Flight of the Eagle

Max von Sydow, who died last Sunday at the age of 90, was more than just one of the great screen actors who, like too many others I could mention, lavished his talents on mediocre star vehicles. Though he finally succumbed to the lure of Hollywood in 1965, he was lucky enough to work multiple times with two great filmmakers in his native Sweden - eleven films with Ingmar Bergman and seven with Jan Troell. Although it was with Bergman that he received the most attention, in iconic roles like the knight Blok in The Seventh Seal, who outwits Death in a game of chess, and Töre in The Virgin Spring, who savagely avenges the rape and murder of his daughter, it was for Troell that von Sydow gave his most convincing (and comprehensive) performances. He is at the center of the six-and-a-half hour Emigrants saga, playing Karl Oskar, the patriarch of a Swedish family that emigrates to Minnesota in the mid-19th century. He was totally convincing playing Knut Hamsun in the biopic Hamsun. But it was in the relatively overlooked Flight of the Eagle (Ingenjör Andrées Luftfärd, 1982) that von Sydow gave what one critic called "a magnificent, stricken-oak performance,"(1) and that I wish to use as his memorial.

Troell derived the story of the film from Per Olof Sundman's 1967 documentary novel of Salomon August Andrée, an engineer and a staunch technocrat with an interest in ballooning, who came up with the bold idea of flying a hydrogen balloon across the North Pole. In 1896, nearing the very end of the Age of Discovery, Andrée managed to persuade the Swedish King, Oscar II, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Alfred Nobel that the expedition was feasible. It was accepted as a bold plan that would bring prestige to the nation and funding was provided.(2) Andrée recruited two men, Knut Fraenkel and Nils Strindberg, and together they trained and outfitted themselves for the journey. The film devotes all the time it needs to these preliminary stages, with its private and public details, to establish not just their historical context but to give convincing life to the three men, to salvage them from history. Troell is abetted in these efforts by his actors, Sverre Anker Ousdal as Fraenkel and Göran Stangertz as Strindberg. Max von Sydow gives us Andrée, a man of some accomplishment who is quite overwhelmed by the efforts of those he has inspired in the realization of his dream. He is neither a fool nor a dreamer, but a practical man of science who, the film makes clear, gets in over his head when he is given the opportunity, in the summer of 1897, to put his plans into action.

The balloon, christened the "Eagle," doesn't leave the ground in Spitzbergen until fifty-five minutes into the film.  Just after it is airborne, the balloon is caught in a downdraft and nearly sinks in the ocean. The crew throw enough ballast overboard to raise the balloon, but the accident also severs two of the three long guide-ropes which were going to be used to navigate the balloon. The men notice this, as do members of the ground crew, but the balloon continues on its way. And just sixty-five hours later - thirteen minutes in the film - it is on the ice, never to rise again. What ultimately brought the balloon down was ice buildup on the rigging and gondola, making it too heavy to gain the altitude it needed. From the time when the balloon drifted out of sight in Spitzbergen, the script had to rely on notes taken by Andrée to re-create events, simply because the fate of the expedition remained unknown until 1930. Troell opens the film with photographs taken of the remains that were discovered, including the bones of Andrée himself.

The last hour of the film, when the balloon is brought down and the men have packed sledges to make the trek across pack ice to the nearest island, is one of the most grueling stretches of film ever recorded.(3) Even so, I wondered at Troell’s use of flashbacks, as all three men find in their memories something to give them comfort or strength for the days ahead. I think the last hour would’ve been more harrowing if it had been unrelieved by the men’s glowing (and so splendidly colorful) flashbacks. One moment, however, is unforgettable: Strindberg opens a locket containing a picture of his fiancée and a lock of her hair, he removes the hair and touches it to his swollen and chapped lips.

Once they arrive on Kvitoya, a small island east of Svalbard, the film enters its final phase. Strindberg, whose photographs appear throughout the film (his photographic plates were discovered among the team’s remains) is the first to go. His body was found in a makeshift grave on the island, but there is speculation about the circumstances of his death. Some believe he may have committed suicide, others that he was killed by a polar bear. Troell simply shows him collapsing suddenly on the ice. When only Andrée and Fraenkel are left, Troell shows them, near the end, having a bitter argument, but they embrace pitifully when they realize that all they have left is each other. It is a heartbreaking moment.

It was a time when no one was around to ask the simple question, "What could possibly go wrong?" Flight of the Eagle is more than just a careful record of a doomed expedition. Yes, it was Andrée’s folly. But Troell gives the account a tragic dimension. In the film’s last moments, in which Fraenkel is killed by a polar bear and Andrée begs him not to leave him on the blasted island entirely alone, Max von Sydow emerges from the tent and peers around him at the eventless horizon, one that seems to merge the sky and the earth, and the look in his eyes is devastating. It is a moment that calls to mind a speech by Hamlet:

... this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals. And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. (4)

(1) Vernon Young.
(2) It was the same spirit of adventure that Terry Jones and Michael Palin so brilliantly mocked in their Ripping Yarns episode, "Across the Andes by Frog."
(3) When Flight of the Eagle was in limited release in the US, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, unwitting defenders of middlebrow taste, singled it out for derision on their popular TV show, Sneak Previews. When they showed the clip from the film of the balloon lying, deflated, on the ice and the three men saluting it, Siskel and Ebert both laughed, proving that a jackass can look into a mirror, but a philosopher can't look back.
(4) Act 2 Scene 2.

Mr. Hulot's Holiday

    For some inexplicable reason, I decided yesterday to watch the 1953 debut of Jacques Tati's screen character Monsieur Hulot, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, known to English-speaking audiences as Mr. Hulot's Holiday.(1) I haven't seen it since I wrote about it ten years ago on this blog in a post I called "A Brief Vacation." But I remember the experience of watching it for the first time in a theater almost forty years ago. I felt then that it was charming - sufficiently delightful to justify its reputation. It is a bonafide classic - which means that most people accept it unquestioningly as an untouchable masterpiece, to place proudly alongside Chaplin's City Lights or Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. But what, then, is a "classic"? In his 1975 piece, "Jan Troell: A Portrait," Vernon Young makes an oh-so-necessary point: "If the word classic has any value left (after being attributed to movies which are merely old and, if truth be said, often inhumanly tedious), Here Is Your Life and the brace of Emigrant films are classics; they define with unique richness the material of which they are composed."(1)

In his 2004 essay for Criterion, David Ehrenstein called Mr. Hulot's Holiday, "One of the most original—and hilarious—comedies ever made."(2) Really? Even Roger Ebert had reservations. "The first time I saw Jacques Tati's 'Mr. Hulot's Holiday,'" Ebert wrote in 1996, "I didn't laugh as much as I thought I was supposed to. But I didn't forget the film, and I saw it again in a film class, and then bought the laserdisc and saw it a third and fourth time, and by then it had become part of my treasure. But I still didn't laugh as much as I thought I was supposed to, and now I think I understand why. It is not a comedy of hilarity but a comedy of memory, nostalgia, fondness and good cheer. There are some real laughs in it, but 'Mr. Hulot's Holiday' gives us something rarer, an amused affection for human nature--so odd, so valuable, so particular."(3)

In my experience of Tati's film, the trajectory was reversed: the film has shrunk with each subsequent viewing. I get Ebert's point about the film's evocation of "memory, nostalgia, fondness and good cheer." The film is dripping with the mood of summer vacations - even of the strange compulsion to have them once a year, along with everyone else in the Western world. The crazy rush to the train station, the panic and congestion and the long journey off the been track to arrive - at last - at the beach. I am there completely. And the wistfulness of the end - it hurts a little every time I see it.

But after seeing it again on home video in the '80s, then on laserdisc, and DVD (every new medium gives us an excuse to watch all these old films again), it got smaller, thinner, less substantial each time. The word "charming" continues to rise to my fingertips. But I feel less obliged than ever to call the film great. Sixty-six years after it was made, if the word classic still has a meaning, Mr. Hulot's Holiday is not one.


(1) But why the Anglicism "Holiday" when Vacation is closer to "Vacance"?
(1) Vernon Young, "Jan Troell: A Portrait," reprinted by permission from Jan Troell, edited by Lars-Olof Lothwall (Stockholm: The Swedish Film Institute, 1975).
(2) "Mr. Hulot's Holiday," David Ehrenstein
(3) "Great Movie: Mr. Hulot's Holiday," November 6, 1996.

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.

Stagecoach

Something bad is happening to John Wayne and, by extension, to the history and culture of which he is a part. A 1971 Playboy interview was unearthed recently in which the Duke voiced some predictable opinions about politics, the war in Vietnam, and the state of American culture. Wayne was in his 60s and he had a dim view of the youth culture ("hippies"), the anti-war protests, and the film Midnight Cowboy. He also expressed views that were racist and homophobic, which has led some younger readers - bless them - to immediately strike Wayne's name from their list of American heroes. 

In his Guardian piece on the subject, Caspar Salmon quotes the late Roger Ebert: "the film’s attitudes toward Native Americans are unenlightened. The Apaches are seen simply as murderous savages; there is no suggestion the white men have invaded their land ... Ford was not a racist, nor was Wayne, but they made films that were sadly unenlightened.”(1) 

First of all, Roger Ebert has no business apologizing for the alleged sins of John Wayne and John Ford. That is not in his job description. I don't share the views that John Wayne has been called out for, 48 years later (I'm sure there were plenty of people who disagreed with him then), but John Wayne was speaking for himself - not a representative of a country or a party or a group. And he was perfectly free to say whatever he wanted on any subject under the sun. The asininity of this kind of crying over spilt milk makes me wonder how many American "heroes" would stand up to such standards if they were examined in the harsh light of today? What made All in the Family such a funny and important television show in 1971 (the same year of Wayne's Playboy interview) was that it gave Archie Bunker a stage on which to clearly and unapologetically express his reprehensible views. But producer Norman Lear and Carroll O'Connor himself knew that, while most of their audience was laughing at Archie Bunker, some of them were laughing with him. Somehow it was more acceptable - and palatable - in 1971. So why isn't it today, considering how much more informed and "enlightened" we think we are?

Anyone with rudimentary experience, the slightest contact, with history must realize after awhile that the people who lived in the past demand the simple application of some context when we try to understand them, the things that they said and the choices they made. In many cases, it's the only way we can make sense of the past. The incomprehension of the young at what was acceptable in the past, at so many things that cause (sometimes justifiable) outrage today, is an injustice to the past. In many cases, we fall short of their standards of intelligence and civility, so how can we expect them to conform with our standards?

Now that I've got that out of the way, let us consider John Ford's classic film Stagecoach. The 1930s was an important decade for Ford. He had applied his filmmaking skills to a broad spectrum of subjects and earned considerable critical acclaim, so that by the time he returned to a genre that he helped establish as a staple of American film in the 1920s, a genre that was, until the 1960s, exclusively American, he was ripe for a masterpiece.

In the opening credits, the musical direction is attributed to Boris Morros: "Musical Score based on American folk songs adapted by ..." and it lists five names. Against a bright sky, we see a stagecoach cross the frame, followed by a troop of uniformed riders. The music is familiar, including (somewhat incongruously) "I dream of Jeannie with the light brown hair". But then we see another group of riders, indians with long hair and bandanas - and rifles, and the music switches to dums and ominous minor chords - the same music used in countless Westerns whenever "hostiles" are shown. When the action begins, two riders are approaching a military outpost (in Monument Valley, which was protected as a national park, but Ford was permitted to film there as long as they left no permanent traces). Inside the command post, the news arrives that the hills are full of Apaches and are under the leadership of "Geronimo".

When the stagecoach arrives in town, we are introduced to the principal actors in the drama: Buck, the stagecoach driver (Andy Devine); Lucy Mallory (Louise Platt) on her way to join her husband; the notorious gambler Hatfield (John Carradine); Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell), who quotes (garbled) Marlowe as he is being evicted and can't control his drinking; Dallas (Claire Trevor, who got top billing in the credits), who gets kicked out of town by the Law & Order League for reasons that are left to our imaginations; the marshall (George Bancroft); and Gatewood, the bank manager (Berton Churchill) who embezzles the miners' payroll for himself. We hear of the Ringo Kid early on, wanted for busting out of jail, but he (John Wayne) doesn't appear until well into the journey to Lordsburg (18 1/2 minutes into the film, and one of the greatest entrances ever). The coach is full, but since the hills are full of Apaches, the Ringo Kid is a welcome addition. He sits on the floor of the coach.

Lucy gives birth enroute, having concealed her delicate condition from everyone, especially the Hays Office, Dallas turns out (like we didn't expect it!) to have a heart of gold, Ringo proposes to her, the embezzling bank manager is nabbed in Lordsburg, and Hatfield, for all his notoriousness, turns into a nobleman - even though he was on the verge (before taking an Apache bullet) of executing Lucy rather than see her defiled by the "savages."

Andy Devine isn't yodeling nearly as much as he did as he grew older. John Carradine finally got a plummy role he could sink his teeth into (he reminded me of Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday in Tombstone). And John Wayne, who wasn't yet a star, was never more beautiful than he was in Stagecoach. Ford made him a star, just as Kurosawa did for Mifune. The chase scene, shot on the Bonneville salt flats (I once drove across it myself) lasts almost a full six minutes and is still exciting - Yakima Canutt's stunts are still unsurpassed. David Lean must've been thinking of it when he conceived the crossing of the Nefud Desert in Lawrence of Arabia. And when the scene with Bogart and Claude Rains at the end of Casablanca was done, how can anyone not have remembered the end of Stagecoach? Ringo and Dallas ride away in the wagon, leaving Curley and Doc Boone in the street.

Curley: Doc, I'll buy you a drink.
Doc Boone: Just one!

And Gatewood's bilious speech about the government, "America for Americans!" "the government must not interfere with business!" "reduce taxes!" and "what this country needs is a businessman for president!" - lines that are so presciently full of shit, coming from such a crook and coward, how could anyone not hear him and laugh out loud about our present president?

Ford made some Westerns that were more conventional (Fort Apache, probably his most boring) and others that were less conventional (The Searchers, for better and worse, stands way out). Probably because of its bigger budget, Stagecoach fits into the former niche. But for a few nice touches here (the beauty of his framing of interior scenes at mid level - ceilings! ceilings!) and there (the lighting and noise of Lordsburg at night), I find it hard to place it among his best films. I know well enough that calling a film a "classic" can be both a tribute and a kiss of death. (The only thing I don't like about Turner Classic Movies is its middle name.) The occasional process shots, done on a sound stage with rear-screen projection or merely backdrops of landscape or sky, are feeble, especially after going to all the trouble of Monument Valley.

But it's hard to resist this 80 year old film, even with its hideously Shermanesque view of native Americans (according to Sherman, the only good one was a dead one). The irony is that Ford gave them employment when he shot on location, despite the stereotypical roles he gave them as well as at a great deal less than scale as extras. But what would history be without irony?



(1) "Should we be surprised by John Wayne's racist and homophobic views?" The Guardian, 20 February 2019.

The Fearless Vampire Killers

Before proving himself a master of the horror film genre with Rosemary's Baby in 1968, Roman Polański made the horror spoof Dance of the Vampires (1966), based on his own (and Gerard Brach's) original story. I have loved it ever since I first saw it on TV, probably a few years after its theatrical release in the States. Unfortunately, the film that I saw was called The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck, Martin Ransohoff's clumsily edited (and foolishly retitled) American release version, with 12 minutes cut from the original and a "goofy" voice dubbed over Jack MacGowran's to try and amplify the "wacky" elements of Polański's film. Writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert devoted the entirety of his (short) review of the edited film to pointing out the conspicious absence of laughter coming from the movie theater audience. "The night I went to see The Fearless Vampire Killers," wrote Ebert,  "nobody laughed. One or two people cried, and a lady behind me dropped a bag of M&Ms which rolled under the seats, and a guy on the center aisle sneezed at 43 minutes past the hour. But that was about all the action." (January 22, 1968) From his enviable perch at The New York Times, Bosley Crowther acknowledged Polański's desire that his name be removed from the version of his film screened in Manhattan,(1) but, based on what he saw, "there is no sign that Mr. Polański was pointing towards some sly satiric jest, some arrangement of weird allegory so that his society of vampires would have significance apt for today. He was evidently only trying to make fun of horror films, forgetting that horror films, played straight, are now more often funny—unconsciously to—than horrible." (November 14, 1967)

MGM tried to market the U.S. release version as a "farce," but the film that Polański and Brach conceived at an Alpine ski resort during the cutting of Cul-de-Sac was a kind of gothic fairy tale, a "satirical horror drama" with strong Eastern European overtones (Transylvania is in Romania), streaked with Yiddish comedy (the innkeeper, Yoine Shagal, and his wife Rebecca). It parodies every vampire movie cliché (the garlic, the crosses, the sleeping in coffins, the wooden stake through the heart, reflections in mirrors), and toys with the erotic element by introducing a gay vampire (Count von Kroloch's son, Herbert).

Shooting commenced inauspiciously in Austria when all the snow suddenly melted and the production had to relocate to the Italian Alps (the Seiser Alm in the Dolomites). It was Polanski's first film both in color (Metrocolor) and widescreen (Panavision), and he got considerable help realizing his vision from cinematographer Douglas Slocombe, production designer Wilfred (spelled "Wilfrid" in the clever opening credits designed by André François) Shingleton, and a certain "Christopher" Komeda, better known by his Polish name Krzysztof. Komeda composed scores for other Polanski films, including Rosemary's Baby. For Dance of the Vampires, he composed an especially pretty waltz for the grand ball of risen vampires in Von Krolok's castle.(2)

Old Professor Abronsius (Jack MacGowran) and his young assistant Alfred (Polański) have arrived "deep in the heart of Transylvania" hoping to confirm the existence of vampires. Arriving at an inn run by Yoine Shagal and his wife Rebecca, the professor has to be thawed out from the long sleigh ride through the frozen countryside, and the first thing he notices upon coming to is garlic hanging overhead. He points this out to Alfred and inquires of Shagal if there is a castle nearby. Shagal and the villagers present, but for the village idiot, are suspiciously mum. What's funny about these early scenes is that Abronsius is clearly a fool, but his preposterous theories about vampires are proven to be totally right. The Shagals have a young daughter, the lovely Sara (Sharon Tate, given a pile of red hair to appease a producer who wanted Jill St. John in the role), who has a fetish for bathing "at least once a day." Arthur at first thinks she's referring to sex at least once a day, which wins his somewhat abashed approval. Spying on her through a keyhole, he witnesses the vampire, Count Von Krolok (Ferdy Mayne) attacking her in the bath, setting off the film's main plot - rescuing Sara from almost certain undeath.

Ill advisedly, Yoine takes a big bite out of a garlic knob and goes out into the night to save Sara. He is found next morning frozen to a tree stump. Upon examination by Abronsius, however, he finds that Yoine's death did not come from exposure to the freezing elements. He finds bite marks on Yoine's neck, his wrist, and his belly. When Abronsius tells Rebecca that he must now drive a wooden stake through Yoine's heart, she attacks him with the stake and drives them upstairs. By the time they have a chance to do the deed, Yoine the vampire awakes. He's his same joking self (Alfie Bass is inspired as Yoine) until he sees how intent Abronsius and Alfred are to destroy him. Pursued through the inn (Polański indulges in frequent transitions to silent-film speed in his slapstick scenes), Yoine finds himself in the maid's room. She (the toothsome Fiona Lewis) brandishes a crucifix at Yoine, who laughs and tells her, "Have you got the wrong vampire!" Yoine's appearances throughout the rest of the film provide comic relief. Who knew that a vampire could be funny?

Sneaking inside Von Krolok's castle is treacherous for Abronsius and Alfred. They are caught (Krolok turns out to be a fan of Abronsius's research into vampirism), are made comfortable in the castle, and are even invited to the grand ball to be held the following night. During the day Abronsius and Alfred must find the Count's resting place before the sun sets. After finding the way through a window into the Count's crypt, Alfred slips through, but the professor gets himself stuck halfway. So Alfred has to go back outside to pull the professor out. On his way, however, he finds Sara, as usual having a bath, after following the sound of her plaintive singing. With a bite mark on her neck, that she demurely tries to cover, Alfred finds her even more alluring than before. He remembers the Professor, now half-frozen hanging half-in, half-out of the window, and goes back out to extricate him. But their bag of wooden stakes and crucifixes tumbles off the parapet to the ground far below.

Looking for Sara again, this time Alfted encounters Herbert, the Count's son, in the bathroom wearing nothing but his nightshirt and aggressively interested in Alfred. He forces his attentions on the timid Alfred, who has a little book of love poetry. The little book saves him when Herbert tries to bite him and, thanks to Alfred's swift maneuvering, he sinks his teeth into the book instead.(3) A chase ensues, revealing Polański's knowledge of a scene from a Buster Keaton classic (the castle galleries resemble the decks of the derelict ship in Keaton's The Navigator).

I wondered why there would be mirrors in the castle, and such large ones, other than as convenient devices to reveal - or not reveal - to Alfred that the vampires cast no reflection in them and that Sara, though bitten, is still a mortal. At an appointed hour, the castle cemetery empties of a multitude of decrepit vampires, all dressed for a ball from centuries before, and a macabre dance ensues, accompanied by the aformentioned waltz played on a harpsichord.(4) Abronsius and Alfred skilfully manage to escape confinement, steal some clothes from a pair of particularly ancient vampires and join in the dance, intending to steal Sara from the Count's clutches. How they manage to pull off Sara's rescue and escape the castle I will leave you, dear reader, to discover for yourself. Polański proved himself to be a resourceful director in the film's climax, even sneaking in a twist ending that should come as no real surprise to aficionados of the horror genre.

This was to be Polański's last film made in Europe before his sojourn in Hollywood. He took a few Polish friends along with him to California, including Krzysztof Komeda and Wojciech Frykowski. Frykowski was present on the night - August 8, 1969 - the Manson family visited Polański's residence, brutally murdering Frykowski, Sharon Tate and two others (in addition to Tate's unborn child). It was a sobering reminder that Polański's preoccupation with death and violence in his films (his 1971 production of Macbeth is exceedingly bloody) had deeply personal origins.


(1) Polański stated, “I’ve called them and asked them to have my name removed because I don’t want credit for a film I didn’t really make. The one now showing is far from the one I filmed.”
(2) In December 1968, at a party in Los Angeles, Komeda was pushed off an ledge by the Polish writer Marek Hłasko and suffered a serious head injury which left him in a coma. Komeda died in Poland four months later. Hłasko said, ""If Krzysztof dies, I'll go along." Hłasko died in Wiesbaden shortly after Komeda's death, possibly by his own hand.
(3) Incidentally, the Polish actor Vladek Sheybal supplied the voice of Herbert, a clever trick Polański learned when he had to re-record all the dialogue for Knife in the Water. Since the actor who played the hitchhiker was unavailable, Polański dubbed his lines himself.
(4) The ditty is conspicuously absent from the soundtrack album.

War & Peace

Though they were in power for only 75 years, the Soviets saw great significance in anniversaries. The 10th anniversary of the October Revolution inspired them to commission major films on the subject from its best filmmakers, including Sergei Eisenstein. That Eisenstein's film, October, was released several months after the anniversary was the subject of an essay I published on the centenary of the revolution last November.

When the 150th anniversary of the 1812 invasion of Czarist Russia was approaching, a film adaptation of Tolstoy's epic historical novel War and Peace was commissioned by the state film production company, Mosfilm. Hollywood had already tackled Tolstoy's novel in 1956. Directed by the silent-era's King Vidor, it was a respectable dud, featuring the miscast Henry Fonda, who was too old to play Pierre Bezuhov, Audrey Hepburn as Natasha Rostova, showing off what Dwight Macdonald called her "good bone structure" and little else, and Mel Ferrer an utter nullity as Prince Andrei.

The movie was a box office success, but the Russians wanted to take back their national epic and the Soviet Ministry of Culture announced that they were going all-in with a mega-production of their own. The film that began principal shooting on the 1962 anniversary was eventually released in four parts between 1966 and 1967. The production was unprecedented, mobilizing the entire state film apparatus in the acquisition of artifacts to lend its production design and costumes the ultimate in authenticity. 

The appointed director, Sergei Bondarchuk, announced: “Our duty is to introduce the future viewer to the origins of sublime art, to make the innermost mysteries of the novel, War and Peace , visually tangible, to inform a feeling of fullness of life, of the joy of human experience.” Bondarchuk, who started his film career as an actor, appointed himself to play Pierre, the novel's central character, though he was almost as old as Henry Fonda. The ballerina, Lyudmila Savelyeva, played Natasha gracefully and naturally, and the film's highest-paid actor, Vyacheslav Tikhonov, played Prince Andrei in a finely shaded performance, despite also being too old for the part. But the actors, every one of the cast of literally thousands (one of the very last of its kind), are dwarfed by the scale of Bondarchuk's production. Though the grand balls are impressively staged, it is the battles for which the film is justifiably famous. 

And it is here that I must interject a disclaimer. The decision was made by Mosfilm, the film's production company, that the film would be shot on high-resolution 70-millimeter film stock, and not on the usual 35mm film, using anamorphic lenses to create a "letterbox" widescreen aspect ratio. This decision called for the use of special cameras to handle the film format, but also 70mm film projectors when the finished film was screened in cinemas. I have never had the opportunity to see Bondarchuk's massive film on the big screen - I have only seen it in a compressed digital format. Some films (some would insist all films) were designed expressly for the big screen. Bondarchuk's War and Peace exploits the special attributes of an outsized, panoramic big screen - one that can accommodate the 70mm aspect ratio - the same ratio as two television screens side by side. However closely I may hold my device to my face, I can only get an approximate, attenuated look at what audiences saw when the films were first exhibited in cinemas. When he saw the English-dubbed version of Bondarchuk's film in 1969, Roger Ebert was inspired to write: "It is hard to imagine that circumstances will ever again combine to make a more spectacular, expensive, and -- yes -- splendid movie. Perhaps that's just as well; epics seem to be going out of favor, replaced instead by smaller, more personal films. Perhaps this greatest of the epics will be one of the last, bringing the epic form to its ultimate statement and at the same time supplying the epitaph."(1)

My disclaimers out of the way, and mindful of the fact that the experience of watching a film conceived for a cinema screen on a 5 x 3 device is the future of what was once romantically known as filmgoing, I am able to recognize that this 6 3/4-hour War and Peace is a formidable, sometimes beautiful, and momentarily amazing film experience.(2)

There are three battles depicted in Bondarchuk's film - two in Part I, Schöngrabern (which was little more than a skirmish) and Austerlitz, and the major, full-scale Battle of Borodino in Part III. When asked about his experience of directing the battle scenes in the Hollywood production of War and Peace, King Vidor famously claimed to have had an advantage over Napoleon because he was in command of both armies. The first battle, Schōngrabern, takes up almost a half hour, beginning with a detachment of Russian soldiers singing like a Russian National Chorus as they enter the German town. The battle itself is staged as a crescendo of Russian and French soldiers, in serried ranks, converging on each other. One of the characters, Nikolai Rostov, has his horse shot out from under him and finds himself deliriously fleeing the field. On the soundtrack we can hear a strange sort of musique concrète, with modified instruments, attributed in the credits to Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov. It is quite effective in contributing to the visual confusion witnessed by Prince Andrei. Such confusion, of course, required extensive (and expensive) preparation and teams of drill masters to marshal all of the extras - including many horses - through their movements - exactly like a general. (Look for the famous "cannonball-view" shot - a first, as far as I know, in filmed battle scenes.)

But Schöngrabern was merely a dress rehearsal compared to the Battle of Austerlitz. The historical battle itself was a demoralising rout for the Russian army, and Bondarchuk makes it into a convincing disaster. The moment when Andrei takes up the standard and screams "hurrah!" at the retreating Russian soldiers, only to be knocked down by a piece of shrapnel and find himself suddenly admiring the peaceful sky above him is one of Tolstoy's greatest narrative triumphs. Bondarchuk's handling of this scene is shaky, as if the sudden shift from the external of the battle to the internal of Andrei's delirium was too much for him.

I am compelled to proclaim that the Battle of Borodino, that takes up the last half of Part 3 has to be the greatest battle scene on film. It looks exactly as if a horrific battle takes place that the cameras were there to capture. The Russian army had retreated from the advancing French for weeks when the Czar demanded of his General Kutuzov that his army stand and fight. Far outnumbered, the Russians fought valiantly but managed only to slow Napoleon's advance in Moscow. Even Napoleon saw it as a pointless, if calamitous, expense of life, estimated at between 72,000 to 73,000 dead, wounded, or missing for both sides. Pierre foolishly shows up in fine clothes and a conspicuous white top hat to watch the battle, and his mounting distress at the desperate carnage around him contributes a personal perspective on the catastrophe. In a cinema, the effects of watching the scene must have been overwhelming. Even viewed on my tablet, the images and sounds combined to create in me a nervous, altogether distressing reaction. Two other war films that I've seen had a similar effect: Sam Peckinpah's Cross of Iron and Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line. After watching Peckinpah's film in a cinema, I found myself trembling uncontrollably as I walked to my car.

After all the expense of rubles and testosterone that went into the re-creation of the battles in Bondarchuk's War and Peace, the single scene that I found most moving was the one you can find at the beginning of Book 6 of Tolstoy's novel, in which Prince Andrei, resigned to a joyless existence after the death in childbirth of his wife, refusing even to recognize the beauty of the spring day when he travels by coach to visit the estate of the Rostovs, sees an old oak standing alone, defiantly bare of new leaves and blossoms in the middle of a verdant forest. He recognizes himself in the oak. Then he sees Natasha, and overhears her at night in the room above his calling out to Sonya to come to the window to admire the night. To simulate the moonlight, the entire night scene in the film was shot with a blue tint - an old technique from the silent era used by Bondarchuk to remarkable effect.

Returning the same way he came, Andrei's coach takes him through the same forest of the day before. But the once bare old oak is unrecognizable - it has come back to life, responding to the irresistible pull of the spring with green leaves and white blossoms.

"Yes, it is the same oak," thought Prince Andrei, and all at once he was seized by an unreasoning springtime feeling of joy and renewal. All the best moments of his life suddenly rose to his memory. Austerlitz with the lofty heavens, his wife's dead reproachful face, Pierre at the ferry, that girl thrilled by the beauty of the night, and that night itself and the moon, and.... all this rushed suddenly to his mind. 

"No, life is not over at thirty-one!" Prince Andrei suddenly decided finally and decisively. "It is not enough for me to know what I have in  me — everyone must know it: Pierre, and that young girl who wanted to fly away into the sky, everyone must know  me, so that my life may not be lived for myself alone while others live so apart from it, but so that it may be reflected in them all, and they and I may live in harmony!" (Book Six: 1808-1810, chapters 1-3)

This is the scene that every Russian once knew by heart, that the prisoners in Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich gather together to recount to one another in one of the novel's most moving scenes. The scene is almost like a personal memory to me, and to everyone else who has read it in the 150 years since Tolstoy's novel was published. Sergei Bondarchuk captures the scene beautifully in his film.

Though an impressive, sometimes daunting accomplishment, Bondarchuk's War and Peace fails to maintain a high enough degree of intensity and inventiveness to make it anything more than a series of richly detailed illustrations of Tolstoy's novel. Bondarchuk was tempted, as even some of the greatest filmmakers have been tempted, by the potential for sheer spectacle presented to him in Tolstoy's battle scenes. Although cumulatively effective in capturing some of the excitements and horrors of war (they completely overshadow everything else in the film), Bondarchuk is too much of a little boy, playing with his tin soldiers. Film has to be about more than just explosions to transfix the viewer's attention. I remember watching a television series about silent films when I was in my teens called The Toy That Grew Up. Judging from the box office receipts for the latest superhero/Star Wars movies, film still has a lot of growing up to do.


A closing note to film restorers. I can't say for certain that efforts to restore this 50-year-old film haven't already been undertaken. All I can say is that the digital version of the film available online is in sometimes execrable condition. I understand that the 70mm film stock used for the film was Soviet-made and often of such sub-standard quality that more than 10 per cent of the exposed footage had to be re-shot by Bondarchuk. The color in several scenes is in flux, as if the colors printed on the celluloid had bled into one another. This is especially noticeable in the battle scenes, in which the shifting colors seem to be a part of the atmospherics of sky, smoke, cannon blasts, and swarming masses of extras. In a strange way, the horrible condition of the film actually contributes to the hellish pictures of battle. The film I saw is in quite desperate need of restoration.


(1) Roger Ebert, June 22, 1969. Ebert's review can be found HERE. 
(2) The film is advertised on Wikipedia (consider the source!) at 431 minutes, more than 7 hours. The version I have seen, which has no perceptible lapses in continuity, is 405 minutes. Interestingly, the version cited on Roger Ebert's website is 415 minutes.