The Five Forty Eight

When Blake stepped out of the elevator, he saw her.


In the autumn of 1979, WNET in New York, one of the oldest and most successful public television stations in America, aired a trio of programs for its Great Performances series called 3 Cheever Stories. Three different directors and three different script-writers adapted the John Cheever stories "The Sorrows of Gin," "O Youth and Beauty," and "The Five-Forty-Eight." Despite their presentation on television, the three episodes are three films, shot on celluloid, conceived as stand-alone films, each one an hour in length. The stories were written in the 1950s, "a long-lost world," wrote Cheever in the preface of The Stories of John Cheever, "when the city of New York was filled with a river light, when you heard Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat." The stories are dated, but in that sort of dating that never impedes the ongoing lives of their characters. They live and breathe, perhaps forever, through Cheever's prose. "The constants that I look for in this sometimes dated paraphernalia are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being."

Cheever was offered a chance to adapt the stories for television himself, but he declined. According to Ralph Tyler, in his New York Times notice of the programs, 'An attempt to mount some of his New Yorker magazine short stories on Broadway, under the title “Town House,” flopped in 1948. Each of his four novels has been optioned by Hollywood, including his 1977 best seller “Falconer,” but no film has yet appeared; the 1968 movie “The Swimmer,” based on one of his short stories, made no great box‐office splash despite scattered applause from the critics’ bleachers. Mr. Cheever, himself, has said: “It's my belief that no really first‐rate novel can be filmed. Literature goes to where the camera is not.”'(1) Cheever's objections aside, he wrote an original teleplay that was eventually produced as "The Shady Hill Kidnapping" in 1982 for WNET's American Playhouse.

The television adaptations, however, updated the three stories to the present - 1979 - which has had the strange effect, forty years later, of making them seem more dated than the stories themselves. Another problem is the films, though not quite feature-length, required some padding - additional material not in the stories. The best of the 3 Cheever Stories is The Five Forty Eight,(2) which was directed by James Ivory, scripted by Terrence McNally, and photographed by Andrzej Bartkowiak. The ambient aspect of film (which barely exists any more) that can ease the viewer into a sense of a character's life as it is lived, is used well by Ivory. For instance, Blake, an ad executive, spends some time in the film doing nothing but gazing through his office window at attractive women working in offices in the next building. One of them watches him watching her. At one point, Blake even mentions this to his wife when she calls to tell him that an old friend has had a heart attack, contributing to our sense of the creepy stage at which his marriage has arrived. This is Ivory's contribution - also that Blake has a stack of dirty magazines in his desk, which he keeps covered (a nice touch) with a copy of the Wall Street Journal.

Blake takes advantage of his secretary, Miss Dent, a damaged, emotionally needy young woman. Then, the very next day, he fires her, without explanation. Something to do with her history of eight months in a Catholic institution, but also because something that Blake meant so casually - having sex with her - is taken far too seriously by her. So, after trying to see him in his office - to no avail - she lays in wait for him with a pistol in her purse, rides with him on the train to Shady Hill, Cheever's beautifully imagined Westchester train stop where so many of his stories are set. They wait until the platform is deserted, then she takes him into the rough underbrush away from the station where no one will see, orders him at gunpoint onto his knees, then on his belly, and pushes his face in the mud with her foot. After waiting awhile for the gun to go off, but hearing nothing, Blake looks up and she has gone. "He got to his feet and picked up his hat from the ground where it had fallen [in the film, instead of his hat it's his briefcase] and walked home."

Cheever opens his story like a thriller - a man is being followed through the streets of Manhattan by a woman who may want to harm him. Ivory's film opens with the story's climax - a woman (Mary Beth Hurt) pointing a gun at a man (Laurence Luckinbill) and ordering him to lie down on the ground. But then the film reveals it was a nightmare that the man is having.(3) It puzzles me why the dream was used, since it suggests that Blake has such a guilty conscience for what he did to Miss Dent that his unconscious mind punishes him for it (which would be out of character) or that Blake can see the future.

But this film, on its own merits, is an overlooked gem. Laurence Luckinbill has the dubious swagger of a ladies man, his conceitedness, but he also shows us his fear of a scorned woman, his helplessness when the tables are turned on him and Miss Dent is in control. The look on his face on the platform, when he finds there's no way out, captures the pang of this beautiful Cheever sentence: "The last man looked at his watch, looked at the rain, and then walked off into it, and Blake saw him go as if they had some reason to say goodbye - not as we say goodbye to friends after a party but as we say goodbye when we are faced with an inexorable and unwanted parting of the spirit and the heart."

But the highest praise must go to Mary Beth Hurt, who gives Miss Dent a vital presence that Cheever, for all his art, only hints at. When Blake asks her if she might have a drink with him after work, we have a genuine sense of her loneliness when she boldly tells him, "I have some whiskey at my place." When Blake accompanies her to her apartment, we know from their first embrace how lost she is, and how a rotter like Blake is going to treat her. She suffers from her emotions because she doesn't know how to control them. Blake's world is one of façades, of polite inhumanity, and he is perfectly suited to it.

One is left wondering at the end of the film if Blake has learned anything from the lesson that Miss Dent has given him. She, however, has triumphed over an ultimately shallow egoist, and got the better of her own heart. "Oh, I ought to feel sorry for you," she tells him when they're alone in the coalyard. "Look at your poor face. But you don't know what I've been through. I'm afraid to go out in the daylight. I'm afraid the blue sky will fall down on me. I'm like poor Chicken-Licken. I only feel like myself when it begins to get dark. But still and all I'm better than you. I still have good dreams sometimes. I dream about picnics and heaven and tbe brotherhood of man, and about castles in the moonlight and a river with willow trees all along the edge of it and foreign cities, and after all I know more about love than you." Yes. She does.


(1) "How a Trio Of Cheever Stories Made It to TV" by Ralph Tyler, The New York Times, October 14, 1979.
(2) Cheever hyphenated the spelled-out numbers in the title. The film does not.
(3) Significantly, in Blake's dream we hear the gun go off just before he awakes.

Leap Year

Lord Chief Justice. Your means are very slender, and your waste is
great.
Falstaff. I would it were otherwise; I would my means were greater
and my waist slenderer.

Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I


Mack Sennett, the father of American film comedy, had an eye for talent. He made millions of dollars with his one-reelers that were shown everywhere that films could reach. But he could never hang on to his talented performers because he refused to pay them more than he was making. One by one, his most successful comics, including Charlie Chaplin, Harry Langdon, and Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, left Sennett for more lucrative contracts with other movie studios.

In his groundbreaking essay, "Comedy's Greatest Era" (1949), James Agee concentrated on the Big Four - the four most dominant silent film comics, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Harry Langdon. Walter Kerr's book The Silent Clowns (1976) does the same, while granting additional space to the silent films of Laurel and Hardy, as well as a forgotten clown named Raymond Griffith, whose reputation failed to benefit from Kerr's attempt at rehabilitation. One silent clown, however, has been in desperate need of rediscovery since he suffered a catastrophic fall from stardom in 1921. The standard texts on the subject of silent film comedy mention the name Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle only in connection with Chaplin, who worked with him in a handful of Mack Sennett one-reelers in 1914, and Buster Keaton, who first appeared in Arbuckle's films from 1917. For a short time, once he escaped from Sennett, Arbuckle was as popular as Chaplin, writing and directing several films a year. His physical size was matched by his value to producers when Paramount enticed him away from Sennett in 1914 with a $1,000 a day contract and 25% of the profits from his films. He was teamed with Mabel Normand for a string of comedies of which he had total creative control. In 1916 he formed his own company, Comique, and his fame continued to soar. In his two-reeler The Butcher Boy (1917), Arbuckle introduced to the world a Vaudeville performer named Buster Keaton, and when, in 1918, Paramount offered Arbuckle a $3M contract for three feature films, he gave Keaton controlling interest in Comique.

Arbuckle was one of an old tradition of rotund comic figures. Shakespeare's Falstaff is one of the oldest examples, and John Belushi, John Candy, and Chris Farley are a few of the newer ones. Arbuckle was certainly aware that his size had something to do with his fame, but he bristled at being called "Fatty", insisting that "I have a name." But his size would become a part of the undoing of his career, when a false accusation and three outrageous trials, accompanied by a torrent of unsubstantiated gossip, ruined his reputation and convinced the powers in Hollywood to never allow him to work again in front of the camera. A young woman named Virginia Rappe turned up at a party that Arbuckle threw in San Francisco over the Labor Day weekend in 1921, and she died three days later. Evidence from her autopsy suggest that she must've died of peritonitis brought on by a botched abortion. But none of this evidence emerged until much later. Within days of her death, a friend of Rappe went to the police with a manufactured story accusing Arbuckle of raping Rappe. Tabloid news took this slander against Arbuckle and ran with it, and before long they were printing the story that it was Arbuckle's heavy girth that had crushed Rappe, causing the peritonitis by rupturing her internal organs. None of it was true.

Charged with manslaughter, Arbuckle's first two trials ended with hung juries. The third, however, ended with a unanimous verdict of acquittal and an apology from the jury foreman. But the tabloid circus had already done its damage. An enormous moral backlash was sweeping America since the passage in 1920 of the notorious Volstead Act, which brought about the Prohibition era. The intolerable rumors about Arbuckle's wild party, as well as other high profile Hollywood scandals, caused such concern among movie moguls that it led to the formation of the Hays Office, headed by former congressman Will H. Hays, a self-censorship organ that cracked down on sexually explicit and even suggestive content in movies. Despite Arbuckle's vindication, six days later Hays ordered that he be permanently banned from working in the American film industry, and that his previous films should be suppressed. This led to the wholesale destruction of every print of an Arbuckle film that every company and distributor had in their possession. Virtually broke, Arbuckle had already sold his house and automobiles to pay for his legal defense. To help support him, Buster Keaton, who stood by Arbuckle at the risk of own career, signed over 35% of all profits from his own production company. In December 1922, the ban was lifted, but Arbuckle worked thereafter under an assumed name (William Goodrich) and only as a director.

Fortunately for all of us, the effects of the scandal didn't reach Europe, where Arbuckle was still considered the equal of the Big Four and his films were preserved. In Leap Year, completed just prior to that fateful Labor Day weekend in 1921, Arbuckle plays Stanley Piper, nephew of tightwad millionaire Jeremiah Piper, who is in love with the old man's nurse, Phyllis Brown, who has a "sanitary hair-cut" that predates Louise Brooks's by a few years. Jeremiah fires the nurse and sends Stanley to Catalina Island to get him away from women. Of course, Catalina is crawling with women and Stanley, who still wants to marry Phyllis, finds that he has to fight them off.

As played by Arbuckle, Stanley isn't at all like the useless rich guy played by Buster Keaton in The Navigator, who can't even shave himself. Stanley's weaknesses are a stammer that can only be relieved by a drink of water, and women, most of whom find they can't resist him - when they know what he stands to inherit. When three women on Catalina, to whom he turns for love advice, mistake his confidences for marriage proposals, his response is the same: he jumps up and down like he's standing on hot coals and he runs away like Seabiscuit. The film varies his avenues of escape. The first time, he's on a golf course with a tiny black kid as his caddy. When the girl tries to embrace him, he grabs the kid by the hand and makes a mad dash across the green, with the kid hanging on to the golf bag. Mercifully, in mid-course, Stanley stops, grabs the kid, deposits him in the golf bag and drags it the rest of the way to the hotel. On the second occasion, he runs away from another girl straight into the ocean. When he swims past a yacht anchored offshore (his straw hat still affixed to his head), a third girl invites him aboard. When he confesses his love for nurse Phyllis and the girl thinks it's a proposal to her, Stanley dives overboard and swims back toward shore.

Back at Piper Hall, just when the plot begins to grow tedious, Stanley feigns fits to scare away his three fiancées, and Arbuckle gets to show off his skills at physical comedy - pratfalling and back-flipping like a landed fish. But none of his stunts succeed in scaring the girls away. After a climax involving his rejuvenated uncle, his butler becoming a Lord, multiple magistrates, marriage licences, and a chase in and around Piper Hall, all's well when the film ends, with Stanley and Phyllis shaking hands at their engagement.

Leap Year (a meaningless title) isn't up to Arbuckle's best work, which can be seen in his two-reelers like Love and The Hayseed. The problem wasn't Arbuckle but the script, credited to Sarah Y. Mason and Walter Woods. Arbuckle was formerly cast as a working class character, not as a silly heir to a tightwad millionaire. Despite his size, his performance is tightly controlled. Arbuckle's agility - his strength - was remarkable for a man his size. His movements often have the grace of a dancer, and in Sennett's knockabout comedies he became a virtual acrobat, since knowing how to fall was half the battle. But he simply doesn't look at ease in riding boots or golfing togs. And the business of Stanley's stammer (cured with a glass of water) becomes tedious after its third or fourth appearance.

All this is academic, however, when you consider that Leap Year was never released in the U.S. It finally premiered in 1924 - in FINLAND. Considered lost for decades, a print was found in the 1980s and the film was finally given its first American theatrical release in 1981, 60 years after its completion. In the November 1920 issue of Screenland magazine, Arbuckle wrote of his Paramount "five-reelers": "I am satisfied and hope everybody else is satisfied,and that I am on the right track. And I hope the public is going to devour these new five-reelers as a small boy devours jam. They are clean and wholesome, just as my pictures always were. They are made for the whole family - and that's what is needed in these days of the silent drama."(1) A year later, embroiled in a legal fight for his reputation and his freedom, Arbuckle's words perhaps came back to haunt him.


(1) "FROM SLAPSTICK TO LEGIT: Roscoe (Fatty) Arbuckle tells how it feels to work in Five Reelers," Screenland Magazine, November 1920.

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.

The Judge and the Murderer

Bertrand Tavernier's The Judge and the Murderer was his third film (his third masterpiece), after The Clockmaker (1974) and Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975). It is set in the 1890s - Zola's era (Zola is denounced from a pulpit in an early scene) - and yet it feels magnificently modern. The settings and costumes sometimes resemble the subjects of French painters of the period, like Georges Seurat, the inventor of pointillism. And Tavernier's style also seems pointillistic, applying countless details, like colored dots, that, when we step back from them, take on the shape of real people and places.

Based on an account of the murderer ("assassin" in French means "murderer") Joseph Vaché (called Bouvier in the film), The Judge and the Murderer concerns an egocentric judge named Rousseau (Philippe Noiret) who seizes the opportunity to make a name for himself in his Provence town by catching and prosecuting a man who has made his progress from Normandy all the way to the southeast corner of France, leaving behind him a trail of grisly murders, mostly of young girls and boys. But the man in the film who commits these terrible crimes, Bouvier (Michel Galabru), obviously cannot help himself since he has to live with two bullets in his brain that, when they move around in the non-solid brain tissue, give him seizures and drives him momentarily insane. This diagnosis may sound glib, but it was never admitted as evidence in the man's defense.

Bouvier's life is set on its unfortunate course when he is kicked out of the army because of a suicide attempt. Still wearing his uniform, he pursues an attractive maid named Louise, with whom he has become infatuated. But his increasingly erratic behavior, like following Louise into a church during Sunday service to impress on her, even as she is taking communion, to accept his advances, become intolerable. Louise spurns him, and in retaliation, Bouvier shoots her three times and himself twice in the head. He is placed in an asylum where an attempt is made to operate on his head wounds, but the attempt is abandoned when the doctor is confronted with an apoplectic patient, screaming obscenities and anarchist slogans. Bouvier is released as "cured," despite his protestations that he is not. As soon as he is released, he begins his long trek south and his murders commence. Upon his capture, the actual killer, Vaché (both Bouvier and Vaché are common names for a "shepherd") confessed to eleven murders, but may have killed more than twenty-seven. His name became associated with Jack the Ripper, as "the French Ripper" and "L'éventreur du Sud-Est" ("the South-east Ripper").

Tavernier has a taste for detective fiction, which was reflected in his choices of novels by Simenon and Jim Thompson, but also in his narrative structure. In The Judge and the Murderer, Rousseau becomes obsessed with solving the murder cases (which often included rape and sodomy) that led to the capture of Bouvier. He catalogs their forensic details with a thoroughness that was unprecedented. In fact, the solving of the Vaché case is often credited with the creation of forensic science. 

The quite modern problem presented by the story of Joseph Bouvier is one of responsibility. Is Bouvier responsible - legally, mentally, and morally - for his crimes? Legally, there wasn't much room for such a question in late 19th-century France. Insanity pleas were a novelty, but mental incompetence was an obvious factor, because of the brain damage, albeit self-inflicted, that Bouvier suffered as a result of the two bullets he shot into his head. Bouvier confesses to eleven murders, and even cooperates with the investigation, somehow confident that his insanity plea will save him from the gallows. Rousseau, however, is determined that it shall not, and orders that Bouvier be examined, but only so that he should be declared competent. Tavernier gives Bouvier various opportunities to shout political slogans that establish his anarchist allegiances. When his conviction and sentence become clear to him, he vows that he will not take part in his execution. Accordingly, he is dragged by his guards to the gallows. Joseph Vaché was guillotined on New Year's Eve 1898.

The character of Rousseau, magnificently played by Philippe Noiret, becomes increasingly unsympathetic as the drama proceeds and his cynical treatment of the prisoner in his charge becomes clearer. Two characters, Villedieu, an attorney, and Rose, a village girl who is Rousseau's mistress (Rousseau is unmarried and lives with his mother), offer the viewer some contrast to the limitations in Rousseau's character - although he bullies both of them. Villedieu is beautifully played by Jean-Claude Brialy, and his reasonable objections to Rousseau's determination to make justice do only what he wants drives him to despair and, for this and undisclosed reasons, he kills himself. Rose, though initially passive, grows so intolerant of Rousseau's abuses (there is a scene in which Rousseau, perhaps inspired by Bouvier's crimes, sodomizes her), she leaves him and, at the close of the film that returns us to history, visits Bouvier's first victim, Louise, and joins a village strike, singing the words of a popular Communard song, as soldiers arrive to suppress the strike.

The script for The Judge and the Murderer is credited to Jean Aurenche and Tavernier, from an original idea developed by Tavernier and Pierre Bost. Aurenche and Bost, a legendary script-writing team in France, were unfairly black-balled in 1954 by then-Cahier du Cinéma critic François Truffaut. Attempting to perhaps correct this injustice, the two were coaxed out of retirement by Tavernier in 1974 to help him write The Clockmaker, which was based on a Georges Simenon novel. Bost died in December 1975, before the script for The Judge and the Murderer was completed. Aurenche would assist Tavernier one more time, co-writing Coup de Torchon (1981). And in loving tribute to Bost, Tavernier adapted his novel Monsieur Ladmiral va bientôt mourir for his film A Sunday in the Country (1984).

The Judge and the Murderer, like other Tavernier films, has been especially difficult to get hold of since its initial release. I first saw it (twice) on Telefrance in the early '80s, and I've since managed to locate it online, but aside from a Conoisseur Video version and a Laserdisc, it remains unavailable on DVD. This is a problem because the film is not only one of the best French films from the 1970s, but it was met with respectful incomprehension, with notable exceptions, by American critics. For example, in her New York Times review, Janet Maslin was obviously confused: "Judge Rousseau (Philippe Noiret) takes on the task of deciding whether the murderer, Sgt. Joseph Bouvier (Michel Galabru), is a madman or a fraud." Nonsense. Rousseau is not only convinced that Bouvier is a homicidal maniac, he is determined that the detail of his insanity will not save him from the guillotine. The sensational details of the murders (which he coolly relates to his unfazed mother) made national headlines in France, and Vaché's story gripped readers. Later, Maslin states: "after Bouvier is apprehended, the Judge examines him over and over, trying to determine whether the man's claims of insanity are to be believed." (1) Rousseau knows that Bouvier must be insane, but he doesn't care. He tricks Bouvier into convincing everyone else that he is sane so he can condemn him.

Tavernier evokes the period brilliantly, especially through the virulent anti-Semitism that provoked the Dreyfus Case. Bouvier, in fact, emerges as a strange kind of hero of the story, since he is the victim of the injustice forced on him by Rousseau. Incredibly, he arouses in the viewer more sympathy than Rousseau does. Noiret and Galabru become adversaries in the grim struggle over Bouvier's "insanity" defense. The level of acting between them is peerless. Philippe Sarde supplied the film with music that is movingly passionate, especially the ballads written for the film and sung by Jean-Roger Caussimon. This multi-layered and powerful film leaves the viewer with much to ponder about justice and responsibility. 


(1) Maslin also makes an incomprehensible statement regarding the film's "period": "Mr. Tavernier's 'The Clockmaker' and his 'Let Joy Reign Supreme' belong to the same period as this 1975 film". Does she mean that the three films were made at the same time or set in the same period? The Clockmaker is set in contemporary (1974) France, while Let Joy Reign Supreme is set in the 18th century.

Sense of Security

Imagine two people - neighbors living next door to each other in an apartment building. (They might even be friends, but it's unlikely, as America's political divide dictates.) In one apartment, a man lives alone, has a steady job, goes about his daily life, and goes to bed at night, sleeping soundly with his front door and sliding glass back door securely locked. In the second apartment, a man lives alone, has a steady job, goes about his daily life, and goes to bed at night - but he sleeps fitfully, sometimes awakened by "sounds" that may, he thinks, be caused by someone trying to break into his apartment. So the second man gets an extra lock for his front door, and puts a metal rod in the runner of his glass back door. But the sounds he hears at night persist. So he pays for a security service and installs an alarm. Then he gets a dog, and pays the deposit to his landlord to have it. Finally, when he still can't sleep, he purchases a Smith & Wesson .38 calibur pistol, and loads it with semi-jacketed hollow point rounds (for greater stopping power). But even with the loaded gun lying within reach in the night table drawer, he can't sleep soundly, and gets up in the morning, still tired.

Now, the question I have to ask is: will building a wall on the border with Mexico help the second guy get some sleep?

Now imagine, as hard as it might be, living in a place where you feel so secure and safe that, when you leave your house to go run an errand, you don't feel the need to lock your door. You walk away from your house not thinking "Oops! I forgot to lock the door." You don't even have to think about it. You just do it. The door closes behind you and you go and get in your car and you drive away and never once does it occur to you that you forgot to lock your door. The next question I want to ask some people is, would you want to live in such a place - such a town, such a state of our Union? Because there are such places. I have visited some of them.

As a lifelong city-dweller, I would still lock my door if I lived in such a place, and not from force of habit. Maybe it would take me years to get over the natural sense of insecurity that I developed over the years of living in cities. Maybe I would never get over it. There are some who would say that the people who don't lock their doors are simply asking for trouble. The trusting attitude they have is an invitation to criminals. There is always someone who might not even have a criminal mentality who is looking for just such an opportunity to take advantage of people who feel so secure they don't think about having to lock their doors. And they don't lose any sleep trying to remember if they did or they didn't do it.

I can guarantee that there are some people who would not want to live in such a place. It seems to me that such people have become defined by their insecurity. It has shaped their politics and their world-view. When they look around them and notice how many people don't look like them and don't share their ethnic history, whose ancestors came from a different place, who perhaps worship a strange god, worship in a strange church that probably isn't called a church - they feel threatened, as if their way of life were under siege and their country were no longer the exclusive property of people like them. And politicians have become expert at capitalizing on their insecurity. Rather than trying to assuage it, they exacerbate it. And Fox News fans their hate. Turn on Fox News any day and they will feature a story about an "illegal" committing some egregious crime against an American citizen.

We have all grown unnaturally paranoid about the tiniest things. Driving to work in the mornings, did we remember to turn off the iron? The thought that, if we didn't, we might return home to a pile of ashes that was our house gets under our skin. But we can't turn around and go back every time such a thought occurs to us when we drive away from our homes. So we adapt. We no longer react to our paranoia, as justified as it may it be. We adapt to the risks. We have to. Otherwise we would never accomplish anything. Think about the McAlister family, who, going through the exhaustive details of their Christmas vacation away from home, left behind their youngest child twice. They had the feeling that they forgot something, but they can't figure out what it was until it's too late. This is why Murphy's Law was invented. To drive us all crazy. I once worked as a security guard in a complex of medical office buildings, and after I was trained about all the little insignificant things I had to check to make sure nothing went wrong, and after doing it for a number of weeks, I understood that there is no such thing as Murphy's Law. Because if all the things that could go wrong did go wrong, the world would fly to pieces.

And I will admit that, though I have never felt unsafe in my apartment and I never lost any sleep because of noises I might have mistaken for burglars, if I was the second man I described above and I felt that I needed to buy a lethal weapon and keep it within reach just so I would feel more secure, I would move. And if I lived in a country where politicians and pundits had convinced me that the best thing in the world to insure a good night's sleep for me was a 2,000 mile wall on the border with Mexico, I would migrate to Canada.

So on the last day of 2018, a year to which I was not especially attached (it made me 60, after all), I will kiss my nearest (if not my dearest) at the stroke of midnight, turn off the lights, lock my front door, and sleep soundly, rising to pee only two or three times. The world is full of strangers.

Happy New Year.

Simon Said

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

The Seventh Seal

Listening to some considerably lesser filmmakers than Ingmar Bergman ridicule his film The Seventh Seal has compelled me to look at it again. It was my very first Bergman film, which was shown at some parent/teacher meeting in 1972 or '73 when I was attending a Catholic school. A nun (most of my teachers were nuns, which only became a problem when we were instructed in sex education) had seen the film and had given in to its religious implications. As I learned later on, Bergman had been preoccupied with the ultimate question - the great WHY of existence - when he made the film, but he came up with the novel approach of addressing it directly rather than obliquely. Not long after he made it, however, he lost interest in the subject, even though it continued to appear in several of his subsequent films. But it was no longer a problem to be solved for him, but only a problem without ready-made solutions. (It is in this respect that I am one of those critics who found Wild Strawberries unsatisfying, since it confronts Isak Borg's imminent death momentarily, but loses its nerve, probably because Bergman loved Victor Sjöström too much to see through with his quietus. He is given an utterly unconvincing contented ending instead.)

However much Bergman may have moved on from the issues he confronts in The Seventh Seal, it is a stimulating confrontation. He didn't settle the matter, he simply let go of it. The argument (put forward by Alexander Payne in the documentary Trespassing Bergman) that the film somehow no longer "holds up" is preposterous. What he meant to say, of course, is that filmmakers no longer have the balls to confront such unwieldy subjects. Barry Levinson includes a scene in his masterpiece, Diner, in which two of his characters are in a Baltimore movie theater watching The Seventh Seal. When Death appears, Steve Guttenberg asks Tim Daly who that's supposed to be. "Death," Daly replies. "Oh, come on," Guttenberg says. "I've been to Atlantic City a thousand times and I never saw Death walking on the beach." "It's symbolic," Daly tells him.

But, of course, it's NOT symbolic at all. It isn't a symbol of Death in The Seventh Seal, walking on that stony beach, but Death personified. After the typically terse opening credits, a title appears that reads: It is the middle of the 14th century. Antonius Blok and his squire, after long years as crusaders in the Holy Land, have at last returned to their native Sweden, a land ravaged by the Black Plague.

We then hear a voiceover intoning lines from the New Testament's Book of Revelation, Chapter 8: "And when the Lamb had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. . . . And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound." The opening scene is justly famous, but it has contributed to an image of Bergman that he had to work long and hard to escape. At dawn, the knight and his squire are lying on a deserted beach. A figure dressed in black with a pale white face appears suddenly and startles the knight, who asks him "Who are you?" "I am Death," the man in black replies matter of factly.

Two scenes, early in the film, make Bergman's intentions explicit. Jof awakes in his wagon and tumbles out into the brilliant morning. As he practices juggling, he sees a woman and a baby walking alone together. Jof smiles ecstatically and rubs his eyes. But when he opens them again the woman and child are gone. He climbs back inside the wagon and wakes Mia, his wife.

JOF: Mia, wake up. Wake up! Mia, I've just seen something. I've got to tell you about it!
MIA: (sits up, terrified) What is it? What's happened?
JOF: Listen, I've had a vision. No, it wasn't a vision. It was real, absolutely real.
MIA: Oh, so you've had a vision again!
MIA's voice isfilled with gentle irony. JOF shakes his head and grabs her by the shoulders.
JOF: But I did see her!
MIA: Whom did you see?
JOF: The Virgin Mary.
MIA can't help being impressed by her husband's fervor. She lowers her voice.
MIA: Did you really see her?
JOF: She was so close to me that I could have touched her. She had a golden crown on her head and wore a blue gown with flowers of gold. She was barefoot and had small brown hands with which she was holding the Child and teaching Him to walk. And then she saw me watching her and she smiled at me. My eyes filled with tears and when I wiped them away, she had disappeared. And everything became so still in the sky and on the earth. Can you understand...
MIA: What an imagination you have.
JOF: You don't believe me! But it was real, I tell you, not the kind of reality you see every day, but a different kind.
MIA: Perhaps it was the kind of reality you told us about when you saw the Devil painting our wagon wheels red, using his tail as a brush.
JOF: (embarrassed) Why must you keep bringing that up?
MIA: And then you discovered that you had red paint under your nails.
JOF: Well, perhaps that time I made it up. (eagerly) I did it just so that you would believe in my other visions. The real ones. The ones that I didn't make up.
MIA: (severely) You have to keep your visions under control. Otherwise people will think that you're a half-wit, which you're not. At least not yet as far as I know. But, come to think of it, I'm not so sure about that.
JOF: (angry) I didn't ask to have visions. I can't help it if voices speak to me, if the Holy Virgin appears before me and angels and devils like my company.

But Jof IS a fool - the kind whose truths are mistaken for jokes. The second scene that makes Bergman's intentions somewhat more explicit is in a church where Jons encounters a man painting inside.

To the right of the entrance there is a large fresco on the wall, not quite finished. Perched on a crude scaffolding is a PAINTER wearing a red cap and paint-stained clothes. He has one brush in his mouth, while with another in his hand he outlines a small, terrified human face amidst a sea of other faces.
JONS: What is this supposed to represent?
PAINTER: The Dance of Death.
JONS: And that one is Death?
PAINTER: Yes, he dances off with all of them.
JONS: Why do you paint such nonsense?
PAINTER: I thought it would serve to remind people that they must die.
JONS: Well, it's not going to make them feel any happier.
PAINTER: Why should one always make people happy? It might not be a bad idea to scare them a little once in awhile.
JONS: Then they'll close their eyes and refuse to look at your painting.
PAINTER: Oh, they'll look. A skull is almost more interesting than a naked woman.
JONS: If you do scare them...
PAINTER: They'll think.
JONS: And if they think...
PAINTER: They'll become still more scared.
JONS: And then they'll run right into the arms of the priests.
PAINTER: That's not my business.
JONS: You're only painting your Dance of Death.
PAINTER: I'm only painting things as they are. Everyone else can do as he likes.
JONS: Just think how some people will curse you.
PAINTER: Maybe. But then I'll paint something amusing for them to look at. I have to make a living, at least until the plague takes me.

For all the talk about God and the Devil, Bergman made The Seventh Seal to directly confront his fear of death. There is a scene, shot in just one day, in which a procession of flagellants passes through a village, led by a half-crazed monk who screams at the gathering of townsfolk.

MONK: God has sentenced us to punishment. We shall all perish in the black death. You, standing there like gaping cattle, you who sit there in your glutted complacency, do you know that this may be your last hour? Death stands right behind you. I can see how his crown gleams in the sun. His scythe flashes as he raises it above your heads. Which one of you shall he strike first? You there, who stand staring like a goat, will your mouth be twisted into the last unfinished gasp before nightfall? And you, woman, who bloom with life and self-satisfaction, will you pale and become extinguished before the morning dawns? You back there, with your swollen nose and stupid grin, do you have another year left to dirty the earth with your refuse? Do you know, you insensible fools, that you shall die today or tomorrow, or the next day, because all of you have been sentenced? Do you hear what I say? Do you hear the word? You have been sentenced, sentenced!

The monk (impressively played by Anders Ek) never mentions salvation or damnation. Why bother, when Death is much more imposing and terrifying? It is as if Bergman himself stood on a stage and addressed us in the audience directly. "You back there with the swollen nose ..." If I were in the audience, perhaps I would suddenly feel self-conscious about my nose.

The film was made on a tight budget with the expert resources of Gunnar Fischer's utterly raw black-and-white imagery, P. A. Lundgren's inventively economic design, and Erik Nordgren's evocatively authentic-sounding music. Max von Sydow is imposing as Blok. Gunnar Björnstrand is marvelous as the skeptical squire, Jons. Nils Poppe probably got fed up with comparisons to Chaplin, but, for once, they are earned. Bibi Andersson is captivating as Mia. And there was no better Death than Bengt Ekerot.

I have mentioned before that fewer people are reading and being enthralled by Dante's The Divine Comedy because, since hardly anyone continues to believe in personal immortality, heaven and hell have ceased to be interesting to readers even as abstract concepts. But death continues to be a perplexing problem - a problem that needs to be faced, rather than solved. When Bergman wanted to address the problem, he refused to face it in the usual philosophical or metaphysical terms. Especially since film is - as it should be - so damned literal. People in films are given visions, but they never appear to us the way they appear to the character in the film - as visions. Some special photographic or lighting effect may give them a strangeness that signals to us that what we are seeing, through the character's eyes, isn't supposed to be taken literally. When Henry James wrote The Turn of the Screw, he clearly wanted the reader to continually wonder if the ghosts that the children's governess sees are genuine ghosts or simply figments of her - presumably sexually - overheated imagination.

But in The Seventh Seal Bergman wanted to treat his subject in an utterly unambiguous, head-on manner. So why do so many responsible people respond to the film the same way Steve Guttenberg did in Barry Levinson's Diner? Could it be because they're made uncomfortable by it? Sneering at the film doesn't diminish its power or invalidate its argument. As Philip Larkin wrote,

Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
("Aubade")

I think Larkin (and Bergman) would be incredulous of anyone who claimed that they weren't afraid of death. I think they would both have laughed at Woody Allen's line, "I'm not afraid of death. I just don't want to be around when it happens."