Bibi

The 90th birthday of Max von Sydow was celebrated on April 10, and on April 14 news of the death of Bibi Andersson went round the world. Of course I knew of her from the Bergman films I've seen throughout my life. Her beauty and graceful presence gave The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries an unexpected charm. As the nurse in Persona, she was dominant by design, since her patient, Liv Ullmann, had lost the power of speech. She came across as the less neurotic of Bergman's actresses, though her characters were never without their own secrets (this was Bergman country). I think I liked her best as the sole woman between two men in a film I first saw only a few years ago, largely because it was deemed a much lesser effort from Bergman, known as The Touch, produced by the American ABC Pictures Corp. Though with English dialogue and starring the big box office draw of the day, Elliott Gould, it was made entirely on Bergman's terms, shot in Sweden (on the island of Götland, adjacent to Fårö).

If nothing else, what an opportunity to be introduced to a bonafide Bergman film, for audiences who don't watch films in a foreign language - foreign films in more than one sense of the term. There were two versions, reportedly, but the one in which the Swedish actors speak their lines in Swedish has been misplaced. It was known as Beröringen. But the principal actors all speak their own English dialogue. Both Bibi Andersson and Max von Sydow had appeared in American films, and could speak English accountably. I don't recall reading a single approving review from the time of its release, either from the daily reviewers like Vincent Canby and Roger Ebert, or from "highbrow" critics like John Simon and Stanley Kauffmann. It bombed at the box office and became an embarrassment for Bergman. I don't know if he regarded it as anything more than a fat check. It was revived in 2011 at New York's Lincoln Center and was eventually released last year on DVD/Blu-Ray by Criterion. Since then it has been the beneficiary of a kind of forensic criticism that merely reminds us of the current paucity of films worth viewing. This practice of locating films, that were previously regarded as unworthy of praise, out of their context of 30, 50, 70 years ago and hoisting them up as somehow undeserving of this initial appraisal and now much worthier of praise than ever before is a kind of retroactive cruelty that contemporary critics, in these threadbare days of the film medium, carry out on films from the past.

I don't know how Bergman approached the writing of his script, but the results make me think that he purposely dumbed it down for audiences that were perhaps unaccustomed to the intensity of his writing in Swedish. The dialogue is at times both stilted and banal. In the last scene of the film, Karin has told David that it's over between them. David tries to stop her: "It hurts physically being without you," he tells her. "It's like a constant ache ... I can't live without you. It sounds so utterly ridiculous to hear myself say 'I can't live without you,' but it's true."
KARIN: "Don't say anything more. It just makes it more difficult."
DAVID: "You can't just leave me like this. Please don't go."

When Antonioni wrote the script of Blow-Up with Tonino Guerra in Italian, he got Edward Bond, the British playwright, to translate the dialogue into English. I can't believe Bergman didn't consider doing the same. Some of the dialogue in The Touch is painfully artificial, and only reinforces what Swedish critics always complained about in Bergman's films, his flowery, formal dialogue.

Now for the procedural part. Right out of the gates, Elliott Gould's character, David, comes across as an ass (Karin's husband, Andreas, even shows us a slide show with some pictures of a donkey, not knowing that David has just professed his love for Karin). Since this is a tribute to Bibi Andersson, let me get Elliott Gould out of the way. He loves the film. When it was screened in Brooklyn in 2008, the only print available then was Gould's personal print. He is the only American actor ever to appear in a Bergman film, so he has reason to be delighted by it. But the film portrays him as a bounder from beginning to end. If you ever wondered why Bergman picked Gould to play the American archaeologist in the script, it becomes obvious in his first scene with Max von Sydow. Physically, they are like Jacob and Esau (even when Gould shaves off his beard after the film's midpoint - and then grows it back). Sven Nykvist's lighting of the first sex scene between Gould and Andersson is as kind to Gould as it's possible to be. I couldn't find a single reason, aside from sheer boredom, why Karin jumps into bed with him. Andreas is a very successful doctor whose practice takes up much of his time. It isn't a job he can simply let go of at quitting time. Max von Sydow makes him attentive, vulnerable, and sympathetic. Andreas is an utter bore, but at least Von Sydow delivers his lines with conviction. Gould's readings, especially when the lines are so stilted, are plain awful. He should be proud of being chosen by Bergman, even if he is rather oblivious of Bergman's motives for choosing him. David blunders his way into the lives of a contented Swedish couple, shakes things up between them, and then gets indignant when Karin shows him the door. In a way, The Touch is Bergman's revenge on the Americans and ABC Pictures Corp.

But The Touch, even with all of its inadequacies, is worth watching because of Bibi Andersson, who makes Karin completely substantial, no matter how inexplicable the situations seem. The role was intended for Liv Ullmann, who was unavailable at the time of shooting. Andersson thought she was unsuited for the role, but I can't imagine Liv Ullmann in the part. Andersson lends total authenticity to every scene she's in, and she's in nearly every scene. When she learns that her mother has died in hospital, she is left alone with her body. What do you do in the presence of the dead? Even when it's someone who was very close to you. Karin walks quietly around the bed. Bergman focuses on her mother's face (her eyes are partially open), her hands. Finally, Karin sits down beside the body, takes her hands, embraces her. She waits when the nurse retrieves her mother's wedding rings, then collapses in the cloakroom. And now Bibi Andersson is dead.

When the film wasn't received well, accused of "banality," Andersson defended it: "So long as we are banal human beings with conflicts that are often banal, I think it would be becoming if we were to embrace banality with at least a smile of recognition." I have no problem embracing banality. I'm simply not accustomed to doing it in an Ingmar Bergman film. A great many artists eventually fall into self-parody. They simply can't maintain the same level of intensity for very long. That The Touch is Bergman Lite became all the more obvious when he followed it with Cries and Whispers and Face to Face, films that are flawed, but intensely concentrated.

When Shirley Horn died a number of years ago, I thought that when great singers and film stars die, their work, which was our introduction to them, and which is really our only contact with their lives, will always be there. Thanks to Bergman (and a few other Swedish filmmakers), Bibi Andersson's immortality is secure.

Adieu Philippine

Already, as early as 1964, John Simon could pronounce that "the New Wave is waning." The French New Wave, that broke upon the international film scene sixty years ago with the first films of Claude Chabrol (Le Beau Serge), Jean-Luc Godard (Breathless), and François Truffaut (The 400 Blows), found itself, a mere five years later, petering out. Jacques Rozier, now 92, is four years older than Godard, who, if not the heart of the movement, remains its soul. Rozier made his feature debut in 1962 with Adieu Philippine, a film whose style is much less purposefully structured than either Chabrol's or Truffaut's, or indeed as purposefully anarchic as Godard's. It has a documentary, slice-of-life feel, following a young man on his last few days of freedom before his enlistment in the Army and being sent to Algeria. He is helped in his celebration by two young women, who are more than willing to enlist in the cause of his final fling.

The film opens, after informing us of all of the grands prix the film won in '62 and '63, with a title that reads "1960 sixième année de guerre en Algerie". Michel (Jean-Claude Aimini ) is working at a Paris TV station. He runs into two girls, Juliette (Stefania Sabatini) and Liliane (Yveline Céry), outside the station, anxious to see the band performing inside, and he escorts them quietly into the studio. Later, they meet, like all teenagers did, over sodas. Michel gets the girls a tryout for TV commercials that end after numerous takes fail to produce the desired results. With the day of his enlistment looming, Michel manages to get fired from his job (during a live broadcast, he ruins the shot by walking in front of the camera - and I thought I saw Jean-Claude Brialy behind the camera) and he leaves impulsively for Corsica. The girls follow him there.

Because so much of the film looks and, more noticeably, feels improvised, the lack of direct sound becomes a bigger impediment than it would otherwise have been. There is an air of exhilaration about the film. A good example are the scenes in which Michel, with three of his friends, buys an old car and takes it for a joy ride. It's the most literal illustration of a "joy ride" I've ever seen. Rozier indulges in some self-indulgent "filmic" touches that deliberately call attention to themselves, like the boys riding along vocalizing the melody of a waltz as the camera bounces from behind the car (where we can't hear them) to beside the car (where we can). They slow down to follow a pair of girls walking beside the road. Then we see them inside, one in the front seat and one in the back.

At one point, a scene of Juliette and Liliane walking along a Paris street (looking for a pay phone from which to call Michel) is interfered with by two men not in the film who are unaware of the camera recording them. Rozier left them in the film perhaps to remind us of how close to life he wanted to get. But as the actresses proceed along the boulevard, pretending not to notice the camera pointed at them from a passing voiture, plenty of passers by notice it. Filmmakers frequently used this type of shot, and still use it. But it looks especially spontaneous in Adieu Philippine because of a certain rawness of intent. The film was probably planned down to the smallest detail (François Truffaut certainly recognized this), but it feels so masterfully unplanned.

The scene shift to Corsica is abrupt and unsettling. At first, the holiday makers seem frantic in their holiday making. Michel locates the oily producer who stiffed them in Paris, but he escapes. But Corsica - those horrible stony beaches and the constant buzz of cicadas! Michel drifts leeward from Juliette to Liliane. The girls' friendship is momentarily tested but, in a night scene that opens the film's closing coda, they laugh at how seriously they have taken things. But suddenly Michel reminds them that he is serious, and how seriously he regards his last days of liberty, and the girls grow silent. The moment at last arrives when all the fun must come to an end. The mood of the film's final ten minutes is tinged with an unexpected sadness. It reminded me of the end of Tati's M. Hulot's Holiday, when the holiday is over and everyone gathers up their things and departs. The awful hurry of departure, that only allows time to reflect once one is safely aboard. Then, the ship is underway, and the girls run to the very end of the quay, waving their hats until they're too far away to be seen.

Thematically, a rough American equivalent to Adieu Philippine is Nancy Sivoca's 1991 Dog Fight, about a young man in San Francisco in 1963 on the eve of his departure for Vietnam. Cinematically, Rozier's film is far superior, and is completely lacking in the quite layered ruefulness imposed on the American film by its historical context (it is also the night before JFK's assassination). In 1960, the French had already quit Vietnam and although the Algerian War was a comparable disaster for France, Rozier's film conspicuously avoids any foreshadowing and wisely omits the heavy-handed scene ("3 years later") when River Phoenix limps back into Lili Taylor's coffee shop.

I read that one critic compared Adieu Philippine to Rohmer's La Collectionneuse. I see only a superficial resemblance. It reminded me, however, of a short novel by Cesare Pavese called The Beach. It, too, depicts the dalliances among a group of friends that ends on a wistful, plaintive note. Stanley Edgar Hyman called it "the comic ghost of a tragic love story." Adieu Philippine is unlike every other New Wave film I've ever seen, even if it hasn't the heft of Truffaut's or Chabrol's or Godard's first works. Perhaps it's unfair to hold Jacques Rozier to such a high standard. But I enjoyed the company of Michel and Juliette and Liliane and felt an unexpected pang at the film's fin.

I first heard of this film in 1976 when I found a copy of Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films in a college library. Sadoul thought enough of it to include it in his survey. I thought then, 12 years before I joined the Navy, that the title disclosed an alluring subject - something to do with the allure of the Far East and perhaps an exotic woman. Now that I've at last - 45 years hence - watched the film, coincidentally sitting in the middle of a Philippine island province, perhaps I can finally admit that its allure worked, but that in fact there is no "Philippine" at all in the film except an almond with two kernels that inspires Liliane to demand a pledge from Juliette, since they both fancy Michel.(1) Alas, the title's allure was just wishful thinking on my part.


(1) "Noun philopena ( plural philopenas ) 1. A game in which a person, on finding a double-kernelled almond or nut, may offer the second kernel to another person and demand a playful forfeit from that person to be paid on their next meeting. The forfeit may simply be to exchange the greeting "Good-day, Philopena" or it may be more elaborate. Philopenas were often played as a form of flirtation.
2. The occasion on which a philopena is forfeited; the forfeit paid.
3. A nut or almond with a double kernel, as used to set a philopena."

The Getaway

Every film has its own history. From the completion of the post production, when positive prints are made from the original negative, to initial release when the prints are distributed to a certain number of theaters in a certain number of cities, to the end of the film's first run, when the prints are returned to the production company. The only difference between now and then is that instead of reels of 35mm film to be mounted on a projector, special multi-layered digital discs are distributed to theaters. The reels of film or the discs are returned to the production company, they are destroyed and the negative is stored in a vault.

Such was the fate of the 1972 film The Getaway, starring Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. It was the second-highest grossing American film in release in 1973, and was the biggest hit for its director, Sam Peckinpah. But it received unfavorable reviews from the critics. The Getaway started out as a novel by Jim Thompson published in 1958. Steve McQueen, who owned the rights to a film adaptation, brought Jim Thompson on board to write a script that was to be directed by Peter Bogdanovich, but disagreements led to the exit of both Thompson and Bogdanovich. McQueen was a big enough star at the time that he could call the shots. Walter Hill was hired to write a screenplay and Sam Peckinpah, who had worked with McQueen on Junior Bonner the year before, was the director. Only McQueen had approval of the final cut, which bothered Peckinpah enough, on one occasion, for him to take out a full page ad in Variety thanking Jerry Fielding for the music he wrote for the film, which didn't satisfy McQueen. Quincy Jones replaced him.

Sam Peckinpah was no studio stooge. Stanley Kauffmann wrote of him: "He is not an oblique puritan, he is a talented maniac who loves his bloody work. And the work is significant."(1) But that was The Wild Bunch. Something as yet undefined inspired Peckinpah to go above and beyond conventional expectations of an American film. Ride the High Country, his second feature film, is a classic of its kind, but it's still well within the boundaries of the Western genre. The Wild Bunch, his fourth film, vivisected the genre and found its beating heart. Kauffman noted that its use of violence called to mind Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty. Pauline Kael was evidently so overwhelmed by Straw Dogs, Peckinpah's 6th film, that she was moved to write, "The siege is not simply the climax but the proof, and it has the kick of a mule. What I am saying, I fear, is that Sam Peckinpah, who is an artist, has, with Straw Dogs, made the first American film that is a fascist work of art."(2)

In The Getaway, Steve McQueen plays Doc McCoy, whom we first see not adapting very well to life in a Texas prison. His wife Carol, played - improbably - by Ali MacGraw, visits him and he tells her, from his side of the cage, to do whatever she has to do to get him out. She succeeds, on condition that he pull off one more heist for Jack Beynon, a San Antonio crime boss (Ben Johnson, a crime boss who wears a cowboy hat). The heist is put together so mechanically by Peckinpah (it reminded me of Kubrick's equally overwrought heist at the heart of The Killing), in such preposterous detail that it comes as no surprise when almost everything goes wrong. When it's over, with only Doc and Carol surviving (Rudy is left for dead), Doc goes to Beynon's house to give him his cut. What he doesn't know is that Carol is then supposed to shoot him in the back, as arranged by Beynon. She shoots Beynon instead, which justifies the remainder of the protracted "getaway."

The bank robbery takes up far too much time - its planning and execution are so carefully laid out for no appreciable reason. It isn't Fort Knox - it's only a savings & loan with one old security guard. There is a genuinely suspenseful sequence aboard a train. And the garbage truck scene is somewhat scary, but only because delicate Ali MacGraw is inside it. Watching her and McQueen together makes one wonder what the attraction was - I mean, other than sex. And not just from her perspective. What was McQueen doing with this beautiful girl who belonged on top of a Christmas tree, not in a heist movie? Sally Struthers, before All in the Family made her immortal, is just another excuse for Peckinpah to show us his misogyny. I mean, who wasn't relieved when, screaming "Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!", McQueen knocked her out with a left jab?

When location shooting started, MacGraw was married to the producer Robert Evans. She and McQueen hit it off during shooting, and it shows onscreen. Although McQueen was known to be physically abusive, MacGraw's vulnerability brings out an unexpected tenderness in McQueen in other scenes, like the one in which they make love after McQueen's release from jail, and he finds that not being with a woman in three years has made him momentarily impotent. MacGraw's patience patience in the scene is touching.

Clearly, Peckinpah wasn't inspired when he made The Getaway. Even the violent scenes feel puffed up - the slowing down of the action that seemed to contribute another dimension to The Wild Bunch seem here to be nothing but highlighting. McQueen slaps Ali MacGraw repeatedly and knocks Sally Struthers out cold, just like a hardened criminal like his character should. But Peckinpah was angered by McQueen's choice of shots, showing him off from his best angles. Two scenes in particular, one inside a garbage truck trash-masher, and the final shootout in an El Paso hotel (or was it a motel?) are utterly gratuitous. And the sickly sweet happy ending, with the couple shuffling off to Mexico - some kind of ultimate sanctuary for Peckinpah's heroes - is unearned by these unlikely partners in crime.

But all this would've been academic had it not occurred to a team of idiots to remake The Getaway in 1994. When a different team of idiots remade the Charles Bronson film, The Mechanic, in 2012, I wrote: "Contemporary American movies are so uniformly execrable that they make even the trashiest movies of the past seem splendid." The remake of The Getaway didn't make Peckinpah's film seem splendid, but it did give it almost iconic status among critics anxious to show off their comparative cinema skills. Alec Baldwin can't even act tough convincingly. Perhaps worried about his image, it's Kim Basinger, as Carol, who knocks out Rudy's girlfriend in the hotel scene. Compared to the remake, Peckinpah's The Getaway is what it always was - a competently-made heist movie. Trash, but skilfully made.

Peckinpah needed a hit when he made The Getaway and he got one. Just as the critical attention that his TV production of Noon Wine led to his contract to make The Wild Bunch, The Getaway gave Peckinpah a new lease on his directing career in 1973. He used it to make Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia the following year, which his fans admire so much but which goes to even greater depths than The Getaway in depravity. The only real difference is there is no sweet ending tacked on to the end of Garcia to carry the viewer out of the theater. Peckinpah managed to pull one more good film out of his hat - Cross of Iron (1977), the cumulative violence of which left me trembling, forty years ago, as I walked back to my car. John Simon was moved to admit that Peckinpah had a "Wagnerian sense of violence." Coincidentally, the heroes of Cross of Iron are Wehrmacht soldiers retreating on the Eastern Front.


(1) Stanley Kauffmann, Figures of Light (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 180.
(2) Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, January 29, 1972.

Simon Said

Looking up articles by John Simon who, now 93, remains the sole surviving film critic of the Golden Age, I came across a querulous piece from 2015 that its author titled, "The Most Hilariously Damning Review Of The Original Star Wars". It was a post from one of the many blogs on which fans pour forth their seemingly unlimited adoration of pop culture fixtures - in this case the Star Wars movie franchise, created by George Lucas and now owned by Disney.

The author of the piece comes from a base of fans for whom Star Wars is unquestionably one of the pillars of movie art, along with what else I can only guess. His distaste for the "hilariously damning review" (by John Simon) derives from the assumption that the first Star Wars installment, released in 1977, is an inviolable film masterwork: "When Star Wars came out in 1977, nobody knew it would become the classic that we all recognize today. Some people were skeptical, for sure. But few reviewers were as hilariously savage as John Simon, with New York Magazine, who called it 'a set of giant baubles manipulated by an infant mind.'"

The author offers "some choice passages from Simon’s review," which I won't repeat here. Simon was possessed of two things that sometimes acted against each other: acute discernment and a sometimes brutal means of expressing it. While recognizing that shooting ducks in a barrel wasn't very sporting, he occasionally couldn't resist the sheer fun of it. Simon's conclusion ("Still, Star Wars will do very nicely for those lucky enough to be children or unlucky enough never to have grown up.") was virtually identical to Stanley Kauffmann's assessment: "This picture was made for those (particularly males) who carry a portable shrine within them of their adolescence, a chalice of a Self that was Better Then, before the world’s affairs or—in any complex way—sex intruded. Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and their peers guard the portals of American innocence, and Star Wars is an unabashed, jaw-clenched tribute to the chastity still sacred beneath the middle-aged spread."

When the 3rd installment of the Star Wars franchise was released, in 1982 I think, Simon appeared on ABC News Nightline in a "debate" with Chicago movie reviewers Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. Simon repeated his opinion that the Star Wars films were made for kids, both underage and overgrown, and that they were trying to make kids dumber. Siskel & Ebert, smiling like they were in firm possession of the high ground, played straight into Simon's argument first by questioning Simon's upbringing (the only explanation they can imagine for why he chooses not to revisit his childhood), and by pointing out the overwhelming popularity of the films among children. Siskel told Simon he should've been with him at a matinee, surrounded by delighted kids who easily identified the good guys and the bad guys, cheering and booing in perfect synchronization (I'm paraphrasing).

What Simon should've asked Siskel was what was he doing sitting among a throng of squealing kids at an matinee? Didn't he feel even the slightest bit out of place? And would he try to smuggle a child into an audience of grownups at an R-rated movie, at the risk of getting kicked out of the theater? (I argued before that the MPAA ratings should cut both ways. Adults should be prevented from watching films marketed to children. But, of course, Star Wars wasn't marketed exclusively to kids. It was given a PG rating, after all -  albeit there wasn't much parental guidance at Siskel's matinee.)

John Simon, like myself, probably had a perfectly normal childhood, of a normal duration, ending some time in his mid-teens when self-knowledge and knowledge of the ways of the world impelled him to turn away from childhood and embrace adulthood. Speaking for myself, if you had asked me when I was 12 what I wanted to be when I grew up, I am confident that I would've replied that I wanted to be an adult. That's all. My profession was unimportant. I saw my childish condition as manifestly, if necessarily, unfair. I was at a disadvantage - one that grownups capitalized on. I wasn't taken seriously because I was a child. And, of course, adults who used physical violence against me as a form of coercion did so precisely because I was too small to defend myself. Why is it that no one remembers this about being a child, but only the endless process of discovery and wonder that is the natural result of being new to everything?

I read comic books when I was a kid and loved watching Western movies and cheered when the cavalry arrived in the nick of time to save the white settlers from the clutches of the the savage "injuns". Even John Ford's "masterpiece" The Searchers is informed by this creed. My heroes were Johnny Unitas and Wilt Chamberlain and Hank Aaron. I thrilled to the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. On TV, I watched Daniel Boone and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and The Munsters. But when I arrived in my teens, I saw Fellini's La Strada (because it had two Hollywood stars, Anthony Quinn and Richard Basehart) and I was inadvertently made aware of a whole world of films that had been deliberately kept from me, just as they were kept from most Americans, by a monopolizing Hollywood.

What ultimately determines the value of any work - a book, a piece of music, a film? Not the opinions of critics, no matter how learned and deftly expressed. Longevity decides. Will it still be known and celebrated in 20, 50, 100 years? Only posterity will tell. Ask a film producer if he cares what posterity will say of his film. He only cares about the film's first run. Not even a cult following can make up for a film's disastrous first showing. The vast majority of what are stupidly called art-house films (by a generation of doofuses) are also known as "niche" productions. They aren't expected to make a killing at the box office. So when they don't, no one is surprised. But if a blockbuster bombs (the word blockbuster was first applied to an actual bomb), it sends shock waves through the film industry. A manufactured product designed expressly to put butts in movie theater seats has failed to function. The butts failed to materialize in sufficient numbers to offset the enormous cost of the production. Careers are in peril.

What can be done to prevent it? Is there no algorithm that can be used to guarantee box office receipts? I can tell you from experience, just as every other experiened critic can tell you, that there is no connection at all between critical success and sales. What is good and what sells exist in different dimensions that never touch. A good film can sometimes sell, but it is unlikely to. What sells, to the extent of its popularity, is mostly bad, but not invariably so.

The clash of sensibilities that the aforementioned Star Wars article highlights is not, of course, an isolated event. It happens whenever a believer comes in contact with the expressed views of a skeptic. I wrote about a similar encounter at the beginning of this month. A website for fans of J.R.R. Tolkien published a review of The Lord of the Rings (by Edmund Wilson) that was highly unfavorable. It was inconceivable to these fans that everyone couldn't share in their unquestioning enthusiasm for the books. Of course, it was also inconceivable to them that a literary world could exist in which Tolkien wasn't among the greatest writers who ever lived, even if they were unacquainted with the writing of Flaubert, Joyce, Mann, Fitzgerald, or any other writer whose work is esteemed to be great. Edmund Wilson came from such a literary world. Which is why, when his job as a professional literary critic required him to read Tolkien's books, because some misguided critics had praised their literary qualities, he had to denounce Tolkien as a writer for children. More recently, Harold Bloom denounced J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books for identical reasons.(1)

John Simon came from a world of film that Star Wars fans know nothing about. It is a world in which the standards were set by films that no Star Wars fan has probably even heard of. So when Simon was required in 1977, as the film critic of the weekly New York Magazine, to express his judgement of the first Star Wars movie, it wasn't at all in accordance with the feelings of its fans. Simon saw it as a poorly written, clumsily executed (however buttressed it was by technical effects) dud aimed at undiscerning children and adults whose childhoods never ended. It's no wonder, then, that Ebert & Siskel took exception to Simon's judgement, even if, as critics, they were miserably unequal to Simon's standard. Had they been book reviewers (which is unlikely), they would've mistaken Stephen King's phenomenal success as some dubious proof of literary prowess, not knowing that sales is never enough of a guarantee of quality.


(1) “The writing was dreadful; the book was terrible. As I read, I noticed that every time a character went for a walk, the author wrote instead that the character stretched his legs’. I began marking on the back of an envelope every time that phrase was repeated. I stopped only after I had marked the envelope several dozen times. I was incredulous. Rowling’s mind is so governed by cliches and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing.” 

Remastering the Film: Michelangelo Antonioni

Michelangelo Antonioni's death on the same day as Ingmar Bergman's (30 July 2003) was comparable to the deaths of F.Scott Fitzgerald and Nathaniel West within twenty-four hours of each other, December 21-22, 1940 (West was on his way to Fitzgerald's funeral when he was killed in a car accident). And although Antonioni was 94, and had not made a film unassisted since 1982, his very existence was a reminder of how brilliant film was capable of being.

With the three films that make up a loose trilogy, L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), and L'eclisse (1962)(1), Antonioni expanded the supposed limitations of film expression. He proved that imagery alone was capable of supporting immense thematic and emotional weight.(1) And he arrived, in L'eclisse, at a nearly plotless narrative. Prior to L'avventura, with his adaptation of the Cesare Pavese novel Tra Donne Sole, known as Le Amiche (1955), Antonioni had already demonstrated an impatience with conventional plotting. In his next film, Il Grido (1957), he moved even further away from pat explanations for his characters' actions. He also drew the ire of his actors, who were never given what they regarded as proper motivation in their roles. (Richard Harris, who would appear in Red Desert (1964), called Antonioni a "quasi-intellectual".)

In 1957, actress Monica Vitti joined Antonioni's Milan theater group, Teatro Nuovo. Whatever her shortcomings as an actress, Vitti became something of a muse for him - so much so that her departure from his work was disproportionately felt. In 1965, Antonioni signed a contract with Carlo Ponti for three films to be made in English, which necessitated his departure from Italy, first to England for Blow-Up (1966). Though it inspired alot of spirited discussion, Blow-Up is a beautiful but ultimately hollow film. While Dwight Macdonald commented that it was a relief to get away from "the miseries of Monica," Vernon Young wrote that Blow-Up "pleaseth the eye but sticketh not in the memory."

His second film in English, Zabriskie Point (1970), was an embarrassing failure, a paean to the youth "counterculture" movement which was then all the rage. After his controversial documentary on Mao's China, Chung Kuo, Cina, which was not shown until 2004, Antonioni fulfilled his contract with Ponti with The Passenger (1975). Regarded highly by some (3), it is handcuffed by a preposterous, pseudo-Pirandellian plot about the ultimate shakiness of identity.(4) Stanley Kauffmann commented that, if viewed simply as a thriller, it is successful.

In 1985, Antonioni suffered a debilitating stroke which left him unable to walk or to speak. He managed to make himself understood to a female companion, who became his unofficial interpreter thereafter. This enabled him to work, and he made Beyond the Clouds (1985), with the help of director Wim Wenders. Antonioni repudiated Wenders work, however, and cut out nearly all of it from the finished film. Visually refulgent, it was welcome but saddening. He also contributed an episode to the anthology film Eros (2004).

While John Simon continues to insist that Ingmar Bergman is the greatest artist the cinema has yet produced, I think that Antonioni is far more integrally important. And Bergman, great as he was, never made a film to equal L'Avventura, which holds riches that will be prized for generations to come.


(1) In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Orson Welles once again showed off his cluelessness: "I don't like to dwell on things. It's one of the reasons I'm so bored with Antonioni - the belief that, because a shot is good, it's going to get better if you keep looking at it. He gives you a full shot of somebody walking down a road. And you think, 'Well, he's not going to carry that woman all the way up that road.' But he does. And then she leaves and you go on looking at the road after she's gone." (This Is Orson Welles, Bogdanovich, 1992.)
(2) Some critics have attempted to make it into a quartet with the inclusion of the inferior Red Desert (1964).
(3) Roger Ebert, who originally called the film "pretentious," now says, "I admire the movie more 30 years later. I am more in sympathy with it."
(4) The credit for the script lists Antonioni, Mark Peploe (brother of Clare, who was Antonioni's mistress at the time) and Peter Wollen, author of Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969), which is easily one of the most impenetrable books ever written about film.

Movie Marginalia

The Golden Globes

How do they do it? How is it possible for the Golden Globes award ceremony to be more unbearable than the Oscars? Perhaps it was all those dreary TV shows I can never stomach that were in the running? (It does not matter that I have not seen three-quarters of the films. You do not have to be Nostradamus to foresee their mass banality. I will be seeing plenty of them - alas - in the coming months.)

As much as I love actors (pace Bresson), watching them make such whores of themselves was excruciating. They must have all been three sheets to the wind - or was it simply the shiny trophies that made them all turn out in their less-than-formal wear? It was nice of some of them to drop the word Haiti every now and then, even if Haiti is on earth and Hollywood is on another planet.

James Cameron's Avatar won in the Best Juvenile Fantasy category, proving once again that what he lacks in knowledge he more than makes up for in know-how. ($200M for colorful shadows on a wall - that jump out at you when you wear special glasses!) Backstage at the Globes, Cameron mentioned that the last "science fiction" film to win the Golden Globe was E.T., and that he wanted more producers to take the genre seriously. This is sheer hypocrisy coming from the director of Aliens, which took Ridley Scott's otherwise adroit science fiction concept and turned it into a stupid action flick.

But the moniker "Hollywood Foreign Press" puts one in mind of a bunch of foreign gossip columnists sucking up to movie stars for the delectation of their readers back home in Budapest and Perth. Which is, of course, exactly what they are, and why I have never taken their Golden Globes seriously.



In Bruges

One of John Simon's funniest dismissals came at the beginning of his review of Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger: "If vacuity had any weight, you could kill an ox by dropping on it Michelangelo Antonioni's latest film, The Passenger." One of the most stupefying films in recent years is In Bruges (2007), made by Martin McDonagh, an Irish director - which explains the preponderance of Irish accents (coming from Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson).

What it does not explain is what they are doing in Bruges, a beautiful city in Belgium. We are treated to a picture postcard tour of the old city, which is used as a backdrop for yet another story about the problems of contract killers, two of them this time, in whose nascent humanity we are expected to believe.

Schubert was dragged in, and we got a few moments from Der Leiermann (The Organ-grinder). And there is a touching bit when Farrell reads a little boy's note to himself as he waits to enter a church confessional: "1. Being moody, 2. Being bad at Maths, 3. Being sad". Of course, Farrell had just accidentally shot the boy in the head.

I watched it on cable, full screen, with the HBO logo stuck in the upper-right corner. Not the best way to watch a film, but considering that so many people are watching them on their i-phones, I was at a definite advantage. I suppose I could have taken it as nothing but a tourist's guide to Bruges, if only I could have overlooked the inanities enacted thereagainst.

The Two Fellinis

I watched the film The Magic of Fellini (2002) recently. The title (1) nearly kept me away. What is generally regarded as Fellini's "magic" is exactly what I most dislike about his work. But it was fun to put faces on so many of Fellini's long-time collaborators, like Tullio Pinelli, Piero Gherardi, Giuseppe Rotunno and Nino Rota. And how sad it was to see Anita Ekberg and especially Claudia Cardinale wearing their age so helplessly and acting as if they were slightly drunk.

If the film ultimately fails to shed any new light on its subject, it is because its creator, Carmen Piccini made a simple but fatal error. Whenever someone mentions Fellini in whatever context, the degree of the person's engagement with his subject can be gauged only when they make it clear exactly which Fellini he is talking about. It is impossible to do justice to Fellini the artist without first acknowledging that there were two of him. The first Fellini was a wonderful poet of the ordinary who was clearly uncomfortable with the rules of storytelling but who, almost despite himself, told stories exquisitely when he was true to his experience of human beings and when he showed us how much he loved them by making them true.

The second Fellini was an exasperatingly erratic and irascible caricaturist who, having exhausted his creative powers - and having the honesty, in 8 1/2, to admit it - turned away from life to his thoroughly juvenile and utterly unedifying dreams, in which all women were surrogate mothers and all men were proxy Federicos. The two Fellinis are so easily distinguishable in their work that it is all the more heartbreaking. The first Fellini hit the ground running with The White Sheik (1952) and didn't break his stride until he had finished 8 1/2. (2) Then the other Fellini took over with the pointless Juliet of the Spirits (1965) and expanded on its pointlessness all the way through La Voce del Luna (1990). Somewhat neatly, the films of the first Fellini are all black-and-white, the films of the second, all color. (3)

Il Bidone (1955) (4) is the least known and least appreciated of the first Fellini's films. Made just after La Strada (1954), it has none of that film's strange poetry, due largely to the absence - in this case beneficial - of his wife Giulietta Masina. But Il Bidone does carry forward La Strada's tenuous metaphysical position, except that Augusto, the foremost bidone, is not left, as in La Strada, writhing on a deserted beach after discovering the existence of his own imperiled soul.

Augusto's (5) last act, once he is done with robbing a poor family of every lira they possess, is to try to rob his fellow swindlers of their share of the spoils. As he is leaving the poor family's farm, Augusto is asked, in his capacity as a (bogus) Catholic Monsignor, to bless a crippled girl. The way that Fellini stages and shoots this excruciating scene - from the shabby grace of the girl (whose very sweetness is almost unbearable) to the fake glory of the Monsignor; from the pain of the girl's aching truth to the pain of Augusto's faltering lies - is more moving than anything else in his work.

And the sense of place that the film projects, the beautiful particularization of the locales in which the initial three bidone carry out their crimes - from the shanty town in which everyone hovers in limbo while the government keeps promising them a place to live, to the empty nightscape of the town where everyone is sleeping except for the ones up to no good - shows us just how much Fellini was still engaged with his origins and with his age. In fact, Il Bidone exposes the extent to which Fellini deserted them both.

(1) Originally simply Federico Fellini
(2) John Simon always insisted it was 8 1/2 that started Fellini's decline. But who else so artfully dramatized his own artistic bankruptcy?
(3) Perhaps to assist puzzled fans, Fellini's name was often part of the titles of his later, considerably lesser, work, viz: Fellini Satyricon (1969), Fellini Roma (1972) and Il Casanova di Federico Fellini (1976)
(4) The original version is 20 minutes longer than the one on DVD in the U.S.
(5) Played beautifully by jowly Broderick Crawford.

Critical Kudos

First things second, a word about my critical leanings. A long time ago I "liberated" a book from a library merely because it was one that I found myself consulting frequently and because it was a "reference" book not in circulation. It was a hardback copy of Georges Sadoul's Dictionary of Films, published by the University of Califoria Press. Later I paid for a paperback copy of Sadoul's Dictionary of Filmmakers. In them I learned about films that I, stuck at the time in a middlebrow Southern city (Columbia, South Carolina), could only dream of some day seeing. Some of them I still haven't seen.

Sadoul was a sensible, usable film critic. At the time I discovered his writings, I was also reading all of the American critics I could locate - James Agee, Dwight Macdonald, Stanley Kauffmann (who, amazingly, still writes his column for The New Republic), and John Simon. I knew about Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris but I never read them avidly. The one critic who became - and remains - my personal favorite was Vernon Young, who wrote for the literary quarterly The Hudson Review for thirty years.

Among my contemporaries, the best film critic writing in English in America is Bert Cardullo. I recently unearthed a bit of plagiarism on his part in my Senses of Cinema piece A Hard Act to Follow. Despite this as yet unexplained (and unaccountable) lapse, he is a worthy successor to Agee, Macdonald, Kauffmann, Simon, and Young.

I read a few others infrequently, if only because, while I sometimes disagree with them, I never seem to learn anything from the disagreement - which is never so with a great critic. Also, Jonathan Rosenbaum, J Hoberman, and Godfrey Cheshire have the unfortunate habit of foisting their politics alongside their aesthetic judgements, a practice that is distracting because it is ultimately unedifying. Granted, I would find it more irritating if their politics weren't progressive, so I suppose I should probably count my blessings. To his credit (as a critic, not as a person), John Simon admitted in 1993 that "I have always sympathized with the autobiographical hero of Anatole France's Le Lys rouge who declares, 'I am not so devoid of all talents as to occupy myself with politics.' Yet this credo, which makes some sense coming from a French artist and intellectual, would foul the breath of an American speaker. For if politics has been one of the two enervating preoccupations in France (need I name the other?), it has trailed just about everything, notably sports, in this country."

I should point out that, after Vernon Young, John Simon is a close second among my favorite film critics.