Love and Despair

Cesare Pavese

Cominciavo a capire che nulla è più inabitabile di un luogo dove si è stati felici.  ("I began to see that no spot is less habitable than a place where one has been happy." The Beach, Chapter 11) 

Il y a des femmes à Gênes dont j’ai aimé le sourire tout un matin. ("There are women in Genoa whose smile I loved for a whole morning." Camus, "Love of Life") 

Most of my lifetime ago I was on a Cesare Pavese kick and I read as much of his writings as I could find at my local (Denver) public library. Among them was a novella called simply The Beach - originally La Spiaggia - that Einaudi published in 1941. R. W. Flint made the translation, which must have seemed a strange experience for Flint, since Pavese had been a scholar of English and had translated several works by American writers, including Melville's Moby Dick. 

The Beach somewhat resembles Camus's L'Etranger, published in Paris in 1942. Camus had modeled his writing on the bare bones school of Hemingway, and one feels that The Beach is a novel that a young Camus might have written, before he became preoccupied by metaphysical themes, because it's a novel about watching the last of one's youth pass away in a setting of sun and sea and in which the love of life is exuded by its imagery. 

The story of The Beach is becalming, in which you can feel the to and fro of the sea (even though tides in the Mediterranean are slight). And it's the same sea that Camus loved, but on the opposite coast, near Genoa. The characters in Pavese's story, Doro, Clelia, Berti, and Guido, are always going into the sea or emerging from it - all except the narrator, the Professor, the old friend of Doro's, who is in love with his new wife, Clelia. But everyone is in love with Clelia, or in lust for her - until the playful atmosphere among them is destroyed by the news, which arrives in the penultimate chapter, that Clelia is pregnant. 

I can go further with the similarities between Pavese and Camus. Pavese's home town, Santo Stefano Belbo, situated between Turin and Genoa, informed much of his fictional writings and overshadowed his personal life. For Camus, it was Algiers, a French colonial city in North Africa. Pavese, five years older than Camus,(1) suffered from asthma that was severe enough to spare him induction in the Fascist Italian army. Camus was diagnosed with tuberculosis at 17 and suffered relapses throughout his life. Camus used a publisher's advance on his first novel, L'Étranger, to visit France in 1942, in the middle of the Nazi Occupation. During the war, Pavese was caught up in the fighting of Italian partisans against retreating Germans around Turin, though he did not play an active role. Caught in Paris by the war, Camus had clandestinely joined the Resistance and wrote for their broadsheet Le Combat. After the war, both men had affairs with glamorous actresses: Camus with Maria Casarés, daughter of a Spanish ambassador, and Pavese with the American movie star Constance Dowling. Pavese's affair was abortive, and it may have precipitated his suicide 72 years ago last Saturday, but it was only natural that he would've been attracted to Dowling, since he had been in love with the idealized America he'd first encountered in the poetry of Walt Whitman. Camus's narrator in L'Étranger, Meursault, could almost be construed to be a sociopath. He is portrayed by Camus as an outsider because he refuses to go along with society's lies - like showing grief at his mother's funeral when he doesn't feel any, or like blaming the bright sun for his murder of an Arab man on the beach, since the sun's reflection off the blade of the man's knife temporarily blinded him. 

Pavese's isolation from the lives of those around him was more of the emotional adjustment of a psychological condition. It's perhaps too simple to conclude that Pavese is the narrator of The Beach: 

I was finding my usual perverse pleasure in keeping apart, knowing that a few steps away in the light someone else was moving around, laughing and dancing. Nor did I lack for something to reflect upon. I lit my pipe and smoked it through. 

(Pavese also smoked a pipe.)   

A familiar depression took hold. The memory of my talk with Guido, added to that, sank me completely. Luckily I was by the sea where the days don't count. "I'm here to have a good time," I told myself. 

The narrator, evidently, has to work hard to keep himself from succumbing to despair, even in the face of natural beauty. Camus defined this odd dichotomy in the so-called Lyrical Essays he wrote and published in the 1930s. In the essay, "Love of Life," he wrote: "There is no love of life without despair of life." Based on his visit to the Balearic Islands, Majorca and Ibiza, the essays in the collection called The Wrong Side and the Right Side ("L'Envers et l'endroit") were written in 1935 and '36, when Camus was 22. They are discursive and impressionistic, and are a unique combination of sensualism and philosophical discourse. At the end of "Love of Life," he wrote: 

In Ibiza, I sat every day in the cafés that dot the harbor. Toward five in the evening, the young people would stroll back and forth along the full length of the jetty; this is where marriages and the whole of life are arranged. One cannot help thinking there is a certain grandeur in beginning one’s life this way, with the whole world looking on. I would sit down, still dizzy from the day’s sun, my head full of white churches and chalky walls, dry fields and shaggy olive trees. I would drink a sweetish syrup, gazing at the curve of the hills in front of me. They sloped gently down to the sea. The evening would grow green. On the largest of the hills, the last breeze turned the sails of a windmill. And, by a natural miracle, everyone lowered his voice. Soon there was nothing but the sky and musical words rising toward it, as if heard from a great distance. There was something fleeting and melancholy in the brief moment of dusk, perceptible not only to one man but also to a whole people. As for me, I longed to love as people long to cry. I felt that every hour I slept now would be an hour stolen from life … that is to say from those hours of undefined desire. I was tense and motionless, as I had been during those vibrant hours at the cabaret in Palma and at the cloister in San Francisco, powerless against this immense desire to hold the world between my hands.  

I know that I am wrong, that we cannot give ourselves completely. Otherwise, we could not create. But there are no limits to loving, and what does it matter to me if I hold things badly if I can embrace everything? There are women in Genoa whose smile I loved for a whole morning. I shall never see them again and certainly nothing is simpler. But words will never smother the flame of my regret. I watched the pigeons flying past the little well at the cloister in San Francisco, and forgot my thirst. But a moment always came when I was thirsty again. 

I have basked in the warmth of these words, of this vision, since I first encountered them at the age of 20.

(1) Cesare Pavese born September 9, 1908, died August 27, 1950. Albert Camus born November 7, 1913, died January 4, 1960.

Three Rooms in Manhattan

 

The story of Georges Simenon's novel Three Bedrooms in Manhattan* is about a man named François Combe who meets a woman named Katherine, or Kay, by chance in a Manhattan bar one night. They strike up a conversation because they discover that they're French. They leave the bar together and spend the following several days, which seem to turn into weeks, with each other. The story is told from the point of view of François. 

But that is only the action of the story, because what Simenon explores is much deeper than the actions of the man and woman. He comes closer to examining the full volatility of love than any novelist since Proust. From one moment to the next, as these two people are beset with emotions so violently passionate, like passengers on a transcendental rollercoaster, it's astonishing that they manage to sit still and maintain their composure. And it hurtles them back and forth, up and down, all the way from page 3 until the end of the novel. Beautifully, Simenon makes you feel almost all of the many emotions to which he subjects François, which is a little tiring. 

Poor François, a French actor in New York, fresh from the loss of his wife to a gigolo, sleepless, prowling the bars, 

The place smelled of fairgrounds, of lazy crowds, of nights when you stayed out because you couldn’t go to bed, and it smelled like New York, of its calm and brutal indifference.

winds up one night sitting next to a woman calling herself Kay, 

Picking at random, he ordered grilled sausages. Then he looked at his neighbor and she looked at him. She had just been served fried eggs, but she hadn’t touched them. She lit a cigarette slowly and deliberately, leaving a trace of her lipstick on the paper.

“You’re French?”

She is too good to be true, but she will not stop talking about her life, of all the men she's known, and fascinates François sufficiently to  inflame his jealousy and incredulity. At one point, a few days into their affair, he becomes so tormented by the tumult of his feelings that he punches her in the face "as hard as he could with his fist, once, twice, three times," and all she can say to him is "my poor darling!" But gradually, over the course of several days together, her stories turn out to be true, and he finds that he loves her and cannot live without her. Luckily, she reciprocates his feelings. 

Somehow, through unforgiving prose, they survive Simenon's brutal assault on their - on our - psyches to arrive at a place of certainty and peace. It is utterly transfixing. But that is the novel, told from the inside, and it's a tour de force for Simenon. The whole trouble with the film, Trois Chambres à Manhattan, directed by 59-year-old Marcel Carné, is that the story, told from the outside, doesn't even work as soap opera. Co-written by Carné and Jacques Sigurd, the film exposes the full extent to which Carné had been reliant on Jacques Prévert, the poet who had written Le jour se lève, Le quai des brûmes, Les Visiteurs du soir, and The Children of Paradise. Carné, in fact, offers a challenge to the auteur argument, since Prévert was the true author of those films, not the director Carné. 

The superb actor Maurice Ronet is too young to play François, who is 48 in the novel, and Annie Girardot has none of the mystery that Simenon gives Kay. The cinematography, by the venerable Eugène Schuftan, who photographed - magnificently - Le Quai des brûmes, among others, is seriously handicapped by the cross-cutting between location shots in New York and studio scenes done all the way back in France (the continuity people had quite a job on their hands). The exterior scenes in Manhattan seem to exist merely to establish the actuality of the setting. The Central Park scenes are especially egregious because they show us views we've seen in countless other films set in Manhattan. (When I visited Washington, D.C. I sat down on a bench in a park but was quickly told to get up because someone was shooting a scene there for a TV series.)

While we get enough exterior shots of Manhattan to provide the film with enough Nouvelle Vague street creds, the film opens with a terrible rear-screen night shot of Maurice Ronet and Geneviève Page in a Mercedes sports car on the Champs-Elysees. Back at their posh residence, Page announces to Ronet that she's leaving him for a younger man who's waiting outside. (We see him sitting like a handsome mannequin behind the wheel of a convertible.) Ronet is resistant to her leaving. She tells him that divorce is only a formality and that can find acting work in America. Cut to Ronet occupying a cheap flat in Manhattan - the first "chambre." He gets out of bed, paces the room, looks out of the window, grabs his jacket and goes out into the night time street. The camera rises to show us the Manhattan skyline and the credits roll (see above). 

Because it's the 60s in the film and not the 40s in the book, the costumes and sets are far less louche. François already has a telephone in his flat. François and Kay meet on adjacent stools at a snack bar. Kay isn't wearing a fur and pearls. The first half of the film is mostly Kay talking, telling François of all the men she's known and the places she's been. François acts as if he doesn't believe her - that she's bullshitting him. 

The Hotel Sherman is the 2nd room in Manhattan. (In the book it's the dreamlike Lotus, although everything in the book is dreamlike.) It's nearly forty minutes into the film before we see daylight. Through it all, Annie Girardot's hair, which makes her look much older, remains exactly the same. The film is black & white, so we can't see how Kay's lipstick smudges her cigarettes. There is one improvement the film has over the book: instead of Kay playing their song on a jukebox, she asks a jazz pianist to play it. The pianist is Mal Waldron, who supplies the film with his marvelous jazz.

What I felt that the movie needed was the mock-noir style of Jean-Pierre Melville in Bob le flambeur. Towards the end, when Kay has flown to Mexico to be with her ill daughter, François, unconvinced that she will return, picks up a young woman, played by the stunning Margaret Nolan - an English actress who had been Sean Connery's masseuse in Goldfinger. As Raymond Chandler once put it, she's the type who would make a bishop kick out a stained-glass window. Lying in bed next to Ronet, their lovemaking is interrupted by the ringing phone. Of course, it's Kay calling long-distance. The naked girl slides out of bed and gets dressed. From the tone of François's voice, Kay suspects that he isn't alone. Oh brother! 

As happens too often, by the time the film is over you will want to return to Simenon's novel, which I highly recommend that you do. It is richly satisfying in ways that will surprise you. 

*Georges Simenon, Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, translated by Marc Romano and Lawrence G. Blochman (New York Review Books, 2003). The French title is simply Three Rooms (Chambres) in Manhattan. The three rooms in question are two small apartments and a hotel room. All three have beds. 

My Worst Location

The British actor Michael Caine is becoming better known since the Brexit vote for his cranky political views than for his acting, which has been in steep decline since he went on a 5-year hiatus from acting in the 1990s and, as Stanley Kauffmann put it, "came back without his talent." (1)

Basically Caine has come to believe, since he and many other rich British people had to move out of Britain when, in the 1980s, a Labour government imposed taxes on them that were so draconian that he couldn't get any richer and he had to go into voluntary exile to the US, that people who live on government benefits are merely being "lazy" and that England would be better off if nobody got government support. After moving back to England in 2009, he stated "The government has taken tax up to 50%, and if it goes to 51% I will be back in America. We've got 3.5 million layabouts on benefits, and I'm 76, getting up at 6am to go to work to keep them. Let's get everybody back to work so we can save a couple of billion and cut tax, not keep sticking it up." Caine also believes that Brexit will restore to his country all of its former glory and prestige. If you share in this delusion I highly recommend a book by James Hamilton-Paterson called What We Have Lost that will disabuse you. (2)

Caine's conservative political views are all the more surprising when one reads his biography, What's It All About? (3) Caine hadn't just seen poverty, he knew it intimately throughout his childhood when his name was Maurice Micklewhite. Were the members of his poor family lazy wastrels, as he now believes unemployed people are? The biggest revelation in What's It All About? was also an enormous shock for Caine as well when, in 1989, upon the death of his mother, he was told that he had a half-brother, David, whom his mother had before she became Mrs. Micklewhite. David was born with severe epilepsy, a condition which left him unable to control his muscles or to speak. He was neither an idiot nor insane, yet at the time it was considered best for him to be confined to an asylum for incurables his entire life until such institutions were closed and he was moved to a more humane hospital. David died in 1992, just after Caine's book was published. His mother had kept the existence of David a secret from everyone, including her husband. And as Caine revealed, 

The most extraordinary information I was given, however, was the fact that for sixty-two years of his life, with the exception of the Second World War and her time with us in Beverly Hills, my mother had visited him every Monday, without my late father, my brother Stanley or me ever knowing anything about it. 

Last week I published my review of Last Orders and I had completely forgotten about Caine's half-brother and his mother's weekly visits to him, just as Amy Dodds had visited her daughter June every week in Graham Swift's novel and Fred Schepisi's film. 

For me, as an involuntary resident of the Philippines for the past 14 years, the most interesting chapter in Caine's memoir was the one called "My Worst Location." As Caine delineates them, 

The best location is, of course, near where you live, and failing that, a place where you would normally pay to go on holiday. I have a dream of opening a script and reading: ‘As the yacht sailed in to St Tropez harbour …’ Usually locations do not come up to this standard. 

The worst location I have ever worked in was the Philippine jungle, where Too Late the Hero, a World War Two story of a battle between a small unit of British soldiers and one American against the Japanese, was filmed. Robert Aldrich, the director, kept us there for twenty-two weeks.(4) 

An enormous American naval base was our destination as we set off on the long journey through some of the poorest villages I had seen since Korea. All around us was dense jungle and great hill ranges. A lot of it was very beautiful – if you were short-sighted and didn’t notice the human misery. So shooting began, in some of the worst conditions I had ever encountered on a film. We were plagued by insects, thorns and 120º temperatures every day, accompanied by the highest humidity that it is possible to measure. The food, I was sure, must be alive with organisms unknown to modern science so my daytime diet consisted solely of sardines and Australian cheese which came out of tins opened in my presence and then consumed before anything else could touch them. The only thing that saved our sanity was our visits to the officers’ mess in the navy base, where we could get a good shower, great food and cold drinks, and watch television. Life was perfect in the evenings, until we had to return to our mosquito-ridden cribs. 

Since the director had a shooting schedule of fourteen days straight and five days off, Caine took his first break in Taiwan. 

We decided to spend our next break ‘at home’ at the naval base. It was here that I met one of the toughest guys ever. He was a member of one of the American secret services, was six feet six inches tall and rejoiced in the name of Toy. He it was who took us on our first and only foray into the local town called Olongapo. This was a place with a population of about twenty thousand people, half of whom were prostitutes serving the naval base. We had heard tales about Olongapo but had been warned off it since it was dangerous for Europeans. 

We were all drinking in the officers’ mess one night when Toy suggested that we should go and visit the place at least once. We told him about the danger and he said not to worry and pulled his jacket open to reveal a heavy .45 automatic in an underarm holster. A wave of courage swept over us and we decided to take a chance. 

Olongapo turned out to be just one long shanty-town main street, brightly lit with neon signs for wall-to-wall bars and discos, and with very dark alleys leading off the street at intervals. ‘Don’t move off the main street,’ yelled Toy above the din of music from a thousand speakers. ‘We’ll never find the body if you do.’ We all moved closer to Toy for safety, like ducklings on a pond and followed him into Sodom and Gomorrah. 

The poverty and stench of the place were unbelievable. We finally found a bar that looked as though they changed the washing-up water at least once per day and went in. The moment we sat down we were smothered with ladies offering various specialities, some of which I must admit I had never heard of before. We all settled for whisky, which seemed to be the safest drink and ordered a round for the girls. I looked at them closely and thought that here I was, surrounded by young available scantily-clad girls, and instead of it being erotic or sexy or even interesting, it was just sad. I looked closely at their badly made-up, prematurely ravaged faces and saw the eyes go dead the moment no one was looking. These kids had been forced here by grinding poverty. Being an actor I not only listened to what they said, but to how they said it, and they all said exactly the same thing in the same way, as though they had all attended the same school, to be taught how to extract money from Europeans. 

Our drinks arrived and before I could pick mine up the girl next to me got out one of her breasts and dipped it into my drink. ‘That will give it a good flavour,’ she said. Not wishing to offend I ‘accidentally’ knocked over my glass and ordered an ice-cold beer instead, hoping that it would be too cold for anyone to be tempted to dip anything else in it. 

We went the rounds of some of the other places but there was such a depressing air of poverty hanging like a cloud over Olongapo that we fled back to the comparative gaiety of the naval base. 

At long last, after what seemed like an eternity of heat, sweat, insects, and a particularly nasty sweatrash labelled appropriately by the Americans as ‘the Crud’, the location shooting was over and it was back to Hollywood for the studio work, with a few days off for partying en route in Manila. And boy, did we party. After a while, though, my social conscience began getting in the way. The gap between the rich and the poor here was the widest I had ever seen in a so-called civilised country. The poor were completely destitute while the rich, with whom we, of course, were mixing, lived in the kind of luxury unknown even in the super-rich countries of the west. I remember going into a party one evening, and seeing the local children rummaging through the rubbish bins from the house and eating the scraps that they found there, only to find inside that the cabaret for the evening was the cream of the Bolshoi Ballet flown in from Moscow especially for that one function. 

On my way home, I stopped the car at the garbage cans and watched the children for a while, thinking how fortunate I had been with my own childhood. Once upon a time I had thought it so poor but never again. The kids finally spotted me and came over to ask for money. I gave them all that I had on me and drove home with tears of anger in my eyes at a society that could treat its own people like this. 

At another party the hostess came over and took me by the arm, saying, ‘There is someone here that I would like you to meet.’ She guided me to the end of the room to a dais that I had not noticed before, and seated upon it were two men deep in conversation. They stopped talking and stood up as we approached, and she introduced me to the leader of this system, President-for-life Marcos. Ferdinand Marcos had the sort of face that I associated with the children outside: the milk of human kindness had long since gone sour in it. (5)

Finally the hellish shoot was finished and Caine flew to Los Angeles with boundless relief:

I finished the worst location of my career – and when I eventually saw the picture, the most unnecessary one. The shots in the jungle were just a mass of trees that could have been taken anywhere. I was reminded of the old director King Vidor who, when asked why a certain film could not go on an expensive location, said, ‘A tree is a tree – shoot it in Griffith Park.’ 

I first visited the Philippines in 1993, two years after Subic Naval Base, adjacent to Olongapo, had been permanently closed. Although I had come to the Philippines to sample the nightlife (I was then a sailor stationed in Okinawa), it was a lot more subdued than it had been in the bad old days of the open bases - and I thank god for it. With dozens of bars instead of hundreds, in a place that was still recovering from the eruption of the Pinatubo volcano in 1991,my vacation was a great deal more relaxed. But that is a story still waiting to be told. 

(1) The New Republic, February 18, 2002.

(2) What We Have Lost: The Dismantling of Great Britain (London: Head of Zeus, 2018).

(3) What's It All About? (London: Random House, 1992).

(4) Caine claims it took twenty-two weeks to shoot, but it was only eight. The difference of fourteen weeks in Caine's memory is probably due to two months in hell seeming like nearly six. Ironically, most of the shooting was done on an isolated island called Boracay, which has since been designated one of the world's best beach resorts.

(5) And now the President-for-life's son, Ferdinand, Jr., is the Philippines' president. 

Last Orders

Having read Last Orders and seen the movie, I wish I'd not done one or the other. I can't decide which. 

 

Last Orders is about five men and two women who have spent much of their lives in one another's company, a lot of it in a pub called the Coach & Horses (on the cover of the first edition is a closeup photo of a pint of beer in want of a refill). Jack, Vince, Ray, Lenny, Vic, Amy, and Mandy share the narration of the story, a group of typically hapless human beings who find friendship and loyalty, but also loss and betrayal. 

Graham Swift, who wrote the novel, could not have asked for a finer director and cast to outfit his book's movie adaptation. We, however, could have asked for a better occasion to assemble them than for this relentless, cumulatively futile drive from Bermondsey in South London to Margate on the east coast to scatter, as directed by the deceased, a pot of ashes off the end of a pier on a rainy April day. 

Swift's novel won the Booker Prize for 1996. Such awards have become misleading to aspiring readers. When I got around to reading it - not because it was a Booker Prize-winner - I was surprised by its slightness, even at 304 pages. Awarding the Booker Prize to Swift became subsequently controversial when he was accused of lifting the plot of his story from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Too bad Swift didn't lift more than Faulkner's plot.   

What is most bewildering about the film, from Schepisi's own script, is that the illustrations of the novel that it provides seem so perfunctory. On the day trip to Margate, the four surviving male friends play out their lifelong regrets and resentments like they're scattering more than just Jack's ashes along the way. Jack's presence in an urn inside a box or a plastic bag that one or another of them are appointed to carry, should've been similar to the presence of Alfredo Garcia's head in a sack in Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Instead, the urn is more like a cross they each have to bear for an allotted time. 

Swift is an excellent writer, even when he's writing everything in cockney vernacular. But even some of the best writers can't handle vernacular speech (I think of Kipling's horrors), since it was never the language they used. They can never avoid moments of beauty when a character starts talking like they're momentarily Graham Swift instead of Ray or Lenny. Visiting the War Memorial at Chatham, the gang don't seem to want to leave:  

The sun goes in again behind the edge of a cloud but only for a moment. I look at the view too, I don’t want to lose it either, but I turn and walk on down, following the others, so the trees come up and the view slips away. It’s shivery among the trees. (Ray) 

And the worst are the Homes, since you know they aren’t homes at all, it’s just a sweet-sounding name for a clearing station for the handicapped or the old, or a stand-in for that word you mustn’t use any more: asylum. And you know that for lots of them it wasn’t such a short stay, that this was where the deceased lived maybe most, maybe all of their life, and that life, in this case, meant a kind of death, a kind of not having a home to go to. (Vic) 

life’s not ever so unfair that there’s not a worse unfairness than yours, and that you can’t ever get so stuck in your ways that there aren’t worse ways of being stuck, like from the word go and for always. (Ray) 

More than 20 years before Fred Schepisi arrived at Last Orders he had made one of the best films of the Australian New Wave, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), itself based on a fine novel by Thomas Kenneally. His career outside Australia started out on shaky ground with the thoughtful but silly Iceman (though it was a terrific commercial for cryogenics) and the thoughtful Western Barbarosa (with Willy Nelson and a very good Gary Busey). But then Schepisi made of David Hare's play Plenty, with plenty of help from Meryl Streep, as good as a film as it could've been. And he returned to Australia, with Streep in tow, to make A Cry in the Dark, aka Evil Angels. 

Early in the pre-production of Last Orders, Schepisi got commitments from all the male principals except David Hemmings. Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings, and Bob Hoskins between them carry more baggage than a bellboy at the Waldorf. Very late in the novel we discover the reason why Jack's wife Amy isn't going to Margate with the boys. It's Thursday, which has always been the day when she's visiting her daughter June, who is mentally disabled, in a home where she has lived all her life. 

In the film, Amy is introduced early, played by Helen Mirren. In all those years Jack never once visited June or spoke of her. Bob Hoskins, as "Lucky" Ray, and Helen Mirren, as Amy, are back together for the first time since The Long Good Friday. David Hemmings plays Lenny, the goofball of the group. (His eyebrows were beginning to look like wings.) You will do a double take when you see the Young Lenny, who is played by Nolan Hemmings. It's a sweet touch. Two years later, David Hemmings died of a heart attack at 62 on a film set in Romania. Oddly, Michael Caine, the biggest star in the cast, comes across the least substantially. The actor who plays him as a young man - (identified in the credits as JJ Feild) - is more of a presence in the film than Caine.

One of the obvious differences in the movie of Last Orders is having to adjust my American imagination. As soon as the four of them pile into the Mercedes, or the "Merc," in and out of which so much of the action takes place, the steering wheel, of course, is on the right. In the book, I forgot this simple fact and imagined the wheel on the left. And there's a great deal more weather in the book - the usual English wind and rain. Almost all the weather in the film was very unEnglish bright sunshine. 

Two major changes made by the film are the one in which Jack (Michael Caine) dies just as his winning horse comes in at 33 to 1, and Ray (Bob Hoskins) telling Amy about the winnings and asking her to come to Australia (to visit his daughter Sally) with him. In the book Ray returns the £1,000 that Jack borrowed from Vince to place the bet, but he keeps the rest for himself. These changes made by Schepisi fail to give his film a raison d'être. What was needed was a gesture much grander than the one depicted, a bigger risk taken, much more passion, a blowout, instead of the wan and weak and rather dreary gesture that Schepisi was stuck with. Jack may not have deserved a better send-off, but that incredible cast certainly did. 

His Days Are Numbered

Downshifting from last week's mountaintop, Monicelli's The Organizer, it's a considerable downhill coast getting to Elio Petri's second film, I Giorni Contati (1962), released in the US as His Days Are Numbered. (The print I watched identified it in the subtitles as On Borrowed Time.) It was intended as a serious exploration of a middle-aged man's confrontation of his own mortality and his unsatisfying search for some meaning to his life. The film leaves us as unsatisfied as he, but it turned out to be more ominous than its director knew. 

Cesare Conversi, a 53-year-old plumber, has quite a scare on his way home from work one day in Rome. The tram on which he is riding is crowded with passengers and a conductor climbs aboard to collect tickets. The conductor asks a man seated by a window for his ticket. When the man doesn't respond, the conductor shakes his shoulder as if to wake him. The man slumps over in his seat. A woman exclaims, "he's dead!" The tram stops. Cesare climbs down from the tram with a look of genuine fear on his face. He walks away but then he turns around and goes back as a crowd gathers to see the dead man. He and the dead man looked about the same age. 

Late that night, Cesare can't sleep. He turns on the light, sits up in bed and lights a cigarette. He chokes, stubs it out and turns off the light. At 7 in the morning his landlady knocks at his door. He sits up and starts to put on his socks, but suddenly stops and lies down again. At 9 the landlady's toothsome daughter knocks to tell him one of his clients needs his help. Awake, Cesare lies in bed. Finally, after apparently sleeping all day, he rises, puts on an evening suit and goes for a stroll past the Colosseum (yes, that one) where a friend, Amilcare, is painting white stripes on the pavement with other city workers. Cesare tells him about the dead man on the tram and that he has decided not to go back to work. 

Thereafter, the story, just like Cesare, loses all sense of direction. It is as if Petri and Guerra thought up a certain number of adventures for Cesare, killing time before time kills him, until they accumulated enough for a feature length film. What neither Cesare nor the film is prepared to admit to us is that he hasn't the slightest idea what he's looking or waiting for. This is mainly due to Cesare not being a particularly intelligent or even curious man. He talks to his doctor: "You're very well-educated, so please, tell me, when will I die?" 

Wandering around Rome one evening, Cesare happens to see Graziella, the landlady's daughter, who is supposed to be working late at her job, get out of an expensive sports car escorted by a man of a certain age. She is 17. The next day Cesare rebukes her and gives her 50,000 lira so she can get another job. (She spends it on a wig.) Graziella promises to pay him back, and then offers herself to him. He has the grace to turn her down, but he recognizes that what she is offering him is life itself. "La vida!" he tells her as he smiles and gets up to leave. Next we see him choosing from among Rome's many streetwalkers. The one he chooses leads him to a hill overlooking the city. They lie down on the ground, but Cesare can't perform. "Was it the climb?" she asks. He wearily puts his jacket back on and walks away. 

In his utterly aimless - and ultimately circuitous - quest for life's meaning, Cesare returns by bus to his old village. Depopulated of nearly everyone he once knew, having died of drink or are in the process of dying, there are more dogs than people. In a quite surreal moment, he locates one old friend, deep in his bottle of chianti, on a hilltop overlooking a beautiful but, lit by a strange light from the sky, a nightmarish landscape. His old friend falls down, weeping. Cesare hitches a ride back to Rome. 

Another day he catches sight of a woman named Giulia with whom he was once romantically involved (although at this, too, Cesare was a disappointment). He follows her to a public bath where she is working. Eventually, he gets up the courage to approach her. She is now married and has children, but Cesare asks her to meet him at the movies. In the theatet they find their seats, but notice a young couple a few rows behind them passionately making out. Cesare looks at them. So does Giulia. She gets up from her seat and Cesare follows her outside. She asks him what he wants from her. It's obvious, yet he can't find the words to tell her. She walks away from him in the street. 

Inevitably Cesare runs out of money. He inquires about a pension but is told that he needs to be 60 before he can get the full amount. He runs into a young man he once knew who introduces him to the idea of a scam that would land him a lot of cash. All he has to do is have his arm or his leg broken by a professional, make it look like it happened in an accident, and collect the insurance. He chooses to have his arm broken, and there is a terribly funny scene in which Cesare places his arm across two cement blocks so that a large man can smash his arm with a pipe. After two abortive attempts, Cesare runs away, his arm intact and his pockets still empty.

Predictably, Cesare has to return to work, crawling around people's toilets. On his way home on the tram, he seems overwhelmed by the faces and views passing by his window, accelerating until he becomes dizzy and covers his eyes. Finally, a conductor tells him, "Sir. Sir! We have arrived!" Cesare doesn't stir. The empty tram pulls away from us down a dark tunnel. 

What the film desperately needed was more humor. There is a scene in which Cesare encounters an art expert at a museum. They strike up a conversation about art, which the art expert assures Cesare has nothing to do with what's in the museum. Outside, Cesare tells him his profession and the expert invites him to his house. His house is filled with quasi-abstract paintings. Under the film's credits we are shown engravings ("incisione") by Lorenzo Vespignani, and the works hanging in the house resemble them. He takes Cesare to a room in which a large sink is stopped up with black water. He asks Cesare to fix it. "Do you have a wrench?" he asks as he crawls under the sink. 

Salvo Randone was a marvelous character actor whose career didn't take off until the 1960s. He appeared in a few other Petri films. He has the right hangdog face and world-weary demeanor to invest Cesare with enough to hold our interest through the film. Petri made just eleven films in a career of more than 40 years. He was fully engaged with his time and had the talent to evoke it. I reviewed his marvelous film We Still Kill the Old Way on this blog. 

But there is something more to this film - something oddly prophetic. In the story written by Petri and Tonino Guerra, Cesare is 53. He feels pains in his chest after running up some stairs and he goes to his doctor for a checkup. Assured that it wasn't a heart attack, he tells the doctor, "Doctor, I'm afraid." 

"Afraid of what?" the doctor asks. 

 "I'm afraid of… the thing. The cancer." 

 "I'm afraid also," the doctor tells him. 

 On November 10, 1982 Elio Petri died of cancer. He was 53 years old.