Of All Time

After having to wade through the fetid swamp of the BBC's 100 Greatest American Films last July,(1) what a relief it was to be presented last month with The Guardian's list of the 100 Best Novels Written in English, reinforcing my conviction that, even if the film medium survives another hundred years (and even if works of great merit continue - stubbornly - to be made), it will never completely escape its origins as a carnival sideshow attraction.

Robert McCrum spent two years compiling the list, which was published in the Observer and theguardian.com. That he spent so much time coming up with the list seems astonishing given the results. One of the authors with a novel on his list - Anthony Trollope - had a daily routine of writing two thousand words before going to his full-time job at the Royal Mail. McCrum compiled his list after establishing a set of draconian rules that severely limited the quantity (only one novel per author) and quality of his choices. To mention only one example: when he compiled his 100 Greatest Novels of All Time in 2003, McCrum could only name one novel by Tolstoy, so he named Anna Karenina and left out War and Peace, which is one of the biggest sins of omission ever committed.

His defense of his choices is rather more impressive than the choices themselves:

In the parlour game called 'Humiliation', in David Lodge's 70s campus novel Changing Places, the players score points by confessing the famous works of literature they have never read. In a memorable comic climax, ambitious academic Howard Ringbaum admits he has never read Hamlet, instantly wrecking his career.

Lodge's insight into the practice of literature is that everyone who steps into the world of books and letters risks humiliation. Rightly, for the well-being of culture and society, this is a competitive affair. Beneath the eye of eternity, it's a matter of life and death: either some kind of literary afterlife or (more likely) oblivion.

Casual browsers sometimes took a moment to grasp that my list of 'top novels' was a) derived exclusively from fiction written in the English language; b) strictly chronological; and c) gave each writer equal space, an especially restrictive criterion. With a prolific writer, the selection of one 'classic' text became almost intolerable. To cite an unfair example - Dickens (No 15, David Copperfield) and Wilde (No 27, The Picture of Dorian Gray) appear in the list on the same footing, with one novel apiece. With such rules, every thoughtful person must concede that my list is bound to have its ridiculous side.

After answering the question "what is a classic?" McCrum admits that "thereafter, the issue becomes subjective. Classics, for some are books we know we should have read, but have not. For others, classics are simply the book we have read obsessively, many times over, and can quote from. The ordinary reader instinctively knows what he or she believes to be a classic. While our preferences inevitably reflect gender, nationality, class, and education, there is no accounting for taste."

But there are perfectly sensible ways of accounting for taste. McCrum admitted that it's "a competitive affair," otherwise known as "criticism." Not only are there books (and films) around which all the conflicting and contradictory subjectivities sometimes agree, but there are standards that exist - that must exist - to which every critic can appeal. George Orwell, who was an insightful literary critic, knew that "ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion."(2)

While admitting, like McCrum, that so much of serious criticism consists of emotional responses reinforced by often shaky rational arguments, Orwell also insisted that there was something called "intellectual detachment": "Supposing that there is such a thing as good or bad art, then the goodness or badness must reside in the work of art itself."

It would be irresponsible of me not to object to some of McCrum's list, but what is more interesting to me are the little inconsistencies that have appeared between this list and McCrum's 2003 100 Greatest Novels of All Time. For instance, of the many novels in English that made the Greatest Novels list, McCrum chose Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang rather than his Oscar and Lucinda, Roth's American Pastoral rather than his Portnoy's Complaint, Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians rather than his Disgrace, Bellow's Herzog rather than his The Adventures of Augie March, Greene's The Quiet American rather than his The End of the Affair, Beckett's Malone Dies rather than his Murphy, Dos Passos's USA rather than his Nineteen Nineteen, and Conrad's Nostromo rather than his Heart of Darkness. And Mailer's The Executioner's Song, which is one of McCrum's Greatest Novels of All Time, was omitted by him two years later because he thought Mailer was "too much of an American celebrity in thrall of the medium."

While I strongly object to a few of McCrum's choices (Bram Stoker? Jack Kerouac?), I had far less to quibble about with McCrum's list of best novels than I had with the BBC's list of greatest American films. Why? Only one person compiled the list of novels, but sixty-three people submitted suggestions to the list of films. So why does the opinion of one person seem so much more authoritative and acceptable than the opinions of sixty-three people?

Clearly, Robert McCrum was given the job of evaluating three hundred years of English fiction because a) he has done a good deal of reading and only someone who has read as much has any business making such determinations; and b) there happens to be a much broader concensus among literary critics about who is in the winner's circle and who is out. With film, as anyone who has taken the medium seriously knows, consensus is practically nonexistent. For every film critic who thinks that the best films are the ones that employ screenplays and actors, there are others who argue that documentaries or experimental films or silent films are the medium's purest examples; or that only the Russian masters of montage or the Italian neo-realists or Bresson or Straub had it figured out; or that Godard is as important to film as Dante is to literature, and so on. Every ten years since 1952, the British Film Institute has managed to locate enough critics to vote for a handful of films that they think represent some sort of core value, even if that value shifts so erratically from poll to poll that it mitigates all notions of authority.

In his book, Movies Into Film, John Simon suggested that there is a difference between a film and a movie. For instance, Bicycle Thieves is a film, whereas Psycho is a movie. The two words not only imply a difference in quality, they represent wholly different pursuits. I recently watched To Each His Cinema (2006), a compilation of short films by many different filmmakers which captures - or attempts to capture - their nostalgic feelings about the pursuit of filmgoing. Watching it, I thought that, while the ceremonious act of filmgoing, of attending a film screening in a pre-arranged place - whether it's an actual theater or a village square - is dying out, the activities in front of the screen that each filmmaker eulogizes in the To Each His Cinema - the ecstatic attention to the events unfolding on the screen or the interactions of the filmgoers - has nothing whatever to do with the films being presented. One filmmaker depicts people sitting in the dark watching a Bresson film, another shows us people watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but the people and the films seemed to me interchangeable.(4)      

I think McCrum's list is intended to be prescriptive. Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who made a canonical list of a thousand greatest films, confessed that when he bought the issue of Sight and Sound in 1962 that contained the BFI Film Critic's Poll of the Top Ten Films of All Time, he set out to find and to watch every film on the list. That must have been a daunting task in the 60s, even in a big city. I found it just as daunting in the 70s, when I was on the hunt. The amount of trash I had to hew my way through to find a worthwhile film sometimes made it seem like a sleeveless errand.

If David Lodge's parlor game were to concentrate, instead, on film, the players wouldn't face humiliation because they hadn't seen The Passion of Joan of Arc, nearly ninety years old and still one of the three or four greatest films ever made. The winner would always be someone like Quentin Tarantino - not because he has seen every film and is proud of this dubious accomplishment, but because he obviously can't distinguish the good ones from the bad.


(1) If you wanted a list to provoke the greatest number of howls of execration, you could not improve on the Rolling Stone's recently published list of The 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time, which seems to use the premise that songwriting originated in Lubbock, Texas in 1955. Instead of commissioning the Rolling Stone, Apple Music might just as well have commissioned someone who was both illiterate and stone deaf.
(2) George Orwell, "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool."
(3) In a stab at fairness, The Guardian asked its online readers to submit titles that they thought belonged on the list. They published fifteen titles, seven of which were written by what one reader called Straight White Men (some of whom are dead, and who once would have fit the horrible term DWEM from the 90s, or Dead White European Men. Now the word Straight has replaced European as a mark of contemptible distinction). The rest of the novels on the list were written by three straight white women, one African male, two Anglo-Indians (one male, one female), and two African-American women, one straight, the other lesbian.
(4) Despite the fact that the title of Walker Percy's novel is The Moviegoer, which has a far different meaning than if it were called The Filmgoer, which was, of course, Percy's intention.  

Good Intentions

Quite apart from its qualities as a film, and apart from the extraordinary performances of its two principal actors, Barry Levinson's Rain Man (1988) is an exercise in cruelty. The film tells the story of Charlie Babbitt, played by Tom Cruise, who is a callow, selfish California luxury car salesman who learns of an inheritance from his deceased wealthy father in Cincinnati. At the reading of the will, Charlie is informed that all he has been awarded are a classic Buick and some prize-winning rose bushes. The bulk of his father's fortune is left to a mental hospital where Charlie's older brother Raymond, played by Dustin Hoffmann, is a resident. Charlie, who never knew of Raymond's existence, discovers on meeting him at the hospital that he is an autistic savant and incapable of caring for himself. Raymond's life is a repetitive round of actions - like watching The People's Court on television every day - designed to maintain a predictable and comforting sameness in which his autism can be controlled and studied. Determined to get more of his father's fortune, Charlie Babbitt schemes to gain legal custody of Raymond, absconding with him from the hospital and taking him on an impromptu cross-country trip to California in his classic Buick. (When Charlie tries to get him on a plane, Raymond goes into a hysterical tantrum about plane crashes and they are kicked off the flight.)
        
The rest of the film relates how the worm turns - how Charlie Babbitt gradually comes to care about Raymond, how he realizes that he is better off in the hospital and reluctantly sends him back to Cincinatti. Surprisingly, Rain Man was the highest-grossing film of 1988 and won Oscars for Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Actor (Hoffmann) and Best Director (Levinson). Hoffmann's performance is fascinating - a magisterial turn of method acting: how a talented, charismatic actor made himself into a cipher, a human black hole. He understood that Raymond, no matter how many scenes he's in, is only marginally there; other characters interact with him, or try to, but Raymond's presence in the room with them is incidental. His mental state effectively seals himself inside his own head. And because, to Charlie and to the instuitution that houses him, control of him means control of a lot of money, Raymond is used as a pawn by them to achieve their own ends. 

Hoffmann's performance was criticized by some who didn't seem to understand what he was up to. It was comparable to (though not as great as) Anthony Hopkins's performance of the butler, Stevens, in The Remains of the Day. Hopkins studied with an experienced butler in preparing for the role who told him,"when you enter a room, it should feel more empty." Raymond is, at best, an unwitting player in his own drama. He is not even complicit in his own actions. By subsuming himself inside Raymond, Hoffmann reveals to us how defenseless Raymond is when he is let loose in the world. Knowing this exposes the underlying cruelty of the actions of the other characters in the film toward Raymond, who reflects whatever ideas or emotions that they project onto him.

I was reminded of Rain Man by a teenaged son of one of my neighbors here in a province of the Philippines. The boy is not like Raymond, but he is what one might call "cognitively challenged." He is what we used to call, more bluntly and less sensitivelty, "retarded." Every day - several times a day - I hear him bouncing his basketball past my house on his way to the basketball court across the highway. He is probàbly unable to count the number of times a day that he performs this seemingly obsessive ritual, walking back and forth bouncing his ball.

His parents put him in a nearby public school when he was six, but he quickly fell behind in his lessons and they withdrew him. They tried it again the next year - and the following four years - with the same result. He's now 14. There are no "special needs" public schools in the Philippines, but the family managed to find a private school in a nearby town and they enrolled him there last June. Yesterday, I heard someone bouncing a basketball past my house and I looked out to see who it was. It was the boy, who, I was told, couldn't make it in the private school, who dropped out and has returned to passing the time the only way he knows how to.

I can't get inside the boy's head, but I think that he wishes he could be like the other children that he watches going off to school every day, but only because he feels so alone all day, with no one around to play with him except toddlers. I used to see him in the mornings with a book bag on his back, as if he might convince everyone that he, too, was going off to school. 

I'm sure that his parents had his best interests at heart by enrolling him, year after year, in school. They're far too poor to afford any sort of assessment of the extent of the boy's autism, so they have no way of knowing the limitations of his intelligence. But they also have no inkling of the cruelty of their repeated attempts at getting him started in school. They are like the incessant importunities of a parent to push a child into one sport or another, only to see the child fail again and again. The boy must be aware that he doesn't measure up to the standards of other children, that he isn't as smart as them. But to keep pushing him as they have, for eight straight years by now, is, I think, unintentionally cruel. They have been setting their boy up for failure time after time, without knowing of the toll of so much failure on him. 

If I were to return to this place in a decade, I would probably notice the boy, fully grown, obeying his strange compulsion of bouncing his ball across the highway to the basketball court (asssuming it's still there), or all the way home when whatever it is in his mind tells him that it's time to go home.

Taking the Plunge

Jan Troell is a Swedish film director for whom the word "filmmaker" was invented. He not only directs his films; he writes them, photographs and edits most of them himself. In 1971, Svensk Filmindustri spent more money than they had ever spent on a single film until then to produce Troell's film diptych, Utvandrarna (Emigrants) and Invandrarna (Immigrants). Based on the epic novels of novelist Vilhelm Moberg, the films featured Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann in the lead roles. They played the characters Karl-Oskar and Kristina, farmers in 19th century Sweden forced to choose between impossibly tough conditions for them in their homeland and the chance for a fresh start in America.

Though epic in scope, the film gives us intimate details of the hazards of crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a sailing ship: the seasickness of people utterly unaccustomed to a life at sea, living in close quarters below decks - so close that everyone is afflicted with body lice -, the duration of the voyage that seems never to end, and the sweetness of reaching land and of standing on solid ground again.

Troell told a familiar American story of poor people risking everything - including their lives - to travel by ship to a faraway land that held out to them nothing but the promise of a life that might be better than the intolerable lives they had always known and for which there was never an alternative.

When film critic Vernon Young reviewed Troell's film for The Hudson Review in 1972, he opened his essay with the sentence, "The great American film has now been made - in Sweden."(1) The film is so great that, when Warner Brothers bought the rights to distribute it in the US, releasing them as The Emigrants and The New Land, not even their brutal editing of both films could diminish their impact.(2)

The history of America is, of course, the history of immigrants. Even the Native Americans crossed the frozen Bering Strait to North America more than ten thousand years ago from Siberia during the last Ice Age. Their progress over the millennia from North America to the farthest reaches of Patagonia in South America, establishing settlements everywhere in between, is one of the most amazing testaments to humanity's endless longing for greener pastures, for the lands of milk and honey that always lie just over the next horizon.     

At the end of The Great Gatsby, with Gatsby dead and his great house on Long Island falling into neglect, the narrator goes for a walk along the shore:

"I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

In his essay on Fitzgerald, Lionel Trilling wrote that "Ours is the only nation that prides itself upon a dream and gives its name to one. To the world it is anomalous in America that so much raw power should be haunted by envisioned romance. Yet in that anomaly lies, for good or bad, much of the truth of our national life."(3)

In the summer of 2001, upon going to live in Des Moines, Iowa, I saw a local news report of a railway car that was discovered that contained the dead bodies of numerous people. It was learned that they were Hispanic immigrants, left to die in the locked railway car by the people - now known as people smugglers or human traffickers - who had transported them all the way from the border to Iowa. Some people, including myself, wondered how and why they had come so far. But, of course, they wouldn't have come so far without some assurance that there would be jobs waiting for them.

Then, just last week, I saw another television report about the seventy-one refugees, all Syrians, found suffocated in the back of an impossibly small truck in Austria.(4) The people who had been quickly arrested were Bulgarian and Hungarian people smugglers, who provide the desperate refugees with means of transportation, at a prohibitive price, farther into the European Union. Most of the refugees who preceded them - the ones who arrived alive at their destinations - ended up in Germany and Sweden.

When I see on television the immigrants to Europe and the US crossing the waters and the borders that lie between them and safety, between them and a good life for themselves and for their families, I remember some of the people, trapped in the upper floors of the Twin Towers on September 11, who stood in the windows with smoke billowing from behind them, waving to whomever was watching, facing the choice of burning to death or jumping. To us, such a choice is unimaginable - unthinkable. But it is the choice that every immigrant to Europe and the US is now facing.


(1) Vernon Young, "Hands Across the Sea," The Hudson Review, 25, No. 2 (Summer 1972).
(2) The Emigrants was released in the US with 40 minutes trimmed from its original length. The New Land had 102 minutes cut out.
(3) Lionel Trilling, "F. Scott Fitzgerald," The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: The Viking Press, Inc.)
(4) The small truck filled with dead bodies made me think of the gas vans that the Nazis used to gas the Jews before the gas chambers were built.

Woody Allen: Looking Back

In a rare interview with NPR at the end of July, Woody Allen "opened up" about his long-term relationship with Soon-Yi, his wife of twenty years. He didn't respond to the "allegations," past and present, of child abuse that have damaged his reputation, at least in the U.S., but he denied that it has had any effect on his freedom to make films. "I always had a small audience," he said. "People did not come in great abundance and they still don't." While this may seem like a candid admission from a film director, Allen's career has had its commercial ups and downs. While he certainly lacks what the British call the "common touch," he can't quite take comfort in being too good to be popular.

Allen, who turns 80 in December, has now made forty-five films as director. Over the decades, I have seen seventeen of them. He has managed to find an audience for his films through the fat years in the '70s and '80s as well as all the lean years since. He has done, I think, everything he wanted to do as a filmmaker - except achieve greatness. He obviously wanted to be known as much as a filmmaker of genius as he is as a comic of genius. He recently admitted that he never made it into the same room as the filmmakers he so admires and sometimes tried to imitate: Fellini, Antonioni, and especially Bergman.

But he's Woody Allen, which is more than enough. Remarkably, in an industry grounded on profit, on mega-profit, he has navigated his small vessel through the icebergs of Spielberg, Lucas, Cameron, and Bay, and even the parade of comic book films. He failed, I think, to successfully separate himself from the "nebbish" character that he created in his standup routines, despite making seventeen films that he didn't act in. And this is an important problem with Allen's films that won't go away: he has acted in twenty-eight of them.

The late Stanley Kauffmann took long-lasting issue with Allen's acting; whether the characters' names are Fielding Mellish, Alvy Singer, Mickey Sachs or Joe Berlin, they're always the same fumbling, stammering, gesticulating, self-deprecating persona that Allen used in his standup routines. He's an improvement on Jerry Lewis, but he's not exactly Jacques Tati either. In his review of Allen's film Everyone Says I Love You (which he happened to enjoy), Kauffmann wrote: "The trouble isn't that he's always the same - but Allen's sameness is uninviting. His performance doesn't even create self‑parody."(1)

One of the conspicuous pleasures of watching Allen's films through the years has been his choice of leading ladies. But I sometimes had the uncomfortable feeling that they were also Allen's latest girlfriends. As Kauffmann wrote [again of Everyone Says I Love You], "At one point in the picture, Julia Roberts has, for sufficient plot reasons, gone to bed with Allen and is in a semi‑daze after his magnificent love‑making. With a real comedian - say Robin Williams or Dustin Hoffman - this moment might be funny, a gorgeous woman reeling from an encounter with a shrimp. Here, however, all we can think of is that Allen, as director, is using his power to build himself up as a man." 

I think it's fair to say that Woody Allen's genius is primarily verbal. He is adept at funny one-liners, having written, from the age of sixteen, thousands of jokes for funny performers, including Bob Hope and Sid Caesar. He began his standup career in 1960, and his first play, "Don't Drink the Water" was produced on Broadway in 1966. Studying film at NYU and CUNY, he was so dissatisfied by the film made from his first screenplay, What's New Pussycat? (1965) that he decided to direct all his scripts in future. "Allen's directing career," wrote Stanley Kauffmann, "is a prime instance of on-the-job training."   

Starting with Take the Money and Run (1969), he was exceptional in American film - since Charlie Chaplin, that is - for writing, directing, and acting in a string of comedies that culminated with Annie Hall (1977), which won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He followed it with Interiors (1978), a starkly serious drama about three daughters who each have to come to terms with their mother's suicide. It was heavily influenced by Ingmar Bergman's late films, and it was released the same year as Bergman's Autumn Sonata. Vernon Young commented that Allen's film was actually a somewhat better Bergman film than Bergman's.(2) Like Chaplin's drama, A Woman of Paris (in which Chaplin did not appear), Interiors was a misguided try at a level of high seriousness that took everyone by surprise. It was greeted with incomprehension when it was greeted at all. It was an experiment that Allen never attempted again, and I think that this was a blow to Allen's ambitions as a filmmaker from which he never recovered.

For most of his career, Annie Hall was his most profitable film, with Manhattan (1979) a close second. But it was recently eclipsed by Midnight in Paris (2012), and two of his most recent films, Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) and Blue Jasmine (2013) have been surprising successes. Still, despite Roger Ebert's dubbing him "a treasure of the cinema," the most that a Woody Allen film has made ($151 million gross) is small potatoes by current industry standards. In a 2004 interview, he admitted that "In the United States things have changed a lot, and it's hard to make good small films now. The avaricious studios couldn't care less about good films - if they get a good film they're twice as happy but money-making films are their goal. They only want these $100 million pictures that make $500 million."(3) Adjusting for inflation, I can imagine such a statement coming, verbatim, from Erich von Stroheim in the 1920s, Orson Welles in the 1940s, or John Casavettes in the 1960s. Hollywood hasn't changed, really.

Which brings me to what I believe is the most searching observation about Woody Allen, again from Stanley Kauffmann:

"What's most curious in Allen is his nostalgia. He keeps trying to remake New York into what he imagines it was like about the time that he was born (1935), with music drawn from the Broadway and Hollywood hits of that decade. Radio Days was an overt attempt to go back there; Bullets Over Broadway was a grab at Damon Runyon. Through many of Allen's films, despite their freight of topical reference, there's a hint that things used to be better, especially the music. (Remember how Gershwin on the sound track supported the up‑to‑date Manhattan.) Allen, full of postwar frankness about neuroses, yearns for what he feels was a pre‑war Eden."


(1) Stanley Kauffmann, "The Food of Love," The New Republic, November 11, 1996.
(2) Vernon Young, "Autumn Interiors," Commentary, 67 (January 1979).
(3) To Simon Garfield, "Why I Love London," The Guardian (UK), August 8, 2004.

Some Lives Matter

The current controversy over the "Black Lives Matter" movement gives us a clear illustration of the effects of racism in America. While black people find racism everywhere, simply because they are the targets of it, and know too well how it impacts on their day-to-day lives, many white people don't seem to see it anywhere, and would deny that it is a factor in 21st century American society. There is considerable confusion over the slogan "Black Lives Matter" among whites, who don't see what an exceptional claim it is. "Of course black lives matter," they insist. "All lives matter." But clearly, to some Americans, some lives matter more than others.

Tomorrow, August 21, is known as Ninoy Aquino Day here in the Philippines, marking the anniversary of the murder of Aquino (whose son is the current sitting president of the Philippines) undoubtedly by persons in the pay of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. I wrote a piece on this blog almost exactly six years ago about a curious quote by Aquino that used to be printed on the five hundred peso bill. Like "Black Lives Matter," it doesn't seem like such a remarkable phrase. But Aquino knew that it was: 

'Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino, Jr. is on the Philippine 500 peso bill, with his words, "The Filipino is worth dying for" on the right hand side. I have often wondered at this famous quote because it doesn't sound the least bit exceptional. Nobody would think of saying that "The Italian is worth dying for", or the Egyptian or the Japanese. Everyone would think such statements were self-evident and didn't warrant stating. But it is only because Aquino's words are not self-evident that they were considered remarkable, even revolutionary - because Ferdinand Marcos was convinced, and tried to convince his followers, that the Filipino was not worth dying for. It was finally Aquino that made the words true. I wonder how many others in the Philippine government really believe in them?' (1)

 
What makes "Black Lives Matter" such a significant slogan is that, to many Americans - and not just white Americans - black lives obviously DO NOT matter, or don't matter as much as white lives. 


(1) The original post can be found here.

Haute Auteur

Aside from what he is best remembered for (not, alas, for his splendid essays), Gore Vidal, like many another American writer, did his time in the Hollywood salt mines and worked on scripts for various half-forgotten or forgettable movies. His experience gave him a clear understanding of the men who made the movies - not the directors, whom he rarely met, but producers and his fellow writers. Naturally, he took a dim view of the auteur theory, that I've expended excessive space on this blog debunking. (I feel as if I'm fighting for the soul of the medium, dear reader.)

Unlike literature and literary criticism, which continue to cling to standards established over centuries, Film's standards are all over the place since it is stubbornly viewed as that most impossible of things - a popular art. Consequently, despite the existence of a tradition of quality established in a small percentage of films almost entirely from abroad, American film, either oblivious of that tradition or defiantly contrary to it, has formed its own standards, based on its own dubious traditions which the French, in their capricious love-hate of all things American, are supposed to have codified (or trumped up) into a "politique."

Appalled at the deleterious effects that American films had had on American fiction, Vidal wrote an illuminating essay on the contents of a contemporary New York Times fiction Best Seller List. The following is an excerpt from the recent New York Review of Books reprint of that piece, written in 1973. 

'"Shit has its own integrity." The Wise Hack at the Writers' Table in the MGM commissary used regularly to affirm this axiom for the benefit of us alien integers from the world of Quality Lit. It was plain to him (if not to the front office) that since we had come to Hollywood only to make money, our pictures would entirely lack the one basic homely ingredient hat spells boffo world-wide grosses. The Wise Hack was not far wrong. He knew that the sort of exuberant badness which so often achieves perfect popularity cannot be faked even though, as he was quick to admit, no one ever lost a penny underestimating the intelligence of the American public. He was cynical (so were we); yet he also truly believed that children in jeopardy always hooked an audience, that Lana Turner was convincing when she rejected the advances of Edmund Purdom in The Prodigal "because I'm a priestess of Baal," and he thought that Irving Thalberg was a genius of Leonardo proportion because he had made such tasteful 'products' as The Barretts of Wimpole Street and Marie Antoinette.

"The bad movies we made twenty years ago are now regarded in altogether too many circles as important aspects of what the new illiterates want to believe is the only significant art form of the twentieth century. An entire generation has been brought up to admire the product of that era. Like so many dinosaur droppings, the old Hollywood films have petrified into something rich, strange, numinous-golden. For any survivor of the Writers' Table (alien or indigenous integer), it is astonishing to find young directors like Bertolucci, Bogdanovich, Truffaut reverently repeating or echoing or paying homage to the sort of kitsch we created first time around with a good deal of 'help' from our producers and practically none at all from the directors - if one may quickly set aside the myth of the director as auteur. Golden age movies were the work of producer(s) and writer(s).'

Gore Vidal, "The Ashes of Hollywood," The New York Review of Books.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/20/gore-vidal-ashes-hollywood/

The Stranger

There are several reasons why the Luchino Visconti film called Lo Straniero (The Stranger) in Italian is splendid, but the biggest reason is because it doesn't in the least bit seem like a Luchino Visconti film. This could explain why Visconti's fans never liked it, because it lacks the idiosyncratic qualities that marked - and, in my opinion, marred - most of his films: the attention to a sometimes suffocating production design, the preoccupation with cultural decline and decay, and with love which time or circumstance make impossible. The Stranger (1967) lacks these qualities, and is a quite arrestingly beautiful achievement.

When he approached the widow of Albert Camus (Camus had been killed in a spectacular car crash in 1960 at the age of 46) for the rights to make his novel L'étranger into a film, Visconti wanted to update it to avoid having to re-create French colonial Algiers and to give the story more topicality, since Algerians had recently managed to persuade the French to abandon their colonial designs on their country. Mme Camus, however, insisted on total faithfulness to the book, down to the most insignificant period detail. Despite the passage of thirty years, however, Visconti managed to appease Mme Camus and make the pre-war era seem closer than it was.

Once he got down to making the film, with a honed-down script by himself and Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Visconti had a few things in his favor. The location shooting in Algiers exudes - thanks to the irreplaceable presence of Giuseppe Rotunno behind the camera - the striking beauty of Camus's city, and catches the right sensual atmosphere of his "summer in Algiers." Marcello Mastroianni is noticeably not French - an inescapable fact that caused some critics to grumble; but he is near-perfection as Meursault.(1) And Piero Piccioni contributed to the film a subtle and suitably alienating modernist musical score.

When I first saw Visconti's film more than thirty years ago, it was the French-dubbed version. Although Mastroianni spoke passable French, he was dubbed by another (French) actor, which effectively cut his performance in half. I have lately - last week - had the pleasure of seeing the Italian version, with Mastroianni's own voice restored,and the difference is crucial. Hearing the first line of the novel in Italian, "Oggi mama e morte" ("Mother died today") was perfectly apposite to the balmy atmosphere of the film.

Visconti knew that what was central to the story of a young Frenchman's misadventure one summer in Algiers is the portrait of a man out of sync with his surroundings, a truly estranged man. The plot of one Arab's efforts to defend the honor of his sister against the abuses of a Frenchman (Masson) and Meursault's chance involvement in the feud becomes, in Camus's sensual prose, a pretext for the portrayal of a man who lives in a world that expects from him things that he can't bring himself to give. He can't show grief at his mother's death because he doesn't feel it. He begins an affair with a girl while he is supposed to be in mourning. He is sickened by a pathetic old man's attachment to his dog, and the old man's bewildered sadness when the dog runs away. And he befriends an obvious pimp, and shoots an Arab to death with the pimp's gun because the sun at the beach was so overwhelming. Asked at his murder trial to say something in his defense, all Meursault can say is "It was because of the sun."

The novel was a collection, really, of scenes in which Meursault isn't so much involved with events in the world around him as he is diverted by them. After his girlfriend departs his flat one Sunday morning, he spends the rest of the day eating and smoking in a chair, watching the life of the city below his window parade past. The scene seems meaningless, but it is central to the novel, and Visconti realizes it beautifully. At the close of the scene, Meursault sees his reflection in the mirror and thinks (in Stuart Gilbert's translation), "It occurred to me that somehow I'd got through another Sunday . . ." How many times have I recalled those very words, having got myself through innumerable Sundays?

The OTHER great scene in the novel, when the prison chaplain visits Meursault's cell uninvited, is integral to advancing Camus's peculiarly sensual atheism. Visconti and Rotunno put us in Meursault's cell, cut off from the light and life outside of his barred window. We are drawn, like Meursault, to peer out through those bars at the tiny patch of sky and its changing colors as night passes into day.

The chaplain, whom Meursault had repeatedly refused to see, tells Meursault: "These stone walls, I know it only too well, are steeped in human suffering. I've never been able to look at them without a shudder. And yet - believe me, I am speaking from the depths of my heart - I know that even the wretchedest amongst you have sometimes see, taking form against that grayness, a divine face. It's that face you are asked to see."

And Meursault narrates: 'I informed him that I'd been staring at those walls for months; there was nobody, nothing in the world, I knew better than I knew them. And once upon a time, perhaps, I used to try to see a face. But it was a sun-gold face, lit up with desire - Marie's face. I had no luck; I'd never seen it, and now I'd given up trying. Indeed, I'd never seen anything "taking form," as he called it, against those gray walls.'

A pleasant surprise in the cast is Anna Karina, freed from Godard's clutches, in the role of Marie. She sweetly elicits her love for Meursault, which is most touching in the trial in the trial scenes and in her visits to the jail in which Meursault is confined. She makes one feel keenly the pang of regret that he must have felt when she stops writing to him or paying him visits.

Camus's novel has been a disturbingly cool favorite of mine ever since I was lucky enough to read it when I was twenty. And Visconti's film is as lovely and faithful a companion piece to the book as I could have wanted.


(1) In the novel, Camus never told us Meursault's first name. In the film, he is dubbed "Artur."