Book Report: Cutter and Bone

Quite the oddest thing about reading the novel, Cutter and Bone by Newton Thornburg, was wishing that it were more faithful to the movie. The novel sprawls not just up and down the California coast, but after what comes as the novel's climax, the action plunges halfway across America to Missouri. In the movie (that I reviewed here two years ago), everything happens in and around a beautifully evoked Santa Barbara, redubbed Santa Condominica by Alex Cutter. 

Thornburg (1929-2011) was a successful novelist who specialized in low-grade psychological thrillers and whose style was sometimes compared to Ross MacDonald. Cutter and Bone was his fourth novel, published in 1976, and is often cited as his best work. Set in Santa Barbara, nestled between hills and the Pacific Ocean, it is redolent of the 1970s post-Vietnam War bad faith that gripped America after it lost the war and then pivoted into amnesia, burying the subject of military and political failure under another burst of the usual trippy consumerism. The titular characters are Alex Cutter, a Vietnam veteran disfigured in the war, missing half a leg, half an arm and one eye, and Richard Bone, a kind of beach bum adonis who crashes at Cutter’s house and occasionally provides sexual services to middle-aged women visiting Santa Barbara. Alex is married to a woman named Maureen, whom he calls Mo, and they have an infant son, Alex III (or is it IV?). Another reason why Bone sticks around Cutter’s house is because he’s in love with Mo. 

One night Bone’s jalopy 1948 MG breaks down and, after abandoning it, electing to walk the rest of the way to a bar where Cutter is holding court, he sees “a late-model car” pull into an alley, a man get out and pull what could have been a bag of golf clubs out of the passenger seat and throws it into an adjacent dumpster, and drive quickly away. The next day some cops show up at Cutter’s house looking for Bone, having found his MG parked near the scene of a crime: the golf clubs turned out to be the dead body of a 17-year-old cheerleader. In the dark, Bone couldn’t make out the man’s appearance, and tells the police as much, but reading the local newspaper later in the day, he sees a photograph of J. J. Wolfe, a corporate magnate, and says, “My god, it’s him.” 

Thereafter, the novel turns into a caper involving Cutter, Bone, and the murder victim’s older sister, Valerie, to blackmail J. J. Wolfe. Cutter tells Bone the reason why he wants to do it: 

I get out of bed every day like it was Armageddon. I can’t stand the thought of looking at faces and listening to voices. I can’t stand communicating. I’d rather kiss Mo’s clit than her mouth. I’d rather bounce a ball than the goddamn kid. I don’t want to read anymore, I don’t want to see movies, I don’t want to sit here and look at the goddamn sea. Because it all makes me want to puke, Rich. It gives me the shakes. I guess the word is despair. And it’s become like my heart. I mean it pumps day and night, steady. I’m never without it. I’m sick all the time. So I think about death. I think I would as soon be dead. 

But there’s another reason Cutter wants to nail J. J. Wolfe: 

I don’t like this motherfucker Wolfe and all the motherfuckers like him, all the movers and shakers of this world, kiddo, because I saw them too many times, and I saw the people they moved and shook. I saw the soft white motherfuckers in their civvies and flak jackets come slicking in from Long Binh to look us over out in the boonies, see that everything was going sweet and smooth, the killing and the cutting and the sewing up, and then they’d grunt and fart and squeeze their way back into their choppers and slick on back to Washington or Wall Street or Peoria and say on with the show, America, a few more bombs will do it, a few more arms and legs. And I don’t care if they were as smooth as the Bundys or as cornpone as Senator Eastland or this cat Wolfe, one fact was always the same, is always the same—it’s never their ass they lay on the line, man, never theirs, but ours, mine. 

In a 1981 interview, Thornburg stated: "You had to know Cutter, almost live with him, to understand the savagery of his despair, that it precluded his responding to any idea or situation with anything except laughter, sometimes wild but more often oblique and cunning, as now. His mind was a house of mirrors, distortion reflecting distortion." 

Bone agrees to help him blackmail Wolfe only after lengthy consideration. The caper doesn’t turn out well for either of them. 

I got around to reading Cutter and Bone last month. Because of its reputation, I was curious to discover how it differed from the movie, called Cutter’s Way. I was disappointed to find Thornburg as a novelist a few rungs below Raymond Chandler and a few more below James M. Cain. He goes to some lengths showing off his knowledge of – or research on – Santa Barbara, dropping the names some of its streets and landmarks. I looked them up on Google Maps and while they gave the story a strong sense of the locale, they didn't make the characters and action enacted thereagainst by Thornburg any more convincing. In fact, they only emphasized their insubstantiality. 

Cutter’s Way was an uneven but quite distractingly alive film with three fine performances from its principals, Jeff Bridges, John Heard, and Lisa Eichorn. There are some small and some quite large differences, the most surprising of which is the film’s overall superiority to the book. In the movie, I got the impression that "Bone" was Richard’s nickname, since he moonlighted as a hustler, a dependable boner; Alex and Mo don’t have a child; J. J. Wolfe becomes J. J. Cord; and instead of Ibiza as Cutter’s dream destination, it’s Tahiti. In fact, the best line in the movie, spoken by Cutter to Mo, is “Some day in Tahiti we’ll look on all this and laugh.” 

Tasked with deriving a film script from the novel, Jeffrey Alan Fiskin admitted its faults: "The set-up's great, the characters are fine. But the last half of the book is an instant replay of Easy Rider. You cannot make a film out of this." That Fiskin managed to make a good film out of Cutter and Bone, with Ivan Passer as director, attests to the importance of being unfaithful to the original text. 

The resolution of Cutter’s Way unfolds in Santa Barbara, but the novel crosses the country in Cutter’s 1948 Packard Clipper in pursuit of J. J. Wolfe to his cattle ranch in Missouri. Once there, the escapade quickly becomes as grotesque as Andy Kaufman’s foray into pro wrestling, deliberately mocking its fans by showing them soap and toilet paper, and telling them, “I’m from Hollywood!” Thornburg had raised cattle on a sixty-acre ranch in the Jane, Missouri, but he indulges in some of the worst redneck portraiture. His ending is practically copied from the 1969 movie Easy Rider, except that Bone is alone and driving Cutter’s Packard. The film, in complete contrast, ends in a bold, astonishing flourish of action and violence that left me speechless the first time I watched it. 

An Acquired Distaste

When I was growing up in the Deep South (Georgia and South Carolina), I didn't need any reminders of what Southerners called the War Between the States and what the rest of us called the Civil War. There was an ongoing wrestling match in my own household between my father and mother - a tacit civil war - between the north and the south. It wasn't fought physically or even verbally, but I could sense its ebb and flow, its push and pull. My father, born in LaGrange, Georgia, represented the Confederacy, while my mother, from Akron, Ohio, was the Union. 

It started when, in 1945, my father met my mother, who was working at the post office in Akron, Ohio. They fell for each other, and he took my mother to meet his parents in LaGrange before they were married on December 9. His parents couldn't have been more enchanted by my mother, who was 27, and beautiful in a way that was typical of the times. My father was a 32-year-old soldier, a veteran of campaigns in North Africa and Italy. It wasn't the first rodeo for either of them - they had both been married before. 

Towards the end of her visit to LaGrange, my mother was walking down a city street and an older black man was walking towards her on the sidewalk. As soon as the black man was within ten yards of my mother, he stepped off the sidewalk into the gutter and tipped his hat as my mother passed him. My mother had never witnessed such strange behavior before and as soon as she got back to her in-laws' house she related the incident to my father. He explained to her in matter-of-fact terms that, if the black man hadn't behaved in that way, he'd have been found the next morning hanging from a tree. My mother quietly considered my father's words for a moment and then told him to take her back to Ohio as soon as possible because she didn't want to remain in a place where such things happened. 

Over the rest of their forty-three year marriage, my mother and father disagreed on matters of race every now and then, and she always won, but only because she was always right and because my father loved her enough to admit defeat. So it was my mother's principles that informed my understanding of the South, about racism and racial bigotry. She hated the South, but my father had his Army career, that had landed him at the last in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. When he retired in 1968 and was awarded full disability (a heart attack pushed him out) and he found that he still couldn't support us, he got a job at the State Penitentiary as a tower guard, working the night shift. A few years into the job, however, another heart attack got him retired from that job, too. 

So in 1975 my mother decided that it was her turn to choose where we would live. At first she thought about going back to Europe. My father had been stationed in Stuttgart for several years in the early ‘50s and they were the happiest of my mother's life. But Germany had become too expensive in the decades since. Her next choice was Switzerland, and, on receiving a real estate booklet in the mail, she was amazed at the low cost of living there. This was due to her having confused Swiss francs with French francs. When someone pointed out her mistake, Switzerland was quickly out of the question. I recommended Vermont, because I had found a book of photographs of the state that made me feel homesick for it, even though I'd never been there. But no one else, alas, was keen on New England because of its notoriously hard winters. Then my mother hit on an alternative to Switzerland, the state of Colorado. So in September of 1975 we packed everything we had into the biggest U-Haul trailer available and we left the South – we hoped for good – and went West. 

My father was growing old and his poor health gave his wish to die in the South a sense of urgency. Over the following 9 years, the civil war between my parents bounced us back and forth between Colorado and South Carolina five times until my father finally got his wish, dying in Columbia in 1988. I inherited my mother's distaste for the South. Since departing the region for the Navy in 1988, I have only been back there on leave for a few weeks at a time, and the very last time I was there was in 1992. Living there for so long until I was 17 seems to have inured me to being discontented. 

As readers of this blog (all three of you) should know by now, I have been marooned in the Philippines since my passport was stolen in 2007 and my tiny Veterans Disability pension made sure that I would never have enough money to acquire a replacement passport and to pay for a decade's worth of visas. Living with me for most of my exile has been a Philippine woman and her youngest children, a boy and a girl. Deserted by their own father before I came into their lives made them both understandably dubious of fathers and whatever role fathers are supposed to play in their lives. I was their provider, if not much else, and the language barrier between us took care of the rest. When they saw me open my mouth to speak and heard nothing but gibberish, they learned to stop listening to me. (Even now, they will interrupt me when I'm speaking simply because, by now, they don't hear me.) All that these two children have known of me is that I am in the Philippines involuntarily and that all I want is to get myself out of here. A perhaps unintended consequence of this is that they seem to have acquired the same distaste for their country, a lack of faith in it, and the desire to leave it. Both of them are going to extraordinary lengths to get themselves out of their country. Her son, assisted by a cousin now living in Germany, got a Bachelors Degree in computer science from a local university, but is now being trained as a caregiver, since it is one of the few jobs available for him in Germany. 

But it's the girl, now 20, who has gone to the greatest lengths to secure a chance of living abroad, and her choices are the ones that are the most painful to me. Against my understandable objections, which I’ve made abundantly clear to her, she dropped out of high school and, following her 18th birthday (which is known to Filipinos, among other cultures, as a young woman’s “debut”), she travelled north to Angeles City, a tourist resort that caters to men who travel from all over the world to have sex with young women. The girl who lived under my roof from the age of 6 has chosen to be one of those young women. 

There is a cruel irony in this, a cruelty that is double-edged. Angeles City is the place I visited on my first visit to the Philippines in 1993, on leave from the Navy. It astonished me then, and probably astonishes every tourist who visits the resort today, how easy and cheap it was to get an attractive young woman to go back to my hotel with me and stay for the night. But by now my astonishment has been replaced by a sickened sense of inevitability: the reason why it’s so easy and cheap to have sex with these young women is simply because it’s something they and most Filipinos have been doing all their lives – lying down and taking it. 

But what I want to know before I leave this country forever is – did the two children who lived in my house absorb the distaste for the Philippines and the desire to get out of here from me, just as I had absorbed my mother’s distaste for the South? Am I responsible for their hard choices? 

My mother might have told me that it wasn’t her that taught me to hate the South. The South did that. Was it the Philippines that taught them that their only chance for lasting happiness is abroad? I passionately hope that it was.

[The reason why the photograph of my mother is so tattered is because my father carried it in his wallet from 1945 until his death in 1988.]

Lost Weekend

Susan Sontag

To refresh my memory of just how much intelligent discussion Jean-Luc Godard inspired once upon a time (a time – long gone – when cinema invited intelligent discussion), here is Stanley Kauffmann's reaction to Susan Sontag's 1968 essay “Godard,” that was later published in her collection Styles of Radical Will. Sontag opens her essay with this declaration: 

Godard’s work has been more passionately debated in recent years than that of any other contemporary film-maker. Though he has a good claim to being ranked as the greatest director, aside from Bresson, working actively in the cinema today, it’s still common for intelligent people to be irritated and frustrated by his films, even to find them unbearable. Godard’s films haven’t yet been elevated to the status of classics or masterpieces—as have the best of Eisenstein, Griffith, Gance, Dreyer, Lang, Pabst, Renoir, Vigo, Welles, etc.; or, to take some nearer examples, L’Avventura and Jules and Jim. That is, his films aren’t yet embalmed, immortal, unequivocally (and merely) “beautiful.” They retain their youthful power to offend, to appear “ugly,” irresponsible, frivolous, pretentious, empty. Film-makers and audiences are still learning from Godard’s films, still quarreling with them.

Kauffman included Sontag’s remarks in his review of Godard’s film Weekend: 

Weekend (October19, 1968) 

By far the best pro-Godard commentary I know is Susan Sontag's essay in the Spring 1968 Partisan Review. I reread it between my two viewings of Weekend. Miss Sontag sketches the adverse criticism of Godard ("What his detractors don't grasp, of course, is that Godard doesn't want to do what they reproach him for not doing"); then she examines these points, attempting to show that the supposed faults are part of Godard's method. Miss Sontag overlooks the fact that some adverse critics assume that Godard works with intention but that intentionality does not itself create an esthetics; still her arguments, all relative to Weekend, are the best critical support for Godard that I can imagine. On the matter of Godard's flashy use of ideas and of literary references: 

Certainly ideas are not developed in Godard's films systematically.... They aren't meant to be. In contrast to their role in Brechtian theater, ideas are chiefly formal elements in Godard's films, units of sensory and emotional stimulation.... What's required is that literature indeed undergo its transformation into material, like anything else. This does not exactly contravene the objection by many, including me that Godard is irresponsible in his use of explosive political ideas and callow in his literary display. It says that he is masticating these matters into fodder for cinema; that he treats, say, Mao and Dostoevsky as he would treat a tree, a flower, a kiss. I think this approach is antihistorical, antiintellectual, and finally anticultural, but it does have an imperial bravado. On the ceaseless display of Godardian "effects": ... Godard proposes a new conception of point of view, by staking out the possibility of making films in the first person. By this, I don't mean simply that his films are subjective or personal.... [He] has built up a narrative presence, that of the film-maker, who is the central structural element in the cinematic narrative. This first-person film-maker isn't an actual character in the film.... He is the person responsible for the film who yet stands outside it as a mind beset by more complex, fluctuating concerns than any single film can represent or incarnate.... What he seeks is to conflate the traditional polarities of spontaneous mobile thinking and finished work, of the casual jotting and the fully premeditated statement. 

That is a sympathetic description of Godard's effort to make every film a record of his experience in making the film, of the tension he wants to convey between the film and the world, of his frenzied insistent drive to treat film as if it were not a photographic record, fixed before we see it, but something happening at the moment we see it – a response to everything around the film and in Godard at every moment. What Miss Sontag disregards is that even the Divine Comedy was created by a mind beset by more complex, fluctuating concerns than that poem could incarnate, that Godard's struggle for seeming spontaneity is doomed because no film is a spontaneous event and because the effort to seem spontaneous can get wearisome. With Godard we become aware of the desperation, of the fixed and photographed impromptu. 

I cannot summarize all of Miss Sontag's article (it should be read), but, for me, it leads to and away from this sentence: 

Just as no absolute, immanent standards can be discovered for determining the composition, duration and place of a shot, there can be no truly sound reason for excluding anything from a film. 

This seemingly staggering statement is only the extreme extension of a thesis that any enlightened person would support: there are no absolutes in art. The Godardians take this to mean (like Ivan Karamazov) that therefore everything is permissible. Others of us take it to mean that therefore standards have to be empirically searched out and continually readjusted, to distinguish art from autism; that, just as responsive morals have to be found without a divine authority if humanity is to survive, so responsive esthetics have to be found without canonical standards if art is to survive. The last may be an open question, but it is open as long as men continue to make art.

Stanley Kauffmann, Figures of Light (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 109-111.

The Other Jean-Luc

I have to admit that Jean-Luc Godard, whose death was announced yesterday, wasn't quite as horrible as the ad-hoc accolades being showered on his name in the hours since. Every periodical and news-gathering service has felt obliged, in purple prose, to eulogize Godard. The tributes might give one some idea of how controversial he was - fifty years ago. In those days, films were thought to be worthy of passionate debate. It was the steep decline of the quality of films in the late '60s that brought an end to it. Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984. His death was followed, over the ensuing years, by Chabrol's, Rivette's, and Rohmer's. Godard hung on in Switzerland until his body was so depleted that a doctor was asked to assist him into that glittering movie palace in the sky (it's legal in Switzerland, don't you know). Alas, Godard's influence, the effect he had on film criticism and on cinephilia, will live long after his assisted suicide. His films, however, are so redolent of the Sixties that they will remain a monument to its strident inanities. 

It all started in 1940 with the Fall of France when little Jean-Luc was 9 years old. (François Truffaut was 8, but the two didn't meet until 1948.) What the Nazis did to the French in four years of occupation shouldn't happen to any nation, but it was especially demoralizing for one that had been the mortal enemy of Germany for generations and that had participated, with its Vichy government, in its own occupation. Godard and his family was safe in Switzerland, but as an ethnic-Frenchman he must've been deeply affected by the plight of France. 

Immediately after the liberation in 1944, American film promoters moved into France to reassert Hollywood's hegemony over its film markets. During the Occupation, there had been an embargo on American films, so the reappearance of them on French cinema screens after the war was revelatory to the young men - Godard was 13 and Truffaut 12 - who needed a distraction from postwar conditions, one of which was finding out how best to forget the Occupation. Back in Paris to pursue a university degree in anthropology, Godard joined film clubs where he made the acquaintance of Truffaut and Rohmer. He began to contribute to André Bazin's film journal Cahiers du Cinéma in the early '50s, often locking horns with Bazin's positions. 

Then, in 1954, something terrible happened when Cahiers published an essay by Truffaut called "Une Certaine Tendance du Cinéma Français" ("A Certain Trend of French Cinema"). Just to give you a sampling of Truffaut's critical prowess, he once proclaimed that Jean Renoir never made a bad film. But it's impossible to exaggerate the impact of this single essay and the theory that grew out of it.(1) 

Immediately after its publication, battle lines were drawn. Even Bazin took exception to it. Truffaut and Godard, their heads and dreams filled with Hollywood movies, argued that a director is as much the author, in French auteur, of his work as any novelist or playwright. The problem with their theory was that it was disastrously uncritical. Though the Cahiers critics were especially savage when they considered the French films of the generation of their parents, which they quite transparently labelled cinéma du papa ("daddy's cinema"), they fell over themselves in praise of Hollywood movies. This was a complete inversion of film criticism prior to Cahiers - Hollywood movies weren't taken seriously by critics simply because experience had taught them not to. The works of film art that had appeared intermittently were invariably made somewhere other than Hollywood. 

Another problem with the auteur theory is how indiscriminately it was applied. Not only was Hitchcock an auteur, but so were Howard Hawks (Godard's personal favorite) and Raoul Walsh and William Wellman and Allan Dwan and every other Hollywood director one could name. This was their Achilles Heel. Though it could conceivably be demonstrated that a studio employee like Michael Curtiz was the author of every one of his 181 movies, nobody found it necessary to address the quality of the individual movies or the quality of their author. In other words, Vincente Minnelli became an "author" of equal value to Federico Fellini. Is L. Ron Hubbard an author equal to Saul Bellow? Is Colley Cibber a playwright equal to Shakespeare? 

Godard was a perfect example of the theory - he was the guiding force behind all of his films, their true author. But one more giant flaw in the theory is the notion that every film an auteur makes is worthy of attention. This is one reason why, in the popular imagination, Stanley Kubrick, whose work suffered a falling off in the mid-1960s and kept on falling to the bitter end, made nothing but masterpieces. 

Godard never stopped stirring the shit, but sometime during the Vietnam War audiences stopped noticing. The world has shrunk immeasurably since March 16, 1960, the day a film called Breathless - or Á bout du souffle - opened in Paris. It doesn’t matter any more if the only films of Godard's that are worth bothering about, even conditionally, were made 60 years ago, and I'm thankful for that. But Godard was a kind of art film Tarantino - clever but ultimately half-witted. One of his more coherent quotes sounds just like Tarantino: "I know nothing of life except through the cinema." It wasn't Breathless or Le petit soldat or Bande a part that we remember, but the fact that the stir the individual films created for about a decade was caused by cinema. That doesn't happen any more and will never happen again. 

(1) Auteurists often argue it wasn't a theory.

Think Again

I recently saw a clip on YouTube of Patton Oswalt introducing the Kurosawa film Ikiru to a radio interviewer who hadn't seen it. Oswalt said he was jealous because he wished he could go back to being the person he was before he saw Ikiru so that he could undergo the transformation all over again because, he told the interviewer, "it will make you rethink your life." 

Then Oswalt undercut his praise of Ikiru by comparing its impact to Hirokazu Koreeda's After Life and Harold Ramis's Groundhog Day. Having praised all three of these films on this blog, I now find it necessary to qualify my praise. 

Koreeda's film cleverly actualizes a beautiful concept: when we die each of us is given a week to choose from among our lifetime's memories the one in which we will spend eternity. I enjoyed the film and found its concept inspiring. It makes one think about one's memories and, in the process, better understand what happiness is. But it didn't make me rethink my life. 

Groundhog Day transcends its light comedy structure, but does it so deceptively and gently that some people have spilled a lot of ink trying to give it metaphysical dimensions that it simply doesn't have. Its implications about the proper way to conduct one's life are happily limited to the narrow confines of one person's change of heart. But the alterations he decides to make are only reached after what must have been hundreds of iterations of a single day - February 2nd - in his life, with an exhaustive sequence of trial and error. The errors are what makes the movie funny - it is a nightmare Comedy of Errors. The hero, Phil Connors, finally "rethinks" his life, but only after he is forced to. He had to find a way to break the endless repetition and breaking the spell is only achieved once he has figured out that being kind and generous are better than being mean and selfish. I was entertained by the movie, uplifted even. But it didn't make me rethink my life. I didn't even rethink my evening. 

Ikiru's great lesson of one man, Watanabe, one mediocre bureaucrat, making a difference, even a tiny one, in the small corner of the world he lives in, is reached at the cost of his life. If he hadn't been diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer, and realized that he was quickly running out of time, he would never have awakened from his deep moral slumber. 

Kurosawa's film doesn't begin with a what if? He shows us a world, one resembling ours in its minutiae, but also in its broader implications. One day something feels different in Watanabe's gut, so he goes to his doctor. In the waiting room he meets another man who explains to him the symptoms of stomach cancer. Watanabe recognizes each symptom as identical to those he is experiencing. The man also tells him that, even if he has stomach cancer, the doctor won't tell him because the news would so discourage him that he would lose his will to live. So the customary practice among doctors at that time in Japan was to keep the awful truth from a patient. Instead, so the man says to Watanabe, the doctor will tell him he has a mild ulcer, no need to operate, and he can eat whatever he likes as long as it's digestible. If the doctor tells him this, it's certainly stomach cancer and he has less than a year to live. 

Watanabe is examined and x-rays are taken and the doctor knows that it is, indeed, stomach cancer. But he tells Watanabe almost verbatim what the man in the waiting room said he would tell him if it was cancer. Watanabe is so shaken by the news - by the lie that discloses the truth - that he is almost run over by a truck in the street. 

Kurosawa doesn't make Watanabe's redemption easy. Patton Oswalt said that once he knows he's dying he goes through "the seven stages" - despite there being only five. Actually, the only stage Watanabe experiences is that of cutting loose, which leads him nowhere except the inevitable return to sober fact of his impending death. A girl who once worked in his office shows him the way. She got another job in a factory making mechanical children's toys. The hours are long and the pay is inadequate, but when she thinks of all the children made happy by her toys she feels that her labors are not in vain. Then and there Watanabe knows what to do with the rest of his days. 

Art is exalting. This is a subject that cries out for greater scrutiny, because it's too often a bone of contention between what's regarded as art and another thing called (somewhat contemptuously) entertainment. My argument against such a distinction is simple: art is the ultimate entertainment. It isn't so simple as people want you to think it is. Stephen King is not more entertaining than Dostoevsky, he's just a lot smoother going down. More people prefer Budweiser to craft beer. And few people are outfitted for the state of exaltation in which In Search of Lost Time leaves a reader. 

When it comes to movies, which is considered a mass art, works that offer the same intensity of aesthetic excitement as a literary masterwork are extremely rare. Writing about a different Kurosawa film - Red Beard - in 1967, Vernon Young defined Kurosawa's peculiar power over the viewer: 

Red Beard is an overpowering experience. I recognize that fewer people all the time go to films wishing to be overpowered, Soon I'll have nobody to talk to.... 

Though writing about a film Kurosawa made 13 years after Ikiru, Young could easily have been commenting on Ikiru (and I'll let Young have the last word): 

Kurosawa's art is principally the sum of his conviction. By now we can take for granted that he knows how to achieve the intensity at which he is aiming - esthetic distance is not his ideal - and where to place the viewer whom he hopes to subjugate. I was subjugated by this film. A detached appraisal of it, two months after the event, is something I am unable to deliver. Because, in truth, I felt myself being submerged during the running time of Red Beard, I tried desperately to keep my critical distance, but I was unequal to the resolve. I wanted to resist the nagging logic and the driving agony of the film, to quarrel with it, become bored by it, condescend toward it - just as one does when assailed by life itself. And after every bout of fidgeting, sighing, and protesting under my breath, after every obstinate refusal to yield my sentiments any further. I was forced to give in and to return (fascinated) to the fray, to the importunate suffering, the hopelessness, the pity, and the stench. 

I suspect that the normal strategy of the filmgoer who finds himself at the mercy of an emotion too painful to bear is to retreat beyond the peripheries of compassion or anger. By what means he manages to do this, I don't know. I don't think I really want to know. 

I knew that for some months any film that aimed at less would seem unworthy of my attendance.... Suffering is an absolute value, not to be impugned by democratic hedonism nor bewailed by accusing at God in hiding. Kurosawa's best films, and this is one of them, do what serious art has always done when engaged with the human condition. They challenge us to live authentically.

(Vernon Young, On Film: Unpopular Essays on a Popular Art (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972), pp 302-304.)

Restoring The Rules

At the end of August the Aussie film critic and 2K to 4K digital restoration authority David Hare got his hands on one of the latest release Blu-ray editions of Jean Renoir's masterpiece, La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) and posted the following comment on Facebook. 

If you buy this and begin to watch, do not expect to see anything as remotely beautiful as a Warner Archive 4K scan and restoration of a Black and White 1939 movie. 

Warner will have made a scan of an original nitrate neg, and access to a multitude of other elements - interpositive, fine grains etc - which enable, simply perfection. 

Neither the original neg, nor any first generation element of Renoir’s 1939 La Règle du Jeu has survived. The most recent restoration which is presented here had to be scrounged from much later elements and we are left with a less than perfect composite. 

Putting on this new 4K UHD delivers a series of shocks. Never before has the exact quality of the surviving elements been so nakedly on display. What you are seeing, thanks to the optimum resolution and quality of the UHD format is as close to 35mm projection as possible. It is in effect the same. Then you begin to notice how much “darker” is the image, after the last Blurays. And that’s where this new disc really takes off. Sharpness is variable, as it must be and always was given the appalling condition of the elements. But composition and depth are here in spades. HDR has been applied with great skill to extract every last grain of grayscale, shadow detail and degrees of light as they can exist in the 35mm format. 

Whether you think this exercise is worth it or not is a quandary. I vote yes, but others may not. Criterion/Janus is one of the stakeholders in this 4K release and when/if they choose to release this in 4K is yet to be seen. The French disc from ESC label only carries a short extra, with none of the plenitude of supplements on the older Criterion (and BFI) blus. 

I may have more to say after a second viewing. 

Without knowing who on earth would not think such loving attention to one of the greatest cinematic ghosts of all time is worth it, this is one film, among perhaps a half-dozen others, for the ages - a film that was first hobbled by draconian cuts that Renoir himself had to make to please his producers (who were only trying to make as much money as possible) and then consigned to oblivion by the war and 4 years of the total German/Vichy disgrace called the Occupation, its physical elements presumed destroyed and nearly forgotten until, as everyone knows by now, the miracle of its rescue from oblivion by Jean Gaborit and Jacques Maréchal took place in 1956. The film's negative was lost when the lab where it was stored was bombed in 1942. Gaborit & Maréchal got the rights to the film and located fragments of it stored in boxes in the bombed-out lab. From these fragments they restored the film to within three minutes of its original length. This new digital transfer is only the latest stage in the film's new lease on life. Who on earth would not think such an enterprise is "worth it" is quite beyond me. 

But there is something else to this comment that I found rather chilling. If, to conceive the inconceivable, Renoir had been working in the complete safety of America, an ocean away from the war in Europe, and had made a film in 1939 that someone regarded as of some value today, all a restorer would have to do is find out in which vault the film's extant elements were stored,  collect them and go to work. But when Hare suggests that even the finest restoration of Renoir's film would not - could not - come close to the perfection of a Warner Archive 4K scan, I wonder if he is attesting to the difference in the quality of the reproduction or of the difference in quality of any old Warner Brothers film from 1939 and La Règle du Jeu. The joys of the latest digital reproductions of 35mm films are indeed dizzying. What you are looking at when you watch a 4K Blu-Ray copy of a film made 83 years ago is as close as one could possibly get to the condition of the original 35mm film when it was exhibited for the first time in theaters. 

I once asked what answer Hollywood had in 1939 to La Règle du Jeu, or indeed what answer it had to Les Enfants du Paradis in 1945 or to Smiles of a Summer Night in 1955, to L'avventura in 1960, 8 1/2 in 1963, or The Battle of Algiers in 1968. The answer, in every case, in any comparative qualitative sense, was nothing. Renoir fled France in 1940 when the Germans invaded and found work in Hollywood. He made five films there, not one of which comes close to his best films in France. His last Hollywood film, The Woman on the Beach, was mishandled by RKO and Renoir was required to cut the film and reshoot scenes to make it presentable for release. Is anyone attempting to restore it to its original release version? Or does anyone think it's worth it?

Book Report: Over the Frontier

Second childhoods are supposed to be the onset of what used to be called senility, brought on by poor blood circulation. Since one's muscles are withering for lack of activity, one's brain is fading out, too, like a guttering candle. 

When I was at the opposite end of my life - a few years after it's beginning, one of my favorite school assignments was writing what were called Book Reports. So I've decided to write them again, at a little more length and more in-depth than those I wrote fiftysomething years ago, and with fewer misspells and - I hope - grammatical gaffes. A pity Mrs. Bradshaw, bless her heart, is no longer around to grade them. Here goes the first. 

Over the Frontier by Stevie Smith. This was the second novel written by Stevie Smith, born Florence Margaret Smith in 1902, but she is best known as a poet. Her wry, sardonic voice gives her poems a strangely childish note, while tackling very grown-up subjects, like her recognition of death and her quarrel with God. 

What care I if Skies are blue, 

If God created Gnat and Gnu, 

What care I if good God be 

If he be not good to me? 

("Egocentric") 

You want to take her seriously, but she almost doesn't let you. This has led to her acquiring a quite unfair reputation as a mere eccentric curiosity. 

In Over the Frontier, published in 1938, a war in Germany or against Germany is forecast in the first half of the novel and is happening throughout the second half. Smith had visited Berlin in 1931 and, like many members of her generation, knew that something terrible was coming for Europe. Her heroine, Pompey Casmilus, is invalided from London, which seems surprisingly carefree, to a spa on the northern frontier of Germany. There she encounters various people, all of whom may or may not be spying for the other side - whatever the other side is. 

I grind my teeth to think of Germany and her infection of arrogance and weakness and cruelty that has spread to our own particular enemy, has set on foot this abominable war, has brought us all to this pass, and me to a hatred that is not without guilt, is not, is not a pure flame of altruism; ah, hatred is never this, is always rather to make use of this grand altruistic feeling, to bring to a head in ourselves all that there is in us of a hatred and fury upon a less convenient truth. 

Over the Frontier doesn't work very well as a novel. Some argue that its use of different styles was an early example of postmodernism. In the novel's second half, Smith adopts the tropes and action of a suspense/adventure story like John Buchan's The 39 Steps, which Alfred Hitchcock made into a splendid film. There are midnight rides across bleak, deserted landscapes, but Smith never succeeds in establishing any sense of scale or distance. The long ride that Tom and Pompey take goes on for several nights and only adds to the fantasy atmosphere. But then Pompey (the same protagonist in Smith's first novel, Novel in Yellow Paper) makes pronouncements on evil and death that seem - but only seem - to suggest a connection to Nazi Germany. Pompey sees a coming war, but knows that her side (our side) will win. 

In England there is no national ideology, or not one that is formed, to be carried through, to be expressed in a word and impressed upon a people, as in Germany it is expressed and impressed, with what of an original pure intention we cannot know, with what of a calamity in event we know too well. And upon this side of the frontier it marches with the enemy, it informs their dotty heroism. But we shall win, we shall win. We have the arms and the money, the mercenaries and the riff-raff of many armies. Death to the dotty idealismus, death to all ideologies; death upon the flying bullet that has been paid for; death from the bent form of the hired soldier; death upon the wind from the north. 

Was Smith satirizing, in the first half of the book, the British ruling class for its obliviousness in ignoring the signs of the coming of war? George Orwell's Coming Up for Air was published the same year as Over the Frontier and also foreshadows the war, but it's a war that Orwell's hero anticipates with some relish. Pompey, forever bored, seems just as bored by the war, even if she finds in it a sense of purpose. Pompey feels herself, in the book's last pages, being seduced by the high demonic style of the German evil, the ideology of hate, and its powerful sado-masochism. It isn't Smith's admission of sympathy for the devil. It comes across as just talk, the quasi-philosophical ramblings of her insufferable heroine. But in trying to avoid a melodramatic ending, that bends over backwards, if necessary, to resolve itself favorably, Smith goes too far the other way and finds melodrama there. Smith ends with this ominous-sounding sentence: 

Power and cruelty are the strength of our life, and in its weakness only is there the sweetness of love. 

But I prefer to remember Pompey's deliberate ambiguity in the poem Smith interposes several pages ahead of the ending: 

In my dreams I am always saying good-bye and riding away 

Whither and why I know not nor do I care 

And the parting is sweet and the parting over is sweetest 

And sweetest of all is the night and the rushing air. 

In my dreams they are always waving their hands and saying good-bye 

And they give me the stirrup cup and I smile as I drink 

I am glad the journey is set I am glad I am going 

I am glad I am glad that my friends don’t know what I think. 

"In My Dreams" from Tender Only to One (1938)