Dear Readers: A personal situation has come up, and I have been unable to pull this issue together. So, I’m sorry but I must take a break. I promise that I will be back when I can. Thank you for being subscribers to The Moveable Marquee. I have loved writing it for all of you.

Sincerely,

Steven Huff

Alan Ladd as Shane

Issue # 75 // August 1, 2026

Contents of This Issue:

Film Commentary: The Changing West: George Stevens’ Shane.

Classic Film Capsules: Beat the Devil; Bitter Victory.

Quote: Jean Arthur

I have nothing particular on my mind for the Entrée in this issue, nothing to crank about. So, I’m going to skip that section this time and go right to the Film Commentary. This time it’s on Shane, a very popular and influential Western movie when it was released in 1953. Many boys born in the ‘50s—and God knows how many dogs—were named Shane. It wasn’t Shane but Hondo (also 1953) that influenced my parents. They didn’t name me Hondo—I already had a name—but they gave me a pair of chaps and a plastic six-gun and holster.

Anyone too young to remember the ‘50s might wonder at the popularity of Westerns then, both on the big screen and on TV. It may have had to do with the Cold War and a desire to retreat to a time when America had vast open lands to settle. Of course, that meant robbing from native peoples who had occupied them for millennia. But Hollywood films of the time rarely asked uncomfortable questions.

Still, Shane is a fine film that dramatizes the development of landownership and fencing off fields in the West. It wasn’t a strictly American problem. In England it was called Enclosure, or the fencing off of property, which dispossessed sheep grazers and others who depended on open fields.

Film Commentary:

The Changing West: George Stevens’ Shane

By Steven Huff

Shane (1953). Directed by George Stevens. With Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Van Heflin, Brandon De Wilde, Jack Palance, Ben Johnson, Elisha Cook, Jr. , Emile Meyer, John Dierkes, Edgar Buchanan. Screenplay by A. B. Guthrie, from a novel by Jack Schaefer. Cinematography by Loyal Griggs, Music Composed by Victor Young. Color. 1 hr., 58 mins.

Streaming on Prime, Paramount+, MGM+

Shane is a story of the settlement of the American West. Specifically, it’s about families who acquired small tracts of farmland under the Homestead Act of 1862, and their conflicts with free-range cattle barons who reserved the right to graze their beef wherever they pleased and to drive them to markets across the Great Plains, as depicted in Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948). They did not like fences getting in their way. And sometimes the conflicts turned violent.

I have a personal fondness for this movie. My grandparents were homesteaders in Western Nebraska around 1910. I think it was under the later Homestead Act of 1909. As rough as it was—they lived in a sod house for a time—conflicts of the kind dramatized in Shane were a thing of the past. However, in 2015 when I went to Nebraska to hunt down the old place, I found that it—like most such homesteads for many miles—had been swallowed up by a beef cattle ranch. Such ranches have fences now, but their land holdings are enormous. So, in a way, the cattlemen won after all.

Without a doubt, the film has one of the most strikingly beautiful openings in all of cinema. We see the Edenic countryside of Wyoming and the Grand Teton Mountains in the background. An elk wading in a pond raises his head and, between his antlers, we see the image of a man approaching on horseback. It’s Shane (Ladd), a man who, like many Western heroes, has only one name. He’s a gunfighter and a drifter, a man of few words, but strong principles. I say Edenic, although life here can be nasty, brutish and short. The landscapes in this film are not merely there for their beauty but give us the sense that life here could be wonderful, if only there were law and order. The nearest US marshal is a three-day ride away.

Shane stops at the homestead of Joe (Heflin) and Marian Starrett (Arthur) and asks for water, then he shows his gratitude by helping Joe with the bullwork of wrestling a tree stump out of the ground. He’s invited to dinner, and just as he’s washing up, cattle baron Rufus Ryker (Meyer) arrives on horseback with his tough cowboys. Ryker tells Starrett that he has a contract for his beef cattle. He needs all available space and wants the Starretts to pack up and move on. Then he sees Shane step out of the shadows, his six-gun on his hip. Ryker’s face shows that intimidating these pesky homesteaders might not be so easy. It’s also the point at which Shane becomes part of the Starretts’ struggle, as well as that of the other homesteaders. He is going to stay on and work for the Starretts.

Van Heflin as Joe Starrett

The movie has a good solid cast. Heflin as Joe Starrett is a straight-up, hardworking farmer, solid husband and dad, if not particularly colorful or romantic. Jean Arthur is convincing as Marian Starrett although she looks a bit old for a woman to be a mother to their young boy, Joey (De Wilde). In fact, she is older. Born in 1900, she was fifty-one when filming began, and she’s older than both Heflin (1908) and Ladd (1913). Yet the effect is of a struggling pioneer woman, worn down from hard work.

In critical writing on the film, much is made of Marian’s attraction to Shane. Her eyes are on him from the start. After all, he’s handsome, self-assured, can handle an axe with the best of them, dresses smartly (maybe a bit too smartly for a drifter). When Joe and Shane limp home after a fistfight with Ryker’s boys in the saloon in town, she is more attentive to Shane’s bruises than her husband’s. While cleaning Shane’s head wounds she sits with her breasts almost directly in his face (as erotic as a film dared to be at the time). At the Fourth of July dance she waltzes with Shane who, for a gunslinger, proves adept on his feet, as Joe looks on with more admiration than jealousy. But no real triangle gets started. In this story, philandering won’t settle the American west, only muscle, fidelity, principles, and a willingness to fight to protect your home.

Jean Arthur as Marian Starrett

It’s the boy, little Joey, who idolizes Shane, imagining him to be the apotheosis of manhood. He begs him to teach him to shoot. In a memorable scene, Shane obligingly draws his six-shooter for the boy, and fires straight at the camera, making a rock leap from the ground. The gun is shockingly loud, not the medium decibel bang-bang of most westerns. The message is: guns are dangerous. Gun violence is irreversible.

There’s more than one serpent in this paradise, but the worst snake is a hired gun named Wilson (Palance), who Ryker hires when he realizes that the homesteaders are not going to yield to mere harassment. Wilson arrives with a gun on each hip. To prove his malevolence, he taunts a homesteader named Stonewall Torrey (Cook, Jr.) into reaching for his gun and then shoots him dead. The director George Stevens had a cord attached to Cook’s back, so that when he’s shot, he’s thrown back into the soupy mud in front of the saloon. Stevens spent a whole day on this scene, filming it over and over, Cook having to climb out of the mud and change into a clean costume after each shoot.

It’s a crucial turn in the story. Now Joe believes there is no alternative but to go to town with a gun or there will be no peace. Other men think it’s best to move on.

Joe Starrett: “We can have a regular settlement here. We can have a town and churches and a school.”

Fred Lewis: “And a graveyard.”

Starrett: “I don’t know. We just got to, that’s all.”

Marian, distraught, begs Joe not to go and pleads with Shane to stop him. This leads to one of the best fistfights in film history. Shane agrees that Joe is no match for Wilson and he’s not going to let him leave the homestead. So, the two determined friends fight each other so viciously that the horses and cattle bolt, one bull even trying to climb a rail fence. The earth seems to shake. It ends with Joe out cold in in the barnyard and Shane saddling his horse to go to town.

Entering the saloon—where the Ryker boys seem to live—he confronts Ryker himself as Wilson glowers from a table:

Shane: “You’ve lived too long. Your kind of days are over.”

Ryker: “My days? What about yours, gunfighter?”

Shane: “The difference is I know it.”

Ryker: “All right. So, we’ll all turn in our six-guns to the bartender. And we’ll all start hoeing spuds. Is that it?”

Shane: “Not quite yet.”

Wilson stands up to challenge Shane.

The shootout scene lasts only a couple of minutes from that point until Shane walks out again. The result is almost perfunctory. Wilson, Ryker and his brother are shot dead, as we would expect. And yet it has an emotional value that some later films couldn’t match. For example, the spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s ushered in a new norm of dozens of men falling in a single shootout. Easily a hundred die in Django (1966). In those films, and henceforth in films of other genres, killing is banal, eliciting little emotion, let alone guilt.

Shane, on the other hand, is deeply affected by his own actions in the shooting, and he has to explain to Joey—who witnessed the whole scene—that after killing three men he has to leave the valley: “Joey, there’s no living with a killing. There’s no going back from one. Right or wrong, it’s a brand. A brand sticks. Now you run on home to your mother and tell her everything’s all right. And there aren’t any more guns in the valley.”

He rides off on his horse, and Joey, famously, runs after him, hollering, “Shane, come back.”

Brandon De Wilde as Joey

The brief dialogue at the shootout and its aftermath addresses issues of a changing West. Free-range cattle raising is in its waning hours. So is part of what Shane represents: The age of the lawless gunslinger. But also, of the roving cowboy, however much such characters actually existed. Shane does not know where he’s going from here. And we get the sense that he’s running out of destinations. The recognition of that kind of character’s mutability reaches its zenith in David Miller’s Lonely Are the Brave (1962), in which Kirk Douglas, as a contemporary cowboy, escapes jail on horseback and is eventually run down on a highway by a semi driven by Carroll O’Connor.

It was also a time of change for Western Movies. Shane was filmed in 1951 and released in ’53 after extensive editing. It was the beginning of the decade when film seemed to be in a life-and-death struggle with TV for audiences. TV Westerns were becoming so popular that they replaced B-movie “horse operas.” What gave a leg up to films like Shane, John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), John Farrow’s Hondo (1953) and Anthony Mann’s Bend of the River (1952) were the color panoramas with which TV could not compete. But, of course, it could not go on forever: color TV was on the horizon.

CLASSIC FILM CAPSULES:

Beat the Devil (1953) Directed by John Huston. With Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Peter Lorre, Robert Morley, Edward Underdown, Ivor Barnard, Marco Tulli. Written by Truman Capote and John Huston, based on the novel by James Helvick. Cinematography by Oswald Morris. Music Directed by Lambert Williamson. Black and White. 1 hr., 29 mins. Streaming on Prime, Tubi, MGM+, Roku and other online services.

In an interview with John Huston in 1972, Dick Cavett mentioned that he knew several people who’d seen Beat the Devil repeatedly, and one who’d watched it eighteen times. This was, of course, before home video became popular and made multiple viewings easy. The film is a dark comedy of a group of criminals, Bogart, Lorre, Morley, Barnard, and Tulli, sailing from Italy to Africa. They claim their mission is to sell vacuum cleaners, but they actually mean to exploit the continent’s mineral wealth, especially uranium for atomic bombs. A fake aristocrat from London (Underdown), posing as a coffee merchant, is after the same thing. Only Bogie and his romantic partner (Lollobrigida) seem to have common sense; the rest are buffoonish felons. Much goes amiss before they even set sail, and all are shipwrecked on the African coast. The picture seems to get funnier with each viewing. Lorre’s understated performance as Julius O’Hara (“What is time? Swiss manufacture it. French hoard it. Italians squander it. Americans say it is money. Hindus say it does not exist. Do you know what I say? I say time is a crook.”) is one of the best roles of his later career. The film’s occasional disjointedness likely owes to the fact that Huston and Truman Capote were reworking the script every night.

Bitter Victory (1957). Directed by Nicholas Ray. With Curd Jürgens, Richard Burton, Ruth Roman, Anthony Bushell. Screenplay by René Hardy, Nicholas Ray, and Gavin Lambert from a novel by Hardy. Cinematography by Michel Kelber. Music conducted by Maurice Leroux. Black and White. 1 hr., 22 mins. Streaming on Prime.

Major David Brand (Jürgens) is with the British Army in North Africa during World War II. He has been assigned to lead a small force of men to attack a German installation in Benghazi and steal military documents ahead of a planned battle against Romel. But his second in command is Captain Jimmy Leith (a good early role for Burton) and, unfortunately, they are in love with the same woman: Brand’s wife, who has clearly not gotten over her past fling with Leith. Brand is jealous. Leith is sullen. They lead the mission together anyway. Disguised in Bedouin robes, they attack the Germans and successfully make off with the documents. The camels that were supposed to carry them back to home base never show up—you know how camels can be—and the journey on foot across the Sahara is worse than brutal. Naturally, they’re critically short of water. There are some inherent problems with the story. It’s not clear why the men despise Brand, who is doing his faltering best. And why weren’t they issued a first aid kit? When Leith is stung by a scorpion, they are unable to treat him, and gangrene sets in almost overnight. Now Brand has to decide whether to leave Leith to die in the desert or to put a bullet through his head and end his misery; either way he will eliminate his rival. Despite the above conundrums, it is an exciting story of the heightened realities of men who are driven to the end of their endurance, with the added ingredient of a love triangle. Jürgens, by the way, was German, but was critical of Nazism and spent part of World War II in a labor camp for shooting off his mouth in a beer garden.

SOURCES:

Bell-Metereau, Rebecca. “1953: Movies and Our Secret Lives.” American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations. Edited by Murray Pomerance. Rutgers University Press, 2005.

Ebert, Roger. Shane. Rogerebert.com . September 3, 2000.

Fenin, George N. and William K. Everson. The Western: from Silent to Cinerama. The Orion Press, 1962.

Thomson, David. Have You Seen…? Afred A. Knopf, 2008.

ACKNOWEDGMENTS:

Thanks to Barry Voorhees for editorial.

Thanks to Tim Madigan for suggestions.

QUOTE: “I am not an adult, that's my explanation of myself. Except when I am working on a set, I have all the inhibitions and shyness of the bashful, backward child. Unless I have something very much in common with a person, I am lost. I am swallowed up in my own silence.” —Jean Arthur

El Capitan Theater. Photo by Visitor7 [See Sources for license]

Contents of This Issue:

Entrée: The Battle of the Screens

Film Commentary: Il Sorpasso.

Classic Film Capsules: Outrage; The Bigamist.

Sources and Acknowledgments

Quote: Ida Lupino

Entrée: The Battle of the Screens

In his most recent book, A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of the Movies, David Thomson marvels that audiences in the 1950s gave up theaters like Radio City Music Hall and other grand palaces for a screen that “measured in inches.” I’ve often wondered about that myself. I remember my family’s first TV. It came mounted in a cabinet with double doors that were closed politely when guests arrived. The screen was black and white, and a peephole compared to the wider color screens that showed up just a few years later, and the pictures were often snowy.

But much of the generation of Americans who had lived through the Great Depression and fought the big war had moved to the suburbs. Packing the kids in the car and driving downtown to a show was a hassle. Why not just open a beer and turn on the tube? The big suburban multiscreen theaters were still many years away.

Needless to say, this was a profound shift in American culture. In 1946, about 90 million people bought movie tickets every week. That number fell drastically by 1953 when roughly half the homes in the country had a TV.

Photo: Evert F. Baumgardner (National Archives and Records Administration).

I rather doubt that the movie business would have made the changes it did in the ‘50s—at least not so quickly—if it weren’t in a pitched battle with television: Screen images were expanded in Cinemascope and VistaVision, the vast majority of films were produced in color, 3D was resurrected, and mega-bucks were spent on big sandal-epics such as The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur. TV couldn’t do those things—not yet, anyway.

But no entertainment technology ever truly goes away. Movies were expected to replace “legitimate theater,” CDs were going to replace vinyl, DVDs and Blu-rays would kill movie theaters, digital was to be the death of film cameras, and streaming, like a monster from the deep, was going to eat everything. None of those things happened.

As for screens that measure in inches, I see people on planes and coffee shops watching movies on their phones. Maybe the entertainment business, like the ouroboros, is eating its own tail.

Jean-Louis Trintignant and Vittorio Gassman

Film Commentary:

A Short Happy Life: Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso.

By Steven Huff

Il Sorpasso (1962) Directed by Dino Risi. With Vittorio Gassman, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Catherine Spaak. Written by Dino Risi, Ettore Scola and Ruggero Maccari. Cinematography by Alfio Contini. Music Composed by Riz Ortolani. In Italian with English subtitles. Black and White. 1 hr. 48 mins.

Streaming on Criterion and Prime

Novelist John Gardner once said that all stories begin with one of two premises: A protagonist rides into town, or one goes on a journey. As much as this sounds like an oversimplification, a great many stories fall into one of those two constructions, at least allegorically if not in action. One of my favorite man-rides-into-town films is Red Rock West (John Dahl, 1993), in which a drifter played by Nicholas Cage arrives in a Southwestern town and is mistaken for a professional hit man who’s expected to arrive the same day.

As for journey films, I love Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso, an Italian road trip adventure-comedy that has influenced such movies such as Rain Man, Sideways, Two-Lane Blacktop, and Thelma and Louise. The usual ingredients of most road stories are two individuals: one reserved, the other an extroverted sensualist. And a car.

Dino Risi (right) on set.

Il Sorpasso was initially an international hit, then receded from circulation. It was restored sometime in the last fifteen years and it’s available now on Criterion, Prime, and on disc.

Roberto Mariani (Trintignant) is a law student in Rome who one morning invites a man up to his apartment to use his telephone. For Roberto this small, courteous act both opens his dour existence to adventure and is his fatal move. Bruno Cortona (Gassman), the man who enters his apartment, is a brassy, uncouth, wild man who rarely shuts up. After he’s made his call, he lures Roberto out of the safety of the apartment to his car on a supposed trip to lunch at a café. The café is closed, however, and the quest for lunch turns into a road trip, Roberto protesting that he needs to get back to his books, Bruno assuring him that the trip will be short and pleasurable. “Trust me,” he says.

The title Il Sorpasso means, literally, the overtaking, or in the case of this film, passing another car in a heated rush, which Bruno does again and again with abandon, giving the finger to the other driver, which deeply unsettles Roberto. Bruno is at once irrepressible and vulnerable. One senses that he’s constantly trying to cheer himself up as much as to tickle Roberto.

When they stop at the home of Roberto’s aunt and uncle, Bruno so utterly charms them that Roberto feels that Bruno is the nephew and he himself is the stranger.

There is a pivotal foreshadow moment when they happen onto the scene of a truck accident which Bruno finds fascinating until he sees a victim of the crash lying on the pavement under a blanket. Yet, his spirit is dampened only momentarily. A minute later he’s on the road rushing past other cars, whipping his finger.

The film is a critique of a new, prosperous, postwar Italy, one that was waking from many difficult years under fascism and war. Bruno himself is a symbol of a new materialism. “You know what the best age is?” he says, “I’ll tell you. The age you are, day by day. Until you croak, of course.” There is no past for him. When Roberto mentions that they’re passing Etruscan tombs, Bruno says, “You know what you can do with your tombs.”

The fatal race

Roberto, meanwhile, slowly molts. As the trip continues, he becomes complicit in the antics. That night he is drunk and giggling when they arrive at the home of Bruno’s estranged wife. And the next day, when, as promised, Bruno is driving him back to Rome, he says that the past two days have been the most enjoyable of his life. He pushes Bruno to drive faster, careening along mountain roads until a semi forces them over a cliff. Bruno survives, but not poor Roberto. The movie might have been titled, “The Short Happy Life of Roberto Mariani.”

Bruno being Bruno

But I mentioned the film as social critique. The beach party scene, near the end of the film, complete with rock music and gyrations, are not unlike those in the American genre of the same period such as Beach Blanket Bingo and Bikini Beach. Does director Risi really disapprove of what prosperity has brought to Italy? No. He is critical of Bruno for his comic shallowness. Although, what is life without a clown? Bruno’s wife, his daughter (cosplaying Cleopatra) and her much-older, wealthy lover show up on the beach. They are also pleasure seekers, at least of the moment. They seem mildly amused by his antics, doing handstands for the crowd. But felicity has its price, in this case the law student who will never take his bar exam.

Vittorio Gassman (1922-2000), was—and I hate to use the cliché— born for this role. According to David Thomson, “Gassman has always been an outrageous monopolizer of films. To call him an overactor is to suggest a willful stepping on the gas.” He appeared in one of my favorite caper movies Big Deal on Madonna Street (Mario Monicelli 1958), and Scent of a Woman (1974, also with Risi), and in American films such as Robert Altman’s A Wedding (1978) and Barry Levinson’s Sleeper (1996).

Jean-Louis Trintignant (1930-2022) is a near-classic presence in European cinema in films such Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman (1956), Éric Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s (1969), Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman (1966), Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970, one of the greatest films of that decade), and in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Red (1994), a hundred and fifty-four films in all, often wearing a subtle, impassive, and sometimes sinister countenance. Roger Ebert wrote: “Was there a gentle man under all his hauteur and emotional armor? More to the point, would he kiss you, or kill you? It was that persistent, anxious question that animated his career from first to last.”

Director Dino Risi (1916-2008), was orphaned at age 12, and was raised by relatives. He entered medical school and worked professionally as a psychiatrist before taking jobs as assistant to directors Mario Soldati and Alberto Lattuada—more or less as a lark. But then he began making his own features, eighty-five films in all, including The Scent of a Woman (1974), and La Marcha Su Roma (1962). He received a Golden Lion lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival in 2002.

CLASSIC FILM CAPSULES:

Actor Ida Lupino directed eight films, one of only two women directing features in Hollywood’s Golden Age, the other being Dorothy Arzner. Because of her star status, she’s better remembered than Arzner. The two pictures below are among her best, and both cross some of the red lines imposed by the Hays office of the Motion Picture Production Code.

Outrage (1950). Directed by Ida Lupino. With Mala Powers, Tod Andrews, Robert Clarke. Written by Collier Young, Malvin Wald, and Ida Lupino. Cinematography by Archie Stout. Music directed by C. Bakaleinikoff. Black and White. 1 hr. 15 mins. Streaming on Prime.

Secretary Ann Walton (Powers), engaged to be married, is stalked and raped in a dark lot on her way home from work. The story then follows the nightmarish effects of her trauma. Unable to face her coworkers and friends after the attack, she gives her fiancé the brushoff and boards a bus to Los Angeles but gets off aimlessly on a rural road and collapses. She’s picked up on the roadside by a minister (Andrews) and taken to a ranch where the kindly orange growers call a doctor for her. She uses an alias and they give her a job as a bookkeeper. But she’s teetering emotionally and leans on the pastor for support. When a buffoonish local man at a dance comes on to her too strongly, she brains him with a wrench and lands in jail. The Production Code Office demanded that the word “rape” and “sex” not be used. Instead, it is called “brutal assault.” Powers is compelling as a woman violated, teetering on the brink of madness.

Ida Lupino

The Bigamist (1953). Directed by Ida Lupino. With Joan Fontaine, Edmond O’Brien, Ida Lupino, Edmund Gwenn. Written by Collier Young, Lawrence B. Marcus, Lou Schor. Cinematography by George E. Diskant. Music directed by Leith Stevens. Black and White. 1 hr., 20 mins. Streaming on Prime, MGM+, Fawesome, Roku, Tubi.

Traveling salesman Harry Graham (O’Brien) is chronically lonely, neglected by his all-business wife Eve (Fontaine). While on a sales trip to Los Angeles he meets Phyllis (Lupino), a woman as lonely as himself, and the two begin an affair. When Phyllis becomes pregnant, Harry asks her to marry him, not telling her that he already has a wife in San Francisco. So begins a high-stress double life which is uncovered when an investigator for an adoption agency (Harry and Eve, childless, had applied to adopt a child) knocks on his door in LA. Cornered, Harry spills his guts to the investigator. But how will he explain himself to his two wives who will meet each other for the first time in court? This film is daring, since unwed pregnancy and bigamy were both verboten subjects in 1950s Hollywood, but somehow it got past the Production Code censors. It is the only picture in which Lupino directed herself.

SOURCES:

Ebert, Roger. “Jean-Louis Trintignant: 1930-2022).” www.rogerebert.com/tributes/jean-louis-trintignant.

“Italian Director Dino Risi Dies.” BBBC NEWS | Entertainment | Italian director Dino Risi dies, June 7 2008

Lopate, Phillip. Il Sorpasso: The Joy of Disillusionment. Criterion Essays. Apr. 27. 2014

Monda, Antonio. Il Sorpasso: Italy, Dark and Light. Criterion Essays. May 12, 2014

Photo license: Deed - Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported - Creative Commons.

Prilo M. Il Sorpasso: An Underrated but Significant Comedy. Peliplat. www.peliplat.com

Thomson, David. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Thanks to Barry Voorhees for editing.

Thanks to Tim Madigan for suggestions.

QUOTE: “I’m mad, they say. I am temperamental and dizzy and disagreeable. Well, let them talk. I can take it. Only one person can hurt me. Her name is Ida Lupino.”

–Ida Lupino

Text copyright 2026 by Steven Huff

The Regent Showcase Theater, photo by Carol M. Highsmith

In This Issue:

Entrée: Follow Your Nose

Film Commentary: Daisies

Classic Film Capsules: The Two of Us; The Legend of Suram Fortress

Sources and Acknowledgements

Quote: Marlene Dietrich

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Entrée: Follow Your Nose

Entrée Sometimes I feel utterly dwarfed by the enormity of the art and literature of film. I think any serious film lover knows this feeling. It is impossible to see all the films that matter. Moreover, to really know a film, one must see it more than once.

Thoreau said that life is too short to read any but the best books. But what are the best books? And what are the best films? Should you accept such film recommendations as Sight and Sound’s list of the top shelf? I like the film lists, and there are a lot of them to feast on. They turn me on to great cinema that I might have missed otherwise. And I sincerely mean for The Moveable Marquee, to provide such lures and enticements. As Americans we tend to live on a cultural island, and one of the best things that the lists do—if they’re good lists—is lure us overseas to Japan, to Europe and Africa.

Sometimes you must simply follow your nose, the way you would in a library or bookstore, approach films with curiosity and without recommendations. Scan the movie posters on the streaming site. Scan the disc shelves at the library. If it looks interesting, if the tagline catches you, go for it. It may be a gem. I rarely shut off a movie once I have started watching it at home. In my whole life I’ve only walked out of a theater in the middle of a film three or four times.

Film Commentary:

The Devil May Care: Vera Chytilová’s Daisies.

By Steven Huff

Daisies [sedmikraasky] (1966). Directed by Vera Chytilová. With Ivana Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová. Screenplay by Vera Chytilová and Ester Krumbachová, from a story by Chytilová and Pavel Juráček. Cinematography by Jaroslav Kučera. Music Composed by Jiří Šlitr and Jiří Šust. Sections variously in Color and in Black and White. In Czech with English subtitles. 1 hr., 15 mins.

Streaming on Criterion, Hulu, HBO Max.

Daisies is a singular work of cinematic art. That is, I can’t think of another film that quite compares to it. It’s the best-known film by Vera Chytilová (1929-2014) and considered one of the central films of the Czechoslovakian New Wave of the 1960s. Two self-indulgent young women, both named Marie, one blonde (Karbanová), one brunette (Cerhová), declare that the world around them is a terrible place and go on a romp, with frenetic erotic energy, to exploit or destroy whatever they encounter.

They despoil their own apartment, then move on to bigger events. Using their wiles on older men who buy them expensive dinners, they dump them before the expected sexual favors can happen, or they misbehave so bawdily in restaurants that they get thrown out. It all climaxes when they enter a building where a large banquet has been laid out. Before the expected guests arrive, they eat what they want, then dance on the tables, tromp on the lavish platters of food, swing on the chandelier and generally destroy the scene. All with impunity, since no one shows up to stop them.

There is a fair amount of acrobatics in the lengthy—and unforgettable— banquet caper, reminiscent of Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

That’s the plot. But part of what carries this film is the superb cinematography by Jaroslav Kučera, including a dizzying montage of flashing colored patterns, pixilations, whiplash scene-juxtapositions, and jolting switches from color to black and white and back again. Moreover, the destructive acts are interspersed with war images of bombings which together push the film at a frantic pace. Not that you could easily take your eyes off it, since the antics, particularly in the banquet hall, are appallingly entertaining.

The daisies of the title allude to the crown of blossoms that the two women share at various moments, which projects the satirical show of innocence that they use to seduce rich, older men.

The film is a satire on the disorder of class materialism and male domination under Communism in Czechoslovakia. It also appears to many critics to be a feminist manifesto, since the girls do whatever they damn well please and mock the men who try to lure them. However, that would be a cheap view of feminism. According to film historian Kristin Thompson, Chytilová herself disagreed. It is, she said, about destruction. The wiping out of existing order. Of course, two women can only wreck so many things. But that destruction, especially of the banquet, brought negative reactions from some Czech audiences who were themselves struggling to afford food.

Directors of the Czech New Wave in the 1960s were taking advantage of a new less-restrictive government there (although working with very low budgets), which came to a head in the Prague Spring in 1968, when the Soviets invaded and cracked down. The movement also included such luminaries as Milos Forman, František Vláčil, Jan Nemec, Jiří Menzel, Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos, to name only a few. There were probably more directors associated with the Czech New Wave than with Fance’s Nouvelle Vague.

Vera Chytilová, Photo by Tomáš Fassati (link to license below)

Daisies was banned in Czechoslovakia for two years, although it was acclaimed by critics and won the Grand Prize at the Bergamo Film Festival in Italy. According to film historian David Cook, Czech President Novotny was furious when he viewed Daisies and Jan Nemec’s Report on the Party and Guests, with its metaphors of despotic rule. The two films were “used as an excuse for a denunciation of the entire New Wave in the Czechoslovak National Assembly in May 1967.” Chytilová managed to complete another film, The Fruit of Paradise (1970)—harder to follow, but a fascinatingly Edenic tale—before she was officially refused permission to make films. The ban lasted several years. Her next film, The Apple Game (1977), about a philandering male gynecologist, was released in 1977.

With twenty-four films to her credit, most made under the duress of the Communist system, Vera Chytilová was the only prominent woman director of the Czech New Wave. Daisies is considered her masterpiece. Ten of her films, including Daisies, are available for streaming on the Criterion Channel.

CLASSIC FILM CAPSULES:

The Two of Us (1967). Directed by Claude Berri. With Michel Simon, Alain Cohen, Luce Fabiole. Charles Denner, Zorica Lozek. Written by Claude Berri, Gérard Brach and Michel Rivelin. Cinematography by Jean Penzer. Music composed by Georges Delerue. In French with English subtitles. Black and White. 1 hr., 27 mins. Streaming on Prime.

A young Parisian Jewish couple in Occupied France try to protect their nine-year-old son Claude (Cohen) from the Nazis by sending him to stay with an elderly Catholic couple in the countryside. It is based loosely on director Berri’s own childhood experiences during the war. Before they put him on a train, they change his name from Langmann to Longuet and teach him to recite The Lord’s Prayer to conceal his identity. And not to let anyone see his circumcised penis. The old man, Pépé Dupont (Simon), is antisemitic (a supporter of Vichy France leader Philippe Pétain) and does not realize the boy is a Jew. But the two form a loving bond that transcends prejudice and pretty much all other concerns. Simon is most remembered (and in fact unforgettable) for his work with Jean Renoir in La chienne (1931) and Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932). His role as Pépé in this beautiful film might be the best of his late career, and it won him the Silver Bear Award for Best Actor at the Berlin Internation Film Festival. Director Berri is best known to Americans for Jean de Florette (1986) and its sequel of the same year, Manon of the Spring.

The Legend of Suram Fortress (1985). Directed by Sergei Parajanov and Dodo Abashidze. With Zura Kipshidze, Sofiko Chiaureli, Dodo Abashidze. Screenplay by Vaja Gigashvili from a book by Daniel Chonqadze. Cinematography by Yuriy Klimenko. Choreography Gogi Aleksidze. Music composed by Jansug Kakhidze. Soviet Union. In Georgian and Russian with English subtitles. 1 hr., 28 mins. Streaming on YouTube.

Sergei Parajanov was the preeminent Georgian filmmaker of this time. He made The Legend of Suram Fortress after fifteen years as a Soviet dissident, part of which time he spent in prison. He retells a traditional Georgian legend of Durmishkhan (Kipshidze), a feudal serf who leaves home and his beloved, Vardo (Chiaureli), to find money to buy her freedom from servitude. Instead, he marries a wealthy woman and never returns. Vardo, jilted, becomes an oracle. When some men are sent by the Czar to ask her if they should attempt to restore Suram Fortress, which has crumbled every time it is rebuilt, she realizes that one of them is Durmishkhan’s son. Her answer is that the rebuilding will be successful if a tall, blue-eyed young man is bricked alive in the fortress wall. The son understands that she means him and does not realize that Vardo is seeking revenge. The time period is intentionally ambiguous, with a seaside scene showing modern ships.

SOURCES:

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film, 4^th Edition, W. W. Norton, 2004.

Fassati, Tomáš License for photo of Chytilová https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Fox, Margalit. “Vera Chytilova Dies at 85; Made Daring Film in Czech New Wave.” New York Times, March 22, 2014.

Rapold, Nicolas. “An Audience for Free Spirits in a Closed Society.” New York Times, June 29, 2012.

Reed, Rex. Rex Reed Profiles Marlene Dietrich. Devault-Graves Digital Editions, 1968.

Sabino, Mariana. “10 Essential Films of the Czech New Wave.” Tastes of Cinema – Movie Reviews and Classic Movie Lists. Web. June 27, 2014.

Thompson, Kristin. “Motifs of Destruction in Daisies.” Criterion Channel filmed commentary, 2022.

Thomson, David. The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

ACKNOWLEGEMENTS:

Thanks to Barry Voorhees for editing.

Thanks to Tim Madigan for suggestions.

QUOTE:

“There is a whole group of people in America who do nothing but sit around in dark rooms in the Museum of Modern Art and watch old movies. Don’t they have anything more important to do with their lives?” --Marlene Dietrich

In this Issue:

Entrée: Pordenone

Film Commentary: In Cold Blood

Classic Film Capsules: After Hours, House by the River

Sources and Acknowledgements

Entrée: Pordenone

Welcome to The Movable Marquee’s Third Anniversary Issue. I’m opening a bottle of wine tonight to celebrate.

But first, my apologies. This issue is late. Among the things that held me up this time was the Nitrate Picture Show, a four-day festival held each year at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester. It’s unique among film festivals in that it shows old movies on their original nitrate stock, which means they won’t run anything later than 1951 when the industry replaced the highly flammable nitrate film with cellulose acetate (or safety film). But those old pictures are surprisingly luminous in both black and white and in color, and they must be seen to be appreciated.

There are a number of wonderful classic film festivals around the world, especially in Europe. Of course, air travel has become expensive and difficult. But I want to tell you about one in Italy that may be worth your attention. The Pordenone Silent Film Festival , in Pordenone, Italy, Oct. 2 through 12, can be attended online. Tickets, for both onsite and online attendees, go on sale Sept. 25.

If you’re not a silent film enthusiast, you might wonder, what is the big deal? Many people are hesitant to watch one because they’ve seen poorly preserved copies on TV that are scratchy and jerky. But to see a well-preserved silent film, run at the proper speed of 16 to 18 frames per second, instead of the modern standard of 24 fps, can be a revelation. It was in some ways a very different art from the later talkies. With only title cards serving for dialogue, actors worked, in effect, as mimes.

Fortunately, interest in silent films is growing, due in part to film preservationists, and to institutions that are willing to exhibit them, such the Dryden Theater at the Eastman Museum—with Dr. Philip Carli, the museum’s resident musician, accompanying them on piano—and festivals such as at Pordenone. But you don’t have to wait for a festival. There are many restored silents on DVD and Blu-ray, and on streaming services.

Here are just a few of the best known: King Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925) and The Crowd (1928); Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920); Charles Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) and The Gold Rush (1925); Buster Keaton’s The General (1926); Fritz Lang’s The Metropolis (1927); F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) and Nosferatu (1924); Victor Sjostrom’s The Wind (1928); and Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last (1923). All of these can be streamed.

Give them a try. Remember, I sent you.

Film Commentary:

The Crime That Shook America: Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood.

In Cold Blood (1967). Directed by Richard Brooks. With Robert Blake, Scott Wilson, John Forsythe, Paul Stewart, Jeff Corey, Charles McGraw, Will Geer, Ruth Storey, John McLiam, Brenda Currin, Paul Hough. Screenplay by Richard Brooks, adapted from the book by Truman Capote. Cinematography by Conrad L. Hall. Music by Quincy Jones. Black and White. 2 hrs., 14 mins.

Streaming on Prime

It wasn’t the movie, In Cold Blood, that gave me nightmares when I first saw it many years ago. It was Truman Capote’s book, one of the most powerful pieces of writing I’d read up to that point. And yet it wasn’t the murders in the book as much as the hangings that affected me so: the official, methodical, passionless killings. The story is about the brutal killing of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and the subsequent apprehension and execution of the killers. It is widely regarded as the first “non-fiction novel.” Capote, who had already published numerous works of fiction, used elements of the novel form to tell the story, including a plot with an arc, in-depth character development, foreshadowing, and backflashes.

In my writing classes I’ve referenced the book to illustrate what I call luminous details in storytelling. For example, Capote is telling us something important about the personality of Perry Smith, one of the murderers, when he writes that he liked the taste of aspirin and chewed it dry. And there is the décor of the Clutters’ home. In the 1950s wall-to-wall carpeting was not standard. The Clutters had it, but what color did they choose? Liver. That tells us they were prosperous, but sober.

It was a sensation when it was published in 1966. The runaway book sales, and the subsequent film, Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood (1967), made Capote a wealthy celebrity. It also, according to his friends and even himself in various interviews, destroyed him psychologically because in researching the book he got emotionally close to the killers, whom he visited in prison, and witnessed their hangings.

Worse, he needed these men he cared about to be hanged so that he could finish his book. Imagine the guilt he felt.

Robert Blake, Scott Wilson and Truman Capote on the set of In Cold Blood

Richard Brooks’ film is remarkable for, among other things, its character study of the two murderers, Smith (Blake) and Richard Hickock (Wilson). Of the two, Hickock is the manipulative one, and Wilson plays him beautifully, the man with a more subdued killer instinct, yet capable not only of passing bad checks, but conning salespeople to let him write them for a hundred dollars over, so he’d have pocket cash. Hickock had shared a cell in Kansas State Penitentiary with a man who had worked on the Clutter farm, and who told him that Herb Clutter (McLiam) kept a lot of cash in a safe in the house, maybe as much as ten thousand dollars. Once paroled, he contacted Smith, another con, and convinced him to join in his planned robbery.

In the early hours of Nov. 14, 1959, they drive to the Clutter house and enter through an unlocked door. They get the family out of bed, tie up father and son Kenyon (Hough) in the basement, and mother Bonnie (Storey) and daughter Nancy (Currin) upstairs. Smith not only prevents Hickock from raping Nancy but tells him there is no safe in the house, that it was all a big mistake and that they should leave, let neighbors find them and untie them in the morning. No great harm done, probably no one would chase them very far. And yet, it’s Smith who, in a moment of rage, slits Herb’s throat, then shoots all four members of the family in the head with a 12-gauge shotgun.

These were people who no doubt believed that in rural Holcomb, Kansas, they were safe from such criminals. They didn’t even lock their doors.

Why does Smith pull the trigger and snuff out the lives of the four Clutters and effectively end his own and Hickock’s lives. People who do violent things almost always have had violence done to them. Smith’s mother and father were rodeo performers. His mother was an alcoholic who died while he was still young, and his father both brutalized and abandoned him. Smith grew up in an orphanage and in juvenile detention centers. In the film, Brooks shows Smith imagining that he sees his father just before he pulls the trigger for the first time. It’s also important to note that Capote wrote that he thought the two men together made a third entity, a killer, and neither of them would have done such a deed on their own.

After the murders, they steal a car, go to Mexico, then north to Las Vegas where they’re arrested after Hickock passes more bad checks. They’re extradited to Kansas, and on the way, Smith relates the story of the murders and what led to them, which we see in a series of flashbacks.

They’re tried and convicted, spend five years on death row while appeals are filed, and are executed by hanging on April 14, 1965. The hanging scenes are intense. Hickock doesn’t die right away, and a doctor has to keep checking him with a stethoscope. The last shot is of the behooded Smith bouncing on the end of his rope. One should appreciate that this film was part of a New Hollywood trend that showed more grit, more graphic violence. The oppressive Production Code was on its way out since the frank sexual references in Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf the year before, and directors were feeling a freer hand. In Cold Blood was released four months after Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde which had drawn criticism for its graphic bloodshed. Even though Brooks’ film doesn’t actually show much blood, no American movie had depicted such realistic hanging scenes. It was a daring film.

Robert Blake and Scott Wilson with director Richard Brooks

Richard Brooks read the book while it was still in galleys and bought the rights from Capote. He decided to shoot in black and white (which Capote also wanted) in order to give the film a docudrama feel, as well as a gritty ambience of film noir. In fact, the murders were filmed in the very house where they took place. He resisted Columbia’s push to cast Paul Newman and Steve McQueen as Wilson and Smith; he felt they would be too predictable in the roles. Instead, he opted for relative unknowns who could more effectively portray the two ne’er-do-wells. Wilson had just finished playing a supporting role in In the Heat of the Night, and Sidney Poitier had called Brooks and recommended him for the part of Hickcock. Robert Blake was a working actor but not a star. As a child he was one of the Our Gang rascals and was Little Beaver in the Red Ryder series. He was the Mexican boy selling lottery tickets in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). Later, he acted in Town Without Pity (1961), Naked City (1961), PT 109 (1963) and Ensign Pulver (1964). But as Smith In Cold Blood he got his chance to play a frightening, complex and unpredictable role.

Two subsequent movies, Bennett Miller’s Capote (2005), and Douglas McGrath’s Infamous (2006), tell the same story as Cold Blood, except that their main focus is Capote himself and his work on the book. In both films he follows his initial intention to write an article for the New Yorker on the murders and how they affected people in a rural community where everyone knows everyone. Flying on inspiration, he boards a train to Kansas with his close friend since childhood, Harper Lee (author of the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird), who helps him with research. The films dramatize the difficulty he had winning the confidence of not only Kansas law enforcement but of the local people, as well as the interviews he did in prison and the bond he formed with the two men, particularly Perry Smith.

In Infamous he has a harder time ingratiating himself to the locals than in Capote, which is probably accurate. I lived in rural Attica, New York, at the time of the prison uprising there in 1971, and I remember how local people resented reporters, none of whom had Capote’s flamboyance.

Blake and Wilson

Blake had his own troubled childhood to draw from in playing Smith. His parents were small-time show business people who moved to Los Angeles to put their three sons on stage as The Three Hillbillies. His father was an alcoholic who abused him until he ran away from home at age 14. Witness the anguish and confusion in his face as he follows Hickock’s lead into the jaws of a crime he would not have dreamed up on his own. (Blake was himself tried for the murder of his wife and acquitted, although he later lost a civil suit in the case).

In Cold Blood is a deeply unsettling and powerful film. Even sixty years later, when such murders are more common, it has a decidedly visceral effect and refuses to be forgotten. Both the book and the movie shocked Americans and made them reconsider their concepts of safety and security, and to comprehend that there are angry, confused and homicidal people roaming the night. One might be in the next car coming down the road. Even in our world of security cameras and gated communities, immunity from crime is a dream, and always has been.

Note: The facial images—eyes, primarily—on the movie poster above are not Wilson and Blake, but the actual murderers Smith and Hickcock.

#

Classic Film Capsules

After Hours (1985). Directed by Martin Scorcese. With Griffin Dunne, Rosanna Arquette, Verna Bloom, Teri Garr, John Heard, Cheech Marin, Tommy Chong. Written by Joseph Minion. Cinematography by Michael Ballhaus. Music by Tony Terran. Color. 1 hr., 37 mins. Streaming on Criterion and Prime.

Griffin Dunne was already famous for An American Werewolf in London when he starred as the hapless Paul Hackett in this dark, Kafkaesque comedy. One night he’s reading Henry Miller’s The Tropic of Cancer in a Manhattan coffee shop, which inspires a young woman named Marcy (Arquette) to strike up a conversation with him. He follows her to the apartment of a diabolically hip sculptor in Soho, which becomes the stepping off point of a hyper-odyssey of surreal encounters and coincidences as he tries all night unsuccessfully to get home. Accused of burglary, he’s chased by a mob and an ice cream truck. The actual burglars, who are robbing apartments right under the noses of Hackett’s accusers, are played by Cheech and Chong, one of the funniest comedy duos since Laurel and Hardy. Dunne is fine as an innocent in a stew of American urban wilds. Great, highly detailed, night photography by German cinematographer Ballhaus, who has worked with Rainer Werner Fassbinder on films such as The Marriage of Maria Braun and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant and continued to work with Scorsese on The Color of Money, Goodfellas, and others.

House by the River (1950). Directed by Fritz Lang. With Louis Hayward, Jane Wyatt, Lee Bowman. Screenplay by Mel Dinelli from the novel by A. P. Herbert. Cinematography by Edward Cronjager. Music composed by George Antheil. Streaming on Roku and YouTube.

Lang, the great German director of M and Metropolis, went for Southern Gothic in this story of betrayal and murder. Louis Hayward is Stephen Byrne, a young writer, unpublished and frustrated, who in a fit of passion strangles Emily (Patrick), the family’s housekeeper. Panicking, he enlists the deeply reluctant aid of his brother John (Bowman). Together they put Emily in a canvas firewood sack owned by John, row out to the middle of the nearby river and dump her. When the bag surfaces downriver, and police find John’s name stenciled on the bag, Stephen allows his brother to go on trial for murder. While this film doesn’t quite rank with Lang’s M or Fury, its theme of madness and penitence makes for a stirring tale, especially with a strong performance by Jane Wyatt as Stephen’s abused wife. Cronjager’s low-light photography on the river enhances the gothic effect. Composer Antheil also wrote music for such classics as In a Lonely Place and Make Way for Tomorrow.

SOURCES:

Bushman, David. “He Was There: Scott Wilson Remembers ‘In Cold Blood.’” Paley Matters. Paley Center for Media. October 27, 2014.

Fujiwara, Chris. “In Cold Blood: Structuring the Real. Criterion Essays. Nov. 18, 2015.

Thomson, David. “Film Studies: You Thought It Was Too Soon for Another Capote? Think Again…” The Independent, and The Independent on Sunday. London. 10 July, 2006.

LaSalle, Mick. “’Infamous’ Takes Another Crack at Uncovering Capote.” Chronicle Movie Critic, October 13, 2006.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Thanks to Barry Voorhees for editing.

Thanks to Tim Madigan for suggestions.

“Movie Audience” (1924)

Audience at an early 3D movie, 1922

In This Issue:

Entrée: Historical Characters.

Film Commentary: Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky

Classic Film Capsules: You Are Not I; Westfront 1918.

Sources and Acknowledgements

Entrée: Historical Characters

Last week I watched The Six Triple Eight (2024) with my wife. It’s a story of a black women’s Army unit in World War II that almost miraculously sorted and delivered a backlog of around seventeen million letters to and from soldiers, thus boosting morale in the fighting forces. In the film they get support from President Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt who have to put pressure on Army brass to allow the work to go ahead. It’s a good film, well made by Tyler Perry.

But Susan Sarandon looks like Eleanor after a crash diet. Sam Waterston as FDR looks like, well, Sam Watertson in a wheelchair. Maybe if they’d bulked him up a bit and put a cigarette holder in his mouth he might have passed.

Mostly, films do a good job of casting historical characters, I mean by appearance. Two recent examples: Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill in Joe Wright’s Darkest Hour, and Brendan Fraser as Gen. Eisenhower in Anthony Maras’s Pressure. But I see a trend of complacency in recent years. Maybe they think that the public has no clear idea of what the characters looked like. Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator does not look like Howard Hughes—not even a little. That Scorsese cast Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa in The Irishman is problematic. First, he looks nothing like Hoffa; moreover, giving the impression that Hoffa (likely killed by a mob gunman) was Italian distorts the story. Hoffa was German-Irish.

Anyone who was alive and conscious in the late 1950s or early ‘60s, would know that Armando Iannucci, director of The Death of Stalin, could hardly have found an actor who looked less like Nikita Khrushchev than Steve Buscemi.

I don’t ask for spitting images.

Film Commentary:

Adventures in the Dark: Elaine May’s Mickey and Nicky

Mikey and Nicky (1976). Directed by Elaine May. With Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, Ned Beatty, Carol Grace. Written by Elaine May. Cinematography by Bernie Abramson, Lucien Ballard, Jack Cooperman, Jerry File and Victor J. Kemper. Music conducted by John Strauss. Color. 1 hr., 46 mins.

Streaming on Criterion, and HBO Max.

One of the subgenres of film is the “buddy movie.” Two men, or women, share an adventure that takes unexpected turns, each helping the other through the hurdles. Most such stories, usually comedies, center on likeable, if flawed, characters. Often one of them has all the smarts while the other steps in quicksand. The film I wrote about in the last issue, The Man Who Would Be King, falls pleasurably in that category.

In Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, the buddy thing turns very dark. The two pals in the story are smalltime gangsters who go on a grimy nighttime peregrination around Philadelphia. Although a thin comic thread runs through much of the film, it makes no pretense of giving us likeable characters, but dives deep into their unkempt humanity. May’s superb direction and her fluency in the argot and realities of gangster life, as well as superb performances by Peter Falk and John Cassavetes, make it an unforgettable and challenging film.

Mikey and Nicky are men of the night. They won’t whither like Nosferatu if they don’t make it to bed before sunrise, but it’s obvious that daytime is not their world. Nicky (Cassavetes) is holed up in a sleazy hotel room, nearly insane with fear. He’s stolen money from the mob and now the don has a contract out for him. How much did he steal? He has a thousand in his pocket, but he must have stolen more. For a mere grand you might get your legs broken. Teach you a lesson. But murder is messy, and the don must pay a hit man (Beatty). To bump Nicky off for an amount that, even fifty years ago, would have been pocket change for the godfather doesn’t seem plausible. So, what did he do with the rest of the loot? We don’t know.

Cassavetes and Falk

Nicky makes a frantic call to his friend Mikey (Falk), also a shady character, but the only one he thinks he can trust at this moment. Mikey shows up and tries to reason with him, telling him he’s not going to die. His logic is, just because there’s a contract out for you doesn’t mean they’re really going to kill you. He tries to talk his friend into a quick flight out of town until things blow over. But Nicky is too panicky to listen to reason.

Attempting to pacify him, Mikey follows him to an all-night movie theater. But he’s too restless to stay there or anywhere else. They make a quick exit from a bar where the volatile Nicky makes a racist slur at a black man, nearly causing a fight. They visit Nicky’s girlfriend, played by writer Carol Grace (who was a friend of Truman Capote and, according to Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, may have been the model for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s). Here she plays a single woman desperate for affection, even when it means risking Nicky’s physical and mental abuse. While riding a city bus, Nicky gets in a brawl with the driver. Mikey drags him away from all of these scrapes.

However, Mikey is actually in on the hit. In fact, he’s the finger man. The phone calls he makes during this Dantesque tour, under the guise of checking in with his wife, are actually to give the hit man their locations. But he has little taste for the task, and he wants it finished and to go home to bed. When Nicky talks him into climbing over a wall to a cemetery to visit his mother’s grave, their dialogue, always terse, heats up.

Mikey: Frankly, this is ridiculous.

Nicky: You didn’t like my mother?

Mikey: I loved your mother. I thought she was a wonderful woman.

Nicky: Why is it ridiculous to visit her grave?

Mikey: Because it’s one o’clock in the morning.

Nicky: That makes it nicer.

Mikey: It doesn’t make it anything, Nick. A grave is a grave. There’s not a religion in the world that says a person’s soul is buried with them in their grave. It’s not your mother in there.

They split up after Nicky smashes Mikey’s watch, which was a gift from his deceased father. Some things are unforgivable.

Later, Mikey rides around with the hitman to help him get Nicky in his gunsights, although we get a clear sense that he’s feeling remorse and is throwing the gunman off Nicky’s trail. All this will end at daybreak with Nicky pounding on Mikey’s door, begging to get in, while the hitman’s car approaches.

May’s night photography is rich in warm tones that work so well in gangster pictures such as The Godfather and neo-noirs such Chinatown and Hamett, providing the shadows that are so satisfying in the early black and white noirs. But the evenness of the photography is remarkable since she went through five cinematographers. Reportedly, her perfectionism was unrelenting. She filmed every scene over and over, running through 1.5 million feet of film. Her finished picture is an hour and forty-six minutes, or about 9 thousand feet. That’s a shooting ratio of 166/1. A more normal ratio would be somewhere between 3/1 and 10/1. No wonder she took two years to edit.

Elaine May

Elaine May was one half of Nichols and May, an improvisational standup-comedy act with Mike Nichols. When it broke up, both went into film. Nichols, of course, was far more successful with The Graduate, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Catch 22, and on and on. May directed critically well-received, but not financially successful, films such as The Heartbreak Kid (1972) and A New Leaf (1971). Her streak ended with Ishtar (1987) a high-priced bomb. But she also worked as a writer and actor.

One of the pioneers of independent cinema, John Cassavetes (1929-1989), directed such classics as Shadows (1959) Faces (1968), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), although he was also an actor in many films, such as The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967), Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1967), and played the lead in the TV detective series Johhny Staccato. Peter Falk (1927-2011), of course, was TV’s Columbo, the grandfather in Princess Bride (Rob Reiner, 1987), Sam Diamond in Murder by Death (Robert Moore,1976) and more than 130 other roles.

Unfortunately, Paramount gave Mikey and Nicky low-voltage publicity and lax distribution. Typically, studios do not know what do with films that are hard to categorize: Yes, it’s a gangster film, and a neo noir, but fits uneasily in both categories for lack of a hero, or even a likeable guy, let alone a resolution that is anything but nihilistic. Yet, few films manage to trespass so deeply, simultaneously, into two men’s murky characters.

It probably never earned back the $4,300,000 budget. But it grew legs that have carried it to enthusiastic audiences fifty years later, helped of course by the Criterion Channel.

Classic Film Capsules:

You Are Not I (1981). Directed by Sara Driver. With Suzanne Fletcher, Evelyn Smith, Lucy Sante (as Luc Sante). Screenplay by Sara Driver and Jim Jarmusch, from a story by Paul Bowles. Cinematography by Jim Jarmusch. Music composed by Phil Kline. Black and White. 50 mins. Streaming on Criterion and Prime.

Sara Driver made this short film for her MFA thesis at NYU. It was not generally released to theaters, although some critics have called it one of the best films of the 1980s. Though made on a shoestring, it carries an eerie power. Elena is an inmate in a mental asylum in Washington, New Jersey, who escapes one day in the confusion of a nearby multi-car accident with multiple fatalities. Because she seems in a daze, a Good Samaritan takes her for an accident victim and drives her to her sister’s house. Far from welcoming her home, her sister panics and calls the asylum. But when the men in white coats show up, they take the sister away. Believed lost for many years, a print of this film was found among Paul Bowles’ effects (author of the story) after his death and was later restored. Driver coauthored the script with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch (her life partner), who was also the cinematographer. Driver later directed Sleepwalk (1986), When Pigs Fly (1993) and The Bowery (short 1994), and acted in a number of Jarmusch’s films.

Westfront 1918 (1930). Directed by G. W. Pabst. With Fritz Kampers, Gustav Diessl, Hans-Joachim Möbis, Claus Clausen. Screenplay by Ladislaus Vajda and Peter Martin Lampel, from the novel Vier von der Infanterie, by Ernst Johannsen. Cinematography by Charles Métain and Fritz Arno Wagner. Music composed by Alexander Laszlo. Black and White. 1 hr., 15 mins. Streaming on Criterion HBO Max, Tubi and Prime.

Americans who are at all familiar with German film director George Wilhem Pabst know him as the director of Pandora’s Box, in which Louise Brooks played her immortal role of Lulu. He’s one of Germany’s greatest filmmakers. Westfront 1918, his first sound film, is clearly an antiwar story. It focuses primarily on four soldiers from dissimilar backgrounds, thrown together by the heartless and seemingly mindless machine of war: the avuncular Bavarian (Kampers); the handsome Karl (Diessl); the young idealistic lieutenant (Clausen); and one, called only The Student (Moebis), who falls in love with a peasant girl. Besides all the carnage, and horribly realistic field hospital scenes, Pabst shows—through the experience of Karl when he is on furlough in Berlin—that the fabric of German domestic life is coming unraveled. He sees lines of hungry people waiting for bread. Then climbs the stairs to his own apartment where he surprises his wife in bed with the local butcher’s son who has been buying her favors by giving her meat and saving her from starvation. He is about to shoot them both. Instead, he leaves and goes back, tragically, to his friends on the front line. Often compared to All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), both films were banned in Germany when Hitler came to power.

Sources:

Bradshaw, Peter. “Mikey and Nicky review—a neglected gem of ‘70s cinema.” The Guardian, 15 June, 2018.

Nathan Rabin. “Mikey and Nicky: Difficult Men. Criterion Essays, Jan. 22, 2019.

Schwartz, David. “’Don’t Expect to Like ‘Em’: The Making of Elaine May’s Mikey and Nickey.” Filmmaker Magazine. Thegotham.org, Dec 14, 2024.

Acknowledgments:

Thanks to Barry Voorhees for editing.

Thanks to Tim Madigan for suggestions.

QUOTE:

“Security is a false God. Begin to make sacrifices to it and you are lost.”

--Paul Bowles

Issue # 70 //May 15, 2026

In This Issue:

Entrée: The Harry Palmer Films

Film Commentary: The Man Who Would Be King

Classic Film Capsules: Lumière, Le Cinéma!, Heat Lightning.

Sources and Acknowledgments

Entrée: The Harry Palmer Films

Len Deighton, who died in March at age 97, was never on my radar as a novelist, famous though he was. But I’ve always loved Cold-War spy movies and three of his early cloak-and-dagger novels became films. The first, The Ipcress File (Sidney J. Furie, 1965) introduced Harry Palmer, an agent in a British intelligence unit called WOOC(P), played by Michael Caine. Palmer’s insubordination, philandering and cockiness make his superiors tear their hair. But he manages to crack a complicated national security case of “brain drain” in which British scientists are captured by hostile forces and have their memory medically wiped clean.

This was followed a year later by Funeral in Berlin (Guy Hamilton, 1967), in which Palmer is sent to East Berlin to rescue a high-level Soviet intelligence officer planning to defect but who imposes a number of conditions, one being that he wants comfort and security in the west, the opportunity to grow roses, and that Palmer himself must orchestrate the escape. It’s more complicated than that, of course, but that is the gist.

Both are intriguing and good fun. However, the third Palmer film, Billion-Dollar Brain (Ken Russell, 1967), is an overblown dog, and the series, which would have included another Deighton story, Horse Under Water, was scrapped. Too bad—Palmer was at least as interesting and more believable than James Bond.

Writing recently in the London Review of Books, Thomas Jones compared the Ipcress novel’s “almost dreamlike movement of the story” to Kazuo Ishiguro or Franz Kafka, and says, “The trick is to give up trying to make too much sense of what is going on and enjoy the ride.” I’d say ditto to the film versions of both Ipcress and Funeral.

Speaking of Michael Caine, who is now 93, he stars with Sean Connery in Kipling’s story, The Man Who Would Be King (1975), the subject of this issue’s Film Commentary. Director John Huston was, I think, the best and most fearless adapter of literature-to-screen that Hollywood ever produced. I’ll name only a few films: B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1958), Leonard Garner’s Fat City (1972) Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1979) Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1982), and his swan song, James Joyce’s The Dead (1987). I say fearless because all these titles are classic and / or beloved works certain to bring defenders out of the woods. Moreover, it’s hard to think of another director who would even consider filming Under the Volcano or The Dead.

Film Commentary:

“God’s holy trousers:” John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King.

By Steven Huff

The Man Who Would Be King (1975). Directed by John Huston. With Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer, Saeed Jaffrey, Shakira Caine, Larbi Doghmi, Karroom Ben Bouih. Screenplay by John Huston and Gladys Hill, from the story by Rudyard Kipling. Cinematography by Oswald Morris. Music by the National Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Maurice Jarre. Produced by John Foreman. Color. 2 hrs., 9 mins.

Streaming on Prime, Tubi

For almost twenty years, John Huston mulled over the idea of filming Rudyard Kipling’s story, “The Man Who Would Be King.” He planned to cast Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart in the starring roles of Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnahan. But before he could get the project off the ground, death intervened for both actors, and it was shelved. Later he considered a long list of other American actors. It was Paul Newman who convinced Huston that he needed Brits in the film, since the loveable miscreants in the story are former English soldiers in India. That was good advice, as Sean Connery and Michael Caine seem born for the roles, and both turn in what is possibly the best performances of their careers. As Huston has said, “Half of directing is casting the right actors.”

He was fourteen when he first read Kipling’s story, fifty when he sketched out the project, and seventy when filming began.

John Huston

I’ve seen it a half dozen times, and it has retained its strength over the past fifty-one years as a seriocomic tale of colonial fantasy. Or let’s call it a swashbuckler with tragic humor, rich in its improbabilities.

Danny (Connery) and Peachy (Caine) are soldiers, sometime in the nineteenth century, who resigned from the British Army while in India and have been knocking around as thieves and pickpockets since then. Finally nabbed for blackmail, it’s the local newspaper editor in Lahore, Kipling himself (Plummer), who comes to their defense and convinces the District Commissioner not to press charges.

Late one night they barge into Kipling’s office and ask him to witness a contract between them. They are going to leave their bad luck in India behind and head north into Kafiristan, part of present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, and use their experience as officers to train an army, take over whatever kingdom is there and set themselves up as kings. And, while they’re at it, carry away whatever treasure comes with royal office and return to England as millionaires.

Christopher Plummer as Rudyard Kipling

Kipling warns them that the region is almost impassable: there is a treacherous, icy, mountain barrier, a possibly hostile enclave-culture, and no European has penetrated the area since Alexander. “Alexander who?” Peachy asks.

They start out with camels loaded with guns and ammunition, trudging over rugged terrain. But in the frozen mountains they find themselves stranded in a cave, stuck between two impassible crevasses. As they watch their fire burn low, facing death, they fall into a reflective mood. “Have our lives been misspent?” Danny asks. The ever cheerful Peachy says, “How many men have been where we’ve been and seen what we have? Bloody few!” They begin reminiscing and the echo of their hilarious guffaws causes an avalanche, creating a bridge by which they’re saved.

It’s on to Kafiristan where they meet a Gurka named Billy Fish (Jaffrey) who speaks both English and Urdu, and with him translating they succeed in raising an army and conquering one kingdom after another. When Danny is hit in the chest with an arrow, it lodges harmlessly in the ammunition belt under his clothing. But the astonished Kafiristanis, seeing him pull an arrow from his breast, now think he’s an immortal god. Moreover, he’s found by the high priest Kafu Selim to be wearing a Freemasons insignia around his neck, for which he’s believed to be the long-awaited son of Alexander who had left them twenty-two hundred years before, promising to send his son. When Danny and Peachy see the magnificent royal treasure room of gold and rubies, they gasp, “God’s holy trousers!” Unfortunately, all the ensuing pomp goes to Danny’s head. He comes to believe that it’s his destiny to be King of Kafiristan, even if it means that he also has to play god.

Connery as king, and Caine in background with Jaffrey as Billy Fish

When his ruse is discovered—he tries to take a wife (played by Caine’s wife Shakira Caine), who bites him during the ceremony and draws mortal blood—he’s chased onto a rope bridge. Before his pursuers cut the ropes and send him falling to the rocks below, he sings, “The Son of God Goes Forth to War.” Peachy is tortured but survives and makes his way back to India and Kipling’s office a broken man.

The film was shot primarily in Morocco for the rugged terrain and the availability of about five hundred extras; and the Grande Montée, Chamonix, France, for the snowy mountain scenes. The high priest Kafu Selim was played by Karroom Ben Bouih, a Moroccan night-watchman who was about one hundred years old. It’s his only film role. When he watched the rushes and saw himself, he said, “Now I’m immortal.”

The Man Who Would Be King is an Icarus-like tale of a man falling from the sky for over-lofty ambition. It’s also the violent end of a treasure hunter, a theme Huston explored earlier in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. And it’s a fable of lust for power and reckless colonial hubris in which Danny Dravot and Peachy Carnahan are the tragic stand-ins for the British Empire or, for that matter, any empire. The silly portrayal of an Indian man named Babu whom Peachy kicks off a train may make you cringe. But I don’t believe there has ever been a perfect movie.

The Man Who Would Be King was nominated for four Academy Awards, for Art /Set Direction, Costume Design, Film Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It is, I think, the best film of Huston’s later years.

The Lumière brothers.

Classic Film Capsules:

Lumière, Le Cinéma! (2024). Directed by Thierry Frémaux. Documentary. In French with English subtitles. Black and White. 1 hr. 54 mins. Streaming on Criterion.

The first public screening of a motion picture was on December 28, 1895, at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris, by the brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, manufacturers of photographic equipment. They showed ten films on their Cinématographe projector, all under fifty seconds in length. Reportedly, audience members were awed and startled to see life-size moving images on the screen. When on another occasion they showed a train coming into a station, some audience members tried to jump out of the way. Though immortalized by this first demonstration, Louis Lumière actually made almost 1,300 short films between 1895 and 1900. Now French director Thierry Frémaux has brought together some one hundred of those short pieces in a single anthology film, Lumière, Le Cinéma!, all restored to almost pristine quality. Here are street scenes, people working their trades, such as blacksmiths and launderers. If you like the Paris photographs of André Kertész, you’ll be fascinated by these street scenes made a generation earlier. Louis went abroad with his camera to the Mediterranean, East Asia and New York, and for the first time Parisians saw moving pictures of the world beyond Europe. It’s streaming on the Criterion Channel. If you do not have access to Criterion, this film alone is worth the subscription. What the Lumières accomplished set in motion the dominant visual art form of the twentieth century.

Heat Lightning (1934) Directed by Mervyn LeRoy. With Aline McMahon, Ann Dvorak, Preston Foster. Lyle Talbot, Glenda Farrell, Frank McHugh, Willard Robinson, Jane Darwell, Ruth Donnelly. Screenplay by Brown Holmes and Warren Duff, adapted from a screenplay by Leon Abrams and George Abbott. Cinematography by Sidney Hickox. Music composed by Bernhard Kaun, conducted by Leo F. Forbstein. Black and White. 1 hr., 3 mins. Streaming on Prime.

This is a forgotten gem, and a short one at 63 minutes. Two sisters run a remote gas station and diner in the California desert where temps reach 110 at midday and the night sky pulses with heat lightning. The older sister, Olga (McMahon), has a dark past but has found happiness as a car mechanic. She’s tough and cynical about men and is determined to keep her sister Myra (Dvorak), who is half mad to leave the isolation of the outpost, from going after loser men. Two criminals arrive after robbing a bank in Salt Lake City where they murdered a couple of cashiers. Of the pair, George (Preston Foster) is the heavy, and when he sees Olga, he recognizes his old lover who is deeply shaken by his unexpected presence. When two wealthy women arrive and rent a tourist cabin from Olga, they lock their jewelry in her safe. George and his partner are anxious to get to Mexico, but first he wants to bust the safe. The immortal Jane Darwell plays a short role. Sidney Hickox provides beautifully textured cinematography, although the night landscape is painted. Mervyn LeRoy, later famous for Quo Vadis (1951) and Random Harvest (1942), made solid films in the early sound era, including Little Caesar (1931), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), and Tugboat Annie (1933).

Sources:

AFI Catalog of Feature Films, “Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King.”

Ebert, Roger. The Man Who Would Be King. Review. Rogerebert.com.

Jones, Thomas. “Deskbound Party Bastards: Thomas Jones on Len Deighton.” London Review of Books. Vol 48, No. 8, 7 May, 2026.

John Huston: A New Perspective On Directing. Documentary. Perspective. YouTube, directed by Simon Rigden Green. 2012

“The Man Who Would Be King, Directed by John Huston.” Cliomuse.com.

Acknowledgements:

Thanks to Barry Voorhees for editing.

Thanks to Tim Madigan for suggestions.

Contents of This Issue

Entrée: Farewell to Nathalie Baye

Film Commentary: What the Dead Do in Heaven: George Cukor’s A Bill of Divorcement

Classic Film Capsules: Nothing but a Man; Let There Be Light

Sources and Acknowledgments

Entrée: Farewell to Nathalie Baye

About ten days ago I watched The Green Room (1978), Francois Truffaut’s midcareer film about a death-obsessed man, played by Truffaut himself, who creates a room in his house that becomes a shrine to his deceased wife. Playing opposite him was a young Nathalie Baye, on her way to becoming a mainstay in French cinema. The next morning, with her performance still fresh in my mind, I read her obituary in The New York Times. Sadly, she’d died a couple days before at age 77.

Her passing was announced by President Emmanuel Macron who called her “an actress with whom we loved, dreamed and grew up,” and noting the “singular path she took in our French cinema—by the side of great directors, never abandoning a popular touch.” Indeed, over her long career, in about a hundred films, she worked with most of France’s great filmmakers, Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Bernard Tavernier, as well as with Americans such as Steven Spielberg.

A four-time winner of the César (France’s equivalent of the Oscars), she was known for her versatility. Here are just a few of her films: Day for Night (1973), The Man Who Loved Women (1977), Tell No One (2006), Strange Affair (1981), The Return of Martin Guerre (1982), Laurence Anyways (2012), and Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022).

According to The Guardian, she was born in 1948 to bohemian parents who were, she said, “in a perpetual state of adolescent crisis,” which had traumatic effects on her childhood. “They were funny, but they were suffering … my father paid me a single compliment; my mother never did.”

However, they enrolled her in the École Alsacienne, an elite school in Paris. But she struggled there with dyslexia and dyscalculia and dropped out to enroll in a dance school. Later, she attended the Conservatory for Dramatic Arts where she graduated second in her class. Shortly after, she met Truffaut who cast her in the part of Joelle, the script girl in Day for Night, her breakthrough role.

What the Dead Do in Heaven: George Cukor’s A Bill of Divorcement

By Steven Huff

A Bill of Divorcement (1932). Directed by George Cukor. With John Barrymore, Billie Burke, Katharine Hepburn, David Manners, Elizabeth Patterson, Paul Cavanagh, Henry Stevenson. Written by Howard Estabrook and Harry Wagstaff Gribble, adapted from a play by Clemence Dane. Cinematography by Sidney Hickox. Music composed by W. Franke Harling, orchestrated by Max Steiner. Black and White, 1 hr., 10 mins.

Streaming on YouTube and Internet Archive

Lately I’ve been chasing down John Barrymore’s films. Many are hard to find on streaming services. Films fall out of the streams, sometimes faster than you can watch them. A month or two ago Criterion featured several excellent pre-code films of Mervyn LeRoy. Now they’re gone. Often, it’s YouTube that comes to the rescue, as with this issue’s feature, A Bill of Divorcement. There are several copies there. Take your pick, but one is colorized and I suggest avoiding that one. It’s a black and white film, period.

Originally a 1921 play by Clemence Dane, A Bill of Divorcement ran successfully on stage in London and Broadway. In the early sound era, Hollywood was converting theatrical works to the screen, attempting to raise the sophistication of cinema. This story, which takes place almost entirely in one large house, was easily adaptable, at least technically. It was George Cukor’s first important film, and it’s the first appearance of his discovery and favorite actress, Katharine Hepburn. It made her a star. As for Barrymore, producer David O. Selznick thought it was his finest performance on film. I would say that it’s certainly one of his best.

George Cukor

The setting is England, near London, early 1930s.

Meg (Burke) and Gray (Cavanaugh) are a middle-aged couple anxious to marry. Although ruing that they met so late in life, they’re planning to live the years that they have as happily as they can make them. Meg is a wealthy woman, but her life has been rocky and melancholy. Her former husband Hilary (who was an accomplished composer) was a soldier in WWI. He went mad from shell shock and has been in an asylum for the past fifteen years, so insane that he doesn’t recognize her. Under a new divorce law in Britain, insanity is sufficient grounds, and Meg recently divorced him so that she can marry Gray. Indeed, she feels as if she is happy for the first time, that she never really loved Hilary. She’d gotten caught up in the spirit of the war, when young girls were marrying soldiers bound for the front.

“Life only starts when love comes,” she tells Gray.

It’s Christmas Eve, and Meg is throwing a party in the manor home that she shares with her daughter Sidney (Hepburn) and Hilary’s sister Hester (Patterson). And a merry party it is, with dancing and caroling. Sidney is also about to marry, to a man named Kit (Manners) and follow him to Canada. Things seem on the verge of change.

Katharine Hepburn and David Manners in A Bill of Divorcement

The next day, Christmas, while Meg is at church with Gray, Sidney receives a phone call from the asylum informing her that Hilary has escaped. Shortly after, the front door opens, and Hilary (Barrymore) walks in wearing his old army overcoat. He begins looking around, with the face of a man who’s been long away, like a Rip Van Winkle. When he turns and sees Sidney, he believes at first that she’s Meg. His face is full of love and need and astonishment. According to Barrymore biographer Margot Peters, his performance in that scene was so strong that Hepburn felt “shattered.” Indeed it is a stunning moment. He tries to explain to his incredulous daughter—who has never actually met him before—that he’s come home now because he is well. He compares his escape to St. Peter’s miraculous flight from prison in Acts.

It’s abundantly clear, however, that he is not entirely well. For one thing, he’s highly excitable. Although he says he knows it is all in his head, he sees a black hand rising from the floor to choke him. Meg returns from church, sees the disastrous situation, and falls into despair. All of her plans are now in jeopardy, and she must try to somehow mollify her former husband while saving her marriage plans. Hilary, meanwhile, is utterly confused. He doesn’t know how much time has passed, and he seems shocked that he could not simply walk back into his old life. Meg has divorced him. The daughter he never knew is a young adult on the verge of marriage. His sister Hester is now an old woman, embittered that Meg would not remain faithfully married to her brother. He doesn’t belong here.

“But,” Meg asks, “They were kind to you there, weren’t they? They treated you well?”

He answers, “Do you know what the dead do in Heaven? They sit on their golden chairs and sicken for home.”

Meanwhile, Sidney has called Dr. Alliot, head of the asylum, who comes to the house and tries to convince Hilary to come back to the institution, while also attempting to mediate between him and his family. But he lets drop a crucial bit of information that utterly changes Sidney’s life. For the first time, she learns that shell shock only brought on a latent madness that that was likely to surface anyway, since there is a history of madness in the family. Her mother and aunt knew this but had kept it from her.

“It’s in our blood,” Sidney says, grimly. She asks the doctor, “What if I have children?”

“There would be a risk,” he says.

Sidney quickly breaks off her engagement to the confused and heartbroken Kit. In one grand, selfless move, she solves everything. She pushes her mother and Gray out the door, telling them to go off to London. Get married. Start a new life. Be happy. “I’ll take care of father. I understand him. I’ll live here with him.” In the last scene Hilary is in the music room, trembling, watching through a window as Meg and Gray leave with their suitcases, climb into a car and drive away. Sidney comes in, calms him. They sit down at the piano and play one of Hilary’s unfinished sonatas. They have suddenly become father and daughter.

After every major war, of course, there are reported instances of soldiers—believed lost in action—who return to find their spouse or fiancé with another. My father was in World War II and told me of such a case. A Bill of Divorcement is a variation on that theme in that Hilary does return from war but is a lost soul left to an institution as if dead. For an eye-opening look at similar cases, see John Huston’s documentary, Let There Be Light (1946) about returning veterans committed to a hospital for treatment of debilitating psychological trauma. (See Classic Film Capsules below.)

The story is also inspired by the gradual liberalization of British divorce laws after the 1912 Report of the Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes. One of the report’s recommendations was that a divorce could be granted in cases of a spouse’s incurable insanity at least five years after diagnosis. Prior to the commission’s recommendations, the only way to be granted a divorce in Britain was in cases of infidelity, and far harder for a woman to obtain than a man.

And of course, its other theme is madness itself. In this story, it is a living death.

George Cukor made a heartbreaking film that demanded extraordinary work from the principal actors. Barrymore gives one of his most haunting and nuanced performances—one moment manically wild, the next a man trying to prove himself sane, gracious and understanding of his family who have abandoned him. Hepburn is also compelling, happily planning marriage, then seeing her future crushed—then firmly, calmly, settling in with a stranger who is her father for an utterly uncertain life. Burke (who had gained renown on stage working with Barrymore and would later play Glinda in The Wizard of Oz) pulls an anguished performance that falls in the uncertain territory between sympathy and loathing. In a time when happy endings in movies were almost de rigueur, this film ends on an ambiguous note, like the unfinished sonata.

Billie Burke as Glinda in The Wizard of Oz

A Bill of Divorcement belongs in the venerable category of films that approach the deeply emotive subject of returning soldiers, including The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946), The Big Parade (King Vidor 1925), Coming Home (Hal Ashby 1978), The Deer Huner (Michael Cimino 1978), The Return of Martin Guerre (1982), and Let There Be Light.

Classic Film Capsules:

Nothing but a Man (1964). Directed by Michael Roemer. With Ivan Dixon, Abbey Lincoln, Julius Harris, and Gloria Foster. Written by Michael Roemer and Robert M. Young, who was also cinematographer. Music by Wilbur Kirk. Black and White. 1 hr., 35 mins. Streaming on Prime, Tubi and Criterion.

Ivan Dixon plays Duff Anderson, a young black man on an Alabama work crew laying railroad, hammering spikes. The title is an obvious allusion to the folksong about John Henry, the “steel-drivin’ man,” who says to the captain, “A man ain’t nothin’ but a man,” before he dies trying to compete with a steam drill. Anxious to settle down, Duff quits the railroad and marries Josie (Lincoln), a young schoolteacher who is a preacher’s daughter. His pride, crude manners, and lack of religious faith put him in conflict with her family. He’s fired from jobs for refusing to compromise with white employers who expect him to grovel. The death of his alcoholic father in Birmingham becomes a catalyst for pulling his life together. Lincoln was best known as a jazz singer but was also an actor with roles in For the Love of Ivy (1968), and ten other films including this one. Dixon gained fame as the black POW in TV’s Hogan’s Heroes in the 1960s. In the 1970s he directed several blaxploitation films, including Trouble Man (1972) and The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973). He had roles in A Patch of Blue (1965) and Porgy and Bess (1959). Nothing but a Man shows him to be a complex actor, convincing in his role as a hard-luck black man making his way in Jim Crow South.

Soldier receiving psychiatric care in Let There Be Light

Let There Be Light (1946). Directed by John Huston. Written by Huston and Charles Kaufman. Cinematography by Stanley Cortez, John Doran, Lloyd Fromm, Joseph Jackman and George Smith. Music by Dimitri Tiomkin. Black and White. 58 mins. Streaming on Criterion and YouTube

John Huston was among a group of Hollywood directors who, during WWII, were given military commissions to make movies (largely documentaries) in support of the war effort. This postwar film, commissioned by the Army, documents the plight of returning soldiers with “battle neurosis,” what today we would call PTSD, who find themselves in a mental hospital on Long Island, unable to return to civilian life. The psychiatric staff uses a variety of techniques such as hypnosis and group therapy in addition to drugs to treat the men, some who can’t walk, some who can’t talk, and others whose sleep is racked with horrible dreams. All have horrific stories to tell, one was buried under dirt for twenty-nine hours before he was rescued. This film is a reminder that many war wounds are not visible but are of psychiatric nature. Although the program appears successful and most men are sent home after some weeks, the Army suppressed the film for fear that it would affect post-war Army recruitment. The ban was lifted in 1981 and it screened that year at the Cannes Film Festival.

SOURCES:

Anderson, Lyndsay. Never Apologise: The Collected Writing. Plexus, 2004.

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. W.W. Norton, 2003.

“Nathalie Baye obituary.” The Guardian, 19 April, 2026.

“Nathalie Baye, Versatile and Admired French Actress, Dies at 77,” New York Times, April 30, 2026

Peters, Margot. The House of Barrymore. Simon & Schuster, 1990.

“Royal Commission On Divorce.” The British Medical Journal 2, no. 2707 (1912): 1402–5. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25299362.

ACKNOWLEGEMENTS:

Thanks to Barry Voorhees for editing.

Thanks to Tim Madigan for suggestions.

Included in this issue:

Entrée: On Nuremberg

Film Commentary: Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man.

Classic Film Capsules: Jamaica Inn, Rasputin and the Empress.

Sources and Acknowledgments

Entrée: On Nuremberg

In a recent article in The New York Review of Books, “Misjudgment at Nuremberg,” Alice Kaplan takes to task James Vanderbilt’s recent drama, Nuremberg (2025), for historical inaccuracies. Kaplan has other complaints about the film, but I find the issue of inaccuracies most interesting. She is Sterling Professor of French at Yale.

The film, based on Jack El-Hai’s book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist is, of course, about the international tribunal after World War II where high-level Nazis were tried for war crimes. It focuses primarily on German Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring, Hitler’s second-in-command, played by Russell Crow, and the psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), whose job it was to determine if the Nazi leaders were sane enough to stand trial. In the film, Goring catches Kelley off guard with charm and guile, and Kelley gets a bit too close, carrying letters from him to his family against regulations.

Here are some of the inaccuracies that Kaplan points out. Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert H. Jackson takes a side trip to the Vatican to confront Pope Pius XII, seeming to blackmail the pontiff (who earlier had been tolerant of the regime) into supporting the trials. This runs counter to Jackson’s own written account of the meeting where the Pope was much more agreeable. Jackson did not, as the movie claims, write all the court briefs himself, “Because it has to be done right.” In reality, he had a large staff gathering evidence. Moreover, it puts Kelley at the center of the drama, “despite that he had left Nuremberg months before Goring’s testimony.”

So, do these inaccuracies really matter if the film has an overarching truth, i.e., that high-ranking Nazis were tried, convicted of murdering six million Jews (and about five million others) in concentration camps and were summarily executed (save for Goring who chomped a cyanide capsule rather than face the indignity of hanging)? Well, yes, and Kaplan is making important points.

But then, Vanderbilt needed to tell a story. And to do that he needed a protagonist other than Goring or Jackson. While not forgiving all the inaccuracies, I think it made sense to keep Kelley around for the entire film, especially because of what it tells us that he did after the trials: he wrote a highly controversial book that warned us that under the right set of circumstances, America too could produce figures similar to the worst Nazis. And for including that in the movie, I must applaud Vanderbilt.

After reading Kaplan’s article, I racked my brain to think of popular American non-documentary movies set in the realm of modern history that could meet a high standard of accuracy. I thought of Eight Men Out, John Sayles’s film about the 1919 Black Sox Scandal. And Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men, which however was made only two years after the events portrayed and could hardly take egregious liberties. Hard to think of many more.

#

Peter O’Toole in The Stunt Man

Film Commentary:

How Tall Is King Kong? Richard Rush’s The Stunt Man.

By Steven Huff

The Stunt Man (1980). Directed by Richard Rush. With Peter O’Toole, Steve Railsback, Barbara Hershey, Allen Garfield, Charles Bail. Written by Lawrence B. Marcus and Richard Rush, adapted from a novel by Paul Brodeur. Cinematography by Mario Tosi. Music by Laurie Higgins Tobias, Malcom McNab, Emil Richards, and Dan Wallin. Color. 2 hrs., 10 mins.

Streaming on Prime, Tubi, Roku, and other prominent streaming services.

Cameron is a scruffy young Vietnam War vet, in trouble and running on foot from the police. He finds himself on an iron bridge high above a river, little realizing that this bridge is his crossing from a fugitive life to a dominion of illusion. A vintage luxury car is coming at him. The driver seems about to run him down. Grasping a loose iron plate from the bridge, he hurls it through the car’s windshield, causing the car to plummet into the river.

He doesn’t stay around to ruminate on what has just happened. He must keep moving.

On the other side of the bridge, Cameron (Railsback) wanders into movie set where a World War I action film is being is being made on a beach. The horrendous battle being filmed is not unlike what he experienced in Vietnam: explosions throw bodies in the air, blood flows and severed limbs and heads litter the seashore. Then the director calls, “Cut.” The dead rise from the sand, pick up their rubber appendages and wipe off the fake blood.

Steve Railsback in The Stunt Man

The director, Eli Cross (O’Toole), informs Cameron that the driver of the car that he’d caused to plummet into the river (Cross had seen it all from a helicopter) was his stunt man, now dead. Realizing Cameron’s predicament with the law, and that he could now also be charged with manslaughter, Cross knows he’s got him on the spot. He offers him the cover of a job, replacing the stunt man for the final three days of shooting, and Cameron knows he’d better take it. His beard is shaved off; his hair is dyed blond. He’s given a new name: Lucky.

Chuck Barton (Bail), the set manager, doubts Cameron will survive on the job. He asks, “Ever done any stunt work?”

Cameron answers, “Not really.”

“Not really? You have or you haven’t.”

“I got out of ‘Nam in one piece. That’s a helluva stunt.”

“That’s ancient history.”

“Seems like yesterday to me.”

Cross is a charismatic, egomaniacal bully, given to tantrums on set, but capable of bending anyone to his will. Now, under his power and in a milieu of make-believe, Cameron must leap from roof to roof under gunfire, tumble from a steeple, and dance the Charleston on the wing of a biplane in flight. Cross urges him on to more daring-do until it seems that he might be trying to kill him. He is also Cameron’s mentor in ambiguity. He says, “Do you not know that King Kong was just three feet six inches tall? He only came up to Fay Wray’s belly button!” The big ape’s size on the screen is illusion, trickery. And so is everything else, he seems to be saying. “If God could do the tricks that we can do he’d be a happy man.”

Barbara Hershey in The Stunt Man

But there is another thread. When he sees an elderly woman fall from a rock ledge into the ocean, Cameron dives in to save her. While carrying her out of the water in his arms, he quips, “Just like in the movies.”

Tearing off her makeup, she says, “I am the movies,” revealing herself to be Nina Franklin (Hershey), the female romantic lead. He becomes infatuated with her. But romance is also ambiguous and rocky. Though hardened in jungle warfare, Cameron is naive in love and is crushed and furious to find out that Cross had bedded her before he had.

Sam, the screenwriter (Garfield), while busy doing last minute rewrites, tries to talk sense to Cameron. He asks, “Was she supposed to be a virgin?”

“Yeah.”

“I had a virgin once,” Sam says, shaking his head. “I had to fly to Guatemala for her. She was blind in one eye and had a stuffed alligator that said, ‘Welcome to Miami Beach.’ ”

In comparing the real to the make believe, The Stunt Man works its central paradox from the furthest possible poles: real war, as experienced by Cameron, and the war scenes that he’s hired to fight. Finally, it comes down to the last scene—the bridge again—the scene that Cameron botched by throwing the iron plate through the windshield of the car and killing the stunt driver. He must now drive another vintage car off the bridge. And, hopefully, survive.

Since The Stunt Man disappeared from theaters quickly, and was a long time making it to disc and streaming services, it often goes unmentioned in retrospectives of Peter O’Toole’s work. Yet one of the strengths of this offbeat movie is his flamboyant and enigmatic performance as Eli Cross and his imperious pas de doux with Steve Railsback’s Cameron.

A satire on Hollywood is by extension a joke on American life because the entertainment business, on whatever device you choose, so permeates our lives. That critics yawned at The Stunt Man may mean that its message of a culture of unreality wasn’t welcome, understood or appreciated. However, it was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Actor for O’Toole, Richard Rush for Best Director, and Rush with Lawrence B. Marcus for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Janet Maslin in The New York Times wrote, “Though Richard Rush’s film professes an interest in lofty questions of illusion and reality, simple trickery remains its prime concern.” Roger Ebert is kinder, calling the film a “cinematic puzzle in which there are no answers and the only question is that old standby—what is reality?” And he gives it two stars out of four. But it seems to me that it is now more relevant than ever. I hardly need to point out that such twenty-first-century illusions as reality TV and AI imaging have all but obliterated any certainty in media representations of reality. Never mind King Kong.

It is, I think, director Rush’s crowning work. His best-known films, Freebie and the Bean (1974) and The Color of Night (1994) were both panned. Stunt Man, however, has rebounded and become a cult classic. He told an interviewer at the We Are Cult blog, “I had the audacity to think that I could make a picture that would explore illusion and reality, and I wanted to use the film as a mirror for the paranoid mindset that we all live through at one point or another.”

Classic Film Capsules:

Charles Laughton and Alfred Hitchcock on the set of Jamaica Inn

Jamaica Inn (1939). Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. With Charles Laughton, Maureen O’Hara, Robert Newton, Leslie Banks, Marie Ney. Screenplay by Sydney Gilliat and Joan Harrison, from a novel by Daphne du Maurier. Cinematography by Bernard Knowles and Harry Stradling. Music composed by Eric Fenby. Black and white. 1 hr., 38 mins. Streaming on Fawesome, Roku and Prime.

Unless you’re a true Hitchcock buff, you may not have seen Jamaica Inn, the last movie the master of suspense made in England before fleeing to Hollywood. In fact, it’s not a suspense tale at all, but a story of a gang of early-nineteenth-century Cornish cutthroats who gather at the coastal Jamaica Inn to plot their crimes: They lure merchant ships to wreck on the rocks, then pirate the goods, killing all aboard. Nasty stuff. Maureen O’Hara, in her third film, is Mary Yellan, the hapless Irish visitor who falls into their clutches. Robert Newton (who in 1950 popularized movie pirate talk as Long John Silver in Treasure Island and later in the related TV series) is Jem Trehearne, an undercover marshal who discovers the dirty beasts and their boss, the wealthy squire, Sir Humphrey Pengallan (Laughton). Author Daphne du Maurier did not like film because it was too removed from her novel, nor did Hitchcock like it much himself. But don’t let them spoil it for you. It’s a good gothic tale of murder and piracy, with plenty of daggers and pistols. Laughton’s performance is cold and sinister.

Rasputin and the Empress (1932). Directed by Richard Boleslawski. With John Barrymore, Ethel Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Frank Morgan. Screenplay by Charles MacArthur. Cinematography by William H. Daniels. Music Composed by William Axt. Black and white. 2 hrs., 1 min. Streaming on Prime.

Much of what makes this a good film is Lionel Barrymore, superb as Rasputin—sly, steely-eyed and malignant. MGM designed his makeup from newspaper photos from the period. Also featured is vintage news footage of the Czar’s army on the march. It’s Ethel Barrymore’s first talkie and the only film with all three famous siblings together. They were notoriously difficult to work with and Boleslawski must have had his hands full: John Barrymore who plays the monk’s assassin Prince Chegodieff, was a notorious boozer; Ethel, who plays the Empress, was an aging doyenne of the stage and considered film acting beneath her, but she needed the money. Lionel was a curmudgeon, addicted to morphine, but it’s evident that he’s working hard. The film conflates historical events considerably. The mystic Rasputin is called to the palace to cure the son of the Czar and Empress of hemophilia, effectively saving his life. The grateful parents make him a family confidante and an advisor to the Czar. But then he begins wielding influence over the empire, convincing the Czar to enter WWI against Germany, much to the ire of the people and the army. (Historically, Rasputin tried to talk the Czar out of the fight.) Interestingly, Felix Yusupov, the real Russian prince who killed Rasputin, was furious that he was not given credit for the murder in the movie. He sued MGM and won a settlement reputed to be nearly a million dollars.

SOURCES:

Ebert, Roger. “The Stunt Man Review and Summary.” Nov. 7, 1980. rogerebert.com.

Kaplin, Alice. “Misjudgment at Nuremberg.” The New York Review of Books, April 23, 2026.

Maslin, Janet. Review: The Stunt Man. The New York Times. October 17, 1980.

Peter O’Toole: Along the Sky Road to Aqaba (2022). Film documentary. Directed by Jim Sheridan. Peter O’Toole, Sian Phillips, Anthony Hopkins and others.

Peters, Margot. The House of Barrymore. Simon & Schuster, 1990.

“The Stunt Man review – Peter O’Toole runs amok in a gleefully deranged Hollywood satire.” The Guardian, 6 February, 2026.

Watt, Mike. “The Stunt Man (1980)” Film Threat. August 18, 2011.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

Thanks to Barry Voorhees for editing.

Thanks to Tim Madigan for suggestions.

Movie Theater, Tokyo, 1929. Image by Kōshirō Onchi

Contents of This Issue:

Entrée: Roger Corman’s Centennial

Film Commentary: Stage Door

Classic Film Capsules: Fifth Avenue Girl; Primrose Path

Sources and Acknowledgments

Entrée: Roger Corman’s Centennial

If he were still around, Roger Corman would be celebrating his hundredth birthday next Monday, April 6. The B-movie master died two years ago at the age of 98. Corman actually was many things: director, producer, actor, distributor. Yes, he made a lot of cheap movies. Some are good, and some bad, as B flicks often are. His autobiography is titled How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime (1990). Certainly, you must spend money to lose money, and Corman had a formula for making movies on the cheap.

As a kid I loved The Masque of the Red Death (1964), The Raven (1963, which had naught to do with Poe’s most famous poem), and The Haunted Palace (1964), although even then I knew those flicks were cheapo. The biker movie, The Wild Angels (1966) was good drive-in fare. My favorite of his films is, I think, House of Usher (1960) with Vincent Price, Mark Damon and Myrna Fahey. I don’t claim to have seen most of his hundred features.

Part of his legacy is his mentorship. He produced Martin Scorsese’s first commercial feature, Boxcar Bertha (1972), as well as early features by others who later became giants: Francis Ford Coppola’s Battle Beyond the Sun (1959); Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets (1968) and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968); and Jonathan Demme’s Fly Me (1973). He gave early roles to Jack Nicholson and other young actors. Television eventually replaced B-movies, and thus, the opportunities that young directors had in Corman, to learn by doing, are harder to find.

Gregory La Cava (1892-1952), the director of Stage Door, the subject of this issue’s Film Commentary, started in silent films but hit his stride in Hollywood’s Golden Age. He earned Best Director nominations by the Academy for both Stage Door, and his previous film, Our Man Godfrey (1936) with William Powell and Carole Lombard, one of the great comedies of the decade. Later he made Fifth Avenue Girl and Primrose Path (1939,1940; see Classic Film Capsules below) and Lady in a Jam (1942). He’s little remembered today. Gary Morris wrote in Bright Lights Film Journal, “Gregory La Cava is probably the greatest classic Hollywood director still in need of rediscovery.

Film Commentary:

“You’re an actress now. You belong to them!” Gregory La Cava’s Stage Door

By Steven Huff

Stage Door (1937). Directed by Gregory La Cava. With Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou, Constance Collier, Andrea Leeds, Lucille Ball. Screenplay by Morrie Ryskind and Anthony Veiller, from the play by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman. Cinematography by Robert De Grasse. Music composed and directed by Roy Webb. Choreography by Hermes Pan. Black and white. 1 hr., 32mins.

Streaming on Prime

In my early twenties I went to New York to be a folk singer. It was a humiliating experience, and I finally limped home dragging my guitar case behind me. I didn’t realize at the time how I was changed by that disappointment, but, as Keats would say, I “molted.” Soon enough I was on to the next thing in my life, but with less naivete. So…I understand the impetus of the wannabe actresses in a New York boarding house in Gregory La Casa’s Stage Door, their grasping for a life elevated by art. Based on the Broadway production of the same title by Edna Ferber and George S. Kauffman, the film has an outstanding cast: Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers and Adolphe Menjou at the top, and a prodigy-cluster of other stars early in their careers, such as Lucille Ball, Eve Arden, Ann Miller, Gail Patrick and Andrea Leeds.

It’s hard to think of another Hollywood film of that era led by such a dynamic assembly of women actors, except, perhaps George Cukor’s The Women (1939). And yet, this assembly of beautiful dreamers who make up the emotional core of the film is under the power of men who dominate the theater industry, including the roguish producer Anthony Powell (Menjou) who maintains a casting couch in his plush apartment. Since it’s also the Great Depression, and money from home is scarce, the women date men for the sole purpose of getting a square meal. Judith Canfield (Ball) finally gives up and marries a hometown “hick” for an easier life.

The film belongs mostly to Hepburn and Rogers who have the central roles. Stage Door was one of the bright spots for Hepburn in the 1930s. After winning a Best Actress Oscar for Morning Glory (1933), she went into a slump. In view of her later career, and her imposing presence in Stage Door, it’s almost puzzling to realize that she was considered box-office poison then and casting her was risky. When she played Susan Vance in her next film, Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks 1937), opposite Cary Grant, it flopped. That was the last straw for her at RKO, and they cancelled her contract. It took her a while to regain her stride

Katharine Hepburn and Constance Collier

Rogers, of course, is remembered principally for dancing (first paired with Fred Astaire in 1933 in Flying Down to Rio) and romantic comedies. But Stage Door was her best chance to prove herself a dramatic actor, and her terse zingers make the film’s best dialogue. It was the age of wisecracking women, like Joan Blondell, Mae West, and Barbara Stanwyck. Few could deliver a shot with the wit and timing that Rogers does in her role in this film as Jean Maitland.

Adolphe Menjou, the single principal male star, had perhaps the longest career in film at that point, starting in The Acid Test, in 1914. Although most of his silent films are now lost, his work with Charles Chaplin in Woman of Paris (1923) and with Ernst Lubitsch in The Marriage Circle (1924) are classics. He had a long run in films, often playing suave, impeccably dressed men, such as Monsieur La Bessiere in Josef Von Sternberg’s Morrocco (1930).

Early in Stage Door, a new actress-hopeful, Terry Randall (Hepburn) arrives at the Foot Lights Club boarding house. She exudes privilege and class, has more luggage delivered than all the other women combined, and demands a single room with a private bath. Such is not available, however, and she finds herself rooming with Jean Maitland (Rogers) who is clearly resentful of the snooty, assuming Terry.

Jean: Hmm! Fancy clothes, fancy language and everything!

Terry: Unfortunately, I learned to speak English correctly.

Jean: That won’t be of much use to you here. We all talk pig Latin.

Terry will remain a pariah in the house until one morning when she goes to Powell’s office and sees one of the others, Kay Hamilton (Leeds), who is the most beaten-down in spirit of all the girls, getting a rude brush-off by Powell’s receptionist. Terry stomps past the receptionist into Powell’s office and gives him holy hell.

He retorts, “Something ought to be done about these girls that come to New York and try to go on the stage. They’d be so much better off at home, raising families.”

Yet Powell, surprised by Terry’s pluck, thinks she has enough spirit, spunk and conceit to light up a stage. That wins her an invitation to his apartment where he’d already entertained Jean. This is not a Pre-Code film, so we’re left to our assumptions of how Terry gets a part in a play that is just going into rehearsal. The director and playwright, however, are distinctly unimpressed with her wooden performance and only her status as Powell’s protégé keeps her from getting trash-canned.

Lucille Ball, center, with Ginger Rogers on the ukelele

Terry has taken the part that Kay has dreamed of for as long as she’s lived with the other aspirants. Losing the part to the woman who had defended her, combined with starvation—she doesn’t have money to pay for meals at the boarding house—sends her from disappointment to delusion. In a deeply intense sequence, she climbs the boarding house stairs hearing voices of crowds cheering her, and she jumps from an upstairs window to her death.

Learning of Kay’s suicide, Terry is distraught and says she can’t possibly go on stage. Miss Luther (Collier), the boarding house’s resident acting coach, tells her she must go on, not just for the sake of the play itself, or art itself, but because so many depend on her, not only the director and producer and actors, but stagehands, costumers, reporters and photographers, etc., etc. “You’re an actress now. You belong to them!”

Once again, everyone in the boarding house, especially Jean, despises Terry. And yet, it is the crushing experience of Kay’s death that finally gives her the depth and sadness that she needs to raise her performance to a sensational success.

While Hepburn and Rogers dominate the film, the more unsettling and nuanced role is Leeds as Kay Hamilton, for which she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. The young women in the boarding house, save for Terry, represent the majority of people who fall to the wayside in the entertainment world. Some survive on humor, cheap stew, and passion. But Leeds’s Kay is the face of the dire, soul-eating consequences of failure. In the arts you dream of transcendence, and then the door closes in your face.

RKO Pictures bought the film rights to the play in 1936 for $130,000 (about 3 million in 2026 dollars) and put a team of screenwriters to work on it, principally Morrie Ryskind and Anthony Veiller, who together were nominated for Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay. Ryskind was renowned for writing three Marx Brothers films, Coconuts (1929), Animal Crackers (1930), and A Night at the Opera (1935), and got a previous Adapted Screenplay Oscar nomination for My Man Godfrey (1936).

Stage Door has enough comic moments for James Harvey to list it among comedies in his book, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges. But Kay’s emotional dissolution and suicide—combined with the imperative that “the show must go on,” regardless of what has happened, takes it in a serious direction that one can feel building by the middle of the picture. At the end, a new wannabe enters the boarding house, bright and starry-eyed. She’ll be taking Kay’s old room.

Classic Film Capsules: Two more from Gregory La Cava and Ginger Rogers.

Fifth Avenue Girl (1939). Directed by Gregory La Cava. With Ginger Rogers, Walter Connolly, Veree Teasdale, Tim Holt, Kathryn Adams, James Ellison. Written by Allan Scott. Cinematography by Robert De Grasse. Music by Russell Bennett. Black and white. 1 hr., 23 mins. Streaming on Hulu and HBO Max.

This delightful yet somewhat restrained (not truly screwball) comedy was RKO’s biggest hit of 1939. Walter Connolly plays wealthy Timothy Borden, the owner of a pump manufacturing company who goes out one night to celebrate his birthday by his lonesome self, since his family doesn’t give a damn. He meets young, down-on-her-luck, Mary Grey (Rogers) on a park bench, and he convinces her to join him for dinner at a posh restaurant. Then he hires her to pose as his mistress, even installing her in the guest room of his house, in a foolhardy attempt to shock his wife (Teasdale) and family out of their disaffection for him, and their crass insouciance. The film is, after all, a Depression-era lampoon of the rich. The ruse works, but it also inspires his daughter (Adams) to fall in love with their Marxist chauffeur (Ellison), and his son (Holt) to fall for his dad’s supposed paramour. Connolly, who usually plays bumbling authority figures, is winsome in one of his last performances before his fatal stroke a year later. Holt’s role is much like his snooty George Minafer in The Magnificent Ambersons, a bratty rich kid. Many hilarious twists. Rogers’s character seems the only one with innate sense, and is, in effect, the straight-man role.

Primrose Path (1940). Directed by Gregory La Cava. With Ginger Rogers, Joel McCrea, Marjorie Rambeau, Henry Travers, Queenie Vassar, Joan Carroll, Miles Mander. Written by La Cava and Allan Scott. Cinematography by Joseph H. August. Music by Werner R. Heymann. Black and white, 1 hr., 33 mins. Streaming on Prime.

Ginger Rogers proves her remarkable versatility, playing, at twenty-nine, a penniless teenage girl, Ellie May Adams. She falls for Ed (McCrea) whose father owns the local diner-gas station where he also works. They quickly marry, and Ellie May’s hard work and quick wit as a waitress makes her a favorite of diners. But Ed rejects her when he meets her disreputable family on Primrose Hill, the bad side of town. She’d lied to him about her background: her mother (Rambeau) is a prostitute, her grandmother (Vassar) is a crusty former hooker, and her father (Mander) is a notorious, hopeless drunk. Ed’s father (played endearingly by Travers) tries to talk sense to his son, but he’s unmoved. Can Ellie May save her marriage (or should she) while also helping her family through a crisis when her father accidentally shoots her mother? Especially good performances by Rogers and Rambeau. It’s the first substantial break for eight-year-old Joan Carroll who brilliantly plays Ellie May’s little sister Honeyball. Marvelously convincing sets, and moody cinematography.

SOURCES:

“Andrea Leeds, 70, Ex-Actress.” New York Times obituary. May 23, 1984.

Harvey, James. Romantic Comedy in Hollywood: From Lubitsch to Sturges. Da Capo Press, 1998.

Larson, Allen. “1937: Movies and New Constructions of the American Star.” American Cinema of the 1930s: Themes and Variations. Ina Rae Hark, edtr. Rutgers University Press, 2007. Pps: 191-195.

Morris, Gary. “Forgotten Master: The Career of Gregory La Cava.” Bright Lights Film Journal, April 30, 2004.

Pratt, Kelee. Outspoken and Freckled: Stage Door, 1937 kelleepratt.com/ 2026/03/12/stage-door-1937/

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Thanks to Barry Voorhees for Editing

Thanks to Tim Madigan for Suggestions

(Photo by Carol M. Highsmith)

Contents of this issue:

Entrée: On Last Pictures

Film Commentary: The Valley of the Bees

Classic Film Capsules: The Hanging Tree; Three Godfathers

Sources and Acknowledgements

Entrée: On Last Pictures

In Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 film Goodbye, Dragon Inn, a mere handful of people sit in the Fung-Ho Grand Theatre in Taiwan to watch the final show before it closes its doors forever. The film they’re watching happens to be a classic, Dragon Inn ( King Hu,1967), a story of a heroic Chinese past where valiant swordsmen (and a swordswoman) fight to protect the family of a murdered general from a tyrannical eunuch and his band of bloodthirsty brigands.

Ming-liang’s film is “slow cinema,” not to everyone’s taste, with long takes of the few patrons scattered among the vast theater of empty seats. A woman ticket-taker wears a leg brace and walks painfully through the halls. Men stand at urinals during intermission. Occasionally the camera turns to action sequences on the screen.

When the show is over, the projectionist rewinds the film while two elderly men talk in the lobby. They are Chun Shih and Miao Tien from the cast of Dragon Inn. Miao Tien says, “I haven’t seen a movie in a long time.” Chun Shih replies, “No one goes to the movies anymore, and no one remembers us anymore.” The ticket-woman limps home in a downpour of rain.

Yet the film is entrancing. It is, of course, an elegy for the end of a century of film culture, with a wary eye to the future of digital cinema and the stay-at-home audiences of the twenty-first century.

Peter Bogdanovich’ film of Larry McMurtry’s novel, The Last Picture Show (1971), is set in a North Texas town in 1951. The movie theater is closing because the town is dying. The last show is another classic, Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), also about a heroic past, the settling of a vast Texas territory by a mean cattle baron, played by John Wayne. Bogdanovich’s film is also, among other things, an example of cinema art looking inward at its own impermanence.

Yet, cinema is still lively, even if it plays to smaller crowds. Support your local theaters! We still need them!

I don’t recall the final film that the Astor Theatre showed before it closed in my hometown of Attica, New York. I only remember that there wasn’t much to do in that little berg afterward. Go to church, I suppose.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003). With Kang-sheng Lee, Shiang-chyi Chen, Chun Shih. Streaming on Prime.

Dragon Inn (King Hu, 1967). With Polly Ling-Feng Shang-Kuan, Chun Shih, Ying Bai, Miao Tien. Taiwan, Hong Kong. Streaming on Criterion.

The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971). With Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, Cybill Shepherd, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman. Streaming on Prime.

Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948). With John Wayne, Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru, Walter Brennan. Streaming on Prime, MGM+, Fawesome, Roku and other services.

Film Commentary:

The Valley of the Bees (1968). Directed by František Vláčil. With Petr Čepek, Jan Kacer, Vera Galatíková, Zdenek Kryzánek, Josef Somr, Zdenek Sedlácek, Jana Hájková. Screenplay by Vladimír Körner from his story, and by Frantisek Vlacil. Cinematography by Frantisek Uldrich. Music composed by Zdenek Liska. Black and white. 1 hr., 37 mins. Streaming on Criterion.

Unlike many of his Czech colleagues, such as Milos Forman and Vera Chytilova, František Vláčil (1924-1999) did not attend FAMU, the Czech film school; instead, he studied art history and aesthetics at Masarek University in Brno. Of his seventeen feature films, he’s probably best known for his trilogy, The Devil’s Trap (1962), Marketa Lazarova (1967) and The Valley of the Bees (1968), all of which dramatize ideological conflicts in historical settings. His next film, Adelheid, is the story of conflict following World War II between Czech people and remnants of the Reich’s Army and German settlers. It was released in 1969, the year after the Soviet Army invaded Czechoslovakia and stamped out the liberal Prague Spring. Along with Valley of the Bees, it fell afoul of Communist authorities who saw both films as metaphors for the Soviet occupation, and Vláčil was unable to direct another film until 1977.

The Valley of the Bees is set in thirteenth-century Bohemia. The Lord of Vlkov (Kryzánek), who is a middle-aged widower, marries a teenaged girl, Lenora (Hájková). At the wedding banquet at his castle, his adolescent son Ondrej (Sedlácek), who has been tending bees instead of attending the ceremony, presents his stepmother with a basket of blossoms. She tosses them merrily in the air but finds, to her horror, that under the blossoms are squirming bats. One senses that Ondrej is undisciplined and a problem to his father. Infuriated, Kryzánek hurls his son against a stone wall. Instantly regretful, he cradles the boy in his arms and vows to the Virgin Mary that he’ll dedicate his son to God if she spares his life.

The story shifts north to a monastery near the Baltic Sea, where Ondrej is going through a ritual joining the order. The Knights of the Cross, or the Teutonic Order of monks, is rigidly militant, and their cross is the handle of their swords. They practice long purification fasts and infractions are punished severely. When he becomes an adult, Ondrej (Čepek) comes under the influence of Armin (Kacer), a zealous ascetic. Armin takes Ondrej to the shore near the skeletal remains of a shipwreck. They lie naked on their backs with their arms linked, allowing the frigid water to roll over them in something suggestive of a homoerotic ritual. Armin tells Ondrej, “You will feel chill, then pain. Your lower body will be numb, but your spirit will rise.” The site becomes sacred to their friendship.

But Ondrej was sent to the order by his father against his own inclinations, and he is increasingly unsettled. A decisive incident occurs when a monk named Rotger (Somr) escapes and tricks Ondrej into giving him his horse. Rotger is caught, brought back, and forced to cast himself from a tower, and his body is devoured by dogs. Ondrej is punished and confined to his cell. He escapes. Armin, who clearly loves Ondrej, goes in pursuit. But he is fended off violently by Ondrej when he catches up to him.

Returning home to Vlkov, Ondrej finds that his father is dead. Assuming the lordship, he receives dispensation from the local priest to marry his widowed stepmother Lenora (Galatíková), who as an adult has been running an impoverished castle. He begins tending his bees again. Under his rule the castle regains its prosperity. The priest tells Ondrej, “Bees are like people. They fear and sense disaster. You can destroy their homes, and they begin building new ones straight away.”

Vera Galatíková as Lenora, Petr Čepek as Ondrej, and Jan Kacer as Armin.

Armin arrives at the castle on the wedding day to reclaim his spiritual disciple. He finds himself in an earthy realm that seems as much pagan as Christian, and where dogs go mad when they smell blood or the pheromones of fear. He brings with him a small bag of sand from the sea, the place where they became friends. To reclaim Ondrej and free him from carnal sin, he murders Lenora. Ondrej sets his hungry dogs on Armin and they devour him.

In the final scene Ondrej is returning to the order. Before he enters, he kneels at the site by the sea. He has surrendered himself. What will he have to do to atone? Will he have to throw himself from a tower like Rotger?

There are multiple themes in The Valley of the Bees. An Oedipal conflict between the father and Ondrej plays out when he marries his father’s widow. There is the ideological rivalry, the rigidly Christian order against the genial local faith in Bohemia which, in effect, coexists with the earthy life of the castle, also symbolized by the apiary of bees. And both are uneasily linked by the theme of homoeroticism, Armin’s love for Ondrej. The ideological differences can be seen against the political strife in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the year that the film was made and the Soviet Army invaded. Certainly, the militant severity of the stonily dogmatic Teutonic Order can be seen as paralleling Soviet rule—that Ondrej chooses to return to it, would suggest that there is no escape. And the dogs? Well, whether carnal or pious, nature is hungry and ready to eat us.

Vlacil’s sets for Valley of the Bees are so authentically detailed—and I can say this for Marketa Lazerova as well—that they give us the best possible illusion, that it really is the thirteenth century, not just in the two acres of a shoot.

The Valley of the Bees was hard to find for many years. It was digitally restored by UPP and Soundsquare Studios by the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in collaboration with the Národní filmový archiv, Prague. It had a recent showing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s now available to stream on the Criterion Channel, along with other films in the trilogy, The Devil’s Trap and Marketa Lazerova, as well as Adelheid and The White Dove.

Note: I reviewed Adelheid in the August 1, 2024 issue. See Archive.

Classic Film Capsules:

The Hanging Tree (1959). Directed by Delmer Daves. With Gary Cooper, Maria Schell, Karl Malden, George C. Scott, John Dierkes. Screenplay by Wendell Mayes and Halsted Welles, from a novel by Dorothy M. Johnson. Cinematography by Ted D. McCord. Music composed by Max Steiner. Color. 1 hr., 47 mins. Streaming on Prime and Fawesome.

This is an unusual Western, especially for the 1950s. There are no bank robberies. No sheriff goes out in the street to face a homicidal badman. Set in a rough and tumble Montana goldmining camp, it’s hardly a town at all, and void of real law and order. Prostitutes have set up shop in a tent. The mess of human greed is on sharp display, as you might expect in such a place. A doctor named Joe Frail (Cooper) rides into town and sets up shop in a cabin on a hill overlooking a muddy street of rough shacks. Dr. Joe packs a gun and he’s an aggressive gambler. While he’s one of the few characters in the story with any ethical sense, he’s less a hero than an antihero, running from a dark past—an unusual role for Cooper (and one of his last). A stagecoach carrying a Swiss immigrant and his daughter Elizabeth (Schell) is robbed in the mountains outside of town. Papa is shot dead, and Elizabeth, lost in the wilderness, suffers exposure and temporary sun blindness. Once she is found, Joe uses all his skill to bring her back to health. He advises her to go back east. But, hell no, she’s going to stay and mine gold. Karl Malden, who usually plays benevolent roles, is convincing as Frenchy Plante, the town’s most prominent ne’er-do-well, determined to get his dirty mitts on Elizabeth. George C. Scott plays a mad faith healer. Unfortunately neglected, this dark drama comes with a dose of loco mayhem, and no doubt influenced McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971). Oh, the hanging tree in the title? That gets saved for the end.

Three Godfathers (1936). Directed by Richard Boleslawski. With Chester Morris, Walter Brennan, Lewis Stone, Irene Hervey. Screenplay by Edward E. Paramore Jr. and Manuel Seff, from a novel by Peter B. Kyne. Cinematography by Joseph Ruttenberg. Black and white. 1 hr., 21 mins. Streaming on Tubi and YouTube.

In this Western tale of crime, atonement and sacrifice, four men stage a bank holdup in the desert town of New Jerusalem (which seems arbitrarily named since there is little to allude to the earthly city of God). The cashier is shot dead. In their frantic rush out of town, one bandit is shot off his horse. The other three escape without enough drinking water in their canteens to get them to the next town, eighty miles away. They find what looks like an abandoned covered wagon. But inside is a dying woman and her baby boy. Searching their souls they realize that the only way the baby will survive is if they carry it back to New Jerusalem on foot (since their horses ran off in the night) where they’ll certainly be hung. But can they make it? Chester Morris is Bob Sangster, the cruelest of the three, who must dig deepest to find his inner decency. Stone is Doc, a philosophical robber who reads Schopenhauer. Walter Brennan, of course, is one of film’s greatest character actors, and his role as Sam, the kindly, illiterate crook, is the strongest of the cast. The baby boy in the film is actually a girl, Jeanne Rivello, who never made another movie. Boleslawski’s film is a remake of William Wyler’s Western, Hell’s Heroes (1929, released as both a silent and a talkie), remade again as 3 Godfathers (1948) by John Ford, starring John Wayne, Pedro Armendáriz, and Harry Carey, Jr.

#

SOURCES:

Brook, David. “Valley of the Bees—Second Run.” Blueprint Review. https://bueprintreview.co.uk/2024/10/the-valley-of-the-bees-second-run/#respond. October 4, 2024.

Hoberman, J. “Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2002; Taiwan).” Film after Film: Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema. Verso: 2012, 2013.

“Out of the past: Frantisek Vlácil.” BFI: Sight & Sound. BFI | Sight & Sound | Out of the past: Frantisek Vlácil.

Pfeifer, Morris. František Vláčil’s The Valley of the Bees (Údolí včel, 1968) eefb.org/retrospectives/frantisek-vlacils-the-valley-of-the-bees-udoli-vcel-1968/Vol. 2 (February 2011).

ACKNOWLEGEMENTS:

Thanks to Barry Voorhees for editing

Thanks to Tim Madigan for suggestions.

Text copyright © 2026 by Steven Huff

Contents of This Issue:

Entrée: AI and The Magnificent Ambersons

Film Commentary: Douglas Sirk’s Influence on Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Classic Film Capsules: Samurai Rebellion; Big Deal on Madonna Street

Sources & Acknowledgements

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Entrée: AI and The Magnificent Ambersons

Articles about this situation keep popping up. A company called Showrunner, funded by big Amazon bucks, is using AI to “restore” the legendary forty-three minutes that were cut from Orson Welles’s classic, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). I suppose I shouldn’t bother complaining, because it’s already happening, and this kind of thing will keep happening whether film lovers like it or not.

As much as anyone alive, I would like the film to be restored to Welles’s original form. But it’s not possible. While a few people are still actively hunting for the lost footage, it’s like searching for Elvis—it’s not to be found. When RKO viewed the finished film, they didn’t like it (they’d already lost substantial money on Citizen Kane); and while Welles himself was in South America making a “goodwill” documentary for the Rockefeller Foundation, they chopped off about one-third of the film and reshot a happier ending. The cut footage went into the incinerator. Welles was apoplectic.

Purportedly, this AI-powered project is not being done for commercial viewing (Warner Bros., which now owns the rights has not given consent), but rather, it’s to test the ability of AI to complete such a task. And granted, Brian Rose, the head of the project, is working from original storyboards and extensive research into Welles’s production. But Welles, as a director, often strayed from script and storyboard to make use of serendipity and happenstance: Mistakes were frequent, and if one looked good, he used it.

Therefore, it remains that Rose’s final product cannot be a restored version of Ambersons, but one with significant AI reimagining. All the principal people involved in making the original film are dead, of course. But the Welles Estate has objected, telling Variety, “This attempt to generate publicity on the back of Welles’s creative genius is disappointing, especially as we weren’t even given the courtesy of a heads up. While AI is inevitable, it still cannot replace the creative instincts resident in the human mind, which means this effort to make Ambersons whole will be a purely mechanical exercise without any of the uniquely innovative thinking or a creative force like Welles.”

As for it being only a test case, companies invest money to make money, and I’ll wager that this AI-imaged Ambersons will eventually be available for streaming.

Film Commentary:

Social Oppression and Loneliness: The Influence of Douglas Sirk on Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.

By Steven Huff

All That Heaven Allows (1955). Directed by Douglas Sirk. With Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, Agnes Moorehead. Screenplay by Peggy Fenwick, from a story by Edna L. Lee and Harry Lee. Cinematography by Russell Metty. Music Composed by Frank Skinner. Color. 1 hr., 29 mins.

Streaming on Criterion and Prime

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974). Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. With Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbara Valentin. Written by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Cinematography by Jürgen Jürges. Color. 1 hr., 34 mins.

Streaming on Criterion, Hulu, HBO Max, Prime.

In this issue I want to discuss a German film, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and the American film that influenced it, Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows. All films are influenced by others to one degree or another, of course, but I think the relationship of these two films is especially interesting since it was a young iconoclastic German director who drew inspiration from a film that, at the time, Americans had all but forgotten.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder is one of the ten or so film directors that I approach with trepidation for the depth and power of their work, and in Fassbinder’s case, his enormous output. At the height of his career in the 1970s, Fassbinder (1945-1982) was the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema. An exceedingly energetic artist, he made forty-one films in fourteen years before his untimely death. Like Ingmar Bergman, another director of prodigious output, he was also busy as a theater director. And he made a monumental television series, the fourteen-part Berlin Alexanderplatz. But it’s for his feature films that he’s most remembered. All of his films that I have seen (and many of them are available to stream on Criterion), bear repeated watching for continually revealing dramatic and semiotic nuances, sometimes mixed with wild overstatement and brutality. He was one of the geniuses of twentieth century cinema.

Sirk (1897-1987) began making films in his native Germany, where he also directed an early production of Bertolt Brecht’s Three-Penny Opera. He emigrated with his Jewish wife to the US in 1937 to escape Hitler’s regime. The films he made in Hollywood in the 1950s focus on situations that evoke high emotion and melodrama, for which critics at the time wrote them off as “women’s weepies.” But Fassbinder (partly responsible for Sirk’s “rediscovery”), saw them differently. “Sirk has made the tenderest films I know, they are the films of someone who loves people and doesn’t despise them as we do.” I think it would be hard for anyone to remain dry-eyed through Imitation of Life (1959), in which a black mother struggles to hold onto her daughter who tries to pass for white. His best remembered films, which also include Magnificent Obsession (1954), There’s Always Tomorrow (1956), and Written on the Wind (1956), are about as accurate a picture of American life in the ‘50s as Hollywood features ever managed. Fassbinder also pointed out that in Sirk’s films women are often in thinking roles, instead of being relegated to simple reactions, which was indeed a rare thing for Hollywood in the 50s.

All That Heaven Allows is set in a small New England town. Jane Wyman plays Cary Scott, a well-to-do widow with two college-age children. Rock Hudson plays Ron Kirby, the gardener who comes to trim her trees. He arouses her pent-up sexual longing and want of companionship. Other men in her social circle who have made overtures to her just don’t ring the bell. Falling for Ron, although he’s a caring and decent man, bodes trouble. For one thing, he’s fifteen years younger than her; worse, he’s not of her social class. In her echelon, men like him are supposed to be invisible. It’s a bit like Lady Chatterley falling for her groundskeeper Oliver Mellors.

Ron is a salt-of-the-earth kind of man, no bullshit, hardworking. His rustic house is a converted mill, which he remodels for Cary’s comfort when their relationship becomes serious. He has earthy friends who read Thoreau and throw impromptu dinners, setting up a table with sawhorses and planks.

Cary and Ron are deeply hooked by the time she introduces him to her country-club friends at a party. The crowd is as insultingly dismissive as highball-slurping arrivistes can be, and they make an early exit. Worse, her status-conscious son and daughter are outraged and utterly rude when they meet him. Soon enough, domestic and social pressures force them to split up. He tells her the problem is she’s afraid, which infuriates her.

At Christmas, her children suddenly announce that they’re moving away. Her daughter is marrying and her son is going to Europe and wants to sell the house. As an antidote to her abandonment, they buy her a television, what she calls “the last refuge of a lonely woman.” The cruel joke is on Cary. But, of course, it’s not the end. Sirk’s script was going to kill Ron off, but the studio heads at Universal demanded a happier ending, which Sirk delivers with a dose of irony. After Ron is badly injured falling from a cliff, Cary comes to his bedside. “I’ve come home,” she tells him. Home is now the mill, not her house in town. But she says it quietly enough that she may or may not mean it.

Part of Sirk’s success as a storyteller is his visual sense. The woman who is most gossipy and threatening to Cary’s love life has flaming faux-red hair. He augments mood with color, such as the contrasting bland hues of Cary’s lonely home and the country club scene with the consolatory deep browns of the mill. While snowfall merely covers the village, it wraps the mill in snug comfort. Melodrama it is, but it gets accused of oversentimentality, which is off base. No one is wishing on a star in this movie. What may seem like sentimental situations are really where doors open to the depths of Ron and Cary’s characters.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Photo by Gorup de Besanez. See below for license.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul loosely transposes the story to Munich, Germany. It also deals with class disparities, and with an intensity that approaches deeper heartbreak than in Sirk’s film. But Fassbinder had no big studio to answer to, so he could do what he wanted. He does not begin his story with a wealthy woman, but one working hard and scraping to get by.

As the film opens, Emmi (Mira), a dowdy woman of sixty who cleans offices, is walking in the rain and ducks into a bar that is frequented by Arab immigrant men. She feels wary and out of place as the crowd stares bleakly at her. Noticing her discomfort, Ali (ben Salem), a forty-ish Moroccan auto shop mechanic, takes pity on her and walks her home. It’s still raining when they get to her door and she invites him in. Two lonely people—she a widow with no close friends, and an Arab in a strange country struggling with the language, unable to feel at home. They drink cognac and talk late into the night. He stays over and they become the unlikely lovers that drive the story. He comforts Emmi in her angst, like Ron does for Cary. Fear is not good, Ali tells Emmi, “Fear eats the soul.”

Thus Emmi, a former Nazi Party member (like everyone else she knew), finds love with a dark-skinned Moroccan man, twenty years younger than herself, breaking the mold that society and politics had made for her. They are both innocents and seem startled by the consequences of their relationship. Similar to events in Sirk’s film, Emmi is ostracized by her neighbors, friends and co-workers, except that in this story they are outright repulsed. Her children are not only rude and outraged when they’re introduced to her fiancé, but one son becomes violent and kicks in the screen of her television. Yet Emmi and Ali are undeterred.

In perhaps the film’s most melancholy sequence, they sit alone at a café after their civil wedding. They are the only customers. The place looks cold. Subdued and uneasy, they try to lift their spirits by ordering foie gras and caviar, which they can ill afford. They take a trip away, and when they return, they find people changed. Her coworkers have found someone else to pick on, the son who kicked in the TV needs her for a babysitter. The neighbor women have softened, and she allows them to come into her apartment and look Ali over, feeling his muscles, like they’re petting a large dog—which offends him.

The cumulation of stresses have Ali falling off a psychological cliff, and he leaves her for a time. Only minutes after they begin to reconcile on a dance floor, he has an attack from a perforated stomach ulcer. At the end of the film, Emmi is sitting by his hospital bed. He is comatose with hoses and wires keeping him alive. It is uncertain if he’ll survive. But there she is, talking into an ear that cannot hear her.

It hardly needs to be said that no studio-made Hollywood production would have cast either Mira or ben Salem as romantic leads, at least not in Sirk’s time. All That Heaven Allows and Fear Eats the Soul give us people who, while of different social levels, are nevertheless presented in their essential loneliness. Both give us the raw and even deadly circumstances that befall people who risk ostracism for love. Both show characters navigating milieus that they did not choose and find dangerous.

Fassbinder died of an overdose of drugs at the age of thirty-seven. It’s useless to try to imagine what he might have accomplished in another twenty years. Besides Fear Eats the Soul, he made several that I would call classics: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972); Martha (1974); The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979); and Lola (1981). Everyone who loves his films has a different list, I suppose.

In his retirement, Douglas Sirk lived with his wife in Switzerland. One day, a young man arrived with a few companions. It was Fassbinder, at last meeting the director he so admired. They talked well into the night.

In an obituary for Fassbinder, Sirk wrote, “Fassbinder’s films were for a long time controversial and hopefully will stay that way. For only those things that can survive opposition have the power of permanence.”

Classic Film Capsules:

Samurai Rebellion (1967). Directed by Masaki Kobayashi. With Toshirô Mifune, Yôko Tsukasa, Gô Katô. Screenplay by Shinobu Hashimoto, from a novel by Yasuhiko Takiguchi. Cinematography by Kazuo Yamada. In Japanese with English subtitles. Streaming on Criterion.

The great Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune stars as Isaburo Sasahara, an aging Samurai and head of a respected family, in this poignant story of a fight for decency and compassion over law and tradition. The lord of the clan to which the family belongs demands that Isaburo’s son Yogoro (Kato) marry Ichi (Tsukasa), a woman that the lord had rejected as unruly and who has already born a child. The forced marriage however is a happy one and she has another child with her new husband. When the lord’s son dies he orders that she be returned to him so that he can father an heir. Yogoro and Ichi refuse the demand as cruel and unreasonable. Isaburo and Yogoru must then fight the lord’s forces. Samurai battles are riveting when done well, as they are here. Tsukasa is excellent as the tragic wife who refuses to be a brood mare, especially for a beast. Best known for his three-part war trilogy, The Human Condition, Kobayashi was one of Japan’s most prominent directors of the postwar period. A World War II veteran, and profoundly affected by his experiences, he was an outspoken critic of Japan’s militarism, and a champion of human rights.

Big Deal on Madonna Street [I soliti ignoti] (1958) Directed by Mario Monicelli. With Vittorio Gassman, Marcello Mastroianni, Claudia Cardinale, Renato Salvatori, Memmo Carotenuto. Screenplay by Agenore Incrocci and Furio Scarpelli (with others), based on a story by Italo Calvino. Cinematography by Gianni Di Venanzo. In Italian with English subtitles. Streaming on Criterion.

The Italian title, I soliti ignoti, means, “the usual suspects,” probably the more appropriate title, since the utterly inept crooks in this comedy are all repeat offenders, risking longer prison sentences if they get nailed pulling their “big heist.” The plan is to bust the safe of a pawn shop in the middle of the night by breaking into an adjacent apartment (whose occupants are out of town) and cutting through a wall into the shop. Why a pawnshop? Because this is postwar Italy, unemployment is cruel and rampant, people have been selling their jewels to keep afloat. Thus, a pawnbroker seems like a logical target. By category, it’s comic film noir, but with echoes of Italian neorealism. It’s also an obvious spoof on Jules Dassin’s 1955 French heist drama, Rififi. Also influenced, I think, by Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers (1955), a British theft comedy. Every possible thing goes wrong for these men when they put their plan into operation. Once in the apartment, in one of the funniest sequences, they break through the wall, rupturing a water pipe and then find they’ve only busted into the same apartment’s kitchen. They sit down and eat cold risotto that was left on the stove. Big Deal on Madonna Street is Italians laughing at their difficulties, and for that, it’s a treasure. Great role for Mastroianni as a photographer who’d had to pawn his camera, and since his wife is in jail, has to bring their baby to the secret planning sessions. Cinematographer Di Venanzo also worked with Fellini and Antonioni.

Sources:

“AI to tackle ‘Magnificent Ambersons’ restoration.” Wellesnet. 9/2/25. contactwellesnet@gmail.come.

Fassbinder, Rainer Werner. “Six Films by Douglas Sirk.” New Left Review. May/June 1975

Fassbinder photo License at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Locke, Richard. “On Fassbinder.” The Threepenny Review, no. 116 (2009): 18–20. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25651003.

Mulvey, Laura. “Fassbinder and Sirk,” Visual and Other Pleasures. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Sirk, Douglas, and Barrie Ellis-Jones. “OBITUARY FOR RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, no. 20 (1983): 4–5. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44111884.

Acknowledgments:

Thanks to Barry Voorhees for editing.

Thanks to Tim Madigan for suggestions.

Text copyright © 2026 by Steven Huff

Louise Brooks, February 1927

# 64 // February 15, 2026

Contents of This Issue:

Entrée: Paying Attention

Film Commentary: The Perils of Nancy: William A. Wellman’s Beggars of Life.

Classic Fim Capsules: Whistle Down the Wind, and Say Amen, Somebody.

Sources and Acknowledgments

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Entrée: Paying Attention

In a January 30 article in The Atlantic, Rose Horowitz writes that professors in film-studies programs are finding that it’s harder these days for students to hold their attention through full-length feature films. By the middle of a film, they’re “furtively checking their phones,” or losing concentration to the point that they’re unable to complete their assignments.

How long has this been going on? Well, especially since the pandemic, according to some professors she spoke with. I wonder, why would anyone who can’t pay attention to a film enroll in a film-studies program?

As distressing as this sounds, it’s hardly surprising, since so much media is hustling our attention, getting right in our faces. And with AI-sourced material coming at us at all times, it’s a veritable riot of chattering monkeys, conditioning us to lose focus.

I did not notice a particular problem with students’ attention span when I taught Writing about American Film at RIT. They had to write only three or so pages about each film, and not all wrote thoughtfully about them, but it was obvious that they’d paid attention. I hasten to add that this was more than ten years ago. So, things have changed that quickly, apparently.

But what those professors are talking about is something that many filmmakers have been aware of and responding to for some time. Increasingly I notice that in new films, especially those made for TV, something startling must happen about every five to seven minutes to hold the audience’s attention. In features watched at home, the film is competing with phone calls and trips to the kitchen for snacks.

On the other hand, there is ample evidence that the public’s interest in good cinema is alive and well. Look at the popularity of the Criterion Channel, Letterbox, Mubi and the proliferation of film festivals. Cinema is still cool. One must simply pay attention.

Film Commentary:

The Perils of Nancy: William A. Wellman’s The Beggars of Life

By Steven Huff

Beggars of Life (1928). Directed by William A. Wellman. With Wallace Beery, Louise Brooks, Richard Arlen, Bob Perry, Blue Washington. Screenplay by Benjamin Glazer based on a memoir by Jim Tully. Cinematography by Henry W. Gerrard. Music conducted by Manny Baer. Paramount Pictures. Silent with dialogue cards. Black and white. 1 hr., 24 mins.

Streaming on YouTube. I suggest the copy tagged: Beggars of Life (Wellman, 1928) — High Quality 1080p

In 1928 when William A. Wellman began work on Beggars of Life he was still basking in the glory of Wings (1927), his World War I air-battle movie which won the Best Picture Oscar at the first Academy Awards. In between he’d made Legion of the Condemned and Ladies of the Mob (both 1928), neither of which are particularly memorable.

This film would feature two actors he’d worked with before, Wallace Beery and Richard Arlen, both well-established stars. The real casting problem was Louise Brooks, whom he hoped to sign for the role of Nancy, a woman wanted for murder who leads police on a wild chase, traveling with hoboes. But he had trouble tracking her down. Typical of Brooks, who had recently filed for divorce from her first husband, she was incommunicado, on a long jaunt with a new beau. Though lacking the star quality of Arlen and Beery at that time, she had distinguished herself in such comic films as Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em (1926) and A Girl in Every Port (1928). In Beggars of Life she had the opportunity to move away from comic and flapper roles for a part in a realistic drama aspiring to social relevance. Eventually, Wellman caught up with Brooks and she was signed.

Jim Tully, on whose autobiography the story is based, had himself lived as a hobo, much like the characters in the story, before becoming a boxer, a novelist (considered a literary genius by H. L. Menken), and for a time worked as a publicist for Charlie Chaplin.

Brooks found the production rough going. Against the advice of Beery, she allowed Wellman to talk her into dangerous stunts, such as hopping a moving freight train and being dumped off the back of a milk wagon, which did not endear her to the director. Moreover, Arlen (who’d worked with her before in Rolled Stockings, 1927) disliked her, and one drunken evening he told her that she was a “lousy actress” and “not even good-looking.” She made fast friends with Beery.

Richard Arlen and Louise Brooks

The film was unusually realistic for its time, with many of its action scenes filmed in a mountainous terrain near the Mexican border and on a San Diego and Arizona Railway train, which provided occasion for Gerrard’s rich photography. However, the filming locations represent an ambiguous region, since Arlen’s character hopes to make his way to Canada, suggesting that the action is supposed to be somewhere in the northwest.

Beggars of Life was made a year before the 1929 stock market crash, but it begs comparison to Wellman’s Depression Era movie, Wild Boys of the Road (1933) in which young people are forced out of their homes and hop freight trains. Yet the so-called Roaring Twenties didn’t roar for everyone. Bank failures and farm bankruptcies were common, and in 1928 half a million men were riding rails looking for work.

The film opens with Jim (Arlen), an unemployed man wandering the road. One morning he catches the scent of ham and eggs which he follows to the screen door of a house. He sees a man sitting at a kitchen table and calls out that he’s willing to work for breakfast. When the man neither answers nor moves, he walks in. The man is dead, with a bullet hole in his head. Cowering nearby is Nancy (Brooks), a girl the man had adopted out of an orphanage. She had shot him when he attempted to rape her, and he’d fallen back into his chair.

“He’s always been after me,” she says, “pawin’ me with his hands.”

Thus the story establishes a case of justifiable homicide. But she’s sure the law won’t buy her story. The two leave together, although Jim is reluctant to have a traveling companion, particularly one in trouble with the law. She dresses incognito in ill-fitting boy’s clothes and cap. (Interestingly, Wild Boys also features a young woman trying to slip by in boys’ clothes.). When they hop a train, they’re pushed off again by a railroad dick.

Loise Brooks in Beggars of Life

While sleeping under a haystack, they hatch a plan to go to Alberta, where Jim has ambiguous hopes of settling, and where she’d be out of reach of the police. Under a hazy moon, a hint of romance creeps into his philosophy, when he says, “Ain’t it funny when you think o’ the millions of people in warm houses and feather beds, an’ us just driftin’ ‘round like the clouds? But I guess it’s about even when you boil it down. Even them people in feather beds ain’t satisfied—we’re all beggars of life. Some begs for one thing, and some for another—and me, I ain’t found out yet what I want.”

Nancy answers, “I know what I want, just a place to be quiet in—a place to keep clean in—a place to call home.”

The next night finds them in a hobo encampment. There, once again, she faces assault, and both she and Jim are backed into a corner. An argument over allowing a murderer to hop the next freight with them becomes violent until detectives show up looking for Nancy. A scuffle ensues and the cops find themselves handcuffed to a pole.

Nancy’s travails continue in the boxcar of the train where a hobo named Oklahoma Red, played by Wallace Beery, sets up a comic “kangaroo court” to decide her fate—or rather, who is going to take possession of her. But she and Jim are inseparable, and in the ensuing plot twists they find themselves fighting off Red as well as the police who storm the train. Later, Jim and Nancy make a getaway in a car stolen by Red. With police watching the highways and railways, they seem unlikely to make it, although Red, in a dramatic change of heart, dies in a heroic act to cover their tracks.

Wallace Beery

Despite improbabilities in the plot, Wellman’s Beggars of Life is an evocative ode to the stragglers and homeless in American underclasses. It avoids the predictability of a conventional Hollywood ending in that Nancy, who has been the target of the law and the caprices of men who are themselves luckless and hungry, is now heading into an uncertain and dangerous future. Moreover, it foreshadows the trials of Brooks’ Lulu in Pandora’s Box and Thymian in Diary of a Lost Girl (Both G. W. Pabst, 1929), the two films she made in Germany which were the apotheosis of her otherwise erratic career.

Of Beggars of Life, film historian Kevin Brownlow wrote, “The customary freshness and unstudied casualness of most American silent films is replaced here by a dignified, carefully studied style, suggestive of European cinema, and indicating a conscious striving toward artistry.”

Beery made 242 films, often playing the brute whose truculence conceals an inner streak of decency. He won a Best Actor Oscar for The Champ (1931). He and the immortal Marie Dressler truly endeared themselves to audiences in Min and Bill (1930) and Tugboat Annie (1932).

Brooks’s career devolved after her work in Germany. Pabst wanted to hold onto her, but she sailed for home. According to her biographer Barry Paris, she turned down a role in Wellman’s Public Enemy (1931) with James Cagney which should have kept her career on track. Instead, she never recovered from that mistake. Her last film was Overland Stage Raiders (1938) with John Wayne for Republic Pictures. At that point the name Louise Brooks was in small font on the movie posters. Republic was a “poverty row” studio, the end of the line for many actors, Wayne being an exception. Paris wrote, “Nobody burned more bridges than Louise Brooks, or left prettier blazes on two continents.”

She had a second career as a writer. In 1956, Film curator and preservationist James Card brought her to Rochester, New York, to be near the film archives of the Eastman House (Now the Eastman Museum). In her apartment on Goodman Street, she wrote numerous articles on her life in film, some of which were collected in Lulu in Hollywood with a Foreword by Kenneth Tynan, still one of the best books on the silent film era. She died there in 1985.

She wrote, “In the sixties, many schoolboys wrote to me and came to see me. Most of them knew only my name and had never seen any of my films. They approached me with wildly uniformed flattery….”

CLASSIC FILM CAPSULES:

Hailey Mills

Whistle Down the Wind (1962) Directed by Bryan Forbes. With Alan Bates, Hayley Mills, Bernard Lee, Norman Bird, Alan Barnes. Written by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall from a novel by Mary Hayley Bell. Produced by Richard Attenborough and Jack Rix. Cinematography by Aruthur Ibbetson. Black and white. 1 hr., 39 mins. Streaming on YouTube

To appreciate this simple, charming film one must know, or recall, that beards were uncommon in 1961 when it was made. Fidel Castro had one, as did some bohemians and Gabby Hayes. But, by and large, the world of men was clean-shaven. So, when adolescent Kathy Bostock (Mills) discovers a bearded man (Bates) hiding in her family’s barn in the English countryside, she believes him to be Jesus, returned to earth. He’s actually a murderer being sought by police. She’s convinced that he’s hiding so that he doesn’t suffer crucifixion again at the hands of authorities, and she enforces secrecy on the other awed children who visit. Kathy also unwittingly supplies him with a gun. Her little Judas of a brother (Barnes), however, spills the beans. It was only the second film role for the soon-to-be-famous Bates. Rather subtle direction from first-timer Forbes (who would make The L-Shaped Room and Séance on a Wet Afternoon); he nevertheless draws strong work from Mills (whose mother, Mary Hayley Bell, wrote the original novel), and the rest of the cast. Mills was already under contract with Disney and had won the “Juvenile Oscar” from the Academy, the last time that it was awarded. Stephen Vagg of FilmInk writes that the film needs one more plot twist, and I think he’s right. In fact, the old Chekhov rule is, don’t introduce a gun unless it’s going to used. However, it’s still a very satisfying story of faith, illusion and trust.

Say Amen, Somebody (1982) Directed by George T. Nierenberg. With Willie Mae Ford Smith, Thomas A. Dorsey, Sallie Martin, Edward O’Neal, Edgar O’Neal. Cinematography by Edward Lachman and Don Lenzer. Color. 1 hr., 40 mins. Streaming on Criterion.

This film on the history of African American gospel music, and the gospel music scene at the time of filming, was a hot item on the art house movie circuit in 1982. Critics sang its praises, and awards followed. It’s now recognized as one of the great documentary films of its time. In fact, it may be one of the most spirited music films ever made. Roger Ebert said, “Say Amen, Somebody” is the most joyful movie I’ve seen in a very long time. It is also one of the best musicals and one of the most interesting documentaries. And it’s also a terrific good time.” Amid the church choruses, it focuses largely on two personalities. Thomas A. Dorsey, a blues musician who had been the band leader for Ma Rainey, called the father of gospel music, for having written hundreds of gospel songs, including the famous “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” Mother Willie Mae Ford Smith, a central figure in gospel music, was a mentor and energizer of younger singers. Nierenberg knew little about gospel music before he began researching this project, suggested to him by Ry Cooder. Its color restoration five years ago, overseen by Nierenberg, brought it to its original brilliance.

SOURCES

“Bank Failures in the 1920s: Causes and Consequences.” LegalClarity Team, Dec 12, 2025. Bank Failures in the 1920s: Causes and Consequences - LegalClarity.

Brooks, Louise. Lulu in Hollywood. Introduction by Kenneth Tynan. University of Minnesota Press, 1974, 1982.

Brownlow, Kevin. The Parade’s Gone By… University of California Press, 1968.

Louise Brooks: Looking for Lulu (1988). Documentary, directed by Hugh Monro Neely.

Movshovitz, Howie. ‘Say Amen, Somebody’ Restoration Unveils the Wonder of the Gospel Pioneers. NPR Morning Edition broadcast. February 25, 2020.

Paris, Barry. Louise Brooks: A Biography. Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. University of Minnesota Press edition, 2000.

Vagg, Stephen. “Forgotten British Film Studios: The Rank Organisation.” FilmInk Forgotten British Film Studios: The Rank Organisation, 1961 - FilmInk.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Barry Voorhees for editing.

Thanks to Tim Madigan for suggestions.

Text copyright 2026 by Steven Huff

Issue # 63 // February 1, 2026

Included in this Issue:

Entrée: The Z Channel

Film Commentary: The Member of the Wedding.

Classic Film Capsules: Rapsodia Satanica, Eyes in the Night.

Sources

#

Entrée: The Z Channel

Last week I watched a film from 2004 that had passed me by before. Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession is a documentary directed by Xan Cassavetes (daughter of John Cassavetes) about an early Los Angeles cable channel, now defunct, devoted entirely to movies. Founded by Theta Cable in 1974, it hired a program director in 1980 named Jerry Harvey who was utterly obsessed with film. Not just some films, not only well-known classics, but B-Movies, foreign, silent, early sound, and even porn late at night.

According to the Los Angeles Times, “He even ran turkeys and encouraged the audience to enjoy them for their camp value. The formula worked.”

For a time, it had 90,000 subscribers, running serious competition with other cable channels. If you did not live in LA in the 1980s you would likely have been as unaware of it as I was, since it only served that area. Yet the impact of its programming was enormous. Many formerly forgotten films are now available on disc or streaming services because Harvey rescued them from oblivion. Moreover, it influenced other cable channels to offer classic films.

Cassavetes interviews directors such as Alexander Payne, Jim Jarmusch and Robert Altman who owe a debt of gratitude to Harvey for resurrecting their early films. She includes clips of a few of the hundreds of films that had crashed at the box office or didn’t get regular distribution in the United States but were saved by Z Channel.

When possible, he obtained director’s cuts, usually longer than versions shown in theaters. In one notable case he showed Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, a film that had been viciously trimmed by the studio and trashed by critics and consequently made history as one of the biggest box office bombs of all time. When Z Channel viewers saw the complete, three-and-a-half-hour movie, they were surprised to see a marvelous film.

Jerry Harvey—obsessive and possessed with manically high energy and gall—was difficult to work with, prone to tantrums and dark moods. But no one expected his empire to fall, at least not in the way that it did. In 1988 he fatally shot his wife and then turned the gun on himself. Shortly after that, Z Channel switched to sports, then went dark.

You can find Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession on Prime, Roku Channel and Tubi. It’s a good watch.

Please note: I have made a format change: I have moved my Sources and my Acknowledgments to the end of the issue, instead of at the end of the Film Commentary.

Film Commentary:

His Eye on the Sparrow: Fred Zinnemann’s film of Carson McCuller’s The Member of the Wedding

The Member of the Wedding (1952). Directed by Fred Zinnemann. With Ethel Waters, Julie Harris, Brandon De Wilde, Arthur Franz, Nancy Gates, William Hansen, James Edwards, Harry Bolden. Written for the screen by Edna and Edward Anhalt from the novel and play by Carson McCullers. Cinematography by Hal Morh. Music composed by Wiliam A. Lyon.

Streaming on YouTube

The Member of the Wedding, the film version of the novel and play by Carson McCullers, is the story of Frankie Addams, a twelve-year-old white girl who feels trapped in smalltown Southern life, and Berenice Sadie Brown, her family’s African American cook who is both her confidant and surrogate mother. It stars the same principal cast as the Broadway production which opened in 1950 and ran for about two years. It’s one of the lesser-known films directed by Fred Zinnemann, who distinguished himself with such classics as High Noon (1952), From Here to Eternity (1953), The Nun’s Story (1959), A Man for All Seasons (1966), and The Day of the Jackal (1973). Columbia Pictures hardly promoted it, and of all the major critics, only Pauline Kael championed it. To this day, there is not much criticism written on The Member of the Wedding. Yet the roles of Berenice (Waters) and Frankie (Harris), which form the core of the story, are unforgettably compelling.

It’s almost mystifying that the twenty-five-year-old Julie Harris managed to play a twelve-year-old girl so persuasively. But she does.

Julie Harris, Ethel Waters and Brandon De Wilde in the Broadway Production. Photo by Alfredo Valente

The film differs in several ways from both the novel and the play. For example, the worst racial epithets are elided; scenes which only happen off-stage in the play, such as the wedding and the ruckus that Frankie causes there, as well as her aborted attempt to leave home, are vividly dramatized in the movie. A near rape that takes place in a bedroom in the novel is, in the film, moved to the backroom of a bar. But the film is far more consistent than at variance with the other versions, and since I’m here to write about the film, I won’t delve further into those differences.

The Member of the Wedding opens with Frankie walking home. She’s wearing a sombrero under which she seems small, slight. A narrator speaks lines from the opening of the novel: “It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjointed person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.”

The major theme of the film is entrapment. Frankie feels alienated from her surroundings, and that her life is going nowhere if she does not find a way to get out of town. The setting, mostly in the kitchen of her family’s home, augments Frankie’s sense of confinement. That her brother Jarvis, a soldier, and his fiancé Janice are about to marry and leave on their honeymoon, and seem to Frankie to live charmed, romantic lives, pushes her toward emotional crisis. She announces to Berenice (but does not tell Jarvis and Janice) that she is going to pack her suitcase and go with them. She represses her resentments against Jarvis, who never answered her letters while in the Army or thanked her for sending him homemade fudge. In fact, he’d sent her a doll meant for a much younger girl.

Ethel Waters - Photo by Alfredo Valente

Frankie, whose mother died at her birth, has grown into a gangly misfit and roughly chopped off most of her hair in a fit of anxiety. In a scene that signifies her desperation, she threatens to shoot a group of young women crossing her backyard who belong to a club that has excluded her. They’re on their way to tell another girl—who plans a career as a concert pianist—that she’d been elected to their society. That Frankie can hear that young woman tuning her piano at all hours drives her almost mad.

Berenice tries to both console and talk sense to Frankie about her plan to go with Jarvis and Janice, to no avail. While she recognizes what is going on in Frankie’s mind and soul, she has a black woman’s perspective on the world and has acclimated herself to her circumstances out of self-preservation; she agonizes over her young foster brother Honey (Edwards), a jazz trumpeter who runs afoul of the law and has to escape town to avoid prosecution or possible lynching. Whatever dreams she’d had for her future, Berenice, in her forties, sees her love life as a thing of the past. She had one good marriage to a man named Ludie Freeman who died. Her subsequent three marriages were to men who, she said, were “scrap.” She now dates a man named T. T. Williams (Bolden), who’s “walked in grace all his life,” but she has no urge to remarry.

She’s also a kind of surrogate guardian to Frankie’s neighbor and cousin, a small boy named John Henry (De Wilde), who is generally underfoot in the kitchen, and at times seems to be of ambiguous gender as he dresses in women’s clothes and plays with the doll that Frankie didn’t want. Everyone is dismissive of him until he comes down with fatal meningitis. His very name, John Henry, is one of the story’s ironies, a fragile boy carrying the name of the mythic railroad steel-driving man who dies with a hammer in his hand.

Fred Zinnemann [MGM]

Ethel Waters provides two of the most moving scenes in the film, both in closeups. In one, while attempting to impress on Frankie the wisdom she’s gained about longing and wanting, she tearfully describes the night she beseeched God not to take Ludie; in the other, with both Frankie and John Henry in her arms, she sings the spiritual, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow”:

I sing because I’m happy,

I sing because I’m free

For His eye is on the sparrow,

And I know he watches me.

She is attempting to comfort all three of them with this hymn. Perhaps Frankie and John Henry are the sparrows. But this moment has only a temporary effect on Frankie. In a frightening scene after the wedding, she plants herself in the couple’s car and has to be forcibly removed by her father. She falls sobbing on the pavement in a fetal pose, her suitcase lying open as the car drives away. That night she tries to make her getaway with eleven dollars that she stole from her father. She wanders the town with her suitcase, goes into a bar and is lured into a backroom by a soldier who attempts to rape her until she smashes a glass pitcher over his head. The outside world, she finds, is a perilous place. She walks slowly home again.

The film is a heartbreaking tour de force for Harris and Waters, possibly the finest performance for each of them. Zinnemann, understanding that he had a great American play in his hands, does not attempt any cinematic tricks, but allows his actors the space to do what they’d done so well on stage for two years. In fact, he credited the film’s success (though obviously not commercial success) on the performances of Waters, Harris and De Wilde. He had assured McCullers, who had worried that a Hollywood treatment might ruin her play, that he would protect the dignity of her work. Cinematographer Hal Mohr, whose work began in early silent films, uses effectively sharp depth of field in the rather large kitchen set. The Member of the Wedding is a long-ignored cinematic gem from a director who had already shown that he could work with actors in sensitive and controversial material in films such as High Noon and The Men (1950, about a paralyzed war veteran played by Marlon Brando).

Other Notes:

According to film historian Foster Hirsch, “Waters could be openly hostile to white people by whom she felt disrespected.” One of those miscreants was John Ford, who was the original director of Pinky, one of the so-called postwar race films. Their battles caused Ford to quit the film. He was replaced by Elia Kazan, who appreciated Waters and worked well with her.

Brandon De Wilde, who plays John Henry, was most famous for his role as Joey, who, in the movie Shane (1953), hollers the immortal words, “Shane, come back. Come back Shane.” Unfortunately, he died in 1972 when the van he was driving hit a parked car. He was 30.

Classic Film Capsules:

Eyes in the Night (1942). Directed by Fred Zinnemann. With Edward Arnold, Ann Harding, Donna Reed, Stanley Ridges, Reginald Denny. Black and white. 1 hr., 20 mins. Streaming on Prime, Fawesome, Tubi and Roku Channel.

One more from Fred Zinnemann. Eyes in the Night was made on a B-Movie budget, but it has a superb cast led by Edward Arnold as Duncan Maclain, a blind private detective who uses all his other senses, plus a seeing-eye dog, to solve a case of Nazi espionage in America during wartime. Reginald Denny plays Stephen Lawry a scientist who has developed a breakthrough armament system; the Nazis want the plans and are happy to kill to get them. Ann Harding plays Stephen’s wife Norma; and Donna Reed (four years before her role as Mary in It’s a Wonderful Life) is his daughter who unwittingly gets involved in the intrigue by falling for a Barrymore-like stage actor who is up to his neck in it. Heroic Maclain and his dog Friday quickly find something is rotten in Connecticut; they save the day—and the life of Dr. Lawry. The story is unlikely, of course, but it is also highly unusual for its portrayal of a blind man, not only in a lead role but with the capability to “see” what others cannot. Arnold and his dog Friday appear together in one more movie, The Hidden Eye (1945). Unfortunately, it’s not a strong as Eyes in the Night, but I have to say that Arnold and Friday are terrific in both. Mantan Moreland, the black man who plays Alistair, the family servant, is a sad story. He specialized in goofy, bug-eyed, racially insensitive roles in the 1930s and ‘40s, which later fell out of favor, and he found himself out of work until, near the end of his life, he made a brief comeback in different parts on TV, such as The Bill Cosby Show and Adam-12 in the 1970s. Essentially, Hollywood made him dance to a silly tune, then pulled the rug out from under him.

Rapsodia Satanica (1915) Directed by Nino Oxilia. With Lyda Borelli, Andrea Habay, Ugo Bazzini, Giovanni Cini. Italian intertitle cards with English subtitles. 43 minutes. Streaming on YouTube.

In this enchanting version of Faust, a party is held for elderly Countess Alba d’Oltrevita (Bortelli) in her castle. Wandering off from the festivities, she falls into a fit of melancholy because of her age. Mephisto (Bazzini) steps out of a painting and offers to restore her youth. The price of course is steeper than she could ever imagine. Her sudden joy and felicity turn to arrogance and lead to the suicide of Sergio (Cini) who has fallen desperately in love with her. More sorrow ahead. There are several copies available on YouTube. The 43:13-minute copy has been restored from an original nitrate print by Cinemateque Suisse, and completed by L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Bologna, Italy, with the original color tinting. The results are fascinatingly sharp. A couple of very short sections show disintegration. The original orchestral score by Pietro Mascagni was conducted by Timothy Brock and recorded in 2015, one hundred years after the making of the film. The date on the YouTube copy is 1917, which is the year that it was originally released. Director Oxilia was also a playwright. He died in 1917 fighting in World War I. Lydia Borelli (Countess Alba d’Oltrevita) became an actual countess after her marriage to Count Vittorio Cini in 1918, at which point she retired from film.

Sources and Paths to Further Exploration:

Gauthier, Jennifer L. “On The Member of the Wedding (an its adaptations) Seventy-Five Years Later.” MAYDAY. https:// maydaymagazine.com/on-the-member-of-the-wedding-and-its-adaptations-seventy-five-years-later-by-jennifer-l-gauthier/. 2025.

Gianetti, Louis. “Repeat Business: Members of the Wedding.” From The Films of Fred Zinnemann: Critical Perspectives. Edited by Arthur Nolletti, Jr. State University of New York, 1999.

Hirsch, Foster. Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties. Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.

Nolletti, Jr., Arthur. “Conversation with Fred Zinnemann.” From The Films of Fred Zinnemann: Critical Perspectives. Edited by Arthur Nolletti, Jr. State University of New York, 1999.

McCullers, Carson. The Member of the Wedding (novel). Bantam Books, 1958.

McCullers, Carson. The Member of the Wedding (play). New Directions, 1951.

Ziegler, Peggy. “The Death of Z Channel--What Now? : The History : Beset by troubles, quirky station will switch to all-sports.” Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1989.

Acknowledgements:

• Thanks to Barry Voorhees for editing.

• Thanks to Tim Madigan for suggestions.

• Images are from public domain sources.

Text copyright © 2026 by Steven Huff

Béla Tarr. Photo: Kolja Hub [Free Art License 1.3 | Copyleft Attitude]

Contents of this issue:

Entrée: Béla Tarr (1955-2026)

Film Commentary: Victor Fleming’s Red Dust

Classic Film Capsules: Mogambo (1953); The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)

Quote: Béla Tarr

Entrée: Béla Tarr (1955-2026)

The great Hungarian filmmaker, Béla Tarr, died on January 6 at the age of 70. In his obituary in The New York Times, he is called the “Titan of Slow-Moving Cinema.” His camera might run for ten minutes without a cut, while a typical American shot these days can be measured in a few seconds. His is the kind of “slow” filmmaking that Paul Schrader talks about in his book Transcendental Style in Film, which focuses primarily on the work of Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dreyer. He makes the claim that Ozu and Andrei Tarkovsky paved the way for Tarr, meaning that they prepared audiences for his poetically slow epics.

Yet it’s hard to compare Tarr to anyone else. His method of storytelling and camera work can be entrancing.

In Damnation (1988), which takes place in a dank Hungarian mining town where a hopeless love triangle develops, and Werkmeister Harmonies (2000), set in another remote village where a bizarre carnival drags a dead whale into the square and a sinister prince arrives to drive people into violence, his so-called long takes are just as long as they need to be for us to see. Can a camera go into a muddy, gloomy town and penetrate the soul of a place and its inhabitants and even find beauty there? And human dignity? Tarr has shown that it can.

I’ve never seen one of his films on the big screen. I got excited when I read about him in an essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum, and I started acquiring his films on Blu-Ray one at a time. And, truth be told, I haven’t yet seen his seven-and-one-half-hour Sátántangó (1994).

My favorite of his films that I’ve seen so far is The Turin Horse (2011) in which a wagoner and his daughter face the illness and death of their horse—their only source of income—while the earth grows apocalyptically dark. It won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival that year. But it was his last film. He said he’d made all the films that he wanted to make. In his remaining years he taught at a film school that he founded in Sarajevo called the film.factory.

Granted, his films are not for everyone. But they part curtains like you may not have walked through before.

Film Commentary:

Love in the Monsoon: Victor Fleming’s Red Dust (1932)

By Steven Huff

Red Dust (1932). Directed by Victor Fleming. With Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Mary Astor, Gene Raymond, Donald Crisp, Willie Fung. Screenplay by John Mahin and Donald Ogden Stewart from a play by Wilson Collison. Cinematography by Harold Rosson. Music Composed by Domenico Savino. Black and white. 1 hr., 23 mins.

Streaming on Prime

Clark Gable and Jean Harlow first worked together on George W. Hill’s The Secret Six (1931), when they were both fledgling actors. They became fast friends and were happy for the opportunity to work together again on Red Dust. Over the previous year, both had matured as actors. Indeed, Harlow, who had been whipped by critics in earlier films for amateurish performances (although she was hugely popular with audiences), worked hard at her craft and improved remarkably. By the time she made Red-Headed Woman (1932), her film before Red Dust, she was hitting her stride and had become MGM’s most profitable star. Her chemistry with Gable, along with a strong role for Mary Astor, made Red Dust one of their most memorable films.

Victor Fleming (1927)

Director Victor Fleming was a stuntman in early silent films and learned directing as an assistant to D. W. Griffith. He worked with Harlow again in the screwball comedy Bombshell (1933). He directed Gone with the Wind (1939) after replacing George Cukor and co-directed The Wizard of Oz (1939) with George Stevens and Norman Taurog. Aside from those classics, Fleming was known for adventure films such as Treasure Island (1934) and Captains Courageous (1937).

In Red Dust, Dennis Carson (Gable) owns and operates a rubber plantation in French Indochina, present-day Vietnam. It’s the monsoon season; working in the mud is misery, and Carson is generally in a sour mood. The sudden and uninvited appearance of a woman named Vantine (Harlow) infuriates him. Saucy and wisecracking, evidently a harlot, she’d jumped on an upriver boat from Saigon to outrun the gendarmes who had a warrant out for her.

She admits all this to Carson, who warns her that she’s got to get on the next boat south again, which, however, is four weeks away.

Jean Harlow and Clark Gable (MGM)

“Don’t worry, big boy,” she says. “I’ll stay out from under foot. I’ll even pay for my board if you insist on it nicely.” She works on him, always around with a drink and a wisecrack. Soon enough he softens his hide and flirtation turns to romance.

Things change abruptly when a new surveyor named Gary Wills (Raymond) comes to work with Carson. He has his wife Barbara (Astor) with him, and it’s becoming crowded in the house. Wills idolizes Carson professionally. But he falls sick with swamp fever, and Barbara and Carson nurse him back to health. Barbara is out of her element on the rubber plantation. She carries a high class, privileged demeanor and looks down her nose at Vantine and others. When she falls for Carson, it seems that he’s tapped her passionate inner self that has never been quite satisfied by Wills. In a move reminiscent of David and Bathsheba, Carson sends Wills on an extended surveying trip in the jungle so that he can carry on a romance with Barbara.

Mary Astor and Clark Gable (MGM)

Vantine is summarily dumped, but she hides her disgust behind more wisecracks. In a famous scene she takes a bath in a rain barrel. During filming, she suddenly stood up baring her breasts, and said, “Here’s one for the boys in the lab!” Fleming stopped and took the film out of the camera, knowing that dupes of the shot would likely travel far beyond the film lab and make bad publicity.

Barbara and Carson’s affair heats up to the point that they decide that it’s time for him to saddle his horse and ride out to where Wills is camped to tell him. But when he gets there, he has an attack of conscience and finds that he can’t do it.

Back at the house, knowing that he has to end the affair, Carson makes a show of hugging and kissing Vantine. When Barbara walks in on them, he tells her, “I’ve never been a one-woman man, and I never will be.” Enraged and humiliated, Barbara pulls a gun that Carson had given her for protection against panthers and tigers, and she shoots him, wounding him in the arm. Wills, who has followed Carson back, walks in while Barbara is still holding the gun. Carson tells him, “I made a pass at her and she shot me.” Vantine realizes what he’s doing and backs his story. The Wills marriage is saved. Carson’s romance with Vantine is rekindled as she binds his wound.

Jean Harlow (MGM)

Production was arduous for the cast and crew. A jungle, complete with rain, was built on Stage 6 of the MGM lot. When the hot lights were on, the set turned steamy making it difficult to work. But the worst snag occurred partway through filming when Paul Bern, Harlow’s husband of two months, stripped off his clothes at home, stood in front of a mirror, and shot himself in the head. Harlow collapsed at the news. Filming was delayed while she recovered from the trauma. But after eight days, she returned to work and soldiered through. Although she returned in a somber mood, her work is remarkably even throughout the film; nowhere do we see the least indication of her personal struggle. Harlow was a consummate professional.

Astor very convincingly plays the proper wife who falls into wickedness, heart and all. For his part, Gable is the rugged, caustic, devilish individualist, who also has conscience and a streak of decency. But the film is Harlow’s more than anyone’s, and it was her strongest role to date. Her performance is layered: she’s hurt but holds herself together when Carson drops her; she’s inciteful and understanding when she deals with Barbara’s frustration and misgivings over her illicit affair; and she’s world-wise, able to see through everyone’s game. MGM knew they had a winning pair in Gable and Harlow, and they starred together in four more movies before her death in 1937.

But one of the film’s greatest strengths is the dialogue, especially the verbal sparring between Gable and Harlow:

Carson: What’s the matter with you? Are you crazy?

Vantine: Just a little nauseated. This rain seems to have uncovered a pile of garbage around here.

Carson: Stop looking through keyholes. It’s bad for the eyes.

But also, between Harlow and Astor:

Barbara: It’s stupid of me to be so frightened.

Vantine: This storm isn’t the only thing that has you worried around here, is it? I saw him kick your door shut. He came out with rouge all over his mouth. I suppose he asked to use your lipstick?

Red Dust was made during what is called the Pre-Code Era (1929 to mid-1934), before the Motion Picture Production Code began strictly enforcing moral authority over Hollywood films. Had the film been made two years later, the suggestive dialogue would have been dumbed down. The barrel scene probably would have been cut—Harlow’s breasts do not show, but Gable peers into the barrel. Barbara and her husband would have slept in twin beds. And its theme of marital infidelity? It probably wouldn’t have made it past the screenplay stage.

What will make a contemporary viewer cringe is the way the native population is portrayed, particularly Willie Fung, who plays Hoy, the cook. Meant for comic relief, I suppose, but the role is ignobly silly. However, that the native people working on the plantation are called Coolies, distrusted and despised, is probably accurate for the time and place.

Sources and Paths to Further Exploration:

Neibaur, James L. The Jean Harlow Films. McFarland and Company, 2019.

“Red Dust (1932).” 4 Star Films. https://fourstarfilmfan.com/2018/10/23/re-dust-1932/

Stenn, David. Bombshell: The Life of Jean Harlow. Doubleday, 1993.

• Thanks to Barry Voorhees for editing.

• Thanks to Tim Madigan for suggestions.

#

Classic Film Capsules:

Ava Gardner in Mogambo

Mogambo (1953) Directed by John Ford. With Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Donald Sinden. Written by John Lee Mahin, from a play by Wilson Collison. Color. 1 hr., 56 mins. Streaming on Prime, HBO Max, and Hulu.

Mogambo is John Ford’s remake of Red Dust. It’s Clark Gable again, this time as Victor Marswell, a big game hunter whose business is to capture animals for zoos in America. Grace Kelly plays Mary Astor’s role as the lovely wife of the naïve husband, and the vixen is Ava Gardner in Jean Harlow’s old role. It’s still Wilson Collison’s story but set in Africa instead of Indochina. The location filming in Technicolor of the vast plains and wildlife of Kenya is far more visually exciting than the rainy faux-jungle location of Red Dust. Dangerous situations with beasts and scenes of hostile natives make for good tension. But Gable is 21 years older in this film and looks hard-ridden; thus, his affair with the 24-year-old Kelly stretches plausibility and hasn’t the spark of the younger Gable with Mary Astor and Jean Harlow. Gable’s animal-catching profession is so much like John Wayne’s in Howard Hawks’ Hatari (1962) that it must have served as an inspiration. In that film, the 55-year-old Wayne gets it on with 27-year-old Elsa Martinelli. There must be something in the drinking water in Africa. But the film is a good watch, and good fun, although there are unfortunately few Africans in speaking roles—none in English—and except when tribal people get warlike, they’re basically landscape, typical of Hollywood adventure films set in Africa.

Image: Lotte Reiniger/Primrose Productions, 1926

[Deed - Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International - Creative Commons]

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). Written and directed by Lotte Reiniger. Animation with color tinting. German title cards with English subtitles. Original music composed by Wolfgang Zeller. 1 hr., 5 mins. Streaming on Criterion and YouTube.

There were filmmakers in the 1920s who realized that movies were not going to go away, that film was not throwaway art like last month’s Scribner’s magazine. Film was, in fact, open to possibilities hardly imagined before. Unfortunately, many studios did not share this view and, by some estimates, more than seventy percent of films from the silent era are lost. The Adventures of Prince Achmed is the earliest extant animated feature-length film, eleven years earlier than Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), which is commonly called the first. Influenced by early shadow plays, Achmed is a fairy tale in which a sorcerer, in a ruse to possess Dinarzade, the lovely daughter of a wealthy Caliph, creates a magic horse and tries to trade it for the daughter. But Prince Achmed, the Caliph’s son, finds himself on the horse which carries him through the sky to distant lands and battles with supernatural forces. He fights to rescue lovely Peri Banu, ruler of the island of Wak-Wak, from the demons who hold her captive. Reiniger created the film frame by frame over a period of three years with silhouette characters in stop-motion animation on a luminous background with color tinting. It is astonishingly sophisticated for its time. She continued to make silhouette films until her death in 1980. Don’t miss this one.

Quote:

“Courage is not the absence of despair but the decision to continue in it.”

—Béla Tarr

Text copyright 2026 by Steven Huff

Included in this issue:

Entrée : Brigitte Bardot in La vérité

Film Commentary: No Greater Glory.

Classic Film Capsules: History Is Made at Night, and The Big Trail.

Quotes: Brigitte Bardot.

Entrée : Brigitte Bardot in La vérité

It’s typical of celebrity obituaries nowadays: Death is announced by a family member or organization with no mention of when or where the famous person died, or from what cause. Usually, those details do not really matter, and since Brigitte Bardot was a superannuated 91, one may imagine that her heart simply slowed to a halt. Gracefully, one hopes.

By the time this issue appears, her obits and tributes will have flooded the media. So, I won’t bother writing about her life and professional career, her advocacies, politics, and so on. Or that she’d been away from cinema for more than five decades. I’ll just talk briefly about the one film she made that she was proud of, or so she said.

In Henri-Georges Clouzot’s La vérité [The Truth] (1960), Bardot is Dominique Marceau, something of a hedonist. She has a troubled home life, always in the shadow of her high-achieving older sister, who is a superb violinist. She lures away her sister’s fiancé (a prudish young musical prodigy) and, seizing his inner passion, has a volatile affair with him, driving him to such distraction that his career as a conductor is nearly ruined. She loses interest and dumps him, turning to prostitution when she runs short of cash. Later, when she wants him back and he refuses, she shoots him to death before attempting to kill herself.

Was it a crime of passion or premeditated murder? It’s an important distinction because in France in those days murder aforethought was rewarded with the guillotine. The story begins and ends in the courtroom, with frequent backflashes dramatizing her precarious nightlife and love follies, which become dirty laundry picked apart by grandstanding prosecutors while she sits helpless.

Playing a character with wildly erratic emotions, Bardot showed in La vérité that she was not merely a sex icon, but a convincing actor. In fact, if she never made another film after this one, it should have made her reputation solid—at least in a just universe. It was expertly directed by Clouzot, nearing the end of his career, and wonderfully photographed by Armand Thirard. You can find it on YouTube, which has a good quality copy.

Frank Borzage

Film Commentary:

Hollywood’s Most Unusual Anti-War Film: Frank Borzage’s No Greater Glory

By Steven Huff

No Greater Glory (1934). Directed by Frank Borzage. With Frankie Darro, George P. Breakston, Jimmy Butler, Jackie Searl, Donald Haines, Ralph Morgan, Lois Wilson. Written by Ferenc Molnár (novel) and Joe Swerling (screenplay). Cinematography by Joseph H. August. Music composed by R. H. Bassett. Black and white. 1 hr., 14 mins.

Streaming on YouTube

Director Frank Borzage (1897-1961), a native of Salt Lake City, Utah, acted in his first film in 1912 and directed his first short a year later. He won the Oscar for Best Director at the first Academy Awards Ceremony in 1927 for Seventh Heaven. In his long career he directed such films as A Farewell to Arms (1932), Moonrise (1948), History Is Made at Night (1937, see “Classic Film Capsules” below), finishing with a biblical flop, The Big Fisherman (1959).

No Greater Glory opens abruptly with battle footage from Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, a World War I film released in 1930. It cuts to a scene in which a shell-shocked, wounded soldier denounces war and the military leaders and politicians who’d dragged untold numbers of soldiers into the deathtrap of battle. He swears he’ll refuse to fight on, and he’s dragged off to a psychiatric ward. After this unconventional use of another filmmaker’s footage, the film cuts to a classroom of boys, where the teacher tells his students that patriotism is the highest human ideal, similar to a scene in All Quiet

The use of the footage from, and allusion made to, another film seem stark and heavy- handed in stating its antiwar theme. Borzage apparently thought that the main storyline would not get his point across. But it does. No Greater Glory can also be seen in the context of the contemporaneous rearming of Germany with the rise of Hitler. Trouble was also brewing in Austria, where civil war finally broke out a month before the film’s release in March of 1934.

The film approaches its subject in yet another unusual way. While there are a few adults in minor roles, the main characters are children who act in ways reflective of what has been impressed on them by adults. Adapted from the novel A Pál utcai fiúk (The Paul Street Boys) by Hungarian novelist Ferenc Molnár, the story is set in a Budapest neighborhood. A group of youths form a military-style gang to defend their playground in an abandoned lumberyard from encroachment by another gang.

George P. Breakston

Boka (Butler), The Paul Street Boys’ leader, rules and assigns ranks to a motley unit of adolescents. Nemecsek (Breakston), the gang’s smallest member, is the only private in a company of officers, and the only one not permitted the official hat that the other boys wear. The son of a poor tailor (Morgan), he’s physically frail; demeaned by Boka and the others, his name is regularly added to the Black Book for various infractions.

These boys playing soldiers might be comic if their intensions were not so serious. In fact, the only humorous moments are the incessant banana eating, even during battle, by Csonakos (Haines).

Frankie Darro

Their adversaries are a gang of older boys known as the Red Shirts (an apparent allusion to Germany’s Brownshirts), led by the charismatic Feri Ats (Darro). He rules his troops with an iron fist but is also the occasional voice of restraint. His boys meet at night in the city’s Botanical Gardens. Early in the film, the Red Shirts bully some Paul Street Boys who are playing with marbles under a bridge. They also have a mole among the younger boys, Gereb (Searl), who leaves the gate to the playground unlocked so that Feri Ats can steal the Paul Street Boys’ flag. After that incursion, war between the gangs seems inevitable.

Boka organizes two gang members to go with him on a night mission to sneak into the Botanical Gardens and retrieve the flag. Nemecsek begs to go, hoping to distinguish himself, get promoted and earn the all-important hat. They scale the garden’s fence and find themselves on the bank of a creek. Red Shirts are guarding a bridge over the water, but the intruders find a rowboat. Watching the Red Shirts’ meeting from behind trees, they’re stunned to see Debec among them wearing his Paul Street officer’s hat, instructing them how to get access to the playground.

Lois Wilson

Nemecsek, ever loyal and inept, falls in the water twice during the covert operation. He then catches a cold and is confined to bed at home. As he becomes feverish, apparently with pneumonia, his life hangs in the balance. When the inevitable battle breaks out in the playground (as exciting and action-packed as some of the best screen battles), the feverish Nemecsek has a hallucination of Boka ordering him to fight. He leaves his sickbed and sneaks out of the house. In a striking sequence, he staggers several blocks, his face sallow; he joins the battle, and then finally falls exhausted. His mother (Wilson), realizing what he’s done, arrives at the playground to find her son dead. In a heartbreaking scene, she carries him home in her arms, followed by a parade of boys from both gangs.

The antiwar theme of No Greater Glory is underscored in the end when the boys realize that the playground that they fought so hard to preserve is about to be developed for real estate. So, they fought for nothing.

A further irony: two cast members, Jimmy Butler (Boka) and the banana-eating Donald Haines (Csonakos) died fighting in World War II. Ferenc Molnár, author of The Paul Street Boys, left Europe and came to the United States in 1940 to escape the Nazis.

In his review in The New York Times, Mordant Hall pointed to themes of “loyalty, sacrifice, and the glorification of military ideals.” Other critics made similar comments. But I think they missed the point that Borzage’s film is clearly an antiwar allegory, since the momentum of the boys’ actions drives the story toward foreseeable and needless calamity. While it lacks the punch of Stanley Kubrick’s similarly themed The Paths of Glory, it’s still effective and is, perhaps, the most anomalous antiwar story Hollywood ever produced.

Andrew Sarris, while calling Borzage “an uncompromising romanticist,” said he “never needed dream worlds for his suspensions of disbelief. He plunged into the real world of poverty and oppression…. His anti-Nazi films—Little Man, What Now and Three Comrades—were far ahead of their time, emotionally if not politically.” David Thomson wrote that Borzage’s Mortal Storm (1940) “is a more perceptive and frightening study of fascism than, say, The Great Dictator (1940, Charles Chaplin) or the Capra films.”

Other Notes:

Frankie Darro (1917-1976), who plays Feri Ats, began as a child actor in silent films. He was just starting to break into teen roles when he starred in No Greater Glory. In Wild Boys of the Road (1933), he plays Eddie Smith, a high school student in the Depression who takes a turn as a migrant train-hopper to relieve his parents of the burden of having to feed him. Even after returning to Hollywood after serving in WWII, he continued to play in youthful roles, since at 5 foot, 3 inches, he was too short to play many adult roles. He contracted malaria during the war, which affected his health for the rest of his life. It led to heavy drinking to control pain which eventually made him an unreliable actor. In one of his last roles, he wore the bulky costume of Robbie the Robot in Forbidden Planet (1956).

Ralph Morgan (1883-1956), who plays Nemecsek’s father, was an accomplished character actor, especially during Hollywood’s Golden Age, with roles in such films as The Power and the Glory (1933), Magnificent Obsession (1935), and The Life of Emil Zola (1937). His brother Frank Morgan was better known, principally for his role as the wizard in The Wizard of Oz.

Lois Wilson (1894-1988), who plays Nemecsek’s mother, was also a highly accomplished actor, beginning in the silent era through the Golden Age, earning plaudits for roles in The Covered Wagon (1923), the first filming of The Great Gatsby in which she played Daisy (1926), and School for Girls (1934).

Sources and Paths to Further Exploration:

Hall, Mordaunt. “The Screen”. The New York Times, May 5, 1934, p. 22.

“No Greater Glory.” Inforuge No Greater Glory (1934) B&W 1.37:1.

“No Greater Glory, 1934.” Obscure Hollywood.

Sarris, Andrew. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968. Da Capo Press, 1996.

Thomson, David. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Updated and Expanded. Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

• Thanks to Barry Voorhees for editing

• Thanks to Tim Madigan for suggestions

Classic Film Capsules:

History Is Made at Night (1937). Directed by Frank Borzage. With Jean Arthur, Charles Boyer, Colin Clive, Leo Carrillo. Black and white. 1 hr., 37 mins. Streaming on YouTube.

Frank Borzage’s History Is Made at Night is the kind of serio-comic romance that the 1930s decade was famous for, in which love overcomes impossible odds and improbable twists. It’s aimed at audiences who are exceedingly generous in suspending disbelief, and it gives full bloom to Boyer as the romantic lead. Irene Vail (Arthur) is an American woman who wins a divorce decree in London from her insanely jealous and possessive husband Bruce Vail (Clive), a fabulously wealthy British owner of ocean liners. By English law, the divorce will be final only if Irene remains “blameless” for six months. So, Vail pays Irene’s chauffeur to enter her Paris apartment at night, to forcibly embrace and kiss her, so that Vail and his private dick can burst in and catch her in the act. But Paul Dumond (Boyer), a renowned Parisian headwaiter, happens to witness the hubbub through a window. He enters pretending to be a thief, cold cocks the chauffeur, locks Vail and his dick in a closet, and “kidnaps” Irene. Thus begins a romantic intrigue between Dumond and Irene, including a contrived murder rap for Dumond, and the lovers’ escape on one of Vail’s ships that collides with an iceberg. While it lacks the masterful touch that Ernst Lubitsch or Leo McCarey might have given the story, it has the satisfying romance, tension and comic turns that make for a good watch. People of a certain age will remember Leo Carillo, who plays the chef in Dumond’s restaurant, as Pancho in the 1950s TV western series The Cisco Kid. Colin Clive was Dr. Frankenstein in James Whale’s films Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

The Big Trail (1930). Directed by Raoul Walsh. With John Wayne, Marguerite Churchill, Tyrone Power, Sr., Tully Marshall, Ward Bond. Black and White. 2 hrs., 5 mins. Streaming on Prime

In his first starring role, John Wayne plays Breck Coleman, a scout and trapper who leads a wagon train from Missouri to Oregon. On the way, he falls in love with Ruth (Churchill), fights to the death with Lopez (Stevens) and grizzled Red Flack (Power, Sr.) whom he suspects murdered another trapper, and he fights attacking Indians. This film has grandeur, almost startlingly so, especially when one expects the nearly square frames of old pictures and instead sees a panoramic widescreen. Fox Films—which would become 20^th Century Fox a few years later—was experimenting with 70-millimeter cameras. After The Big Trail and a few other wide screen adventures, it was abandoned. Theaters and audiences were not ready for it, and the revenue just didn’t make it worthwhile. But The Big Trail is a bona fide epic, and even though it bombed at the box office, the widescreen format pays off aesthetically, depicting the panoramic western plains with wagon trains stretching to the horizon. I should offer similar plaudits to James Cruz’s 1923 silent The Covered Wagon, with easily as many wagons, and with a love triangle to steepen the plot. But it hasn’t the grandeur of The Big Trail’s wide screen. Sometimes actors seem to be shouting their lines. That’s because it was the early days of sound films and they were trying to be heard by concealed microphones that were nowhere near as efficient as those used later. It was the final film for Tyrone Power, Sr. (father of the more famous and handsomer son) who died shortly after the film was completed. Ward Bond appears as Sid Bascom, in his eighth of 278 film roles. Chief John Big Tree, a Seneca, who had an uncredited Native role, was an actor who later played Chief Pony That Walks in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford, 1949) and acted in some sixty other film roles. He claimed to be one of three Native American chiefs who served as models for the Indian Head nickel.

Quotes: Brigitte Bardot

"Fame has only the span of the day; they who live longest are forgotten first."

“They wanted me to be a myth, and I refused.”

Text copyright 2025 by Steven Huff

In this Issue:

Entrée: On Empty Theaters.

Film Commentary: Since You Went Away.

Classic Film Capsules: Following; Hell’s Angels.

Quotes: Jean Harlow.

Entrée: On Empty Theaters

Once, when I was in college, The Alvin Ailey Dance people came to perform. This was in 1968 or ’69. Five people showed up to see them. My date and I were the only students, and there were three elderly towners sitting together. But the performers were good sports and danced their hearts out as if the hall were packed. Afterward, since I was on the college’s current events committee, I felt I should show them a little hospitality and I took them all out to dinner—except I had around two dollars, so they had to pay for their own meals.

They climbed into my Chevy II Nova, a car that was on its last legs and had holes in the floor. We were four in front, and about six in the back, with one dancer lying across the others’ laps. The most famous member of the company, Judith Jamison, looked at us like a carload of merry lunatics and caught a ride in the towners’ Cadillac. The car sagged and my muffler scraped the pavement. We went to an Italian place, the only restaurant open that late. My date and I had coffee and watched the tired, gloomy dancers eat their spaghetti and meatballs.

That’s the way things go in the arts sometimes, even with the famous.

Some movies that we now call classics were panned when they opened and consequently played to near-empty theaters. Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), now considered one of the greatest films of all time (and the most expensive one made in France up to that point), earned boos and hisses and it crashed. Fritz Lang’s silent classic Metropolis (1927) was likewise booed and panned, and about a third of it was trimmed for later unsuccessful releases. Citizen Kane (1941) played to thin crowds, partly because the Hearst newspapers refused to review or accept ads for it—since it was reputedly about Hearst himself.

A flop means that someone loses money, bigtime. I’m one of the few writers who think that Francis Ford Coppola’s $120 million Megalopolis (2024) is a very good picture. I went to see it at an AMC theater. Five people showed up. It vanished from theaters before I could see it again, and it’s not yet available to stream. Coppola was nearly bankrupted—not for the first time. As equivocal as I am about heavy use of CGI, I think he used it quite suitably. I wonder if I’ll live long enough to enjoy being proven right.

Film Commentary:

War’s Homefront: John Cromwell and David O. Selznick’s Since You Went Away

By Steven Huff

Since You Went Away (1944). Directed by John Cromwell. With Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotton, Shirley Temple, Monty Woolley, Lionel Barrymore, Robert Walker, Hattie McDaniel, Agnes Moorehead, Keenan Wynn. Screenplay by David O. Selznick and Margaret Buell Wilder, adapted from Wilder’s novel. Original musical score by Max Steiner. Cinematography by Stanley Cortez and Lee Garmes. Black and white. 2 hrs, 57 mins.

Streaming on YouTube.

I have never included a Christmas movie in The Moveable Marquee’s curriculum. Yes, I’m aware that it’s December. As far as merch and media go, it’s been December almost since Labor Day. I love the holiday, and I’m not a Grinch. But most Christmas-themed films (not all!) are so ponderously over-watched that babies are probably born already knowing the plots. Anyway, now I give in, sort of. John Cromwell’s Since You Went Away is not a Xmas flick, but it does have significant Yuletide scenes, and I’ve been wanting to write about it—so here we go.

I first saw Since You Went Away on television many years ago in a drastically trimmed-down form; since the complete film falls just short of three hours, it’s impossible to fit into a network TV slot. I watched it again last month at the George Eastman Museum’s Dryden Theatre. The story of a family holding together after Pop goes off to fight in World War II, it’s propaganda of course with a dose of sentimentalism. But it’s a solid story and should not be written off. It has especially good performances by Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotton, and one of my favorite actors, Monty Woolley. And it’s no more sentimental than producer David O. Selznick’s previous epic, Gone with the Wind (1939).

David O. Selznick

The movie is also important as a piece of wartime Americana, even if its attempt to portray a typical American family misses the mark. It’s one of a slate of films that Hollywood made in support of the war effort, most of which were produced by the U. S. War Activities Committee. They were made quite sincerely, although there was also a motive to prove the industry’s patriotism when it was being accused of communist influence. Other films made to support the war were John Ford’s The Battle of Midway (1942), George Stevens’s That Justice Be Done (1945), William Wyler’s The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944), John Huston’s Report from the Aleutians (1943), and a whole program of Frank Capra films, including The Nazi Strike (1943), War Comes to America (1945), and Know Your Enemy—Japan (1945).

All five of these directors enlisted as commissioned officers to make their films. Cromwell, however, born 1886, was probably too old for military service. Independent producer Selznick tried to join, and couldn’t get in. But he was determined to produce a film in support of the war. So, he made Since You Went Away. He exerted considerable creative control, even taking over as director for a short time when Cromwell was ill. Selznick liked to put his money into epics, although this one could have been stronger with about twenty minutes trimmed, and it doesn’t need the overture that is on some copies.

To wade into this movie, you must first step over the statement in bold titles at the beginning: “This is a story of the Unconquerable Fortress: The American Home…1943.” Of course, that is a bromide and a mischaracterization of American homes in 1943 or in any other time.

The story focuses on the Hilton family in an unnamed small town. Pop (who doesn’t actually appear in the film) is an advertising executive who accepts a commission in the Army. His wife, Anne (Colbert) has to assume a tower-of-strength posture, although she has the help of her daughters Jane (Jones) and Brig (Temple). Without Pop’s income, Anne has to rent a room to the grumpy, retired Colonel Smollett (Woolley), and for a while they have to let go of their African American maid, the aptly named Fidelia (McDaniel).

Another lodger, for a brief time, is Lt. Tony Willett (Cotton) who is back in town on leave. He was once Anne’s suitor before she jilted him and married Pop, although he’s remained a family friend. It’s obvious that it’s a supreme effort for him to keep his hands off of her. But he’s too good a guy to cross that line, at least in wartime. In fact, that relationship is one implausible thread in the storyline: Willett takes Anne out for drinks and accompanies her to a dance that the community puts on for soldiers on leave, and yet smalltown tongues do not wag.

Joseph Cotton and Claudet Colbert in Since You Went Away

Then Anne gets a telegram that Pop is missing in action in the Pacific. She faints on the floor, and a pall falls over the house. Nevertheless, a romance develops between Jane (who has become a Red Cross nurse’s aide), and a lonely, awkward young Army corporal named Bill who happens to be the grandson of Col. Smollett. Unfortunately, the colonel has disowned him for flunking out of West Point. Bill apparently has no other family. After their soda-fountain romance, running in the rain and so on, he gets shipped out. Jane, who senses that she won’t see him again, runs desperately beside the train as it pulls away. Beautifully filmed from a train window, it’s one of the classic tracking shots in cinema.

As Yeats wrote, And he had known at last some tenderness, / Before earth took him to her stony care….

Jennifer Jones

Are they a typical American family? Not in terms of their standard of living. Most American homes did not have a live-in maid, nor did they live in houses as large as the Hiltons’. In the 1940s, 23 percent of Americans lived on farms; 25 percent of the workforce were in factories, the rest in other jobs and trades—until 16 million put on uniforms in the war effort.

In perhaps the film’s best scene, an immigrant woman talks to Anne and asks her if she knows the inscription on the Statue of Liberty. Anne doesn’t. She’s obviously never thought of it. The woman recites, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free….”

At one time I would have thought that more sentimental schlock. Now it breaks my heart.

The story wraps too neatly at Christmas. Ho-ho! But there are things that the movie gets right. War is always personal. War, for whatever reason, against whomever, means that people, the ones you love, the innocently gung-ho, with their lives ahead of them, die along with all the ones you do not know. Limbs are lost. Hearts are crushed under an iron heel. Col. Smollett only learns to love his grandson Bill after he’s killed (in fact, he has a Scrooge-like transformation). The dead are the heroes in this film.

The material sacrifices of the Hiltons do not seem comparatively great. Yet, in focusing on the supposed ideal home, the message (though they didn’t know it yet) is that America lucked out in one significant way: our homes were not bombed, our cities were not blitzed or leveled. After the war Americans could take stock of their losses (as terrible as they were) in heated rooms, not by sorting through rubble. (For an epic movie on Americans coming home from that war, see William Wyler’s 1946 classic, The Best Years of Our Lives.)

Since You Went Away was nominated for nine Academy Awards but won only for Best Original Score by Max Steiner.

Other Notes:

Monty Woolley (Col. Smollett) is probably best-known for his role as Sheridan Whiteside in William Keighley’s production of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941), as Priam Farll in Holy Matrimony, and Professor Wutheridge in The Bishop’s Wife (1947). A gay man, he retired with his partner to Saratoga Springs, New York, where he died in 1963 and is buried there in Greenridge Cemetery, where screenwriter and producer Charles Brackett is also interred.

Hattie McDaniel made film history as the first African American to win an Oscar— for Best Supporting Actress as Mammy in Gone with the Wind. At the Academy Award ceremony, she was seated not with the other stars of the film but at a separate table in the back. Her emotional acceptance speech, about rising from humble beginnings and being a credit to her race, was written for her by David O. Selznick’s publicity department. Atlanta officials disallowed her to attend the film’s premiere which was held in that city. Nevertheless, she had a busy career of supporting roles until her death 1952.

Child star Shirley Temple’s career was already on the downward slope when she took the role of Brig. It did not pick up again in any significant way, although she had a substantial role as Philadelphia Thursday in John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948). She quit film in 1950. Many years later President Gerald Ford appointed her Ambassador to Ghana. Eventually she became Chief of Protocol of the United States.

Cinematographer Stanley Cortez was Charles Laughton’s cameraman on The Night of the Hunter, Samuel Fuller’s on Shock Corridor, and, most famously, Orson Welles’ cameraman on The Magnificent Ambersons. He was much sought after and made dozens of other films.

Sources and Paths to Further Exploration:

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. W. W. Norton & Co., 2004.

Harris, Mark. Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War. The Penguin Press, 2014.

Thomson, David. The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.

Yeats, William Butler. ”The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland.” From The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats. Scribner, 1996.

· Thanks to Barry Voorhees for editing.

· Thanks to Tim Madigan for suggestions.

Classic Film Capsules:

Following (1998) Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. With Jeremy Theobald, Alex Haw, Lucy Russell, John Nolan. Streaming on Criterion, Mubi, Tubi, Prime and other services.

Jeremy Theobald plays the Young Man, an aspiring author with a bad case of writer’s block. He takes to following people around London: No one in particular (as he explains to a police detective in the film’s Prologue—so we know he’s going to get into trouble), but anyone who looks interesting, just to see what they’re doing, where they’re going. It’s innocent until it becomes an obsession, which is where the trouble starts. The film’s non-linear storyline, which moves back and forth and sideways like so many checkers, is so skillfully structured that it keeps us on edge for the whole of the brief, sixty-nine-minute film. He follows a man named Cobb (Haw) into a restaurant who suddenly turns the tables on him and draws him into his own web of burglarizing apartments. Cobb teaches him the ropes and even imparts a philosophy of pilfering, of interrupting the victims’ quotidian lives, “making them see all the things they took for granted…. You take it away and show them what they had.” But Cobb is skillfully drawing the unsuspecting Young Man into deeper intrigues which include theft from an organized crime boss, and becoming the patsy when the police close in. The first feature-length film from Christopher Nolan, director of Dunkirk and Oppenheimer, Following is a small masterpiece of intrigue. Its nonlinear structure is similar to his Memento (2000).

Hell’s Angels (1930). Directed by Howard Hughes, James Whale and Edmund Goulding. With Ben Lyon, James Hall, Jean Harlow, John Darrow, Lucien Prival. Streaming on Fawesome, Tubi and Prime (all with ads, unfortunately).

This movie is notable on several points. It’s the first film that Howard Hughes both produced and directed—with the help of co-directors James Whale and Edmund Goulding. It includes Jean Harlow’s first starring role after a series of bit parts in silent films. And with a nearly $4 million-dollar price tag ($73 million in today’s dollars) it was the second-most expensive film made in Hollywood up to that point. Although it was a major hit, it did not earn back its enormous costs until later releases. Hell’s Angels is the story of two British brothers Roy and Monte Rutledge who join the RAF in World War I. Roy (Hall) is a moral and honorable man in love with party-girl Helen (Harlow), convincing himself against all evidence that she is a “good girl.” Monte (Lyon), on the other hand, is a womanizing cad and moral relativist, and he sees her more clearly. (Hall, Lyon and Harlow are all Americans, and do not sound the least bit like Brits.) But Monte earns himself a reputation in the air corps as a coward, having chickened out of a mission in which the pilot who took his place was killed. To counter that smear on his character, Monte volunteers for a suicide mission to bomb a German ammunition depot—and Roy goes with him to make sure he completes the job. Hughes began working on the film in 1927, assembling authentic aircraft and stunt pilots. (The air battle sequences are very impressive and exciting.) But before he could complete it, talking movies arrived. He reshot most of the picture as a talkie—delaying its release and running up the costs. Harlow’s role is not very demanding, but it put her on track for a career of twenty-four more films until her death in 1937 at age 26. Some night scenes have color tinting and are Harlow’s only appearance in color.

Quotes: Jean Harlow

“I like any dog that makes me look good when it stands next to me.”

“Don’t give me a book for Christmas. I already have a book.”

Text copyright 2025 by Steven Huff

Contents of this Issue:

Entrée: My Modus Operandi, and the Beginning of Narrative Film

Film Commentary: To Help a Man Die: Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry

Classic Film Capsules: Jason and the Argonauts; The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser

Quote: Brian Desmond Hurst

Entrée: My Modus Operandi, and the Beginning of Narrative Film

Occasionally I like to restate the mission of The Moveable Marquee. When I began in 2023 my idea was to draw attention to classic films that are less often written about in mainstream reviews and commentaries. That is still my central motive. Therefore, you won’t find commentaries here on Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, The African Queen, Stagecoach, Chinatown, or Citizen Kane, although I love those films. I used to teach a course at Rochester Institute of Technology, “Writing about American Film,” and I’ve screened Casablanca more times than I can remember.

Film, and I mean worldwide cinema from its dawn with the Lumiere brothers until the present day, is an enormous body of literature, and any attempt at film literacy will enrich the mind and especially the soul. I aim my commentaries at anyone who is interested film, from scholars to those with a mere budding fascination. And I welcome responses from anyone.

Georges Méliès

Those first films by the Lumiere brothers were less than a minute long, on such subjects as a crowd of workers leaving the Lumiere factory, and a train arriving at a station—which startled their audience and made them jump out of their seats thinking they were about to be run over. Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, writing about those first films, said, “for the first time in the history of the arts, in the history of culture, man found the means to take an impression of time.”

For me, narrative film begins with Georges Méliès, a French stage magician who attended the Lumière brothers’ historic first public screening in 1895. Right away he realized film’s potential in magic performances and special effects, and as a vehicle for story. You can find much of his surviving work on YouTube and Prime, including my favorite, A Trip to the Moon (1902).

The moon, by the way, figures wonderfully in the end of Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry, the focus of my film commentary in this issue.

Film Commentary:

To Help a Man Die: Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry

By Steven Huff

Taste of Cherry (1997). Directed by Abbas Kiarostami. With Homayoun Ershadi, Safar Ali Moradi, Mir Hossein Noori, Abdolrahman Bagheri. Written by Abbas Kiarostami. Cinematography by Homayun Payvar. Music: “Saint James Infirmary,” performed by Louis Armstrong. In Persian and Kurdish with English Subtitles. Color. 1 hr., 35 mins.

Streaming on Criterion and HBO Max

Abbas Kiarosami (1940-2016) was among the vanguards of the film division of the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (also including Amir Naderi and Noureddin Zarrinkelk), which in the 1970s became a center of Iranian filmmaking. Over his career, his influence increased dramatically, not only in Iran but in world cinema. In 1997 Phillip Lopate wrote, “In terms of international art cinema (though Americans don’t know it yet), we are living in the Age of Kiarostami.” Lopate credits Kiarostami with thoughtful, emotionally powerful work which “reinvents neorealism (amateur actors, slice-of-life stories),” with modest budgets and large themes.

The films, Where is the Friend’s House (1987), And Life Goes On (1992), and Through the Olive Trees (1994), make up his Koker Trilogy, focusing on the people of a small Iranian town, and are landmarks of Iranian cinema. The Taste of Cherry (1997), which won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival the same year, is generally considered his greatest film. It stars Homayoun Ershadi in his first role, who, unfortunately, died on November 11 of this year.

Abbas Kiarostami

Taste of Cherry opens with a middle-aged man (Ershadi) driving slowly around a suburb of Teheran. He offers a ride to a young Kurd (Moradi) in the uniform of the Iranian Army. The soldier is grateful to get the lift because he must report to his barracks by 6 pm, and it’s now 5. But the driver—who introduces himself as Badii—seems to have something up his sleeve. While promising to deliver the soldier to his barracks on time, Badii drives him into the sandy hills outside of the city, stops the car on a dirt road and makes a proposition. He points to a hole that he’s dug beside the road and says that he’s going to climb into it that night and commit suicide by taking a lethal quantity of sleeping pills. He wants the soldier to come back in the morning and check on him. If Badii doesn’t respond, the soldier is to use a shovel to throw dirt over him, then help himself to money that the man will have left there—200,000 Tomans (about $200). The soldier refuses, but Badii keeps pressing him until he panics and bolts from the car, running back over the hills toward Teheran.

Next, Baadii picks up a young Afghan seminarian (Noori) and makes the same offer. The seminarian tells him flatly and firmly that suicide is against Islamic law and that he won’t help him; instead, he tries to deter him. Badii, who is becoming peevish at this point, snorts that he doesn’t want a religious lecture. He does not explain to anyone his anguish or why he wants to end his life. What’s going on deep in his mind and soul is one of the enigmas that nourish the story.

Kiarostami’s juxtaposing Badii’s plight with soldiers marching though the hills, with men on heavy machinery digging up earth—mechanical aspects of ordinary life—emphasizes his insulation.

Finally, Badii picks up a kindly old taxidermist (Bagheri) on his way to his job at the Natural History Museum. The elderly man agrees to do the deed only because his son is ill and he needs the money for his care. But as they ride, the old man tells him a story of a time when he himself, after a fight with his wife, was going to end his life. One morning before sunrise he was about to hang himself from a mulberry tree when he tasted some of the fruit, and the sweet sensation moved him. As he ate the berries the sun was rising. “What a sun, what greenery!” He took mulberries home and gave them to his wife and they ate them together. After that experience, he came to appreciate sunrises, the moon and stars: the taste of life.

“But you want to give it all up,” he says. “You want to give up the taste of cherries?”

The old man’s story, essentially a philosophy of awakening, gets through to Badii to some extent, or at least makes him uncertain of what he’s going to do. After dropping the taxidermist off at the gates of the museum, he suddenly turns and drives back and, quite earnestly, asks the old man to throw two stones at him in the morning to rouse him. The old man, a bit annoyed at being distracted from his work, replies that he’ll throw three.

That night Badii takes a taxi out to the spot in the hills. The camera follows the taxi ponderously in the dark. Badii gets out and sits on the roadside and lights a cigarette and then climbs into his hole. Thunder rolls and it begins to rain. The moon is rolling through the clouds above the lights of Teheran.

Perhaps the larger unknown in this story is not what motivates Badii to commit suicide, but whether he actually goes through with it. In fact, Kiarostami doesn’t end the film with the scene of Badii climbing into his hole, but with a sudden switch to grainy video footage of the film crew working in broad daylight and Ershadi himself walking casually about, offering a cigarette to Kiarostami, all to the music of Louis Armstrong playing “Saint James Infirmary.” This ending has been controversial and puzzling to many. I think that it serves as a coda that does two things at once: it ironically avoids closure, that is, we are not to know if Badii ends his life; and it tells us that, essentially, this is just a story.

Joseph Campbell, in a PBS interview with Bill Moyers, said that people do not actually seek meaning in their lives, but rather a full experience of being alive. The taxidermist (who, ironically, deals professionally with dead animals) is a bit of a sage. He doesn’t give Badii a philosophical reason to stay alive, rather his is a wisdom of sensual experience, the astonishment of sweetness and sunrise, sensations available to anyone who does not reject them. Badii may be too closed up to hear such things.

That he’s so intent on enlisting another person in his purpose suggests that he is at least half-hoping to be talked out of it, even though he rejects the attempts by the seminarian and the taxidermist to do just that. Yet, there is his ardent request that the taxidermist make a greater effort to rouse him. And there we see that this film is as much about Badii’s isolation, his loneliness—a man who can offer no more information about himself than that he wishes to die—as it is about suicide. Maybe he’s of two minds, one which wants to die and one which wants to live. I knew a man once who, distraught, attempted suicide, and when he woke up later in a hospital, was ebulliently happy that his life had been spared—almost as if there were another self who had tried to kill him.

Taste of Cherry is a masterpiece of storytelling, and of ambiguity. It’s not that it stands alone as a film about someone on the edge of suicide. Yet Kiarostami handles the subject adroitly, without sentimentality or melodrama. He realizes that when an individual reaches the brink of suicide, rational, moral, or philosophical entreaties may not help. And he knows better than to give us answers. Instead, he shows us a character who professes his resolve to die, while also trying fervently to involve others—ostensibly sane people—in the deed, like planning a bank robbery and inviting your shrink to go along. Badii might take the pills. He might take only enough to sleep. Or he might just lie there in the rain and look at the moon.

Sources and Paths to Further Exploration:

Erfani, Farhang. Iranian Cinema and Philosophy: Shooting Truth. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Dabashi, Hamid. Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present and Future. Verso, 2001.

Nafisy, Hamid. “Hamid Naficy on Abbas Kiarostami.” Criterion video essay, 2020.

Lopate, Phillip. “Abbas Kiarostami: Through the Olive Trees and Taste of Cherry.”. My Affair with Art House Cinema: Essays and Reviews. Columbia University Press, 2024.

· Thanks to Barry Voorhees for editing

· Thanks to Tim Madigan for suggestions.

Classic Film Capsules:

Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Directed by Don Chaffey. With Todd Armstrong, Nancy Kovack, Laurence Naismith, Gary Raymond, Nigel Green. Streaming on Prime and Tubi.

I saw this film last month at the Dryden Theater at the George Eastman Museum in a series on stop-motion animation. They screened Martin Scorsese’s personal print—his vast film collection is stored in their vault. Anway, it was the first time I’d seen it since I was a kid. I’m not being merely nostalgic to say that this story of Jason (Armstrong) and the bewitching Medea (Kovack) who betrays her royal family and all of Colchis by helping him to steal the Golden Fleece is pure pleasure. Unlike in the myths, it is more Jason’s prowess with the sword than Medea’s witchcraft that enables him to defeat the hydra serpent and the army of skeletons. Niall MacGinnis and Honor Blackman play a comic Zeus and Hera looking down on the whole mess. Even Hercules (Green) is more buffoon than hero. But what is especially wonderful about this film is the intricate work of the stop-motion animation master Ray Harryhausen, who makes the skeletal warriors and the giant bronze Talos warrior happen. In this era of computer- generated images, one might think these special effects look dated, but they should be admired for an enormous accomplishment, done the hard way. (I should mention that stop-motion animation is still in use by some filmmakers.) The fact is, the miraculous is in the eyes of the beholder: sixty-two years ago, this movie made our eyes pop out.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), also known as Every Man for Himself and God Against All (1974) Directed by Werner Herzog. With Bruno S., Walter Ladengast, Brigitte Mira. West Germany. Streaming on Criterion, Fandor, Tubi, Prime, and other services.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is based on “historical” events, despite some disagreement concerning what elements of the story actually occurred. In any case, Kaspar Hauser (1812-1833) was truly an enigmatic and tragic individual. Hauser, so the story goes, was kept chained in a dark cellar for the early years of his life, during which time he never experienced fresh air, never saw a tree. At the age of seventeen his captor dumped him in the middle of Nuremburg with a letter stating that he, Hauser, wished to become a valiant cavalryman like his father. He was barely able to walk or speak—an extreme case of arrested development. He came under the care of schoolmaster Friedrich Daumer, who did his best to educate and socialize the unfortunate young man despite his impulsiveness, manipulativeness and seeming desire to retaliate against society. While in Daumer’s care he suffered a head injury from an attack he claimed was perpetrated by his original captor and was stabbed in the chest in the park by a person unknown. This is the basic story that Werner Herzog tells. Some scholars and doctors claim his wounds may have been self-inflicted to regain public sympathy that he felt was waning, while others cast doubt on the story of his early confinement. Nevertheless, Herzog’s film is engrossing, a bit in the vein of Francois Truffaut’s historical film Wild Child (1970) about a boy rescued from the wilderness in eighteenth century France and the doctor who attempts to acclimate him to society. In the role of Hauser, Herzog cast Bruno S. (1932-2010), the son of a prostitute who beat him and abandoned him to be raised in institutions. While a child, Nazi doctors experimented on Bruno, as they did on many children they considered mentally deficient. He became a musician and painter while working menial jobs to support himself and had a sporadic film career, including in Herzog’s Stroszek (1977). In the Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, he shows himself a capable actor. While he was older than the real Hauser, he had an essentially awkward and off-putting personality resemblant of the character he played.

#

Text: Copyright 2025 by Steven Huff

Quotes: “I am trisexual. The army, the navy, and the household cavalry.” —Brian Desmond Hurst.

Contents:

Entree: On Film Adaptations

Classic Film Commentary: “An Eternity of Sand. Hiroshi Teshigahara’ Woman in the Dunes.”

Classic Film Capsules: Cabiria (1914), The Barbary Coast (1935).

ENTRÉE: Film Adaptation Nirvana

When I was an undergrad, I was on a committee that chose films for a series that the college screened once or twice a month. We had some money to throw around which seemed like big bucks to me then. We were a good group, and those meetings were among my fondest memories of my sophomore year. I remember we showed, among many others, Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, Jirí Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew. And, for general interest, David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago.

A few days after Zhivago was screened I was sitting in a faculty office waiting for my advisor to show up, and I got into a conversation with an instructor in the English Department. She hated the movie version of Zhivago. She ran down a list of complaints, mostly about melodramatics. But what stuck in my memory is what she said about a scene near the end of the movie when the Zhivago is riding a city bus and he thinks he sees Lara walking down the street. He goes bonkers, rushes off the bus to chase after her, has a heart attack, and dies.

“That didn’t happen in the novel,” she said, with a sip of vinegar.

I don’t remember how I responded. But I’ve thought about that last point many times when I’ve heard people make similar complaints about films liberally adapted from novels. Granted, a film’s fidelity to a novel, on whatever level, is a virtue. And many novels have been shamefully butchered on the screen—especially in the old days of the Hollywood studio system when a whole team of writers might pick a novel apart like buzzards on a dead cow. Characters were scrubbed clean, endings softened, and any breath of sexuality erased until, in some cases, the story dropped dead from antisepsis. Those old, botched surgeries gave adaptations a bad name.

And yet if a film adaptation’s only function is to illustrate a novel, what, really, is the point? Film is a medium apart from a novel or short story. A director must work with different tools to tell the story. For example, a film does not have the advantage of internal dialogue (except for sometimes ponderous voiceover), and another dramatic method must be found to convey that information. And, if a director is any kind of filmmaker, they have an interpretation of their own to extrapolate from a story.

If fidelity to a novel were the prime consideration, Guillermo del Toro’s new Frankenstein (a good film, I think, though the special effects are a bit overwrought; but that is the language of horror now) would not be possible. Nor, for that matter, would any of the other film versions of Mary Shelley’s novel, even, especially, the first, made by Edison Studios in 1910 (see the lobby card above). Usually, complaints by the adaptation purists boil over when a film is new in theaters; after a time, the grumbling fades.

I suppose that for some readers I’m flogging a unicorn that died long ago.

In my commentary this time, I focus on Woman in the Dunes, by the great Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara, adapted from a novel by Kôbô Abe who also worked on the screenplay. Since it was a popular novel which appeared only a couple years before the film and was still fresh in the public’s mind, it is well that Abe was involved in the process.

***

Just a note: I do not use AI in writing The Moveable Marquee, and I do my own research.

An Eternity of Sand: Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes.

By Steven Huff

Woman in the Dunes (1964). Directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara. With Eiji Okada, Kyôko Kishida, Kôji Mitsui, Hiroko Itô. Screenplay by Kôbô Abe and Eiko Yoshida, from a novel by Abe. Music composed by Tôru Takemitsu. Cinematography by Hiroshi Segawa. In Japanese with English subtitles. Black and White. 2 hrs., 27 mins.

Streaming on Criterion and Prime

Woman in the Dunes, based on a novel by Kôbô Abe, opens in a Japanese desert bordering the ocean. Director Hiroshi Teshigahara gives us a highly textured landscape of sand, constantly in motion from the sea wind. Niki Jumpei (Okada), an entomologist from Tokyo on a three-day holiday from teaching, trudges over the dunes, studying sand beetles. Niki is a determined man. His ambition, as he says later in the film, is to find a new variant of the species and get his name in textbooks. He will have made his mark in life. We see insects wiggle from the sand into his hands. He impales them with pins and boxes them.

Absorbed in his work, he forgets time. Some members of a local village tell him that he’s missed the last bus back to the city and that they will find a home for him to spend the night. There is already an eerie sense when they lead him to a sandy cliff, and he climbs down a rope ladder into a deep pit where a lovely young woman (Kishida) invites him into her small, sparse, wooden house. She feeds him dinner and offers him a bed for the night. Then she goes out to shovel sand which constantly silts down the walls of the pit and encroaches on the house. He watches her load sand into wooden vats which the villagers haul up the cliff with ropes.

Eiji Okada

Niki offers to help. She says, “No, not on the first night.”

He laughs. “But I’m only staying one night.”

The sand that the men are collecting from her, she says, has too much salt content to be sold for construction, but they sell it cheaply on the black market. He realizes he’s in a rarefied environment and he’s full of questions. He asks how long she’ll shovel.

“Till morning,” she says.

“Where is everyone…your family?”

“Last year a storm swallowed up my husband and daughter.”

Swallowed up? He looks around, realizing her family is somewhere nearby, under an avalanche of sand.

“If we stop shoveling,” she says, “the house will get buried.”

In the morning, the rope ladder is gone. Little by little Niki comes to realize that he is a prisoner. The woman (who is not named in the film) tells him the work is too much for her alone and she needs him. She is obviously lonely, starved for sex, and overworked. But he is frantic to escape and wants out. He has a job—and a life.

Kyôko Kishida

Thus begins a time of torment for both, as Niki vents his frustrations on the woman, becoming violent. They’re given weekly rations by the men above that keep them nourished, even cigarettes and liquor (shochu), and he and the woman eventually become lovers. But all his attempts to free himself end in frustration. The village men laugh and taunt him from above when he begs them to let him out. At one point they say they’ll let him go if he and the woman have sex out in the open where they can watch. Niki is desperate enough to believe them, and he tries to drag the woman out of the house to put on the show. “We’re just animals anyway,” he yells at her. But when she fights him off, he realizes in his humiliation the futility of his struggle. Slowly, begrudgingly, Niki resigns himself to the Sisyphean task of shoveling sand; he has become like the beetles he studied, trapped in a universe of sand that ponderously silts down on them. In a sense, he has become the variation of the species that he had sought.

With nothing but sand around them, the passage of time seems ambiguous, although months pass. As Abe said in an interview with Nancy S. Hardin, “We feel time only when we see the changes of space. Unless we can catch that change of space, we cannot feel time.”

When the woman becomes desperately ill with a pain in her abdomen, he hollers to the men for help. They come and check her over and realize that she is pregnant and probably has an ectopic pregnancy. They hoist her out of the pit wrapped in a futon and take her to a doctor. After they’re gone, he sees that they have left the ladder in place. He climbs out, walks about the sandy landscapes, and gazes at the ocean. Then he climbs back down. He has accepted his place in a primal order.

On one level, Woman in the Dunes is an erotic fantasy—with its isolated setting for two lovers thrown together in a primitive situation without normative social constraints. And, of course, it is a tale of entrapment. On a more important level, it is an existential allegory of the human condition. Had the story been set in a forest or other wilderness location, and had the pit been merely one of earth and mud, the effect would have been quite different. Sand, especially in motion and mutable, tells a very different story. It says something about the state of being, not only of these characters, but of us all. It is not simply that it provides the milieu in which Niki finds freedom in release from the attachments of modern life—all its maze of licenses, contracts, IOUs and other officialdom which he complains about in a monologue early in the film before he is trapped. Sand also represents eons of time and contradicts the illusion that many of us have that we are somehow operating apart from eternity.

Hiroshi Teshigahara

Woman in the Dunes is Hiroshi Teshigahara’s second feature, and many consider it his masterpiece. According to Peter Cowie, Abe’s novels “found their perfect director” in Teshigahara, who also filmed Abe’s Pitfall (1962), The Face of Another (1966), and Man without a Map (1968).

The film won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes and Teshigahara was nominated for an Oscar for Best Director which he lost to Robert Wise for The Sound of Music,

Hiroshi Teshigahara was a film critic before directing his own films. He made twenty-four films in all, including—in addition to the four Kôbô adaptations— two episodes of a TV series, Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman; as well as documentaries, including a short film on the painter Hokusai, and Antonio Gaudí, about a Catalan architect. For some years he left filmmaking to take up pottery and became director of the Sogetsu school of flower arrangement. He died of leukemia in in 2001 at the age of 74.

Other Notes:

The most noted role for Eiji Okada (1920-1995) was as Lui in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959).

Kyôko Kishida (1930-2006) acted in 175 films and TV episodes, including one of Yasujirô Ozu’s masterpieces, Autumn Afternoon.

Tôru Takemitsu, (1930-1996) who composed the score for Woman in the Dunes, also composed for Akira Kurosawa’s Ran and Masaki Kobayashi’s Harakiri

Sources and Paths to Further Exploration:

Bergen, Ronald. “Hiroshi Teshigahara.”´Obituary. The Guardian, .25 Apr 2001.

Cowie, Peter. Japanese Cinema: A Personal Journey. Stone Bridge Press, 2022.

Hardin, Nancy S., and Abé Kobo. “An Interview with Abé Kobo.” Contemporary Literature 15, no. 4 (1974): 439–56. https://doi.org/10.2307/1207771.

Mellen, Joan. Voices from the Japanese Cinema. Liveright, 1975.

Shatnoff, Judith. “Woman in the Dunes (Suna No Onna) by Hiroshi Teshigahara.” Film Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1964): 43–46. https://doi.org/10.2307/1210940.

Thanks to Barry Voorhees for editing.

Thanks to Tim Madigan for suggestions.

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Classic Film Capsules:

Cabiria (1914) Directed by Giovanni Pastrone . With Italia Almirante-Manzini, Lidia Quaranta, Bartolomeo Pagano, Umberto Mozzato. Silent. Black and White. Italian. 2 hrs. 6 mins. Streaming on Prime.

In the time of the Second Punic War (218-201 BCE), Cabiria (Quaranta), the small child of wealthy Sicilian parents, survives an eruption of Mount Etna, but is then captured by pirates and sold to the high priest of Carthage for sacrifice to Moloch. As she is about to be cast into the fiery furnace, she is rescued by a Roman spy named Flavius Axilla (Mozzato) and his faithful slave Maciste (Pagano). But they lose her in the mayhem of their escape. Years later, as Carthage wages its battles with Rome, Cabiria, under the alias Elissa, is now the slave of Sophonisba (Almirante-Manzini), the indolent daughter of Carthaginian general Hasdrubal, brother of Hannibal. When Sophonisba has a dream that Elissa, now a lovely young woman, is the notorious escaped Cabiria, she is once again condemned to the fire, and tension flares. Divided into five episodes, and filmed in Italy just before World War I, Cabiria was one of the earliest film epics. The sets are stunning and, for their time, innovative. There are actually some modest and gentle tracking shots (very unusual for the time, in fact they used to be called “Cabiria movements”), and effective double exposures. In all, it is a dazzling production which made a star of Pagano. Reputedly, it inspired D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1918) and the epics of Cecil B. DeMille. Amazon Prime is streaming a restored version, apparently complete, and the images are sharp. Title cards are in English. With piano accompaniment by Jacques Gauthier based on an original score.

The Barbary Coast (1935) Directed by Howard Hawks. With Miriam Hopkins, Edward G. Robinson, Joel McCrea, Brian Donlevy, Walter Brennan, Frank Craven, Harry Carey. Black and White. 1 hr., 31 mins. Streaming on Criterion, Prime, Plex, Tubi.

Mary Rutledge (Hopkins) steps off a boat in 1850s San Francisco as a mail-order bride, only to find that the goldminer she was going to marry had been murdered after losing all his money gambling. He was a sore loser, people tell her. It’s winter, and the sordid streets are knee deep in mud, the air a dense fog. Rutledge claims she is too plucky to give up and go home to New York; actually, she hasn’t the money to reboard the ship. She goes to work running the gambling wheel in a casino where her intended husband was killed. It is owned by wealthy, psychopathic Luis Chamalis. Robinson plays Chamalis to perfection—a man who hasn’t got a decent molecule in his body (even nastier than his role as Johnny Rocco in Key Largo). His chief henchman Knuckles Jacoby (Donlevy) doesn’t balk at murder when enforcing his boss’s rule over the whole town where people live in fear. Chinese people are treated terribly in this story, but it is probably accurate for the time and place. Chamalis has everything he wants except Rutledge. New danger starts when she falls in love with a handsome, benevolent, prospector (McCrea) and Chamalis is bent on revenge. Harry Carey plays the sheriff who deputizes vigilantes against Chamalis. Hawks’s film is a stirring costume drama adapted from Herbert Asbury’s novel by legendary screenwriter Ben Hecht with Charles MacArthur. As a team, they wrote the classic comedy Twentieth Century, among other films, and The Front Page, the 1928 play that has enjoyed many film adaptations.

And, by the way:

Knowing Knott: Essays on an American Poet, which I edited and wrote the Introduction to, has been reprinted. Bill Knott (1940-2014) was an iconoclastic and highly influential poet and an extraordinary character. Included are essays by Star Black, Stephen Dobyns, Jonathan Galassi, Timothy Liu, Thomas Lux, Michael Waters, and others. Also included are six color-plate pages of Knott’s artwork.

16.95 126 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-9976305-3-4.

Available directly from Tiger Bark Press: https://www.tigerbarkpress.com. Otherwise, I recommend ordering through an independent bookseller rather than from Amazon.

Text copyright 2025 by Steven Huff

Issue # 57 / November 1, 2025

Contents of This Issue:

Entrée: Refound Cinema

Film Commentary: “Ghetto Verité: Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep.”

Classic Film Capsules: The Annihilation of Fish; Battling Butler; The Young One.

Quotes: from Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Douglas Sirk

***

Entrée: Refound Cinema

Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker recently about the 39^th annual film festival in Bologna, Italy, held this past June. It’s called Il Cinema Ritrovato, or in English, “refound cinema,” where old films are screened. Most are prints that have been restored locally at the laboratory of a film archive called the Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna. On the program were films as varied as Charles Chaplin’s 1925 The Gold Rush (there are more versions than one), Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1978).

A print of Georges Méliès’s Le Raid Paris-Monte Carlo en Automobile (1905, about an auto trip across France) was screened. Méliès (1861-1938), a professional stage magician, began making films shortly after seeing the Lumière brother’s historic first public screening of a motion picture in Paris in 1895. He may have been the first to give narrative structure to any film. It inspired Lane to reflect on an issue that I’ve thought about many times myself.

Lane asks, “Were we not being spun back in time and granted a chance…to hook up with the original audience? Did we not drink in this fizzy little movie as they had drunk it, a hundred and twenty years ago?” He says that to ask that question, one must confront another question that concerns all art restorations, in regard to audience. “I can kid myself that I enjoyed ‘Le Raid’ just as a Parisian would have done in 1905; as likely as not, though, we were laughing at different jokes.”

Lives were different then. Assumptions and experiences were different. The world was different. Though I react deeply to William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, I’m not experiencing it as someone did in 1946 who had just returned from World War II, or someone whose loved one didn’t make it back, or indeed, anyone who lived through the war. I could go on at great length about this issue.

And then there are films, many of them, that never had anything like a full audience in their own time. One is the previously mentioned Killer of Sheep, the subject of my commentary in this issue. For the first thirty years of its existence, it had no effective commercial distribution.

***

By the way, if you haven’t seen Blue Moon, I highly recommend it. A new film by director Richard Linklater is always an event. But this biopic with Ethan Hawke as Lorenz Hart at the party following the opening of Oklahoma!—after Richard Rogers had dropped him and replaced him with Oscar Hammertstein—is a masterwork. Don’t miss it.

Film Commentary:

Ghetto Verité: Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep

By Steven Huff

Killer of Sheep (1978). Produced, directed, written and filmed by Charles Burnett. With Henry Gayle Sanders, Kaycee Moore, Charles Bracy, Angela Burnett, Eugene Cherry, Jack Drummond. Music by various artists—see below. Black and White. 1 hr., 20 mins.

Streaming on Criterion and Prime.

About twenty-five minutes into Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, two men knock on the door of a shabby white house in the Watts section of Los Angeles. When Stan (the story’s main character) comes out to talk to them, they offer him the chance to join them in an ugly crime caper. They want a third partner, someone who won’t “blush to murder.” He’d make some money. Stan refuses, angrily. When his wife (Moore) comes out and hears what’s being discussed she rages at them. One of the men says. “We’re just trying to help the n----- out.”

Killer of Sheep goes in a different direction from the Blaxploitation films of its era, or most American films of the time with prominent black characters. Although two men attempt to lure Stan into a crime, no murders or other major crimes actually occur in the film. No police presence. Just people struggling to get by. Initially, the film seems loose, and it’s hard to see where the story is going; but then the medley of scenes falls subtly into place.

Charles Burnett Photo: Studio Harcourt

Stan (Sanders) is certainly struggling financially but he’s not going to risk getting in trouble along with two crooks packing guns.

“Man, I ain’t poor,” he protests to a friend. “I give things away to the Salvation Army. You don’t give nothin’ away to the Salvation Army if you’re poor.”

There are numerous signs that money is scarce for Stan and his family: holes in the living room wall, the kitchen table is paint splattered. He doesn’t have a car that runs or a bank account. He must cash his paychecks at a local liquor store. His job in a slaughterhouse (the source of the film’s title) is apparently steady, though probably not well paid. The disturbing scenes there, the pitiless hanging of sheep by their legs, cutting their throats, and carting away the guts, symbolize how harshly and quickly life can end. Stan is exhausted, depressed, and can’t sleep; he’s distant from his wife, which leaves her frustrated. “I’m workin’ myself into my own hell,” he tells his friend Bracy.

“When you last been in church?” Bracy asks. Stan thinks for a moment before answering, “Back home.” He doesn’t elaborate on where that place was, but we get a sense of the family’s economic and racial displacement. Where they live isn’t quite home. Burnett himself was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi before his family migrated to LA in search of work.

Most of what Stan gets into is unlucky. He buys a used car engine off the kitchen floor of a shady character. He and his friend Eugene lug it down three flights of exterior stairs and set it in the bed of Eugene’s pickup truck. As soon as the truck lurches into gear, the engine falls on the pavement. The block is cracked. It’s useless. They drive away, leaving the engine in the street. One of the film’s most striking progressions follows that fiasco. Stan is walking home through an alley while high above his head kids are leaping from the roof of one building to another. There’s reckless felicity in youth. Things get serious when you’re an adult. “Life is too soon over,” Stan says.

In small ways we see Stan begin to lift out of his depression. Cuddling with his daughter in his lap. Slow dancing with his wife to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth.” By the end he wears a sardonic smile at work as he herds sheep to slaughter, while Washington sings “Unforgettable.”

Henry Gayle Sanders and Kaycee Moore

Killer of Sheep has the feel of cinema verité, its black and white documentary style alive with the tempo of everyday life in the neighborhood: kids in a vacant lot throwing rocks at a freight train, Stan talking through his blues, listening to his wife’s frustrations. A drive to the racetrack in Eugene’s car (the only scene filmed outside of Watts) ends with a flat tire and no spare; they drive back home on the rim.

Director Burnett made his film—which Jonthan Rosenbaum says is “conceivably the single best feature on ghetto life”—on a succession of weekends (continuity must have been a nightmare) in 1972 and ‘73 with mostly non-professional actors. He submitted it for his master’s thesis at UCLA. Burnett was part of the so-called LA Rebellion at the time, which was a group of Black film students who got together and decided that the industry was not going to give them the opportunity to make realistic films about the Black experience in America and that they were going to have to do it on their own. Mutual moral support.

The results were, in addition to Killer of Sheep, Haile Gerima’s Harvest 3000 Years, Jamaa Fanaka’s Emma Mae, and Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts. An enormous output from a small group. And those were just the first films from these four: they all went on to further filmmaking careers. When Killer of Sheep premiered in 1977, it had no real commercial distribution partly due to legal battles over rights to music used in the soundtrack, pieces that truly enrich the film, including Paul Robeson’s “The House I Live In”, “Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues,” Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Reasons,” Elmore James’s “I Believe,” Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto #4,” and, most poignantly, Dinah Washington’s songs. It scored a review in the New York Times by Janet Maslin, who knocked it down for monotony and a lack of coherence.

It was generally seen only at film festivals until 2007, when a restoration and transfer to 35mm (from its original 16mm) breathed new life into it, and then it played the arthouse circuit in more than two-hundred cities. Cinephiles of the world were impressed. It was named one of the 100 Essential Films by The National Society of Film Critics, and one of the first fifty films enshrined as a national treasure by the Library of Congress and was listed as one of the 100 Greatest American Films by the BBC. Astonishing for a master’s thesis project. More recently it was released on DVD and on streaming services.

It’s easy to note its influences. Certainly, Italian Neo-Realism, such as Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open-City (1945) and early French Nouvelle Vague, such as Agnes Varda’s La Pointe Courte (1954). Yet it covered important new ground: the Black experience in LA in the ‘70s, barely a decade after the Watts riots that left dozens of people dead.

Killer of Sheep holds up fifty years after it was made. Its characters are flesh and blood filmed with the integrity of an earnest man with a script and a camera.

Sources and Paths to Further Exploration

Maslin, Janet. “Screen: “Killer of Sheep” is Shown at the Whitney: Nonprofessional Cast.” New York Times, Nov. 14, 1978.

O’Sullivan, Marie. “Film Review: Killer of Sheep.” The Movie Isle: Film for Your Deserted Island. April 17, 2025. themovieisle.com/2025/04/17/film-review-killer-of-sheep-1977/

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Killer of Sheep” From the August 3, 2007 Chicago Reader.

Stevens, Dana. Black Sheep: A Legendary Film from 1977 Gets Its Due. Killer of Sheep Reviewed. Slant magazine. Slant.com, March 30, 2007.

• Thanks to Barry Voorhees for editing

• Thanks to Tim Madigan for suggestions.

Classic Film Capsules:

The Annihilation of Fish (1999). Directed by Charles Burnett. With James Earl Jones, Lynn Redgrave, Margot Kidder. Streaming on Criterion and Prime.

I thought it appropriate to add another film from Burnett. A man named Fish (Jones) is a Jamaican immigrant in Los Angeles. He wrestles physically with a demon that only he can see. Poinsettia (Redgrave) is also a case, believing herself to be the lover of the likewise invisible Giacomo Puccicni. Both are new tenants in an apartment house run by a lonely widow (Kidder). Fish shakes the house with his wrestling, while Poinsettia shrieks out Madama Butterfly which she claims Puccini wrote for her. They fall into a truly offbeat love story that, as they trade psychoses, explores issues of loneliness, advanced-age-romance, triumph over old hauntings, and revivification. Burnett runs his romantic comedy around erratic corners while maintaining a harmonic balance to the story. This film is another example of why Burnett, director of Killer of Sheep, is considered a master. Unfortunately, distributors didn’t pick it up, and like so many great independent films it was years getting its due—in fact, Redgrave did not live to see it. Now a restored version is available on DVD and Blu-ray, and on streaming services. Not a film to miss.

Battling Butler (1926) Directed by Buster Keaton. With Keaton, Sally O’Neil, Snitz Edwards, Francis McDonald. Silent. Streaming on Criterion, Filmbox, Tubi, and Prime.

I haven’t focused on a silent film in a while, so I’m including a great one here. Of all Keaton’s feature-length films, only Seven Chances has a more unlikely premise. It’s the only one of his films made from an original stage play. Young, wealthy Alfred Butler (Keaton) is sent on a hunting and fishing trip by his father hoping that roughing it will finally make a man of his insouciant son. Of course he takes his ultra-obsequious valet (Edwards) along. On a wooded mountain, he meets the woman (O’Neil) whom he wants to marry and tells his valet to “arrange it.” But her rough mountain family does not want a weakling in their clan. So, the valet convinces them that Alfred Butler is actually Battling Butler, the boxing champ who is rising to fame. Now he’s in big trouble because he must perform elaborate fakery to save face; and worse, when the real Battling Butler (McDonald) finds out about the imposter, he tells poor Alfred he has to fight a big brute named The Alabama Murderer to keep his championship. Overshadowed by his more famous films, The General and Sherlock, Jr., this one is nevertheless farcical and very funny. Keaton does some startling boxing when he and Battling Butler square off near the end of the film. By the way, Snitz Edwars plays Florine Papillon, the only comic role in Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera (1925).

Luis Buñuel / Photo by Man Ray

The Young One (1960). Directed by Luis Buñuel. With Bernie Hamilton, Zachary Scott, Key Meersman, Crahan Denton, Claudio Brook. Streaming on YouTube.

A Black man named Traver (Hamilton) is a clarinetist in a traveling jazz band. In a Carolina coastal town, he’s falsely accused of rape. Running to escape a lynch mob he steals a small boat and travels as far and fast as he can until the outboard motor runs out of gas. He paddles to shore on an island that is a wildlife preserve and hides in the woods. A gamekeeper named Hap (Scott) lives in a cabin on the island with an illiterate teenage girl named Evvie (Meersman), whom he abuses at night. When Hap goes ashore for a meeting, Traver comes to Evvie to beg food. Hap, a thoroughgoing racist, comes home and finds supplies and a shotgun missing and goes in search of the fugitive. A violent, grimly ironic, sometimes almost comic, contest ensues, complicated by the arrival of Rev. Fleetwood (Brook) to baptize Evvie. One of Buñuel’s least-known films—made during the Civil Rights Movement—The Young One is an intriguing film about the Jim Crow South, also taking on issues of pedophilia. Singer Leon Bibb provides the pithy folk spiritual, “Oh, Sinner Man (where you gonna run to)” for the soundtrack.

***

Quotes:

“[T]he gangster environment is a bourgeois setting turned on its head, so to speak. My gangsters do the same things that capitalists do except they do them as criminals. The gangster’s goals are just as bourgeois as the capitalist’s.” —Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

“This is the dialectic—there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” —Douglas Sirk.