The Swedish 'Ordet'

Get rid of the miracles, and the whole world will fall at the feet of Jesus Christ. Rousseau 

Not until this past week have I had a chance to watch the film Ordet. Not Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet, that he waited until 1955 to make, that has inspired some critics to write about in words so reverential that you’d think the film was the record of an actual miracle and not the bald and quite ridiculous representation of one. Chris Fujiwara stated categorically “that Ordet is a great film, one of the greatest ever made, only a rash or foolish person will deny.” Fujiwara, I learn, has written books – BOOKS – about Otto Preminger and Jacques Tourneur. An auteurist is someone who goes around kissing every frog he can find on the outside chance that just one of them is an enchanted prince. 

But I’d rather not dwell on Dreyer’s ponderous version, because there is another Ordet, made in 1943 in Sweden by Gustaf Molander, who is best known for having brought Ingrid Bergman to the attention of David O. Selznick in his 1936 film Intermezzo and for directing Woman Without a Face, from one of Ingmar Bergman’s earliest scripts. Molander’s Ordet opened in Stockholm the day after Christmas in 1943. Nine days later, Kaj Munk, who wrote the original play, was murdered by the Gestapo in Denmark. His body was found in a ditch the next day. As I wrote eleven years ago, “In itself, this [Molander’s making a film adaptation of Munk’s play] was a rather daring act in a nation (Sweden) that, to save itself from the fate of Denmark, was officially neutral throughout World War II.” Carl Dreyer reportedly wanted to make his own film of Ordet, but had to wait at least a decade after Molander’s film due to copyright restrictions. 

Molander’s film has a great deal going for it – not the least being originality. But, compared with Dreyer’s version, it has much less going for it in terms of style – the manner in which the story unfolds is less formal, but also less mannered. By the time Dreyer made his last two films, Ordet and Gertrud, his ideas about film had so ossified that it’s a stretch to call them motion pictures. Dreyer’s actors seem like opera singers, who have to plant themselves so that their diaphragms can function. The lighting of his interior scenes is as unnatural as that of a portrait gallery. 

The differences between the two films are striking. In Molander’s film when we first meet Johannes, he is a pastor in his father’s church. In Dreyer’s film he has already flipped his lid, has escaped his family’s confinement and wanders the oh-so picturesque grassy hills preaching to the wind. Molander opens his film, after a disembodied voice gives us a tour of a cloud-filled sky and verdant earth near a rocky coast, at a farm house where several voices call out for “Inger” – everyone from the old patriarch with the familiar face of Victor Sjöström, as Knut Borg, needing her help putting on his Sunday collar to her husband looking for his socks in the kitchen to her younger brother trying to comb his cowlicked hair. Inger has to quiet them all because Johannes (Rune Lindström), a student pastor – like Kaj Munk – is nervously preparing his sermon, so nervously that he gets hiccups. His wife, Kristina, gives him a spoonful of sugar. 

Two differing Sunday services, and their religious dogmas, are contrasted by Molander – the orthodox Lutheran and the “born again” sect. Predictably both sides are convinced of their own righteousness. Knut Borg’s (Sjöström) orthodox Lutheran family is brought into direct conflict with a “born again” family, headed by Petterson (Ludde Gentzel) when Knut’s youngest son and Petterson’s daughter fall in love. Knut’s eldest son (Holger Löwenadler) announces his doubts about God, gets drunk in a tavern and gets beaten up. Then, after giving his Sunday sermon, Johannes disappears. Apparently, it isn’t theology that troubles him (Dreyer blamed his mental breakdown on his reading too much Kierkegaard) but the nature of faith itself. While he sees and hears more than enough of religion in the world, faith is lacking. 

And in Molander’s telling, Kristina, Johannes’s wife, is run over by a car after she tries to bring him back home. In a bizarre scene that anticipates the film’s climax, at Kristina’s vigil, Johannes tells her corpse, “In Jesus’s name, stand up!” Johannes’s subsequent breakdown makes somewhat more sense. His wife is eliminated by Dreyer. The actor playing Johannes was the remarkable Rune Lindström, who also wrote the Molander film’s screenplay. (The most hair-raising moment in the film comes not at the end but when Johannes, who by then thinks he is Jesus, goes in to see Inger just after she has died. When he looks at her he – and we – hear her voice calling to him to help her!) 

The rest of the story is familiar to anyone who has seen the Dreyer film, but the way it is told in Molander’s film is much more naturalistic. For one thing, Molander’s Ordet is crowded with life, and his actors resemble real people rather than archetypes. And his film is alive with humorous touches. This was an important choice for Molander, since he avoids the horrible solemnity of Dreyer’s film, and he doesn’t set us up, as Dreyer does, for the supernatural scene in which Inger, who died in childbirth, is roused by Johannes, as if from sleep, from her coffin. The scene is staged in two rooms, a smaller room where the coffin sits and an outer room, filled with a few dozen people. Just as they are about to screw the coffin lid down, Johannes arrives. He closes the door so that he (and his little sister) are alone with the body. He repeats the same command that he used with Kristina’s corpse, “In the name of Jesus Christ, stand up!” First her nostrils flare, then her eyes open. (If I found her sitting up in the coffin a little too pat, it’s only because I’ve seen too many vampire movies.) 

If Munk’s play and Dreyer’s film demonstrate one thing definitively it is that surely the raising of Lazarus was the most vulgar of Jesus’s miracles. Dreyer’s film has had an odd effect on many critics who were otherwise level headed reporters for their periodicals. It makes them go all reverent and weak in the knees (and between the ears). When Roger Ebert, who is usually so sensible and down-to-earth, saw Ordet, he wrote things like “The camera movements have an almost godlike quality” and “The lighting, in black and white, is celestial”. He tells us that “I had started by viewing a film that initially bored me. It had found its way into my soul.” I won’t try to figure out what Ebert is talking about. I saw the same film he did and I didn’t think the stunt staged in the last scene made up for the protracted tedium of what led up to it. I wonder what Roger Ebert would’ve written about Gustaf Molander's film if he’d seen it before Dreyer stole all of his thunder. 

Every frame of Dreyer’s Ordet gives away his game, that is so solemnized and emphatic that we could be watching the life of a saint instead of the ordinary lives of farmers. Molander’s film is like a Breughel painting – like The Fall of Icarus. 

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood 

Its human position: how it takes place 

While someone else is eating or opening a 

window or just walking dully along; 

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting 

For the miraculous birth, there always must be 

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating 

On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot 

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course 

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot 

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse 

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. 

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away 

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may 

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, 

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone 

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green 

Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen 

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, 

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 

(“Musee des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden) 

Molander was never a master, thank god. He was only an intelligent and conscientious filmmaker trying not to appeal to our faith but to move us.

Nemesis

What hath Roth got? – Saul Bellow (1)

That box in which a twelve-year-old was twelve years old forever. The rest of us live and grow older by the day, but he remains twelve. Millions of years go by, and he is still twelve. 

For no good reason I came late to Philip Roth. In fact, I read my first of his thirty-one novels, The Human Stain, last October. I just finished reading my second Philip Roth novel, called Nemesis. I didn’t know until after I finished it that it was Roth’s last. It was published in October 2010 when he was 77. 

In many of Roth’s novels his presence isn’t hard to find, down to a character, who is often the novel’s narrator, that bears a resemblance (even if only a moral one) to Roth. The hero in Nemesis has the unlikely name Bucky Cantor (no one calls him by his given name, Eugene), a short, extremely near-sighted twenty-three year old who made up for his height disadvantage and bad eyes by becoming a formidable athlete. Because his mother died in childbirth and his father was a criminal (“a very shady character”), he was raised by his grandparents in a nearly exclusively Jewish district of Newark, New Jersey called Weequahic. This town also features vitally in Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint. That novel’s complainer, Alexander Portnoy, was a graduate – like Roth – of Weequahic High School in 1950. So it wasn’t surprising that Roth would go back there in what became his last novel. 

The story of Nemesis is told by Arnie Mesnikoff, but we don’t learn about him until the novel's third part, set in 1971. In the summer of 1944, the time in which most of the story is set, Philip Roth was 11 years old. Unlike Roth, Arnie was stricken with polio which left him wearing braces on his legs for the rest of his life. 

The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in Bucky’s Junior year at Panzer College, but when he tried to enlist with his two best friends at the college, he was classified 4F because of his poor eyesight. He never quite got over his sense of his own inadequacy as a man from that day, not even when he landed a job as the summer playground supervisor at Chancellor Avenue School, which was next to Weequahic High School, where he planned to apply for a job as phys ed teacher. 

Unlike flu viruses or Covid-19, polio always appeared in the hottest months of summer. And in that especially hot summer of 1944, there was an outbreak of polio in Newark. There had been polio outbreaks every year, in some parts of America, since 1916, and it was polio’s most famous victim, Franklin Roosevelt, who established the charity organization, The March of Dimes. Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine wasn’t available until 1955. 

The novel’s scene stealers include Bucky attending the funeral for Alan Michaels, one of the boys in his charge on the summer playground. Already questioning the culpability of a God who would send polio to cripple and kill children, his resentment reaches a crescendo when they reach the cemetery:  

They all joined the rabbi in reciting the mourner's prayer, praising God's almightiness, praising extravagantly, unstintingly, the very God who allowed everything, including children, to be destroyed by death. . . But what might not have occurred to the Michaels family had not been lost on Mr. Cantor. To be sure, he himself hadn't dared to turn against God for taking his grandfather when the old man reached a timely age to die. But for killing Alan with polio at twelve? For the very existence of polio? How could there be forgiveness—let alone hallelujahs—in the face of such lunatic cruelty? It would have seemed far less of an affront to Mr. Cantor for the group gathered in mourning to declare themselves the celebrants of solar majesty, the children of an ever-constant solar deity, and, in the fervent way of our hemisphere's ancient heathen civilizations, to abandon themselves in a ritual sun dance around the dead boy's grave—better that, better to sanctify and placate the unrefracted rays of Great Father Sun than to submit to a supreme being for whatever atrocious crime it pleases Him to perpetrate. 

Also impossible to forget is Bucky’s “love interest,” Marcia Steinberg, a year younger than him and a first grade teacher at the Chancellor Avenue School. She had gone to a summer camp in the Poconos just before the polio outbreak in Weequahic. She was worried for Bucky, and she begged him to keep himself safe and come to work at her summer camp. He knows it’s his duty – perhaps the only one left to him – to stay where he is and not let the boys he supervises in the playground down by playing it safe and running away to the Poconos. Deep down, though, Bucky isn’t really cut out for such devoted self-sacrifice, and almost against his will he leaves Weequahic just as the epidemic is getting worse. Because of his guilt over this – as he sees it – act of desertion, and because there is an outbreak at the summer camp shortly after his arrival that afflicts him as well and that disfigures his athletic legs and one of his arms, Bucky renounces his engagement to Marcia. 

Twenty-seven years later, he tells his story to Arnie Mesnikoff, who was one of his boys at the Chancellor schoolyard. He tells him about the letter Marcia wrote to him with two words, “My man,” written in perfect cursive two hundred and eighteen times down the front of the page and halfway down the back. 

The letter was signed with just her initial, M, a tall, beautifully formed capital exhibiting a little flourish in the loop and the stem, followed by "(as in My Man)." 

But then he tells Arnie about his last meeting with Marcia at the hospital, about how she entreated him to marry her because she didn’t care what the polio had done to him, that she loved him no matter what. But Bucky refuses to subject her to a life married to a “cripple,” and sends her away. But what she tells him is the truth, that it wasn’t polio that twisted him: 

Bucky, you've always been this way. You could never put things at the right distance—never! You're always holding yourself accountable when you're not. Either it's terrible God who is accountable, or it's terrible Bucky Cantor who is accountable, when in fact, accountability belongs to neither. 

Bucky ends it with Marcia anyway. The nemesis in the book’s title isn’t God or polio, but Bucky’s ill-formed character. And he destroys two lives with it. As Arnie concludes: "He has to find a necessity for what happens. There is an epidemic and he needs a reason for it. He has to ask why. Why? Why? That it is pointless, contingent, preposterous, and tragic will not satisfy him. That it is a proliferating virus will not satisfy him. Instead he looks desperately for a deeper cause, this martyr, this maniac of the why, and finds the why either in God or in himself or, mystically, mysteriously, in their dreadful joining together as the sole destroyer." 

This sad, elegiac novel ends with a glorification – an apotheosis – of Bucky’s lost athletic beauty. He takes the boys onto an empty dirt field where the high school football team would practice and shows them his skill throwing a javelin. It is a beautiful, fleeting image from a lost summer, and all the more beautiful for being the last fictional moment in Philip Roth’s work. 

(1) Comment made to Dick Cavett.

The Father

Novelist, playwright and stage director Florian Zeller’s first film, The Father, based on his own acclaimed play, is not what I expected. It has been a tour-de-force, since it was translated by Christopher Hampton and produced for the stage, for Kenneth Cranham in the lead role on the English stage and for Frank Langella on Broadway. In 2016 Cranham won the Laurence Olivier Award and Langella won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play. Anthony Hopkins, who gave up theater acting in 1989, was the natural choice for the role in the film, and Florian Zeller himself chose to direct it. Hopkins won this year’s Best Actor Academy Award, beating out the favorite, Chadwick Boseman, who was expected to be awarded posthumously. 

When the film opens with Olivia Coleman striding toward her London flat, we hear the “The Cold Song” from Purcell’s King Arthur (“I can scarcely move Or draw my breath”) and when we enter the flat we find an old man is listening to it on headphones. He is Anthony who lives in his daughter Anne’s (Olivia Coleman) flat, which he thinks is his flat. He has driven his latest carer away because he believes she stole his watch (he simply misplaced it). Anne announces she is moving to Paris to be with a man. But then Anthony, who is alone in the flat, hears a noise and finds a strange man is there. He is Paul (Mark Gatiss), Anne’s husband, but Anthony doesn’t recognize him. When Anne returns, she is someone else (Olivia Williams). Anthony is visibly disturbed by the confusion of faces, but pretends he is fine. Later Paul becomes someone else (Rufus Sewell). 

What the hell is going on? Anthony thinks they must be playing a joke on him, but he doesn’t find it funny. Everything is presented to us so directly that we know we aren’t watching a surrealist joke in a Buñuel film. Buñuel used two actresses in the same role in his last film, but no one in the film noticed the difference. Surrealism establishes its own normalcy and logic. This isn’t surreal, but it’s somewhat confusing and, for Anthony, it’s a serious problem. 

The story continues like this, with the slightest transitions notifying us that time has passed. We see exactly what Anthony is going through as he is going through it. But then there are time slips, scenes back up, overlap, change perspectives, almost as if Anthony’s mind is searching for the missing junctures, trying to put things back together that his mind has broken up. The scenes call to mind the middle two stanzas of Philip Larkin’s terrifying poem “The Old Fools”: 

 At death, you break up: the bits that were you 

 Start speeding away from each other for ever 

 With no one to see. It’s only oblivion, true: 

 We had it before, but then it was going to end, 

 And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour 

 To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower 

 Of being here. Next time you can’t pretend 

 There’ll be anything else. And these are the first signs: 

 Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power 

 Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they’re for it: 

 Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines – 

 How can they ignore it? 

 Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms 

 Inside your head, and people in them, acting. 

 People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms 

 Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning, 

 Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting 

 A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only 

 The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning, 

 The blown bush at the window, or the sun’s 

 Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely 

 Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live: 

 Not here and now, but where all happened once. 

With dementia, the bits that were you depart slowly, well before you die, leaving you in a helpless, bewildered state, unable any more to recognize your family or your surroundings. 

As I said, The Father isn’t what I expected. What I was expecting was something like what Dwight Macdonald wrote about Jean Vigo’s Zéro de Conduite: “the most unrhetorical cinema I have ever seen... in presenting life from the viewpoint of a child, with the baffling transitions, the obscure motivations, the poetic daze of adult life as it appears to a sensitive child, achieving a kind of direct realism which is so lacking in the literal-dramatic conventions we are used to that it has a surrealist effect.” 

Of course, what I expected The Father to show was what Larkin called the “inverted childhood” of old age, in which one doesn’t build on experience but is slowly divested of it. I expected something closer to a guided tour of a dementia victim’s world from the inside, from his perspective. The film gives us glimpses, fleeting vignettes, scenes from a fracturing mind, but doesn’t go far enough. We remain on the frustrating fringes of the experience. 

Florian Zeller adapts his own play very respectfully, as I suppose he had a right to. As a first film, it is heavily dependent on the text. And why not? But when some critics compare The Father to Michael Haneke’s Amour, which is about a husband’s reactions to his wife’s stroke and her mental and physical decline, all I can say is it doesn’t add up. All Zeller really gives us are the fragments of a character whose pieces never fit together to make anything close to a whole. Anthony is disintegrating before our eyes, but we’re never allowed a glimpse of who he was before the disintegration started. Actors pop in and out and exchange identities arbitrarily. The arbitrariness is part of the puzzle, part of the awful process that afflicts Anthony. The film is steadfast and honest and doesn’t spare us the nastiness of dementia. Anne hangs on to her father, she keeps him with her for as long as she can until the effects of his helplessness begin to smother whatever joy there is in her own life. When she finally places Anthony in a nursing home it comes as something of a relief, since we have grown concerned for her well being, not so much his. 

The ravages of time and loss, how the simple process of continuing to live guarantees loss, is what I expected from The Father, but what it fails to give. Anthony Hopkins has been lauded but I found Olivia Colman far more compelling as Anne, the long-suffering daughter. The film is far too tasteful, too discreet. We are shown a glimpse of Anne trying to strangle Anthony. But she was merely daydreaming. Zeller’s model for his film was clearly Michael Haneke’s Amour, but he hasn’t any of Haneke’s powers of concentration, of framing and pacing. Haneke can show us something unspeakable with shocking coolness, with no trace of dramatic emphasis so that it seems almost commonplace – and all the more terrible. 

The Father is a carefully-wrought hall of mirrors in which we see Anthony Hopkins wander, looking for the way out. His Theseus has no thread to lead him out of the labyrinth. At the film’s close, Anthony cries for his “mummy” and collapses into the arms of his nurse (Olivia Williams) whom he once mistook for Anne. She comforts him, rocking him gently, murmuring comforting words, and the camera pans – discreetly – away to gaze out of a window at wind-stirred trees. ("The blown bush at the window.") The trees are moving, but The Father is not.

An Eye for an Eye

How many people die every year on hospital operating tables? It must be one of the major causes of death, and the reason why doctors have to pay for malpractice insurance. Advances in medical science aren’t always forthcoming when people need them, or when doctors try to evade their own humanity. 

On the list of the Unworthily Obscure, films that, for whatever reason, have been forgotten or simply overlooked, Andre Cayatte’s An Eye for an Eye (Oeil pour Oeil - 1957) is a standout for me. (1) Despite its showing in New York (almost four years after its release in France), where it was reviewed somewhat favorably in the Times, it hasn’t turned up in any retrospective that I know of, nor has it been rediscovered, restored, and/or re-released to any commensurate fanfare. Cayatte never inspired much enthusiasm, despite his mastering and domesticating - in Justice Is Done and We Are All Murderers - the pièce-á-thèse. Cayatte’s Wikipedia page includes An Eye for an Eye on its selected filmography list of 24 films, but it is the only title without a link to a page of its own. In 1961, A. H. Weiler of the Times wrote “this unrelievedly grim study proves to be an exotically fascinating affair with a starkly surprising dénouement that holds a viewer's attention despite its basically funereal pace.” He concludes that “It's a terribly somber view minus romance or happiness. It makes for a serious, professional drama of limited appeal.” (2) 

Based on a novel by Vahé Katcha, with dialogue written by Pierre Bost, the plot of the story is simple but inexorable: in Syria, a European doctor named Walter is visited at his home late at night by a man whose pregnant wife is having a difficult delivery. Having already drunk a few cocktails and not having any instruments, Walter tells his concierge to tell the the man to take the woman to the hospital where Matik, whose shift it is, can attend to her. Enroute to the hospital in the morning, Walter passes the man’s old car, apparently broken down some distance from the hospital. At the hospital Matik explains to him that the man carried his wife several kilometers and that the pregnant woman died because her pregnancy was ectopic, or extrauterine. Matik wasn’t skilled enough to save her. But how was Walter to know all this? He assures the emotional Matik that there was nothing they could’ve done. 

However, Bortak, the dead woman’s husband, blames Walter for her death. The film shows us his elaborate revenge on him. Bortak seems to follow him everywhere. When the doctor’s home phone rings repeatedly, with no one on the other end of the line, Walter opts to stay at the hospital. Walter even has to have Bortak’s jalopy towed when it conks out inconveniently right outside the window of his room. Walter spends his evenings boozing in the local dives. In one of them he is paying his bill when he finds he is out of pocket. He intends to write out an IOU when the manager informs him that Bortak, who has been sitting at the bar sucking Coke through a straw, has paid his bill. When Walter crosses the crowded dance floor to the bar, Bortak has slipped out. 

Whether it is indeed Bortak whom Walter can’t shake or his own guilty conscience doesn’t actually matter. Cayatte paces the film with the precision of a legal brief. He eases us into a game of cat and mouse without informing us of which is which. Finally finding Bortak driving his car one night, Walter intercepts him and discovers his little daughter (who speaks French) is a passenger. Since Bortak’s engine is dead Walter feels suddenly obliged to give him a lift home. His own car out of gas, Walter spends the night in Bortak’s home. The following morning he acquires the gas he needs but he learns of an old man in a farther village who needs medical attention. When he arrives in the village, all whitewashed adobe (and familiar to anyone acquainted with spaghetti Weaterns, the villagers Arabs instead of Mexicans), Walter is prevented from administering to the injured old man an antiseptic injection by the hostile Arabs gathered in his house. He contemptuously empties the life-saving hypodermic into the air and leaves the house. 

Returning to his car, Waltet discovers its front wheels are missing. His angry reaction arouses the ire of the locals and he takes refuge in the most preposterously apportioned cafe-hotel on earth. Unable to sleep and leery of intruders, Walter finds Bortak in the adjacent room. He tries to explain to Bortak his condolences for his dead wife, but that he was not responsible for her death. Bortak is unmoved. 

Having missed the bus to Damascus, Walter stoically packs what provisions he thinks he will need into a sack and starts to hike back to the city. But to his surprise, if not entirely ours, he finds that all roads don’t necessarily lead to Damascus and that Bortak is somehow always several steps ahead of him. Bortak tells him he knows the shortest way, so Walter joins him. For the remainder of the film, they are the only people in view in a landscape that grows increasingly like that of Mars. When Walter figures out that Bortak has been leading him farther away from Damascus, he takes Bortak's shaving razor and slashes his arm, assuring him that he won’t bleed to death as long as he leads him the right way. So Bortak points him in a different direction, assuring the doctor that Damascus is just beyond the next ridge. As he plods away from the camera, it ascends to reveal to us what Walter cannot see: desolate hills and gullies all the way to the horizon. 

Curd Jürgens, a familiar villain for English-speaking audiences, is excellent as the reasonable doctor Walter, stuck in a place where reason is no use to him. Folco Lulli, whom I remember from several Italian films, especially Monicelli’s undeservedly neglected masterpiece I Compagni (The Organizer), is a perfect bull for the bullheaded Bortak. Cayatte makes no concessions to our expectations. His subject is the grim facts of the ultimate failure of human empathy – the usual reason why justice eludes us. 

I suppose the reason why critics greeted the film so coolly was because it failed to provide them with “wider implications.” Vernon Young called the film an allegory: 

To this injured, obdurate man [Bortak], Walter’s guilt is irrevocable: he shirked his professional obligation and the patient died... At the rational altitude of human response, Walter’s dereliction, suavely depicted as unavoidable, is patently justified by the detailed circumstances to which the audience bears agreeable witness. Nonetheless, asks Cayatte, when a man evades an appeal to his moral instinct, no matter how temporizing a case he can make out for himself, is he not likely to initiate a chain of reprisal out of all proportion – as we conventionally see it – to the innocence of his evasion? Cosmic response to human frailty is seldom relevant. The civilized doctor does in truth refuse humanity, and an oaf, Bortak, is the instrument invoked to avenge – terribly – this refusal. (3) 

Cayatte particularizes Walter’s fate beautifully enough for the viewer to fail to see the imposition of a universal rule. No court of law would’ve convicted Walter of the “wrongful death” of Bortak’s wife. But Bortak doesn’t care about the law. In his occluded mind, Walter is fully responsible for making him a widower. If the film illustrates anything it’s the stupidity of the proverb in the title, which is said to have originated in the Code of Hammurabi. As Gandhi pointed out, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." 

(1) The film was shot in Almeria, Spain with the VistaVision process, but the Gaumont print I saw was standard aspect ratio. Although the picture was sharp, at times the color fluctuated wildly. Cayatte probably wanted to exploit the widescreen to drive home the enormity of desolate landscape into which Walter is lured by Bortak. 

(2) A. H. Weiler. 

(3) “A Condemned Man Escapes: Five Films on the Subject,” The Hudson Review, Winter 1959-60.

A Front Row Straight-jacket

When James Agee died of a heart attack in a taxi in New York City on May 16, 1955 (my birthday, three years later), the tributes to him from his friends approximated the enormity of their personal loss as well as the loss to American English prose. In the seventy years since, those tributes haven’t really come to an end. All of the poems, stories, essays, letters and fragments have been collected and published. Few American writers are now as celebrated or as regretted as Agee. 

The bulk of Agee’s writing consists of the movie reviews he wrote for Time (November 1941 to February 1948) and The Nation (December 1942 to September 1948). As uninspiring as the overwhelming majority of movies on which Agee was obliged to comment were, he took his job seriously. So we have his one-liner appraisals of The Affairs of Susan to Up in Mabel’s Room without very many people now living having seen either of them. Movie critics then weren’t what they are today, who provide nothing more than consumer advice. 

I want to take a moment to recall just one of the reasons why Agee was not just a fine minor poet and a great writer of prose, but also a great critic. We know how enthused and encouraged Agee had been by the always struggling art of the movies. He had seen greatness in it, enough to recognize what it was capable of doing, but he hadn’t seen enough greatness and it whetted his appetite for more. 

So he took on the job that few had ever really wanted: the movie desk at Time, Inc., which made him easily the most powerful critic writing for a non-daily in America. His knowledge of movies had been acquired the hard way, by seeing as many films available in New York City as he could get his eyes on. By 1942, when he began writing for Time, Hollywood was already past its prime – its so-called golden age was over. The war put the industry on a different footing – keeping the home fires burning with heavy-handed propaganda, most of which probably didn’t hold up even then. After the war budget strictures pushed Hollywood back into the streets, with a greater feeling for real locales but burdened with the same old phoney scripts. 

Agee was in such despair over the paucity of worthwhile films that he often rounded up a dozen or so of them in a single column. His one-liners still sting. Leafing through the book Agee on Film is to be transported to a Manhattan theater seat, like the Fifth Avenue Playhouse, with the light from the projection booth shining through layers of cigarette smoke. Movie admission cost 55 cents in 1946. (A gallon of gas was 21 cents.) 

An excellent illustration of the difference between a perceptive critic like Agee and a mere reviewer can be found in his back-to-back analysis of the last two films (he only made four) of Jean Vigo, written for The Nation in 1947-48. The conventional wisdom today is that Vigo’s only feature-length film, L’Atalante, is his most mature work, one that displays his genius at integrating sound and image most acutely, and that his earlier short film Zero de Conduite, though more personal and inventive, is “experimental,” its ideas not fully developed. Agee thought the opposite was true, that Zero was the better film and L’Atalante a disappointing attempt to domesticate Vigo’s feral genius. Agee goes a great deal further to defining the extent of Vigo's contribution to film language. 

Of Zero de Conduite: 

It was the one film which worked deeply within pure motion picture style, and it extended the possibilities of style and expression as brilliantly, and germinally, as the best work of Griffith, Chaplin, Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, and Murnau. It was made fourteen or fifteen years ago, and nothing so adventurous in terms of pure movie expressiveness has been made since. 

Of L’Atalante: 

Vigo was a more experienced director by the time he made L’Atalante, and the picture shows gifts fully as great as those shown in Zero de Conduite. But for all its quality L’Atalante suggests the struggles of a maniac in straight-jacket; whereas in Zero he moves freely, and it turns out that he is dangerous only to all in the world that most needs destroying. 

Agee, who learned the few details of Vigo’s short life from the Hollywood Quarterly, challenges the conventional views of Vigo’s place as an artist: 

On a foggy day, indeed, or with a prejudiced eye, it would be possible to confuse his work with the general sad run of avant-garde movie work, as several reviewers, including some whom I ordinarily respect, have done. But Vigo was no more a conventional avant-gardist than he was a Hollywood pimp; he was one of the very few real originals who have ever worked on films. Nobody has approached his adroitness in handling reality, consciousness, and time on film (in Zero); or has excelled his vivid communication of the animal emotion, the senses, the inanimate world, and their interplay (in L’Atalante); nor have I found, except in the best work of the few masters, a flexibility, richness, and purity of creative passion to equal his in both these films. 

Most movies, including many of the best, have been made timidly and under great handicap, with fragments of the movie alphabet which were mostly shaped and frozen around the year 1925. In an important sense Vigo is far from “unconventional”; he is merely making much of the rest of the alphabet available. He has gone as far in this, I think, as Eisenstein and Dovzhenko – in a very different direction, of course – and a great deal that he has done in [Zero], bold as it is, should be regarded less as inimitable experiment than as the conquest of more of the full ground on which further work can be done. It is as if he had invented the wheel. Many others were fumbling at it; some still are; but nobody of anything remotely like his ability is trying to find further uses for it; and one is sure to be branded as a solemn snob, incapable of “enjoying” movies, if one so much as dares to speak in favor of these elementary devices by which enjoyment could be enlarged. 

After reading how a film gourmand like Agee relished the chance to dine on haute cuisine like Vigo’s films, it is all the more dispiriting to see him having to gorge more sausages from the Hollywood grinder in his column the following week. Clearly, Agee on Film is, like Vigo's L'Atalante, made up of the struggles of a maniac in a straight-jacket.