The Seventh Seal

Listening to some considerably lesser filmmakers than Ingmar Bergman ridicule his film The Seventh Seal has compelled me to look at it again. It was my very first Bergman film, which was shown at some parent/teacher meeting in 1972 or '73 when I was attending a Catholic school. A nun (most of my teachers were nuns, which only became a problem when we were instructed in sex education) had seen the film and had given in to its religious implications. As I learned later on, Bergman had been preoccupied with the ultimate question - the great WHY of existence - when he made the film, but he came up with the novel approach of addressing it directly rather than obliquely. Not long after he made it, however, he lost interest in the subject, even though it continued to appear in several of his subsequent films. But it was no longer a problem to be solved for him, but only a problem without ready-made solutions. (It is in this respect that I am one of those critics who found Wild Strawberries unsatisfying, since it confronts Isak Borg's imminent death momentarily, but loses its nerve, probably because Bergman loved Victor Sjöström too much to see through with his quietus. He is given an utterly unconvincing contented ending instead.)

However much Bergman may have moved on from the issues he confronts in The Seventh Seal, it is a stimulating confrontation. He didn't settle the matter, he simply let go of it. The argument (put forward by Alexander Payne in the documentary Trespassing Bergman) that the film somehow no longer "holds up" is preposterous. What he meant to say, of course, is that filmmakers no longer have the balls to confront such unwieldy subjects. Barry Levinson includes a scene in his masterpiece, Diner, in which two of his characters are in a Baltimore movie theater watching The Seventh Seal. When Death appears, Steve Guttenberg asks Tim Daly who that's supposed to be. "Death," Daly replies. "Oh, come on," Guttenberg says. "I've been to Atlantic City a thousand times and I never saw Death walking on the beach." "It's symbolic," Daly tells him.

But, of course, it's NOT symbolic at all. It isn't a symbol of Death in The Seventh Seal, walking on that stony beach, but Death personified. After the typically terse opening credits, a title appears that reads: It is the middle of the 14th century. Antonius Blok and his squire, after long years as crusaders in the Holy Land, have at last returned to their native Sweden, a land ravaged by the Black Plague.

We then hear a voiceover intoning lines from the New Testament's Book of Revelation, Chapter 8: "And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. . . . And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound." The opening scene is justly famous, but it has contributed to an image of Bergman that he had to work long and hard to escape. At dawn, the knight and his squire are lying on a deserted beach. A figure dressed in black with a pale white face appears suddenly and startles the knight, who asks him "Who are you?" "I am Death," the man in black replies matter of factly.

Two scenes, early in the film, make Bergman's intentions explicit. Jof awakes in his wagon and tumbles out into the brilliant morning. As he practices juggling, he sees a woman and a baby walking alone together. Jof smiles ecstatically and rubs his eyes. But when he opens them again the woman and child are gone. He climbs back inside the wagon and wakes Mia, his wife.

JOF: Mia, wake up. Wake up! Mia, I've just seen something. I've got to tell you about it!
MIA: (sits up, terrified) What is it? What's happened?
JOF: Listen, I've had a vision. No, it wasn't a vision. It was real, absolutely real.
MIA: Oh, so you've had a vision again!
MIA's voice isfilled with gentle irony. JOF shakes his head and grabs her by the shoulders.
JOF: But I did see her!
MIA: Whom did you see?
JOF: The Virgin Mary.
MIA can't help being impressed by her husband's fervor. She lowers her voice.
MIA: Did you really see her?
JOF: She was so close to me that I could have touched her. She had a golden crown on her head and wore a blue gown with flowers of gold. She was barefoot and had small brown hands with which she was holding the Child and teaching Him to walk. And then she saw me watching her and she smiled at me. My eyes filled with tears and when I wiped them away, she had disappeared. And everything became so still in the sky and on the earth. Can you understand...
MIA: What an imagination you have.
JOF: You don't believe me! But it was real, I tell you, not the kind of reality you see every day, but a different kind.
MIA: Perhaps it was the kind of reality you told us about when you saw the Devil painting our wagon wheels red, using his tail as a brush.
JOF: (embarrassed) Why must you keep bringing that up?
MIA: And then you discovered that you had red paint under your nails.
JOF: Well, perhaps that time I made it up. (eagerly) I did it just so that you would believe in my other visions. The real ones. The ones that I didn't make up.
MIA: (severely) You have to keep your visions under control. Otherwise people will think that you're a half-wit, which you're not. At least not yet as far as I know. But, come to think of it, I'm not so sure about that.
JOF: (angry) I didn't ask to have visions. I can't help it if voices speak to me, if the Holy Virgin appears before me and angels and devils like my company.

But Jof IS a fool - the kind whose truths are mistaken for jokes. The second scene that makes Bergman's intentions somewhat more explicit is in a church where Jons encounters a man painting inside.

To the right of the entrance there is a large fresco on the wall, not quite finished. Perched on a crude scaffolding is a PAINTER wearing a red cap and paint-stained clothes. He has one brush in his mouth, while with another in his hand he outlines a small, terrified human face amidst a sea of other faces.
JONS: What is this supposed to represent?
PAINTER: The Dance of Death.
JONS: And that one is Death?
PAINTER: Yes, he dances off with all of them.
JONS: Why do you paint such nonsense?
PAINTER: I thought it would serve to remind people that they must die.
JONS: Well, it's not going to make them feel any happier.
PAINTER: Why should one always make people happy? It might not be a bad idea to scare them a little once in awhile.
JONS: Then they'll close their eyes and refuse to look at your painting.
PAINTER: Oh, they'll look. A skull is almost more interesting than a naked woman.
JONS: If you do scare them...
PAINTER: They'll think.
JONS: And if they think...
PAINTER: They'll become still more scared.
JONS: And then they'll run right into the arms of the priests.
PAINTER: That's not my business.
JONS: You're only painting your Dance of Death.
PAINTER: I'm only painting things as they are. Everyone else can do as he likes.
JONS: Just think how some people will curse you.
PAINTER: Maybe. But then I'll paint something amusing for them to look at. I have to make a living, at least until the plague takes me.

For all the talk about God and the Devil, Bergman made The Seventh Seal to directly confront his fear of death. There is a scene, shot in just one day, in which a procession of flagellants passes through a village, led by a half-crazed monk who screams at the gathering of townsfolk.

MONK: God has sentenced us to punishment. We shall all perish in the black death. You, standing there like gaping cattle, you who sit there in your glutted complacency, do you know that this may be your last hour? Death stands right behind you. I can see how his crown gleams in the sun. His scythe flashes as he raises it above your heads. Which one of you shall he strike first? You there, who stand staring like a goat, will your mouth be twisted into the last unfinished gasp before nightfall? And you, woman, who bloom with life and self-satisfaction, will you pale and become extinguished before the morning dawns? You back there, with your swollen nose and stupid grin, do you have another year left to dirty the earth with your refuse? Do you know, you insensible fools, that you shall die today or tomorrow, or the next day, because all of you have been sentenced? Do you hear what I say? Do you hear the word? You have been sentenced, sentenced!

The monk (impressively played by Anders Ek) never mentions salvation or damnation. Why bother, when Death is much more imposing and terrifying? It is as if Bergman himself stood on a stage and addressed us in the audience directly. "You back there with the swollen nose ..." If I were in the audience, perhaps I would suddenly feel self-conscious about my nose.

The film was made on a tight budget with the expert resources of Gunnar Fischer's utterly raw black-and-white imagery, P. A. Lundgren's inventively economic design, and Erik Nordgren's evocatively authentic-sounding music. Max von Sydow is imposing as Blok. Gunnar Björnstrand is marvelous as the skeptical squire, Jons. Nils Poppe probably got fed up with comparisons to Chaplin, but, for once, they are earned. Bibi Andersson is captivating as Mia. And there was no better Death than Bengt Ekerot.

I have mentioned before that fewer people are reading and being enthralled by Dante's The Divine Comedy because, since hardly anyone continues to believe in personal immortality, heaven and hell have ceased to be interesting to readers even as abstract concepts. But death continues to be a perplexing problem - a problem that needs to be faced, rather than solved. When Bergman wanted to address the problem, he refused to face it in the usual philosophical or metaphysical terms. Especially since film is - as it should be - so damned literal. People in films are given visions, but they never appear to us the way they appear to the character in the film - as visions. Some special photographic or lighting effect may give them a strangeness that signals to us that what we are seeing, through the character's eyes, isn't supposed to be taken literally. When Henry James wrote The Turn of the Screw, he clearly wanted the reader to continually wonder if the ghosts that the children's governess sees are genuine ghosts or simply figments of her - presumably sexually - overheated imagination.

But in The Seventh Seal Bergman wanted to treat his subject in an utterly unambiguous, head-on manner. So why do so many responsible people respond to the film the same way Steve Guttenberg did in Barry Levinson's Diner? Could it be because they're made uncomfortable by it? Sneering at the film doesn't diminish its power or invalidate its argument. As Philip Larkin wrote,

Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
("Aubade")

I think Larkin (and Bergman) would be incredulous of anyone who claimed that they weren't afraid of death. I think they would both have laughed at Woody Allen's line, "I'm not afraid of death. I just don't want to be around when it happens."

Scare Me

The problem I have with scary movies is that, with notable exceptions, they no longer scare me. I was plenty scared by them when I was a child, but it was because I hadn't yet figured out that the people who made them were simply using tricks of the motion picture medium to manipulate me as a member of the audience. Now that I am more knowledgeable about how movies are put together and how many quite simple technical devices are employed to create an emotional or sometimes visceral reaction, I can no longer suspend my disbelief long enough to get a good scare out of them. Like an old movie ghost, I find that I can see through the special effects to the trickery behind them.(1)

Of course, it's also because I have grown into a skeptical adult, and because horror, the distinct genre of stories and plays and films that have developed (if that is the word) since the 19th century, plays upon conventions - widely accepted formal requirements - that are far from the ordinary lives of human beings. I remain skeptical of the reality, of the existence, of much of its subject matter. Many famous people, some of them reputable, claim to have seen ghosts. Even George Orwell, who was probably the person least susceptible to such an experience who ever lived, described in a letter an encounter with a ghost in Walberswick cemetery: “I happened to glance over my shoulder, & saw a figure pass ... disappearing behind the masonry & presumably disappearing into the churchyard. I wasn’t looking directly at it & so couldn’t make out more than that it was a man’s figure, small & stooping, & dressed in lightish brown; I should have said a workman. I had the impression that it glanced towards me in passing, but I made out nothing of the features. At the moment of its passing I thought nothing, but a few seconds later it struck me that the figure had made no noise, & I followed it out into the churchyard. There was no one in the churchyard, & no one within possible distance along the road – this was about 20 seconds after I had seen it; & in any case there were only two people in the road, & neither at all resembled the figure.... The figure had therefore vanished. Presumably an hallucination." (Letter dated 16 August 1931 to Dennis Collings)

What else could it have been? However intrigued he was by the encounter, Orwell never wrote a ghost story. In fact, none of the great novelists or dramatists wrote what are narrowly identifiable as ghost stories. There are ghosts in Shakespeare's plays - the ghost in Hamlet even speaks. But none of his plays is about ghosts. Dickens wrote stories featuring ghosts, and even contributed the most famous ghost story for Christmas (a strange and delightful British tradition), A Christmas Carol, that contains no less than four ghosts who pay visits to Ebeneezer Scrooge one fateful Christmas Eve. But it's a Christmas story, not a ghost story.

Dickens was an admirer of Edgar Allen Poe, whose writings, however exceptional they are, are distinguished by a level of conviction that has given them, like Poe himself, a unique place in literature. None of the so-called "gothic" writers who preceded and succeeded him were nearly as good as Poe or as convincing.

There is a ghost story related by the near-insane character Svidrigailov in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. He claims to have encountered the ghost of his dead wife and of an old servant. Raskolnikov refuses to believe in them, but Svidrigailov leaves him with a disturbing metaphor for eternity: “We keep imagining eternity as an idea that cannot be grasped, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, imagine suddenly that there will be one little room there, something like a village bathhouse, covered with soot, with spiders in all the corners, and that’s the whole of eternity.” (Crime and Punishment, Part Four, Chapter Two) However convincingly strange Svidrigailov's accounts may be, Dostoevsky wrote no ghost stories.

Ambrose Bierce, who witnessed some of the bloodiest battles - like Shiloh - of the American Civil War, wrote of ghosts in his stories with a reporter's matter-of-factness that lends them an uncanny quality. I wrote about an excellent short film adapted from Bierce's story about a man about to be hanged for espionage from Owl Creek Bridge. Awaiting his execution, the man engages his imagination in a vivid daydream in which the rope that hangs him breaks and he swims to freedom, being chased and fired upon for miles. He reaches safety and finds himself in familiar surroundings. He finds his own house and his wife and, "As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon—then all is darkness and silence! Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge."

And Henry James, who liked reading ghost stories, wrote stories and a novel that could be classified as ghost stories. In fact, The Turn of the Screw is widely celebrated as a gripping, if extra-carefuly written, story of the haunting to two English children by two ghosts. In his close reading of the novel, however, Edmund Wilson concluded that The Turn of the Screw is ambiguous as to what actually happens, whether we can take it as a straight ghost story or as a subtle psychological portrait of an emotionally and sexually repressed English nanny. It is this ambiguity, I think, that makes the novel more fascinating than it would be if the reader weren't left wondering, if only in the back of his mind, exactly what he has read.

I have had encounters, two of them, that occurred when I was in the Far East, that have left me wondering about ghosts. The first encounter was in Okinawa when I was stationed there in the Navy. The Japanese island of Okinawa was the site of some of the most intense battles of World War Two. The base on which I was stationed, called White Beach, is on a peninsula on the eastern coast of the island. There are cliffs above the beaches that are pitted with caves, some of which are closed to the public and marked with signs designating them as tombs. Japanese soldiers withdrew from the fighting into these caves and committed suicide, sometimes using grenades to kill themselves. One night in 1993, I was walking with a few friends up the road that wound down from the front gate. I had to use an ATM first, so I told my friends to go ahead of me and I would catch up with them. As I was climbing the hill, I passed a young Japanese man who approached me and, putting two fingers to his lips, let me know that he wanted a cigarette. I gestured that I had no cigarettes, and the young man shrugged his soldiers and continued on his way down the hill. All I remember specifically about his clothes was the cap on his head, which looked like it was military issue, one that I had seen in old photos of Japanese soldiers. When I caught up with my friends, some of whom had cigarettes in their hands, I asked them why they hadn't offered the man who passed me - and who had to have passed them - a cigarette. "What man?" they asked. They had passed no one on the road. Ever since then, I have thought that it was perhaps the ghost of a soldier who had killed himself in one of the caves in the cliffs above White Beach.. Or else it was "an hallucination."

The second encounter took place in the Philippines, where I'm now living. In 2016, a Filipino man I knew died of a heart attack. His widow paid for a traditional funeral, which was preceded by a long vigil, like a wake, that lasted for days. I went to her house by the highway on the first day to give her my condolences. I sat down, but I did not wish to stay very long, because Filipino parties are segregated, with the men outside drinking and carousing, and the women inside cooking and preparing drinks (as well as drinking and carousing). The man sitting next to me was getting drunk, but I wasn't drinking at the time, so I excused myself and headed back down the highway toward home. As I was walking I kept an eye out for a ride, but there was no ride forthcoming. So, since it was another mercilessly beautiful day, late afternoon, I decided to walk the kilometer or so home. After I passed the crest of a hill, it was downhill the rest of the way, and I was alone on the highway. I rounded two curves down the highway until I saw a man standing ahead of me on my side of the highway. I noticed he was wearing a "barong," a traditional sheer long-sleeve shirt that covers a short-sleeved shirt underneath, with black trousers. But why was he standing there? If he wanted to catch a bus - out of town (which is the only bus to catch), he should've been on the other side of the highway. He was facing to the West, where the afternoon sky was already turning orange. And as I approached where he stood, watching my step along the edge of the highway, I recognized him as the man whose vigil I had just left, who was lying in his coffin in the front room of his house, dressed in the same clothes he was standing up in by the highway. He paid no attention to me as, without thinking, I crossed to the other side, while keeping my eyes on him. He was gazing at the sky to the west with a look of utter distraction and peace on his face. I walked past, keeping him in my peripheral view, and proceeded at a normal pace, turning my head every now and then, making sure he hadn't moved. But when the highway wound to the left, I picked up my pace for the rest of the way. It was the last I ever saw of the man. I didn't join the funeral procession to the cemetery a few days later. This Undas, November 2nd, the Filipino Day of the Dead, his widow will visit the cemetery with food and drink, enough for herself and some for her dead husband, and pay her respects. If she doesn't do it, Filipinos believe that his spirit will grow restless again and it will walk the earth. I won't be walking that particular stretch of highway again unless I am accompanied by another living soul.

But the real problem I have with ghost stoires, and with horror movies, is that the best writers and filmmakers usually avoid the genre, just like every other genre, because it imposes an artificial structure on the story or the film that interferes with their discovery of life, with the illumination of their characters with a light that seems to come as much from within them as around them. Hitchcock resorted to horror effects when he made Psycho, but even some of the critics who admired his work were appalled at the result. In his brief notice of the film, Stanley Kauffmann wrote, "Two murders and a third attempt are among the most vicious I have ever seen in films, with Hitchcock employing his considerable skill in direction and cutting and in the use of sound and music to shock us past horror-entertainment into resentment." Hitchcock drags us into an embezzlement scheme, makes us care about what happens next to Janet Leigh, only to then have us take part in her brutal murder by a knife-wielding mental case. Thanks, Al, but no thanks. Gus Van Sant's shot-for-shot remake of Psycho only proved how uselessly formulaic the original was.

Effectively entertaining horror films have been made in the past by skilled filmmakers. I think of William Friedkin, fresh from The French Connection - an effective crime thriller - who made The Exorcist (1973), which is probably the scariest film I've seen. Even if one doesn't believe in God or the Devil, the film will make one jump at most of the carefully appointed moments. (Be careful how you're holding your popcorn.) But Friedkin's skill was just about up to the level of horror-entertainment and not higher. When he thought he was good enough to remake Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear, with a budget much greater than Clouzot's, the film (Sorcerer, 1977) was a failure on several levels, and it sent Friedkin's career on a circuitous detour.

Now there is CGI to further complicate matters. Now all manner of horrors can be visualized on the screen, including heretofore unimagined ones. Whatever can be conceived, in fact, can now be realized in a motion picture, including holographic three-dimensional images of actors and entertainers long dead. Such technical advances always have little or no effect on the quality of films.(2) If anything, technical advances set the art of the motion picture back a few years because it takes awhile for filmmakers to master them. As I wrote some time ago, CGI has now made film animation both easy and impossible. The best thing that the latest technical advances has done, I think, is to simplify filmmaking to the point at which it is now quite possible for a film to be made from start to finish and also to reach a mass audience with a great deal less money. If independent filmmakers find it easier to make a horror film (remember the success of the first Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity films), it shouldn't come as all that much of a surprise. Especially to horror movie fans.


(1) For similar reasons, I don't like magicians either. There can be only two reasons why people find them entertaining: it's either because they believe they're witnessing real magic or because they like to be fooled.
(2) It was Stanley Kauffmann who, writing film criticism for 55 years (1958-2013), came up with the statistical estimate that, "in a good year," 95% of the films realeased are trash, 4% are good entertainment [remember that number before underestimating good entertainment], and less than 1% are accomplished art. And that's in a good year.

The Return of the Soldier

Rebecca West was 25 when, 100 years ago, her first novel The Return of the Soldier was published. The First World War wasn't to conclude until November 11, but to speculate that the war's last battles, claiming its last dead or disfigured, were a tragic waste of life would be an admission that the dead millions in the three previous years of the war had died for something.

The novel is narrated by Jenny Baldry, the 30-something unmarried cousin of Chris Baldry. Chris is at the front, and Jenny lives with his wife, Kitty in a glorious house called Baldry Court, made even more glorious by renovations made since the death of Chris and Kitty's 2-year-old son five years ago. The scenes at Baldry Court make it seem as if the way of country life that the Great War brought to such an abrupt end was breathing its last in its own marbled mausoleum.

There has been no word from Chris in two weeks, and Jenny's concern is exacerbated by troubling dreams:

"Of late I had had bad dreams about him. By nights I saw Chris running across the brown rottenness of No-Man's-Land, starting back here because he trod upon a hand, not even looking there because of the awfulness of an unburied head, and not till my dream was packed full of horror did I see him pitch forward on his knees as he reached safety, if it was that. For on the war-films I have seen men slip down as softly from the trench-parapet, and none but the grimmer philosophers could say that they had reached safety by their fall. And when I escaped into wakefulness it was only to lie stiff and think of stories I had heard in the boyish voice of the modern subaltern, which rings indomitable, yet has most of its gay notes flattened: 'We were all of us in a barn one night, and a shell came along. My pal sang out, "Help me, old man; I've got no legs!" and I had to answer, "I can't, old man; I've got no hands!"' Well, such are the dreams of English-women to-day. I could not complain, but I wished for the return of our soldier."

Out of the blue, a middle-aged woman pays a visit to the house, and immediately we are subjected to the most horrific class snobbery, from Kitty and from Jenny herself. The woman is Margaret Grey, formerly Allington, who abruptly informs Kitty and Jenny that "Mr. Baldry" (she doesn't know his rank in the army), has sent her a telegram to a 15-year-old address, along with letters that convince her that he is ill. Kitty and Jenny at first don't believe her and think she is perpetrating a fraud in order to get money out of them. But the telegram is authentic. Having endured their insults and incredulity, Mrs. Grey leaves convinced that she should never have come.

Frank, Chris's cousin, who is "in the church," goes to France and discovers him in a hospital in Boulogne. He has suffered an unusual form of shell shock that has affected his memory and he believes that he is not married to a woman named Kitty with whom he had a deceased child, but that he is 15 years younger and is in love with Margaret Allington and that she, too, is as she was 15 years before and is in love with him. The letters he wrote to her are passionate love letters written by a man she hasn't seen since they parted company when she was a girl of 20. She, too, has married and (we only learn in the last chapter) lost a 2-year-old child five years ago.

Chris is told the truth about his wife (but not about the lost child) and he is invalided home to Baldry Court. He is happy to be home, though he doesn't recognize the house's renovations, and he demands that he see Margaret at once. Jenny fears he won't recognize the middle-aged Margaret, but she finds that "to lovers innumerable things do not matter."

While Chris and Margaret cavort like children in the house's gardens and woods, Kitty calls on the expertise of several doctors, who study Chris's case and examine him without knowing what should be done to bring him back to normalcy. But one doctor, a psychiatrist (a newfangled profession in 1918) named Gilbert Anderson arrives, confesses to the three women, "It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself." But Margaret, who goes upstairs with Jenny to make herself more presentable to the good doctor, discovers a photo of Chris's dead boy in Jenny's room. Realizing that both Chris's child and hers had died five years ago at the age of 2 leads her to conclude that "It's -- it's as if they each had half a life." This remark leads Jenny to think how she "had of late been underestimating the cruelty of the order of things. Lovers are frustrated; children are not begotten that should have had the loveliest life; the pale usurpers of their birth die young. Such a world will not suffer magic circles to endure."(1)

Margaret tells the doctor, who knew nothing of the child, and he suggests that it might be the key to Chris's amnesia. He tells them to find a memento, a toy or piece of clothing that could break into Chris's amnesia. Margaret volunteers, but expresses doubts, knowing that a cured Chris will have to go back to the war. But she relents, "the truth's the truth, and he must know it," and takes a red ball and a blue jersey out to Chris. Kitty and Jenny remain in the nursery and Kitty asks Jenny to watch from the window and to tell her what she sees.

"There had fallen a twilight which was a wistfulness of the earth. Under the cedar-boughs I dimly saw a figure mothering something in her arms. Almost had she dissolved into the shadows; in another moment the night would have her. With his back turned on this fading unhappiness Chris walked across the lawn. He was looking up under his brows at the over-arching house as though it were a hated place to which, against all his hopes, business had forced him to return. He stepped aside to avoid a patch of brightness cast by a lighted window on the grass; lights in our house were worse than darkness, affection worse than hate elsewhere. He wore a dreadful, decent smile; I knew how his voice would resolutely lift in greeting us. He walked not loose-limbed like a boy, as he had done that very afternoon, but with the soldier's hard tread upon the heel. It recalled to me that, bad as we were, we were yet not the worst circumstance of his return. When we had lifted the yoke of our embraces from his shoulders he would go back to that flooded trench in Flanders, under that sky more full of flying death than clouds, to that No-Man's-Land where bullets fall like rain on the rotting faces of the dead."

As most critics noticed at the time, The Return of the Soldier is about how three women, all in love with one man (Jenny's unrequited passion for him is obvious), save him from the trauma of war. But if there is any weakness in this terse tale of a man whose confrontation with the painful reality of the modern world drives him into a denial of that reality and into a retreat long before experience, it is the patness of its resolution - the simplicity of Chris's "cure." Dr. Anderson's job is merely to point out to the three women things they figured out on their own.

The novella reminded me in places of The Beast in the Jungle, which makes sense since West was heavily under the influence of Henry James. Just beneath the lovely surface, in which Baldry Court is itself a place of dreams far from the trenches, there is a crushing pain. The only happy ending is Kitty's, who gets her husband back.

The transformation of West's intimate little novel into a film in 1982 is hardly a transformation at all. Everything seems to arrive intact on the screen, with a little welcome fleshing-out of the characters and their motivations. After a credit sequence depicting Ann-Margret (Jenny) watching over a sleeping Alan Bates (Chris) in the middle of what looks like a nocturnal battlefield, the film begins inside Jenny's dream, with her and Chris as children at play half in Baldry Court and half in No Man's Land - the cratered wasteland between the British and German trenches. Richard Rodney Bennett's music cries out insistently on the soundtrack as Jenny raises a stick like a rifle and - BANG! - she sees Chris blown to smithereens. The film shows us Baldry Court's social life both before Chris goes off to war and after he jettisons his memory. The role of his cousin, Frank (Jeremy Kemp) is greatly expanded in the film, and he is definitely NOT "in the church". And Chris is provided with terrifying visions of death that break into his otherwise placid home life.

One crucial scene not in the novel is an absurdity: Kitty and Jenny travel to France to find Chris. They find him in a ward crowded with other men. He recognizes Jenny but reacts violently to Kitty's suggestion that she is his wife. The absurdity of the scene is that it would be logistically impossible (and probably prohibited) for British families to travel to France to find their wounded soldiers. The scene in the hospital, in which people clamor around a nurse demanding information about their loved ones, is suitably nightmarish. An older man asks in a crushed voice as he passes the nurse on the stairs where he can collect his son's "things."

The film gives us more of William Grey, Margaret's husband (West merely sketches him in). He is played beautifully by Frank Finlay. I mean, what must he have felt about Chris's love letters to Margaret? There is a quiet scene in which he studies Glenda Jackson as she's cleaning up after the milk has boiled over on the stove, like he's trying to look into her thoughts.

Ann-Margret's performance is, thankfully, understated. Julie Christie's pretty frigidity is perfectly contrasted with Margaret's dormant love. Glenda Jackson gives by far the best performance. The scene in the child's nursery as she recalls the short life of her own child is heartbreaking. Ian Holm manages to impress in the tiny role of Dr. Anderson. But Alan Bates carries all the drama of the film, managing to suggest with his bearing alone something of the trauma he's been put through. The film shows us what Rebecca West could not: the very moment of Chris's reawakening. Shot mostly at middle-distance, the scene is perfectly staged. We first see him (from Jenny's vantage point at the window) enter on a bicycle, while Rodney-Bennett's music makes us feel suddenly protective of this middle-aged man who is about to be reminded of his child's death. Margaret presents him with a stuffed toy (ironically a soldier in khaki), he takes it and he acts exactly as if a veil has been lifted from his eyes. He gives the toy back to Margaret and strides resolutely ("every inch the soldier") towards the house. As he nears it, we can hear the sound of the heavy guns in faraway France, and as the scene fades we can hear the officer's whistle ordering his men over the top.

Alan Bridges directed adroitly, interweaving reality, memory, and nightmare in this ultimately sad tale. Hugh Whitemore, who died last month, wrote the script, and his additions to West's text - except for the hospital scene - are perfectly apposite. Two years after The Return of the Soldier, Bridges returned to the English countryside in The Shooting Party, from the Isabel Colgate novel. Set in 1913, and taking its cue from the rabbit-hunting scene in Renoir's The Rules of the Game, its prevailing sense of doom was somewhat overstated but exquisite nonetheless.


(1) Not knowing what to do about Chris, Margaret tells Jenny that she prayed and read the Bible, but it gave her no help. "You don't notice how little there is in the Bible really till you go to it for help."