Roads Not Taken

One is never wrong if they call Citizen Kane the greatest American film of all time.
 

Unfortunately, this safety net has in fact come to work against the film in recent years. Many people coming to the film for the first time are so overburdened with expectations concerning the picture’s sizeable reputation that their first viewing inevitably leaves them both disappointed and rather curious what all the fuss was about to begin with. Others resist labeling Citizen Kane ‘the greatest’ for other, more obvious motivations: They want to be different and buck the convention wisdom. 

 Neither condition applies to me.

I first encountered Citizen Kane in a high school film class and I found its perspective, wherein a newspaper reporter interviews several characters about Kane and the narrative of the picture leaps between time periods in an almost disjointed fashion, completely enthralling. For me, the richness of the film’s themes, its technical achievements and its overall artistic vision have not dulled with time, either. This is quite simply the greatest American film ever made, no matter what criteria one is asked to consider, and it will remain such, I believe for eternity.

Indeed, there are so many angles one can come at when discussing Citizen Kane—a testament, I believe, to its greatness—that one almost does not know where to begin. There are its many technical achievements, in which set design, costuming and makeup reached hitherto unforeseen heights in film. There is the cinematography. Never before had light and shadow been used so effectively, actors positioned in such crucial ways and cameras positioned in such strange and wonderful places (Orson Welles famously cut the floor out of some sets to shoot up and at his actors from their feet to make them appear larger than life).

However, the construction of the film’s narrative and the underlying themes that narrative contains are where I believe Citizen Kane is at its greatest.

Orson Welles, a man who needs no real introduction to contemporary readers, for better and worse—mostly worse, if you know anything about Welles—was at the height of his powers when he made Citizen Kane and the choices he makes as a storyteller are inspired. I have no evidence Wells read William Faulkner or James Joyce, but the notion the conventional narrative underwent a serious revision in the 1930s and 40s should be apparent to even the most casual reader of American and world literature from that time period.  Furthermore, Welles in his infamous “War of the Worlds” broadcast had already demonstrated during the 1930s that he had a penchant for turning the conventional narrative on its head through the innovative use of established mediums.

His application of this in Citizen Kane is clear in that he takes the traditional film noir narrative of a mystery in need of solving (in this case about Kane’s last words), fatalism and trust and betrayal and enlarges the genre to tackle nothing less than the entirety of the American dream and what it means to gain and lose things (people, power, love, adoration, hate and prestige). In a film so about narrative, it is telling we never hear from Kane himself. Rather, he is a corpse from the very first frame of the film and instead we hear from those who knew him at his best and his worst, as the narrative leaps here and there and provides sharp and soft shards of a man’s life, who by his own account could have been a great man, but was not.

And yet, for all the cinematic bells and whistles (and what a movie this is JUST to watch, even on mute), for all its tricks of camera and flashes of brilliance, this is at its heart a film about people and their failure to interact with another, to love one another and to live to meaningful lives. All of the characters in Citizen Kane are haunted ghosts, empty reflections of a former “greatness” that when peeled away turns out to be far more prosaic and ordinary than we first believed. Kane’s longtime sidekick still remembers a nameless woman he never spoke to but glimpsed on a New York pier, Kane’s best friend just wanted to write an honest review of Kane’s wife because he could not remember how to do anything honest. 

These are small, simple acts (or non-acts) and yet they all had more impact than Kane’s failed gubernatorial bid or the Second World War on all of those involved. That is because in the end, Citizen Kane is about the roads not taken or the decisions made or not made and what each of those moment renders in the years that follow. What is a life but the fragments of where it touched other people? Kane’s physic interior can be guessed at, but never known. What can be known, both by him and all the other characters, is the decisions they all made and how those decisions created their lives and formed them into the people they became. Thus, Kane’s “Rosebud” was a sleigh ride never taken, a life of complete ordinariness in Colorado wilds that was never possible after his mother sent him East with his millions.

That he seemed willing to trade all the subsequent moments, all the subsequent decisions and outcomes for a chance at that lost life is the tragic nostalgia at the heart of Citizen Kane’s power as a film. For who among us believes every path we chose was the correct one? That all of those roads not taken were truly unworthy of exploration? 

The Greatest Irony

George Lucas’s 1977 Star Wars is a great many things.

A childish romp, a sophisticated homage to Hollywood’s long-forgotten serials – Flash Gordon, Buck Rodgers and the like – and a secular fantasy for the United States, one whose easily discernible vision of good versus evil rendered it easy fodder for defense department planners and journalists alike to utilize the film’s name as a moniker for America’s nascent Space Defense Initiative in the 1980s.

Star Wars also cleverly cast aside the somber, post-studio system cynicism that dominated Hollywood and film in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and hearkened back to the swashbuckling films of Errol Flynn, to the long, purposeful stride of larger-than-life John Wayne and to a time when the moviegoer, regardless of age, could watch a fun, thigh-slapper of film and come away from it with the simple enthusiasm of a child just returned from his first circus. As a result, it became one of the most successful films of all-time. Then, it became something more than a film...

When it was released, Star Wars was the independent film of independent films. It had no opening credits, but a strange scroll, for which Lucas was chastised by Hollywood's famous guilds, it had little known actors and an almost paint-by-numbers story. Then there was, as we all know, an endless array of Star Wars merchandise, most of which initially came about partly to help Lucas fund and re-coop the expense of making the film itself, but then stuck around and continues to stick around. Indeed, the film franchise would eventually be sold in 2013 for more than $4 Billion to Disney, largely on account of said merchandise and the potential for more of it. (As a famous aside: Alec Guinness became quite a rich man by foolishly – or so he thought at the time – agreeing to take a cut of the merchandise sales in lieu of his usual fee for acting).

All of the above is a long way of saying that we are all living in the post-Star Wars world, and that whether we like it or not, there is no going back to what came before. Star Wars helped finish off what little was left of the Old Hollywood, which had begun to fall apart in the mid-1960s with the collapse of the studio system, and subsequently helped usher in the New Hollywood of corporations, high finance and marketing. Summer blockbusters, an explosion of science fiction, toy tie-ins and – this more than anything else – a new reliance on advanced special effects, which up to this point in Hollywood’s history had largely been limited because they were not strong enough to carry a picture (actors and scripts did that), are all part of the cinematic world Star Wars created. 

That Lucas intended none of the above is relevant only if we choose to remember how radical a film Star Wars actually was when it was released and how uncertain its place in the American cinema would have been absent Lucas’s compelling vision and his drive to completely fashion an independent film out of the best pieces of myth, iconography, religion and popular culture. Put simply, Star Wars is the most important movie of the past 35 or so years, though I doubt anyone now or then, including Lucas himself, would say so if asked.

Part of the reason for this stems from the fact that outside of its obvious commercial success with audiences, Star Wars has enjoyed little critical fanfare.

Film writer Thomas Schatz dismissed Star Wars as “remarkably superficial”; Robin Wood called it “intellectually undemanding.” Little has changed since these initial pronouncements. Indeed, the arrival of the tortured and overwrought prequels has, if anything, only confirmed the view of many outside the usual fan-base that Star Wars is shallow eye-candy that relies on action and special effects to overcome wooden actors, dull plots and intellectually undemanding themes. Lucas’s aforementioned heavy borrowing to generate the grist of Star Wars material has not helped him on this account, either. 

There are, as my own eyes show me, entire shots lifted from brilliant films, such as The Searchers and Lawrence of Arabia, and from lesser efforts, such as 633 Squadron. There is also the matter of the cantina scene ripped straight from a Western, a character named Han Solo who is the interstellar incarnate of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and the film’s two climaxes, the first of which is essentially a sword-fight, shot almost frame-for-frame like a Kurosawa scene, with the second portraying an attack on a space station that plays out in similar fashion to The Dam Busters.

This is not to say Lucas is not an original, for as I have already suggested, Star Wars was indeed a radical film when it was made, a fact that is lost in time and the film’s subsequent success. Nobody, and this includes most of the cast and crew, understood what Lucas was after in Star Wars and when the first cut of the film was completed, the studio heads were terrified to release it. Talking Robots? A Princess? A villain dressed all in black armor? Spaceships? A furry and howling sidekick? It was all quite out there back then and all something no one knew how to classify...

The other major piece of radicalism in Star Wars is its inherent conservatism, which is also another of its ironies. Lucas chose to make an epic science fiction film that was fantastically different from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or Franklin J. Schnaffner’s The Planet of the Apes, the other two high-budget science fiction films that garnered mainstream attention. Lucas intentionally eschewed Kubrick’s cold intellectualism and Schnaffer’s hip political sensibility and chose instead to make a movie that recalled myths from Ancient Troy to King Arthur. At its heart, Star Wars is a hero quest, with a protagonist who is chosen by destiny (Luke) and guided by an old sage (Obi-Wan Kenobi) to first confront and then overcome evil (Darth Vader and the Empire). Lucas set his film to a soaring John Williams score that echoes Wagner and created powerful visual contrasts – the colorless Vader and Storm Troopers and the rag-tag Rebels in their orange jump suits – that ensured audiences saw and felt the difference between good and evil on the screen as much as they understood it. Add the equally simple and powerful themes of maturation, of leaving home, of finding and sacrificing for one’s friends of committing one’s self to something outside the self and you have a palpable mixture of emotion that should have assuaged some of the concerns studio executives felt about the film’s content.

At the same time, it has become impossible to separate Lucas the filmmaker from Lucas the businessman and entrepreneur, a fact even his close friends acknowledged by the early 1980s, when the Lucas Empire had become large enough that many began to openly question the man’s priorities. Francis Ford Coppola, John Milieus and Stephen Spielberg, all of whom were Lucas’s contemporaries at film school at the University of Southern California, all speak highly of Lucas and his talent, both then and now. Coppola, who made at least three of the greatest American films in the latter half of the 20th century, has even called Lucas “one of the most talented directors of that time," but like the others, there is a limit to what he will stomach from his old friend's various conversions.

For example, Coppola has said Star Wars does not show one-tenth of what Lucas is capable of as artist. Lucas, Coppola believes, chose the “industrial marketing complex" instead of art. This is a creative collapse that Lucas himself occasionally acknowledged back in the 1980s, when his empire was much smaller than it is today and he was still uncertain of its ultimate direction. Star Wars, he once griped in between installments, “took over his life,” and in doing so, he became precisely what he hated when he struck out on his own as an independent filmmaker: A corporate CEO. “What I was trying to do was stay independent,” he said in 2005, when it was clear he had given up on this desire. “I’m not happy with the fact corporations have taken over the film industry. But now I find myself the head of a corporation. So there’s a certain irony there.”

Indeed, there is Mr. Lucas.

I would venture farther that such a moment of self-awareness, which now have become almost unheard of as Lucas more and more speaks like the media-savvy fight promoter, is even more ironic when one realizes that the corporate takeover Lucas appears troubled by occurred precisely because of the great commercial success of Star Wars. That is, in order to capitalize the increasingly expensive special effects moviegoers demanded after becoming accustomed to adventures like Star Wars, it became necessary for filmmakers to secure tremendous amounts of funding. In most cases the necessary amounts could only be had through the kind of merchandising Lucas pioneered, which more and more was reliant upon corporate partnerships and a new sort of Hollywood money-man who cared not a whit for the artistic value of their financial ventures. Return on investment, and not just return, but staggering Star Wars-like levels of return became the new expected norm.

For all his aloofness and lack of acknowledgement for what he hath wrought, Lucas remains something of a sympathetic character, if for nothing else than for the sensation one has in reading some of his comments that at one time Lucas genuinely believed he would make other films after the Star Wars trilogy concluded and that those films would be more in line with his earlier, more expressive work. Instead, as we are all well aware, Lucas went on to help invent Indiana Jones, yet another fantastically successful amalgamation of Old Hollywood tropes, and tinkered and then re-tinkered with his original three Star Wars films. Lucas then found – or more likely, invented – reasons to make three additional Star Wars films, none of which approached his initial effort in terms of impact or quality, though all made their creator staggering amounts of money.

With each new Star Wars film, with each new scene of perfectly sculpted Computer-Generated-Imagery (CGI), which is to say with each new piece of rubbery unreality that a director who once boasted of hating actors has been able to utilize, we are one step farther away from the magic of Hollywood’s Golden Age and one more step within contemporary Hollywood’s age of visually shallow wonder, for it impossible to imagine nowadays a major film without the kind of staggering budget and without the kind of staggering effects Star Wars requires to capture its audience. (This is especially the case with the prequels, bereft of emotion as they are. Would there be any reason to watch them at all if they were not visually stunning? Lucas has indeed rid himself of actors in those films). And while some of this might be good for the child in all of us, I cannot help but feel like something else has been sacrificed, something that George Lucas of 1977 might have appreciated about classic film, which he borrowed from so successfully. It is a shame then, that he is both the creator and the destroyer of worlds he loves and that we all must both thank him for all the joy his 1977 vision has given to us even as we all suffer from what that vision so crudely discarded and replaced.

Mistakes of Their Own

The Graduate is more than a classic film.

It is a piece of Americana that has penetrated the nation’s collective consciousness through multiple forms of media to the point that it is now essentially known and ubiquitous.

There is the image of Dustin Hoffman, for example, somewhat cocky and somewhat confused, with his hands thrust in pockets, staring at the outstretched and stocking-clad calve and foot of co-star Anne Bancroft. Surely, this is one of the cinema’s most enduring images of the last century?

And while adultery no longer shocks America, that image retains the power – and the moral price of caving into that power – of raw sexuality and naked titillation. There is also the Simon and Garfunkle acoustic soundtrack that includes “Mrs. Robinson,” a folksy pop tune whose exuberance masks the sadness documented in lyrics that pine for a lost American age represented by famed baseball slugger Joe DiMaggio. And there is, of course, the film itself. It has been parodied, held up as a siren song for a generation, and even more recently, returned for reexamination as a stage play for a whole new age-group and audience.

Timelessness? I think that is an apt word, but a curious one nonetheless, to apply to a film that debuted in 1967 and was immediately embraced as a kind of zeitgeist for the disaffected American youth who looking back saw nothing but the rather grim – but economically successful – 1950s and looking ahead the growing shadow of Vietnam, fractured race relations, urban upheaval and gradual restructuring of the United State’s post-World War Two order. Or perhaps that is all too academic? The undeniable power in this film, I believe, is the confusion that sits at its core. That is, Dustin Hoffman is an educated, somewhat well-to-do young man, but he is seemingly passionate about nothing and has no idea what to do with himself or with his life, a set of ennui-ridden attributes that have afflicted American youth from 1967 up until the present day.

If the Greatest Generation vanquished fascism and put America at the top of the world economic heap, what, if anything was left for their offspring to do? Enjoy the world as inheritors? That world, as shown here, is one of afternoon booze and cocktails, peopled with a seedy and curiously amoral set of characters who speak of investments in plastics as if the welfare of the Republic depended on such mundane commerce. It is a curiously hip and Left-wing view, in that it accepts Marx’s theories about the estrangement of wage laborers as fact and correspondingly presents the most successful of America’s capitalists – as surely Hoffman’s odd parents and their ilk are meant to represent – as dreadfully dull, or, in the case of Mrs. Robinson, mildly socio-pathic and disturbed by the lack of real substance in their lives.

Ennui, of course, is nothing new. And the chronicling of the “quiet, desperate lives” all Americans supposedly live has been a standard trope of both novels and films for at least the past 100 years. What separates The Graduate from this pack is its focus on youth, something that perhaps had not occurred in popular culture up until the 1960s. Hoffman is in the prime of his life. There is, the film shows us, still time for him to avoid becoming his parents. It is this possibility, this thematic fork in the road, which I believe keeps the film fresh well into another century: All youth wants to both emulate and reject their parents, regardless of time period, and Hoffman’s character is no different.

Hoffman debases himself with Mrs. Robinson in a kind of bizarre emulation, but at the same time, he uses his defilement – and hers, one must say – as a catalyst to muster the courage to try to break out of the world of easy living and fancy cars that she and his parents wished to bequeath him and his generation. The ultimate irony is that Hoffman eventually settles on the idea of marriage – or at least, some kind of “elopement” – with Mrs. Robinson’s daughter as his ticket to independence. This is interesting in that marriage is the ultimate conservative social institution, but in the world of The Graduate marriage too is presented as shambolic in 1967 (and this well before the country’s divorce rate really skyrocketed).

The final scene of the film, which has been the source of much debate and parody, is deeply moving.

In a matter of seconds, the Hoffman and Elaine’s expression seems to shift from joy, to contentment to a sad sort of resignation. I have never been able to pin down the source of the last emotion, but I suspect it is something more than the adrenaline dying down in their veins. I suspect what they realize is that they have made a choice by fleeing together, and what is more, this is the first real adult choice they have ever made. 

They are, in other words, not children anymore, and for the first times in their lives, they have exercised their free will and acted outside the wishes and inducements of their parents and their school friends. They have decided to eschew the mistakes their parents made and to run away to make some of their own. That is liberating, hence their initial glee. But gradually, their expressions change, because they realize, almost immediately, that their first “mistake” is the elopement itself. 

Not because the elopement is morally wrong or against the wishes of their parents or of society writ large, but because it is wrong for them, as free-thinking and independent adults. Their rebellion, in other words, is torpedoed at almost the exact moment it began by the very act that sets them free and on their way. What is brilliantly left unknown is how or whether they can recover from this act in time to stave off becoming their parents...I leave it to you to decide, but if you need evidence of what these Baby Boomers became, there is plenty around you in contemporary America.

The Dreariness of Sanctity

How does one film The Great Gatsby?

With a great deal of care and reverence, I suppose.

Certainly, the Jack Clayton 1974 version – Hollywood’s third attempt to depict arguably the greatest American novel ever written – is filmmaking with the sort of attention to detail and seriousness usually reserved for a religious ritual.

And yes, like most actual religious functions, this effort is far too somber and particular to ever really entertain or convey anything like sentiment. Adaptation is never an easy art to pull off, of course, and the old adage that great books make lousy movies and lousy books make great movies is never truer than it is here. Standout performances from Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, both of whom seemed born to play Gatsby and Daisy, cannot save what one critic quipped is a film “as lifeless as a body that’s been too long at the bottom of a swimming pool.”

The strangeness of the failure is even more acute when one realizes that both Francis Ford Coppola and Vladimir Nabakov – the latter no slouch at writing novels – worked on the screenplay, a screenplay which on the page, probably sang with passion. The scenes themselves, especially that first grandiose party at Gatsby’s waterfront abode, also look spectacular enough to get the heart pounding and the head hoping that what we are about to see will equal the power and the pitfalls of the novel. But sadly the aesthetics and the integrity of the plot are all that is on offer here. The movie just does not hum along the way the book does and scenes that are meant to be emotional, especially the tragic ones, play out flat and boring, as if conveyed by the robotics of rote memorization.

That the book is far more complicated and less clean than filmmakers and high school English teachers think no doubt also plays havoc on this adaptation. For what is Fitzgerald after in the novel? Many would say it is about money not being everything, an oblique reference to Fitzgerald’s “the rich are not like you and me” quote, which is so often taken out of context as to entirely lose its meaning. Certainly, Redford, with his shirts from Turbell & Asher and his French champagne and fake Oxford degree is not like his contemporaries, something both the novel and the film make clear once he is dead and there is almost no one at his funeral, save Nick Carraway. But is the book – and therefore, the film adaptation here – really so simple? 

Certainly, I did not think so the second time I read the novel, nor the third.

Rather than bore my handful of readers with literary analysis, I will simply offer the following. Gatsby and Nick’s intertwined searches for the self are entirely that: Searches for the self. Gatsby attempted to remake himself because he never knew who he was in the first place and was not sure what he wanted to become. This is the glory and the rootlessness of egalitarian America, where you are not what your parents were and are not confined by where you came from (unlike Europe, for example). You must then invent yourself – and this can take a lifetime, and even longer still, and the worst part of it is, you may never reach a satisfactory result. Certainly, Gatsby did not.

Gatsby chooses Tom and Daisy’s crude and boorish model of success as his lamppost because he wanted Daisy to be his and not Tom’s. What he really wants is a past that he could not recapture and a future based on an alternate past that never unfolded. He does not learn that you are not entirely what others think of you. Worse, if you do not know yourself, truly know yourself, then no party can ever be big enough, no lie convincing enough.

Gatsby is a muddled, shook-up man who likely knows less about himself at the end than he did at the beginning.  Only Nick grows, but even he is paralyzed by his own uncertainty about his own identity to do or say much throughout the plot’s events, which is precisely why he is a great narrator, but near-awful protagonist. He cannot break away from Tom and Daisy until it is too late and he cannot help save Gatsby from himself. The plot itself is about a great many things, wealth, discovery, the American dream, the hollowness of that dream, relationships, love, nostalgia, maturation, lost innocence. I could go on, because it is all there, and what we are dealing with is decisively deadly in the way a tight Shakespearean tragedy is.

Funny thing about the old Bard, he does not film well, either.

My suspicion is these texts matter too much to the people who found some or all of the richness in them and that this affinity prevents these adaptors from the level of interpretation and confinement necessary for two and half hours of film. In that sense, The Great Gatsby, is a beautiful but mediocre film, one that becomes interesting only when we watch it for what it is not. In other words, no matter how earnest the acolyte, he or she cannot conjure up the same magic as the prophet who inspired them, and in the case of this film, what we have is a rather unintentional examination of failing to achieve the sort of legitimate greatness the title character himself vainly sought in the pages of a century-old novel.

Not Dark Enough

Strange waters these.

I am quite the Humphrey Bogart devotee, as my profile of him on this site suggests.

And so I find myself wandering in unfamiliar territory when I make the claim that I do not believe Bogart works well as Raymond Chandler’s infamous shamus in 1945’s The Big Sleep, a film that also suffers from far too much subtlety and not enough naked awfulness (more on the latter below). In most cases, I would defend Hollywood’s by-gone penchant for leaving the crude unsaid and for suggesting rather than showing, largely because we have far too much of the opposite these days, but in the case of The Big Sleep, the production code at the time simply did not allow for the grit and grime and human frailty of Chandler’s pre-war Los Angeles to appear on-screen.

And Bogart, painful as it is for me to write, is part of the problem.

Certainly, he is great in the other film noir detective classic – The Maltese Falcon.

In that film, Bogart shines as Sam Spade, but that is largely because Sam Spade has no human weaknesses, is on a mission of righteous revenge. Bogart also essentially plays him as Bogart. But Phillip Marlow, Chandler’s know-it-all private dick? As a tremendous fan of a writer I consider much more than a mystery hack, I can honestly say there is a tragic grandeur to Marlow that Bogart just cannot capture. Bogart is too sure of himself, too clean and too self-righteous for Marlow, a man whom Chandler writes as a kind of fallen angel, a once-righteous being that is now chock full of cynicism to shield himself from more disappointment, more failure.

Marlow on the page is a grubby human who makes a grubby living, but he infuses what is an otherwise parasitic and not-so-honest way of living with a kind of noble grandeur by adhering to a strict and unspoken code that raises him above his clients and their short-term interests driven by greed or sex. Bogart, on the other hand, is noble in The Big Sleep, but he has none of Marlow’s ugliness, none of his self-awareness about his character’s ugliness, and consequently, he delivers lines intended to convey pained self-understanding – no doubt gained through previous unspeakable awful events – with such deadpan earnestness that the dialogue comes across a series of clever quips instead of moments of carefully crafted, naked confession.

Perhaps this failure has to do with the Howard Hawks’ impressive but flawed production.

Faithfulness is often a virtue, but in this case, the film tries to follow so many of the novel’s permutations – of which there are many – that the result is dizzyingly confusing onscreen (it all works much better on the page). Indeed, two endings of the film were cut, both of which are available on the DVD, because audiences in 1945 were uncertain exactly what the hell happened in Hawks’ first attempt at a resolution. So he tried again. I could follow events well enough, but then I have read the novel and had that as a primer. Woe to the filmgoer who approaches the story here cold.

This is not to say the good guys are not obvious and the bad even more so.

Lauren Bacall simmers here in one of her three onscreen appearances with Bogart as the more responsible, if somewhat still less than honest, daughter of Bogart’s client. Bacall arches her eyebrows in all the right places and she absolutely purrs all the right lines at just the right moment with just the right amount of licentiousness.

Martha Vickers’ sucking her thumb and batting her eyes as she attempts to lure men to their doom or find a new thrill is much more disturbing and much closer to the mark laid down by the novel. Her portrayal of the little girl all grown up in all the wrong ways is both frightening and positively scandalous. And why the filmmakers went this dark in this one portion of the movie and remained vanilla elsewhere mystifies. She is, at one point, quite clearly drugged, raped and photographed for blackmail purposes. As if this is not enough, Vickers makes it clear her character actually enjoyed the defilement.

The relatives around Vickers, Bacall included, is far cleaner than Chandler’s dark vision of a noble family that has been dragged down by the ugliness of their environment and the awfulness of their individual obsessions. Part of this, I suspect, stems from the filmmakers needing to make Bacall a legitimate love interest for Bogart. Hence, she cannot be that bad and must have some redeemable qualities, despite being dangerous and very obviously a femme fatale of sorts. The problem is this waters down Vickers performance – to say nothing of the rest of the rogues gallery on display here – and makes her actions appear almost alien. Context is important and the disjointedness apparent in the film goes well beyond its uneven handling of its characters. For example, it is even more difficult for the audience to find a context for the plot’s sheer awfulness, given that the L.A. we see here looks like what it is: The L.A. of glittering movie sets. Chandler’s vision of the city is something more sinister, and is perhaps lost to history after a fashion. That is, Los Angeles now has 70 years of crime and riots to chip away at its glamour and nobody today would be shocked that the events in The Big Sleep could occur there. But Chandler was writing about pre-War California, when it was the land of bright promise and sunshine and people migrated there for the climate and new job opportunities – not to fester in an overregulated, traffic-sodden economy built on an odd combination of Hollywood, the music industry and street crime. Like a more contemporary director, David Lynch, Chandler was peeling back the normalness – to say nothing of the downright positivism that sunny California built itself selling – and showing his audience that private eyes like Marlow needed to exist in the otherwise beautiful climate out West, because people were secretly running drugs, having covert affairs and constantly trying to rob their fellow Californians.

Amongst this, Marlow navigates the city’s hellish underbelly in an almost monastic way. Sure, he smokes constantly, is probably an alcoholic and his way of making a living could be considered somewhat dubious, but given the characters around him, the ones his job forces him to deal with, he is simple, pure and perhaps even holy. Indeed, Marlow never overcharges, never switches side or falls for a femme fatale, the latter of which the movie ignores (there has to be a love interest, right?). Thus, The Big Sleep’s biggest disappointment is that this Marlow is not present on the screen. Bogart’s Marlow is not better than his fellow characters, he is simply smarter and less driven to vice. I do not think Chandler is interested in this kind of relativistic judgment. Hard and ugly judgments are more his thing. And make no mistake, this is not an ugly film. The times just would not allow it and the actors, in most cases, just did not have that kind of depravity in them.

The Unbreakable Shell

John Wayne does three things well.

He talks with a languid toughness that manages to sound both intimidating and wise at the same time and whenever he struts across the screen as a soldier or cowboy he comes across as completely legitimate, despite the painful obviousness in many of his performances.

In 1949’s Sands of Iwo Jima, Wayne puts his best boot forward – and collected an Oscar nomination in the process – when he offers up equal doses of stoicism and sympathy in his now-legendary role as the no-nonsense Marine Sergeant Stryker. It is not an exaggeration to say that the very stereotype of the hard-as-nails drill instructor originates with Wayne and this performance. It is also not an exaggeration to assert Wayne being Wayne in this film is precisely what saves an effort that otherwise would be a profound piece of propaganda celebrating the legend of the Marine Corps.

Because as I said, this is not altogether incredible stuff.

There is a kind of paint-by-numbers with these World War Two epics: The platoon or company is always the center of our attention and it is typically comprised of souls with immediately identifiable accents and at least one personality trait that enables the viewer to remember something unique about that character when he is spotted among the rest of the cast. Part of this is economy, because nobody needs a film with a dozen developed characters, and part of it is filmmakers giving the audience what they expect from the genre (see Saving Private Ryan). Sands of Iwo Jima may be decades old and made within living memory of the actual event, but quite a lot of World War Two films had already appeared by 1949, many of them with Wayne in them, and Hollywood knew what people wanted. More complicated war films, with less obvious tracks, would not come until America began to grapple with how to depict the Vietnam conflict on the screen.

In the case of this film, the American triumph on the tiny island of Iwo Jima signified by the iconic flag-raising ceremony on the summit of Mt. Suribachi was known to virtually every American. The photograph, taken by Joe Rosenthal, had not only graced magazine covers and posters, it had also been used extensively as propaganda piece to raise war bonds (see Flags of My Father). The decision to graft a challenging, if somewhat one-dimensional and episodic plot, on top of a film building to an inevitable event therefore deserves some credit. Stryker could have been more boorish and more boring, and in the hands of a lesser actor he might have been.

Wayne makes him believable and he does not with his bark but with the pained scowl he gets whenever he is confronted by another’s failure to perform or on the occasions when the awfulness of failure attempts to impose itself on his life and the fate of his men. There is a telling scene when Wayne encounters a baby belonging to Julie Bishop after a brief romance in her home. The father is gone, either dead or disinterested, and Wayne is painfully reminded of his own estrangement from his child, and haunted by the possibility that he too may one day leave a woman without a man and a child without a father, should he fall combat.

The scene plays well on Wayne’s running confrontation with John Agar, the arrogant, college-educated son of an officer under whom Wayne served. Agar is the smart-aleck recruit who presents his sergeant with a problem. This would feel stale and prosaic were the father/son motif not the foundation of the turmoil. Wayne watched an officer he loved as a father die, and now the son of that officer is under his care. What is he to do? The answer is make certain the son is ready.

On the American side, the battle of Iwo Jim claimed upwards of 6,000 men and 19,000 casualties, including the lives of most of the men in the famous flag-raising photograph. All but 200 or so of the 20,000 Japanese soldiers on the island died in combat. The latter of the two statistics speaks to what manner of battle the American Marine faced on the island – the enemy, almost literally, was willing to fight to the last man, and nearly did so. America's triumph should be viewed in martial terms that take into account those horrific numbers, but also in the more human tones painted in this film. When Wayne, rather inevitably, falls, his men find a letter on him addressed to his estranged son, saying all the things he wanted to say but could not find the strength to do so while he was alive. It is a cliched moment perhaps, but it still makes the audience feel nonetheless. Here is a tireless warrior, a man among men who trained other men to do great things. And here, laid bare, in a letter he knew could only be posted after he died, is his soul. He was unbreakable as a Marine, but even Marines are people, too.

Dangerous Ideology

No doubt there are plenty of people who watch 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate today and come away thinking it little more than a period-piece, or a kind of curiosity that chronicles an opaque form of paranoia from the Cold War that seems as alien to them as the once-held belief in the divine right of kings.

However, dismissing John Frankenheimer’s calculated adaptation of Richard Condon’s novel on such grounds is a mistake. For starters, I can think of few other films where the imitation of life is as brilliantly warped and overdone – and at the same time as strangely accurate – as this one. That is, we know now that the Soviet Union and its ill-begotten allies really did believe they could brainwash people in political reeducation camps, a plot point that would seem to be cooked up by a kooky screenwriter. We also know the Central Intelligence Agency experimented on methods to both control minds and resist the mind control efforts of their enemies (the infamous MKULTRA project that included a certain compound that later gained famed as LSD). Conspricacy-laced political thrillers that have just a touch of truth may be common fair these days, but in 1962 – when the majority of Americans still trusted their government – the genre was just beginning to find its own feet.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that The Manchurian Candidate is avante garde filmmaking masquerading as a boorish crowdpleaser (and in doing so, mimicking one of its lead characters quite intentionally). The end-result is a film that may chronicle the dark and often difficult to discern Cold Way conflict better than any other effort, minus Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Only, unlike Kubrick’s dark and wickedly cynical slice of satire, Frankenheimer plays it straight and serious. Audiences today might snicker at the lengths the Chinese government undertake in the film to train and condition an assassin capable of propelling their candidate to office, but the kernel of truth within what is obviously hyperbole and artistic license is worth mentioning.

The Rosenburgs -- Guilty as Hell

There is little doubt today, thanks to FOIA disclosures and solid historical work by scholars such as Christopher Andrew, that the Soviet Union possessed agents who had thoroughly penetrated the U.S. government in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Indeed, the Soviet espionage apparatus stole what could be viewed as the ultimate secret – and in doing so, reshaped the balance of power in the entire world – when agents affiliated with the infamous Rosenburg couple ferreted out the knowledge needed build an atomic bomb. And if you can steal the power of the sun, how hard could it be to try to shape an election?

The infamous "garden party" with the old ladies

Not for nothing is there a line of dialogue about the Senator Iselin character being more dangerous to America than the Soviets themselves. Harry Truman said almost exactly the same thing about Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy and his public attacks on the U.S. government, a historical realism definitely reenacted by the Iselin’s character’s drunken, nonsensical allegations throughout the film about the loyalty of his fellow represenatives. The only problem is that Iselin – like the odious McCarthy before him – is correct. There is something wrong with the American government in The Manchurian Candidate, just as there was in the real life American government in the early 1950s (Chambers, Hiss, Rosenburgs et al were all very, very guilty – despite the intellectual cartwheels that attempt to prove otherwise). Condon’s brilliance is take Truman’s statement of disgust and make it into the ultimate nightmare scenario: What if McCarthy was actually an agent of influence, and in being one, campaigning in the open against traitors like himself in order to avoid discovery? 

These are the kind of visceral historical thrills the film produces, but there are others. Besides all the politics and the espionage there is a fundmentally human story, burgeoned by a pair of powerful performances. Angela Lansbury’s portrayal of Mrs. Iselin is a bone-chilling reincarnation of Shakespeare’s twisted Lady MacBeth. She is at once perfect and unsettling, outdoing the Scottish noblewoman, in that she uses and manipulates both her amenable husband and her recalcitrant son. She is all ideology and narcissism, and perhaps the most disturbing part of her portrayal is the realization that partisans such as her, partisans willing to sacrifice everything – family included – to further their aims, are real and remain among us.

Laurence Harvey’s performance as Raymond, her distinctly unlovable son and prodigal son is the film’s other standout – not Frank Sinatra’s turn as the Army Major haunted by what happened in Korea. Harvey is the picture of frustration, the boy whose overly doting mother never allowed him to become a man. When he finds love, she wrecks it. When he finds fame and success, she capitalizes on it for herself. Throughout, he wrestles with great demons, unsure of how and when to act (like another Shakespeare character). With his father dead and Sen. Iselin living in his father’s house, there is an Oedipal striving in Harvey and his outbursts. His love interest is attractive enough, but one cannot help but feel his attraction for her only grew when he learned she is the daughter of his step-father’s fiercest political rival. Becoming involved with her, means he is screwing his step-father and his mother at the same time.

However, the film saves its ultimate irony and its ultimate revenge until the end. By killing his parents, Harvey becomes a real hero in place of the phony one he has been throughout the film. The irony is that it took an act of familial betrayal to get him there. “Poor Raymond,” Sinatra says, summing up a man whose entire life seems to have been burned away by the powerful flame of Lansbury’s insatiable ideology. In this, the film seems to be saying that the most dangerous people are the ones who have nothing but their principles to lose and nothing but the revolution to strive for. A person’s politics and patriotism are one thing – suborning both to some imaginary cause something else entirely. This was the inherent danger of the Cold War and its Marxist idealists. Like the religious fanatics plaguing the world today, they seemed to have no earthly cares. Ideology was everything . . . and I can think of nothing more dangerous.