Pulp

That bizarre adventure which put five people in the cemetery and ruled me out as a customer for laxatives. Mickey King

I watched TCM Remembers just before Christmas, a look back at all of the movie lights that have gone out this year. The British filmmaker Mike Hodges died too late - December 17 - to make the cut. He was 90. I've written about his work before on this blog, but I haven't devoted a post to what is my favorite of all his films, Pulp (1972), which he made after his first film Get Carter became a huge hit. Pulp, however, was a financial failure, and it sent Hodges's career in a different direction. Moving easily between film and television, a career spanning forty years had its surprises and disappointments.

The claims I'm going to make for Pulp are largely personal. Since I first watched the film, on a late night television airing in the late 1970s, every time I had an opportunity to see it again over the fifty years since, I did so happily. By now I must have seen it seven or eight times. I became a part of its cult following.

Pulp is an odd, one-off, and rather self-indulgent film, the work of a young filmmaker who had a rare opportunity to make a personal statement with resources he wouldn't otherwise have had at his disposal. And Mike Hodges did dispose of them, as surely as if he had misplaced them. The Three Mikes production company (Michael Klinger, Michael Caine, and Hodges) would dissolve and Michael Caine would never work with Hodges again. 

The stodgy plot is uneventful. In a publishing house typing pool "somewhere in the Mediterranean," a writer of low-grade novels crammed with vicarious crime and sex - otherwise known as "pulp," named Mickey King turns up for an appointment with the representative of a mysterious client who wants Mickey to ghost-write his life story. King is played by Michael Caine, coiffed and bespectacled in 70s style, and he narrates the story with characteristic deadpan humor. 

The mysterious client turns out to be former Hollywood star and associate of gangsters, Preston Gilbert, played by Mickey Rooney, now retired and living in a secluded villa. (The locale feels like Italy, but shooting was done entirely on the island of Malta.) Gilbert wants Mickey to write his tell-all biography, but before Mickey can even commit an opening sentence to paper, Gilbert is murdered at a party. Feeling cheated out of a lucrative fee, Mickey proceeds to investigate the crime on his own, and almost gets killed following clues to a dead end. He winds up the captive of a corrupt prince, recuperating from a gunshot wound to his shin. Sitting on a terrace and writing of his imagined revenge on his captors, he mutters, "I'll get the bastards yet!"

As Mickey, Michael Caine is engaged with the material, even when the material isn't engaging. Mickey Rooney is typecast as a Hollywood has-been, showing off even when no one is watching. He's killed in the middle of a painful slapstick routine, posing as an incompetent waiter. When he falls dead, the crowd applauds. Lionel Stander, always playing heavies, is at least authentic, even if nothing he says or does is. Micky's noirish one-liners are used as a counterpoint to the action, which accentuates their falsity. Hodges is spoofing his own spoof. The cast is dotted with Italian actors, notably Leopoldo Trieste. Pulp was partly an homage to John Huston, and in fact the Italian actor Giulio Donnini appeared in Beat the Devil nineteen years before Pulp.

Having seen the film so many times, I was curious to know what Michael Caine had to say about it in his memoir, What's It All About? Having met Shakira, his wife-to-be, shortly before shooting in Malta, his memory of it is rose-tinted:

Pulp was the second film that I produced with Michael Klinger after Get Carter, and Mike Hodges was again the director. It was a strange little piece and it had also been written by Mike as a sort of homage to John Huston. It was a real oddball of a movie that never really quite worked. Its heart was in the right place, but in a business where wallets are kept over the heart it did not count for much. Pulp never made any real money, but I again had a wonderful experience making it so I remember it with affection. It was winter in England when we arrived in Malta, where it was beautifully warm so we were ahead already. Shakira eventually joined me and the temperature got even hotter as we embarked on an idyll of really discovering each other in a hotel on the beach, which couldn’t have been better had we planned it. Being absolutely besotted by this lady I don’t remember much of the actual film-making, even though I was supposed to be the associate producer, but Mike Klinger held it all together and gave us his blessing. He was a small rotund man with a perpetual smile on his face, and what with this look and his benevolent attitude towards Shakira and me, he always seemed like an elderly and slightly sinful Cupid.(1)

I recently found some remarks made by Mike Hodges in a Foreword to a book about Get Carter that apply equally to Pulp:

It is salutary to be reminded of the process of creativity. For film makers of my age influences have often become obscured. Ghosts in the machine. Pentimento. A film seen just once in the distant past – and I mean just ‘once’ – for this was long before videos. Then you will come across it decades later – usually on  – and recognise where some ‘moment’ in one of your films has come from. It is always startling fact and fiction occupying the same territory in one’s brain – recognising our amazing ability to collect and store slivers of time. With that comes the realisation that originality is not quite what it seems.(2)

It's difficult for me to properly assess the qualities that I like so much in Pulp, since it's become such a private place. "Everyone walking this earth," Mickey wrote, "has a secret closet he'd rather left closed. Stop." Having no one with whom to share this little film suits me just fine. Again, I won't call it a work of art, since I'm quite capable of distinguishing between what I like and what is demonstrably good. Pulp falls considerably short of greatness, but I love it. Every time I remember the film I think of the bittersweet theme music composed by George Martin. Like the film, it's stuck in my head on eternal repeat.

Remember that thou art pulp and unto pulp thou shalt return.

Cheerio, Mike Hodges.

1 Caine, Michael, What's It All About? (London: Arrow Books, 2010)

2 Chibnall, Steve, Get Carter (London: I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2003)

Christmas Evil

Some movies are done a double disservice by publicity campaigns that never seem to understand them. Christmas Evil is a good example of this. Marketed as a slasher movie on its first release in 1980, which contributed to its being a box office flop, it has lately - since 2000 - been repackaged as a psychological drama rather like the Joaquin Phoenix movie Joker, which has contributed to the movie's new, albeit modest, lease on life. But Christmas Evil is neither a slasher movie nor a psychological drama. It's very slight on gore (only four corpses) and its psychological depth is shallow. Why, then, has it acquired a cult following? In the DVD commentary, an enthusiastic John Waters called it the "greatest Christmas movie ever made."

Professional clowns have been having a tough time of it for the past few decades, because of a cultural shift - brought on by fact, the serial murderer John Wayne Gacy, who was also a professional clown, and fiction, Stephen King's supernatural clown character Pennywise - have combined to make clowns into creepy figures. Santa Claus has been subject to the same treatment in American popular culture for at least as long, if Christmas Evil is anything to go by.

When we first meet Harry Stadling, the hero of the movie, he's a little boy who, with his big brother Philly and his mother, is sitting on the stairs watching as someone dressed as Santa Claus comes down the chimney, eats some bread and honey and drinks milk left out for him, places gifts under their Christmas tree and in their stockings on the mantle, and then, just as in the Clement Moore poem, "laying his finger aside of his nose,/And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose." Back in their bedroom, Philly tells Harry it was their dad dressed up as Santa, and calls Harry "crazy" for thinking it was really Santa. Harry insists that it was Santa, and sneaks back downstairs to discover Santa and his mother making out. Harry angrily runs upstairs to the attic where he takes a glass snow globe and smashes it, a la Citizen Kane, on the floor. He takes a piece of the broken glass and cuts his hand. The blood falls on the roof of the broken snow globe house and the credits roll. (1)

Segue to "the present," a man dressed as Santa wakes and goes about his morning routine to the accompaniment of Christmas records through rooms filled with Santa paraphernalia. Next we see him on the roof looking through binoculars at windows across the street, but he isn't exactly a pervert - he's spying on children doing their chores, playing with dolls (the good ones) and one who is cutting centerfolds out of a Penthouse magazine (a bad one). The music suddenly turns into jarring electronica as Harry runs to two big books, one for good children and one for bad, in which he inscribes the names of the children he just spied on. 

Harry has a desk job at the Jolly Dream toy factory, which makes perfect sense knowing his fixation on Santa Claus, but he misses working on the assembly line. He lectures employees on their lunch break about making quality toys. They look at one another and grin. The assembly line workers don't care that their toys are poorly made. Another assembly line worker named Frank needs someone to cover his night shift so, knowing that Harry misses the line, he talks him into covering for him.

Later that night, on his way home from the factory, Harry sees Frank in a bar and overhears him calling him a schmuck for taking his shift. Harry rushes home and, almost apoplectic with anger, he takes a small doll in his hands and, humming "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" slowly crushes it. Harry is clearly becoming unglued, but this is just the beginning. It's almost as if, when he finally dresses up as Santa Claus, which happens at the 40 minute mark, Harry becomes an avenging Christmas angel. 

Harry goes to a mental hospital for children and, despite some initial resistance from the staff, hands over a van-load of toys for the children. The nurses cheer him as he drives away in a van with a sleigh painted on the side. His euphoria changes when he stops at the church where his boss is attending Midnight Mass. As soon as they see Harry on the sidewalk still dressed as Santa, some of the exiting worshippers begin to taunt him. He responds by stabbing one of them in the eye and striking three of them in the head with a hatchet. 

The entire scene of Harry's visit to co-worker Frank's house - beginning with his attempt to fit down his chimney (he gets stuck and only extricates himself after strenuous effort), his attempt to smother Frank with his sack of toys, with his wife asleep beside him, finally slashing his throat with the star atop a bedside Christmas tree, his wife waking and her breathless scream, and Harry's flight through a glass door that slowly closes - is utterly macabre. 

Christmas Evil is a movie with insurmountable problems. The biggest problem is the obvious psychotic who is the center of the story. We're given clues to indicate what drove Harry over the edge, but not what got him to the edge in the first place. And we're not even sure where the edge occurs. He switches from being jolly St. Nick to a homicidal maniac without any apparent transition. There is no connective tissue between these two Harrys. It's as if the director simply decided that he'd shown us enough of Harry being subsumed in the character of Santa Claus and it was time for him to go berserk. 

The movie muddles its way to whatever point it's trying to make, which has something vaguely to do with the corruption of Christmas into the meaningless commercial circus that we have to endure today. The cast has several familiar faces, including Brandon Maggart, whose performance as Harry has been lauded by a lot of people who clearly don't understand how easy it is for an actor to play a mentally unbalanced character. (Practically everyone still swoons over Adam Sandler's psycho impersonation in the terrible Punch Drunk Love.) When an actor acts as if he has lost his mind, who other than someone with experience with lunatics can tell if he's getting it right? At first, Harry comes across as a fairly common functioning sociopath. Then, for no apparent reason, the movie veers into criminal insanity. 

I can sympathize with the desire of apparently so many to see Santa made into a sinister figure - a supernatural being who spies on children to learn if they're naughty or nice, who invades people's homes when they're sleeping and who invariably disappoints them with gifts they hadn't asked for. Christmas Evil has its moments, as when an angry crowd chases Santa down a nocturnal street with flaming torches. And Harry's final apotheosis is almost poetic. Having followed him thus far into his delusions, we are as amazed as he apparently is when his sleigh/van takes flight, turning left towards the moon, "ere he drove out of sight." 

Merry Christmas!

(1) The title of the version I watched was You Better Watch Out. 

Three

And then all he could think was, It's my fault. I let the summer go on one day too long.

What an incredible mythology modern culture has constructed around the summer season, which is the season of school vacations, family holidays to the beach, and a momentary pause in our working lives. Somehow, love affairs flame and are extinguished, friendships grow sharper, knowledge and wisdom are attained - all in the space of three fleeting months. It is exactly as Karl Marx defined the alienated man, who can only relax and feel alive in his time away from work.

Occasionally on this blog I take a moment to notice a film that suffers an obscurity that I feel is undeserved. A few weeks ago, while gathering information about the American writer James Salter, I came across a film I was utterly unaware of called simply Three that Salter wrote - based on Irwin Shaw's short story "Then We Were Three" - and directed that is a kind of variation on a theme that he explored in his novel A Sport and a Pastime, namely what used to be called a love triangle, or three dimensions that are resisting the pressure of gravity to become two. The story of Three is remarkably simple: near the end of summer two young American men are wandering together from Italy to France, celebrating the last great days of their youth, when they meet a beautiful girl who agrees to accompany them on condition that she doesn't choose one of them and ruin their friendship. But, of course, she does, and the story ends with the departure of one of the men while his friend and the girl are sleeping - together. 

Something of the same conflict appears, albeit in the imagination of the narrator, in Salter's novel, which is often intensely erotic, and suggests a kind of jealous desire that he could be a stand-in for one or the other subjects of his narrative. But whether he is jealous of Dean's intimacy with Anne-Marie or jealous of Anne-Marie's intimacy with Dean is left to the reader to speculate. I knew that Salter had worked as a screenwriter, most notably for Michael Ritchie's Downhill Racer, but that, according to Wikipedia, he became "disdainful of it" - likely because of his failure to achieve commercial success in the medium. 

The "three" in Irwin Shaw's story are Munnie, Bert, and Martha, who become in the film Taylor, Bert, and Marty. It shouldn't have taken much effort for Salter to improve on Shaw's story, which is a straightforward portrait of childhood's last fling before responsibilities are imposed. The film's tagline, which appears on its poster (see attached), is "... but at the same time?" which is a salacious promise that the film doesn't come close to delivering. 

In my book report on A Sport and a Pastime, I suggested that, if the book were made into a film, it would be directed by Éric Rohmer. I failed to remember that a quite similar story had already been adapted to film by François Truffaut called Jules and Jim, based on the novel by Henri-Pierre Roché. One of the themes explored in the Truffaut film was the threesome - a personal relationship between two people expanded to include a third. As its title suggests, in the case of Jules and Jim the central relationship is the one between two men, a German and a Frenchman. When they meet and become mutually fascinated with a woman named Catherine, their friendship is tested when the woman chooses to sleep with Jules. Despite her marrying Jules, and having his child, Catherine is unhappy and the two friends agree that the solution to the problem would be for Jules and Jim and Catherine to cohabit. 

In Three it becomes too obvious which of the two friends will break their pact with Marty and sleep with her. Though he is achingly sincere and at one point Marty even asks him into her room (he demurs for the sake of his friendship with Bert), Taylor is the one who is cheated. 27-year-old Sam Waterston was cast as Taylor, and an Australian singer named Robie Porter, who is actually quite good, was cast as Bert. But whatever interest the film holds today was the casting of 22-year-old Charlotte Rampling (even her name is erotic) as Marty. 

Waterston is a shy, and rather forced presence throughout the film. As an actor, he really didn't develop much throughout his long subsequent career. (He was a terrible choice for Sydney Schanberg in The Killing Fields.) He was 27 during shooting, but looks much younger. He is tall but physically quite unimposing, even when he appears bare-arsed in an attempted sea rescue. Charlotte is eminently sexier, for reasons that are hard to identify. After all these years, the allure of the young Charlotte Rampling is something of a mystery. She made quite a career for herself by appearing in arty Italian films like The Damned and The Night Porter that she improved with her nudity. 

Every now and then, Salter shows us, from a distance, Bert and Marty walking or playing together like contented children, while Taylor looks on forlornly. I waited for a spark that would ignite the story, but I waited in vain. Only at the very end does a strong emotion appear, but it's Taylor's dejection and disappointment at Bert and Marty violating the terms of their arrangement. Just after dawn, he stealthily takes his leave of them, asleep together upstairs, and drives the old Peugeot down the tree-lined street. Once the car is safely out of sight, Salter shows Bert and Marty walking to a café table and taking their seats - a duet now instead of a trio. 

A word about the cinematography by Etienne Becker, who was the son of the marvelous filmmaker Jacques Becker. He started his career with Chris Marker and Éric Rohmer. He was responsible, just prior to shooting Three, for the haunting imagery of Louis Malle's Phantom India. In Three, we are treated to glimpses of Florence from refreshing angles and scenes shot in the south of France by night and early morning light. 

As I mentioned at the beginning, I enjoy directing attention to films whose obscurity is undeserved. Three failed to convince me that it's one of those films. Florence, Antibes and Biarritz are eternally alluring, but the three people chosen to walk around them are not.

The Revenge of the Herd

The movies were wonderful because they took you out of yourself, and at the same time they gave you a sense of being whole. Things of the world might serve to remind you at every turn that your life was snarled and perilously incomplete, that terror would never be far from possession of your heart, but those perceptions would nearly always vanish, if only for a little while, in the cool and nicely scented darkness of any movie house, anywhere. Richard Yates, Cold Spring Harbor

One of the not so novel ideas underpinning Ken Kesey's novel - and Miloš Formans movie - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is that we put the wrong people in our insane asylums. The real loonies are the ones in charge. How could anyone have a glance at Sight and Sound's brand new list of the Greatest Films of All Time without coming to the same conclusion about the contemporary film world? 

I once believed that the whole point of doing this sort of thing once a decade was to establish a canon for fledgling film goers to use as a serious guide through the entirely unserious carnival world of movies. For the last 40 years, however, its seriousness has been challenged by a generation of critics that is growing in numbers and influence who seem much more like fans than critics. 

A canon is something like a baton or a torch that is passed from one generation to the next that celebrates the best work of the past - whether the past is many centuries old, in the case of poetry and music or, in the case of film, only a single century plus 27 years. Standards, especially standards of excellence, are always evolving, but the last three Sight and Sound polls have named a different film as the Greatest of All Time. The latest, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels, was made 47 years ago. Clearly, it hasn't taken critics that long to decide that it's a great film. 

In the Autumn 1952 issue of Sight and Sound, the editors published an introduction that was really a sort of disclaimer. The editors voiced some of the reservations that the "nearly 100" critics (of whom 69 responded to the poll) had made, the most crucial of which was

our request was for personal references – “the films that have impressed you most personally” – and many critics were quick and right to answer that the films one thought best (in the history of the cinema, etc.), were not necessarily the films one liked best.

This has become the real sticking point in any kind of criticism: learning to distinguish between what one likes and what one believes is good. They can sometimes agree, but they are not at all interchangeable and every competent critic must always keep one from interfering with the other. 

But something else has come to light in the few days since the latest Poll was published. In an effort to be more inclusive of works that were made by people outside the mainstream - the mainstream being white males - and, in some cases, bending over backwards in the process - the pollsters reportedly hired a consultant whose mission was to deliberately toss all the usual criteria for compiling the list - like the films that appeared consistently higher on voters' lists - and push another agenda that accommodates the viewpoints of people who are clearly unacquainted with film history. They have succeeded, but not only in foisting a heretofore film outlier to the top of the heap; they accomplished the feat of standing on their own necks.  

A few months ago I listened to an episode from the podcast Against the Rules in which Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and The Fifth Risk, examined the importance of referees, expert mediators in all fields, and how their function can be subverted when the stakes are conspicuously high. He used the discovery of a hitherto unknown painting that some authenticators, hand picked by the owners of the painting, declared was "the last Leonardo" - painted at least partially by Leonardo da Vinci. The painting had been heavily restored in secret and was eventually auctioned at Christie's for a record $450M to an unidentified Saudi prince. The painting has since disappeared, the Paris Louvre refused to attribute it to Leonardo, and it has been widely repudiated as a fake. So now, thanks to the tampering with vetted authentication, some Saudi prince is in possession of a worthless fake that will go down in history as an enormous hoax. 

In an article about Lewis's podcast, Tim Schneider wrote something that has bearing on the current Sight and Sound fuore:

art authenticators…are heavily incentivized to declare competent if not necessarily spectacular works to be masterpieces by canonical talents, even in the face of legitimate doubt.

The incentives motivating many of the 1600 people who were polled by BFI, nearly twice as many as in 2012, are clearly in conflict with people who have seen every film in the canon, and tens of thousands besides, and who have an understanding of cinematic greatness - an understanding that has been tempered by decades of re-viewing and reappraisal. 

I haven't liked the results of these polls before now. These lists are probably the result of the stupefying effects of capitalism on culture, reducing everything to a monetary value (like a Leonardo) giving comfort to people who read best-sellers and who will like something only when they are assured of its popularity. Ranking films or books or songs represents a deeply philistine misunderstanding of quality, despite Richard Brody's claims to the contrary:

Lists are no substitute for criticism, but those who take them as inimical to criticism are pharisaical. Lists are solo acts of personal passion; voting acknowledges that one is part of a community. While there’s no allegiance or deference invoked by the results of a poll (as there is in an election), the poll’s outcomes are a satisfying reminder that it isn’t only family and friends who share one’s strongest enthusiasms. If a critic feels confident going out on a limb, it’s because of the implicit understanding that there’s a tree.

But the tree is rotten and needs to be pulled down. How do I know this? Think about it for a moment. Jeanne Dielman is a great film that deserves more attention. I can't complain that it's at #1 because at least it knocked Hitchcock's silly Vertigo into the #2 spot. I can understand Richard Brody being tickled by its miraculous appearance at #1. His incentive in voting for it was doubtless to maintain his street creds, such as they are, and his strenuous effort to avoid the charge of being "pharisaical" (a pharisaical word if ever there was one - and isn't it the very height of pharisaism to call a 3 ½ hour film that scrupulously avoids anything close to entertainment value the GOAT?). 

Ordinarily, I would spend a long time deconstructing the new poll, as I have done with past polls. I'm not going to this time. Besides, I'd rather any day be a pharisee than a philistine.

[Postscript December 11: the photo of an old Sight and Sound cover I chose to illustrate this piece shows the front door of the British Film Institute, bombed out during the Blitz. The coincidence was inadvertent, but nonetheless pertinent.]

Book Report: A Sport and a Pastime

The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design. 

An old friend chose to spend the Thanksgiving holiday in Paris with his family. And I was reading, coincidentally, James Salter's novel about Americans kicking around France, A Sport and a Pastime. Salter was an unabashed francophile. What one encounters most vividly in his novel is his love of France, in the beauties of its civic design, of cities laid out like dreamscapes, people living out their lives in the shadows of monuments from an ancient past, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic. The novel's narrator takes up residence in a house “built right on the Roman wall,” on a street behind a 12th-century cathedral. 

Autun, still as a churchyard. Tile roofs, dark with moss. The amphitheatre. The great, central square: the Champ de Mars. Now, in the blue of autumn, it reappears, this old town, provincial autumn that touches the bone. The summer has ended. The garden withers. The mornings become chill. I am thirty, I am thirty-four–the years turn dry as leaves. 

In Autun, a city in Burgundy overlooked by tourists, we meet two American men, a 34-year-old anonymous narrator who takes photographs and lives in a house on loan from Parisians, and Dean, who recently quit Yale, whose father is rich, but who is now at ends so loose that a weekend visit to Autun turns into months. Dean meets Anne-Marie, a young French shopgirl, in a nightclub, accompanied by some black American soldiers. 

She’s a girl from the country who works here on weekends, I’ve seen her before. She wears a turtleneck sweater, black skirt, a leather belt cinched tightly around her waist dividing her into two erotic zones. 

Effectively stealing her away from the black men, Dean begins a long, doomed affair with her that involves a great deal of driving from town to town in a 1952 Delage convertible. He cashes in his return plane ticket to extend his stay. But the narration, relating details about Dean and Anne-Marie's affair that are daringly intimate, engages in imaginative invention. Dean, in fact, becomes the narrator's fantasy hero - exactly why we can only guess. The erotic details of Dean's lovemaking suggests something more than friendly interest. Is the narrator fucking Anne-Marie by proxy? Or is he merely using the sex scenes to get closer to Dean, to assume Dean's sexual attractiveness, his success with women? As the loving and lovely narration proceeds, I began to ask "what is he seeking?" and "what has he found?" The Dean/Anne-Marie affair can only go so far, requiring Dean to make promises he can't keep. Sooner or later, he runs out of cash, must borrow from his sister so that he can get away clean from Anne-Marie. There is a last excursion in the Delage, along the River Loire to the coast at Perros-Guirec, a sort of honeymoon built on promises. Dean talks of bringing her to the States. 

When they get back to Autun, there is a long-anticipated goodbye. Dean even borrows from the narrator, using the Delage, which isn't his, as collateral. A last look, then the train to Paris, the plane leaving from Orly. The pang of regrets. The lies that do more harm than they're meant to. But isn't it a sort of dance, after all? A melodrama written by others, imposed on Dean and Ann-Marie? The climax is anti-climactic. The end arrives off stage. 

As I look back, I see that life is like a game of solitaire and every once in a while there is a move. 

I'm no Dean, but I've said goodbyes to enough women to know the special sweetness of the moment, and the bruises it always leaves. Saying goodbye on a sidewalk outside a club, going to my car around the corner, looking back at her as she seems to dissolve on the sidewalk. Or climbing out of the backseat of a taxi at the curb of a airport terminal, pulling my luggage out of the trunk, kissing another one goodbye. And the look on her face from the rear window as the taxi pulls away, knowing she will never see me again. Or watching her, my wife, leave for work, not knowing the Ryder van parked below is one that I rented, as she gets into her car and drives out of sight. Then the methodical packing of boxes, moving everything that's mine down to the van, then, a final touch, attaching a note to the TV screen explaining - but not explaining - my absence when she gets home later that evening. An absence that became forever. 

If A Sport and a Pastime had been a film, a French film, it would be made by Éric Rohmer. Two years after A Sport and a Pastime was published, Rohmer's third Moral Tale, My Night at Maud's, was released. It tells the story of an egoist named Jean-Louis who knows what he wants - a good Catholic girl (who only appears to be good) - who finds himself at the end of a long day alone with Maud in her one-room flat in Clermont-Ferrand. They engage in a silly moral argument that ends with Maud asking Jean-Louis to stay the night with her. Though finding her extremely attractive (she is played by the great beauty Françoise Fabian), he ruins everything by first insisting they only sleep together, with a heavy blanket between their bodies, but then trying to make love to her. She rebuffs him, asking him archly what became of his morality. Though they remain friends, circumstances pull them apart. 

Years pass and Jean-Louis is strolling down a path to a beach when who should pass by him but Maud. But Jean-Louis is accompanied by his good Catholic girl and their child. As I wrote in my review of the film in 2009:

Something happened at Maud's. Even Maud talks about that night with unabashed nostalgia. Near the end of the film, Jean-Louis refers to it as "that evening," and Maud corrects him: "Evening? Night, you mean. Our night." By so italicizing that wintry night in Clermont, in which two people attract, but ultimately fail, each other, Rohmer comes close to the rueful, fate-streaked universe of the Alexandrian poet Cavafy: 

The Afternoon Sun 

This room, how well I know it. 

Now it’s being rented out, with the one next door, 

for commercial offices. The entire house has now become 

offices for middlemen, and businessmen, and Companies. 

Ah, this room, how familiar it is. 

Near the door, here, was the sofa, 

and in front of it a Turkish rug; 

Close by, the shelf with two yellow vases. 

On the right—no, opposite, a dresser with a mirror. 

In the middle, the table where he’d write; 

and the three big wicker chairs. 

Near the window was the bed 

where we made love so many times. 

They must be somewhere still, poor things.

Near the window was the bed: 

the afternoon sun came halfway up. 

… At four o’clock in the afternoon, we’d parted 

for one week only … Alas, that week became an eternity. 

[1918; 1919] 

(Daniel Mendelsohn translation)

Babette's Feast

The proximity of Thanksgiving Day to the Christmas Season (and Halloween, which is a different kind of feast day) has made the end of the calendar year in the US into a gauntlet of gastronomic overindulgence. Feasting is a tradition reserved for special occasions like the end of Lent or Ramadan, Christmas or the pagan celebration of the Winter solstice that Christmas supplanted. No better film I can think of captures the pure sensual delight of - and the justification for - the feast better than Gabriel Axel's Danish film Babette's Feast. 

Karen Blixen's tale, from her 1958 collection Anecdotes of Destiny, first serialized in the American magazine the Ladies Home Journal, concerns a tiny community of ultra-pious Christians in barren West Jutland who devote every moment of their lives to the study and practical application of Christ's teachings. Their founder, a pastor whom they consider a prophet, has two daughters, Martine and Philippa, whose beauty attracts successively the attention of a young Swedish army officer and a famous French opera tenor. The sisters spurn the advances of both men, who are bitterly disappointed but who will impact their lives many years later. 

The old pastor dies, but his daughters carry on his mission. Fleeing the chaos of Paris Commune in 1871, a Frenchwoman named Babette arrives at the door of Martine and Philippa seeking refuge. She carries with her a letter from Achille Papin, the French tenor, who asks the sisters to take her in. When the sisters tell Babette that they can't afford to employ her, she offers to work for nothing. Gradually, Babette makes improvements on the community's plain diet of bread soup and boiled fish. But the community dwindles and its members grow fractious and argumentative. 

The years pass until a letter arrives informing Babette that her lottery ticket, which a friend had renewed every year, has won her 10,000 francs. The sisters become resigned that Babette will leave them, but Babette tells them that she will cook them a grand dinner on the centenary of their father's birth and sends her nephew to France to buy the ingredients. She returns with crates of cheese and fresh fruit, several live quail chicks and an enormous sea turtle. That night, Martine has a disturbing dream. In the morning she calls together the members of her community and she expresses to them her strong misgivings about the grand dinner that Babette is preparing. The simple sensuous enjoyment of good food is something their faith has taught them to rebuke, along with every other sensuous pleasure. They promise one another that they will not take pleasure from the meal Babette makes for them. 

An unexpected guest is announced, a General Lorens Löwenhielm, who was Martine's suitor thirty years before. While dressing for the feast, in full uniform, the general ponders his long and successful career and wonders if he isn't, indeed, a failure: 

Can the sum of a row of victories in many years and in many countries be a defeat? General Loewenhielm had fulfilled Lieutenant Loewenhielm’s wishes and had more than satisfied his ambitions. It might be held that he had gained the whole world. And it had come to this, that the stately, worldly-wise older man now turned toward the naïve young figure to ask him, gravely, even bitterly, in what he had profited? Somewhere something had been lost. 

A strange kind of transference occurs during the meal in which the worldly General Löwenhielm is so overwhelmed by the sensory delights of Babette's dinner that he is moved to deliver a beautiful sermon and the flock of pious Christians become so intoxicated by the exquisite food and wines that they end the evening in quasi-pagan celebration. 

Gabriel Axel's film was an unexpected joy upon its release in 1987, taking critics and audiences completely by surprise. There is a magisterial balance in the tone of the film. The sisters' extreme piety never becomes tiresome or so absurd that it lapses into comedy. In fact, watching the looks of pleasure alighting on the faces of the congregants during the feast is a climax in itself: 

The boy once more filled the glasses. This time the Brothers and Sisters knew that what they were given to drink was not wine, for it sparkled. It must be some kind of lemonade. The lemonade agreed with their exalted state of mind and seemed to lift them off the ground, into a higher and purer sphere. 

Babette's Feast is as close to perfection as a film is likely ever to get. One of the things about it that has never been properly praised is its precision. The first half of the film feels like sheer exposition, moving the story along, until the second half unreels, folding the story back on itself and confirming every promise that it made. Stage by stage the tale proceeds, making points that have unerring bearing on the final revelation, spoken by General Löwenhielm: 

‘We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! that which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!’ 

There are several familiar faces in the cast, including the Danish actors Birgitte Federspiel, Lisbeth Movin, and Preben Lerdorff Rye, veterans of Carl Theodor Dreyer films, and the Swedish actors Jarl Kulle and Bibi Andersson, favorites of Ingmar Bergman. I especially loved Jean-Philippe Lafont as Achille Papin, a genuine operatic tenor whose outsized character is almost transcendent in the village in Denmark where he finds - and loses - the beautiful Philippa. But above all the other actors is the accomplished Stephane Audran as Babette, who loses everything in France only to find her true vocation with two Christian sisters in Jutland. 

What the film tells us is that, no matter how strictly our lives are hemmed in, no matter how life-denying it may be or how joyless, a single day of sensuous indulgence is permissible - if only to clarify our resistance to the forces that conspire to destroy us. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Quiet Girl

‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’ 

The beautiful film (I almost want to pronounce it "filum" like the Irish are wont) The Quiet Girl, that was made by Colm Bairéad from Claire Keegan's short novel Foster suffers from the same affliction endured by most film adaptations of finer literary works. It enlarges the most intimate dimensions of the book, told from the perspective of Cáit, a 9-year-old girl, like it feels obliged to open everything up for the Big Screen so everyone can see it in all its tiniest details. Technically, it's a kind of showing off - one medium exulting in externals in the same way another medium exults on the internals. But there is also a misplaced need to always explain, to make explicit what is implicit. Too many filmmakers are afraid that some viewers who are less attentive won't get whatever they're getting at. They need to get over this fear. 

The little book, published as a stand alone novella, has reminded some critics of Chekhov, who also avoided the longer form. Published in 2010 but set in Counties Wexford and Wicklow in 1981, Foster is a remarkably sweet and delicate story of a girl sent by her mother to live for a summer with a couple that has no child so that the mother can get on with bearing her sixth child. The summer becomes such a respite in the girl's life that she (quietly) dreads having to leave and go back to a houseful that overwhelmed her before and is likely to be worse with the addition of one more. 

The film, shot in County Meath, quickly establishes Cáit's isolation within her large family. We first see her lying in a meadow as voices call out to her. When we notice her lying there, obscured by the bushes, her stillness and the voices calling her name are a little alarming. She gets up and goes back to the house. Her family isn't exactly poor - they live in a two-storey farmhouse. But her parents don't appear to be up to the challenges of their life. Cáit's father is younger than he seemed in the story, and also much cruder. He drinks, chain smokes and dallies with other women. The mother is reduced to a baby-making drudge. 

The little cruelties that children in large families endure don't have to be shown to us. We each have an innate sense of them, almost beyond memory. Cáit's family is never overtly abusive. When she hides under her bed rather than face her mother's reaction to her having wet the bed the night before, her mother, knowing she's there, sourly tells her she has "muck" on her shoes. Clearly, the worst she has to endure from her family, as the youngest of four daughters, is total neglect. 

The foster couple she is sent to live with, Sean and Evelyn Kinsella, are materially better off than the girl's family, but not by much. The difference is that their house seems so much larger and finer with just the two of them. Sean runs a dairy farm, and though Cáit isn't required to work, she helps Sean with the sweeping and learns how to feed the calves from a bottle, since the cows' milk is for sale. 

Immediately upon her father's departure, without so much as a goodbye hug (and driving off with her suitcase), Cáit is given the most luxurious bath of her life by Evelyn, all the way down to scrubbing her toes. Evelyn tells her there are no secrets in the house, but she neglects to tell her that they had a son who chased the dog into a slurry pit and drowned. Cáit doesn't learn about it until a nosy neighbor woman tells her. 

The Quiet Girl is Irish in more than just its setting. The spoken language is almost all Irish, an ancient Gaelic language. And the dialogue occasionally switches to English words at the oddest moments. Interestingly, Cáit's father is the only character in the film to speak exclusively in English, which further isolates him from everyone around him. 

It's a very quiet film, using Stephen Rennicks's music so sparingly it's almost unnoticeable - which, I have found, is the best film music. I can't honestly tell if the wondrous quality of the cinematography, by Kate McCullough, is due to the beauty of the country or not. But it doesn't matter. There are three principal actors, Carrie Crowley as Evelyn Kinsella, Andrew Bennett as Sean, and a newcomer, Catherine Clinch as Cáit. Clinch is never called upon to act, but she manages to suggest with her deep blue eyes alone such a range of reactions, and always so subtly, that it draws the viewer closer to her and into the world in which she breathes. 

When, sadly, Cáit must return to her home and get ready for the new school year, the Kinsellas are left childless as before. The only benefit is Caít's experience of genuine familial love. The film’s final scene is overwhelmingly beautiful. 

There are missteps. When the girl runs to the mailbox and back and in the closing scene, the film switches to slow-motion. It's a common enough device. In this case I would guess it's the filmmaker's way of italicizing the moment, stretching time to make the moment last. In Claire Keegan's story, the girl says, 

My heart does not so much feel that it is in my chest as in my hands, and that I am carrying it along swiftly, as though I have become the messenger for what is going on inside of me. 

But the switch is jarring in The Quiet Girl, knocking us into the unreal. Not as egregious as the moment Forrest Gump starts to run, kicking off his leg braces. But that was a bad movie, and this is a good one.* 

*I can't condemn the use of slow motion entirely. A friend reminded me of Sam Peckinpah's use of slow motion, which was often fascinating. So there is a creative way to use the special effect.

All Quiet On the Western Front (2022)

What more is there to be said about war that Griffith and Gance and Eisenstein and Vidor and Renoir and Kurosawa and Kubrick and all the rest haven't said already? A new adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's classic pacifist novel All Quiet on the Western Front* is available streaming on Netflix. It covers a lot of old ground but fails to cover it creatively or memorably. 

World War I wasn't the first war of attrition - a war that was little more than the systematic slaughter of millions of people, mostly German men, Frenchmen and Englishmen - but it was a demarcation dividing one age from another. According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, "some 8,500,000 soldiers died as a result of wounds and/or disease," in a war that lasted a little more than four years. But the Great War has also had an extraordinary afterlife. Veterans of the war - poets, playwrights, novelists, and filmmakers, as well as memoirists - took their combat experience as their subject and created works of art that have fixed the war in our collective consciousness. The tone of nearly all Great War literature was pacifist and anti-war. 

According to Andrew Kelly, whose book Cinema and the Great War I recommend, Lewis Milestone's movie adaptation of All Quiet of is "The measure for all anti-war cinema." But it's a very tricky term, "anti-war cinema." As I mentioned before, battle scenes have occupied the creative resources of some of the greatest filmmakers, quite understandably because of their extreme visual impact. Shots of dozens, sometimes hundreds of people doing violence to one another are unlikely to leave any viewer feeling ambivalent about them. Film is a kinetic art - hence the word cinema. Our eyes are attracted irresistibly to movement. And what could possibly be more kinetic in a film than a battle scene? 

The trouble with battle scenes for the filmmaker is precisely their ability to thrill. Even when, as in Apocalypse Now, a filmmaker tries to show that war is of its nature insane, he often succumbs to the spectacular qualities of combat. If one were to ask viewers of Apocalypse Now to name their favorite scene, I doubt that many would fail to name the famous morning helicopter raid, with speakers on board the helicopters blasting Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" and a deranged Colonel telling us how the napalm smells like victory. 

50 years after the event, Philip Larkin could write in his poem "MCMXIV": 

Never such innocence, 

Never before or since, 

As changed itself to past 

Without a word—the men 

Leaving the gardens tidy, 

The thousands of marriages 

Lasting a little while longer: 

Never such innocence again. 

I haven't read Remarque's novel, which Goebbels banned, prompting Remarque to seek refuge first in Switzerland and then in America, but I've now seen three movie adaptations of it: Lewis Milestone's 1930 version, with its extraordinary photography by Arthur Edeson, the 1979 version, made for television, directed by Delbert Mann, and now a German-language version directed by Edward Berger. Of the three, Milestone's is the best, probably because it was made only 12 years after the war ended and the world's attitude toward war hadn't yet been overwhelmed by the Nazis. 

Early in the new film, after the viewer has already been introduced to the trenches (I almost used the adjective "hellish," but the word seems clichéd), a group of the latest cannon fodder leaves school in cheers, enlists in the Army and marches off, just as Larkin wrote, "Grinning as if it were all/An August Bank Holiday lark". We are shown in explicit detail how the uniforms they are marching in were recycled from the bodies of soldiers killed in action: the blood rinsed away, the bullet holes sewn shut. 

Fed the same bullshit nationalism that a generation of French and English armies had been, the enthusiasm with which this group of young German men enlist in the army and march off to war is not even allowed its irony - Edward Berger underscores these scenes with disturbing noises - not music - throughout. We all know by now what they're headed for. After lengthy scenes of trench warfare carnage, an extended lull behind the lines muddles the film’s pacing. There is one scene I must single out in which Paul and his friend Kat (Albrecht Schuch) open letters from home while sitting bare-arsed using an improvised latrine. Paul is the central character, played by as unprepossessing an actor - Felix Kamerer - as could be found on either side of the front. I suppose he was cast because of his sheer averageness (I couldn't avoid being reminded of a younger Karl Malden). 

Two years ago on this day I reviewed the Sam Mendes film 1917. All Quiet begins the same year, on the German side of the lines. Kudos (I guess) to the movie's makeup department for showing us what the corpses of combat casualties look like in living - livid - color. The cinematography is by James Friend, a Brit, and it's often beautiful despite the ghastliness of so much of his subjects. 1.78:1 is the aspect ratio and it sometimes seems even wider, but the film exploits it far too much. What was needed wasn't the panoramic but the claustrophobic. I don't think even David Lean would've tried for epic moments given such a subject. The best scene in the film isolates Paul and a French soldier in a huge bomb crater. Paul mortally stabs the Frenchman several times but must then witness his protracted death. Paul draws his knife to cut open the soldier's tunic and calms him by repeating the word "Kamarad!" Helplessly, he tries to close the wounds and stop the blood from flowing from the Frenchman's mouth. After he dies, he tells the dead man he's sorry and he finds a photo of a woman and child in his pockets and a packet of letters. I can't say that this and other scenes, like the final scene of Paul's own death, are unmoving. They are all just short of veritable. 

Finally, the people who adapted Remarque's novel committed a curious and serious error by chosing to introduce non-fictional scenes involving Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Remarque's novel was narrated by Paul, and he tells the story simply and honestly. His narrative is cut short at the end by a matter-of-fact report of his death and the words announced by wire services at the 11th hour on November 11, 1918: Im Westen nichts Neues - All Quiet on the Western Front. 

I can find no pressing need for this film, at this time. The only good reason I can think of for why it was made is neglect. Either no one has seen Lewis Milestone's 1930 version or they don't want to see it. After all, it's a grey movie with photographic qualities that are no longer appreciated when CGI can do it so much more easily - and the mayhem is more "graphic." Paul Fussell's great book The Great War and Modern Memory may have to be renamed The Great War and Modern Amnesia. Is it possible today to communicate the message of Remarque's novel to the people it was intended to reach? The people - like Putin and Xi - who aren't convinced of the futility of war? 

*first published 96 years ago yesterday.

One Way Ticket

He disappeared in the dead of winter: 

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, 

And snow disfigured the public statues; 

The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

What instruments we have agree 

The day of his death was a dark cold day. 

W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" 

On the afternoon of November 7, 2007 - yesterday - I departed Anchorage, Alaska on a Northwest flight to Manila, arriving on November 8 - today - some time around noon. 15 years have passed. I can't let this day go by without apostrophizing it. 

On that day my sister drove me to the airport across a town already locked in ice and the sky was overcast. The road that goes past the two terminal buildings was one-way, and we missed the Northwest Airlines entrance and had to go all the way back around to find it. I lost my temper at my sister because travel makes me so anxious that I can't relax until I'm checked in, sitting near my gate and awaiting boarding instructions. I didn't think what that drive meant to my sister and how it would affect her. I didn't think about what her long drive home without me must have been like, to an empty house (except for Lucky, her dog) on Caress Circle, where I had been living with her for nearly two years. Within months she would lose the house to Wells Fargo's foreclosure. And my dear sister would never see me again. She died of heart failure on October 27, 2016. It had to be heart failure, didn't it? 

As soon as I was checked in, I made my way to the airport lounge and ordered a drink. All my attention was fixed on what lay ahead of me. I had been planning the trip, my sixth trip to the Philippines, since 2005. I had told my sister about it from the beginning, from when I moved in with her just before Christmas in 2005. I had a small disability pension from the VA, which had been eating at my consciousness ever since I started drawing it. The thought of quitting my job and going to live on my pension in a poor country was utterly tantalizing. As I told my sister, I hadn't given up on life just yet. She assured me that she hadn't, either.

If I could change one thing, I would never have got on that plane. I was 49 then and I'm now 64. In a few months I'll be flying back to the States - not to Anchorage but to the other side of the country, Maine. This time I won't be coming back. The fascination that this place had for me when I visited in 1993 and on five subsequent occasions over the years is long gone. 

Bye bye, PI.

The Rising Shadow

Les Podewell

Very deep inside the Harold Ramis movie Groundhog Day, an old idea is given somewhat chilling validation: the day of your death is inscribed in every cell in your body, in your tissues, and there is no way to escape it. You may see it coming, and be granted a little time to put your house in order. But when the time comes, your time, the show is over. 

Some argue that we should live every day as if it were our last day. But aside from being a little silly, it would also be acutely difficult. If you knew you were going to die on a certain day, you would naturally make preparations, like updating your will or settling debts or even gathering your loved ones around you. In other words, if there were literally no tomorrows to anticipate, your sense of purpose would be focussed on nothing but getting you to the end. Enzo Ferrari once said the ideal formula one race car would fall apart the moment it crossed the finish line. It's purpose only as finite as the checkered flag, it should disintegrate when the race was over. Or, as Saul Bloom (Carl Reiner) put it in Oceans Twelve : "I want the last check I write to bounce!" 

In the movie Groundhog Day, after a certain number of reiterations (and we never know how many there have been), Phil Conners comes to something like this same realization - that it ultimately doesn't matter whether he plays by the rules or doesn't, whether he finishes the day in his bed or behind bars or even on a slab in the morgue. The clock will be rewound and he will wake at 6 o'clock in the morning - the same morning - fully intact. So Phil never has to worry about saving his own skin, since there are no consequences for him. 

But among the many citizens of Punxsutawney whom Phil encounters in his daily repetitions is a beggar identified in the credits simply as "Old Man" and played by a veteran American actor named Les Podewell. He appears in six scenes in the film - the first five standing in the same place, a street corner, at the precise moment, or thereabouts, when Phil passes by on his way to Gobbler's Knob. The beggar does the same thing every time - he holds out his right hand for whatever change Phil can spare. On the first encounter, Phil pats himself down as if looking for his wallet. The beggar looks hopeful, but Phil walks right on by. The second encounter, when Phil is slowly coming around to the fact that something strange is happening to him, and he pats himself down for a second time, revealing that it's his standard routine when confronted by a panhandler, you can see the déjà vu on his face when he looks at the beggar. On the third encounter, when Phil is alarmed at the seeming nightmare he's in, he jumps in fear when he sees the beggar standing in the same spot on the corner. On the fourth day, Phil sarcastically tells him, "Catch you tomorrow, Pop," sure in his belief that there is no tomorrow and he can use the same line with impunity the next time. 

Forty minutes of the movie elapses before Phil meets the old man again, but by then, after spending innumerable Groundhog Days trying to get Rita into bed, all in vain, Phil is a different man. He looks at the beggar, reaches into his pocket, takes out a wad of cash and, after beginning to count it, places all of it in the beggar's hand and walks away. The old man looks in amazement at the money in his hand. Later that night, walking past an alley, Phil sees the old man struggling along a brick wall. He goes to him and says, "Hello father. Let's get you someplace warm." The old man smiles at him and Phil says, "Remember me?" 

Cut to Phil standing in a hospital waiting room. A nurse approaches him. "Are you the one who brought the old man in?" "How is he?" Phil asks. "Well, he just passed away," the nurse tells him. "What did he die of?" "He was just old. It was just his time." Phil asks to see his chart, enters the room where the old man expired and throws back the curtain. The nurse tells him, "Sometimes people just die." "Not today," Phil tells her. 

In the following scene, on the following Groundhog Day, Phil and the old man are sitting in a diner. When the old man finishes a bowl of chicken soup, Phil pushes another in front of him. "Gets hard down there on the bottom," Phil tells him. The old man smiles at him and even more food arrives. Late in his life Les Podewell was afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis, and we see his gnarled fingers, making his hands into claws. (see photo)(1) 

The following shot takes place in an alley. The old man is lying on the ground and Phil is trying desperately to revive him. "Come on, Pops, breathe!" he pleads. Phil breathes into his mouth but the air escapes as steam in the cold night air. Phil looks up at the sky in a mute appeal. As Phil learns, the old man always dies, no matter what he does to save him. But he can't save him. This scene is the real catalyst in the movie, the moment when Phil realizes what's happening to him and what he needs to do to turn it - his life - around. It's his encounter with death - implacable, inescapable, and final. This idea isn't a new one. Simply put, your death in inscribed in every cell of your body, like an expiration date, and there is nothing you - or anyone else - can do to change it, delay it, or postpone it. Witnessing the old beggar's death affects Phil deeply, and it's the catalyst for all his subsequent actions. The wonder of the film is that, no matter what he does, whether he's a good man or a bad man, Phil has to keep doing it over and over until he gets it exactly right. He is given no indication that being a loving human being will release him from the curse - if it is a curse. But he does it anyway. 

A cottage industry has grown up around Groundhog Day trying to estimate the number of days that Phil had to repeat. Harold Ramis, who co-wrote and directed the movie, estimated that Phil had to endure 10 years of repeated Groundhog Days in order to master the piano, ice sculpting, and become a loving human being. 

Ramis shows us the old man's dying in the alley only once, but there were others. There is a "deleted scene" from Groundhog Day that is available on YouTube. Because of time limits, and in the interests of the narrative flow, but mostly because he was making a comedy, Harold Ramis decided to cut the scene. But after Phil watches the old man die in the alley, does he just leave him there? In the deleted scene, Phil puts a blanket over the body, looks at his face for one long moment, and then he walks away - just before an ambulance enters the alley. Two EMTs get out and go over to the old man. One of them recognizes him as "Old Jesse." While one of them examines the body, the other finds a note in his pocket and reads it aloud: 

Every night by cold bricks' glow 

I watch the shadow rising 

from this old man in the snow 

At 8:02 he let it go. 

The other EMT pronounces Old Jesse dead. 

Phil was with the old man in his last moments - because he had no one else - for an undetermined number of nights, providing Old Jesse with companionship and comfort until the very end. It's an extraordinary act of compassion from a once selfish and cynical weatherman on his day by day road to redemption. 

(1) At his funeral service in Chicago in 1998, Podewell was eulogized by Studs Terkel.