A View of the Coast

F. Scott Fitzgerald

On the occasion of the 92nd Academy Awards, I quoted at length the decidedly dim view that Edmund Wilson took of the Hollywood scene in 1937. While he lacks the enthusiasm for the motion picture medium that his contemporaries Otis Ferguson and James Agee possessed, Wilson’s views were not as outlandish as they seem. It is by now a commonly held view, for example, that the quality of the Marx Brothers’ films suffered a noticeable decline when they left Paramount and signed with MGM.

Of the many novels that use Hollywood as a backdrop, there are two that stand out: Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, published in 1939, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, left unfinished at the author’s death in December 1940.(1) Edmund Wilson, who had been a close friend of Fitzgerald’s, and who had corresponded with him during the writing of the novel, undertook the preparation of The Last Tycoon for publication in 1941. Both Fitzgerald an West had worked in Hollywood movies as script-writers. The money they made there was outrageously disproportionate to their output, although the money that West made allowed him to live out his last years in comfort. And they both managed, with uneven results, to turn their experiences under what Wilson called “the insipid Hollywood sun” into compelling novels.

But I left out a particular passage from Wilson’s review of the book The Great Goldwyn because I wanted to expand on it. The passage was about Hollywood’s treatment of writers:

And the writers. Before the vultures have picked the bones of theatrical talent, the big white worms of the studios have grown fat on the decaying flesh. But the vultures get the worms, too. Have we not all had needy friends who have gone West with a smile on their lips and who have never returned again? – from whom we have ceased to hear and whose names we no longer mention, whom we remember as young people of promise, wondering what they have found to do and never thinking to connect them with the processed stuff we hear croaked out, between kisses and pistol-shots, by the smooth-faced gigantic phantoms, when we are foolish enough to go to the movies? It is true, as Mr. Johnston tells us, that Sam Goldwyn always wants the best writers; and there they are out on the Golden Coast, cooped up in their little cells, like school children in study hour. Teacher is the supervisor, and one hopes to be teacher’s favorite. There they are, blowing in their money on goofy Los Angeles houses and on ostentatious cocktail parties, at which they talk about their salaries and their options and always speak of their superiors with admiration, while they submit to being spied upon and having their correspondence opened. Those who do not care to admit surrender pretend to be uncompromising Leftists, getting together in little groups to give three discreet cheers for Stalin and to shed a tear for Republican Spain. But when the Writer’s Guild was organized, it took only one woof from Schulberg to send them running like prairie-dogs – leaving the job to the technicians and the actors. And now the blacklisted leaders ate creeping back, having become so profoundly habituated to high salaries for low work that, no matter how radical they claim to be, they don’t know how to get along without them.

As I mentioned above, Wilson had been in correspondence with Fitzgerald when he was at work on The Last Tycoon, which is an intimate portrait of a maverick young movie producer that resembled Irving Thalberg. Fitzgerald knew first hand how writers were valued by the big studios, and how their treatment by the producers exposed their utter incomprehension of what writers do. Fitzgerald introduces a character named Boxley in the novel and includes him in the following scene in which Monroe Stahr, the novel’s protagonist, tries to explain to him how to write a movie scene:

Stahr smiled at Mr. George Boxley. It was a kindly fatherly smile Stahr had developed inversely when he was a young man pushed into high places. Originally it had been a smile of respect toward his elders, then as his own decisions grew rapidly to displace theirs, a smile so that they should not feel it finally emerging as what it was: a smile of kindness sometimes a little hurried and tired, but always there toward anyone who had not angered him within the hour. Or anyone he did not intend to insult, aggressive and outright.

Mr. Boxley did not smile back. He came in with the air of being violently dragged, though no one apparently had a hand on him. He stood in front of a chair, and again it was as if two invisible attendants seized his arms and set him down forcibly into it. He sat there morosely. Even when he lit a cigarette on Stahr's invitation, one felt that the match was held to it by exterior forces he disdained to control.

Stahr looked at him courteously. "Something not going well, Mr. Boxley?" The novelist looked back at him in thunderous silence. "I read your letter," said Stahr. The tone of the pleasant young headmaster was gone. He spoke as to an equal, but with a faint two-edged deference.

"I can't get what I write on paper," broke out Boxley. "You've all been very decent, but it's a sort of conspiracy. Those two hacks you've teamed me with listen to what I say, but they spoil it - they seem to have a vocabulary of about a hundred words."

"Why don't you write it yourself?" asked Stahr.

"I have. I sent you some."

"But it was just talk, back and forth," said Stahr mildly. "Interesting talk but nothing more." 

Now it was all the two ghostly attendants could do to hold Boxley in the deep chair. He struggled to get up; he uttered a single quiet bark which had some relation to laughter but none to amusement, and said: "I don't think you people read things. The men are duelling when the conversation takes place. At the end one of them falls into a well and has to be hauled up in a bucket." He barked again and subsided. 

"Would you write that in a book of your own, Mr. Boxley?''

"What? Naturally not."

"You'd consider it too cheap."

Movie standards are different," said Boxley, hedging.

"Do you ever go to them?"

"No – almost never."

"Isn't it because people are always duelling and falling down wells?"

"Yes – and wearing strained facial expressions and talking incredible and unnatural dialogue."

"Skip the dialogue for a minute," said Stahr. "Granted your dialogue is more graceful than what these hacks can write - that's why we brought you out here. But let's imagine something that isn't either bad dialogue or jumping down a well. Has your office got a stove in it that lights with a match?"

"I think it has," said Boxley stiffly, "but I never use it."

"Suppose you're in your office. You've been fighting duels or writing all day and you're too tired to fight or write any more. You're sitting there staring - dull, like we all get sometimes. A pretty stenographer that you've seen before comes into the room and you watch her idly. She doesn't see you, though you're very close to her. She takes off her gloves, opens her purse and dumps it out on a table --" Stahr stood up, tossing his key-ring on his desk. "She has two dimes and a nickel and a cardboard matchbox. She leaves the nickel on the desk, puts the two dimes back into her purse and takes her black gloves to the stove, opens it and puts them inside. There is one match in the matchbox and she starts to light it kneeling by the stove. You notice that there's a stiff wind blowing in the window but just then your telephone rings. The girl picks it up, says hello - listens and says deliberately into the phone, 'I've never owned a pair of black gloves in my life.' She hangs up, kneels by the stove again, and just as she lights the match, you glance around very suddenly and see that there's another man in the office, watching every move the girl makes." Stahr paused. He picked up his keys and put them in his pocket.

"Go on," said Boxley smiling. “What happens?"

"I don't know," said Stahr. "I was just making pictures."

Boxley felt he was being put in the wrong. "It's just melodrama," he said.

"Not necessarily," said Stahr. "In any case, nobody has moved violently or talked cheap dialogue or had any facial expression at all. There was only one bad line, and a writer like you could improve it. But you were interested."

"What was the nickel for?" asked Boxley evasively.

"I don't know," said Stahr. Suddenly he laughed. “Oh, yes the nickel was for the movies."

The two invisible attendants seemed to release Boxley. He relaxed, leaned back in his chair and laughed. "What in hell do you pay me for?" he demanded. "I don't understand the damn stuff."

"You will," said Stahr grinning, "or you wouldn't have asked about the nickel."

Nearly a decade after Fitzgerald’s death, Wilson was asked to look at a movie adaptation of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, starring Alan Ladd. Stanley Kauffmann was at the private screening and provided the following account:

When I saw the 1949 film of The Great Gatsby, the only other person in the screening room was Edmund Wilson (whom I didn’t know). Afterward, as he left, a smiling Paramount publicity man asked him how he had liked the picture. “Not very much, I’m afraid,” said Wilson, and kept walking to the elevator. The Paramount man looked less disappointed than betrayed, as if saying, “We’ve gone to the trouble of making a whole movie out of your friend’s book and you don’t even appreciate it!”

(1) Fitzgerald died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940 and Nathanael West was killed in a car crash on December 22. Fitzgerald was 44, West was 37.

It Stinks!

“And yet this book makes one slightly sick.”


For me, watching the Academy Awards is not much different from watching the Grammys – a prolonged celebration of products to which I would otherwise pay no attention. The movies that are awarded by what I once called the Hollywood Institute of Self-Congratulation are the ones that uphold Hollywood’s dimly conceived standard of what a movie should be. But even bothering to state as much has become a whopping cliché. This is how it has always been. The vast majority of movies today are just as awful as they always were, from 1929 to to the present. As even a generous critic like Stanley Kauffmann believed, only less than one percent of them make the medium viable and keep it from veering into irrelevance.

So just now, instead of watching the ceremony, which has always left me feeling slightly sick, allow me to reprint a criticism of Hollywood by an interested outsider. Edmund Wilson is one of the preeminent American literary critics. So what qualifies him to write about movies? One thing qualifies him perfectly: he was not a fan. Being a fan is grounds for the immediate disqualification of any critic, yet the majority of people writing on the subject of film are unmistakable sufferers from this malady. Not only can they not distinguish between what they like and what is good, they refuse to believe there is anything like an objective standard – such as an aesthetic standard. 

Ask anyone who knows anything about the subject and they will tell you the same thing: the Hollywood’s Golden Era was the 1930s, and the Golden Year was 1939. Writing a review in 1937 called The Great Goldwyn by Alva Johnston, Edmund Wilson, who never warmed so much to the subject, suggested that this was a misconception, and that Hollywood had little to be so proud of. When Johnston asserted that “Next year is Sam’s silver jubilee [in the movie business]. It is something for everybody to feel patriotic about. The U.S.A. leads the world by a wider margin in pictures than anything else, and one of the chief reasons is the Great Goldwyn,”  Wilson took umbrage at the appeal to patriotism, and expounded his reasons why:


Well, I for one will be damned if I will feel patriotic about Sam Goldwyn’s silver jubilee. In what sense does the United States lead the world in moving pictures? We make more of them than any other country and are, I suppose, more proficient technically, but have we ever turned out anything that was comparable artistically to the best German or Russian films? I can think of nothing except Charlie Chaplin, who is his own producer and produces simply himself. There was a time – up to, say, 1930 – when our pictures seemed to be improving. There were new actors brought in from Europe and from the speaking stage in New York; there was mechanical experimentation and an aesthetic attention to photography;  intelligent directors were given their chance.

But then the depression fell; the producers were frightened and forced to retrench; and the whole movie business seemed to harden into something immovably banal. It nailed down its favorite formulas in all their vulgarity and falsity, and almost entirely abandoned any attempt to make the old situations seem lifelike or to point them up with novel direction. The actors who were brought to Hollywood were handled with extreme stupidity, and, if they stayed there, almost invariably ruined. A lot of talent has been fed into the studios, and what have our pictures to show for it? How shall we ever know now, for example, whether Katharine Hepburn – or, for that matter, Greta Garbo – ever really had anything in her? They set the talented Emil Jannings to performing over and over again wretched parodies of his German masterpieces, with everything that had given them reality and made them human and moving bleached out by the insipid Hollywood sun, until he could stand it no longer and departed. Charles Laughton has also escaped and has returned to England and the Old Vic. Marlene Dietrich, who must have had some ability at least as a night club singer, because she has made marvellous phonograph records in German, has been turned into something in the nature of one of those loose-jointed dolls  designed to be propped up against the pillows in boudoirs with sateen bedspreads, and has been made to appear in pictures so foolish, so unsightly and of such horrible taste that the most beautiful woman in the world could not play in them without looking ridiculous. But the only mirrors, apparently, in which film actors can look at themselves are the magazines that exploit the glamor of the trade and are edited for adolescent schoolgirls. That able Soviet actress Anna Sten the Great Goldwyn was unable to use at all; and I see that she is now making for another producer pictures with such titles as Love Me Again, Gorgeous and Orchid Girl. Mae West, whose peculiar attraction was that she worked up her own material and created a legendary world of her own, now has to have savorless imitations written for her by Hollywood hacks, who have quickly converted her fantasies into run-of-the-mill goods. The vultures of the Coast got them all. A director like King Vidor who has serious aspirations ends by turning out the worst kind of monstrosity: the bad serious picture. The shimmering polish of Lubitsch ends as a veneer on the awful old formulas. We have actually got to a point where features like Tarzan and Charlie Chan are the most satisfactory things one can go to. They are absurd, they are fairy tales; but they do have a certain independent existence.

The other day, after long abstinence from the movies, the result of having seen nothing but bad films for a year, I went to see one for the first time in months. I had assumed that the Marx brothers were indestructible. True, I had been reading the publicity stories about their new picture, A Day at the Races: how it had first been taken all over the country in the form of a stage entertainment, with a view to weeding out every gag that could not be immediately appreciated by the audience of the average town of over two or three thousand inhabitants. But I hadn’t foreseen that the result of this would be to deprive the Marx brothers of all their natural vitality and spontaneity. As if even popular comic art, if this is really to capture the public, were not more a matter of putting over an audience (as Charlie Chaplin and Walt Disney have) something from one’s own imagination than of finding an infallible formula to provoke its automatic reactions! The idea of establishing and exploiting the lowest common denominator of audiences has finally killed the movies. They are absolutely sterile and static. And even the Marx brothers are no longer the Marx brothers. Their corporate élan has been deadened by unnatural selection of their dullest gags; and they now fall asunder helpless. It would be amusing if A Day at the Races, after all the special trouble taken with it, should turn out to be a total flop.

I remember only one American critic who has seemed to me to do full justice to this subject of the Hollywood producers: Mr. George Jean Nathan in the Smart Set. Mr. Nathan had the rich and reckless language for it; I am sorry that my own powers are relatively feeble. That was ten years or more ago, but it is plain that today’s producers, including the Great Goldwyn and the late lamented Irving Thalberg, are the same megalomaniac cloak-and-suit dealers that their predecessors were. You have only to look at their products. You have only to look at their staffs. From the servant you may know the master. Mr. Johnston can have had only a brief submergence, and look at the book he has written. 

from "IT'S TERRIBLE! IT'S GHASTLY IT STINKS!" July 21, 1937 

Detour

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).

Breech Birth

Lillian & Dorothy Gish

For the past few years, a political movement has been gaining momentum in the world that is best known as "populism," but which could be more accurately described as "illiberalism." One of the major driving forces behind the movement has been a strong reaction against political correctness, an aggressive kind of radical liberalism that takes liberal values to altogether absurd lengths.

The May 4 issue of the Toledo Blade ran the following story:

"BOWLING GREEN — The longstanding Gish Theater is no more. Bowling Green State University trustees Friday afternoon voted 7-0 to remove the Gish name from the campus theater following student calls to do so, according to a university spokesman. For more than 40 years, the theater has honored actresses Dorothy and Lillian Gish. Members of the college’s Black Student Union questioned the theater's name because Lillian Gish is particularly well-known for starring in The Birth of a Nation. The film is a 1915 D.W. Griffith-directed silent-movie tribute to the Ku Klux Klan that is credited for reviving the white supremacist group. It also found that while the Gish sisters 'do not appear to have been advocates for racist or exclusionary practices or perspectives,' the content and historical impact of an actor’s work should be taken into account. The task force also stated it could not find documentation that Lillian Gish ever denounced the themes of the film or distanced herself from the director or his views."

According to the university spokesman, “We struggled with historical issues in today’s time and I think that, at the end of the day, that's what universities are all about ... As a public university we engage in these discussions and debate. While not everyone will agree with this decision, I know, this is what makes strong democracy. We listen to each other, learn from each other and move forward.” (1)

Oh, how they must have struggled! It is a well-worn fact that the pioneering D. W. Griffith film The Birth of a Nation (1915) tells the story of the Civil War from the slave-owner's side and has a powerful propagandistic aspect. As I put it ten years ago on this blog, "The case for the movie as a motion picture landmark is secure, but its content is compromised by its distortions of both history and morality in the portrayal of a 'heroic' antebellum South filled with cheerful slaves and slave owners cavorting in a bucolic paradise, destroyed by the greed and envy of Yankees. The heroes of Griffith's movie are the Ku Klux Klan, riding to the rescue in the film's last reel ... When it was released it was a sensational hit, and made Griffith a fortune. This was due largely to the riots the film's screening provoked and the refusal of some major cities to show it simply in the interests of public order. It also inspired lynchings, an activity that usually needed no provocation in many places in America. It was attacked in the press and Griffith was labelled as a racist. In response, Griffith was inspired to make his next blockbuster, the extravagant and simple-minded Intolerance (1916). Lillian Gish continually defended 'Mister Griffith,' as she called him against the charge of racism. But the film tells a very different story."

Lillian Gish needn't have bothered trying to defend Griffith. It shouldn't have come as a great surprise that the first American film to argue, convincingly, for the artistic potential of the film medium should have been such an electric reminder of America's Original Sin. Griffith was a major artist of the 20th century, but the stories that he decided the new medium should tell were at least 50 years old when the film that practically invented Hollywood was made. The Birth of a Nation stands like some monument to an outdated understanding of why the Civil War was fought. And, like so many other such monuments, like the one for Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, its legitimacy as a historical statement is being questioned. I have already expressed my own opinion on the subject of monuments to Confederate heroes. They stand not as reminders of our sins, but as rebukes to the outcome of what many Southerners still call the War Between the States, a war that, for them, hasn't concluded.

The Birth of a Nation is, if you will, a magnificent work of propaganda - comparable to Leni Riefenstahl's love poems to Hitler, Olympiad 1936 and Triumph of the Will. When Griffith died so ignominiously in Hollywood in 1948, James Agee, himself a Southerner, got carried away enough to write this about him:

"Even in Griffith’s best work there is enough that is poor, or foolish, or merely old-fashioned, so that one has to understand, if by no means forgive, those who laugh indiscriminately at his good work and his bad. But even his poorest work was never just bad. Whatever may be wrong with it, there is in every instant the unique purity and vitality of birth or of a creature just born and first exerting its unprecedented, incredible strength ... There is not a man working in movies, or a man who cares for them, who does not owe Griffith more than he owes anybody else." As generous and well-intended as some of Agee's words sound, he was incapable, in 1948, of seeing just how far we have come from Griffith's attitudes in the seventy years since.

But why should Lillian Gish be held responsible for it? She was an actress who, like hundreds of others, appeared in the film, collected her fee, and moved on to her next project. (As much as I am appalled at the sheer waste of acting talent lavished on trash like the Harry Potter movies, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and the superhero movies, it's impossible to blame the actors, for whom they are nothing but [extremely] well paid gigs.) Gish was from Ohio, where Bowling Green State University is situated. Griffith was the son of a Confederate colonel who had a score to settle with the United States. Doubtless, Gish was utterly oblivious of Griffith's agenda in making The Birth of a Nation. He himself was incapable of seeing its broader implications and would never have dreamed how we react to it more than a century later. In 1969, Stanley Kauffman could write, "Trotsky's famous remark about Celine is that he 'walked into great literature as other men walk into their homes.' In aptness of genius, at least, the same can be said of Griffith and film. By now it's a commonplace that he gave the new medium its grammar; he also gave it many of its aspirations. What we see, first and fundamentally, in Griffith is a change of mind toward film that epitomizes - precedes - a huge cultural shift. At first he was ashamed of being associated with 'flickers'; he was a theatre actor and playwright, and he wanted to remain one. Within five years he had become oracular and evangelical on the subject of film ... The right man had come along at the right historical moment, and the result was a fury of creation that helped refashion the culture of the entire world." (3) All of this is just what any cinephile would say in any final assessment of Griffith's legacy to film. But the people who wanted Lillian Gish's name expunged from their campus were most definitely not cinephiles.

Needless to say, the BGSU spokesman was correct in admitting that not everyone agreed with their decision. Film historian Joseph McBride eloquently expressed his disdain for the decision in an essay published by Bright Lights Film Journal last Tuesday titled "Political Correctness Run Amok: Life and Lillian Gish at Bowling Green State University , Ohio." Expressing his understandable outrage at the decision, he wrote, "A university should be a place where the history of the arts is studied with care and perspective and the debate over artists’ legacies should be allowed to flourish, rather than a place where, as too often happens today, we try to obliterate from awareness the controversial aspects of our troubled history." (4)

Clearly, nobody has time for careful debate. Ours is an era of political intolerance, exacerbated by the election of a devisive and clumsy fool as president who seemed, during his campaign, to deliberately try to lose by spouting utterly stupid, sexist, racist statements, insulting every standard of civility. He continues to do so practically every day. And instead of provoking unanimous revulsion for him, tens of millions of Americans saw him as the Last White Hope and voted for him. As a reaction to his appeal to the lowest, commonest denomination, the rest of America is acting just as petulantly by demanding the immediate expulsion of every suggestion of disagreement or variation from the new draconian standards of correct behaving and correct thinking and correct expressing. As I suggested above, it is engendering a backlash that appears to be sweeping the world. It's getting to be difficult to imagine a positive outcome.

(1) Toledo Blade.
(2) James Agee.
(3) Stanley Kauffmann.
(4) Joseph McBride. McBride mentions in his essay that Quentin Tarantino denounced John Ford as a racist for his having appeared as a Ku Klux Klansman in The Birth of a Nation. This business of singling out actors for having appeared in a film that has fallen out of the Zeitgeist's favor reminds me of how Hitler went after actors who had appeared in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel. One of them, Kurt Gerron, fled Germany to France, and thence to Holland. When the Nazis invaded, he and his family were taken first to Theresienstadt, where he was forced to make a film painting a cruelly false picture of life in the camp for foreign consumption. As soon as it was finished, Gerron and his family were shipped to Auschwitz and killed.

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.

War & Pride & Peace & Prejudice

As beloved a writer as Jane Austen (1775-1817) is, and has been for 200 years, too often a serious analysis of her "place" among English novelists arrives at the forbidding word "special". It is indeed a special place, for many reasons, some of them not as edifying as others. What Austen had to overcome to achieve her richly deserved place in English letters is, on examination, staggering. But what had that to do with her standing as a person of letters? When Werner Herzog went to downright dangerous lengths to make his film Fitzcarraldo, often putting his cast and crew in life-threatening situations, in order to maximize (I'm assuming) the film's realism, it didn't make the resulting film and better or worse than it is. And what viewer unacquainted with all of the film's backstory really cares how difficult it was to make Fitzcarraldo if he doesn't like it?

Jane Austen wrote exclusively about people in drawing rooms. Knowing what there is to know about the way she lived, it is perfectly fitting that she should have done so. She does so with great authority and great art. But some critics of Austen have, for 200 years, used the limitations that her life imposed on her writing against her. Herman Melville served in the U.S. Navy, jumped ship in Tahiti, and later manned whaling ships. Most of his novels, including his most famous, Moby-Dick, are drawn from that - very specialized - experience. No critic is his right mind would think of claiming that Melville's experience, just about as exclusively male as you could get in his lifetime, limited him as a novelist.

Virginia Woolf, who wrote novels to stand proudly beside Austen's, was perhaps more acutely self-conscious of being a woman writer than any of her predecessors, illustrious or otherwise. In October 1928, when asked to address students at Girton, the women's college at Oxford, she boldly told the students that before they can even consider taking up writing as a profession, they will need "money and a room of her own." One of the most significant events in Woolf's life, a life rich with significance, took place in 1918 when an aunt (whom she identifies as "Mary Beton" in A Room of One's Own) died and bequeathed her £500 a year. The money set her free, in ways that surprised her and that took her some time to properly grasp.

It took Austen seventeen years to complete Pride and Prejudice. The announced subject of Virginia Woolf's address at Girton was "Women & Literature," and she confronted the problems experienced by the Big Four (Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and George Eliot):

I thought, looking at the four famous names, what had George Eliot in common with Emily Brontë? Did not Charlotte Brontë fail entirely to understand Jane Austen? Save for the possibly relevant fact that not one of them had a child, four more incongruous characters could not have met together in a room—so much so that it is tempting to invent a meeting and a dialogue between them. Yet by some strange force they were all compelled when they wrote, to write novels. Had it something to do with being born of the middle class, I asked; and with the fact that the middle-class family in the early nineteenth century was possessed only of a single sitting-room between them? If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain,—"women never have an half hour… that they can call their own"—she was always interrupted. Still it would be easier to write prose and fiction there than to write poetry or a play. Less concentration is required. Jane Austen wrote like that to the end of her days. 'How she was able to effect all this', her nephew writes in his Memoir, 'is surprising, for she had no separate study to repair to, and most of the work must have been done in the general sitting-room, subject to all kinds of casual interruptions. She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants or visitors or any persons beyond her own family party. Jane Austen hid her manuscripts or covered them with a piece of blotting-paper. Then, again, all the literary training that a woman had in the early nineteenth century was training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting-room. People's feelings were impressed on her; personal relations were always before her eyes. Therefore, when the middle-class woman took to writing, she naturally wrote novels, even though, as seems evident enough, two of the four famous women here named were not by nature novelists. Emily Brontë should have written poetic plays; the overflow of George Eliot's capacious mind should have spread itself when the creative impulse was spent upon history or biography. They wrote novels, however; one may even go further, I said, taking Pride and Prejudice from the shelf, and say that they wrote good novels. Without boasting or giving pain to the opposite sex, one may say that Pride and Prejudice is a good book. At any rate, one would not have been ashamed to have been caught in the act of writing Pride and Prejudice. Yet Jane Austen was glad that a hinge creaked, so that she might hide her manuscript before anyone came in. To Jane Austen there was something discreditable in writing Pride and Prejudice. And, I wondered, would Pride and Prejudice have been a better novel if Jane Austen had not thought it necessary to hide her manuscript from visitors? I read a page or two to see; but I could not find any signs that her circumstances had harmed her work in the slightest. That, perhaps, was the chief miracle about it. Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare. If Jane Austen suffered in any way from her circumstances it was in the narrowness of life that was imposed upon her. It was impossible for a woman to go about alone. She never travelled; she never drove through London in an omnibus or had luncheon in a shop by herself. But perhaps it was the nature of Jane Austen not to want what she had not. Her gift and her circumstances matched each other completely.

Knowing all this about the conditions in which Pride and Prejudice was written, some critics continue to take exception with Austen's subject, which is nothing more or less than the daily lives of "middle class" women, imposed from without by sexual and social circumstance. Stanley Kauffmann, in his reviews of the (mediocre) films made from Austen's novels Emma and Pride and Prejudice, felt duty bound to bring it up: "But the story! Jane, Jane, the story that you worked on for seventeen years! It was most pithily criticized by Emerson in his journals. He disliked Austen's novels for several reasons, but what bothered him most was their dominant theme: 'The one problem in the mind of the writer in both the stories I have read, Persuasion and Pride & Prejudice, is marriageableness; all that interests in any character introduced is still this one, Has he or she money to marry with, & conditions conforming?' Critics innumerable have either scanted the matter that disturbed Emerson or, allowing it, have rhapsodized about Austen's prose and her perceptions of character.(1) ...Laud Austen's structure as it deserves, her acuteness about character, her wit; still, ultimately this is a story of young women whose sole serious occupation is finding agreeable husbands with money. Was Austen subtly castigating a society that so narrowed a woman's existence? In the late twentieth century we have to hope so: because without believing it, these novels seem pathetic, enraging and just a touch disgusting."(2)

I don't quite understand what is being criticized here. Austen was simply telling us about the lives of the people she knew, living in the world as they found it. How is Austen to blame for telling the truth? Virginia Woolf cuts through to the proper lesson that we should take away with us on reading Austen, the Brontës, and Eliot:

One could not but play for a moment with the thought of what might have happened if Charlotte Brontë had possessed say three hundred a year—but the foolish woman sold the copyright of her novels outright for fifteen hundred pounds; had somehow possessed more knowledge of the busy world, and towns and regions full of life; more practical experience, and intercourse with her kind and acquaintance with a variety of character. In those words she puts her finger exactly not only upon her own defects as a novelist but upon those of her sex at that time. She knew, no one better, how enormously her genius would have profited if it had not spent itself in solitary visions over distant fields; if experience and intercourse and travel had been granted her. But they were not granted; they were withheld; and we must accept the fact that all those good novels, Villette, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, were written by women without more experience of life than could enter the house of a respectable clergyman; written too in the common sitting-room of that respectable house and by women so poor that they could not afford to buy more than a few quires of paper at a time upon which to write Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. One of them, it is true, George Eliot, escaped after much tribulation, but only to a secluded villa in St John's Wood. And there she settled down in the shadow of the world's disapproval. 'I wish it to be understood', she wrote, 'that I should never invite anyone to come and see me who did not ask for the invitation'; for was she not living in sin with a married man and might not the sight of her damage the chastity of Mrs Smith or whoever it might be that chanced to call? One must submit to the social convention, and be 'cut off from what is called the world'. At the same time, on the other side of Europe, there was a young man living freely with this gypsy or with that great lady; going to the wars; picking up unhindered and uncensored all that varied experience of human life which served him so splendidly later when he came to write his books. Had Tolstoi lived at the Priory in seclusion with a married lady 'cut off from what is called the world', however edifying the moral lesson, he could scarcely, I thought, have written War and Peace.

What matters is the individual writer's ability to observe and to transform his or her observable world into ageless art.


(1) "Family Troubles," The New Republic, December 12, 2005.
(2) "Scotland Now, England Then," The New Republic, August 19, 1996.

A Decent Factory

Finding myself reading, once again, the film criticism of Stanley Kauffman from the year 2005, and coming across a review of a documentary called A Decent Factory, about a Nokia cellphone assembly factory in China, I paused at a passage in which Kauffmann poses a challenge to one of Karl Marx's better-known observations on Labor. Kauffmann mentions the working conditions in the factory:

"As far as the workers' comments are concerned, the only complaint we hear is about the food, which they find poor. They often slip out at night to buy food. And one woman reports a fight that another of the women had with a rough-tongued female supervisor. The one true grievance we do not hear from any of the women: we learn it from one of the bosses in a matter-of-fact way. The average pay is only about half the legal minimum wage. The factory had been built in China because labor is cheap, and it is being further cheapened. When the inspectors later report this fact back in Finland, management promises to do something about it.

"As the film progresses, expectation of exposé dwindles. Half salary is hardly a trifling matter, but the factory seems well enough run and is apparently a haven for some of the young women whose homes are a lot less attractive. Why, then, is the picture chilling? Because it is a calm reminder of an inevitability. The sight of long lines of young women doing tiny bits of attachment work or packing hour after hour, day after day, is saddening. The fact that the factory conditions are decent, as the title says wryly, makes it even sadder. Marx said that the alienation of labor--the gap between the worker and his work--is an evil of capitalism, but this is too limited: factories like this one flourish everywhere under every system. Marx's percept is not a charge against a system but a condition of modernity. Thousands of factories around the world where the attaching and packing go on and on--it's like Chaplin's Modern Times without Charlie."(1)

I'm not certain whether or not Kauffmann is being disingenuous here. He knew enough about Marx's idea of alienation to recognize it in the Nokia factory, but he must've known that China is only nominally a Marxist society. Finland (or, for that matter, the USA) is closer to being a Marxist society that communist China. Besides, China has embraced market capitalism on an unprecedented scale in order to expand its economy. This has created, as Marx predicted, enormous inequalities in China that didn't exist before - inequalities between people who want nothing more than a decent life and people who want impossibly more than they will never need.

Marx put it succinctly: a worker in a capitalist society "does not fulfil himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker, therefore, feels himself at home only during his leisure time, whereas at work he feels homeless. His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs."

Marx knew that as long as the nature of work, which reduces the worker himself to a commodity, remains the same, work will forever be reduced to an utterly depersonalized and soul-destroying repetition of manual tasks. Almost seven years ago, I wrote about Oscar Wilde's brilliant pamphlet, which is utterly forgotten today, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism":

Wilde's vision of Socialism is unorthodox and often unrealistic. At times, when he discusses work and the freedom from work that he believes Socialism promises, he sounds like Eric Hoffer's remark about the modern "worldwide revulsion for work. To the new generation, 'la dolce vita' is not a life of plenty but a life of as little effort as possible."

Wilde believed that some time in the future all menial labor will be performed by machines, and men and women would be completely free from toil, suffering, and pain. He seems to think that work itself, and not just the motive behind it, will be eradicated under Socialism. I don't think that any socialist thinks this way. Work, which is mostly mindless toil, even for the middle class, will attain its true purpose once the motive behind it (making a living) is changed. Work, I think, is essential to living when it places the individual in the position of realizing that he is not simply an individual, but a part of a huge organism that is more than the sum of its parts. Soldiers find this out, whether they serve in combat or not. And its why they are willing to lay down their lives. They recognize probably more directly than anyone else the meaning of human brotherhood.

Marx elaborates: "Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have, in two ways, affirmed himself, and the other person. In my production I would have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and, therefore, enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the activity, but also, when looking at the object, I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses, and, hence, a power beyond all doubt. In your enjoyment, or use, of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man's essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man's essential nature ... Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature."

Wilde concludes his essay in quite uncharted territory:

"It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is quite unpractical, and goes against human nature. This is perfectly true. It is unpractical, and it goes against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will change. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development."

Wilde even defends his "scheme" against the charge of Utopianism:

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias."


(1) Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic, July 4, 2005. It is well known that Chaplin had "communist sympathies." In Modern Times, there is a scene in which a truck carrying a load of lumber passes him and the red flag hanging off the end of the load falls on the ground in front of Charlie. He picks it up and, waving it, chases after the truck. Just then a large group of communists waving their red flags rounds the corner and marches right behind Charlie. The police arrive and Charlie is arrested.
(2) "A Brotherhood of One" May 10, 2012.

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.

Scare Me

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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