the tough language or the sudden brutalities or a plot that somehow endows the action of the story with a meaning. Truffaut invests in tiny gestures – Charlie clumsily trying to touch Léna as they walk together, or standing outside the office door of the “impresario” trying to make up his mind to go in, fumbling with the door handle or raising a finger to push the doorbell – that cumulatively reveal his characters’ insipient humanity, presenting to the viewer a living world. 

In the film’s conclusion, Charlie/Edouard returns to his perch behind his piano, confirmed in his solitude. The amount of time Truffaut commits to the film’s climax and ending is remarkably brief (a mere five minutes) and sweeps the viewer along irresistibly, only to find himself deposited, like Charlie, back where he started – with a world of difference in emotion. 

(1) Encountering Directors (New York: Putnam, 1972).

The Plot Against America

We knew things were bad," my father told the friends he immediately sat down to phone when we got home, "but not like this. You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare. (Herman Roth upon returning from a trip to Washington, D.C. a few months into Charles Lindbergh’s presidency.) 

I didn’t watch the HBO adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America, so it’s hard for me to imagine how they managed to make Roth’s deceptive period drama about the Roth family in Weequahic, New Jersey in the years leading up to and during what should’ve been America’s entry into World War Two more convincing than Roth does. Because of its singular brilliance, Roth’s prose doesn’t translate well to the big or small screen. Published in 2004 to acclaim and commercial success, the novel presents to the reader a great yarn, but one to which the reader has to lend himself for it to be fully convincing. 

If you take the extreme view – which is a valid one – that the novel is the product of overactive Jewish paranoia, the TV series can’t have escaped such a charge as carefully as Roth does. The novel opens straightforwardly: “Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews.” As anyone knows who has done a little reading, American history is certainly not without its moments of burlesque. Unfortunately, neither is American literature. 

The “story” of The Plot Against America is told by Philip Roth, about the years of his boyhood. His father, Herman, sells insurance. His mother, Bess, manages the household. Philip has an older brother, Sandy. Some of these details will sound familiar to anyone acquainted with some of Roth’s past novels. Roth is able, as always, to capture the dailiness of the life of a family that had settled in a district of Newark, New Jersey that was almost exclusively Jewish. This wasn’t a peculiar situation in Newark – there were almost exclusively Italian and exclusively black districts. Every large American city was laid out in such a way. In the years leading up to World War Two, however, and during the horrific twenty-eight months of war that America watched from the sidelines, American Jews were confronted with groups that opposed American intervention in the war because Hitler didn’t want it. The Republican Party’s nomination of Charles Lindbergh for president in the 1940 election, and Lindbergh’s landslide win, sets the story into a spin in conjectureland from which nobody emerges unscathed. 

The novel is so much more compelling when it concentrates on the domestic problems of the Roth family and their neighbors – all of the telling moments in which little Philip observes the world around him – that it’s a shame that the twilight zone America that Roth describes with sometimes chilling details (Herman's long drive through West Virginia by night is especially unnerving) fails to seem real. 

Roth is so often criticized for his honest depiction of Jews, with all of their deficiencies on display, that to read his long passage about what makes them Jews is an emotional peak in the novel: 

These were Jews who needed no large terms of reference, no profession of faith or doctrinal creed, in order to be Jews, and they certainly needed no other language—they had one, their native tongue, whose vernacular expressiveness they wielded effortlessly and, whether at the card table or while making a sales pitch, with the easygoing command of the indigenous population. Neither was their being Jews a mishap or a misfortune or an achievement to be "proud" of. What they were was what they couldn't get rid of—what they couldn't even begin to want to get rid of. Their being Jews issued from their being themselves, as did their being American. It was as it was, in the nature of things, as fundamental as having arteries and veins, and they never manifested the slightest desire to change it or deny it, regardless of the consequences. 

Roth wants everyone to understand that he is a Jew but also, and with equal emphasis and pride, an American. Not a minor detail at a time – then as now – when some Americans, some white Christians, have the temerity to suggest that they, to the exclusion of everyone unlike them, are the only Americans, the first Americans. 

As soon as the alternate historical events enter the narrative, the novel becomes quite unwieldy. It isn’t because they’re unlikely – that the isolationism of Americans, whether in favor of Hitler or not, could reach such a hysterical pitch that, having already sat out more than two years of the war, it would simply remain seated while every nation in Europe and in Asia was invaded, bombed, and occupied, aroused my skepticism. And it certainly isn’t that I doubt Americans’ capacity for anti-Semitism or any other racial bias under the sun. Roth fails to make Charles Lindbergh much more than an enigma, despite the history of the man that we – barely – know. And I found it hard to believe that a sitting president would be permitted to exercise his fondness for flying by barnstorming daily – unaccompanied and unescorted – wherever his Spirit took him. As I mentioned earlier, these are too close to sheer burlesque. In fact, the novel itself could be called an Historical Burlesque on American history. 

Roth definitely did his homework researching historical figures. I didn’t know, for example, that New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was part Jewish. It’s too tempting to think that The Plot Against America should’ve been called The American Plot, that Roth’s sounding an alarm about the sinister forces of white supremacy in America is really just an exposé of the obvious, shining a bright light on aspects of American society that are hiding in plain sight. This is the opposite extreme from the argument made by one critic of the novel, Bill Kauffman, who forgot that he was reviewing a work of fiction and concluded that: 

This is a repellent novel, bigoted and libelous of the dead, dripping with hatred of rural America, of Catholics, of any Middle American who has ever dared stand against the war machine. All that is left, I suppose, is for the author to collect his Presidential Medal of Freedom. (1)

Kaufman evidently believes that there is one America, just as there is one American history. (Even if he stupidly, for the sake of his argument, gives legitimacy to the anti-war movement at a moment in history when it was completely untenable.) He doesn’t believe that, from the perspective of a Jewish kid in New Jersey, there could possibly be another America, just as he probably doesn’t recognize the enormous rift dividing the country today. 

Has surviving four years of Trump in the White House made The Plot Against America more prescient? HBO certainly thought so. What will always stay with me from my reading of the novel is Roth’s affectionate portrayal of what it was like to be a Jewish-American in the 20th Century, and what being an American fully means.

(1) "Heil to the Chief," The Ametican Conservative, September 27, 2004.

A Divided Life

We read so we don’t feel so alone. C. S. Lewis - or, rather, Anthony Hopkins playing C. S. Lewis in a film called Shadowlands - said that. We read so we don’t feel so alone. We’re lonely, but the loneliness expressed by others somehow lessens the feeling – the knowledge that someone else feels it, too, or felt it a thousand years ago. Of course we’re not alone in feeling so lonely in the world. So why should we always be surprised when we discover that someone else was there before us? Or even that someone is there right now, as they read this? 

Technically this is called “intersubjectivity,” which Oxford Reference defines as “The process and product of sharing experiences, knowledge, understandings, and expectations with others....Things and their meanings are intersubjective to the extent that we share common understandings of them.” The “shock of recognition” is what Melville called it: “For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.” 

But it’s also what can be called “numinous,” as defined by Merriam-Webster: 'Numinous is from the Latin word numen, meaning "divine will" or "nod" (it suggests a figurative nodding, of assent or of command, of the divine head). English speakers have been using numen for centuries with the meaning "a spiritual force or influence." We began using numinous in the mid-1600s, subsequently endowing it with several senses: "supernatural" or "mysterious" (as in "possessed of a numinous energy force"), "holy" (as in "the numinous atmosphere of the catacombs"), and "appealing to the aesthetic sense" (as in "the numinous nuances of her art").' 

This accounts for the “shock” that Melville describes, which is a kind of electric shock that happens when a connection is made. The etymology of the word "numinous," by the way, means "to wink." When we look at a work of art, or a myth, and something "winks" at us, then we know not only that we are also being seen, but that such an incarnated image is the carrier of those invisible energies. If it "winks" at us, it is recognizing something like it in us already, something of which we were heretofore unaware, perhaps. That is, re - cognition, like to like. 

A poet writes about an experience and we think, “I’ve done that" or "I’ve felt that way.” For 14 years, Home has been a collection of moments in time for me rather than a physical location. The moments are always there to return to, but the physical location has altered with the years. I went to Google Earth and looked at my sister’s house in Anchorage. It’s still there, much as she left it in 2008 when her bank repossessed it and sold it at auction. But I can’t go back to it, open the door with a key that I left behind with my sister, and climb the stairs to my room in the loft above the garage. The house that I lived in, not to mention my dear sister, are no longer there. As Brian Cox put it so beautifully, moments in time still exist, but we can no longer reach them. Because of the geometry of space-time, we are impelled to move inexorably into the future. 

But I’ve learned a very hard way that it is possible to live a double, a parallel life in one’s mind apart from one’s physical situation. When I was married and away from my wife, like when I waited 385 days for her to get her visa and join me in the States in 1995-96, or when I was in the Army stationed in South Korea in ‘98, I was effectively split in two; my body was located in one place, but my heart was in another, thousands of miles away. But that was when I was married – a common enough condition. 

Right now, and for the past 14 years, I have been physically located on a small island in the center of the Philippine archipelago, but I have projected myself, by conscious effort, those same thousands of miles away to my homeland, to the places and some of the people I’ve known, that I remember (since memories are all that I have left) as constituting the place I call home. 

Recently I encountered a poem by Raymond Carver that dramatizes a situation that all of us have been in at one time or another. But the specific situation, in its physical details, happens to be a perfect metaphor for what has happened to me this very long time away from home. Carver himself agrees that “If this sounds/like the story of a life, okay.” 

Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying to Get Back In 

You simply go out and shut the door 

without thinking. And when you look back 

at what you’ve done 

it’s too late. If this sounds 

like the story of a life, okay. 

It was raining. The neighbors who had 

a key were away. I tried and tried 

the lower windows. Stared 

inside at the sofa, plants, the table 

and chairs, the stereo set-up. 

My coffee cup and ashtray waited for me 

on the glass-topped table, and my heart 

went out to them. I said, Hello, friends, 

or something like that. After all, 

this wasn’t so bad. 

Worse things had happened. This 

was even a little funny. I found the ladder. 

Took that and leaned it against the house. 

Then climbed in the rain to the deck, 

swung myself over the railing 

and tried the door. Which was locked, 

of course. But I looked in just the same 

at my desk, some papers, and my chair. 

This was the window on the other side 

of the desk where I’d raise my eyes 

and stare out when I sat at that desk. 

This is not like downstairs, I thought. 

This is something else. 

And it was something to look in like that, unseen, 

from the deck. To be there, inside, and not be there. 

I don’t even think I can talk about it. 

I brought my face close to the glass 

and imagined myself inside, 

sitting at the desk. Looking up 

from my work now and again. 

Thinking about some other place 

and some other time. 

The people I had loved then. 

I stood there for a minute in the rain. 

Considering myself to be the luckiest of men. 

Even though a wave of grief passed through me. 

Even though I felt violently ashamed 

of the injury I’d done back then. 

I bashed that beautiful window. 

And stepped back in. 

What Carver encounters and recognizes in the telling of this poem is himself. If I can use one more Latin word, it is an adjustment, a mutatis mutandis, which I take to mean - in this context at least - is a glimpse of ourselves in a parallel existence – at once outside looking in and inside looking out. Entranced for a moment by the doppelgänger seated behind his desk, yet knowing that it is impossible, he shatters the window, the aperture through which he saw into the past. 

I hope my own revenance won’t require such an act of violence.

Jayne Mansfield's Car

IN THE JUNK STORE 

A small, straw basket 

Full of medals 

From good old wars 

No one recalls. 

I flipped one over 

To feel the pin 

That once pierced 

The hero’s swelling chest. 

- Charles Simic (1) 

You know, people say they don’t like to talk about war because it brings up bad memories, the nightmares and everything. I don’t believe that. I believe they don’t talk about it because nobody wants to hear it. (Skip Caldwell)

Since I moved away from the South 33 years ago, I have revisited it surreptitiously in novels and movies. The South is captured in every bit of its distinctiveness in the novels of Faulkner and the stories of Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor. When Walker Percy was asked why there were so many fine Southern writers, he put it bluntly: “Because we got beat!” 

The trouble with most movies about the South is that, rather than show us what it’s really like, they simply resort to the same tired clichés, reinforcing the ugliest image of the South introduced by Hollywood in the 60s. Who can forget the rednecks in Easy Rider or Deliverance? Yet nobody wanted to make Southerners the subject of a movie – a movie that wasn’t about plantation and slave owners or about maniacal murderers. 

Since he arrived practically on our doorsteps in 1996 with his remarkable film Sling Blade, Arkansas-born Billy Bob Thornton has been struggling against the attempts of celebrity to subdue his talent and turn him into a mere curiosity – a “one-hit wonder.” There was his well publicized failure in 2000 to wrest the film he wanted to make of Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses away from Harvey Weinstein who evidently wanted to punish Thornton for refusing to cut Sling Blade. The experience broke Thornton’s heart, according to Matt Damon, and caused him to vow to never direct again. 

Looked at from the outside, Thornton’s erratic life has been nothing if not interesting. What keeps us interested in what Thornton is doing, whatever it may be, is the fact that he proved with Sling Blade, as writer, director, and actor, that he was worth watching. To quote Polonius, “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.” 

Despite his refusal to direct again (as often happens with such “vows” – Thornton has been divorced five times), in 2012 Thornton and Tom Epperson, with whom he has written several scripts since 1992, produced an original script that they called Jayne Mansfield’s Car. 

War has cast a very long shadow over the Caldwell family in Morrison, Alabama in 1969. The patriarch, Jim, is a veteran of World War I and, despite his well-adjusted exterior, spends his time listening to police dispatch calls reporting car crashes in his vicinity and driving out to get a look at them, regardless of the time or the weather, before the dead and injured are removed. His three sons, Skip, Carroll, and Jimbo, are all veterans of the Second World War, and the only one of the three who is a functioning adult – Jimbo – saw no combat. Skip had been a fighter pilot before a dogfight with a Japanese plane forced him to bail out rather than burn to death. His upper torso is completely scarred from burns he sustained. Carroll, too, was wounded, and has become an extreme pacifist, taking part in protests against the war in Vietnam to the consternation of his father. 

There is a daughter, Donna, who is unhappily married to a good old boy car salesman. Jim’s wife, Naomi, divorced him and ran off to marry an Englishman named Kingsley Bedford. One night during a typically fractious family supper, Jim gets a long distance call from Kingsley’s son, Phillip, announcing that Naomi has died and that because she wanted to be buried “with her people” in Alabama they are bringing her back for her funeral. Naomi’s death and the arrival of Kingsley and his two children, Phillip and Camilla, dredges up memories, good and bad, for the Caldwells. 

What is of special interest, on this Veterans Day, is the film’s depiction of the impact of war on three generations of an American family. There is no evidence among these veterans of any pride in their service, even in wars that America was instrumental in winning. Carroll Caldwell has even turned into a hippie, indulging in drug use and marching in protest against the ongoing Vietnam war. His 18-year-old son leaves him speechless at the film’s sad finish when he announces that he has joined the Army. 

The film sprawls indolently, which probably explains why it got mostly negative reviews on its belated release in the U.S. in September 2013. (It was premiered in Berlin in February 2012.)(2) The few critics who recommended it noted its performances from heavyweights like Robert Duvall as Jim Caldwell, John Hurt as Kingsley Bedford, and Thornton as Skip, who appears in one scene with all of his service medals pinned directly to his scarred chest. Katharine LaNasa is memorable as Donna, whose horniness is almost palpable. And Frances O’Connor as Camilla Bedford deserves a medal for finding Skip’s brazen advances a turn-on. The scene in which she recites Tennyson naked while Skip “beats off” is just this side of macabre. Tippi Hedren was cast as Naomi Caldwell, but all of her scenes were cut from the finished film. (Unless that’s her blonde hair we see in the open casket in the funeral scene.) 

The cinematography, provided by Barry Markowitz, seems diffused with a golden patina – which I found not at all unwelcome. I found the film yet another sentimental journey home, so perhaps I should disqualify myself. Why the film was set in Alabama but shot entirely in Georgia (where I grew up) goes unexplained. And the film’s title is derived from a touring exhibit of what’s purported – in the movie – to be the very car Jayne Mansfield was killed in one night in Louisiana. Jim drags Kingsley to see it, explaining in clinical detail what happened in the accident. Still, the use of it as the movie’s title is a little too Brechtian for me. 

(1) That Little Something (New York: Mariner Books, 2009), p. 39.

(2) As of 2018, the film's box office was only $79,178.

The Story of a Three Day Pass

Melvin Van Peebles died on September 21 at the age of 89. His contributions to film, I thought, had been limited to the so-called “blaxploitation” genre of the 1970s. His film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) is thrown together - unfairly - with films like Shaft, Superfly, and Coffy, as well as others of wildly varying quality and crassness. The films combined commercial pandering to stereotypes of both black and white people with an unfathomable irony. The only way the movie industry in the 1970s was interested in black people was through formulaic depictions of the criminal underworld. So the presence of black actors and filmmakers was tolerated by the industry only through the representation – and reinforcement – of stereotypes. 

Van Peebles accepted these severe limitations because it gave him opportunities to work in American film. What I knew nothing about, I’m ashamed to admit, until reading Van Peebles’s obituaries was that his filmmaking career had begun in the late 1950s with three short films with which he bravely tried to interest Hollywood movie producers. When they showed no interest Van Peebles took his family and moved to the Netherlands in 1960. His short films were shown to none other than Henri Langlois and Lotte Eisner, who were so impressed by them they invited Van Peebles (who adopted the “Van” in the Netherlands) to come to France. He wrote novels and plays in French, and one of his novels, called La Permission, he was able to make into his first feature film, known by its English title The Story of a Three Day Pass.  With some difficulty I found a copy of it, and I've at last seen it. 

Turner is a soldier at a U.S. Army post in France.(1) We first see him looking in a mirror and his reflection is telling him he is about to get a promotion and a 3-day pass with it. But, his reflection tells him, he got it by being his unit commander’s “Uncle Tom” – obedient, uncomplaining, obliging to his superior. But Turner smiles in the mirror because it’s what he has to do to get what he wants. 

With his three day pass, Turner goes to Paris, where he wanders alone in the November city. He returns to his hotel and waits for night to fall. He goes to a nightclub, and after several failed attempts to find a girl to dance with him, he stumbles and his sunglasses, behind which he has been coolly hiding all day, fall and break on the floor. The last girl who refuses his offer to dance, Miriam (Nicole Berger) helps him find his broken sunglasses and, under the table together, they both laugh. The ice broken, they dance and talk all night, and she persuades him to accompany her to the beach in Normandy the next day. Normandy is actually beyond the geographical limits of Turner's pass, but he knows he is taking an even greater risk by being in the company of Miriam. 

There is an element of desperation in these relationships, that have to run the gamut from A to Z in a matter of hours, or in the case of Turner and Miriam, three days. Men in the military have an undeserved reputation of being oversexed. For much of the time they are deprived of female companionship, so that when they are finally at liberty, they always seem to be in a hurry – when, in fact, they are both making up for lost time and creating memories that will last them until their next pass. 

Inevitably, Turner is reminded of his race – distinct from everyone else – even when the reminder is well-intended. In a bar in Normandy, a flamenco performer dedicates a song to Miriam and Turner – for “Miss Ojos Grandes y Señor Negrito.” Upon hearing the word “negro,” Turner flies into a rage and beats the performer. Outside on the darkened street, after being thrown out of the club, Miriam tries to understand his rage and explain that the performer’s use of the word “negro” wasn’t meant as a slur. But Turner doesn’t believe her.  They walk away down the dark street together as Turner asks “How can anyone think that ‘black’ is a compliment?” 

This astonishing scene accentuates what it means – what it is – to be a black man in a white world, but it also tells us of the history that Turner must carry around with him, like weighty old luggage – the centuries-old history of slavery and Jim Crow, of the common practice of prejudice in the U.S. It is a history that many whites would rather forget and would rather wasn’t taught to children in schools. 

Van Peebles uses non-professional players in many scenes. The night club scene, for instance, in which Turner meets Miriam, only comes to life when we see the face of Nicole Berger, the only other actor in the scene. She was almost a decade older than she was in Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. Her presence in Three Day Pass is vital to its overall effect, and she doesn’t disappoint. When, near the end of the film, Turner’s restriction is suspended and he runs to the telephone booth to call her, we feel as let down as he is when a man’s voice – her father’s perhaps – curtly informs him that she is “sick.” In April 1967, shortly after shooting on Three Day Pass was completed, Berger was killed in a car crash. She was just 32.

As I mentioned, The Story of a Three Day Pass was based on a novel Van Peebles had written and published in France called La Permission. It was also used as the French title of the film. This is a more ambiguous and more serviceable title for the film because there are some things that Turner has been granted permission to do – like have three days off in which to visit Paris and “see the sights.” But Turner is not given permission to “miscegenate” – the ugly term used to describe the sexual mixing of the races. Van Peebles knew too well what the limitations of being a black man were in the U.S., even if some of those limitations didn’t exist in France. 

The film is an extraordinary piece of subjective filmmaking. It's told entirely from the point of view of Turner. The only time Van Peebles enters the thoughts of Miriam, it's to show us her utterly limited understanding of black people. She fantasizes that she is threatened by a crowd of black men in primitive garb, when Turner appears like an African chieftain (a large bone through his afro) and embraces her. Meanwhile, Turner is fantasizing he's a French nobleman on horseback visting Miriam in a chateau. Harry Baird, who was frim Guyana in South America, acted in 36 films in a long career, but Three Day Pass was his only starring role, which is puzzling because he is so assured as Turner. He retired from acting when glaucoma rendered him blind and he died in 2005.

Seeing The Story of a Three Day Pass has been a revelation for me, as it must have been for everyone who saw it in 1968. The reasons for my not seeing it until now make no sense, though they are probably as mundane as copyright restrictions and just bad luck. How can I have overlooked it for so long? It was shown at the 1968 San Francisco International Film Festival as France’s entry and it won an award.(2) On the strength of its success, Van Peebles finally attracted the interest of Hollywood producers and he was able to make his first feature film in America, Watermelon Man (1970). 

(1) Late in the film when Turner is recruited to give a tour of the Army post to a group of women gospel singers from Harlem, he tells them that most of the men there have been transferred. On March 7, 1966 De Gaulle ordered all American military installations out of France. 

(2) An interview with Van Peebles from 1967 in San Francisco can be seen here. 

Whistle and I'll Come To You (1968)

The colonel, who remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India, was of opinion that if Parkins had closed with it it could really have done very little, and that its one power was that of frightening. 

Among writers of ghost stories, few are regarded more highly than the Englishman M. R. James (1862-1936). For James, the writing of his stories was secondary to the telling of them to his students and friends at Cambridge and later at Eton. He dedicated his first collection of stories “To all those who at various times have listened to them.” The book was called Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary, and it appeared in 1904. It includes what is regarded as one of James’s best stories, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad.”(1) 

Jonathan Miller, one of the quartet of writer/performers that made up the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe, gave up performing in 1962 and turned to directing for stage and screen. Already well known for his unconventional 1966 film production of Alice in Wonderland, he directed an adaptation of the M. R. James story, its title shortened to Whistle and I'll Come To You, for the BBC Omnibus series for broadcast in 1968. It was so popular that the BBC repeated it at Christmas in ’69 and it inspired a series of Ghost Stories for Christmas, starting on 1972, based on other James stories. 

In the story, Parkin is a young professor of ontography, which is “the human response to the natural environment,” who goes to a seaside town in Suffolk called Burnstowe at the end of term to work on his golf game. In the film he’s a middle aged man who doesn’t play golf who goes for a week to an unidentified seaside town. After settling in at an old inn, Parkin keeps his distance from the other guests, sitting at a separate table at dinner. One of the other guests, known in the story as the Colonel, asks him if he would like to join him for a round of golf, but Parkin declines. He is there to do some sightseeing, take in the dunes and the local cemetery. The Colonel tells him it’s too spooky for him. 

On the strand, Parkin walks briskly, takes his lunch on the dunes, and climbs a low cliff to examine a quite dilapidated graveyard. One of the tombstones, on the very edge of the cliff, has been eroded, exposing some bones. Parkin sees something and finds an old object in the exposed grave. He puts it in his pocket, muttering “Finders, keepers,” and returns to the beach. Walking along, he notices a lone figure some distance behind him. 

Back at the guesthouse that night, Parkin takes the object he discovered out of his pocket. It’s some sort of bone whistle with an inscription carved on it. After cleaning some earth out of it, Parkin takes a pencil rubbing of the inscription, and makes out the Latin words “Quis es iste qui venit” – Who is this who is coming? Parkin raises the whistle to his lips and blows into it. It produces a clear note, and as soon as Parkin stops blowing, the sound of a great wind arises outside and he has a vision on the lone figure standing on the beach. The wind continues and Parkin goes to bed with a perplexed look on his face. 

At breakfast the Colonel asks Parkin “Do you believe in ghosts?” Parkin, all the while eating his grapefruit and haddock, informs the Colonel of his skepticism of the “survival of the human personality.” The Colonel then says, after Hamlet, “there are more things in heaven and earth than a dreamt of in philosophy." To which Parkin replies, “There are more things in philosophy than are dreamt of in heaven and earth.” This reply gives Parkin much satisfaction, but later in the day, alone on the beach, he hears himself repeat the opposite – there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 

That night, Parkin has disturbing dreams of being chased down the beach by something unseen. He awakes to a shout. Closing his eyes, we see him turning to run from an object, a piece of clothing standing erect by itself and moving toward us. Parkin awakes again with a loud start. He turns on the light and tries to read until he can fall asleep again. 

After breakfast, a maid asks him on which of the two beds in his room he would like the blanket placed, since they were both slept in the night before. Parkin insists that he slept in just the one bed and there was no one else in the room. Who is this who is coming? repeats in Parkin’s mind. He will find out. 

The film is only 42 minutes long, but it’s plenty of time for Jonathan Miller to insinuate us into Parkin’s terrorized mind. Michael Hordern plays Parkin as a marginally batty, typically eccentric academic who lives very much inside his own world. He putters about and mutters to himself, almost as if he’s narrating a drama all his own, humming tunes that only he can hear. With what boyishness he charges about in the countryside – the strand and the woods – which is strangely deserted and overgrown with brambles and vines. The locations – in Norfolk and Suffolk – are perfectly chosen to reflect Parkin’s self-isolation. And Miller’s staging and clever use of sound make the nightmare scenes uncannily like the real thing. The last confrontation between Parkin and a poltergeist is more spine-tingling than any of the latest, CGI-driven horror movies precisely because what Parkin sees almost doesn’t appear to be anything at all. Some have suggested that it might only have been a figment of Parkin’s fevered intelligence. But when the Colonel responds to his moans of terror and sits him back down in his bed, Parkin's rational mind quickly reasserts itself as he mutters, “Oh, no” again and again. 

Whistle and I’ll Come To You is a quite perfect film that captures the atmosphere of M. R. James’s best ghost story. 

(1) The Robert Burns poem of the same title has nothing to do with the story.