Shoot the Piano Player

In a 1971 interview with Charles Thomas Samuels, François Truffaut got rather defensive when Samuels asked him why he usually adapted trash novels to the screen: 

I have often been asked to direct great novels, like Camus' L'Etranger, Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes, Celine's Voyage au bout de la nuit, and Du cote de chez Swann. In each case my admiration for the book prevented me from making it into a film. Jules and Jim was an exception because it was so little known, and I wanted to increase its popularity by calling to it the attention of a large audience. However, despite what you say, I have never used a trash novel or a book I did not admire. Writers like David Goodis (author of Down There, the basis for Shoot the Piano Player) and William Irish (source for The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi Mermaid) have special value, and they have no counterparts in France. Here detective story writers are rotten, whereas in America writers as great as Hemingway work in that field. But because so many books appear each year in the States, these detective story writers are usually ignored. Ironically, this liberates them. Made humble by their neglect, they are free to experiment because they think no one is paying attention anyway. Not expecting to be analyzed, they put into their books anything they choose. But let me tell you something. After seeing Shoot the Piano Player and liking it, Henry Miller was asked to write an introduction for a new edition of Down There and therefore had to read the book. He then phoned me to say that he suddenly realized that whereas my film was good, the book was even better. So you see, I don't film trash. (1)

Truffaut contradicts himself here. If he wouldn’t adapt Camus or Proust because “[his] admiration for the book prevented [him] from making it into a film,” what stopped him with Goodis and Irish – especially if, as he contends, they “have special value”? Arguably, Truffaut did film trash novels. What he did with them is all that matters. I know this is the very heart of the “auteur theory,” which Truffaut was instrumental in codifying, but he would shoot holes through his famous theory with his later work. 

Bizarrely, but not surprisingly, Truffaut veered sharply away from his highly personal, emotionally rich debut feature film, Les 400 Coups into a deliberately artificial exploration of a demi-monde populated by damaged men and women, dominated by criminals. Shoot the Piano Player opens with a man being chased down a dark street by a car. He is Chico Saroyan (Albert Rémy), looking for the bar in which his brother Edouard (Charles Aznavour) plays piano. Edouard now goes by the stage name Charlie Koller, and by helping his brother evade the bad guys he embroils himself and a woman who loves him in a deadly plot. Léna (Marie Dubois – a stage name created for the actress by Truffaut) plays a waitress in the bar where Charlie plays the piano. She’s in love with him, and she also knows his secret, that he is the former concert pianist Edouard Saroyan, living in obscurity since the death by suicide of his wife. 

The opening scene in the film follows the novel’s but only so far. Then Truffaut’s poetry transforms Goodis's “hard boiled” writing (quite a few grades below Hemingway, who was the obvious model) into a recognizably human drama. A long conversation between two men in the film’s first scene as they walk along a street at night sets the tone for what’s to come: an artist took an initial setup from a pulp novel – a character literally on the run from an odd pair of killers – and fleshed out the stereotypes to create fully fledged characters in whose fates we take personal interest. Simply by managing to transcend his trash literary material only once, with Shoot the Piano Player Truffaut made a film that is at once a pastiche and a highly personal statement about men and women and about love. It has moments that are undeniably clumsy, like a comically bad shootout at the film’s climax. It also introduces devices that Truffaut used to better effect in his next film, Jules and Jim. But Piano Player reminds me far less of a divertimento, one perhaps played by the celebrated concert pianist Edouard Saroyan, than of an exquisite jazz ballad, a bittersweet torch song played by Charlie Koller and his combo.

I got hold of a copy of the Goodis novel, Down There (retitled Shoot the Piano Player when the film created renewed – and utterly undeserved – interest in it). I read the first few pages and found the writing is serviceable but dead on the page. 60 years after he made it, Truffaut’s film is still as refreshingly alive as ever. I’ve said this before about certain films of the late 1950s and early ‘60s, but the fearless artistry with which Piano Player was made, comparable to recordings by jazz artists of the era like Wes Montgomery and Erroll Garner (Garner is even mentioned in a voice-over in the film), is all the more exhilarating today for being long gone. Nobody makes films the way Piano Player was made any more. 

What Truffaut and Godard accomplished in their earliest works was to pay hommage to genre films by completely exploding genres. In Shoot the Piano Player, it isn’t the tough language or the sudden brutalities or a plot that somehow endows the action of the story with a meaning. Truffaut invests in tiny gestures – Charlie clumsily trying to touch Léna as they walk together, or standing outside the office door of the “impresario” trying to make up his mind to go in, fumbling with the door handle or raising a finger to push the doorbell – that cumulatively reveal his characters’ insipient humanity, presenting to the viewer a living world. 

In the film’s conclusion, Charlie/Edouard returns to his perch behind his piano, confirmed in his solitude. The amount of time Truffaut commits to the film’s climax and ending is remarkably brief (a mere five minutes) and sweeps the viewer along irresistibly, only to find himself deposited, like Charlie, back where he started – with a world of difference in emotion. 

(1) Encountering Directors (New York: Putnam, 1972).

The Plot Against America

We knew things were bad," my father told the friends he immediately sat down to phone when we got home, "but not like this. You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare. (Herman Roth upon returning from a trip to Washington, D.C. a few months into Charles Lindbergh’s presidency.) 

I didn’t watch the HBO adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America, so it’s hard for me to imagine how they managed to make Roth’s deceptive period drama about the Roth family in Weequahic, New Jersey in the years leading up to and during what should’ve been America’s entry into World War Two more convincing than Roth does. Because of its singular brilliance, Roth’s prose doesn’t translate well to the big or small screen. Published in 2004 to acclaim and commercial success, the novel presents to the reader a great yarn, but one to which the reader has to lend himself for it to be fully convincing. 

If you take the extreme view – which is a valid one – that the novel is the product of overactive Jewish paranoia, the TV series can’t have escaped such a charge as carefully as Roth does. The novel opens straightforwardly: “Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews.” As anyone knows who has done a little reading, American history is certainly not without its moments of burlesque. Unfortunately, neither is American literature. 

The “story” of The Plot Against America is told by Philip Roth, about the years of his boyhood. His father, Herman, sells insurance. His mother, Bess, manages the household. Philip has an older brother, Sandy. Some of these details will sound familiar to anyone acquainted with some of Roth’s past novels. Roth is able, as always, to capture the dailiness of the life of a family that had settled in a district of Newark, New Jersey that was almost exclusively Jewish. This wasn’t a peculiar situation in Newark – there were almost exclusively Italian and exclusively black districts. Every large American city was laid out in such a way. In the years leading up to World War Two, however, and during the horrific twenty-eight months of war that America watched from the sidelines, American Jews were confronted with groups that opposed American intervention in the war because Hitler didn’t want it. The Republican Party’s nomination of Charles Lindbergh for president in the 1940 election, and Lindbergh’s landslide win, sets the story into a spin in conjectureland from which nobody emerges unscathed. 

The novel is so much more compelling when it concentrates on the domestic problems of the Roth family and their neighbors – all of the telling moments in which little Philip observes the world around him – that it’s a shame that the twilight zone America that Roth describes with sometimes chilling details (Herman's long drive through West Virginia by night is especially unnerving) fails to seem real. 

Roth is so often criticized for his honest depiction of Jews, with all of their deficiencies on display, that to read his long passage about what makes them Jews is an emotional peak in the novel: 

These were Jews who needed no large terms of reference, no profession of faith or doctrinal creed, in order to be Jews, and they certainly needed no other language—they had one, their native tongue, whose vernacular expressiveness they wielded effortlessly and, whether at the card table or while making a sales pitch, with the easygoing command of the indigenous population. Neither was their being Jews a mishap or a misfortune or an achievement to be "proud" of. What they were was what they couldn't get rid of—what they couldn't even begin to want to get rid of. Their being Jews issued from their being themselves, as did their being American. It was as it was, in the nature of things, as fundamental as having arteries and veins, and they never manifested the slightest desire to change it or deny it, regardless of the consequences. 

Roth wants everyone to understand that he is a Jew but also, and with equal emphasis and pride, an American. Not a minor detail at a time – then as now – when some Americans, some white Christians, have the temerity to suggest that they, to the exclusion of everyone unlike them, are the only Americans, the first Americans. 

As soon as the alternate historical events enter the narrative, the novel becomes quite unwieldy. It isn’t because they’re unlikely – that the isolationism of Americans, whether in favor of Hitler or not, could reach such a hysterical pitch that, having already sat out more than two years of the war, it would simply remain seated while every nation in Europe and in Asia was invaded, bombed, and occupied, aroused my skepticism. And it certainly isn’t that I doubt Americans’ capacity for anti-Semitism or any other racial bias under the sun. Roth fails to make Charles Lindbergh much more than an enigma, despite the history of the man that we – barely – know. And I found it hard to believe that a sitting president would be permitted to exercise his fondness for flying by barnstorming daily – unaccompanied and unescorted – wherever his Spirit took him. As I mentioned earlier, these are too close to sheer burlesque. In fact, the novel itself could be called an Historical Burlesque on American history. 

Roth definitely did his homework researching historical figures. I didn’t know, for example, that New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was part Jewish. It’s too tempting to think that The Plot Against America should’ve been called The American Plot, that Roth’s sounding an alarm about the sinister forces of white supremacy in America is really just an exposé of the obvious, shining a bright light on aspects of American society that are hiding in plain sight. This is the opposite extreme from the argument made by one critic of the novel, Bill Kauffman, who forgot that he was reviewing a work of fiction and concluded that: 

This is a repellent novel, bigoted and libelous of the dead, dripping with hatred of rural America, of Catholics, of any Middle American who has ever dared stand against the war machine. All that is left, I suppose, is for the author to collect his Presidential Medal of Freedom. (1)

Kaufman evidently believes that there is one America, just as there is one American history. (Even if he stupidly, for the sake of his argument, gives legitimacy to the anti-war movement at a moment in history when it was completely untenable.) He doesn’t believe that, from the perspective of a Jewish kid in New Jersey, there could possibly be another America, just as he probably doesn’t recognize the enormous rift dividing the country today. 

Has surviving four years of Trump in the White House made The Plot Against America more prescient? HBO certainly thought so. What will always stay with me from my reading of the novel is Roth’s affectionate portrayal of what it was like to be a Jewish-American in the 20th Century, and what being an American fully means.

(1) "Heil to the Chief," The Ametican Conservative, September 27, 2004.

A Divided Life

We read so we don’t feel so alone. C. S. Lewis - or, rather, Anthony Hopkins playing C. S. Lewis in a film called Shadowlands - said that. We read so we don’t feel so alone. We’re lonely, but the loneliness expressed by others somehow lessens the feeling – the knowledge that someone else feels it, too, or felt it a thousand years ago. Of course we’re not alone in feeling so lonely in the world. So why should we always be surprised when we discover that someone else was there before us? Or even that someone is there right now, as they read this? 

Technically this is called “intersubjectivity,” which Oxford Reference defines as “The process and product of sharing experiences, knowledge, understandings, and expectations with others....Things and their meanings are intersubjective to the extent that we share common understandings of them.” The “shock of recognition” is what Melville called it: “For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.” 

But it’s also what can be called “numinous,” as defined by Merriam-Webster: 'Numinous is from the Latin word numen, meaning "divine will" or "nod" (it suggests a figurative nodding, of assent or of command, of the divine head). English speakers have been using numen for centuries with the meaning "a spiritual force or influence." We began using numinous in the mid-1600s, subsequently endowing it with several senses: "supernatural" or "mysterious" (as in "possessed of a numinous energy force"), "holy" (as in "the numinous atmosphere of the catacombs"), and "appealing to the aesthetic sense" (as in "the numinous nuances of her art").' 

This accounts for the “shock” that Melville describes, which is a kind of electric shock that happens when a connection is made. The etymology of the word "numinous," by the way, means "to wink." When we look at a work of art, or a myth, and something "winks" at us, then we know not only that we are also being seen, but that such an incarnated image is the carrier of those invisible energies. If it "winks" at us, it is recognizing something like it in us already, something of which we were heretofore unaware, perhaps. That is, re - cognition, like to like. 

A poet writes about an experience and we think, “I’ve done that" or "I’ve felt that way.” For 14 years, Home has been a collection of moments in time for me rather than a physical location. The moments are always there to return to, but the physical location has altered with the years. I went to Google Earth and looked at my sister’s house in Anchorage. It’s still there, much as she left it in 2008 when her bank repossessed it and sold it at auction. But I can’t go back to it, open the door with a key that I left behind with my sister, and climb the stairs to my room in the loft above the garage. The house that I lived in, not to mention my dear sister, are no longer there. As Brian Cox put it so beautifully, moments in time still exist, but we can no longer reach them. Because of the geometry of space-time, we are impelled to move inexorably into the future. 

But I’ve learned a very hard way that it is possible to live a double, a parallel life in one’s mind apart from one’s physical situation. When I was married and away from my wife, like when I waited 385 days for her to get her visa and join me in the States in 1995-96, or when I was in the Army stationed in South Korea in ‘98, I was effectively split in two; my body was located in one place, but my heart was in another, thousands of miles away. But that was when I was married – a common enough condition. 

Right now, and for the past 14 years, I have been physically located on a small island in the center of the Philippine archipelago, but I have projected myself, by conscious effort, those same thousands of miles away to my homeland, to the places and some of the people I’ve known, that I remember (since memories are all that I have left) as constituting the place I call home. 

Recently I encountered a poem by Raymond Carver that dramatizes a situation that all of us have been in at one time or another. But the specific situation, in its physical details, happens to be a perfect metaphor for what has happened to me this very long time away from home. Carver himself agrees that “If this sounds/like the story of a life, okay.” 

Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying to Get Back In 

You simply go out and shut the door 

without thinking. And when you look back 

at what you’ve done 

it’s too late. If this sounds 

like the story of a life, okay. 

It was raining. The neighbors who had 

a key were away. I tried and tried 

the lower windows. Stared 

inside at the sofa, plants, the table 

and chairs, the stereo set-up. 

My coffee cup and ashtray waited for me 

on the glass-topped table, and my heart 

went out to them. I said, Hello, friends, 

or something like that. After all, 

this wasn’t so bad. 

Worse things had happened. This 

was even a little funny. I found the ladder. 

Took that and leaned it against the house. 

Then climbed in the rain to the deck, 

swung myself over the railing 

and tried the door. Which was locked, 

of course. But I looked in just the same 

at my desk, some papers, and my chair. 

This was the window on the other side 

of the desk where I’d raise my eyes 

and stare out when I sat at that desk. 

This is not like downstairs, I thought. 

This is something else. 

And it was something to look in like that, unseen, 

from the deck. To be there, inside, and not be there. 

I don’t even think I can talk about it. 

I brought my face close to the glass 

and imagined myself inside, 

sitting at the desk. Looking up 

from my work now and again. 

Thinking about some other place 

and some other time. 

The people I had loved then. 

I stood there for a minute in the rain. 

Considering myself to be the luckiest of men. 

Even though a wave of grief passed through me. 

Even though I felt violently ashamed 

of the injury I’d done back then. 

I bashed that beautiful window. 

And stepped back in. 

What Carver encounters and recognizes in the telling of this poem is himself. If I can use one more Latin word, it is an adjustment, a mutatis mutandis, which I take to mean - in this context at least - is a glimpse of ourselves in a parallel existence – at once outside looking in and inside looking out. Entranced for a moment by the doppelgänger seated behind his desk, yet knowing that it is impossible, he shatters the window, the aperture through which he saw into the past. 

I hope my own revenance won’t require such an act of violence.

Jayne Mansfield's Car

IN THE JUNK STORE 

A small, straw basket 

Full of medals 

From good old wars 

No one recalls. 

I flipped one over 

To feel the pin 

That once pierced 

The hero’s swelling chest. 

- Charles Simic (1) 

You know, people say they don’t like to talk about war because it brings up bad memories, the nightmares and everything. I don’t believe that. I believe they don’t talk about it because nobody wants to hear it. (Skip Caldwell)

Since I moved away from the South 33 years ago, I have revisited it surreptitiously in novels and movies. The South is captured in every bit of its distinctiveness in the novels of Faulkner and the stories of Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor. When Walker Percy was asked why there were so many fine Southern writers, he put it bluntly: “Because we got beat!” 

The trouble with most movies about the South is that, rather than show us what it’s really like, they simply resort to the same tired clichés, reinforcing the ugliest image of the South introduced by Hollywood in the 60s. Who can forget the rednecks in Easy Rider or Deliverance? Yet nobody wanted to make Southerners the subject of a movie – a movie that wasn’t about plantation and slave owners or about maniacal murderers. 

Since he arrived practically on our doorsteps in 1996 with his remarkable film Sling Blade, Arkansas-born Billy Bob Thornton has been struggling against the attempts of celebrity to subdue his talent and turn him into a mere curiosity – a “one-hit wonder.” There was his well publicized failure in 2000 to wrest the film he wanted to make of Cormac McCarthy’s novel All the Pretty Horses away from Harvey Weinstein who evidently wanted to punish Thornton for refusing to cut Sling Blade. The experience broke Thornton’s heart, according to Matt Damon, and caused him to vow to never direct again. 

Looked at from the outside, Thornton’s erratic life has been nothing if not interesting. What keeps us interested in what Thornton is doing, whatever it may be, is the fact that he proved with Sling Blade, as writer, director, and actor, that he was worth watching. To quote Polonius, “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.” 

Despite his refusal to direct again (as often happens with such “vows” – Thornton has been divorced five times), in 2012 Thornton and Tom Epperson, with whom he has written several scripts since 1992, produced an original script that they called Jayne Mansfield’s Car. 

War has cast a very long shadow over the Caldwell family in Morrison, Alabama in 1969. The patriarch, Jim, is a veteran of World War I and, despite his well-adjusted exterior, spends his time listening to police dispatch calls reporting car crashes in his vicinity and driving out to get a look at them, regardless of the time or the weather, before the dead and injured are removed. His three sons, Skip, Carroll, and Jimbo, are all veterans of the Second World War, and the only one of the three who is a functioning adult – Jimbo – saw no combat. Skip had been a fighter pilot before a dogfight with a Japanese plane forced him to bail out rather than burn to death. His upper torso is completely scarred from burns he sustained. Carroll, too, was wounded, and has become an extreme pacifist, taking part in protests against the war in Vietnam to the consternation of his father. 

There is a daughter, Donna, who is unhappily married to a good old boy car salesman. Jim’s wife, Naomi, divorced him and ran off to marry an Englishman named Kingsley Bedford. One night during a typically fractious family supper, Jim gets a long distance call from Kingsley’s son, Phillip, announcing that Naomi has died and that because she wanted to be buried “with her people” in Alabama they are bringing her back for her funeral. Naomi’s death and the arrival of Kingsley and his two children, Phillip and Camilla, dredges up memories, good and bad, for the Caldwells. 

What is of special interest, on this Veterans Day, is the film’s depiction of the impact of war on three generations of an American family. There is no evidence among these veterans of any pride in their service, even in wars that America was instrumental in winning. Carroll Caldwell has even turned into a hippie, indulging in drug use and marching in protest against the ongoing Vietnam war. His 18-year-old son leaves him speechless at the film’s sad finish when he announces that he has joined the Army. 

The film sprawls indolently, which probably explains why it got mostly negative reviews on its belated release in the U.S. in September 2013. (It was premiered in Berlin in February 2012.)(2) The few critics who recommended it noted its performances from heavyweights like Robert Duvall as Jim Caldwell, John Hurt as Kingsley Bedford, and Thornton as Skip, who appears in one scene with all of his service medals pinned directly to his scarred chest. Katharine LaNasa is memorable as Donna, whose horniness is almost palpable. And Frances O’Connor as Camilla Bedford deserves a medal for finding Skip’s brazen advances a turn-on. The scene in which she recites Tennyson naked while Skip “beats off” is just this side of macabre. Tippi Hedren was cast as Naomi Caldwell, but all of her scenes were cut from the finished film. (Unless that’s her blonde hair we see in the open casket in the funeral scene.) 

The cinematography, provided by Barry Markowitz, seems diffused with a golden patina – which I found not at all unwelcome. I found the film yet another sentimental journey home, so perhaps I should disqualify myself. Why the film was set in Alabama but shot entirely in Georgia (where I grew up) goes unexplained. And the film’s title is derived from a touring exhibit of what’s purported – in the movie – to be the very car Jayne Mansfield was killed in one night in Louisiana. Jim drags Kingsley to see it, explaining in clinical detail what happened in the accident. Still, the use of it as the movie’s title is a little too Brechtian for me. 

(1) That Little Something (New York: Mariner Books, 2009), p. 39.

(2) As of 2018, the film's box office was only $79,178.

The Story of a Three Day Pass

Melvin Van Peebles died on September 21 at the age of 89. His contributions to film, I thought, had been limited to the so-called “blaxploitation” genre of the 1970s. His film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) is thrown together - unfairly - with films like Shaft, Superfly, and Coffy, as well as others of wildly varying quality and crassness. The films combined commercial pandering to stereotypes of both black and white people with an unfathomable irony. The only way the movie industry in the 1970s was interested in black people was through formulaic depictions of the criminal underworld. So the presence of black actors and filmmakers was tolerated by the industry only through the representation – and reinforcement – of stereotypes. 

Van Peebles accepted these severe limitations because it gave him opportunities to work in American film. What I knew nothing about, I’m ashamed to admit, until reading Van Peebles’s obituaries was that his filmmaking career had begun in the late 1950s with three short films with which he bravely tried to interest Hollywood movie producers. When they showed no interest Van Peebles took his family and moved to the Netherlands in 1960. His short films were shown to none other than Henri Langlois and Lotte Eisner, who were so impressed by them they invited Van Peebles (who adopted the “Van” in the Netherlands) to come to France. He wrote novels and plays in French, and one of his novels, called La Permission, he was able to make into his first feature film, known by its English title The Story of a Three Day Pass.  With some difficulty I found a copy of it, and I've at last seen it. 

Turner is a soldier at a U.S. Army post in France.(1) We first see him looking in a mirror and his reflection is telling him he is about to get a promotion and a 3-day pass with it. But, his reflection tells him, he got it by being his unit commander’s “Uncle Tom” – obedient, uncomplaining, obliging to his superior. But Turner smiles in the mirror because it’s what he has to do to get what he wants. 

With his three day pass, Turner goes to Paris, where he wanders alone in the November city. He returns to his hotel and waits for night to fall. He goes to a nightclub, and after several failed attempts to find a girl to dance with him, he stumbles and his sunglasses, behind which he has been coolly hiding all day, fall and break on the floor. The last girl who refuses his offer to dance, Miriam (Nicole Berger) helps him find his broken sunglasses and, under the table together, they both laugh. The ice broken, they dance and talk all night, and she persuades him to accompany her to the beach in Normandy the next day. Normandy is actually beyond the geographical limits of Turner's pass, but he knows he is taking an even greater risk by being in the company of Miriam. 

There is an element of desperation in these relationships, that have to run the gamut from A to Z in a matter of hours, or in the case of Turner and Miriam, three days. Men in the military have an undeserved reputation of being oversexed. For much of the time they are deprived of female companionship, so that when they are finally at liberty, they always seem to be in a hurry – when, in fact, they are both making up for lost time and creating memories that will last them until their next pass. 

Inevitably, Turner is reminded of his race – distinct from everyone else – even when the reminder is well-intended. In a bar in Normandy, a flamenco performer dedicates a song to Miriam and Turner – for “Miss Ojos Grandes y Señor Negrito.” Upon hearing the word “negro,” Turner flies into a rage and beats the performer. Outside on the darkened street, after being thrown out of the club, Miriam tries to understand his rage and explain that the performer’s use of the word “negro” wasn’t meant as a slur. But Turner doesn’t believe her.  They walk away down the dark street together as Turner asks “How can anyone think that ‘black’ is a compliment?” 

This astonishing scene accentuates what it means – what it is – to be a black man in a white world, but it also tells us of the history that Turner must carry around with him, like weighty old luggage – the centuries-old history of slavery and Jim Crow, of the common practice of prejudice in the U.S. It is a history that many whites would rather forget and would rather wasn’t taught to children in schools. 

Van Peebles uses non-professional players in many scenes. The night club scene, for instance, in which Turner meets Miriam, only comes to life when we see the face of Nicole Berger, the only other actor in the scene. She was almost a decade older than she was in Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. Her presence in Three Day Pass is vital to its overall effect, and she doesn’t disappoint. When, near the end of the film, Turner’s restriction is suspended and he runs to the telephone booth to call her, we feel as let down as he is when a man’s voice – her father’s perhaps – curtly informs him that she is “sick.” In April 1967, shortly after shooting on Three Day Pass was completed, Berger was killed in a car crash. She was just 32.

As I mentioned, The Story of a Three Day Pass was based on a novel Van Peebles had written and published in France called La Permission. It was also used as the French title of the film. This is a more ambiguous and more serviceable title for the film because there are some things that Turner has been granted permission to do – like have three days off in which to visit Paris and “see the sights.” But Turner is not given permission to “miscegenate” – the ugly term used to describe the sexual mixing of the races. Van Peebles knew too well what the limitations of being a black man were in the U.S., even if some of those limitations didn’t exist in France. 

The film is an extraordinary piece of subjective filmmaking. It's told entirely from the point of view of Turner. The only time Van Peebles enters the thoughts of Miriam, it's to show us her utterly limited understanding of black people. She fantasizes that she is threatened by a crowd of black men in primitive garb, when Turner appears like an African chieftain (a large bone through his afro) and embraces her. Meanwhile, Turner is fantasizing he's a French nobleman on horseback visting Miriam in a chateau. Harry Baird, who was frim Guyana in South America, acted in 36 films in a long career, but Three Day Pass was his only starring role, which is puzzling because he is so assured as Turner. He retired from acting when glaucoma rendered him blind and he died in 2005.

Seeing The Story of a Three Day Pass has been a revelation for me, as it must have been for everyone who saw it in 1968. The reasons for my not seeing it until now make no sense, though they are probably as mundane as copyright restrictions and just bad luck. How can I have overlooked it for so long? It was shown at the 1968 San Francisco International Film Festival as France’s entry and it won an award.(2) On the strength of its success, Van Peebles finally attracted the interest of Hollywood producers and he was able to make his first feature film in America, Watermelon Man (1970). 

(1) Late in the film when Turner is recruited to give a tour of the Army post to a group of women gospel singers from Harlem, he tells them that most of the men there have been transferred. On March 7, 1966 De Gaulle ordered all American military installations out of France. 

(2) An interview with Van Peebles from 1967 in San Francisco can be seen here. 

Whistle and I'll Come To You (1968)

The colonel, who remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India, was of opinion that if Parkins had closed with it it could really have done very little, and that its one power was that of frightening. 

Among writers of ghost stories, few are regarded more highly than the Englishman M. R. James (1862-1936). For James, the writing of his stories was secondary to the telling of them to his students and friends at Cambridge and later at Eton. He dedicated his first collection of stories “To all those who at various times have listened to them.” The book was called Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary, and it appeared in 1904. It includes what is regarded as one of James’s best stories, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad.”(1) 

Jonathan Miller, one of the quartet of writer/performers that made up the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe, gave up performing in 1962 and turned to directing for stage and screen. Already well known for his unconventional 1966 film production of Alice in Wonderland, he directed an adaptation of the M. R. James story, its title shortened to Whistle and I'll Come To You, for the BBC Omnibus series for broadcast in 1968. It was so popular that the BBC repeated it at Christmas in ’69 and it inspired a series of Ghost Stories for Christmas, starting on 1972, based on other James stories. 

In the story, Parkin is a young professor of ontography, which is “the human response to the natural environment,” who goes to a seaside town in Suffolk called Burnstowe at the end of term to work on his golf game. In the film he’s a middle aged man who doesn’t play golf who goes for a week to an unidentified seaside town. After settling in at an old inn, Parkin keeps his distance from the other guests, sitting at a separate table at dinner. One of the other guests, known in the story as the Colonel, asks him if he would like to join him for a round of golf, but Parkin declines. He is there to do some sightseeing, take in the dunes and the local cemetery. The Colonel tells him it’s too spooky for him. 

On the strand, Parkin walks briskly, takes his lunch on the dunes, and climbs a low cliff to examine a quite dilapidated graveyard. One of the tombstones, on the very edge of the cliff, has been eroded, exposing some bones. Parkin sees something and finds an old object in the exposed grave. He puts it in his pocket, muttering “Finders, keepers,” and returns to the beach. Walking along, he notices a lone figure some distance behind him. 

Back at the guesthouse that night, Parkin takes the object he discovered out of his pocket. It’s some sort of bone whistle with an inscription carved on it. After cleaning some earth out of it, Parkin takes a pencil rubbing of the inscription, and makes out the Latin words “Quis es iste qui venit” – Who is this who is coming? Parkin raises the whistle to his lips and blows into it. It produces a clear note, and as soon as Parkin stops blowing, the sound of a great wind arises outside and he has a vision on the lone figure standing on the beach. The wind continues and Parkin goes to bed with a perplexed look on his face. 

At breakfast the Colonel asks Parkin “Do you believe in ghosts?” Parkin, all the while eating his grapefruit and haddock, informs the Colonel of his skepticism of the “survival of the human personality.” The Colonel then says, after Hamlet, “there are more things in heaven and earth than a dreamt of in philosophy." To which Parkin replies, “There are more things in philosophy than are dreamt of in heaven and earth.” This reply gives Parkin much satisfaction, but later in the day, alone on the beach, he hears himself repeat the opposite – there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. 

That night, Parkin has disturbing dreams of being chased down the beach by something unseen. He awakes to a shout. Closing his eyes, we see him turning to run from an object, a piece of clothing standing erect by itself and moving toward us. Parkin awakes again with a loud start. He turns on the light and tries to read until he can fall asleep again. 

After breakfast, a maid asks him on which of the two beds in his room he would like the blanket placed, since they were both slept in the night before. Parkin insists that he slept in just the one bed and there was no one else in the room. Who is this who is coming? repeats in Parkin’s mind. He will find out. 

The film is only 42 minutes long, but it’s plenty of time for Jonathan Miller to insinuate us into Parkin’s terrorized mind. Michael Hordern plays Parkin as a marginally batty, typically eccentric academic who lives very much inside his own world. He putters about and mutters to himself, almost as if he’s narrating a drama all his own, humming tunes that only he can hear. With what boyishness he charges about in the countryside – the strand and the woods – which is strangely deserted and overgrown with brambles and vines. The locations – in Norfolk and Suffolk – are perfectly chosen to reflect Parkin’s self-isolation. And Miller’s staging and clever use of sound make the nightmare scenes uncannily like the real thing. The last confrontation between Parkin and a poltergeist is more spine-tingling than any of the latest, CGI-driven horror movies precisely because what Parkin sees almost doesn’t appear to be anything at all. Some have suggested that it might only have been a figment of Parkin’s fevered intelligence. But when the Colonel responds to his moans of terror and sits him back down in his bed, Parkin's rational mind quickly reasserts itself as he mutters, “Oh, no” again and again. 

Whistle and I’ll Come To You is a quite perfect film that captures the atmosphere of M. R. James’s best ghost story. 

(1) The Robert Burns poem of the same title has nothing to do with the story.

The Thing From Another World

It is useless to judge a movie that belongs to a specific genre according to the standards of a different genre. What is required of a comedy – that it must be funny – is, one might think, obviously inapplicable to a suspense movie or an action movie. This rule wasn’t so obvious to the critics who, in 2012, voted Hitchcock’s Vertigo as the greatest movie of all time on BFI’s Sight and Sound poll, demoting Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, which had been #1 on every prior poll since 1962, to second place. Were they trying to argue that Vertigo was more than just a great suspense movie? (In 1960 Stanley Kauffmann said it was “an asinine, unredeemed bore.”) 

As Halloween approaches, horror films abound. Cable TV channels are serving up the usual fare, from 90-year-old classics like Dracula and Frankenstein all the way to more recent chillers like Insidious (2010) and Mama (2013). The only way to properly assess any of these movies is by gauging their effectiveness at being scary. The only movie that I can recall being genuinely frightened by was William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Even people who are skeptical of the existence of Satan were frightened by it, because the skill with which it was made created the possibility at least for the length of the movie. (Many movies scared me when I was a boy, but only because I was a boy.) 

I first saw the 1951 Howard Hawks production of The Thing from Another World when I was a boy – when space travel was still in the planning stages. It was based on a story first published in 1938 in a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction. Today we look at the science fiction movies from before World War II and try to keep ourselves from laughing, but as a literary genre it was already highly developed. 

I haven’t read the story “Who Goes There” by John W. Campbell, Jr but a synopsis makes obvious that it was more complex than Hawks’s film adaptation. The 1982 John Carpenter remake of The Thing gets much closer to the story. (1) Howard Hawks noticed the popularity of science fiction stories after the war and bought the rights to “Who Goes There” for his production company Winchester Pictures. When the screenplay was written, by Charles Lederer, the story was drastically simplified: the “creature” was transformed from a 4’ tall 3-eyed blob that had the ability to alter its form by absorbing other creatures into a 7’ tall vegetable life form (played by James Arness) that must propagate its species in blood-soaked earth – the blood to be harvested from animals and humans. 

A reporter, Ned “Scotty” Scott, arrives at a snowbound Officers Club in Anchorage Alaska (Elmendorf Air Force Base was established after the war in Anchorage, but the name of the base isn’t given). He’s looking for a story and within minutes he’s handed one when Capt. Hendry is ordered to fly north to a camp on the ice near the north pole where an expedition led by Dr. Carrington has reported the crash of a mysterious “aircraft.” 

Upon arriving at the camp, Capt Hendry takes some of the scientists and flies to where the crash took place. They discover a round craft that melted through the ice on impact and froze there. An exposed piece of it is made of an unknown metal alloy. When they attempt to blow the craft out of the ice with thermite charges, it catches fire and explodes. On further inspection, they find a body has been thrown clear of the craft and quickly frozen in the ice. The men use axes to hack out a slab of the ice in which the body is deposited and take it with them back to the base camp. Due to a mishap involving an electric blanket, the ice melts and what was frozen inside it comes to life and escapes. The creature is attacked in the snow by sled dogs and when the men retrieve the dogs’ bodies, they find the creature’s severed hand. When they bring the hand, covered in the dogs’ blood, inside, it comes to life. Dr. Carrington notes that it was the blood that revived it. Later, the creature breaks into the camp’s greenhouse, kills two scientists and hangs them from the rafters above seedlings it has planted, using the men’s blood as nourishment for developing alien pods. When Capt Hendry decides that the creature has to be destroyed, Scotty says “This is the biggest story since the parting of the Red Sea!” Dr. Carrington suggests that they mustn’t destroy the creature, and that they should instead try to communicate with it. Trying to appeal to Capt Hendry in the name of human progress, Carrington tells him “We split the atom!” To which the pilot Lt. Dykes replies, “Yes, and it sure made the world happy!” 

The movie is science fiction only tenuously. The threat is just as supernatural – non-human – as any vampire or werewolf. In straight parlance: the Boogeyman. What is missing is a Doctor Van Helsing or a gypsy woman who knows what’s needed to neutralize the threat. Instead in The Thing there are scientists who attempt to make sense of the creature and a “mad” scientist whose stupidity almost gets everyone killed. A romantic storyline between Capt Hendry and Nikki Nicholson – one of only two women in the script – is thrown in for comic relief. (Margaret Sheridan is given top billing in the end credits. None of the actors are identified in the opening credits.) 

The movie moves along surprisingly quickly. The only scenes that drag are the two between Kenneth Tobey (Capt Hendry) and Margaret Sheridan (Nikki Nicholson). There is zero chemistry between them, but the failure of their mutual attraction to ignite isn’t the fault of the actors. Such scenes serve to increase our concern for the characters when they become imperilled. James Arness was cast as the creature because of his 6’7” stature. After landing the role of Matt Dillon in the Gunsmoke series, Arness, who is the brother of Peter Graves, refused to talk about his role in The Thing. 

In several scenes the dialogue overlaps – the actors deliver their lines before others are finished talking. This is supposed to be a characteristic of Howard Hawks’s direction, and some critics jumped to the incorrect conclusion that Hawks had directed The Thing besides producing it. Since the U.S. Air Force features prominently in the film, the producers tried to enlist their assistance in the making of the film. The Air Force declined because they didn’t want to be associated with movies about flying saucers. 

Not having seen the film for a few decades, I found it extremely well made - better, in fact, than I remembered it. Despite its age, I doubt that audiences today could keep up with it. It's creation and manipulation of suspense is masterful. How many horror movies since it was made have "borrowed" from it? Ridley Scott's Alien would've been unthinkable without it. Even if the "thing" is a little simplified for an alien, it has a powerful presence even when it's not in the scene - just as Scott's alien, whose proportions were cleverly concealed from view, had. Unlike too many classics, The Thing is worthy of the title. 

In 2001, The Thing from Another World was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry. 

(1) In 2011, a prequel to Carpenter’s film — also entitled The Thing — was released, while a new feature based on the original “Who Goes There?” story was announced in 2020.