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? 

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.

“We’re Not Little Men”

Sean Connery and Michael Caine could do just about anything on film and it would be interesting to watch. Titans of a very different sort, both infuse any picture they are in with the intense gravity that accompanies their commanding presence. In 1975’s The Man Who Would be King, both romp through the exoticism of the East in a film based on a Rudyard Kipling short story about two swindlers intent on conning an entire nation into letting them take over as rulers.

Often labeled, erroneously I think, as rip-roaring piece of criticism about empire, this is a film in which a pair of larger-than-life stars explore the notions of ego and ultimately end up celebrating it. How is that for British irony? Along the way, honor (amongst thieves and otherwise), greed and the corrupting influence of power are also explored, but in the film’s final few frames, Caine, haunted and clearly mad, remains both proud and passionate about what he and Connery achieved through self-motivation and their own guile.

That the two men who perhaps more than any other actors who symbolize British masculinity are cast back to the 19^th century to play rakes and conmen is a genius bit of casting that reveals precisely where the film plans to take the audience:  Away from safe and academic topics and toward the dark recesses of what can drive men to questionable acts. Early on in the film, for example, Caine unleashes a powerful invective against the British bureaucracy in India. It is an impassioned speech, but not a word of it is accurate. What Caine and his companion are suffering from is far more generalized, in that it is not red tape they bristle at, but the very law and order that is inherent in civilization. The pair are, in other words, two of Sigmund Freud’s bored “discontents,” chafing from the proscription of the boundless desires their rather large egos have created.

In other sense, these men are also adventurers, and as such, their sense of scale dwarfs the ordinary man’s. They want to leave India and head beyond Afghanistan and Hindu Kush because men of their ambition need “space.” Or as Connery puts it “We’re not little men.” To ease their abrasions, the two devise a wild scheme, wherein they will help a feudal king in Kafiristan overcome his enemies, then depose the king and assume his authority themselves. To aid in their proposal, the pair acquire 20 British rifles and a cache of ammunition, and off they set.

As I have suggested, these are men of appetite, large appetite. And there is something to admire in the way they go about trying to satiate themselves, but there is also something shallow and sad about it, neither of which was lost on Kipling. Connery and Caine’s ambitions often manifest in incredibly prosaic ways. What Connery wants, for example, more than anything else is to be received by the Queen of England as an equal and then made a member of the Order of the Garter, which contradictorily, would again make him a servant of Her Britannic Majesty. This is a commoner’s, boyish dream – and Kipling meant for us to recognize it as such and chuckle at it.

At about the same time the events in this film take place, Lord Acton famously proclaimed “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” There is nothing terribly new in the supposition that power is a corrupting agent, but the power itself is not really the corruptor. It is the ego that sought the power in the first place. The triumph of Caine and Connery that follows is thus a testament not to a cravenness for power, but to their vision and audacity.

Of course such bold ambition place in the service of self-serving needs cannot be allowed to stand as successful in either literature or film. And thus, the fall comes to Caine and Connery as it does to all misguided and ignoble protagonists. Having installed themselves as rulers and begin pilfering the riches of Kafiristan, Connery cannot resist actually ruling, and ruling as a God no less. Caine attempts to bring his friend back to reality, but to no avail. Connery has truly been ultimately corrupted by the grandiosity of their heist.

The even more incredible irony at work here is the fact that if Connery had kept to the contract – an obvious metaphor for Western temperance – he and Caine devised and minded the part about leaving the native women alone, he would have been able to fulfill their plan (IE -- Loot the riches and flee back over the Hindu Kush). Here, man’s inability to live inhumanly as a God is personified in Connery’s inability to forget Roxanne’s beauty, but more than that, he wants a wife, a family and a child – all of which are very unlike deity-like desires, something the priests quickly call attention to. If there is any ultimate conclusion, it is that audacious swindlers who concoct almighty swindles are still swindlers. They just have larger imaginations than their small-time counterparts. In the end, the goal of both is the same, overturn the traditional order by taking something from someone else to satisfy the rather childish parts of the ego. (Another irony is that wanting to marry and begin a family is the most adult ambition Connery displays throughout the film and it is ultimately his undoing.)

This is not to say Connery and Caine are petty. Their oversized appetite saves them from that fate.

When, for example, they are facing what they believe is certain death early in the film, Caine and Connery are buoyantly resigned to ending their time on Earth, knowing full well that they have lived life in a way few other men have for no other reason than they had the guts to do it. “How many men have been where we’ve been and seen what we’ve seen?” Caine asks. “Bloody few,” Connery pipes back.

Indeed, these are not little men, and we should celebrate them for that. Although the tale is ultimately cautionary, it remains something of a paean to ego. The tragedy as I see it is not that Caine and Connery had these personalities, it is that they were not able to discover anything in their Victorian world that they believed their considerable energies should be dedicated toward. They had, in essence, nothing but themselves and their own desires. Which is the same as almost having nothing.

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. 

The Violent Crucible of Creation

First, a confession: I am probably one of the few people who believe famed director Sergio Leone became a better filmmaker with each picture he made.

Leone with Steiger on location

For most moviegoers, The Man with No Name Trilogy is the Italian’s masterpiece (and the exemplar prime of all Spaghetti-Westerns). And there’s good reason to think so. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the final of the three, is a devastatingly epic movie whose convoluted moral landscape and powerful performances led some to label it one of the best films of all-time.

As for me, I will cast no stones at that picture here, save one…

A true classic

As good as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is, I think Once Upon a Time in the West – Leone’s next effort – is far superior in terms of its scope, its construction and the effectiveness with which it presents director’s quintessential themes. For many, Leone’s career ends – or should have ended – with Once Upon a Time in the West. Accordingly, this line of thinking believes Leone’s abilities behind the camera nosedived at the onset of the 1970s and films such as Duck, You Sucker! (often referred to as A Fistful of Dynamite) and Once Upon a Time in America are dour afterthoughts to a career best remembered by earlier efforts.

I heartily disagree.

Having used up all his ideas about traditional Westerns in the Once Upon a Time in the West, Leone cleverly pivots away from the genre with 1971’s Duck, You Sucker! and confronts his audience with a visionary depiction of political revolution as farce. The result is bold and complicated film that functions on many levels and comes closer to qualifying as art than anything else Leone did in his spectacular career.

The dramatic and philosophical direction Leone intends to go, as well as the fact we are a long way from Clint Eastwood and gold-inspired shootouts, is clear when the film opens with this ominous quotation Mao:

“The revolution is not a social dinner, a literary event, a drawing or an embroidery; it cannot be done with elegance and courtesy. The revolution is an act of violence.”

To ram home these points, one of the first scenes involves a stagecoach full of upper-class passengers who take turns humiliating Juan Miranda, a lowly Mexican peasant who connives his way into their presence. Miranda, played with delightful nastiness by Rod Steiger, eventually robs the coach at gunpoint, rapes the lone female passenger and then revenges himself on the men by kicking them downhill into a gully filled with mud.

What begins as a rather conventional bandit picture – albeit one with striking political overtones – is immediately shaken up by the combustible introduction of the film’s other main character, John H. Mallory. A former IRA activist, Mallory is an expert in explosives who came to Mexico to do demolition work for a German mining company. Throughout the film, his disdain for “uniforms” and other figures of authority is the palpable product of his unspoken anarchism (at one point, he is filmed reading Bakunin’s famous treatise on the topic). Mallory is confronted by Miranda and his gang and subsequently tricked into becoming an outlaw. Mallory eventually returns the favor by tricking Miranda into helping the Mexican Revolution, despite the latter’s complete lack of sympathy for the revolution and total disinterest in politics.

A table fit for the poor

The fact the setting of this film has shifted from the America to Mexico and the timing moved ahead from the Old West’s traditional 19^th century period to 1913 further illustrates Leone’s explicit desire to turn his back on the ferocious isolation he chronicled in Eastwood’s The Man with No Name trilogy. However, there is a thematic connection between those pictures and Duck, You Sucker!

More specifically, Eastwood begins his three films essentially as a loner.

In A Fistful of Dollars, he commits himself to no cause, choosing instead to play two rival factions off each other in a desolate town. In A Few Dollars More, his second outing, he is paired with Lee Van Cleef in what can be construed as a heroic quest. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly begins with an attempt to restore Eastwood to his lone gunman status, only to see events in the film force him into various undesirable partnerships. Along the way, he is – for the first time in the series – forced to acknowledging the suffering of others (most obviously the Civil War soldiers) and to realize that “going it alone” is not always a realistic approach.

Unlikely friends...

This is important because Leone himself claims Duck, You Sucker! is essentially a “buddy” picture that documents the friendship between Mallory and Miranda.

To explain, Miranda begins the film as an almost primitive human being, in that his moral code is entirely the amoral tribalism bound up in familial connections. His gang is made-up of family members and his ambitions will not tolerate any horizon that is not associated with his family’s profit. This is a kind of familial narcissism, in which all other non-familial people, such as those on the carriage, are a means to an end and nothing more.

Mallory’s friendship forces Miranda to accept that non-familial people can have value, and this ultimately shakes-up Miranda’s worldview and forces him to accept the importance of the politics he has hitherto ignored. The politics become even more important when they inadvertently lead to the demise of his family and Miranda realizes that who is in charge of a country can literally mean the difference between life and death.

For Mallory’s part, his friendship with Miranda is purely redemptive. Through a series of flashbacks, it is gradually revealed that Mallory’s best friend back in Ireland exposed the explosive expert’s revolutionary activities to the authorities, most likely because the two men were competing for the love of the same girl. Not only did this betrayal lead to Mallory leaving Ireland, but it also strengthened his feelings toward anarchical sentiment (if friendship is a sham, then all of society’s bonds must be equally empty, right?).

As important as the relationship between the two lead characters is, their interactions are also functional, in that they serve Leone’s larger, more ambiguous intent.

As the opening quotation told us, this is a film about violence and revolution. However, the difference between this picture and the many others that have explored these subjects is that Leone ultimately advances no agenda and offers no conclusive ideology. Those who criticize the film for this – the sort, who I suspect yearn for this picture to morph into a kind of Battleship Potemkin – have missed the one definitive statement Duck, You Sucker! does make.

Put simply, this movie is ultimately about the act of creation, and it explores the notion that all forms of creation – be they political “revolutions” or otherwise – are born from a violent combination of chaos and destruction. This is why The New York Times is correct to observe that film feels “rapturous and more than slightly insane.” Creation typically involves both sudden rapture – or Eureka moments – and the painful all too often zany process of organizing one’s inspiration.

Thus, like the political revolutionary who attempts to breakdown society so he can reorganize the mob within new political boundaries, the artist’s work is an imperfect effort to impose order on formless media – the blank canvas, the shapeless lump of clay or unexposed film reel. Through the imposition of structure, both the revolutionary and the artist hope to create shared understandings that easily translate from person to person.

Miranda, among the masses, against his will

I have no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect Leone worked off pure emotion for most of this film. It just feels spontaneous and delightfully unmanaged. Ambiguity abounds, themes are introduced and disregarded. Entire scenes can seem aimless and irrelevant (until the film is complete). This may sound terrible, but it is not. What Duck, You Sucker! does is take audiences through the absolute fury of creation, and along the way, it punctures the tired and elitist notion that human creativity – especially as expressed in politics – is ever a finished product.

“Don’t tell me about revolutions,” Miranda yells at Mallory. “What happens afterwards? The same fucking thing starts all over again!”

Leone himself said: “I have the film say, in effect ‘Revolution means confusion.’”

Confusion is where creation comes from. It is the void, the chaos from which organization will eventually emerged, but before that process begins to take shape, violence and upheaval have to occur. Miranda has to lose his family in order to see the importance of politics – which admittedly he never wholly subscribes to – and the value in non-familial friendship. Mallory must go through the fire of another bloody revolution to realize he can trust someone and depend on them, regardless of the sort of person Miranda is.

The madness of counter-revolution

And all of this unfolds in scenes of disturbingly violent grandeur or brutal simplicity. The mass executions in the city or the confrontation with the column of soldiers in the desert are both as compelling and beautiful as anything Leone ever filmed, and what is more, I would argue their meaning is far weightier than similar scenes in his previous work.

This is not to say the film is without problems.

It is much too long, for starters, and it undoubtedly suffers from its oft repeated flashbacks and its overly lush soundtrack. Still, for all its blemishes, this is an epic piece of filmmaking, one in which Leone clearly expanded as an artist and a thinker to his outermost limits. Far from perfect, with little or none of the neatness of his previous efforts, Duck, You Sucker! is the boldest and most radical piece of filmmaking the Italian maestro undertook, and it I think it may be the most important movie he ever made.

On Learning to Live with the Machine

What did audiences in 1957 think of Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory?

The film is incredibly dark and moody, nearly every scene oozes with overt cynicism about the absurdity of war and the shallowness of patriotism. Such sentiments seem out of place with our image of the 1950s as safe and sterile. After all, people still believed then. There was no Vietnam, no cultural upheaval and the gradual unraveling of the public trust in officialdom that accompanied both had not yet begun.

Of course, the notion that cynicism was invented in the 1960s is little more than an oft repeated untruth. The requisite horrors of the First World War produced a decade of commentators and artists who ruefully referred to the Great Lie that lay behind the conflict (Gertrude Stein would famously call some of them the “Lost Generation”).

Kubrick could have chosen the easy route with Paths of Glory and simply added his voice to an already impressive chorus with yet another anti-war missive about an armed conflict that seems to make less sense the further time advances from it. Instead, he decided to utilize the incredible lethality of the war – in which there were more than 38 million combat casualties – to present a simple but powerful tale that explores the mathematical ruthlessness of bureaucracy and the ways in which power dehumanizes many of the men who possess it.

This last point is made clear when a pair of French generals meet in the film’s first scene to discuss the possibility of a new offensive. At first, Gen. Mireau resists his commanding officer’s entreaties to attack a German fortification known as the Anthill, saying that he cares too much for his men and will not order them to lose their lives making such a pointless attack. However, when the possibility of promotion is dangled in front of Mireau, he quickly loses sight of the men as anything other than a means to an end and agrees to the attack.  

Kirk Douglas plays Colonel Dax, frontline commander caught between Mireau and the other clueless generals and France’s brave but dispirited soldiers in the trenches. Dax knows Mireau’s order to take the Anthill is a non-starter, but he also knows resisting the order is futile. When the subsequent attack is predictably driven back by heavy German machinegun fire, an enraged Mireau blames the offensive’s failure on group cowardice and orders 100 of Dax’s men to be hauled in front of a firing squad and shot.

Eventually, Mireau is forced to accept a deal in which one soldier from each of the division’s companies will be randomly selected and tried for cowardice. At the trial, Dax does his best to defend the trio of unlucky men, but the hopelessness of resisting the gears of a military bureaucracy that believes more in chugging toward a conclusion than it does in contemplating the character of its actions leads to a verdict that is never really in doubt.

In the film’s penultimate scene, a captured German girl is forced to sing to the French troops. At first, the French jeer her and shout obscenities, but as the girl continues to sing “The Faithful Hussar,” the men slowly are cowed into silence by the sweetness of her voice and eventually they begin to hum the tune, not knowing the words. Equally disturbing and moving, the scene reminds us that for all the pessimism present in Kubrick’s films, he understands the universality of beauty and believes that it transcends nationality and ideology. That it takes a scared refugee to remind the soldiers of their own humanity – and indeed, the humanity of the Huns on the other side of no man’s land – is perhaps the film’s most ironic and subtle moment.

Much of the rest of Paths of Glory suffers from obviousness: Its heroes and villains are far too easy to identify and the complete lack of unexpected choices in the plot places the audience in the awkward position of constantly knowing more about what will happen than the characters do. Even so, one cannot deny the power of the injustice documented in this film. And I am not sure we will ever see a more frightening depiction of the heartless efficiency present in large, bureaucratic administrations.

Kubrick, of course, would go on to make better films, but no one can deny that this effort remains an authoritative opening argument from an artist who uses the medium of cinema to ask his audiences essential questions about the human condition.