Monday, October 31, 2011

Philately as self-abuse

Nueve Reinas (Nine Queens) 2000 Argentina (114 minutes) written and directed by Fabian Bielinsky.
This Mametesque caper set in Buenos Aires involves a pair of con men trying to sell a counterfeit block of nine rare and valuable postage stamps—the ‘Nine Queens’ of the title—to a wealthy but shady Spanish collector.
First we meet Juan (Gastón Pauls), a friendly, nice-looking young guy, trying to pull a bill-change swindle on homely clerks twice in the same convenience store, before and right after they change shifts. 
Marcos (Ricardo Darin), a con man with big ideas and money problems, happens to be in the store and watches this play go down with amusement as he eats a hot dog. Kid’s stuff, but he likes the kid and needs a partner.
Darin may be best known to the English-speaking world for his starring role in The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos), the 2010 Oscar-winning best foreign film from Argentina, in which he played a judge’s clerk haunted by the unsolved brutal murder of a young wife and chagrined by his long unrequited love for the judge’s law clerk.
Juan spends the morning with the older and wiser Marcos, telling stories and bonding as they improvise retail scams strolling through downtown Buenos Aires. In a memorable sequence of shots, Marcos points out more than a dozen different street operators.
Marcos is not popular among his associates in the Buenos Aires underworld. He also has difficulties with his sister Valeria (Leticia Brédice), who leads a straight life climbing a chain hotel management ladder. The fire in Valeria’s eyes comes from her conviction that Marcos cheated her and Federico (Tomás Fonzi), their kid brother who idolizes Marcos, out of their shares in their Italian grandparents’ estate. 
‘Technically, one could say I unilaterally readjusted dividends,’ is the way the self-centered Marcos tries to explain what happened.
Marcos gets an angry midday telephone call from Valeria, who complains that one of his ‘associates’ has embarrassed her by turning up at her place of work looking for Marcos and had a medical emergency. 
The associate, Sandler (Oscar Nuñez), apparently on his last legs, is a master counterfeiter. He gasps to Marcos that he has made ‘mi mejor trabajo’—the masterpiece of his career—a block of nine rare and valuable German Weimar era stamps known as ‘The Nine Queens’. Sandler tells Marcos that he made his copy from a set of originals owned by his wealthy sister Berta (Elsa Berenguer) and believes he can sell the stamps to a guest at the hotel, Esteban Vidal Gandolfo (Ignasi Abadal), a wealthy Spanish entrepreneur. But there are some hitches.
Gandolfo appears to be under a kind of house arrest at the hotel awaiting deportation to Venezuela the next day, evidently due to questionable business activities in Argentina. Sandler, a specialist, not a front man, contacts Marcos because he needs a professional he knows to make the sale happen within 24 hours.
Marcos knows that Sandler is asking him only because he is desperate—they have a history—so Marcos makes the ailing old man agree to give him most of the take, and then settles on a fifty-fifty split with Juan. ‘This is something you could wait for your entire life and never happen to you. One in a million,’ he tells Juan more than once.
And then masterpiece gets jacked in broad daylight on the streets.
These are the main moving parts that set in motion this elaborate game of three-card monte. The rest is a wild ride peopled with an entertaining array of character actors: barman Anibal (Jorge Noya), Mrs. Sandler (Celia Juárez), Sandler’s rich sister Berta and her Fabio-like boy toy (Carlos Falcone), Gandolfo and his double dealing ‘stamp expert’ Washington (Alejandro Awada), among others.
 The key to keeping track of which is the red card—or whether there even is one—is not to suspend disbelief for one second from start to finish. For instance, what the devil is a queen doing on Weimar stamps?
It is the kind of story David Mamet might love because it comes down to justice. But Fabian Bielinsky’s screenplay and direction have a Latin lightness, warmth and fun lacking in Mamet’s stylistically muscular forensic architecture.
Justice is served with a garnish au Tarantino (or John Waters) when Juan at last remembers the campy Italian pop tune (Il ballo del mattone/The brick dance) from his childhood that no one he asks throughout the film seems to know.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Classic mayhem and menace

The Narrow Margin 1952, RKO (71 minutes) directed by Richard Fleischer, written by Earl Felton, includes a kibitz version featuring Fleischer and director William Friedkin commenting as the film runs.
Two Los Angeles police detectives are tasked to take a former big-time mobster’s widow by train from Chicago to Los Angeles to sing to a grand jury, the mob hot on their trail to catch the canary.
Detective Sergeants Walter Brown (Charles McGraw) and Gus Forbes (Don Beddoe) first must pick up the widow, Mrs. Frankie Neall (Marie Windsor), at a safe house in Chicago and get her safely on the train, because the mob has an all-points hit out on her.
After a close call at a police safe house, the mob can identify Brown and watch for him at the station. According to the plot line, they cannot identify the widow.
On board the train, Brown realizes that a variety of people is very actively looking for him and his witness. He does not like Neall. Windsor has the classic look for the part: bathed in the milk of studio lighting, she has a sexy, flinty edge and serves up everything that a hard-bitten career ‘good cop’ like Brown would presume a ‘mob wife’ to be.
When Forbes earlier asked him about Neall, Brown, never having met her, called Neall a ‘dish’. ‘What kind of a dish?’ Forbes persisted. ‘A sixty-cent special: cheap, flashy, strictly poison under the gravy.’ It may turn out that he ordered from the wrong menu.
As Forbes, Don Beddoe is the first of a complement of fine character actors that lend a good story body and seasoning, including Paul Maxey as Sam Jennings, a plus size train detective with the tag line ‘Nobody loves a fat man,’ and Peter Virgo is Densel, a bad man in plaid and a snap brim fedora, among others.
Brown also meets and makes an ally of Ann Sinclair (Jacqueline White), a mother travelling with her small boy and the boy’s nanny, though his casual association with Sinclair may mean other things to lurking mobsters.
The film contrasts the day lit, orderly civilian world where people follow laws, work and raise families (and African-American red caps and Pullman porters are smiling and obliging), and the night world of illicit activity—sneaks, corruption, theft, bribery and murder (that black men know to be well shun of). True to the film noir genre, the contrasts blur when the givens turn out to be not as they first appear.
The lighting and back projection are beautifully composed, and there also are several lovely, tidy shots that combine actual interior and exterior spaces, such as inside a train compartment and outside the window when the train is stopped at a station. Light flicking by the windows and reflected along interior surfaces throughout the film, as well as a camera lightly jounced from time to time, remind the viewer that the action is taking place on a moving transcontinental train. A long, dark sedan keeps pace ominously alongside the train at night when the kill is set.
The denouement is set up with a shot of Neall in a lacy black negligee filing her nails with a rhythmic shhh-shhh-shhh sound in a fit of malicious pique after a testy exchange with Brown, which cuts to a shot of churning, harnessed locomotive wheels, as though the inexorable wheels of fate, with their solid, rhythmic chug-chug-chug.
A teletyped wire message to Brown urgently crosses the middle of the screen from left to right, warning him that the suspicious men he reported on the train at an earlier stop are mob-connected and dangerous...

Saturday, October 22, 2011

Wrong place, wrong time, wrong victim

Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum oder: Wie Gewalt entstehen und wohin sie führen kann (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, or How Violence Develops and Where It Can Lead) 1975 Criterion (106 minutes) directed by Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta, based on Heinrich Böll’s 1974 novel of the same title; director of photography, Jost Vacano; original score by Hans Werner Henze.
The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum puts viewers in the scuffed shoes of an ordinary person who suddenly finds every detail of her life under the microscope of the full investigative force of the state and a sensation-hungry news media.
The ‘honor’ that the tabloid newspaper-hyped ‘Gangsterbraut’ [gun moll] and ‘Anarchistenbraut’ [anarchist-bride] Katharina Blum (Angela Winkler) loses in this powerful 1975 film is her good name and privacy.
Dr. Steven Hatfill, former FBI ‘person of interest’ in the post 9/11 anthrax scare, could tell a tale or two about that.
The film is based on a 1974 polemic of the same title that Nobel prize winner Heinrich Böll wrote in response similar treatment that he felt he had received from the German government hand-in-glove with the powerful Axel Springer media organization and its flagship tabloid Bild for speaking out on behalf of his young compatriots accused of ‘terrorism’ in 1970s West Germany. 
The novel begins—and the film ends—with the following ‘disclaimer’:
‘The characters and events in this narrative are fictitious. Should the description of certain journalistic practices bear any similarity to the practices of the Bild-Zeitung, such resemblance is neither intentional nor accidental, but unavoidable.’*
The novel’s polemic bite comes from its dispassionate, antiseptic style which mimics an official ‘after-action report’ by being everything but that. The film engages us from the start, taking the extra step of putting us in the target’s place.
The narrative strength of the camera helps to make this film compelling. The viewer’s interest is drawn in because the camera engages it subjects the way one engages another in conversation, by really looking at the other. The camera creates depth both by looking into people’s faces and by looking carefully into frames rather than at them.
Here, the camera works like a pencil in drawing: it shapes the story, conveying the feel of a living thing, taking nothing for granted, always on the move, always watching, but never with that jerky, jarring sensation one gets from handheld shooting. A sequence of 16 mm shots in the beginning even has the feel of a person’s calm, steady, curious gaze, providing information without drawing attention to the means or a ‘style’.
What may be most telling is that as much as the camera shows us ourselves in those it closely observes, good or bad, when police and the media look at the same things they see only an ‘other’.
The film starts with a young man (Jurgen Prochnow) in a white parka with a duffle bag aboard a river ferry. We see the same man in grainy black and white, nicely centered in the viewfinder of a hand-held 16 mm camera, evidently unaware that the middle-aged ‘tourist’ filming the scenery is a member of a team watching him.
The surveillance team follows this man into Köln. He goes to a discotheque where colorfully dressed and costumed revellers dance and carouse, celebrating Weiberfastnacht [women’s carnival night], the first night of the German Karneval party that goes through the weekend to Mardi Gras. (Köln is the German ‘New Orleans’ for Mardi Gras partiers.) The team shadows a group of people the young man accompanies to a party at a private apartment. At the party, the man introduces himself as Ludwig to Katharina, who had avoided thus far going out.
Katharina and Ludwig spend the rest of their time together at the party, and in the spirit of Weiberfastnacht, Katharina takes him back to her apartment. He is gone the next morning when we see Katharina rise—and a police SWAT team close in on her apartment to arrest him.
The violence of this assault is conveyed by the contrast of this ordinary woman taking morning tea at home in a white bathrobe with the masked paramilitary SWAT team that bursts suddenly into her modest, bright, IKEA-furnished apartment, its automatic weapons trained over and under in every direction. 
Call it cultural or cinematic conditioning, but there is something chilling in seeing a large German uniformed police presence at the scene of an arrest of a solitary civilian, with disembodied loudspeakers barking ‘Achtung! Achtung!’, issuing instructions to curious but docile bystanders.
Under the direction of Kriminalkommissar Erwin Beizmenne (Mario Adorf) and Staatsanwalt Dr. Peter Hach (Rolf Becker), the police official and prosecutor heading the investigation of alleged ‘terrorist’ Ludwig Götten (Prochnow), officers comb Blum’s apartment for evidence of her criminal involvement. Authorities haul in the incredulous, naïve woman for questioning.
The upshot is the germanically thorough and excruciating dissection of Blum’s intimate life—a process that it is hard to believe would not be painful and embarrassing to anyone who has lived at least 25 years.
Insult adds to injury when the news media, particularly the tabloid Zeitung [Daily] runs the most embarrassing details and inflammatory allegations in bold headlines—some invented, some leaked by law enforcement to Werner Tötges (Dieter Laser), Zeitung’s intensely arrogant, obnoxious and unrelenting reporter on the story.
At one point, Beizmanne asks Tötges how he got Blum’s terminally ill mother, dying in an intensive care unit, to speak to him so eloquently about her ‘uncaring’ daughter for his story.
‘We must help simple people express themselves,’ Tötges said, with a twinkle in his eye. The operating hypocrisy, in Boll’s view, is that the press asserts that the people’s imputed ‘right to know’ excuses any excess; but those who would challenge excesses such as these would strike at the very heart of democracy and its ‘lifeblood’, a free press.
Blum is truly a naïve nobody, a lonely single woman, housekeeper to a prominent lawyer, Dr. Hubert Blorna (Heinz Bennent) and his wife Trude (Hannelore Hoger). The plot thickens when her personal secrets reveal a liaison higher up the food chain, wholly unrelated to Götten and any criminal activity.
Götten’s criminal activity, such as it is, almost predictably turns out to have a good deal less than any terrorist motivation. The thing that no one can explain in the end is Blum’s willingness to give Tötges an exclusive interview…
A notable feature of this film is its musical score, composed by Hans Werner Henze, which lends the narrative wings, not the usual crutches. Henze’s fine score has classical underpinnings with a 1970s free jazz flavor. 
As an aside, veteran actor Heinz Bennent, who played Dr. Blorna and also appeared in films of Ingmar Bergman and others, died earlier this month at age 90.

*‘Personen und Handlung dieser Erzählung sind frei erfunden. Sollten sich bei der Schilderung gewisser journalistischer Praktiken Ähnlichkeiten mit den Praktiken der »Bild«–Zeitung ergeben haben, so sind diese Ähnlichkeiten weder beabsichtigt noch zufällig, sondern unvermeidlich.ʼ

Monday, October 17, 2011

The Ides of March

The Ides of March 2011 (101 minutes) directed by George Clooney and written by Clooney, Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon; based on Willimon’s 2008 play Farragut North.
What happened after attorney Michael Clayton exposed the bad guys—including his own law firm and their main client, a major agrochemical corporation—and rode off in a Manhattan taxi looking for the next poker game?
Judging from the movie The Ides of March, he left town, changed his name to Mike Morris, went into politics and became a United States senator from Pennsylvania running for president.
In The Ides of March, presidential candidate Senator Mike Morris (George Clooney) is a charismatic Democrat and his candid and heartfelt-to-the-point-of-tear-inducing social, political and philosophical views clearly have a broad appeal, not unlike a certain widely celebrated and equally despised incumbent.
Too bad this is all for television.
The ‘politics’ here have nothing to do with political philosophy, the wonky art of guiding government or government policy behind the grand pronouncements, or even fixing potholes. This is not Morris’ fault, it is just the way the game is played—and what a devious poker game this turns out to be, according to the movie.
It’s not ‘the economy, stupid’; it’s winning the deal. It is winning and keeping the deal in a running poker game in which winning means a place at the exclusive big stakes table which is a job in the White House, and losing, a return to a political consulting gig on K Street for another shot later. The dealer calls the shots.
It’s a poker game. All the other stuff takes care of itself, eventually.
As it turns out, politics also is about character, about people’s personalities and personal relationships. Some people—like twenty-year-old interns—do the damnedest things; some you could just kill—or understand at least why someone might seriously consider doing so. People politics is what this film is about.
Clooney is Clooney: other reviewers rightly have noted that his background appearance on political posters and television would have sufficed. Ryan Gosling plays the lead as Stephen Meyers, the chief assistant to Morris’ campaign manager Paul Zara (Philip Seymour Hoffman).
But the wheels this film runs on are the two campaign managers: Hoffman’s Zara and Paul Giamatti’s Tom Duffy, campaign manager for Morris’ main presidential primary rival Senator Ted Pullman, and their best made plans.
From their first evenly matched eyeball-to-eyeball, these two crafty stagers make this picture worth seeing. Giamatti is always entertaining in his antic-frantic, nervous Norvis or moustache twirling Snidely Whiplash modes, but here he is fine-tuned as a seasoned political operative. Hoffman does no less. It’s almost as though these perfectly matched pros revel in showing each other how it is done, both in character and as actors.
            Also of note is Marisa Tomei as Ida Horowicz, a nasal and toothy national political reporter for The New York Times, flashing her front teeth Clooney-style in a way that feels as though meant to parody someone, and the often unsung but always good Jeffrey Wright. 
Wright, in another of his fine character roles, plays Senator Thompson, a horse-dealing senator with political ambition prudently tailored to the possible (vice president, secretary of state, rather than president) and a big chunk of delegates to trade.
The above-referenced twenty-year-old Morris intern Molly Stearns (Evan Rachel Wood) plays the wild card. Her role is least convincing, though she—and Gosling—may be a bit outgunned here among this outstanding cast.
Although Gosling wins the deal at the poker table by the end of the movie and apparently is on track for big things to follow, one does not get the sense that he has come into his own as did Al Pacino at the end of The Godfather. He seems more a legend in his own mind than a serious contender.
This movie is a bit of a paradox, in that the strong characters that carry the drama do not drive the action—best made plans gang aft agley... It is not near as good a thriller as Michael Clayton (2007), starring Clooney and written and directed by Tony Gilroy, nor does it have the grace and poetry of Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck (2005).
But it’s not that bad.
The key to this movie is the nobodies. In the early 1920s, a group of gifted and intelligent political figures did not think that a rough and unsophisticated hack running their party was worth worrying about.
Like Meyers in The Ides of March, the Georgian Iosif Djugashvili who renamed himself Stalin did not give most of them the chance to think twice.
The one who fucked you may not be the bimbo at all.

Friday, October 14, 2011

Singing through the rain

Les parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) 1964 France (91 min.) written and directed by Jacques Demy, with music by Michel Legrand.
            This could be the kookiest movie idea imaginable: a candy-colored, French-made, 1950s-style young romance musical with the entire dialog sung from start to finish.
But both the film, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, starring a stunning 20-year-old Catherine Deneuve, and it’s Oscar-nominated theme written by Michel Legrand, which became in English the popular song ‘I Will Wait for You,’ were international hits and remain classics.
  
The movie’s bright crayon and pastel colors are pretty to look at, from the opening credits’ ‘God shot’ straight down from on high on a wet cobbled pavement as passersby with umbrellas cross the screen, to the Esso service station in Christmas snow at the movie’s end. The shots are nicely framed and sequenced, and convey the arch and self-conscious quality of Frenchness that winks discreetly from a Jean-Jacques Sempé cartoon, confident without taking itself too seriously.
The story is simple. Geneviève Emery (Deneuve), a seventeen-year-old who lives with her anxious widowed mother (Anne Vernon), and twenty-year-old auto mechanic Guy Foucher (Nino Castelnuovo) who lives with his ailing godmother Tante Élise (Mireille Perrey), are in love and want to marry.
However, Madame Emery, who owns an upscale umbrella shop in Cherbourgwith bourgeoise pretentions and adult disappointments to matchdoes not want her daughter getting mixed up with a poor grease monkey—less so a mere auto mechanic who has yet to do his military service while France is fighting a war in Algeria.
Meanwhile, Guy’s Tante Élise has a live-in nurse, Madeleine (Ellen Farmer), a lovely young woman not Catherine Deneuve, who has eyes for the darkly handsome young man. The fair Madeleine is encouraged by Tante Élise, though lovestruck Guy seems barely to notice her.
Guy is called up for service. Guy and Geneviève have sex for the first and only time on a date the evening before he leaves to report for duty, ultimately in Algeria. When Guy and Geneviève meet the next day at the train station before he leaves, they sing a short duet in the café that bears the kernel of what later would become ‘I Will Wait for You’.
Americans will recognize Norman Gimbel’s after-the-fact English rendering of the movie’s theme music, which begins: ‘If it takes forever I will wait for you/For a thousand summers I will wait for you/Till you're back beside me, till I'm holding you/Till I hear you sigh here in my arms…’
‘Mon amour,’ Guy sings to the theme, walking down the railway platform with Geneviève to board the train.
‘Je t’aime,’ Geneviève replies.
‘Mon amour.’
‘Je t’aime, je t’aime.’
‘Mon amour,’ Guys sings from the train.
‘Je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime,’ Geneviève cries as the train pulls out and the theme music swells.
Talk about making a rock cry. And this is only the first of three parts (Le départ).
In part two, ‘L’absence,’ Guy is in Algeria. Geneviève turns out to be pregnant with Guy’s child, but Madame Emery woos a well-heeled suitor for her, Roland Cassard (Marc Michel), for whom this is only a detail.
Roland’s musical theme later became Norman Gimbel’s well known bossa nova-inflected hit song ‘Watch What Happens’, which begins: ‘Let someone start believing in you/Let him hold out his hand/Let him touch you and watch what happens…’
Watch indeed: Geneviève and Guy begin to lose touch during Guy’s two-year absence, by way of Madame Emery’s devout desire if not her direct agency. Madame sells the umbrella shop. Geneviève marries the wooing Roland. They all leave Cherbourg.
In part three, ‘Le retour,’ Guy, recovered from a combat injury and demobilized, returns home to Cherbourg. He hears from Élise that Geneviève has married (Madeleine saw Geneviève and Roland leave the church on their wedding day) and begins to get on with his life without Geneviève.
The brief, bittersweet moment when Guy and Geneviève cross paths four years later by chance at the Esso service station Guy owns and operates with his wife Madeleine is underscored when the romantic musical theme is played to a banal back-and-forth sung by the two former lovers who now have little to say to each other. 
In the end, the singing that at first may disconcert a viewer actually helps make the story charming and romantic. It is a fun show to watch, which tells a good story with catchy music, and the cast is appealing all around without being the least ‘cute’.
Incidentally, it is not Catherine Deneuve doing the extraordinary singing. All the actors’ voices were dubbed for the songs in the movie: Danielle Licari sings the part of Geneviève, José Bartel is Guy, Christiane Legrand is Madame, George Blaness is Roland, Claudine Meunier is Madeleine and Claire Leclerc is Tante Élise.
Theatrical trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb5iVFq7qlQ&feature=fvst

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Wet work

Der Fall Gleiwitz (The Gleiwitz Case) 1961 DEFA Filmstudios, East Germany (63 minutes) directed by Gerhard Klein, edited by Evelyn Carow.
This tight, visually compelling East German feature film recreates the crime that touched off the Second World War. 
On the evening of August 31, 1939, German SS operatives disguised as ‘Polish nationalists’ briefly took over a German radio relay station at Gleiwitz near the German-Polish border. This event was part of a larger scheme orchestrated to justify the Nazi invasion of Poland.
In response to this staged ‘outrage’, early the next morning a German gunboat bombarded the port city Danzig/Gdansk—the ‘first shots’ of the Second World War—and German troops massed on the Polish border opened Hitler’s Blitzkrieg on Poland. Two days later (September 3), Britain and France, honoring their treaty obligations with Poland meant to deter Adolf Hitler’s ambitions, declared war on Germany. 
The film opens with a voiceover on the image of a peaceful city at evening: ‘We have had peace for 20 years. The lull will be over soon.’ This cuts to a newsreel showing joint German-Italian air and naval exercises, and the apparent author of the opening thought, a young man in a full German movie theater.
The young man and the audience watch the images of German military might with apparent pleasure and approval. They also enjoy some Nazi high kitsch: Hitler with small children, and a jolly Reichsführer Hermann Goering hamming it up at a folk festival like a small-town, baby-kissing American politician.
The young man is SS Hauptsturmführer (captain) Alfred Helmut Naujocks (Hannjo Hasse), the officer picked to lead the Gleiwitz operation. He is in the movie theater to meet a contact who will take him to be briefed on the mission by Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller (Herwart Grosse), a figure who resembles an SS death’s head.
Naujocks is the last of a succession of German secret operatives whom Müller summonses by a buzzer on his desk like a Smersh chief in a James Bond film, each given a specific task.
Müller directs Naujocks that he will carry out this mission using the operational name Birke at the head of a team of six ideologically pre-screened ‘Volksdeutschers,’ or ethnic Germans who had lived in Poland and speak Polish. The six were SS assets with special skills and military or paramilitary training.
The team also will get Konserve—‘canned goods’—a coded euphemism for an anonymous unfortunate stricken from the rolls of Sachsenhausen concentration camp (Hilmar Thate)—as a Polish nationalist ‘usual suspect’ to be shot on site and left to help thicken the plot for diplomats and the foreign press.
The target is the radio relay station at Gleiwitz, near the southern Polish border in Upper Silesia, a former German province that Stalin annexed to Poland after the war. It is a sleepy little out of the way place; in our first introduction to the place we see a radio technician there in a white lab coat drinking coffee and reading a newspaper listening to Hawaiian music.
The plot moves quickly. Other than the last-minute scrambling for a broadcast microphone after they seized the station, the film only intimates that the mastermind planning the operation overlooked the detail that this installation was not a broadcast station but a radio relay station for the broadcast station at Breslau, thus had limited transmission capacity. 
That Naujocks’ rendezvous point with security officials is, on two key occasions, a movie theatre—the first during a newsreel, the second during a glitzy musical—would underscore the sense of unreality about this plot if not the entire Hitlerian vision.
Of note is a montage sequence showing Naujocks travelling by train through the rich farmland of peacetime Germany surrounded by well fed, self-satisfied German soldiers and civilians, with a glow of smug satisfaction at the quick victory that he believes to be soon at hand.
Naujocks later reflects on his background and eight-year Nazi career: a jingoistic schoolteacher and problems with higher education shown when a ‘Jew professor’ tells him he needs to work and study harder to succeed; becoming a brownshirt by taking the Nazi oath before a sunset fire; work first as a domestic agent, then a foreign operative of the SD, or Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service).
More powerful is a montage sequence showing the blindfolded ‘unfortunate’ (actually a pro-Polish German named Franz/Franciszek Honiok whom the Gestapo had just arrested) en route to the staging area. He apparently is aware that he has a role in something evil afoot but is unable to do anything about it; his feeling is expressed as he flexes and wrings his hands and wrists in handcuffs between two policemen in the back seat of a police Mercedes sedan.
When the Mercedes jolts to a stop at a railroad crossing, an army train carrying trucks, artillery pieces and soldiers on flatcars and in boxcars to the Polish frontier rattles by, hypnotically synchronized with the ‘Juwi juwi di ha ha ha’ refrain of Schwarzbraun ist die Haselnuss (Dark brown is the hazelnut). This was a German folk song that was a popular marching song with the army and the Hitler Youth.
The Nazis and their views may sound overcooked to the postmodern viewer. However, director Gerhard Klein got into trouble with East German authorities at the time by making his Nazis too convincing: officials suspected that he espoused the attitudes they expressed. Klein, a life-long communist, had served in the Wehrmacht as a draftee and said that he based his portrayals on his experience.
            Details vary among several versions of this event that exist. This story reportedly derives from an affidavit taken from Naujocks by a member of the Nuremburg War Crimes Commission.
The DVD set includes a 16-minute 2003 documentary about film editor Evelyn Carow, from the series ‘Film Professionals: The Editor Evelyn Carow.’ Carow’s work itself makes this movie worth seeing. She appears to have been to Klein what Thelma Schoonmaker is to Martin Scorsese.

Monday, October 3, 2011

Poison quills

Le Corbeau
(The Raven) 1943 Continental Films, France (91 minutes) directed and cowritten by Henri-Georges Clouzot; set includes a short interview in English with French director Bertrand Tavernier.
At outset, Le Corbeau (The Raven), centered at a hospital in a small town where a number of the doctors and staff have troubled or unsettled interpersonal histories, seems the ideal setting for a soap opera.
St. Robain, the fictional provincial French town where the movie is set, does not disappoint us.
An anonymous letter writer self-identified only as ‘The Raven’ stirs things up by targeting mainly his—or her—more self-involved neighbors. The writer’s primary target is Dr. Remy Germain (Pierre Fresnay), a brain surgeon with a shadowed past, accused of performing secret abortions and also of having affairs with several local women, among whom Laura Vorzet (Micheline Francey), the beautiful young wife of Dr. Michel Vorzet (Pierre Larquey), the head of the hospital.
The result is a pithy, well-acted ensemble piece leavened with a dry sense of humor, especially in minor characters’ vignettes and asides, meticulously framed and shot.
The Raven’s letters come in the mail, fall from the horse-drawn hearse of a man whose suicide was caused by one such letter, even flutter from on high inside the town cathedral during a Sunday sermon; they could be written by one person, or several, or the result of malice inspired in many by one original.
Who could The Raven be? Motive is everywhere. The letters are artlessly laughable by appearance and the wickedly salacious and slanderous assertions they make, except that they contain enough grains of truth to fuel the townspeople’s suspicions, passions, and violence.
Ironically for director Clouzot, similar ‘grains’ appear to have succeeded all too well. The film enraged both the political right and the left in France, as well as the Catholic Church. It resulted in the director’s censure after the war—a two-year ban from making films—along with similar sanctions against several members of the cast and crew, all purportedly for having ‘collaborated’ with the Nazis (who reportedly had not been thrilled with the work themselves).
C’est un boulot bien fait—seems as though he did a fair job.
Clouzot shot the film in occupied France for a German production company set up in France under the auspices of Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. The raw human nature unleashed in the townspeople’s reaction to the ‘anonymographe’ was taken to have cast the French people in a negative light, in line with the Third Reich’s characterization of the subjected French as a craven and emotional people.
But Clouzot’s camera eye is closer to the nineteenth century French naturalist writers. He portrays ordinary people going about their lives too self-absorbed to see more of others than what their prejudices or received notions let them see. This leaves febrile ground, when the inexplicable strikes, for their hypocrisy to take root and to inspire them to ascribe to those they know not at all the darkest aspects of their own natures.
It comes down to the light in which one views his subject.
In a night conversation in a narrow staircase lit by a hanging light bulb that Dr. Vorzet has caused to swing metronomically between them, he asks Dr. Germain where in his view good and evil would begin and end in considering one’s character. The lamp continues to swing through the conversation, dramatically changing the light and shadow on each man’s face and the shadow he casts—a shot director Jean-Luc Godard later notably borrowed in Alphaville.
In the end, the character who appears to have the broadest appreciation for human frailty may turn out to be the frailest human of the lot.
Le Corbeau has been labeled ‘pessimistic’: it captures what can happen when one preys on the weaknesses of self-absorbed people lacking self-knowledge, but it ends on a note of not sacrificing the future for the present.