Bandaged and Born Again

Depending on whom you speak to, 1947’s Dark Passage is either foolishly “overlooked” or appropriately “forgotten.”

Not liking such critical absolutes, I would choose something between these two poles of opinion, though if forced to choose a side, I would lean toward the latter – and less flattering – of the two judgments. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the real-life couple who generally shine and sizzle in just about any film they appear, cannot rescue this workmanlike film noir.

Considering the genre we are dealing with, I was fully prepared for an opaque and bleak finale, but much to my surprise, Bogart and Bacall emerge from the rather straightforward prison-break plot relatively unscathed. When we last see them they are on a terrace overlooking a South America beach, gently swaying in each other’s arms – an art-imitating-life conclusion that feels like the result of a studio executive who made his intentions known by scrawling on the film’s screenplay draft: “B&B MUST end up happily ever after.”

Champions of the film point to its nifty camerawork and lasting influence on other directors – both of which provoke a resigned shrug from this particular viewer.

San Franciso on display

The decision by director Delmer Daves to film the first hour or so almost entirely from Bogart’s perspective – that is, with the camera literally functioning as his “eyes” – is not something one comes across that often (Lady in the Lake tried – and largely failed – to pull of the same feat for the length of an entire picture). Undoubtedly, it is a brave and innovative move, but it also robs the film of one of its best qualities – Bogart – for almost half its running time. At the same time, I have to wonder if the director really needs to spend as much time as he does showing us what it looks like to conduct the mundane business of existence – walking, entering an elevator, shaving, etc. – from his protagonist’s perspective. It is many things, but interesting is not one of them, and the end result is the audience feels trapped inside a film school gimmick that does not end as quickly and as neatly as it should.

In the meantime, though, we do get to look at Bacall.

In relative terms, she is not nearly as racy or openly suggestive in this role as she is elsewhere. Indeed, she is so demure she seems almost de-clawed. Her ticket into the action is initially presented as circumstantial – she happens to be painting nearby the place Bogart runs to when he escapes from San Quentin prison. However, during the course of the film, it is revealed she faithfully attended Bogey’s murder trial and believes he was falsely convicted for killing his wife with an ashtray. Bacall sympathizes with Bogart and aids his escape by spiriting him straight to her apartment in downtown San Francisco.

If this seems odd, that is because it is. Bacall is clearly presented as the mixed-up type who today would be caught by her friends writing letters to convicted men in the hope of marrying one of them while he was incarcerated. She is, in other words, fairly creepy despite her tame and domesticated pose. Bacall’s character also relates to Bogey because she claims her father was wrongly imprisoned by her stepmother, and thus the relationship that develops on-screen between her and her real-life husband works as a kind of Cassandra-complex run amuck, in which she replaces her departed dad with another older man.

The obvious villain

The third peg in the plot is a busybody named Madge Rapf. It was Rapf’s testimony that put Bogart behind bars, and when Rapf begins showing up around Bacall’s place, he fears the worst. This leads him to accept an offer – made by the world’s oddest and most helpful cabbie – to allow a back-alley doctor to alter his face. The result is Bogart is given a new lease on life – and a chance to resolve the plot’s pair of dangling mysteries – through a new look, although the anonymity he hoped for proves oddly elusive.

There is not much else to assess here. Clearly, this is a film about characters that are not in control of their lives – and what is worse, they know it. The decisions by Bogart and Bacall to simply take what comes and respond to it as best as possible is a powerful example of the brand of stoicism often celebrated in film noir. That fact everything ultimately works out in the end for both characters is distinctly out of step with accepted noir tropes. There is no bloody finale and no downer-ending depicting the futility of it all.

Instead, the audience is treated to a moody, almost surreal San Francisco, populated by odd characters, fog horns and sweeping vistas. It is a delight to watch, but the claim some critics make that this picture is a Kafka-like nightmare, in which an innocent man stumbles through a plot he is incapable of influencing, seems a bit much. There are some quirky moments to be sure, but if there is a metaphor here, it involves the notion of rebirth.

Both Bogart and Bacall are looking to build new lives on top of old ones that are riddled with error or regret. The title itself could refer to the inevitably violent transition a baby makes from the womb, through the birth canal to the light of the outer world. When the bandages come off Bogey’s face, he is helpless and has to be mothered by Bacall for a week’s time. He must suck his nourishment through a straw the same way a baby feeds from an umbilical cord.

Or maybe I am reading too much into all this and looking for greatness in a simplistic movie about a guy on the run from the law?

Regardless, there is neither enough metaphor nor simplicity to make this film stand taller than the name of the stars on its marquee. The villain is too obvious, the mysteries dangled too meager and the final product in no way reflects the quality of the constituent parts, all of which is a longwinded way of saying that this film is ultimately forgettable, even if parts of it are likeable.

Five Classic Spy Films

To be a voyeur, to peak at a private world not your own is a fundamental part of reading a book or going to see a movie or play. As a reader or an audience member, you are, for a time, permitted to survey that which is typically hidden from you during your everyday life. The only way you can learn about actual people as much as you learn about characters in fiction is by spying on them. Perhaps this is why spies and their genre films have such a visceral pull for audiences. Add sex, lies and state secrets to the essential urge people have for observation and understanding and you have a potent mix for highly emotional drama, in which the best and worst of human nature competes for stakes that are both fantastic and accessible.

Detective stories and the Westerns dominated the early days of film, but tension surrounding two world wars gave legs to a new kind of genre film: The spy film, which began with Fritz Lang’s Spies in 1928, came into its own during the 1930s when Alfred Hitchcock began to make a number of films concerning what many call the world’s second oldest profession. The slew of combat dramas produced by the Second World War were ill-suited for the Colder, much more difficult to understand conflict that followed in its wake. The spy film became the only vehicle to explore the complex, deadly and worldwide game between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.

But for all these grand notions of chronicling an era, the best spy films have always heavily relied on depicting some aspect of the emotional drudgery that accompanies the business itself. Like politics, spying is both awful and noble at the same time. It involves lying, manipulation and exploitation. It also serves the cause of truth – and fewer holier aims exist. As such, the best spy films are the ones in which an important unknown is chased by band of flawed individuals, each trying to get the best of the other.

Sounds a lot like life, doesn’t it?  

1. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

It is not often a great novel becomes a great film, but John le Carre’s classic tome is translated near-perfectly onto the screen in this 1965 film. Richard Burton plays British spy Alec Leamas, a cynical and hardened Cold Warrior who has just seen his entire network of operatives uncovered and executed by the East German Stasi. Sent home in disgrace, Leamas is quickly recruited for one last mission, one in which he is promised revenge against the German responsible for the death of his network. Leamas agrees and allows himself to be recruited by the other side in order to sow confusion there, but unknown to both him and the audience, a larger, more sinister game is being played and Leamas is nothing more than a pawn.

Who is playing who?

Shot in black-and-white, the film oozes atmosphere and functions almost as a film noir. The famous twist at the end, along with Leamas’s resigned decision to quit trying and “come in from the cold,” are unforeseen and haunting, as is Leamas’s dark assessment of his profession and its dehumanizing elements: “What do you think spies are? They are a bunch of seedy squalid bastards like me, little drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands ...” Not to be missed.

2. Notorious

Hitchcock probably made more spy films than any other director. His best is 1946’s Notorious, one of his less well-known efforts. It is a beautiful picture, filmed in elegant settings with glamorous people. But set amongst this splendor is a gritty tale of espionage that captures the complicated relationship between a spy (Cary Grant) and his agent (Ingrid Bergman) better than any other film. Throughout, Grant coldly takes advantage of Bergman’s alcoholism and neuroses in order to get her to spy on an old boyfriend, a man associating with Nazis in Argentina who are up to no good.

Running an agent, cooly...

When the boyfriend (Claude Rains) proposes marriage to Bergman, Grant ignores his own feelings for her and pushes her into the arrangement, knowing it will enable her to feed him better information. The strain of a double-life – faking love and using sex to gain access to secrets – is delicately and expertly portrayed by Bergman. There are several wonderful sequences in the movie and an incredible amount of tension, but it is unabashed realism of Grant and Bergman’s partnership that stands out.

3. The Third Man

Not a straightforward spy film, but spies and espionage abound in this moody expose of post-war Vienna that explores the darkest extremes of human tendencies. Joseph Cotton plays a man who is summoned to work with a friend in the city and arrives to find him dead. Exactly what this friend did for a living and how he died are both shrouded in mystery. All of the people Cotton encounters in this distorted version of Vienna are more than what they initially seem and none of them want him to look too closely at what has happened. Beautifully filmed with a haunting soundtrack an incredible cameo by Orson Welles, this tale is chock full of seediness, intrigue and double-dealing, but we remember it ultimately for what it has to say about human nature and the lies people often tell themselves to excuse the things they do. For a full review of the film, click
here.

4. From Russia with Love

James Bond films do not depict espionage well. Bond is much too extroverted and his methods far too clumsy and action-oriented for real spooks, but not having an entry from perhaps the most famous spy in the world would make for a pretty poor list. Although it is not my favorite Bond, 1963’s From Russia with Love is certainly the best, in terms of plot and actual espionage. Free from the special effects, gadgets and spectacularly absurd antagonists that came to dominate the franchise (as well as make it so easy to parody), this outing sees 007 lured into a Cold War mission to acquire a code-machine under false pretenses.

Incredibly shapely women means it's a Bond flick...

In reality, the international terrorist group SPECTRE is dangling the machine in order to bring Bond into the open so the organization’s assassin can kill him. Along the way, 007 navigates through the nest of intrigue that is post-war Istanbul and encounters a KGB-trained honey pot sent to seduce him with the charms of her considerable body. It all ends in a delicious cat-and-mouse game between Bond and his assailant, an excellent chase scene and a frightening attack from a hag with a knife hidden in her shoe. Who could ask for more, really?

5. Where Eagles Dare

Another Richard Burton outing, this one supposedly filmed so his son could enjoy a “boy’s adventure” film about the War. As far as that goes, this 1968 effort does not disappoint. The 2 ½ hour running time sprints by, thanks to a delightful cacophony of quirky dialogue intermixed heavy doses of intrigue and machine gun fire, most of which is provided by a certain Clint Eastwood. The plot centers on a mission to rescue an American General being held captive in a mountain fortress by Nazis, but this is little more than a springboard for the whirlwind that follows.

Getting ready to kill Nazis

Given the high body count and action-oriented climax, some would call this a straight war film, but I am sticking with the spy genre. Burton’s real purpose for storming the aforementioned castle is to pull off a complex counterintelligence coup, only half of which makes sense the first time it is revealed. The end of the film sets the stage for more Burton/Eastwood sequels. My heart cries that none were made, although perhaps it is for the best. What we have here is pretty damn entertaining – and as I already suggested, it is not all lowbrow stuff, either. One of my favorite films, even if I know I should not revel in its simple complexity as much as I do. This is Indiana Jones meets James Bond and it is nearly perfect.

To Banish Evil, One Must Choose Good

At first glance, Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt is an underwhelming film.

There is nothing in this 1943 effort that matches the director’s murderous shower scene, his flocks of deadly birds or the dramatic confrontation he staged on the stony precipice of Mount Rushmore. Perhaps this is why Pauline Kael wrote the film “isn’t as much fun” as the director’s more ostentatious efforts?

In spite of overt simplicity, Shadow of a Doubt is a remarkable film, one in which a frenzy of psychological activity quivers just beneath the surface and every scene is carefully crafted so that it enhances the greatness of the whole. Hitchcock himself said this is the best picture he made in America – and he may very well be right. So far as I can tell, everything in this film is working exactly as it should, and I can think of no other Hitchcock picture that deals with good and evil as frankly and as poignantly as this one.

It is very easy, of course, to depict evil in its most perverse and grandiose forms.

One need look no further than the James Bond franchise, with is deformed and egoistical madmen, each bent on annihilating something for nothing other reason than to enhance their own sense of self, to see what I am talking about. Nazism and its adherents is another Hollywood favorite – for who among us cannot sneer at the evil Germans and root for their failure? Real evil, the kind of criminal evil each of us stands a greater chance of encountering, is much more mundane, much harder to detect. In Shadow of a Doubt, evil does not lurch onto screen, ugly and scarred and cackling so we know to pay attention to it. Instead, it is quietly invited into the picture’s plot, and for a great deal of time, we are not even certain it is there.

Joseph Cotten as the banal killer.

The inevitable struggle that follows takes place largely inside the mind of Charlie Newton, the film’s youthful protagonist. At the beginning of the picture, Newton is bored with her life in idyllic Santa Rosa and yearns for excitement. In this, she is not alone. Charlie’s father and the family’s next door neighbor are working stiffs who seem incapable of engaging in anything like fun. The pair’s solitary flash of spontaneity and leisure comes when they engage in a macabre verbal game, in which they describe how they will kill each other and then fix it so the police never discover the crime. This foolishness, fired by an overconsumption of mystery novels, also serves to illustrate the innocence of existence in Eden-like Santa Rosa. Actual murderers, intent on committing real murders, could never dwell in such a tranquil place.

When word reaches Charlie’s family that Uncle Charlie is poised to pay an unexpected visit, everyone believes the pivot away from the mundane they were all looking for has finally arrived and life will perk up. The arrival of Uncle Charlie does indeed spice things up, but not in the way anyone intended. Charlie is secretly informed by two private investigators that Uncle Charlie is one of a handful of men suspected of being the “Merry Widow Murderer,” a serial killer who seduces, murders and then robs wealthy widows.

Ominous arrival.

At first, Charlie refuses to consider the idea. At work here is not only familial loyalty, but Charlie’s shared similarities with her uncle. Throughout the film, the two Charlie’s are presented as doppelgangers, in that both carry the same name, the same genes and seem to share a distinct unease with slow-paced suburban living. Uncle Charlie sees much of the same disquiet that drove him from Santa Rosa in his niece, while Charlie correspondingly views her Uncle as something of a sophisticated and well-traveled man of the world. If she shares the same personality as him, the same proclivities and tastes, then the fact her Uncle became a killer is a kind of indictment of her as well.

For his part, Uncle Charlie seems fairly harmless until he tips his hand at dinner one night with a rambling rant about widows being fat animals who deserve to be slaughtered. The remarks are completely shrugged off by the family, but Charlie knows exactly what her Uncle is talking about, and from that point on, the cat-and-mouse game played between the two becomes the film’s dramatic heart. But in order to best her Uncle, Charlie must fully open her eyes and shed her childish naiveté, a point her Uncle makes when he accuses her of being no different than the innocent townspeople in Santa Rosa:

"You go through your ordinary little day, and at night you sleep your untroubled ordinary little sleep, filled with peaceful stupid dreams. And I brought you nightmares. Or did I? Or was it a silly, inexpert little lie? You live in a dream. You're a sleepwalker, blind. How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses, you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?"

As I have already suggested, Charlie shares part of her Uncle’s unsettledness and therefore is less surprised by his shocking – but ultimately banal – turn to evil. Charlie is the lone character capable of understanding what the people of Santa Rosa cannot (the only other people in the film who know the truth about Uncle Charlie are detectives who come from the city). In this sense, the film is something of a Bildungsroman, in that Charlie leaves her childhood and matures into an adult during the film’s events. As Paul Duncan notes, she begins the film in a dress and ends the film in a suit. Along the way, she must face down disturbing truths and choose to follow her own nature (and in doing so, wind up like her Uncle) or reject it and help protect the innocent folks around her.

Two sides of the same coin...

That Charlie not only vanquishes the evil in everyone’s midst but then chooses to prevent their knowledge of it by never revealing her Uncle’s deeds is illustrative of both her ultimate choice and her commitment to it. Charlie has left childhood behind, faced the realities of the world and chosen to function as one of the often overlooked and underappreciated guardians who keep places like Santa Rosa free from harm: Good has triumphed over evil – and all because a girl had the strength to ignore her own inclinations and do what is right.

The power of the above is made even greater by this film’s subtle astuteness. There is no proselytizing, no blaze of holy glory. Accordingly, among the Hitchcock cannon, this gem should never be forgotten, overlooked or ignored in favor of its more flashy cousins. Watch it and be amazed. Then watch it again and be even more amazed at how much cleverer the entire enterprise becomes once you know what comes next. Like a well-made piano, all of the requisite parts here are expertly crafted and carefully assembled, so that when the plot calls for a particular key to be struck, the notes sing out, pitch-perfect and resonate for precisely the right amount of time.

Fool's Gold (Learning What Really Matters in Life)

Greed is certainly an interesting topic, given the recent collapse of the world economy due to what Gordon Gecko notoriously deemed “good” in the contemporary classic Wall Street.

John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre may be separated from Wall Street by more than 40 years of filmmaking, but the former’s depiction of how wealth can pervert human personality is equally as powerful as Oliver Stone’s tome to excess (a movie which ironically encouraged a generation of filmgoers to want to become stockbrokers).

I doubt anyone can watch The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and walk away with a strong desire to take up a pick and shovel and go gold-mining. The audience’s lack of enthusiasm has plenty to do with gold-mining being antiquated and back-breaking work, of course, but I suspect part of the reluctance stems from the film’s depiction of the incredible amount of violence that surrounded the trade. In the dusty and desolate landscape Huston paints, finding and then mining the gold is only half the battle.

Along the way, you have to take pains to disguise what it is you are actually doing – lest the government or some other prospector swoop down – and you have to forever be on the lookout for being robbed by your fellow miners. Then, having successfully mined the substance, you have to transport your gold across a godforsaken land populated almost entirely by bandits and Indians, all of whom are more than willing to knock you on the head and to take away your hard-earned stash.

Paydirt

As interested in these physical rigors as the film is, the real meat of Huston’s efforts comes when the movie focuses on how the sudden acquisition of wealth fosters a dangerous kind of paranoia and desperation that can eventually compel good people to commit violence.

Even more to the point, the film essentially argues “honor” among coworkers and friends is little better than that among thieves – if gold is involved somewhere in the equation. This is due primarily to the emotional qualities gold possesses for those who seek it.

Gold is a means to an end, a kind of cipher, in which “gold” stands in for whatever larger dreams a man may have. Thus, when Humphrey Bogart’s character talks about dreaming “about piles of gold getting bigger and bigger and bigger” it is not the gold he is really thinking of, but all the pleasures the metal can provide. Such is the power and attraction of the dream fulfillment gold promises, as long as “there's no find, the noble brotherhood (between men) will last. … But when the piles of gold begin to grow... that’s when the trouble starts.”

Our main prism for the trouble is the aforementioned Bogart.

When the film opens, the normally classy Bogie is so down and out he physically yearns for a cigarette a man has nonchalantly tossed on the street. Desperate and almost without pride, Bogie makes an attempt to grab the still-smoldering bud, only to lose out to a street urchin. Eventually, he meets up and forms a kind of hobo partnership with Tim Holt, but the alliance fails to alter their luck. Both men are taken advantage of by an unscrupulous contractor who recruits them to do back-breaking work and then fails to pay. When the pair eventually stumbles across the man who owes them the money, they beat him savagely – but crucially, they only take what cash is owed them, and no more.

They decide to try their hand at gold mining after they come across a kooky old man – played by Walter Huston, the director’s father – who has been in the business all his life. The old man seems to have a feel for how the expedition might turn out, but he goes along anyway because for him the act of mining is an end in and of itself (whereas Bogart and Holt want to strike it rich).

The fun does not really get started until the men strike gold. From that point on, Bogart’s greed-driven descent into paranoia is something to behold. He mutters to himself expertly, sweats and exhibits the incredible physical picture of a man no longer in control of his own thoughts or emotions. No assurance is enough for him as the world becomes a darker and more dangerous place (now that he has something to horde and protect). Such is the power of Bogart’s performance, when he robs his partners and leaves one for dead, the audience is unsurprised and shocked at the same time.

Mad with Fever...

Having metaphorically lost his head for gold, Bogart is eventually decapitated by bandits within sight of his final destination. Ironically, the bandits who kill him care little for material wealth. The act of thieving and stealing is an end unto itself for them. So little are they interested in valuables, they do not recognize Bogart’s gold when they discover it and they let the precious powder scatter in the wind (they are only interested in selling Bogart’s mules to buy more guns so they can commit more robberies).

The bandits’ endless cycle of violence is less greedy than the miners’ perpetual quest for wealth, but it is no more purposeful. Well before the trio set out to Sierra Madre, the old man makes it clear he has struck it rich many times before, only to lose it all and begin the process over again. Bogart and Holt ignore this insight, convinced they are powerful enough to avoid repeating the same mistake. They are wrong, and what the film seems to be saying about their incorrectness is that anyone who ties themselves to a purpose no bigger than themselves is doomed to eke out a life in which the selfish cycle never ends – and consequently happiness never arrives.

Ending conflict means establishing familial ties

In contrast, there is a beginning, a middle and end to family life, and this, albeit very subtlety, seems to be the only bit of hope the film dangles in front of an audience who has just witnessed the worst of what human psychology has to offer. The old man shrugs off the loss of his gold and chooses to live out his twilight days among the local Indian village, where presumably he will take a wife and settle into his role as the physician. In similar fashion, Holt will go to Texas, where it is strongly implied he will take up with the wife of the prospector who died defending the trio’s mining camp. The survivors of this tale of greed, in other words, are all men who chose to settle down, begin a family and live a life of steady occupation and reward.

In that sense, this film is blindly simplistic and fairly predictable.

Greed is bad. The iniquitous meet an ugly kind of frontier justice. Those who understood the ill effects of gold eventually sought to regulate their appetites and establish a more simple – and safe – way of life. Reality, of course, is much more complicated than this, much more upside down. But this film is not about reality. For all its grit and grime, this is a fairy tale of a movie – a lopsided and ugly one, to be sure, but a fairy tale nonetheless. And as such, it is a towering achievement that leaves the audience with a profound sense of insight at its conclusion.

I suspect if you showed this film to the men in gray suits who routinely plunder the markets from their corporate towers, they would chortle at the naiveté located at the picture’s heart. In the world of Wall Street, more often than not, the paranoid and greedy Bogart’s win, and the spoils of their twisted labor do not idly blow away in the winds of fate. If life were more like the movies, we would not have to live with the results of such morally bankrupt calculations.

Strangers in Love

I could not have asked for a better venue to view Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion.

Knowing the American Film Institute is conducting a year-long retrospective of Hitchcock films, I traveled up to the AFI theater just outside Washington, D.C. and basked beneath its gilded ceiling. It is a beautiful facility. The old-time music piped through the sound-system and the grandiose, yesteryear style of the décor in the place make it perfect for the old black and whites.

So far was my experience from the usual megaplex, shopping mall variety that accompanies movie-going these days, I probably would have enjoyed anything projected on the screen in front of me that night. Fortunately, I did not have to struggle to find brilliance in some forgotten B-movie. Suspicion made for excellent Friday fare, even if I knew little about the movie before staking my entire night on its quality.

In this, I do not think I am alone. I am increasingly aware that there are quite a lot of Hitchcock films nobody seems to know anything about.

Partly, this is because the little boy who was afraid of the dark and then grew up into a rotund master of thrillers made 53 films. Hitchcock’s career spanned nearly six decades, and in that time, transitioned from silent films to “talkies” and from black and white images to color. And while it would be foolish to claim his legendary filmography contains unearthed “gems,” (because doesn’t everyone know about Hitchcock?), I do think it is safe to say his later work eclipsed many of his earlier, more character-driven pieces in terms of notoriety.

Suspicion fits nicely into the underappreciated cart.

Released in 1941, the film is shot in black and white and has virtually no special effects. The plot shuns external threats – such as giant robots or other people with firearms – in favor of following the odd courtship and even more bizarre marriage between Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine. Grant is depicted as a lazy heel that shuns work and is forever borrowing money to maintain his lavish lifestyle, while Fontaine is an icy and overtly neurotic woman who was destined to become a spinster had she not met her eventual husband.

An unlikely couple meets on a train

Taken together, the two have little in common, beyond the fact they are attracted to one another and oddly balance out each other’s eccentricities. The essential drama in the picture revolves around whether or not it is possible for the couple to truly know their partner. Grant and Fontaine’s courtship is accidental and it quickly resolves itself in marriage before either they or the audience quite understand the gravity of what is occurring.

For the rest of the film, Grant attempts to conform to what he erroneously believes his wife wants while she neurotically obsesses about whether her husband is a criminal interested in killing her for her share of the family inheritance. Along the way, we learn that Grant is both a liar and a thief, but by the end of the picture, we are no closer to understanding the full truth about his intentions than his suspicious – and potentially disturbed – wife.

Part of this brilliant ambiguity lies in the film’s problematic production.

Hitchcock famously complained about how producer David O. Selznick meddled with Suspicion to Francois Truffaut. Essentially, Selznick forced Hitch to scrap an ending in which Grant was in fact a murderer and his wife bizarrely allows herself to be killed. Selznick believed nobody would buy an actor as debonair and charming Grant was a murderer – and he was right. The original ending, which stuck closer to the source material contained in the novel Before the Fact, bombed with test audiences, and thus Hitchcock’s exploration of the charming sociopath never materialized.

For the record, Truffaut also pointed out to Hitchcock that he was wrong about the ending, arguing that the film’s compromised screenplay is better than the novel because it is “less farfetched” and allows for far more “subtler nuances in the characterizations.” However, none of the three luminaries anticipated the response the 2011 audience I was a part of experienced.

Put simply, as the lights came up in the AFI Theater, none of us knew what to make of the movie’s conclusion, and the general consensus I overhead was that the film’s ending was intentionally ambiguous: That is, like Fontaine’s character, the audience is put in the position of choosing whether the self-confessed liar – Cary Grant – was telling the truth about whether he really was capable of murder. This, of course, is not what the filmmakers intended.

A doting husband with a milk? Or a murderer with Poison?

In terms of the script and its intentions, Grant is telling the truth at the end of the picture. He is not a murderer, and his wife’s suspicion is just that – suspicion. Per this reading of the film, Fontaine is a horribly neurotic character, plucked straight from the Victorian stories Hitchcock devoured as a child. Like the disturbed and unreliable female narrator in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Fontaine becomes unhinged by her own imagination and a complete lack of self-confidence. Unable to cope with and respond to reality as it actually is (her husband is a liar and a thief), she creates a much more horrible one (her husband is a murderer out to get her).

She does this, in part, because she is incapable of responding to the more prosaic truth. Overtly demure and largely passive, she functions in the film as a kind of female version of Hamlet, in that she is unable to process new information she learns about Grant and then act decisively. As is the case with the Danish Prince, this builds a palpable frustration among the audience, many of whom quietly yearn for her to cast out her wayward husband. However, such a positive act is clearly beyond Fontaine, who throughout the film acts only reactively. Indeed, she is uninterested in Grant’s courtship until she overhears her parents speculating that she will become a spinster. In response, she immediately kisses Grant, and within the next half hour of film, elopes and marries him.

The problem with viewing Fontaine’s subsequent suspicions as inaccurate is that the audience is given so much reason to believe her feelings are correct. Grant is revealed to be a fairly awful husband, as he is immature, possesses no work ethnic and at times seems unconcerned with his wife’s feelings. Worse still, Fontaine learns he is a perpetual liar, capable of cheating to acquire more money.

But does all this make him a murderer?

As the film progresses, the circumstantial evidence against Grant mounts, but at the same time, Fontaine’s reliability increasingly deteriorates. In one crucial scene, while she is playing a word game that resembles Scrabble, her subconscious directs her fingers to spell out the word “murder” in the presence of her husband and his best friend. From there, her mind easily leaps to a dream/fantasy of Grant pushing his friend from a nearby cliff. When it is subsequently revealed Grant did not kill his friend, Fontaine is overjoyed – but her suspicions return almost immediately with a new and more elaborate scheme (her own poisoning).

All of this is clearer to the audience upon the film’s completion.

During the movie's gradual progress (choosing a waltz as its theme is no accident), the audience is entirely in Fontaine’s sway and we believe what she believes, which is precisely what Hitch intended. That she is wrong at the picture’s conclusion makes us all her unwilling confederates. This is clever, but I think it obscures a deeper, and perhaps more disturbing, commentary on the two protagonists.

Throughout the film, the couple’s love for each other continually blinds them. The end result is that Hitchcock seems to be saying that no matter how much time two people spend together and no matter how close they become, they will never fully understand the inner psychological workings of the other person, even if they are man and wife. 

Will he or won't he?

How else can we explain that a woman could believe her husband is a murderer when everyone else around her does not?

This, I believe, is the overall theme one can take away from a film that teases the audience with delightful confusion and unimagined surprises: In matters of the mind, we largely remain strangers to one another, no matter how much in love we are. In that regard, the question about Grant’s true nature is as much as a litmus test for the audience memebers as anything else. Either you believe a woman could be that wrong about her husband or she knows him better than anyone else does. The choice is yours…

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.