Waterloo

Waterloo is a huge, if little known epic dramatization of Napoleon’s last stand, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk. The scope and texture of Waterloo will be familiar to anyone who has seen the astounding battle scenes in Bondarchuk’s version of War and Peace. Waterloo is much shorter, but since it is about only a battle, there is every reason for the filmmakers to draw it out in detail, and to repeat what was most memorable about the earlier film. The characterizations of the Duke of Wellington (Christopher Plummer) and Napoleon (Rod Steiger) are ably written and performed, but the real star is the swirling reconstruction of the battle.

Effectively, Waterloo is two hours plus of moving battle paintings. As thousands of extras fight in precise formations, fires and explosions send clouds of smoke billowing across the landscape, and lines of cavalry charge at top speed, we are treated to practically a catalogue of rapturously extravagant painting conventions in movement. Made in 1970, and co-produced by the Soviet studio Mosfilm, this ecstatic visualization of the beauties of warfare nonetheless inevitably includes a bit of Vietnam-era anti-war rhetoric which, given the exquisite imagery, feels at best like hypocritical tokenism. You know, for example, that Wellington’s handsome young staff officer is doomed: he has to be killed so that the Duke (and we) will recognize the Terrible, Terrible Cost of Warfare. And when one of the British soldiers breaks down in the middle of the battle and asks “Why? Why? Why do we do this to one another?” (that’s almost a direct quote), the only answer can be “Because it’s so beautiful, of course.”

Such face-saving interjections have little to do with why we’re watching the movie and everything to do with justifying the spectacle that is the film’s raison d’être. That appeal exceeds rational explanation. When, for example, Bondarchuk evokes Lady Butler’s famous painting of the charge of the Scots Greys (above and left), the sheer kinesthetic energy, the unrestrained, corporeal thrill produced by the line of galloping horses, bright red uniforms and shining armor, obliterate any effort to describe or explain the experience.

This formal ecstasy is akin to the excitement of cheering your favorite sports team. (Indeed, one of the best examples of the experience is the chariot race in Wyler’s Ben Hur.) You can know rationally that there is no reason to be excited, that it is a contrivance, that you are responding as much to pure movement as anything else, but none of that matters. Our bodies take over our heads to instill the unadulterated joy of being alive, carrying all before it. Waterloo’s spectacular pleasure bursts the bounds of rational understanding, testifying to the power of visceral rapture. The film does not answer to literary notions of quality. Even less does it conform to dubious moralizing, but it is profound in ways beyond language, beyond empathy, beyond common sense.

Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Dr. Strangelove has entered popular culture as practically a synonym for black humor and outrageous satire, but does anyone talk about it much? This would be a strange development under any circumstance, but given the loaded subject matter and the fact that it was made by someone as famous as Stanley Kubrick, the lack of discussion is striking. Is it because we’re going through a period when reality has become such a sick joke that satire is pathetically redundant? Or is it because the Kubrick myth makes meaningful evaluation almost impossible? Since so many people uncritically accept his films as “genius,” does asking what is remarkable about them risk ridicule?

Kubrick’s oeuvre is sometimes divided into two periods, pivoting between Strangelove on one side and 2001: A Space Odyssey on the other. Watching it again recently, I was struck by how much a product of the “early” Kubrick Strangelove is, perhaps his crowning achievement in that mode, and for that reason, a dead end. The primary difference between the periods is pacing. With the arguable exception of Spartacus (which was not a personal project, and over which Kubrick did not have final control) his early films are marked by rapid forward movement, tart, abrasive action sequences (such as the hand-held camerawork in Strangelove) and razor-precise editing. Scenes last only as long as is necessary to ram home narrative points of sledgehammer subtlety. Story and character are paramount; the physical feel of the settings is largely unimportant. Beginning with 2001, however, the priorities shifted, so that look, feel and texture became primary.

What remains consistent throughout Kubrick’s career is self-conscious technique combined with a heavy irony that totters perilously on the edge of the ponderous. Much of Strangelove, for example, is undeniably funny, but leaden, and no one’s idea of understatement. George C. Scott’s winning performance as Buck Turgidson is brilliance itself, a flamboyant portrait of an American military macho idiot giddy with testosterone. Peter Sellers’s justly famous triple performance as the President, Group Captain Mandrake and Strangelove makes your jaw drop in wonder at “how did he do that?” Both actors make exaggeration into a form of refinement. They choose to be out of control, honing each gesture and verbal quirk into jewel-like studs of absurdity.

Which, frankly, demonstrates one of the limitations of Kubrick’s method. Satire may have no obligation to be light-fingered. Nonetheless, this approach, alternately belabored and ostentatious, threatens to call way too much attention to itself. Only the pacing keeps the results from becoming overbearing. Kubrick cannot linger as he was to do in his later work without risking the alienation of his audience. (A problem that A Clockwork Orange grapples with throughout.) Strangelove, in short, is very much a director’s equivalent of Sellers’s impersonations, an inspired, showy technical exhibition in which we gasp at the audacity, but more in admiration than affection. It is just too clever by half to be anyone’s favorite.

Heaven’s Gate

The reception of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate provides a classic instance of the press making a mountain out of an admittedly very large molehill. It is neither an especially terrible nor good movie. Removed from the bad publicity surrounding its production and release, it doesn’t qualify as much more than an interesting failure. A lot of ink was certainly spilled over it, however.

The controversy centered on Cimino’s profligacy and the resulting collapse of United Artists as an independent studio.* The film’s disastrous reception is also sometimes cited as tolling the death knell of auteurism in American cinema. The investment studios were willing to make in personal projects by acclaimed directors in the 1970s came to a screeching halt because the cost of projects like Gate spiralled out of control. The businessmen, with their profound understanding of audience desires, stepped in to save the studios from irresponsible artists, selflessly freeing viewers from the shackles of art to enjoy themselves mindlessly.

There was certainly plenty of arrogance to go around, but blaming Hollywood’s failures on irresponsible artists is more than a touch disingenuous. Yes, Heaven’s Gate preposterously blows up a minor incident in the Old West into a rehearsal for universal class warfare. Sure, Cimino’s excesses (such as using a locomotive that couldn’t fit through a tunnel, thereby requiring it be air-lifted to the location by helicopter) demonstrated an egotism bordering on the pathological. But who signed the checks? Who gave the project the green light? It couldn’t possibly be studio executives overly impressed with Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, could it? (Current Hollywood budgets are even more out of control, while artists have been reduced to functionaries. Where’s all that money going now?)

There are some wonderful moments in Heaven’s Gate. My personal favorite occurs fairly early, when the inhabitants of Johnson County, Wyoming share some good times in a roller skating rink. The scale of the scene is huge, really too big for the story, but the sheer size of the presentation is part of the shared high spirits. Only the movies can provide moments like it, but unfortunately, the context is so pretentious and remote that the scene feels like a happy accident. The film is beautifully made at a purely technical level, but the rapturous, often violent imagery lacks any real sense of justification.

Which is hardly surprising, because it is difficult to justify piling a gargantuan budget on a rickety foundation, no matter how bravura the treatment. Like another overwrought, politically ambitious failure, Bertolucci’s 1900, aspiration exceeds achievement (and intelligence) in Heaven’s Gate. There just isn’t enough to the movie other than Cimino’s conceit for it to be famous for anything more than sinking United Artists. At best you can say that with it, artistic arrogance combined with business incompetence to produce an occasionally moving, but deeply flawed film.

*For a detailed, though certainly partisan view of these events, see Final Cut: Dreams and Diaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate by Steven Bach.

Fahrenheit 451

I once wrote that François Truffaut’s adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 inverted the book’s sympathies, with far more interesting results than the original. That opinion has only deepened with time. Each viewing confirms how prescient Truffaut and company were. Despite Bradbury’s sententious bibliophilia, the well scrubbed, medicated suburbanites are much closer to our way of life than the scruffy, supposedly virtuous book lovers. The only difference is, we don’t care enough about books even to burn them. We just drown intellectual distinction in a sea of trivia.

Consider the scene in which Montag (Oskar Werner), a man who burns books until he learns to love them, drives his wife Linda (Julie Christie) and her vacant friends to distraction by reading a passage from a novel out loud. First, ask yourself “When was the last time I had a conversation about a book?” Then confront how closely the vacuous TV program the women are watching anticipates Oprah, Dr. Phil and all the other specialists in audience feel good flattery. And while the housewives’ comments about the TV announcer’s hair-do may be meant as satire, their complacent, petty, sniping inanities are painfully close to what passes for wit in our media-saturated, consumerist society.

It is unclear whether this brilliant inversion was accidental or deliberate. Truffaut’s limp, inept Hitchcock imitations do not feel like the work of a director in full control of his technique. On the other hand, the imagery of burning books is ravishing, and a few choice absurdities suggest the filmmakers’ winking recognition of just how ridiculous Bradbury’s ideas are. It is no doubt an inside joke that one of the “Book People” (outcast vagrants who memorize their favorite books) has chosen Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. On the other hand, it’s just a joke, period, that Montag’s new partner, Clarisse (also played by Christie), has memorized Saint Simon’s Memoirs. The unabridged Memoirs run over nine thousand pages.

Deliberate or otherwise, these nudges repeatedly expose Bradbury’s half-baked outrage. For example, his book-burning, supposedly totalitarian society allows the “Book People” to run to the countryside, memorize their favorite books, and expect no police interference. What are they, a “just in case” exception? Even when people are caught with books, what happens to them after their arrest? Montag says the authorities “let them come back.” Huh? If so, exactly what is so terrible about this society?

Answer: they don’t like books and for the bibliophile, that is an unpardonable sin. Even that prohibition is devoid of political substance, however. As the Captain (Cyril Cusack), portentously brandishing a copy of Mein Kampf warns, the firemen have to burn all books, regardless of their content. Books make people think and feel and that makes them unhappy. What makes people unhappy is bad. End of discussion. We may not suffer that attitude as a matter of state policy. We simply accept, even applaud, the tyranny of banality as a manifestation of the popular.

Which is worse?

Valley of the Dolls

Mark Robson’s Valley of the Dolls is a condensed example of everything wrong with Hollywood filmmaking. Maudlin, trashy, more expensive than entertaining, both glossy and crude, mistaking fashion for a style it does not possess—I could go on and on. It nonetheless exercises a certain grim fascination. It is despicable, but notable as proof of the depths to which Hollywood does not hesitate to stoop in pursuit of a buck. It stymies criticism or parody. You could not invent a film this grotesquely awful. You have to leave it to the average hack’s shamelessness to make something this rancid.

Jacqueline Susann’s tawdry story ties together contrived events like a string of cheap plastic pearls. For example, when lovely secretary Anne Welles (Barbara Parkins) walks into her boss’s office as he is talking with a client looking for a young woman to be the icon for his line of cosmetics, isn’t it amazing that Anne is absolutely perfect? She barely has time to catch her breath before she instantly becomes a super-model. The requisite drag queen moments like the brawl between Neely O’Hara (Patti Duke) and her nemesis, Broadway star Helen Lawson (Susan Hayward) are about as exciting as a shoot-out between septuagenarians. The absolute low point, however, among plenty of competing candidates, occurs when O’Hara, in rehab, performs for her fellow sanitarium inmates. As she sings, Huntington’s disease victim Tony Polar (Tony Scotti), recognizing her voice, awakens from his stupor. She then crosses the room to share a cry with him at his wheelchair. The moment isn’t even camp, it is just disgusting as a fatal, degenerative illness is exploited for thoroughly unwarranted pathos.

Lee Grant, as Tony’s unsociable half-sister Miriam and Sharon Tate as his wife Jennifer are the only ones who rise above the material. (Not that being better than this material should be especially difficult.) Grant manages to bring some truth to Miriam’s neurotic efforts to keep it secret that Tony is likely to succumb to the disease that destroyed his father. Tate’s performance is colored by knowing the actress’s horrific fate, but playing a woman who’s only gift is her physical attributes, she manages to be both pathetic and endearing.

All the more reason to blast the film’s hypocrisy, for when Jennifer has to work in soft core porn to pay Tony’s sanitarium bills, the filmmakers have the gall to suggest that appearing naked in a movie is a fate worse than death, even as they show every centimeter of skin they can. Worse, the “art films” in which she appears and which the characters dismiss as “nudies” are bad parodies of the French New Wave, even as Dolls exploits innovations introduced by that movement.

Then again, in Hollywood, hypocrisy is as close to honesty as you’ll ever get. At least Valley of the Dolls provides the queasy pleasure of watching Tinseltown rot from within. It makes Myra Breckinridge look positively wholesome.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

The Agony and the Ecstasy, Carol Reed’s epic dramatization of the struggle between Michelangelo (Charlton Heston) and Pope Julius II (Rex Harrison) during the creation of the Sistine Ceiling is a well-mounted, but not terribly convincing historical pageant. To start, it is difficult to believe that the “warrior Pope” Julius would have worried  all that much about the creation of a mere painting. To assume otherwise is to project on to the Renaissance our modern valuation of art for art’s sake. In fact, at the time Michelangelo worked, he would likely have been considered little better than a highly talented servant.

Of course, if the film’s attitudes toward Michelangelo are suspiciously modern, they at least open a door on to a particularly rich historical moment. While never central, the film pays some attention to Julius’s ambition to weld the Papal States into a single entity, though the conceit that he is doing so to strengthen the Church against encroachments from secular monarchs rather than brazenly grabbing earthly power is highly questionable. There are also “guest appearances” by Michelangelo’s big name contemporaries, like Bramante and Raphael, while others (Leonardo, Ghirlandaio, Henry VIII of England) have their names dropped in to help fill in the tapestry. Certainly the physical recreation of the period is impressive (though as usual, suspiciously clean). Whether things add up to an understanding of the era, Julius or Michelangelo is debatable, however.

Indeed, the very focus on the tensions between Michelangelo and Julius crowds out any larger historical understanding. For example one simple question—why are Julius’s enemies fighting his efforts to strengthen Papal authority in Italy?—is not even asked, much less answered. On the other hand, the portrayal of either man’s psychology extends little deeper than mutual petulance. In fact, the one moment when the filmmakers try to suggest subjectivity is risible. Michelangelo gets the idea of what the Sistine Ceiling should consist when clouds take on the shape of God giving life to Adam. As if that were not tasteless enough, Michelangelo (in voiceover), staring awestruck at the special effect, starts to intone from Genesis, Alex North’s music swoons to raise the goose bumps, and the memory of Heston as the literal Voice of God in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments destroys whatever chance of credibility the moment might have had.

With the exception of that horrendous lapse, The Agony and the Ecstasy is best enjoyed as expensive spectacle. The photography, design and costumes are handsomely sumptuous, the kind of thing only big budget filmmaking can provide. The battle scenes are effectively gratuitous, but they are nicely staged and the illusion we are seeing the Sistine Ceiling gradually coming together is ably handled. Heston and Harrison aren’t bad, especially given that their characters never really make much sense, even within the film’s ambitions. In short, overall, the film is a solid piece of craftsmanship, even if after it is finished, you’re not quite sure what those ambitions were.

Conversation Piece (Gruppo di Famiglia in un Interno)

Having seen Luchino Visconti’s penultime film, Conversation Piece, only once before, and that some time ago in a very poor video copy, I purchased a DVD fully expecting to “appreciate” it more than like it. I certainly didn’t expect to find it downright fun. Admittedly, it’s the fun of bad behavior, and it is not clear the film’s entertaining qualities were intentional, but that just adds to the enjoyment.

Burt Lancaster stars as an aging American scholar, “the Professor,” (we never learn his name) shut away in a luxurious Roman apartment, trying to avoid the messiness of other peoples’ lives. He somewhat unbelievably is persuaded to rent his empty upstairs space to the Marchesa Brumonti (Silvana Mangano), her daughter Lietta (Claudia Marsani), Lietta’s boyfriend Stefano (Stefano Patrizi) and the Marchesa’s “kept boy,” Konrad (Helmut Berger), who become a surrogate family for the Professor. They are his worst nightmares come true, only more so. The Marchesa’s brood specializes in creating messes and insist on involving the Professor in all of them. A bunch of winningly honest vipers, they behave atrociously, but when they snipe at each other (which is quite often), they’re viciously entertaining.

Lancaster is not usually associated with such passive roles. Even when he consciously played against type for Visconti in The Leopard, his character still had a commanding presence. The Professor, on the other hand, seems as if he would be happy to fade into his apartment’s damask wallpaper, or move into one of the paintings that hang on his walls and give the film its English title. (A “conversation piece” is a genre painting that depicts a small group in everyday activities.) We don’t quite forget he’s Lancaster, but he gives a respectable performance.

Berger, on the other hand, cast to type, has never been more convincing. Konrad—gigolo, revolutionary, drug dealer, failed art history major—is a muddled conceit, but Berger runs with it. The political speeches that Visconti and his writers give Konrad are stinging, acrid, bitter and astute, but not terribly convincing, even allowing for the chaos of Italian politics in the 1970s. They do give Berger the opportunity to spit and snarl with especially intense conviction, however, while coating his bitchiness with a face-saving, politically correct veneer. Berger overcomes the writers’ pretensions and manages to make Konrad’s malice likable.

According to the disc program notes, the definitive version of Conversation Piece is in Italian. Oddly, the DVD is in English, with everyone other than Lancaster and Berger dubbed. The synching is done quite well, however. I would argue in this case that dubbing is preferable, only because the nasty dialog goes by awfully quickly for subtitles. I’d hate to miss any of it, because reading choice expletives would reduce their impact to the studied impersonality that I expected. There’s juice in this situation and these performances. It would be a shame to have it pressed out in the name of respectability because Conversation Piece is most enjoyable at its least respectable.