Deep Cuts: With a Screenplay by the Producer

If I was Gregory Peck, any time I thought back on my two films with Alfred Hitchcock, I think I'd be a little cheesed off. One of the great actors stars of his generation, working with a filmmaker with more than his fair share of masterpieces to his name, Peck nevertheless found himself appearing in two of Hitchcock's semi-duds. The first of those collaborations, Spellbound, is hardly forgettable, but it survives in most people's memory primarily due to the astonishing dream sequence, put together by Hitchcock and Salvador Dali. It's all wonky bicylce wheels and bird shadows and giant scissors, and it's a wonder to behold, but even that sequence is badly marred when seen in the context of the entire film, because each bizarre image is later ruthlessly explained to the audience in one of that movie's many instances of tedious psychobabble. In explaining the dream, Hitchcock and company render it strangely meaningless.
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The Paradine Case, the second and last film Peck made with Hitchcock, is not so much forgotten as never bothered with. It occupies space in an interesting limbo, of a sort that every great filmmaker as prolific as Hitchcock has in their cosmos, with Under Capricorn and The Wrong Man and I Confess, movies that nobody seems to truly dislike, but which nobody ever talks about, either (for the record, I love The Wrong Man). Coming to The Paradine Case, as I did, after many years as a Hitchcock fan who has seen the majority of his films, is an interesting, but frustrating, experience. One hopes the movie will be an unjustly ignored gem, of course, but what I found was a film that was not that, but was actually very close to it, and the ways in which it evades greatness, and even very goodness, are exasperating.

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The story, briefly is this: Peck plays Anthony Keane, a highly successful defense attorney, or whatever they call those in England, and a decent man, happily married to Gay (Ann Todd). He is called in by friend and colleague Sir Simon Flaquer (Charles Coburn) to take the case of Maddalena Paradine (Alida Valli), who has recently been arrested and charged with the murder of her blind husband. During his subsequent work on the case, Keane finds himself falling in love with Maddalena, and developing a theory -- which he seems ready to find evidence to support, come hell or high water -- that Andre Latour (Louis Jordan), the dead man's valet, is the real killer. In the course of this story, we will also meet Flaquer's daughter Judy (Joan Tetzel), who is quite dubious regarding Keane's motives and state of mind; the petty, cruel, and lascivious Lord Thomas Horfield (Charles Laughton), who is presiding over the murder trial; and Lady Sophie (Ethel Barrymore), Lord Thomas's much abused wife.

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So that's the groundwork. As a plot, it's really pretty standard-issue, in some ways, but the side characters, particularly the Horfields, add a great deal of color, both in Laughton and Barrymore's performances, which are typically wonderful, and in the off-plot, but not entirely off-theme, digressions they offer. Barrymore is not just terrific, but heartbreaking, as an old woman whose mind is slipping, not necessarily only due to old age, but possibly due to a lifetime of meekly accepting her husband's cruelty. This cruelty, as played loathsomely by Laughton, is not merely casual but also premeditated. Their scenes together are all the more effective for being infrequent, and their contrast with what turns out, unexpectedly, to be the story's main focus -- the relationship between Keane and his wife -- serves to highlight many of the film's missteps.

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See, there's an awful lot of off-the-hook-getting when it comes to Anthony Keane. His wife -- and Simon Flacquer, and Judy Flacquer, and pretty much everybody else -- clue in pretty quickly that he's fallen hard for his client, and while they do sort of judge him for it, and rightly so, they seem to want to give him all sorts of outs. For one thing, when Gay finally confronts him with her knowledge, she tells him that she prays that he's able to get Maddalena off scott free. Not prove her innocent, necessarily -- this seems to be, at best, a secondary concern -- but just set her free, because if she hangs for murder, then Keane will be in love with her forever. If she's free to roam the earth as a tangible, flawed, possibly even murderous, human being, then maybe ol' Keane will eventually come around and go back to loving his perfectly wonderful wife again. Considering Keane's boneheaded emotional transparency, and the utter hash he eventually makes of his case at trial, it's hard for me to see why everybody's so hellbent on giving this guy such a long leash.

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That's maybe a pure story problem, or a character problem. For a problem more directly tied to filmmaking, we have to turn to Maddalena herself, and ask "What the Christ does he see in her??" It's not that Alida Valli isn't beautiful, because she very clearly is. The problem is that she's barely in the movie. Maddalena is purely a supporting character, not just compared to Keane, but to Gay, as well, and when she and Kean do interact, and while it's clear that Peck is playing a deepening inatuation, it's in no way clear why, other than that's what the script says to do. There is no real moment between the two of them. Maddalena is an ice queen, rude and distant, even mildly combative. Keane loves her because there's no movie if he doesn't.

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The best chunk of The Paradine Case is located in the last forty minutes or so, which I've long held is the best place to put the best part of your movie. This forty minutes, of course, involves the trial itself. The downside of this section is that the details of the case, of the murder, aren't very compelling. The upside is that not only is this when we finally get our one true Hitchcock flourish -- when Latour is called to the stand, and he passes by Maddalena in the dock; it's an extraordinary shot -- but we see how close to making a sort of upper-crust English, by way of Hollywood, film noir Hitchock was with this movie -- it certainly has the look throughout. To put it bluntly, Keane fucks up badly, and he pays for it. Peck plays his moment of crumble brilliantly, and for a while there I thought, for all its flaws, The Paradine Case was going to be something of a classical tragedy, as so many film noirs are. And that's sort of what we end up with, except there's one more moment of that goddamn off-the-hook-getting with Keane, and the last scene of the movie almost makes light of how badly he's made a mess of things.

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Along with being the last film Hitchock made with Peck, it was also the last film he made with David O. Selznick, who, by the way, gets a somewhat elaborate screenwriting credit on The Paradine Case as well (see this post's title). Not only did Selznick poke his nose in there, but took a hatchet to the edit, too. So, properly, the final product could in some ways be more accurately called a David O. Selznick film than an Alfred Hitchcock film, although it's highly doubtful that a full and unambiguous David O. Selznick film would have looked this good. In any case, Hitchcock was about to make Rope, and shortly thereafter enter into the amazing work he did in the 1950s. Let Selznick have his bottle, I suppose, but it's still hard not to crave that excellent version of The Paradine Case that's buried in the one we have.

Hey Now Wait a Second...

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Huh. Well, anyway. My post on The Paradine Case has been bumped to Saturday night, or more likely sometime on Sunday. Just settle down, I'll do it...

Good Dog

Or not. Depends of a few factors, really. To discuss those factors, and the rest of Sam Fuller's White Dog, why not head over to Joseph Campanella's Cinema Fist and join in this month's TOERIFC discussion, which begins at 10:00 AM, EST? Huh? Why don't you!?

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On another, more personal, this-blog-related note, I think I'm going to unveil yet another series in the next couple of days. It's called "Deep Cuts", and it's quite uncomplicated. I simply watch a film by a notable director and write about it, but in each case it will be a film that, for whatever reason, is not that well known. For instance, first up will most likely be Alfred Hitchcock's The Paradine Case. Not well known, and not well liked, either, although that last element doesn't necessarily need to apply to all the films in this series. Anyway, look for it on Friday or Saturday.

Who Did What?

A few weeks ago, I watched The Tenderness of Wolves, which bears the credit "Directed by Ulli Lommel" (or the German equivalent). I find this to be a curious credit, for a few reasons. One is that the film was produced by Rainer Werner Fassbinder -- so produced by him, in fact, that he goes all the way to "presenting" it, too -- and features many members of his regular cast, such as Kurt Raab, El Hedi ben Salem, Irm Hermann, and others. Also, it looks just like a Fassbinder film, with its deceptively plain and casual camerawork, colors that are drab except when they're not, and so on. Further, while I haven't seen any other Ulli Lommel films, I did see a trailer for his movie Curse of the Zodiac, which looks like it was shot on camcorder by Jess Franco, when he was doing image tests in order to get Snake Woman just right.

I realize that all of this means less than nothing, but there are a couple of other clues that, while also meaning nothing in themselves, contribute to my belief that maybe Fassbinder was behind the camera during shooting of The Tenderness of Wolves more than anybody is letting on. One bit of evidence is nothing, a mere trifle: on the DVD commentary track, which Lommel shares with Willim Lustig, Lommel says, over a particular shot, "Isn't that a beautiful shot?" Now, yes, he could very well be tooting his own horn, but the tone in which he says it makes it sound more like he was admiring someone else's work. The cinematographer, Jürgen Jürges's work, quite possibly, though I don't remember him being mentioned.

Meaningless, I know. But early on, when Lommel is explaining how the film came about, he says that Kurt Raab was fascinated by the film's subject, serial killer Fritz Haarmann, and through German tax shelter/film funding laws, Fassbinder had a surplus of cash, and wanted to make a movie fast. Raab pitched the idea to him, but Fassbinder demured, saying the material was "too controversial", and took the producing position instead, passing the directing reins off to Lommel. And I'm sorry, but when did Fassbinder ever give a shit about appearing too controversial? I'm hardly an expert on the man, but it has always seemed to me that Fassbinder always made precisely the kind of movie he felt like making, controversy be damned, and, in fact, knowlingly courted that kind of reaction not a few times. So why in the world would this material suddenly make him blanch?

Of course, there is precedent for this sort of thing in Fassbinder's career, although going the other way. Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? is credited to two directors: Fassbinder and Michael Fengler. However, I've been told by people more educated than I that Fengler really was the director on that film, and Fassbinder was happy to co-write the script and then occupy the sidelines. And that film, even if it was helmed solely by Fengler, looks and feels exactly like a Fassbinder movie, as well.

So who knows? I don't, but do any of you?. It's curious, and is made even more so when I think that a case could probably be made that Raab directed the damn thing himself.

A Place Behind God's Back

In 1595, a long war between Sweden-Finland and Russia has ended. A contingent of Russian soldiers is journeying up north, through unexplored and unportioned land. With them are two Finnish soldiers, working for the Swedish king, to help the two kingdoms parcel out this new land and establish post-war borders. Each side would like as much land for their own country as they can get away with.
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Such is the set-up for director Antti-Jussi Annila and writer Liro Küttner's unusual 2008 horror film Sauna. At the center of the film are the two Finnish soldiers, brothers named Eerik (Ville Virtanen) and Knut (Tommi Eronen). The film drops us into the middle of the story's pivotal event, as we're introduced to Eerik as he is murdering a farmer for, he claims, betraying Sweden by withholding supplies. The murder is brutal, and Knut witnesses it, entering the farmer's home after, we learn, locking the victim's daughter in the cellar. Why did he do this? Why did Eerik kill the farmer? We know what both of their stated reasons are -- Knut claims to have been protecting the girl from his brother -- but Annila and Küttner don't let us come to know either man, or either victim, before it's all over. What we learn in subsequent flashbacks, to what led to the murder, alleviates our curiosity only slightly. And what could the reason possibly be for Eerik, after promising his brother that the girl will be released from the cellar, to leave her locked away, only revealing the truth to Knut days later?

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War, would seem to be the filmmakers' answer. Sauna has a disconcerting tendency, in its early-going, to appear simple-minded and pleased with its own pseudo-profundity. After killing the farmer, Eerik whirls on Knut and says, "This is what happens in peacetime!" Yes, well. Thankfully, Annila and Küttner rather quickly realize what actually interests them, and Sauna becomes a progressively stranger take on the idea that the only terminus for a soul stained with guilt is horror. Unending horror, even, unless you're careful. And even then...

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The Russians and the two Finns eventually find a village in the middle of a black swamp. Knut has by this time seen, or believes he's seen, a mud-spattered girl -- the farmer's daughter? -- appearing unexpectedly among the quagmire and barren, branchless trees along their journey, and he's professed a disbelief at his brother's recent behavior. Eerik, meanwhile, admits only to wanting to protect his brother and carve out a greater piece of land for Sweden. He's killed, he says, 73 people over the course of the war, including the farmer. He considers his victims "useless". But this village, we'll soon discover, has a population of exactly 73 people. Of these 73, only one is a child. And this group of 73 did not even develop the village themselves, but rather found it in their travels. Whoever did originally live here, they based their existence around the sauna, a squat white building stuck in the middle of an expanse of black water. In Finland, Eerik says, both the newly born and the newly dead are taken to saunas, to wash away the past.

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Both Ville Virtanen and Tommi Eronen are wonderfully craggy and haunted as the brothers, with Virtanen resembling a young Max von Sydow at his most fit-to-bust, and Eronen a young Gary Oldman at his most despairing. Annila paints his film in blacks and whites and browns, because what other colors could he use? Even the blood, when it flows here and there throughout, and begins to pour at the end, comes out a corrupt black, except when it mixes with a purifying stream. The whole film, in fact, slowly and subtly becomes an attempt to dispense with corruption, as first Knut, and then Eerik, seek absolution, and whatever punishment is connected with it, by entering the mysterious and dreadful sauna. What follows, and surrounds, this decision -- and whose decision it was is, I think, unclear -- is horror of a particularly cutting and bizarre sort, the supernatural revealing its full form without revealing what it is, or why it's here, or even what it wants.

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We know what the brothers want, but their simple desire for cleansing not only comes with an enormous price, but may in fact be a red herring. There is a lot at play in Sauna: not just guilt and redemption, but questions of war, of land, of family. The sexuality of one of the Russian soldiers comes into play, as well as, by extension, the sexuality of Knut. The one child in the village is a girl who disguises herself as a boy. Eerik has a wound on one hand which may remind you of the wounds suffered by a certain well-known historical and religious figure. All of these themes and story elements bounce off each other, and connect, or don't, in tight but perplexing 80-some minute film that contains in its final moments one of the most haunting and chillingly imaginative horror images I've seen quite a while, outside of the films of Guillermo del Toro.

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Regardless of the possibility that the source of the film's horror may have no connection, and may possess an animal indifference to, the jeopardized souls of Eerik and Knut, the fact remains that their fates are tied to the quest for redemption that every honest person spends their life trying to complete, in whatever small way. Most people don't have to journey that far, and many others think they have to travel further than they really do. Others, like Eerik and Knut, have a long way to go, an eternity, and though it may feel like a positive step, the events of Sauna would suggest that merely wanting redemption isn't enough. It depends on what you need to redeem, and where you seek it out. If you look for it in the wrong place, you may bring down more than just yourself.

Born For It

Watching Edmund Goulding and Jules Furthman's Nightmare Alley the other day, and watching Tyrone Power's life play out in line with an unfortunate fidelity to Joan Blondell's Tarot reading (and cringing to the point of laughing at the film's climactic line), I realized that this film and A Face in the Crowd are not exactly dissimilar, are they? Separated by ten years, each tells the story of a man who rises from humble, at best, beginnings through will and a talent for immorality. In Nightmare Alley (based on a novel by William Lindsay Gresham), Tyrone Power plays Stanton Carlisle, who, in the beginning of the film, is working at a carnival as the mouthpiece for Zeena's (Blondell) mentalist act. It's a basic bit of business, but when he gets wind of another, more intricate and ingenious form of the act that Zeena used to perform with her now-perpetually-soused boyfriend Pete (Ian Keith), Stan takes steps to obtain that secret for himself. What happens to Pete is something Stan writes off as an accident, but I have my doubts.
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Meanwhile, over in Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg's A Face in the Crowd, Andy Griffith (in a scorching performance that I'd wager a fair amount of the population isn't even aware he ever gave) plays Lonesome Rhodes, whose first moment on-camera shows him giving such a nasty, mean-dog look to his wards at a dusty old Southern jailhouse, that it's not hard to see that his good-old-boy demeanor, when faced with interested journalist Patricia Neal, hides a pretty grimy soul. Like his spiritual cousin Stan Carlisle, Rhodes is about to rise to the top, putting on a sweet face and exhuding down-home charm, and rising up through radio and into television, as a beloved, influential Will Rogers-type, with a heart of coal.

What's interesting is that Tyrone Power had such an open, nice face, when he needed it, and he's such a gregarious fellow in the early going of Nightmare Alley. Carlisle is one of those guys, like the anti-heroes (which is being kind) of Donald E. Westlake's novel The Hook, who are more or less perfectly content to live their lives as decent human beings, until the opportunity for advancement forces them to realize that they're actually pure bastards -- they'd just never gotten their shot before.

One is tempted to say the same thing about Andy Griffith and Lonesome Rhodes, but A Face in the Crowd actually preceded The Andy Griffith Show, after which point Griffith was nationally embraced as a sweet father and wise and funny Southern gentleman. Prior to his turn as Rhodes, Griffith did have success as a comedian and actor, and this was played on for A Face in the Crowd, but what a bombshell it would have been had the film come out in the mid-60s, when his hit (deservedly so) TV show was in full swing. The point is, Power feels like a gentle soul in Nightmare Alley's first half, and Griffith doesn't. We know Andy Griffith, of all people, is no good in his film. Power's shift towards casual amorality is more of a shock, though Nightmare Alley's colorful, shading into grotesque, early carnival setting does almost act as that film's version of Griffith's feral expresion.

In any event, both men, Carlisle and Rhodes, do maintain a level of humanity, or try to, throughout each film, but they need a hot piece of ass to kick their hearts in gear (this works better for Carlisle than it does for Rhodes), and even then they have to throw someone else over in order to get started. But mainly, they want power, and money. Each is willing to pervert, or manipulate, grand American themes -- faith in Nightmare Alley, basic human values as it applies to the political process in A Face in the Crowd -- to do it, and each man gets their hash settled pretty good as a result. At least they got to enjoy their place at the top of the carnival for a little while.

So Far...(The Andersons)