Running down a dreamhome: Race with the Devil

After reading Susan Compo’s Warren Oates: A Wild Life I found myself hungry for more Oates and tracked down a copy of Race with the Devil (1975). Written by Wes Bishop and Lee Frost, who had collaborated before on some fabulously intriguing genetic thriller called The Thing with Two Heads (72), and directed by Jack Starrett, who cut his teeth on Hell Angels on Wheels (67) and would later helm First Blood (82), this road action-heavy variation on the hillbilly horror flick finds Oates on holiday with his pal Peter Fonda, their lady friends Loretta Swit and Lara Parker, and a little pooch. On the maiden voyage of their newly purchased recreational vehicle, with Fonda’s requisite dirt bikes in tow, the happy campers cruise un-abused until an unfortunate choice of parking spot puts them in harm’s way. All hell breaks loose, and soon they’re careening down tumultuous stretches of Texas highway with Satan hot on their heels.

“It’s not a barbecue,” Oates deliciously quips as he and Fonda spy innocently on some exotically groomed strangers mingling around an enormous bonfire and wearing a conspicuous lack of clothing for a January night sufficiently frigid to inspire Oates to don a toque. Oates’ face lights up under his goofy headgear as he and Fonda get to figuring they’ve stumbled across some crazed hippies having an orgy, but any hopes of enjoying a free show are dashed when a dagger is crammed into the torso of one of the coven’s supply of naked and nubile blonde automatons. The crafty coven of rural Devil worshipers quickly realize they’re being watched and a chase ensues that will consume much of Race with the Devil’s remaining 70 or so minutes, though a sequence where the girls finish vacuuming up the first act’s damage and opt to hit the local library to do a little research into human sacrifice makes a pretty delightful detour in the otherwise driving narrative.

Surprisingly well-crafted and featuring utterly game performances from all involved—including R.G. Armstrong as a placating mustachioed sheriff—the Scooby-Doo premise makes for solid, often eccentric entertainment, with the relentless—and shirtless!—Southern Satanists leaping onto the exterior of the protagonists’ speeding fortress with Cirque du Soleil prowess and flamboyant Mexican wrestler garb. Setting some sort of precedence in sub-subgenre, Race with the Devil is surely among the few home invasion thrillers where the home in question is mobile. The novelty takes on extra resonance in early scenes where Oates’ character, with disarming earnestness, takes pains to establish just what this RV means to him, which is pretty much everything. Things are further imbued with meaning when you account for the extra-filmic factor that the geographically restless Oates was himself deeply enamored with his own RV, which he christened the Roach Coach. It must have pained him to have to witness the accumulative wear and tear done to the deluxe model they used for the movie.

"Those satisfactions are permanent": Susan Compo traces the wild life and enduring work of Warren Oates

Tom McGuane said he had the all-time greatest squint in movies. David Thomson suggested that part of his singular appeal came from his being that rare actor willing to look genuinely dumb. (Thomson also fantasized a production of Waiting for Godot where he'd play opposite Harry Dean Stanton, an actor with whom he shared a distinct kinship and, often enough, screen time.) “At first, I played the neurotic hillbilly son or the third man on the horse,” Warren Oates once said, “then worked my way up with tremendous success to being the second heavy on a horse.”

He did countless hours of TV before finding a niche in the New Hollywood of the 60s and 70s, a memorable presence in whatever crazy project in whichever genre was being turned on its head, and was not infrequently the best thing in the movie. He received only a few shots at being something like a leading man—Dillinger (1973), Cockfighter (74), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (74)—but each time filled the screen with cockeyed charisma and a vulnerability that always caught you off guard, made you feel you knew him for real. You may or may not recognize Warren Oates from many films. You surely recognize he face. But if you do know him and his work well, there’s a 50/50 chance he’s one of your favourite actors.

Actress Lee Purcell had another, rather intriguing theory regarding Oates’ peculiar allure: “Warren always had what the best actors had: Warren always had a secret.” If Oates’ secrets were indeed key to his magnetism, then Susan Compo’s Warren Oates: A Wild Life (University Press of Kentucky, $34.95) is for the most careful to keep the allure intact. It’s not that Compo’s especially shy about detailing Oates’ considerable appetites for liquor, women, drugs and the company of Sam Peckinpah; on the contrary, it’s rather that A Wild Life remains largely a work of reportage without too much in the way of analysis, conjecture or reverie. The prose is on the pedestrian side, the use of quotations to verify simple points sometimes excessive, and, while contradictions are duly addressed—Oates the gentle country boy obsessed with the stock market, the Zen-loving pacifist by nature who also described himself as an anarchist—Oates the man is kept at a certain distance.

Still, it needs to be said that Compo has done admirers—and anyone with serious interest in films of the era—a great service. If solid research can be described as loving, Compo’s book deserves the tag. Taking us from Oates’ Kentucky roots through his early struggles in New York and ambling ascent to character actor stardom in Los Angeles, with many wives and many, many riotous and often famous drinking buddies along the way, A Wild Life compresses a life’s trajectory with a balance of tidiness and detours into some terrific anecdotes—after the first few rather stiff chapters are out of the way, Compo offers a very fun read. And if it feels like less than a fully realized portrait, maybe that’s okay. Oates spent his whole career letting us take long hard looks into his rumpled soul.

Something I hope A Wild Life will help remedy is the almost exclusive association of Oates with Peckinpah, who cast the actor so brilliantly in westerns like Ride the High Country (62) and The Wild Bunch (68), not to mention the sublimely demented Alfredo Garcia. As Compo makes clear, Oates’ collaborations with lesser-known Monte Hellman were just as important. Hellman arguably did more to allow the full breadth of Oates' persona to bloom onscreen, developing leading roles that, even when rendering Oates mute (!), would flush out a rich blend of endearing affectation, innocence, curiosity, orneriness, and desperation. Perhaps the increased availability of Hellman-Oates films like Cockfighter, The Shooting (67) and Two-Lane Blacktop (71) especially will also help generate greater interest in their legacy.

I knew how A Wild Life was going to end, obviously, but it still choked me up. No matter how many times Oates was killed in the movies, no one seemed prepared for his actual death, which occurred off-screen, one afternoon while his lunch was being prepared. He was 53. Despite vague concerns about his general health, there were few alarms preceding the event, though the day before the doctor-phobic Oates phoned up Hellman and told him he’d had a heart attack—before chuckling and saying it was actually just indigestion. No one could ever replace Oates, but there is one great little story in here that reminds us that at least one contemporary American performer has taken up the baton. Oates saw Tom Waits on TV in 1976, fumbling through an interview, erratically searching through his pockets for his lighter. as Compo writes, “Oates took one look at the disheveled singer’s predicament and pronounced, ‘That guy stole my act.’”

The novel as autopsy: Alexander Ahndoril's The Director dissects Ingmar Bergman circa 1961

Ingmar Bergman with cinematographer Sven Nykvist

Speaking of Ingmar Bergman... Swedish author Alexander Ahndoril’s The Director (Portobello Books, $15.95) concerns Bergman and the apparently tumultuous creation of his 1962 film Winter Light. The Director is a novel, though it is a meticulously researched one that reads very much like an impressionistic biography, leaving the frontiers of what constitutes fact and fiction ambiguous for all but those few in the know and still alive to testify. It was written and published in Sweden while Bergman, who died in 2007, was still alive and was initially given the legendary filmmaker’s approval before he changed his mind and publicly condemned it. Regardless, the Swedes made it a bestseller.

Joyce Carol Oates, who last year published a decidedly unflattering collection of novellas about episodes in the lives of Poe, Twain, Henry James and Hemingway, wrote that Ahndoril’s book “arrests our attention like an autopsy performed on a living man.” It’s a very astute observation, even if I’m not sure many readers, especially non-Bergmaniacs, are likely to feel all that arrested by this poetic and image-laden yet deeply ponderous tale of an artist still grappling with his crippling need for a stubborn father’s approval. The Director is indeed morbid, narrow, a little cruel, and as sequestered from the larger, messier world as a pathologist’s quarters. I love that the English translation was performed by someone named Sarah Death.

A scene from Winter Light

Bergman was often very articulate about the enigmatic images that would obsess him until they finally yielded a complete idea for a film. In keeping with this, The Director begins with a vision, caught within a glass jar, that carries inside of it the germ of Winter Light: “A man of his own age walks toward him, quivers and al at once is twenty paces closer. He seems to be dressed as a priest.” Bergman’s father was a priest, and this film—a major turning point in Bergman’s work, largely putting to rest the filmmaker’s interest in dealing directly with religious faith—was conceived as a hypothesis as to how Bergman would have felt by this point in his life—he was in his early 40s—had he followed his father into the clergy. His father never considered the cinema a suitable career for Ingmar and much of the novel finds its protagonist childishly preoccupied with earning his father’s praise, even while the old man falls ill and is hospitalized.

Alexander Ahndoril

The most impressive bits of writing here find Ahndoril, in a concise, very Bergmanesque style, allowing fantasy, dream and memory to slip into objective reality, with ghosts from the past entering and strange discoveries being made, such as a missive from Bergman’s troubled mind that’s somehow been inscribed onto the sole of an artificial foot. The more captivating fully-fledged scenes in The Director however concern the film’s production, even if Ahndoril emphasizes the tension between Bergman and certain actors and crewmembers who considered the project too dreary. When interviewed, Bergman’s collaborators have resoundingly testified to the general cheerfulness on Bergman’s sets, though such generalizations no doubt fail to supply the whole picture, and in any case liberties must be granted when a writer’s intentions are made explicit. The larger question here is to what purpose all of this slippage between fact and fiction has been crafted.

The triumph of Death: The Seventh Seal on DVD

Clouds clothe the dawn, a terrified chorus trembles unseen, an eagle hangs so black and still as to seem stenciled out of the sky, a disembodied voice reads from the Revelation of John, horses wade ankle-deep in the sea. Death (Bengt Ekerot) appears on these rocky shores before the knight Antonius Block (Max Von Sydow), newly returned from the Crusades to a plague-ravaged Scandinavia. When the reaper raises his cloak he might as well be ripping open a black hole, but the gaunt, blue-eyed, deceptively young Antonius does not succumb so easily. He challenges Death to a round of chess. He’s seen paintings and heard ballads and knows he’s met a willing adversary. He doesn’t expect to win but merely buy time, hoping to use his reprieve to perform one meaningful act. If in the meantime he could also glean some evidence of God’s existence he wouldn’t complain.

Did such a chillingly seductive embodiment of death appear before Ingmar Bergman before he departed from this world on his beloved island of Fårö nearly two years ago at the age of 89? Did he bargain, propose a game to play, or merely smile knowing that he’d staged all this before? It’s worth evoking the establishing moments of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) as a reminder that there is here a thoughtful, personal, richly detailed and diversely populated movie, and not just still images so oppressively iconic as to discourage actual engagement. Its impact on international film culture was paradigm shifting, but it’s also an entertainment, an apocalyptic road movie as witty, bawdy and playful as it is gloomy. (“A skull is more interesting than a naked woman,” a painter quips. Bergman was shrewd enough that over the course of his career he often gave us both.) It’s a parable of doubt and regeneration, set in a slyly modern Middle Ages; a nimbly acted, gorgeously staged and photographed tale of disillusioned yet resilient figures—the knight and his squire, a company of traveling players, a cuckolded smith and his juicy wife—traversing a world wracked with violence wrought by the twin terrors of metastasizing civilization and religious piety. (Need we say more about its relevance to our world today?)

I first saw The Seventh Seal half a lifetime ago, thanks, however improbably, to the programmers at faith-based Vision TV, who aired it a few times when I was in my teens. I’m pretty sure it changed my life. Truthfully, I’ve never felt compelled to herald it my favourite Bergman—in just a few years the director’s succeeding, more mysterious, erotic, neurotic and naturalistically photographed films would render certain farcical aspects of Seal pretty corny—but those images, moments, atmospheres, and lingering questions remain singular to me. I’ve never doubted the depth of the film’s impression on my psyche. Or its conduciveness to replay. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it on screens big and small, but it’s every time been an immersive, even haunting pleasure.

Criterion’s new special edition, available both in Standard and Blue-ray, complete with well chosen special features and a new, digitally enhanced transfer so sumptuous that even on my piece-of-shit 30-year-old TV I marvel at the difference, offers another excellent excuse to revisit the film. It ages very well. When I see it now I appreciate different details: the fleeting flirtation between Von Sydow and the arrestingly lovely Bibi Andersson at the start of that scene where Antonius and the squire share fresh strawberries and milk with the players; the series of individual portraits Bergman creates as his characters watch the moaning flagellants parade into a square, preaching fire and brimstone to an already fearful village; or the serenity in the face of Gunnel Lindblom when she finally meets Death after a last breakfast and speaks her one line in the entire film: “It is finished.”

The highlight of Criterion’s new package, also available as a separate disc, is Bergman Island (06), Marie Nyreröd’s documentary portrait of Bergman made just a few years before his death. Shot primarily on Fårö, where, following his wife Ingrid’s death, Bergman had lived alone for years, sometimes speaking to no one for days at a time, Nyrerod’s interviews yield unprecedented candour from the filmmaker on topics such as his predilection for love affairs with actresses and his neglectful fathering. Bergman also speaks eloquently about topics as familiar as his parents, his thanatophobia, and his sense that his best work was done in the theatre. The film overall is very moving, its subject in good spirits. There’s startling 16mm footage from the shoots for Seventh Seal and Persona, and a pretty funny little story about getting invited to a pool party by Barbara Streisand. (He declined, and promptly picked up and moved back home after a brief time in Los Angeles.) But what sticks with me most after seeing it is the image of Bergman’s aged hands, narrow, a little shaky, but still so alive as he speaks, and reconsiders.

The road to parturition: Away We Go

A welcome entry into the surely under-explored subgenre of the bulgingly pregnant road movie, Away We Go begins with considerable brio, its first act’s chain of clipped, zingy, well-sculpted scenes just bouncing along, unburdened by preciousness or ponderousness. There is, initially, so much here to like. The dinner scene featuring a fizzy Catherine O’Hara as doting hippy grandma-to-be and a hilariously over-boisterous Jeff Daniels as the absent-minded old dad who’s really big of affirmative adjectives. The warm, inviting photography, courtesy of Ellen Kuras. The final line in the establishing scene of comic cunnilingus, which begins “From what I’ve read about vaginal flavour…”

As Burt and Verona, John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph are exceptionally relaxed, lived-in, and appealing as the shaggy thirtysomething couple setting out via plane, train and rusted-out Volvo on a slightly loopy quest for an ideal family upon which to model their impending one, for a new place to call home, or, shit, maybe even a new country. Their first stop is Phoenix, where Allison Janney sparkles as Lily, Verona’s old workmate, recently condemned to middle America’s desert suburbs with her shrunken, paranoid husband and pudgy, tormented children. Loud, crass and funny as all hell, Lily, in an especially memorable scene, completes with the PA at the dog track to describe how her children slowly drained the life from her once tremendous tits. I believe “old man’s hairy nut sack,” was how she described their current state. But Janney’s brief appearance in Away We Go finally constitutes, however prematurely, all that’s best in the film. She offers both its comic peak and its most elegantly rendered moment of pathos, a wordless exchange where she lingers too long over a goodnight kiss to Burt. The moment billows with sad desperation in the arid Arizona night, playing out beautifully in a single, uncut wide-shot. From here, it’s all downhill.

Janney, to be sure, gives a broad performance, but she still manages to bring specificity and nuance to a stereotype. Despite some valiant efforts, the same cannot be said of the grotesque Wisconsinite New Age shrew and her sniveling pony-tailed husband played by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton. Their characters are so simultaneously imbecilic and condescending that it’s all too easy for us to go along with Burt when he finally explodes and insults them. There’s no real tension building in the scene because nothing’s at stake. Things get only worse when our errant heroes visit old friends now living in Montreal, a handsome, happy couple with a gaggle of adorable and conspicuously adopted tykes running free in their warmly messy house. Everything seems peachy until the four adults go to amateur strip night at some hipster joint and, in what must be the most dreadfully gag-inducing scene of the year if not the decade, the barren matriarch of the clan suddenly takes the stage to perform a painfully mopey pole dance while her husband explains to Burt how devastated the couple feel because she can’t seem to bear children. All of this to the decidedly unsubtle tune of ‘Oh! Sweet Nuthin.’’ (You remember the one, the closer both to Loaded and the Velvet Underground’s career? The one where Lou Reed sings “She ain’t got nuthin’ at all” about 90 times?) And she doesn’t even strip!

This is probably a good time to mention that Away We Go was directed by Sam Mendes, who even when helming material far breezier than the likes of Revolutionary Road or The Road to Perdition still manages to display a heavy hand, one made more leaden still by his irritatingly reverent use of songs by Alex Murdoch, which sound like they were designed for long distance commercials and sap the juice from scene after scene by turning it into some lame-ass precession. I had to rush home and slap ‘Oh! Sweet Nuthin’’ on the turntable just to squeeze the stuff out. It’s hard to know whether to lay more blame for the film’s weaker passages on Mendes or his screenwriters, novelists/spouses Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, though its easy to imagine how another director less inclined to pomp and more trusting of his actors to carry a scene could have kept things relatively buoyant. Either way, Away We Go winds up frustratingly uneven, a patchwork of some nearly sublime humour and some genuinely touching moments laced with too many clichés for its sometimes superior air and to many scenes that are facile and over-explanatory.

Off the rails: The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

Based on the 1973 novel by Morton Freedgood (writing as John Godfrey), this thriller, filmed previously in 1974 and 1998, finds an NYC subway car hijacked by thugs threatening to kill a passenger a minute if they don’t get $10,000,000 in an hour. Brian Helgeland’s new, gizmo-heavy script has alpha thug Ryder (John Travolta, with conspicuously dyed hair, brows and handlebar) striking up a strangely chatty repartee with Garber (Denzel Washington, paunchy, bespectacled, stubbornly handsome), the MTA employee who first takes Ryder’s demands and thereafter becomes the only negotiator Ryder’s willing to deal with. Discovering that Garber stands accused of accepting a bribe, Ryder apparently identifies with what he views as Garber’s victimization at the hands of an unjust corporate and/or social hierarchy. At one point Ryder gets especially vulnerable and shares a traumatic memory of getting shit on by an Icelandic sled dog while on a date with an ass model. Their interplay and its macho—at times homoerotic—sense of connection are, needless to say, deeply silly.

But Tony Scott is, to say the very least, a deeply silly filmmaker. “I never get excited by coincidence,” Garber says in an early scene, but Scott clearly get excited by absolutely everything, regardless of how inane or pointless it might be. His spastic editing and love of blaring soundtracks, his inability to settle upon anything for more than half a second or keep his camera from aimlessly circling his subjects: all these habits combine to make a monstrously glossy cocktail that in its way something to behold. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is as undeniably diverting as it is stupid, though it gets less diverting and more stupid as it goes—see the superfluous faux-suspense sequence where a subway car hurtles toward a destruction we've already been told isn't going to occur, or the nonsensical showdown/show-off/suicidal finale.

However, Pelham 1 2 3 also holds a certain interest simply as a broad portrait of contemporary Manhattan, strikingly contrasting the dinginess of the 74 version with its high-tech transit management, its police force as virtual standby army, and its surprisingly complex characterization of its municipal leaders, with James Gandolfini giving a fun performance as Hizzonor. Garber seems the avatar of this whole vision of a city that’s equally culturally diverse, overwhelming in terms of busyness and bureaucracy, and somehow cozy. The final image of Garber cheerfully bringing a full gallon of milk home to his apparently lactose-starved wife (Aunjanue Ellis, lovely and totally game in a goofy bit part) rather audaciously leaves his guilt in the bribery scandal totally ambiguous. And there’s something oddly charming, if absurd, about the sense that for all the extra drama, this was all just another day at the office for this hard-working New Yorker.

Sparring with the past

The extraordinary life of Mike Tyson as vividly described by Mike Tyson in James Toback’s Tyson constitutes a startling essay on American fame, race and sex. Never a well-behaved filmmaker, Toback seems too fascinated, perhaps even in love with his subject to soberly editorialize in the margins of this documentary portrait. Instead, he steers and shapes the film by way of carefully calibrated and provocative juxtapositions. Throughout Tyson the lisping, soft-spoken and now flamboyantly face-tattooed former boxer’s testimony is offered in overlapping images and soundtracks, sometimes featuring Tyson giving multiple divergent responses to the same questions. At first the technique seems like empty flash, but soon it reveals itself as an inspired method of portraiture, resulting in a Rashomon-like poem on human contradictions on a spectacular scale, moving from inspiration and thrills to horror and confusion to an evocation of the purgatorial existence of a man whose meteoric ascent and titanic career sank into the abyss around the age most of us are just getting properly started with our lives.

Great portraits typically dispel myths, yet the closer Toback gets to Tyson the more Tyson’s story feels like myth. Not myth as broad gloss but as dense tapestry of heightened experience that spans the breath of several ordinary lives. Tyson’s movement from an impoverished fatherless Brooklyn youth of raising pigeons, getting brutalized and living in fear; to the discovery of a rage so great as to knock men down and a proclivity for thuggery; to juvenile detention, self-actualization and the great fortune of finding a generous and encouraging father figure; to becoming an unbeatable human juggernaut, heavyweight champion of the world at 21, impossibly naïve about so much, yet with the world’s riches and women splayed at his feet; to rape conviction, prison, countless scenes of public humiliation, ear-biting and isolation: all of these phases are explored in a wholly first-person account illustrated through a wealth of archival footage, culminating in a story of a figure not so much larger than life as stranger than fiction.

Have you all seen Fingers? Because Toback’s 1978 startling directorial debut, which stars Harvey Keitel as a mafia collector with a deeply frustrated gift for music, holds the key to so much of what makes Toback’s work distinctive, vital and repulsive, the self-flagellating fantasy of an unabashed wigger. It also makes a dynamite double feature alongside Tyson. (Mind you, Raging Bull wouldn’t make too shabby a pairing either. Nor would The Wrestler.) What Toback offers us in these films and others—including 2000’s Black and White, which features Tyson in a scary, homophobic cameo as himself—is an excavation of male psyches stunted through punishment and empowerment, their empathy drained through brute force, plagued with an inability to reflect that leads to impotency, a sense of being involuntarily thrust into violence, a hunger to at once dominate and be dominated by women, and the inhabiting of some regressive ideal of blackness, regardless of the race of the subject in question. Films like Fingers and Tyson possess a rare transparency. Grotesque and shamelessly entertaining, they infuriate and intrigue. And of we had a few more movies like them we may just learn something of fundamental importance about how men become monsters. Or perhaps how some of us have to work against our instincts just to not become monsters.

War, torture, and the limits of control: Man Hunt, Time Limit on DVD

The story was already in circulation, how in 1934 Fritz Lang was summoned to a meeting with Joseph Goebbels where he was offered the position of Führer of the German film industry; how Lang, whose Jewish heritage Goebbels presumably wasn’t aware of, whose ex-wife, screenwriter and actress Thea von Harbou, had already joined the Nazi party, then fled Germany immediately with nothing but the clothes on his back. The story’s so perfectly in keeping with the pursuit narratives Lang favoured. Its likely at least partially apocryphal, but anyway makes a hell of a great set-up for Man Hunt (1941), the thriller Lang made for Fox, newly available on DVD, that opens with Walter Pidgeon lining Hitler up in his sights on the cusp of World War II. Like Powell-Pressburger’s 49th Parallel (41), Man Hunt was a rallying cry for Americans to enter the war, and it was that much more persuasive for being helmed by this visionary Viennese director who had abandoned a dazzling career in the very country he was urging his new homeland to attack.

Based on Geoffrey Household’s novel Rogue Male (39), the film concerns big game hunter Alan Thorndike (Pidgeon), captured by SS guards after being found perched on a cliff near Hitler’s Obersalzberg home with rifle in hand. When Thorndike eventually escapes, Hitler’s Security Commander (George Sanders) relentlessly pursues him as he returns clandestinely to England, determined to get Thorndike’s signature on a statement claiming the British government ordered the assassination. Yet not only was Thorndike not given any such instructions, he wasn’t actually trying to kill Hitler at all. The rifle wasn’t even loaded. A proud sportsman, Thorndike just wanted to know if he could do it. So Man Hunt becomes the story of how one man comes to understand the Nazi threat, takes responsibility, and returns to the hunt with guns now loaded.

There are some distractions, especially with accents. Pidgeon, the Brit who sounds suspiciously Canadian, and Sanders, the German who sounds suspiciously English, actually fair better than Joan Bennett’s thinly veiled London prostitute. She’s the only one to bother attempting an accent appropriate to her character, though her broad Cockney grates like a rusty lawnmower. Fortunately she’s still lovely, sensual and sassy in spite of her character’s poutiness, and has some touching scenes with Pidgeon, who treats her more like a niece that the lover she wants to become. But Lang’s exemplary staging and camerawork is finally the reason to see Man Hunt: his beautifully rendered inserts; his exquisite use of silence and shadow; his subtle motifs, such as Pidgeon’s forest footprints echoed later by marks left on a floor by his feet when dragged out of a Nazi torture chamber; his haunting compositions, such as those involving water and night especially, or the tree-enveloped deep-focus scene that plays out in a single shot with Pidgeon stumbling away from the Nazis who hunt him through the dense Obersalzberg wilderness.

Moving ahead in time to reflect on America’s involvement in Korea and, indirectly, Hollywood’s ensnarement in the red scare, Time Limit (57) is another allegory involving responsibility, torture and the limits of patriotism. It concerns a former POW accused of collaboration with the communists whose refusal to defend himself prompts a conscientious military investigator to look deeper into his case. The title refers both to the pressure placed on the investigator to speed the ostensibly open and shut case along, and to the psychological limits upon which even the most formidable soldier breaks down and becomes malleable to the enemies’ dictates. The film came out during a time when brainwashing was an increasing concern, one that fed directly into the ideological paranoia of the Cold War.

Time Limit was the only film ever directed by character actor Karl Malden, who took on the project at the suggestion of the film’s star and producer Richard Widmark. Malden had by then firmly established himself as one of Hollywood’s most dependable talents, and his reputation is reflected in the pedigree of his collaborators. Besides the inimitable Widmark, who plays the investigator, the film also features excellent turns from Dolores Michaels as a stenographer who manages to be both sexy and smarter than most of her superiors, a very young Rip Torn in his first credited film role, a very vulnerable Richard Basehart as the guilt-ridden POW, and Martin Balsam, who as a desk Sergeant bullying Widmark to court-martial Basehart and get it over with, embodies the virtual flipside of the character he played that same year in 12 Angry Men. Cinematographer Sam Leavitt, who often worked for Otto Preminger, was behind the camera, which shifts seamlessly between the actors, who are the utter focus of Malden’s clean, crisp approach.

MGM’s DVD’s not great. The aspect ratio’s been reformatted and there isn’t even a menu. But the transfer looks sharp enough and the film itself is sleek and engrossing. It also speaks very much to this mentality that’s loomed over us these last several years, one that says treason is so heinous a crime that mere accusations equal culpability, while ignoring the fact that love of God and country is not itself enough to withstand the frailties of our minds when driven to their outermost limits.

Red harvest: Metro Cinema collectivizes the films of Miklós Janscó

With their flamboyant adoption and advancements on some of the most modernist formal tropes of the era, the 60s films of Hungarian filmmaker Miklós Janscó have often come up against accusations of being more concerned with geometries than geopolitics, of being triumphs of design over directive. You could argue that their ostensibly socialist ideology—Janscó joined the Communist party in 1945 and would eventually work under the auspices of the Soviet film industry—was compromised by techniques and aesthetics inspired by the decadent West as celebrated in the Italian, French and American cinemas. For those inclined to read every artistic choice as a political statement—a habit once quite fashionable, lest we forget—Janscó’s work exhibited a troubling schism of form and content.

But from the perspective of one not even born when Janscó’s most renown films came out, only vaguely familiar with the history they invoke, and open to whatever sort of reading, Janscó’s mise en scène—the audaciously long takes and fluid camerawork; the casts of characters whose allegiances are so often impossible to determine, something the regular shedding of clothing only enhances; the willfully cryptic narratives in which opposing forces become indistinguishable across a vast, featureless landscape—constitutes a powerful political gesture in itself. Violence self-perpetuates. The surrender and assumption of power are exchanged until power itself becomes meaningless. Ideology is reduced to pageantry. (Did I mention Janscó was once a law student?) I can’t think of a body of films with a bolder statement on the futility of war and malleability of national or political identities.

It functions all the better for its dearth of exposition or psychology, for our inability to identify with and comprehend characters, something that only grows as you work through these films where the same actors keep reappearing in different roles. There’s a compelling theatricality to these films, not only in their use of a stock company but, in Red Psalm (1971) especially, the sense that everything is staged as a sort of atheist Passion play. Unless you really know your Hungarian history—and, one suspects, even then—to enter into Janscó’s world is to feel like you should really be understanding everything while understanding almost nothing. Janscó drops us into the midst of a struggle without orienting us. What’s on display is “pure” war, or rather the peripheralities of war, the negotiations and executions. All of which is something most of us could stand to consider more carefully as our world slips ever deeper into a global chasm of conflicts whose meanings are never uncontestable.

The best way to get a sense of how all this works is to see these films in a condensed period, something our friends at Metro Cinema are granting Edmonton filmlovers next week with The Films of Miklós Janscó. The selected quartet begins with Janscó’s breakthrough The Round Up (66), which unfolds in a prison camp following the collapse of Lajos Kossuth’s 1848 revolt against the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A man is accused of murder and the military use him to finger other insurgents they wish to condemn. What follows is a sequence of betrayals and a dismantling of alliances while the circumstances of the supposed murders become increasingly inconsequential. Brutality becomes an end in itself.

The Round Up introduced some of Janscó’s key themes, but the formal distinctions I’ve been describing don’t come into full fruition until The Red and the White (67), shot in the USSR and intended to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution. But the story takes place two years later, with the Communists fighting the White Guard for a hilly plain along the Volga. Territorial lines shift, but any greater purpose for the struggle remains obscure, as does anything resembling heroics. It is the antithesis of a propaganda film. The Soviets were not pleased, while the film was celebrated in the US. Silence and Cry (68), probably the rarest film in this series, revisits the same historical moment, but on a comparatively intimate scale, with a former Red soldier taking refuge on a Hungarian farm regarded as suspect by local authorities. There are moments of what appear to be tenderness and communion, the performances engrossing and nuanced, but everything finally capitulates to the dictates of individual survival. The result is chillingly poetic.

Having seen it just recently, the Palme d’Or-winning Red Psalm—shot in gorgeously saturated colour and, rather surprisingly, with a 1:37 aspect ratio—has become a new personal favourite of mine, though admittedly, hypnotic, erotic, dream-like and seemingly endless—but in a good way!—it may the even more confusing than any of its predecessors. Folkloric and more than a little enraptured with the hippie culture of the time, it centers on a turn-of-the-century uprising of landless agricultural workers, who sing, play music, dance and act out rituals of triumph and slaughter. The camera weaves across faces or hangs back to watch soldiers encircle and open fire upon a ring of peasants. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything like it, though, as with the preceding three films, it makes clear that without Janscó the work of Theo Angelopoulos and Béla Tarr would be inconceivable.

Nocturnes: Kazuo Ishiguro's variations on a theme always amabile, rarely animato

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s most widely admired novels, such as The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans or his most recent, Never Let Me Go, memory’s vice grips conspire with some essential inward tendencies within his narrators to gradually reveal intricate discrepancies between the personal story being relayed and the larger story of the world surrounding. Unreliable narrators constitute a well-mined trope in fiction, but Ishiguro has raised it to a highly particular, melancholy art though crisp, concise language, inventive narratives, a sly manipulation of genres as varied as science-fiction and mystery, and, most especially, an unusual willingness to immerse himself so fully into the minds of his protagonists. I’ve pretty much adored everything he’s written, and greatly admired its daring variation, so I guess I’ve set the bar pretty high.

Still, with Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (Knopf, $29.95), Ishiguro’s first story cycle, I began to wonder if the one literary boundary Ishiguro’s genius can’t quite traverse is the one that separates the needs of long-from from the short. The stories in Nocturnes are each perfectly absorbing and worth the relatively brief investment required, but taken either as separate components or as a whole—which is presumably the author’s intention—they never quite ascend to Ishiguro’s established heights of emotional complexity. As with all Ishiguro’s work, these stories—of vagabond third wheels trying to interpret the cryptic tensions that exist between couples; of musicians who never quite make it as big as they’d hoped; of lives in stasis contrasted with lives in upheaval—observe the precariousness of nostalgia and the pitfalls of poor communication with knowingness. The problem might simply be that few of these characters truly come to life so as to make that knowingness resonate deeply.

In ‘Crooner,’ Jan, a cheerful young Polish guitarist living in Venice, plays for tourists on the piazza circuit, one of whom being Tony Gardner, a 60ish, once-famous American vocalist. He asks Jan to play backup during a moonlight serenade for Garnder’s wife Lindy. They discuss strategies for injecting specificity of feeling into one’s performances, cultivating those unuttered mental images that imbue one’s playing with texture. What Jan has in his mind—memories of his mother taking consolation in Gardner’s records during bleak days in Communist Poland—differs greatly with what Gardner has in mind—memories of a marriage that for his wife has essentially been a career move. Jan says of his playing: “I tried to make it sound like America, sad roadside bars, big long highways, and I guess I was thinking of my mother, the way I’d come into the room and see her on the sofa gazing at her record sleeve…” Each is lost in private, disparate reveries, but if Jan’s reverie is slightly clichéd, I can’t say I ever bought into Gardner’s story at all. Like a number of the larger-than-life Americans found in Nocturnes, he feels like a conceit.

Lindy Garder however is more developed, particularly since she’s able to return later in ‘Nocturne,’ the fourth story, which—get this—finds Steve, a struggling Los Angeles saxophonist, agreeing to allow the rich man who stole his wife from him to pay for Steve’s plastic surgery, a dubious effort to help forward the unhandsome session player’s lagging career. Steve winds up spending his post-surgery rest period in the posh hotel where he meets the slightly older, rather convincingly batty Lindy, who’s just gone under the knife for the third or fourth time. There are several moments in Nocturnes where Ishiguro, who mastered a Kafkaesque comic vernacular in his underrated The Unconsoled, strains for laughs. But once Steve and Lindy meet, the both of them traipsing around the hotel in the middle of the night with their heads wrapped in bandages, at one point trying to retrieve a stolen trophy from the bowels of a roast turkey, I have to hand it to Ish: this stuff is pretty hilarious. And it cries out for a younger Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, say, to do the movie version.

But in ‘Come Rain or Come Shine,’ similar hi-jinx are thwarted by an uncertain tone or too much repetition. Middle-aged university pals reunite. They’re so comfortable with each other that they can insult each other and, despite protests to the contrary, insist they know what the other is thinking to increasingly absurd degrees. Basically, they don’t listen to each other. This not listening goes on for a while. Again, Ishiguro holds things together. He never betrays the basic traits with which he’s endowed his protagonist—though he does, rather improbably, have him imitate a dog. But what he has endowed his protagonist and his narrative with here is pretty limited, even for a short story. The more serious ‘Malvern Hills’ is similarly founded in a solid premise—young English guitarist meets long-married Swiss tourists so oblivious to each other they don’t seem to exist on the same planet—that doesn’t arrive at a very satisfying resolution.

Which leaves us with ‘Cellists,’ the collection’s final and in some ways strongest tale, partially because while being written in Ishiguro’s customary first-person, the narrator is telling the stories of other people who remain sufficiently enigmatic as to make us wonder about what really transpired between them and where their paths led them in the shadow years after the story finishes. It concerns Tibor, another talented young musician from another Eastern European country—Ishiguro’s quite sensitive to the distinctive experiences of Eastern Europeans who fall under the spell of Western music—whose taken under the wing of Eloise, another American musical celebrity—or at least that what Eloise advertises herself as. Eloise is a fascinating question mark, existing on this strange frontier where it’s hard to distinguish between what passes as lived-in wisdom and as pure fantasy. Her true nature is fundamentally unknown to us, yet what we do know about her are details so carefully arranged that we leave the story wanting to know more without feeling we’ve been ripped off.