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.

Seize the Day

Last Thursday I began to read the Saul Bellow novel Seize the Day. Though only half the length of a good-sized novel and the narrative covering the event of a single - an especially terrible - day in the life of Tommy Wilhelm, it took me a week to read it, one chapter every day. I enjoy reading like this, so that the story spills into my daily life. Uneventful enough, in a routine that is itself a protection from living, from the rising and falling passions that afflict the people among whom I am living - poor provincial Filipinos.

I arrived at the final chapter last night before going to bed, and found it, like everyone else who has read the novel must have found it, unforseeable, extraordinary, abrupt, and exquisitely moving. I got out of bed this morning and prepared myself for an errand in town. Returning home before lunchtime, I sat down in my sala, reached for my tablet and opened Facebook. The first thing I saw was a message from an old friend telling everyone he knew that his 13-year-old son's mother had died and that the boy’s heart was broken. My friend took the time to explain the circumstances of the woman's death, and he thanked individuals who had helped him through the arrangements of the woman's passing.

I didn't know the woman nor did I know anything about her life or her illnesses. She was a complete stranger to me when my friend announced her death this morning. But I suddenly found myself crying, as someone would cry at the news that a dear friend had been terribly hurt. And in the midst of my tears I remembered Tommy Wilhelm in the last chapter of Seize the Day. Walking down a Manhattan street, after fleeing his hotel after his estranged wife, Margaret, had hung up on him, he thought he recognized the man who had cheated him out of the little money he had left and somehow found himself helplessly swept up in a crowd of mourners entering a synagogue. Bewildered, feeling lost and hopeless, he was in the line of people filing past the open coffin:

He stood along the wall with others and looked toward the coffin and the slow line that was moving past it, gazing at the face of the dead. Presently he too was in this line, and slowly, slowly, foot by foot, the beating of his heart anxious, thick, frightening, but somehow also rich, he neared the coffin and paused for his turn, and gazed down. He caught his breath when he looked at the corpse, and his face swelled, his eyes shone hugely with instant tears.

The dead man was gray-haired. He had two large waves of gray hair at the front. But he was not old. His face was long, and he had a bony nose, slightly, delicate twisted. His brows were raised as though he had sunk in to the final thought. Now at last he was with it, after the end of all distractions, and when his flesh was no longer flesh. And by this meditative look Wilhelm was so struck that he could not go away. In spite of the tinge of horror, and then the splash of heartsickness that he felt, he could not go. He stepped out of line and remained beside the coffin; his eyes filled silently and through his still tears he studied the man as the line of visitors moved with veiled looks past the satin coffin toward the standing bank of lilies, lilacs, roses. With great stifling sorrow, almost admiration, Wilhelm nodded and nodded. On the surface, the dead man with his formal shirt and his tie and silk lapels and his powdered skin looked so proper; only a little beneath so--black, Wilhelm thought, so fallen in the eyes.

Standing a little apart, Wilhelm began to cry. He cried at first softly and from sentiment, but soon from deeper feeling. He sobbed loudly and his face grew distorted and hot, and the tears stung his skin. A man--another human creature, was what first went through his thoughts, but other and different things were torn from him. What'll I do? I'm stripped and kicked out.... Oh, Father, what do I ask of you? What'll I do about the kids--Tommy, Paul? My children. And Olive? My dear! Why, why, why--you must protect me against that devil who wants my life. If you want it, then kill me. Take, take it, take it from me.

Soon he was past words, past reason, coherence. He could not stop. The source of all tears had suddenly sprung open within him, black, deep, and hot, and they were pouring out and convulsed his body, bending his stubborn head, bowing his shoulders, twisting his face, crippling the very hands with which he held the handkerchief. His efforts to collect himself were useless. The great knot of ill and grief in his throat swelled upward and he gave in utterly and held his face and wept. He cried with all his heart.

He, alone of all the people in the chapel, was sobbing. No one knew who he was.

One woman said, "Is that perhaps the cousin from New Orleans they were expecting?"

"It must be somebody real close to carry on so."

"Oh my, oh my! To be mourned like that," said one man and looked at Wilhelm's heavy shaken shoulders, his clutched face and whitened fair hair, with wide, glinting, jealous eyes.

"The man's brother, maybe?"

"Oh, I doubt that very much," said another bystander. "They're not alike at all. Night and day."

The flowers and lights fused ecstatically in Wilhelm's blind, wet eyes; the heavy sea-like music came up to his ears. It poured into him where he had hidden himself in the center of a crowd by the great and happy oblivion of tears. He heard it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart's ultimate need.

It is the strangeness and suddenness of the novel's last scene that catches the reader by surprise. Having lived through Tommy Wilhelm's long day alongside him, feeling his rising frustration and the congestion in his chest, and his inability to explain to his father or his wife or to Tamkin, the charlatan whose cockeyed wisdom causes Tommy to trust him enough to invest his remaining savings in the trading fortunes of lard on Wall Street, what he is feeling, what he wants in his life, made the release of his tears, at the side of a strange man's coffin, provoked by his love and his fear and his grief at the waste of half his life, an utterly convincing and uplifting conclusion to his day.

Miss Lonelyhearts

On December 3, 1994 the comic Adam Sandler introduced his “Chanukah Song” on Saturday Night Live. It was so popular that, in perennial appearances during the holidays, Sandler performed the song with new lyrics, all of them about how Jewish-Americans have endured, and prevailed, during the Christmas Season, pointing out how American culture has been enriched by Jews.

When you feel like the only kid in town
Without a Christmas tree
Here's a list of people who are Jewish
Just like you and me

Those first two lines are what informs the rest of the song – the feeling of isolation from, and resentment towards, the prevailing – Gentile - culture. Ever since I first heard the song, I have had the overwhelming feeling that it was an anthem of pain – the outcry of a Jewish kid growing up in a goyim world.

One name you won’t find on Sandler’s list of Jewish people is Nathanael West, author of the novels Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust.(1) Born Nathan Wallenstein Weinstein in 1903, his short-lived career as a novelist (just nine years) was beset with misfortune. His second and fourth novels, among the best writing of the 1930s, sold fewer than 2,300 copies in his lifetime. When his fortunes at last turned in his favor and he was enjoying happiness in marriage and success as a screenwriter in Hollywood, he was killed in a car crash.

In his monograph on West, Stanley Edgar Hyman wrote:

West received little or no education in the Jewish religion, and although he was probably circumcised, he was never confirmed in a Bar Mitzvah ceremony. During his years at Brown [University], West threw off what he could of his Jewishness, and suffered for the rest. "More than anyone I ever knew," his friend John Sanford later reported, "[he] writhed under the accidental curse of his religion." West had nothing to do with any organized Jewish activity on campus, hung around the snobbish Gentile fraternities, and was intensely anxious to be pledged and intensely bitter that he never was. "Nobody ever thought of [him] as being Jewish," a college friend has said, but apparently the Brown fraternities did.

West's first novel, The Dream of Balso Snell, seems to have been first written in college, but he rewrote it and in 1931 he managed to get it privately printed in a limited edition of 500 copies. The book listed "Nathanael West" as author and thus marked West's official change of name. He had spent much of his class time at Brown doodling "Nathan von Wallenstein Weinstein," which was the name signed to his [Brown literary magazine] contributions, but even that had turned out to be not Gentile enough. West explained to William Carlos Williams how he got the name: "Horace Greely said, 'Go West, young man.' So I did." West's anti-Semitism was now considerable. He referred to Jewish girls as "bagels," and avoided them.

West's personal life in the East was no more successful than his literary career. Balso Snell was dedicated to Alice Shephard, a Roman Catholic girl who had gone to Pembroke College with West's sister Laura. He was secretly engaged to her from 1929 to 1932, then publicly engaged, but they never married, although West had bought a marriage license and carried it around with him for several years. His poverty was the explanation given out, but in Sanford's opinion the engagement foundered on the religious difference.

West’s novel Miss Lonelyhearts is a unique achievement in American literature. By interjecting interior states into its action of a newspaper columnist exiled to providing advice to the lovelorn (or the otherwise disenchanted), West takes the reader in the opposite direction of contemporary “realistic” writing, away from Hemingway and toward European modes, from Baudelaire through Kafka to the Surrealists. The novel's protagonist, whose name is always “Miss Lonelyhearts,” becomes so overwhelmed by the misery expressed so clumsily in the pile of letters he receives every day that he becomes ill both physically and emotionally. Miss Lonelyhearts becomes an alter ego, it possesses him and, eventually, destroys him. It doesn't matter that, as Edmund Wilson pointed out, Miss Lonelyhearts overestimates the veracity of the letters to him and ascribes disproportionate importance to them. As the son of a Baptist minister, he is predisposed to regard the suffering in the letters, and the moralizing responses they provoke that he publishes in his column, as demonstrations of Christian love and forgiveness. So it is not exactly surprising that, just as he is attaining a kind of Christian grace in his attitudes toward his subject, it leads him directly to disaster.

But West does offer his hero a real chance for human - not divine - salvation in the character of his fiancée, Betty. He has a transcendant idyll with Betty at a country farm in which West's language becomes suddenly explicit and expressive of the physical beauties of the natural world and the conditions of living in its proximity:

He sat on the porch and watched her work. She had her hair tied up in a checked handkerchief, otherwise she was completely naked. She looked a little fat, but when she lifted something to the line, all the fat disappeared. Her raised arms pulled her breasts up until they were like pink-tipped thumbs.

There was no wind to disturb the pull of the earth. The new green leaves hung straight down and shone in the hot sun like an army of little metal shields. Somewhere in the woods a thrush was singing. Its sound was like that of a flute choked with saliva.

Betty stopped with her arms high to listen to the bird. When it was quiet, she turned towards him with a guilty laugh. He blew her a kiss. She caught it with a gesture that was childishly sexual. He vaulted the porch rail and ran to kiss her. As they went down, he smelled a mixture of sweat, soap and crushed grass.

It is, of course, terribly ironic that Miss Lonelyhearts should be undone by Christian love. West's efforts to divest himself of his Jewishness, his having studied medieval Catholicism at Brown and his aborted engagement to a nice Catholic girl, led him, in his last months in Hollywood, to achieve the comfortable life of a successful screenwriter (even while attempting, with The Day of the Locust, to exploit that experience through a fictional attack on Hollywood). He had at last married a nice Gentile woman and was on his way home from a camping trip with her when they both died on Ventura Highway. West's remains were returned to New York where they were buried in a Jewish cemetery.

(1) Sandler’s ever-expanding list of people who are Jewish includes David Lee Roth, James Caan, Kirk Douglas, Rod Carew, Dinah Shore, and The Three Stooges.

Fear the Bern

Four years ago on this blog I commented about the ongoing Republican contest for the party’s nomination (the Democratic contest seemed to be pre-determined):

For a progressive like me, the rise and rise (followed by, I can only hope, an eventual fall) of Donald Trump has been a little terrifying. . . Many pundits are watching this loathsome man's advance with rapt disbelief, like they're watching an unfolding disaster in a movie (a fully loaded dump truck has lost its brakes and is hurtling toward a schoolyard filled with children) and are powerless to intervene. Knowing the outcomes of some previous presidential elections, how could they not be fearful? In 2004, George W. Bush, who led us into a war on utterly mistaken, or possibly manufactured, evidence of WMDs - a war that resulted in the ascendance of ISIL - was nominated by his party and beat John Kerry in the general election. By the time he left office, the nation was on the verge of economic collapse. How can anyone trust in the judgement of the American voter any more? (1)

In an interview on 60 Minutes last Sunday, Bernie Sanders, the current frontrunner in the Democratic Party race, made comments favorable to Cuban dictator Fidel Castro: "We're very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba but you know, it's unfair to simply say everything is bad. You know? When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?"

Sanders’s comments were, at best, disingenuous. (And he’s even more disingenuous when he talks about “socialist” Scandinavian countries – countries that are welfare states, not socialist.)  Given his lifelong struggle - a steep uphill battle in America - to rehabilitate the word “socialism,” he took a leap backwards by arguing in favor of the social reforms of a Communist tyrant. Socialists have lived in the shadow of totalitarian regimes that have been nominally Marxist ever since Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. It does the socialist cause no good to inform people that in the USSR, if you needed a job a job would be found for you. If you needed an apartment an apartment would be found for you. If you got sick medical care would be provided. But you couldn't elect your own government and if you criticized the ruling party you would be arrested and imprisoned. The same goes for Castro's Cuba. How could it possibly matter what the quality of life was like if you had no liberty?

The counter-argument, however, is that all the liberty in the world isn’t much use when you’re broke, out of a job, homeless or ill. Two popular American anthems approach this dilemma, one of them pointedly. In 1940, in a cheap New York City hotel, Woody Guthrie wrote “This Land Was Made for You and Me.” He wrote it in response to hearing the Irving Berlin song, “God Bless America,” which he thought was out of touch with the country that he saw all around him, a land of workers who lost their jobs and farmers who lost their land, of bread lines and soup kitchens. America’s landscape was beautiful and inspiring, Woody declares in his song, but two of the original stanzas were removed on some recordings that cast a questionable light on America:

As I went walking I saw a sign there,
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

The America in Guthrie’s song was a land of contrasts that had to be assessed. His song remains patriotic, but its patriotism is balanced, nuanced. A later, and lesser, American anthem came from country singer Lee Greenwood in 1984. “God Bless the USA” starts out seriously enough:

If tomorrow all the things were gone
I worked for all my life
And I had to start again
With just my children and my wife

I thank my lucky stars
To be living here today
'Cause the flag still stands for freedom
And they can't take that away

And I'm proud to be an American
Where at least I know I'm free
And I won't forget the men who died
Who gave that right to me
And I'd gladly stand up next to you
And defend Her still today
'Cause there ain't no doubt
I love this land
God Bless the U.S.A.

I have disliked this song since the first time I heard it – not least because it’s a country song. (I am not a fan.) It’s a confusing, flimsy kind of national love song. Greenwood argues that he’s proud to be an American even when it’s a country where, tomorrow, he could lose everything, because, what the hell, “at least I know I’m free”. The economic injustice that many Americans, including many of Greenwood’s fans, have faced for generations, with the nightmares of unemployment, eviction, foreclosure and unexpected illness hanging over their heads, seriously devalues one’s personal liberty. It is the obscene gulf that separates the rich and the poor, which has widened terribly in the new millennium, that exposes a serious weakness in our one person, one vote political system. If one voter makes $40K a year and another makes $40M a year, the value of their votes is wildly unequal. 

Whatever happens next week on Super Tuesday, and whatever effect – if any - that Bernie’s mistaken conditional praise of Castro may have on voters, he has at least championed the common man as the preeminent subject of the debate, just as multibillionaire Mike Bloomberg, who dedicated most of his life to gathering for himself an enormous fortune, evidently thinks he can win votes by buying them. 

We shall see.


(1) See Indecision America.

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 

Kirk Douglas

[It seems incredible to me that Kirk Douglas, who has died at the age of 103, was born three years after my father and two before my mother. (My father died in 1988 at the age of 75 and my mother died in 1998 at 80.) As a tribute to him, I'm rebooting a piece I wrote four years ago about a film he produced, which represented a giant step forward for its director, Stanley Kubrick. A few years later, when he needed a replacement for Anthony Mann to direct Spartacus, Douglas again hired Kubrick. Like his son, Michael, Kirk Douglas's contribution to film as a producer was crucial to the development and preservation of quality and talent.]

Paths of Glory

There is a curious history to Paths of Glory. The film that Stanley Kubrick made in 1957 was adapted from a novel by Humphrey Cobb. Cobb (1899-1944) was an American who enlisted in the Canadian army in 1916 and fought in France in the First World War. His novel, published in 1935, was based on an actual incident. The novel had no title when it was submitted for publication, so the publisher held a contest to find an appropriate title and the winner suggested the words from Gray's elegy.

Another book about the First World War called Paths Of Glory existed before 1935, a collection of journalism written for the Saturday Evening Post by an American named Irvin S. Cobb (1876-1944). The earlier book, published in 1915, makes no mention of the incident on which Humphrey Cobb's novel concentrates. The two Cobbs were not related, although both of them wrote for Hollywood films - Irvin wrote titles for silent films and some of his Judge Priest stories were adapted to the screen by John Ford, and Humphrey wrote the script for the Humphrey (!) Bogart film, San Quentin - and both men died in New York City in 1944 within 45 days of each other.

In 1957, when Stanley Kubrick was hired by Dore Schary at MGM to work on film scripts, Kubrick remembered reading Humphrey Cobb's novel and he suggested it to Schary. When Schary showed no enthusiasm for it, Kubrick bought the rights to the book from (Humphrey) Cobb's widow. After writing a script with Calder Willingham, Kubrick and his producer James B. Harris showed it to Kirk Douglas, who saw its potential for his own company Bryna Productions. Douglas got distribution backing from United Artists, and shooting of the film Paths of Glory was scheduled for locations in Bavaria. According to Douglas, when Kubrick arrived in Munich at the Bavaria Filmkunst Studios for the shoot, he showed Douglas changes he had made in the script. Douglas told him to stick to the script he approved.

Being an American film director in the 1950s presented Kubrick with two problems - how could he be successful and keep himself independent of the Hollywood system, and how could he avoid becoming just another exception - like Orson Welles - that proved the rule? Kubrick did the opposite, quietly making a name for himself in America before finding a way, with Lolita (1962), of getting himself out of America altogether. Establishing his production company, Hawk, Ltd., in the UK, it was there that Kubrick produced his best work and where he resided until his death in 1999.

During the making of his film version of War and Peace, King Vidor claimed that he had an advantage over Napoleon when he staged the battle of Borodino for the film, since he was in command of both the French and Russian armies. Battle scenes have occupied the creative resources of some of the greatest filmmakers, quite understandably because of their extreme visual impact. Shots of dozens, sometimes hundreds of people doing violence to one another are unlikely to leave any viewer feeling ambivalent about them. Film is a kinetic art - hence the word cinema. Our eyes are attracted irresistibly to movement. And what could possibly be more kinetic in a film than a battle scene?

The trouble with battle scenes for the filmmaker is precisely their ability to thrill. Even when, as in Apocalypse Now, a filmmaker tries to show that war is of its nature insane, he often succumbs to the spectacular qualities of combat. If one were to ask viewers of Apocalypse Now to name their favorite scene, I doubt that many would fail to name the famous morning helicopter raid, with speakers on board the helicopters blasting Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" and a deranged Colonel telling us how the napalm smells like victory.

While he wasn't exactly a pacifist, Kubrick was avowedly anti-war. He tackled the subject of war head-on in Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket, both set amidst two conspicuously futile wars. The First World War had been tackled before in American films, most notably in King Vidor's The Big Parade and Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front. Kubrick used a German military adviser, a Baron no less, to help him re-create the trench warfare depicted so vividly in Paths of Glory. The trenchworks and the terrain of No Man's Land (the cratered, barb-wired stretch of land between the enemy trenches) that the production constructed reminded me of Siegfried Sassoon's lines from his poem "Aftermath":

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz—
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench—
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?

The scenes also make one aware of how immobile and unchanging the war had been for two years. Having been a soldier myself (although I never saw combat), watching the battle scenes in Paths of Glory is tough going, even after watching it for the fourth time.

But what makes the scenes most effective is Kubrick's avoidance of the worst mistake that so many directors make in such scenes: momentary departures from the perspective of the soldiers to a panoramic, or bird's eye, view. Even Steven Spielberg committed this error in Saving Private Ryan during the landing scene when he cut away to show us the view of the beach from a German pill box. Kubrick twice shows us a periscopic view of the French lines during his battle scene, but it was used to show us what General Murot sees from the safety of his command post in the rear.

It is 1916. After two years of fighting that has resulted in staggering casualties and a virtual strategic stalemate along a front stretching from Belgium to Switzerland, two French generals conceive yet another offensive to take a position known as the "Ant-Hill." General Murot, who sees it as an opportunity for promotion, goes directly to the front line to inform Colonel Dax, commander of a battalion holding the position closest to the objective of the plan. Dax objects to the plan but assures the General that he will lead the attack himself. When the attack takes place, and the Ant-Hill is not reached by the French soldiers, Dax discovers that many of the men in his battalion never left their trenches. When Murot learns of this, he orders the artillery battery to open fire on their own lines, but a radio operator refuses to relay the order to the guns. Murot demands that a hundred men from the battalion be shot for cowardice, but he settles for just three. Colonel Dax, a former defense attorney, volunteers to defend the three soldiers, who are chosen at random. But the trial is a sham and the men are sentenced to death. When Dax is offered General Murot's position, he angrily refuses it and he is told that the men of his battalion are being ordered back to the front.

The film has serious weaknesses. The acting is uneven because there were two different kinds of actors in the film. George Macready and Adolphe Menjou, crusty old Hollywood veterans, do their best with their roles. They were both expert at playing villains, except that their roles in Paths of Glory were based on actual people in actual situations. Their performances make this a little hard to believe. When they are onscreen with actors whose concentration is on their characters rather than the camera, they seem unreal.

But the two generals they play are quite good at reminding the viewer of what every soldier knows: that they are being commanded by old men who have neither knowledge nor interest in the hazards they endure daily. When it is agreed that some of the men will be court martialled for cowardice, General Murot wants a hundred men shot. He's talked down to twelve before he then proposes just three. The numbers are a clear reminder of Genesis, in which Abraham talks to the Lord, who "sat in the tent door in the heat of the day." He tells Abraham that Sodom and its inhabitants is to be destroyed, but Abraham asks him if within the city he can find fifty righteous would He "spare the place." The Lord agrees. Then Abraham talks him down to forty-five, then forty, then thirty, until he gets to ten.

Watching Kirk Douglas, who celebrated his 99th birthday on December 9, it's easy to see what attracted him to the role of Colonel Dax. We're reminded that it's his film when we see him for the first time, shirtless, showing off a physique he was evidently proud of. His impressive pecs are almost as famous as his cleft chin.Paths of Glory is a powerful indictment of the stupidity and ambition of the commanders who were prosecuting the war, but it does not go easy on the common soldiers, either, who are represented as sometimes courageous but also incredibly thick, even sheepish when ordered to go "over the top" to almost certain death. Some of the soldiers are played by actors whom Kubrick directed before and since, like Joseph Turkel and Timothy Carey (despite Carey's being fired during the shoot). They're familiar faces to Kubrick fans, but their acting is noticeably off. When Carey starts bawling when he learns he is to be executed, I wondered what kept Kubrick from firing him sooner.

Some of the film's irony is unnecessarily pointed. The music under the opening credits is the Marseillaise. I remember reading a review by Truffaut that contemptuously mentioned an inaccuracy in the comportment of the soldiers (Truffaut served in the French army). What Truffaut didn't know was that, by law, the uniforms and comportment of soldiers in a film cannot be a hundred per cent accurate. And I could be wrong, but I find it hard to believe that a firing squad would have been conducted smack in front of a chateau in which the general staff is headquartered.

Then there is the ending, which occupies the final six minutes of the film. There was, according to Kubrick's producer, James Harris, to be a "happy ending" that was actually in the novel and was put in the script. The ending that was shot wasn't exactly happy, but was so oddly inconsistent with the grim tone of the rest of the film that some critics (correctly, I think) regarded it as a cop out.  Many others, however, think the scene is some kind of affirmation of humanity.

In the closing scene, a crowd of French soldiers from Colonel Dax's regiment is drinking noisily in a tavern. Dax stops outside the tavern and looks inside. The owner of the tavern appears on an improvised stage above the tables and introduces a pretty young girl. The men react predictably with whistles and jeers. Calling for quiet, the man explains to the soldiers that the girl is German. The tavern owner tells the girl to sing, so she sings the only song she can think of - a sentimental song about a German "hussar." The effect of her quiet, amateurish singing brings tears to many of the soldiers eyes and many of them join her, humming the tune. Dax looks at the ground, knowing that the men are soon to return to the front, tells his adjutant to let them alone for a little longer, then turns and walks away.

The scene is so inconsistent with everything that comes before it that it almost seems transplanted from another film. The only excuse for its existence is the fact that the German girl, identified as Susanne Christian in the credits, became Christiane Kubrick, Kubrick's wife, shortly after shooting was completed, and they remained married for the rest of Kubrick's life.

Paths of Glory is much more than just an above-average Hollywood film. It is an achingly vivid, nervy, and highly original look at war. And Kubrick would expand on what he learned about shooting combat scenes in the assault on Burpleson Air Force Base in his masterpiece Dr. Strangelove, the ultimate statement about the madness of Mutual Assured Destruction (M.A.D.).