I have somehow managed, until the age of sixty-one, to avoid the subject of the film noir. At the outset, I feel obliged to say that I am not a fan. The origin of the term and its elaborate definition is, of course, entirely French. They were discovered and applied by American critics long after the genre had disappeared. I don't want to go into what defines film noir, as codified by Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton in their "seminal" book Panorama du film noir Américain 1941–1953, but over my lifetime I've seen a good number of films now classified as film noir, whether I knew it or not. The problem with such classifications (which is really what "auteurism" is all about) is that they fail to make the films to which they are applied any better than they were before the concept was invented. The films were unremarkable - and unpretentious -, cheaply-made B-movies when they were first released, and no amount of puffery has made them any better.
One could argue that there are better examples of film noir, made with more money, bigger stars and higher production values, but that is beside the point. Detour (1945) is cited as one of the most perfect examples of the genre precisely because it was made cheaply and in a hurry, with a no-name cast, by an Austrian-born director who arrived in Hollywood with F. W. Murnau and who refused to leave. Edgar G. Ulmer's career as a director went on a lengthy detour of its own because of his dalliance with another director's wife. That director was the nephew of Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal, and they blackballed Ulmer's chances of ever taking part in a major production. By the time Detour was made, he had become a fixture of skidrow production companies, one of which was called Producer's Releasing Corporation, whose acronym became better known as Pretty Rotten Crap.
Prior to watching my copy of Detour, I watched the introduction to the film that aired on TCM's Noir Alley, hosted by Eddie Muller. Believe me, such an introduction, while attempting to entice viewers who aren't fans of such a film, was almost enough to talk me out of watching it at all. Muller spoke about the film's schlock elements like they were cardinal virtues and how, once he had first heard about Detour when he was a teenager, he eagerly awaited seeing it, before home video or cable channels existed, on some late night TV broadcast. This kind of obsessive fandom was harmless as long as it wasn't taken too seriously. But then postwar French film critics, who were doing everything they could to trash the generation of French film directors who might have had any connection whatever to the defeat of France in 1940 and the four year German occupation, and who alternatively attempted - unsuccessfully, I believe - to elevate American pulp literature and movies to a level of High Seriousness, seized on the deceptively more adult, and more cynical crime melodramas of the Forties and Fifties. By now, thanks to the intervention of French film criticism (which includes the auteur dogma), American university students can write a PhD thesis on some of the worst Hollywood melodramas of the film noir era that turns them into profound cultural documents like Winesburg, Ohio or The Great Gatsby.
Al (Tom Neal) is a hitchhiker who stops at a greasy spoon in Reno. When a trucker puts a nickel in a jukebox and it plays the song, "I Can't Believe That You're in Love With Me" (played by Artie Shaw), Al lapses into reverie of when he was a piano player in a New York club where he and a singer named Sue (Claudia Drake) were in love and planned to get married. Out of nowhere, Sue announces she's going to California, leaving poor Al to play solo at the club. Again out of nowhere (the film has an unhealthy disrespect for plot), Al decides to hitchhike across the country to be closer to Sue. He makes it as far as the Arizona desert where he's given a ride by a well-dressed guy named Haskell (Edmund MacDonald) in a convertible. Haskell tells him about a woman he gave a ride to not long before who left bloody scratches on his hand. And he keeps having to pop little pills every now and then. After stopping at a roadside diner, Al takes over the driving while Haskell sleeps. When it begins to rain, Al needs some help putting up the convertible top, but Haskell doesn't respond. Because he's dead. So, in the driving rain, Al does what anyone else would do - he takes Haskell's wallet and his driver's licence in case he gets stopped by a cop (licences didn't have photos on them in those days), changes clothes with the corpse, hides it in the brush by the side of the road and keeps on driving to LA. Just as his plan to take his masquerade only as far as San Bernardino is underway, enter Vera (Ann Savage) - the same she-devil who scratched Haskell's hand. Al gives her a lift and within minutes she recognizes the car as Haskell's. Al confesses to robbing him when he found out he was dead, and Vera decides to blackmail him all the way to LA. After a few utterly predictable twists, the movie returns us to poor Al in the Reno diner, whose voice-over narration takes us up to the abrupt conclusion to this mercifully short (68 minutes!) thriller.
Once, when François Truffaut adapted the David Goodis pulp thriller Down There in 1960, a trash novel was transformed into a refreshingly personal, idiosyncratic work of film art. When Truffaut was asked by Charles Thomas Samuels "[Why do] you usually adapt trash novels to the screen?" his response was clever in a Cahiers du Cinema way: "I have never used a trash novel or a book I did not admire. Writers like David Goodis and William Irish have special value, and they have no counterparts in France. Here detective story writers are rotten, whereas in America writers as great as Hemingway work in that field ... So you see, I don't film trash." The fact is, Truffaut used trash as a jumping off point for a brilliant film.
Truffaut, as the originator of the auteur policy, insisted that a film's underlying material was less important than its treatment in the hands of a true film auteur. So, ostensibly, they can create something that demonstrates, in Truffaut's words, "a personal vision of life or of cinema." Detour poses the question: did Edgar G. Ulmer triumph over the severe limitations of his material or was he defeated by them? Detour has cheapness stamped all over it. About 80% of it was shot in a studio, including the many "process shots" of the actors in a car driving down a highway that's projected onto a screen from behind (so that what's in front of the screen doesn't cast a shadow on it). Among Detour's many gaffes is seeing two actors, both wearing big hats (de riguer in 1945) breezing down a highway in a convertible with its top down. (In one scene, Tom Neal is driving at night, struggling to stay awake, while Edmund Macdonald sleeps with his hat resting over his face.) Or Neal hitchhiking and then climbing into the driver's side of a truck or riding beside a driver with the wheel on the right side of the car. The film had to be reversed to maintain continuity and make it look like Al was going in the right direction - right to left (west), according to the superimposed map. All of the elements of the film that were already formulaic in 1945 seem especially tired under Edgar G. Ulmer's direction. So, how could something so cut-rate as Detour wind up with such a following of devoted fans?
In his negative review of Sydney Pollock's film version of Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses Don't They?, Stanley Kauffmann examined the curious history of the novel's publication history:
"When the book was published, it had a fair sale, but when it was subsequently published in France, it was a critical and commercial sensation, and Horace McCoy not very well known here became an outstanding American writer there. My own impression is that his French success was one more example of old-style inverse anti-Americanism. To praise what was second-rate and brutal about America, like facile gangster films, was a way of patronizing." (1)
I recall a college professor in the late 1970s trying to explain how Jerry Lewis, generally regarded as the worst sort of movie fool, was revered by French critics. He said that, to the French, Lewis's bumbling idiot character was seen as the quintessential American: uncouth, uncoordinated, incoherent - always smashing into things and screaming. That was how the French saw Americans.
In his beautiful memoir, My Last Sigh, Luis Buñuel wrote:
"While we're making the list of bêtes noires, I must state my hatred of pedantry and jargon. Sometimes I weep with laughter when I read certain articles in the Cahiers du Cinema, for example. As the honorary president of the Centre de Capacitación Cinematografica in Mexico City, I once went to visit the school and was introduced to several professors, including a young man in a suit and tie who blushed a good deal. When I asked him what he taught, he replied, 'The Semiology of the Clonic Image.' I could have murdered him on the spot. By the way, when this kind of jargon (a typically Parisian phenomenon) works its way into the educational system, it wreaks absolute havoc in underdeveloped countries. It's the clearest sign, in my opinion, of cultural colonialism."
If a movie could be made by a machine, it would look something like Detour. Everything is perfunctory, from Tom Neal's painted-on five o'clock shadow to the impenetrable Manhattan fog outside the Break O' Dawn club to Ann Savage mugging hysterically to live up to her made-up name. Nothing reminds me more that Hollywood was a movie assembly line - what D. W. Griffith, without a trace of irony, once called "a Detroit of the mind." In this respect, Detour is rather terrifying. Remove every element of original thought or conscientious craft from filmmaking and you'll wind up with something like it. It is industrial grade entertainment, made for an audience that, by 1945, would go to the movies no matter what was playing. Producers knew it. Detour is the result. What perplexes me is the awful obviousness of this. I've heard the phrase "it's so bad it's good" used in connection with many things over the years, always to things that have no practical use. Because who would buy a bad television, a bad washing machine, or a bad automobile unless it was a defective lemon advertised as a good one? In that case people would get their money back or call the police. Not so with innumerable bad movies like Detour now being held up as masterpieces. It was Pretty Rotten Crap in 1945, and now it's a Pretty Rotten Classic. In 1992, Detour was selected as one of 100 American films for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". A 4K restoration by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences premiered in Los Angeles at the TCM Festival in April 2018, and a Blu-Ray and DVD of the film was released in March 2019 from the Criterion Collection. The French are having a good laugh.
(1) Stanley Kauffman, Figures of Light (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
(2) Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, translated by Abigail Israel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983).
When I was a boy, I was predisposed to like silent films. I lived in a household where the slightest disturbance could set my mother off into a temper tantrum. A stroke at the age of 40 had left her utterly defenseless against the slightest stress, and trying to make ends meet on a career soldier's salary with four children meant that her tantrums were frequent and unpredictable. This resulted in my being an exceptionally quiet child. I loved libraries because it was a place where quiet was required. And I took to silent films almost instinctively. I even found the term silent film irresistible. I remember watching Chaplin (of course) and the Douglas Fairbanks classic The Thief of Baghdad (1924) I saw every one of Greta Garbo's silent films, especially Flesh and the Devil (1926), with John Gilbert.
But when I grew up, I learned that silence is as much a part of a musical composition or recording as the notes, that silence is so much more than simply the absence of sound, and that only a sound film could use silence creatively. Besides, every silent film I ever saw had some kind of musical accompaniment. One of my cherished memories was watching Chaplin's The Gold Rush in Des Moines with a live chamber orchestra playing Chaplin's own score.
The question may seem impertinent to some (like Kevin Brownlow), but, regarding filmmakers, exactly how many lasting reputations has the silent film yielded? Once you get past the pioneers, the Lumière brothers and Meliès, there are Griffith, Chaplin, Sjöström, Murnau, Keaton, and Eisenstein. Six. Who else? Dreyer made a few sound films that never equalled his last silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). Lang was one of the most successful directors of the silent era, whose career in sound films was interrupted by the Nazis. Metropolis (1927) is remarkably ambitious, but I now find Spione (1928) far more interesting. (He, like Murnau, wound up in Hollywood.) The other Russians - Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Vertov - were in Eisenstein's shadow. The French experimentalists - Delluc, Epstein, Feyder - were, well, experimentalists.
Erich Oswald Stroheim was an Austrian immigrant, the son of a Jewish hatmaker, who arrived at Ellis Island in 1909. Adopting the Von in his name, convincing people be was an exiled Austrian aristocrat,(1) he started working in films in 1914 with D. W. Griffith, then worked as a technical adviser and became famous during the First World War playing Huns, caricatures intended to inspire anti-German sentiment, in films that carried the tagline, "The Man You Love to Hate." After the war, he impressed producers enough that they allowed him to direct. Blind Husbands (1919) and the far more subtle Foolish Wives (1922), in both of which he acted, set the tone of his style of filmmaking and his penchant for extravagance in pursuit of realism. The total production costs of Foolish Wives reportedly topped $1 million before Irving Thalberg, whom Carl Laemmle had appointed the head of his Universal studio, shut it down before Stroheim had completed it and cut it from four hours to three.
No less important to the development of Stroheim's filmmaking skills was his relationship with Hollywood's most powerful producers - Carl Laemmle, Jesse Lasky, Samuel Goldwyn, and Irving Thalberg. The fact that producers were prepared to accept extravagance in its productions at the height of the silent era, especially from directors like Stroheim, who were already famous for their European sophistication, however unsophisticated American perception of it was, certainly contributed to Stroheim's extravagance during his subsequent productions. And the Hollywood trade papers, owned by William Randolph Hearst, that thrived on gossip (only recall how they had destroyed Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's career by spreading salacious lies about him during his "rape" trial - one wonders how Arbuckle would fare in the #MeToo era), followed Stroheim's every move.
His work on Merry-Go-Round (1923), set in pre-war Vienna, was interrupted by Irving Thalberg, who fired Stroheim and replaced him with Rupert Julian. It was the first time that a producer had challenged the authority of a director, and it set an unfortunate precedent in Hollywood. Stroheim then managed to persuade Samuel Goldwyn to let him direct an adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague, the shooting of which took nine months. He showed Greed, Stroheim's name for the film, to a select group of people his cut of the material, which is variously said to have been eight or nine hours long. Even Stroheim knew that its length was unacceptable. He proposed that it could be reduced to six hours, to be screened in two parts on successive nights. With Rex Ingram, he edited it still further to four hours. But then disaster struck. A theater chain magnate named Marcus Loew, who owned Metro Pictures, bought out Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Pictures to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with Irving Thalberg once again the head of production. Thalberg took Greed away from Stroheim and ordered it cut to a manageable length. The trimmed footage was gathered up by a janitor and thrown out with the morning garbage. At two hours and fifteen minutes, Greed was released to unanimously hostile reviews, attacking it for being disjointed, badly structured, and ultimately meaningless - none of which was Stroheim's fault. For the rest of his life, he called the mutilated film "the skeleton of my dead child."
In 1999, a four-hour version of the film was aired on Turner Classic Movies that used Stroheim's shooting script and production still photographs to reconstruct scenes from the truncated film, if only to give viewers a better idea of the film that Stroheim had intended us to see.(2) All that it really accomplished, I think, was to emphasize the enormity of Stroheim's vision and the loss to world film. The fact that what is left of the film looks so unlike every other film Stroheim made is an indication of the originality his vision. Stories of the incredible lengths to which Stroheim went in the name of realism abound. For Greed, he took his cast and crew to Death Valley for the shooting of the film's climax. The conditions, the heat and the below sea level pressure, caused health problems among the crew and even the death of a camera operator. For the early scene of McTeague as a miner, Stroheim took actors and crew down an actual mine, rather than simply recreating the scene on a studio set. He clearly wanted his actors to respond to the adverse conditions in ways that would make their performances more convincing.
Unbelievably, the reputation of Greed, even in its mutilated state, grew greater with the passing years. In 1952, a poll of critics sponsored by the British Film Institute ranked Greed 7th among the "Greatest Films of All Time". A second poll conducted ten years later ranked it 4th. It's comparable to the discovery of a fragment, one quarter, of a lost play by Shakespeare that is so tantalizing that its very incompleteness makes it seem more valuable than Hamlet or King Lear. No one living has seen the film that Stroheim made, so how can anyone make such extravagant claims about its greatness? The same can be said of RKO's edit of Orson Welles's second film, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). It, too, was altered from the finished version that Welles intended, simply because the studio head only wanted films short enough to be part of a "double feature" bill that were popular during the war. What RKO trimmed from Ambersons was reportedly dumped into the Pacific Ocean. Despite this, it has been ranked impossibly high on the BFI critics polls. What do the critics see that I don't - that I can't - see?
After the failure of Greed, Stroheim returned to the studio and the familiar world of Viennese high society for The Merry Widow (1925) and The Wedding March (1928), the latter intended to be Stroheim's tribute to a vanished antebellum Vienna. Joseph Kennedy, who had made a fortune from bootlegging during Prohibition, got into movies by proďucing Queen Kelly (1929), with a young starlet named Gloria Swanson (who was Kennedy's lover). Stroheim was hired to direct. When Kennedy got wind of some of the "indecent" things that Stroheim was putting into Queen Kelly, he shut the production down and fired Stroheim. An alternate ending, directed by Richard Boleslawski, was eventually shot and Swanson released the film in Europe in 1932. It was never shown in America until it was aired on television. With heavy irony, Billy Wilder accepted Stroheim's suggestion that some of the footage from Queen Kelly be used in Sunset Boulevard (1950) in which Stroheim played Norma Desmond's (Swanson's) trusted butler, to establish her as a former silent movie star.
Stroheim tried to direct a few more times, but no one would give him free rein again. He returned to acting and, again with impeccable irony, played a hun once more, Rauffenstein, in Renoir's La Grande Illusion (1937). In 1939, he was ready to direct a film in France, with all the arrangements made, when the outbreak of World War Two cancelled them and he had to return to America for his safety. He returned to France after the war, where reverence for him as a great artist allowed him to live opulently. Just before his death in 1957, he was awarded the Legion d'honneur. "In Hollywood, you're only as good as your last picture. If you've had nothing in production for the past three months, you're forgotten. In France, if you write one good book, paint one good picture, or make one good movie, fifty years can go by and you're still regarded as an artist. They never forget you."
Based on the films that are more or less intact, Foolish Wives and The Wedding March are perhaps Stroheim's most substantial achievements. All we have of them is what Stroheim chose to place in front of his cameras, and based on that alone, they are impressive. They require patience and concentration - attributes lacking in contemporary filmgoers. I didn't see my first Stroheim film until I was in my 20s. By then, my preference for silent films had waned. I continue to watch the silent comedies of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon, Charley Chase, and Laurel and Hardy. The last silent film drama I watched in its entirety was Eisenstein's October a year ago. The greatest silent films, like The Passion of Joan of Arc and Buñuel's Andalusian Dog and L'Age d'Or, are fascinating. Mindful of the cruelties inflicted on him by his producers, Stroheim's films have an added aura of sadness. As Stanley Kauffmann wrote when the 4-hour Greed was aired in 1999, "the directing career he might have had, the work he might have given us, is only one more sharp poignancy in the 'what if' history of the arts."(3)
(1) Billy Wilder commented that Stroheim spoke German with a noticeably lower-class Austrian accent. In La Grande Illusion, Stroheim spoke his German dialogue with a strong American accent. Everyone who knew Stroheim called him "Von."
(2) This version of Greed has been available on iTunes, but has not yet been released on DVD or Blu-Ray.
(3) The New Republic, December 13, 1999.
It was announced today in the news that a federal judge in the U.S. has blocked the online publication of the blueprints for a 3-D printed plastic gun. The publisher of the blueprints has argued that it is a First Amendment - free speech, - not a Second Amendment - the right to bear arms - issue, since the online publication is in the exercise of his freedom of speech. The NRA is, needless - heedless - to say, fighting the federal court decision, and President Trump has come out with a typically incoherent statement on the issue (the president's learning curve looks like Mount Everest).
The gun cult in the United States is taking on ever more ridiculous and dangerous proportions. Last month in Florida a black man shoved a white man to the ground during an altercation involving his girlfriend. The indignant white man then pulled out a gun - for which he had a permit! - and put one round in the black man's chest. The black man was pronounced dead at the hospital. The white man wasn't charged with any crime because of Florida's preposterous "stand your ground" (Trayvon Martin) laws that make it perfectly legal for people to commit cold blooded murder if they feel threatened with death or "grievous bodily injury." In other words, if you're about to get your arse kicked in a fair fight, all you have to do to spare yourself the embarrassment is pull a gun on your opponent and shoot him to death. Why can't a boxer who is being pummeled by his opponent in the ring do the same? In the Bruce Willis movie, The Last Boy Scout, a football running back pulled out a pistol and shot the tacklers who stood in his way of a touchdown. Wouldn't his actions be considered legal in a "stand your ground" state?
If this scenario seems nightmarish to some people (or Home Sweet Home to others), the great Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, in his memoir, My Last Sigh, describes, in his inimitably amusing style, the "gun cult" in Mexico that held sway throughout the 1940s and 1950s. I am fully aware of the fact that many Americans who advocate concealed carry laws, would like to see their country return to a Wild West environment in which everyone wears a sidearm and taking the law in their own hands becomes routine. I, however, refuse to accept the fanciful notion that my fellow citizens, who can't even be expected to behave themselves behind the wheel of their cars, can be relied on not to murder me by mistake.
Here is Buñuel's account:
There is a peculiarly intimate relationship between Mexicans and their guns. One day I saw the director Chano Urueta on the set directing a scene with a Colt .45 in his belt.
"You never know what might happen," he replied casually, when I asked him why he needed a gun in the studio.
On another occasion, when the union demanded that the music for Ensayo de un crimen (The Criminal Life of Archibald de la Cruz) be taped, thirty musicians arrived at the studio one very hot day, and when they took off their jackets, fully three quarters of them were wearing guns in shoulder holsters.
The writer Alfonso Reyes also told me about the time, in the early 1920s, that he went to see Vasconcelos, then the secretary of public education, for a meeting about Mexican traditions.
"Except for you and me," Reyes told him, "everyone here seems to be wearing a gun!"
"Speak for yourself," Vasconcelos replied calmly, opening his jacket to reveal a Colt .45.
This "gun cult" in Mexico has innumerable adherents, including the great Diego Rivera, whom I remember taking out his pistol one day and idly sniping at passing trucks. There was also the director Emilio "Indio" Fernandez, who made Maria Candelaria and La perla, and who wound up in prison because of his addiction to the Colt .45. It seems that when he returned from the Cannes Festival, where one of his films had won the prize for best cinematography, he agreed to see some reporters in his villa in Mexico City. As they sat around talking about the ceremony, Fernandez suddenly began insisting that instead of the cinematography award, it had really been the prize for best direction. When the newspapermen protested, Fernandez leapt to his feet and shouted he'd show them the papers to prove it. The minute he left the room, one of the reporters suspected he'd gone to get not the papers, but a revolver ~ and all of them took to their heels just as Fernandez began firing from a second-story window. (One was even wounded in the chest.)
The best story, however, was told to me by the painter Siqueiros. It occurred toward the end of the Mexican Revolution when two officers, old friends who'd been students together at the military academy but who'd fought on opposing sides, discovered that one of them was a prisoner and was to be shot by the other. (Only officers were executed; ordinary soldiers were pardoned if they agreed to shout "Viva" followed by the name of the winning general.) In the evening, the officer let his prisoner out of his cell so that they could have a drink together. The two men embraced, touched glasses, and burst into tears. They spent the evening reminiscing about old times and weeping over the pitiless circumstances that had appointed one to be the other's executioner.
"Whoever could have imagined that one day I'd have to shoot you?" one said.
"You must do your duty," replied the other. "There's nothing to be done about it."
Overcome by the hideous irony of their situation, they became quite drunk.
"Listen, my friend," the prisoner said at last. "Perhaps you might grant me a last wish? I want you, and only you, to be my executioner."
Still seated at the table, his eyes full of tears, the victorious officer nodded, pulled out his gun, and shot him on the spot.
This has been a very long digression, but in order not to leave you with the impression that Mexico is no more than an infinite series of gunshots, let me just say that the gun cult seems finally to be on the wane, particularly since the many arms factories have been closed. In theory, all guns must now be registered, although it's estimated that in Mexico City alone there are more than five hundred thousand guns which have somehow escaped licensing. Curiously, however, the truly horrific crime ~ like Landru's and Petiot's, mass murders, and butchers selling human flesh - seems far more the prerogative of highly industrialized countries than of Mexico. I know of only one example, which made the headlines a few years ago. Apparently, the prostitutes in a brothel somewhere in the northern part of the country began disappearing with alarming frequency. When the police finally decided to investigate, they discovered that the madam simply had them killed and buried in the garden when they ceased to be sufficiently profitable. In general, however, homicide in Mexico involves only a pistol shot; it doesn't include all the macabre details that often accompany murder in Western Europe or the United States.
How magnanimous of Buñuel to commend Mexicans for not being nearly as murderous as we Americans! The way he describes it, Mexicans sound so much more responsible as gun owners than Americans, and only shoot one another out of honor or economic facility, instead of from a fear of losing a fair fight or when they flip their lids. Speaking for myself, America increasingly seems like a nation of cowards or lunatics.
In 1951, the Cannes film festival was the setting for one of the most surprising resurrections in movie memory. Luis Buñuel, who was last heard from in Europe in the mid-1930s as the director of Las Hurdes, a documentary about the poorest region in Spain, and as co-director (with Jean Gremillon) of an abortive "comedy" about the Spanish army called ¡Centinela, alerta!, reappeared with a new film made in Mexico called Los Olvidados (The Forgotten Ones).
Only later would we learn about Buñuel's wilderness years in America, his working for the Museum of Modern Art in New York until a book by Salvador Dali exposed him as an atheist and he was fired, and his fruitless sojourn in Hollywood, working clandestinely on Robert Florey's The Beast With Five Fingers (1946).
In 1946, just when Buñuel thought that his filmmaking days were over and he was about to apply for American citizenship, the producer Oscar Dancigers somehow persuaded him to go to Mexico and direct movies for him. It was not, of course, anything like his avant-garde days in Paris - the films he would make in Mexico over the next twenty years were, with a few exceptions, commercial work for a mass movie market.
His first film, Gran Casino, was a musical - not exactly the most auspicious way to restart one's filmmaking career. "I hadn't been behind a camera in fifteen years," Buñuel wrote years later, "and if the scenario's not particularly gripping, the technique, on the other hand, isn't half bad."(1) The film floundered and Buñuel waited two years before Dancigers entrusted him with the star vehicle El Gran Calavera in 1949. "I agreed to do it, and although El gran calavera was impossibly banal, it made a lot of money." So Dancigers suggested to Buñuel that he make a "real" movie next. Italian neo-realism was creating all the buzz at film festivals around the world. It inspired Kurosawa to make Stray Dog, which is a kind of Japanese Bicycle Thieves, but with a stolen gun instead of a bicycle. Neo-realism also inspired Satyajit Ray to make his Apu Trilogy a few years later. Buñuel knew and admired Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine, so he decided to make a film about Mexico City's slum children. De Sica's film - and neo-realism in general - had been drawn from the devastation of Rome by the war. It's social criticism was tempered by the effects of an historic disaster. There had been no war in Mexico, unless one counts the deeply-rooted class war that condemned a majority of Mexicans to poverty.
Already in 1950, Mexico City was one if the most densely-populated cities in the world. Poor Mexicans in the regions surrounding the city who moved there in pursuit of job opportunities found themselves in overcrowded shanty towns where living conditions were hazardous at best. It was Dancigers who suggested to Buñuel that he make a film about the city's slum children. Disguised in threadbare clothes, he toured the shanty areas, noting down incidents, listening to people's stories. From these he cobbled together a script, with Luis Alcoriza, every detail of which he claimed was true to the lives he was portraying. The result was a pitilessly clear picture of the effects of poverty on the most vulnerable among us - the children.
Comparing Los Olvidados to Shoeshine would be unproductive. But De Sica had the advantage of a genius for directing child "non-actors," as he had already shown in his fascist-era film, The Children Are Watching Us. But Buñuel had an advantage as well. In his interview with Charles Thomas Samuels in Encountering Directors, Samuels asked De Sica why he avoided the subject of homoeroticism among the shoeshine boys. "Because the subject revolted me," he replied. On the evidence of his films alone, Buñuel appears to be attracted to precisely the things that the rest of us find revolting. In Los Olvidados, Buñuel included a scene in which Pedro (Alfonso Mejía) is propositioned for sex by an older man in the street outside a shop. (The scene is shot through the shop window, so we can't hear the dialogue, but the intentions of the man are unmistakable.) Pedro is about to leave with the man when a policeman causes them to scarper. Buñuel always had a natural fearlessness when it came to such "sensitive" subjects. Of course, it was one of the scenes that outraged Mexican critics, who thought that Buñuel had insulted the honor of Mexico.
What its detractors found most disturbing about Los Olvidados was the total absence of redemption or even remorse. El Jaibo (Roberto Cobo) and his gang attack and rob a blind man (even the blind man is a loathsome monster who fondles young girls and whose eyes look like they're glued shut) and a legless beggar; Pedro, who is rejected by his own mother, at least attempts to do the "right thing" according to society's standards, but he becomes implicated in the murder of another boy by El Jaibo. The message of the film, if it can be said to have one, is that Pedro is damned from birth by a society that will not permit him to find, let alone travel, the right path in his life.
There are telltale surrealist touches throughout the film: after the attack on the blind man, Don Carmelo (Miguel Inclán), he lies on his stomach in the dirt, and Gabriel Figueroa's camera pans to reveal a chicken (which, of course, he cannot see) in front of his face; one of the boys suckles a goat; Pedro dreams that the boy El Jaibo murdered is laughing under his bed, that his mother loves him, embraces him, and offers him a huge steak - but El Jaibo appears and steals it. As he is dying, El Jaibo dreams of a dog running down an endless street. The dreams were shot in slow-motion to heighten their nightmarish qualities. Surrealism always had a powerfully subversive subtext, as Buñuel's films make abundantly clear.
Over a lifetime of filmgoing, Los Olvidados was always one of those films I had always wanted to see, but never had an opportunity until quite recently. The reason for this is obvious: it is, after all, such an unpleasant subject for a film. Buñuel gives us a guided tour through one of the most uninviting worlds ever caught on film. Shoeshine had at least the comfort that we were in the hands on a filmmaker who cared deeply for the fates of the boys whose stories he was telling. With Buñuel, de Sica's compassion is replaced by a kind if cruel fascination.
There is no comfort to be found in Los Olvidados, except perhaps in the satisfaction of being shown the truth about the lives of the boys Buñuel follows. I wrote five years ago that, "To be sure, Buñuel wasn’t born to reassure us that we live in best of all possible worlds." Pedro struggles to free himself from being implicated in El Jaibo's crime, but fails and he is murdered by El Jaibo. The police arrive, too late as usual, and gun down El Jaibo. The end of Pedro, his body thrown onto a garbage dump, recalls the end of the Geoffrey Firmin in Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano: "Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine."
Despite the outrage and protests of Mexican authorities, Oscar Dancigers got Los Olvidados
a screening at Cannes and Buñuel won the Palm d'Or for Best Director. Miraculously, all of the film's enemies changed their minds about Buñuel and his career in Mexico flourished.
(1) All quotations are from Buñuel's autobiography, My Last Sigh (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1983).
