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The Bride Wore Black (1968, François Truffaut)
I watched this film on a recommendation, since I’ve mostly sworn off Truffaut. I’d read it was one of his Hitchcock homages (and anything has to be better than Mississippi Mermaid) but I really wasn’t expecting so much “homage.” Besides the Bernard Herrmann score, which is identical to his more famous Hitchcock scores, mostly Vertigo, Truffaut fills the first act with enough Hitchcock references, I almost thought I was watching a Brian DePalma movie. The film starts fairly bad–there are no sympathetic characters, except a child, his mother, and his schoolteacher, none of whom are particularly pertinent–and Truffaut asks a lot for his first thirty minutes. He expects the audience to watch not because it’s interesting, but because it’s Jeanne Moreau. Now, while this sort of practice drives old Hollywood films and some Hong Kong films today, Truffaut doesn’t do the extra work to make Moreau interesting. She does eventually get interesting, but it’s an hour in, when the film’s already beginning its long, predictable wrap-up.
Moreau is going around killing sexist pigs (which actually has nothing to do with the plot–all the men in the film are sexist pigs) and part of the grabber is supposed to be the audience’s ignorance as to her motive. Unfortunately, once the motive is revealed and is innocuous and lame, the film loses a lot of potential energy. Worse (since it was only potential energy), after killing two of the men with detailed plans, the others go offhand (and in one case, off camera). Since all the male parts are bad guys and all the non-Moreau female parts are microscopic, there’s not a lot of interesting acting going on in the film. Michel Lonsdale, as a slimy politician, has a lot of fun and he gives the film’s best performance. Moreau is fine, but so distant, it’d be hard for her not to be fine. She’s not doing anything….
While I know Truffaut is the guy who brought Hitchcock back, I really don’t think he gets Hitchcock. I’ve never seen any of DePalma’s gratuitous Hitchcock films so I don’t know if he gets it either (I doubt it), but a lot of what works with Hitchcock is the characters. The extreme is probably Rear Window, when all of the characters are likable, but Vertigo is up there too–when the characters make you feel. Even when Hitchcock wasn’t getting it to work, wasn’t making people care about the characters (The Birds), he was at least trying. Janet Leigh and Martin Balsam give the two most important performances in Psycho, after all. Truffaut doesn’t get that aspect of the films. His characters are flat and he’s all about the set pieces throughout the film. The end is particularly bad, when Truffaut goes and shows he doesn’t think his audience has an iota of intellect.
I should have stuck to my boycott.
ⓏⒺⓇⓄCREDITS
Directed by François Truffaut; written by Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard, based on the novel by Cornell Woolrich; director of photography, Raoul Coutard; edited by Claudine Bouché; music by Bernard Herrmann; produced by Marcel Berbert; released by Lopert Pictures.
Starring Jeanne Moreau (Julie), Jean-Claude Brialy (Corey), Michel Bouquet (Coral), Charles Denner (Fergus), Claude Rich (Bliss), Daniel Boulanger (Holmes) and Michel Lonsdale (Morane).
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An Enemy of the People (1978, George Schaefer)
Growing up–early, before I’d really seen any movies–I knew Steve McQueen was in The Great Escape (though I hadn’t seen it, I’d seen the motorcycle clip) and I knew he’d gotten his start in The Blob. When I first did get into film, when AMC was still the station to watch, I discovered McQueen had a method acting era (The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery). In some ways, he’s one of the oddest actors to accept as having a reverence for the stage, so it’s strange An Enemy of the People was a personal project for him. It just doesn’t go along with car racing. Enemy features some of McQueen’s best acting too, since his character’s different (quiet and passive) and he’s got kids. McQueen’s really good with kids and it’s a shame he didn’t get to do more movies with kids.
I didn’t know Enemy was an adaptation of a play until I started watching it, but right away–once the opening credits ended–I knew. A small number of sets, a lot of conversation, these aspects don’t necessarily scream theater, but something about Enemy does. A lot of filmic adaptations of plays scream it–I saw a lot of these in middle school and you can always tell. With a good adaptation, you can’t, but with the standard, you always can. An Enemy of the People is a fairly standard adaptation and, like most adaptations, its problems stem from not going cinematic enough. When a film has a present action of two days, there’s still some impulsiveness about it. It doesn’t have to be deliberate. Scenes can cut from location to location, people can be doing things at the same time and those actions can be important and visible to the audience. I’m sure An Enemy of the People is a pretty good play–it certainly seems like it from the film–but I expect filmic adaptations of plays to make me consider a stage production irrelevant. Maybe McQueen, in not doing so, just had more respect for the theater than I do.
Some of the problem, I’m sure, comes from the director, George Schaefer, being a prolific stage director and a prolific plays on TV director. The sets are beautifully designed and beautifully lighted, but Schaefer’s composition is a visual sedative. The story’s also filled with one dimensional characters. Only one character actually shows any depth and he’s hardly in it. There’s a brother against brother aspect to the story and it never goes anywhere beyond McQueen’s brother is good and Charles Durning’s is bad. Durning still manages to give a decent performance, but it’s one note. Bibi Andersson (the only Scandinavian in this Norway-set film) is also just decent as McQueen’s wife, but Richard Dysart’s got a small role and is real good. Robin Pearson Rose, as the daughter, is good. Most impressive of the supporting cast is actually Richard Bradford. McQueen carries the whole film and it’s a mistake whenever he’s off-screen for too long. It’s probably his most impressive acting work of the 1970s.
★★½CREDITS
Directed and produced by George Schaefer; screenplay by Alexander Jacobs, from the play by Henrik Ibsen, as adapted by Arthur Miller; director of photography, Paul Lohmann; edited by Sheldon Kahn; music by Leonard Rosenman; production designer, Eugene Lourie; distributed by Warner Bros.
Starring Steve McQueen (Dr. Thomas Stockmann), Bibi Andersson (Catherine), Charles Durning (Peter Stockmann), Michael Cristofer (Hovstad), Michael Higgins (Billing), Richard A. Dysart (Aslaksen), Richard Bradford (Captain Forster), Eric Christmas (Morten Kiil), Robin Pearson (Petra), John Levin (Rose Ejlif) and Ham Larsen (Morten).
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Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970, Ted Post)
On rare occasion, I watch (and on even rarer occasion, finish watching) an utter dreg of a film. A film so bad I misuse the word dregs, which apparently–since it refers to a liquid form–must be used as a plural. Beneath the Planet of the Apes is just such a film. Immediately, with its use of footage from the first film’s conclusion (with a few added shots and different dialogue and music) and terrible opening credits, I knew Beneath was going to be bad. When “star” James Franciscus (it’s his real name too) shows up, I noticed he was better than Heston. Even though I just watched the first film, there was that lovely reminder of Heston’s craft tacked on to the beginning on this film. Since he has a lot of the same dialogue as Heston does in that film, one gets to see how nice a measured performance can be. Still, I put star in quotation marks because he’s not really the star of the film. In fact, the film’s such a failure of a narrative, such a waste of celluloid, I could put that last ‘film’ in quotation marks too.
Beneath the Planet of the Apes loses any hint of competence, adequacy, concern, once Linda Harrison shows up. Linda Harrison doesn’t talk. But she does flashback and we get to see her flashbacks, which are filled with Heston acting and bad special effects and stupid ideas. While Planet of the Apes was dumb, the filmmakers there at least were bipedal. Whoever concocted the story to this film must have had trouble chewing gum. So, once the Harrison shows up, the viewer is left with little to do but marvel at the film. I couldn’t believe audiences back in 1970 actually went to go see this film and go they did… the film made enough money warrant a sequel, which is funny, considering how it ends. And a viewer has to finish watching this film, I’m very adamant on that point. Its ending is so unbelievable, it has to be seen. I couldn’t believe it.
As far as the technical side of things, there are some great matte paintings. I’ve seen a documentary on the Planet of the Apes franchise and remembered the discussion of the paintings and when their scenes showed up, I hoped it’d go on for a while. Instead, the film pushed on through them and got to the dumbest religious cult in the history of cinema. Beneath tries to be a metaphor (which Planet of the Apes did not), featuring anti-Vietnam protesters–rather amusing since the apes aren’t really at war–and comparisons of the war-hungry gorilla (a new invention in this film, which has no reasonable continuity to the first) to American soldiers. I’m not sure if the cult is supposed to be the Russians. Probably (it doesn’t work though).
But still, one has to see it for that ending. Oh, and James Gregory is quite good.
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Planet of the Apes (1968, Franklin J. Schaffner)
Planet of the Apes is, I’m fairly sure, the first film I’ve ever watched and known the director started in television. Franklin J. Schaffner has a lot of dynamic shots–helicopter shots, three dimensional motion and camera movement (which is rarer than one would think)–but none of them go together. It’s like watching a different movie every cut. There are also definite commercial breaks in the film and the first hour, until Charlton Heston speaks to the apes, is really a fifteen minute teaser drawn out with a lot of monologues, walking, and chase scenes.
When I started watching the film, I marveled at how bad Charlton Heston’s performance is. He actually gets better, but it’s one of those cases of not knowing if he actually gets better or if the viewer has just been conditioned to his performance. It’s kind of funny, though, to see über-Conservative Heston in a role basically advocating (small c) communism. That correlation is about the only one I could pull out of Planet of the Apes and I had to use a big pair of pliers. We’ve gotten used to seeing science fiction as metaphor and there’s none of it in Apes. It’s an incredibly straightforward approach, which could work well in the film’s favor, if it wasn’t so inconsistent with its characters and generally dumb.
The problem with the film–its stupidity–is in the package. The film asks the viewer to accept this ape civilization–a planet–which doesn’t seem to be larger than a city, doesn’t know anything about science except has verbose scientific terminology (how did they learn them?) and has working firearms–lots of them–but supposedly is opposed to killing. The characters, with the exception of Heston and the two good apes, flip back and forth, the worst being Maurice Evans’s. He goes from being the big bad guy, to just a guy, to sort of a good guy, to a bad guy, to just a guy. Or ape. Whatever. I think he’s supposed to be an orangutan, actually. He generally changes character between commercial breaks (oh, and Schaffner doesn’t know how to do establishing shots). The film’s about ideas (and running) and getting them presented is the only important thing.
Once the movie gets to the end and Heston’s wailing in the surf, I realized it actually could have worked. There was a big thing–during the opening, the twenty minute walk–about Heston wanting to get off the planet Earth because he hated the way things were going (war–yes, this film does actually star Charlton Heston and it has a big anti-war message, one about 150 feet tall). Anyway, there’s a metaphor there, about Heston returning to the Earth he dreaded, where everything he feared had come to pass, and so on and so on. I wouldn’t want to write it, but I would have wanted to see it. Or, at least, I know it’d have been better than what they did.
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