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Party Girl: Nana (1926)

February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeney13 Comments

May 2, 2017

Jean Renoir considered Nana (1926) to be “my first film worth talking about.” An ambitious adaptation of the Emile Zola novel, Nana (Catherine Hessling) is an actress of limited means adept at manipulating men’s hearts, failing as a stage star but lavishly succeeding as an actor in her own life (a theme Renoir would return to throughout his career). After his scrappy independent production The Whirlpool of Fate (1925) failed to get much distribution, Renoir went big, making Nana a million franc French-German co-production. It is an enormous step up in scale, going from shooting around his childhood haunts in Whirlpool to juggling multiple locations around Europe, as well as the egos of his international cast. Still experimenting stylistically, Nana, like Whirlpool, has expressionist touches at the edges of a realist drama. This tension is centered in the performance of Hessling (Renoir’s wife, real name Andrée Heuschling). A devotee of Gloria Swanson, she is elaborately made up and gives a performance of grand gestures and herky jerky movement. Renoir admiringly compared her to a “marionette.” It works for the character – a woman not in charge of her own life – but for audiences used to more naturalistic acting, it faced ridicule. But Nana is no joke, but a bold experiment in which Renoir toys with performance and camera movement to convey the unsaid.

This is the second part of a series covering the films of Jean Renoir, 16 of which are streaming on FilmStruck. You can find the first entry on The Whirlpool of Fate here.

According to Pascal Merigeau’s Jean Renoir: A Biography, the production company Films Renoir was incorporated on September 1, 1925. The previous month Nana had been announced. Renoir was still negotiating with the Emile Zola estate, but eventually paid them 75,000 francs for the rights to the story. In order to secure German funding, they needed to cast German actors. Through the help of producer Pierre Braunberger, the role of Count Muffat, Nana’s main suitor, went to Werner Krauss, known today as Doctor Caligari in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). They also cast the German actress Valeska Gert (The Joyless Street, 1925) as Nana’s maid, Zoe. This helped convince Delog Film Kommanditgesellschaft, Jacobi & Co. to pay for the costs of the German shoot, since there would be a built-in local audience. It didn’t pan out that way, but it allowed for the film to continue.

Gert would later describe Hessling as “an authentic Parisian, chic, capricious [who] used a outrageous amount of makeup, which, at the time, only Gloria Swanson was doing.” Hessling was an untaught talent, and had no intention of taking lessons, unless the Americans called. She told her friend Alice Fighiera that if they called, “it will mean I’ve got talent. If they don’t, none of it’s worth the trouble.” She is introduced rising above the stage on a winch, in one of the first dolly shots of the film. Renoir and his DPs Jean Bachelet and Edmund Corwin use the technique as a slow reveal, a setup and punchline. Catherine is raised but cannot descend all the way to the stage, a knot keeps her dangling frustratingly above solid ground. Her flailing struggles make her look like a puppet. After the show a few suitors are shown waiting at her dressing room. The camera slowly dollies backward to reveal that the whole floor and staircase is clogged with potential paramours.

Only one manages to shoulder his way inside her room, the wealthy Count Muffat, who has enough cash to underwrite Nana’s career at the struggling theater. A blooming fetishist, Muffat becomes aroused by the hair stuck in her comb, and is at her beck and call the rest of the feature – by the end she has him on all fours barking like a dog. Like Charles Foster Kane, he funds her dramatic work, only for her to be laughed off the stage. Nana is completely without self-criticism, she truly believed her flouncy over-affected caricature could fly as a portrait of an upper class lady. When her life as an artist flops, she begins her second, more lucrative, life as a courtesan, with a group of lapdogs on her string. The other most notable victim is Vandeuvres (Jean Angelo), the last remaining scion of a distinguished family. He sullies his name in a poorly thought out racetrack swindle; to win Nana’s heart is through her pocketbook, or so he believes.

But there is no way to Nana’s heart, for even she doesn’t know the directions. Hessling plays her with an armor of artifice, always playacting to the room. One never knows what is authentic emotion or simply a flirtatious technique. Emblematic of her capriciousness is a shot where Nana wields a pool cue, lines it up against a fine piece of china as if setting up a shot, and then smashes it. Renoir would write in My Life and My Films that “In Nana she carried it [stylization] to the uttermost extreme. She was not a woman at all, but a marionette. The word, as I use it, is a complement.” This doll crushes every man like that fine china, not that they don’t deserve it. Muffat is a dour married man who blows up his marriage out of boredom and a hair fetish. Vandeuvres is another of the idle death-wish rich, using Nana as an excuse for self-incineration. The only cad worthy of pity is a callow youth named Georges (Raymond Guérin Catelain), whose love seems innocent and true, and his delicate constitution can’t handle seeing Nana play pseudo S&M games with the masochistic Muffat.

Nana is surprised by her own emotions at the loss of two of her suitors, both of whom take their own lives. During an extraordinary sequence at a Parisian ball, Nana tries to recapture her previous decadence, losing herself in a feverish can-can, an attempt to sweat out her emotions. But she cannot stop them. Renoir ends the film with some of his most complicated and basic techniques. There are double exposures revealing ghosts of lovers past, haunting her with their modes of demise. Her body, unused to such feeling, shuts down. And without depicting a dramatic collapse, or giving her one last command performance, Renoir simply turns out the lights.

Jean Renoir: Whirlpool of Fate (1925)

February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 robertemmetsweeney14 Comments

April 25, 2017

In a fortuitous sequence of events, right after I acquired Pascal Mérigeau‘s biography of Jean Renoir, FilmStruck started streaming 16 of the director’s features and shorts. I’ve skimmed over the surface of Renoir’s career, having seen the acknowledged masterpieces like The Rules of the Game (1939) and Grand Illusion (1937), but never managed to explore much beyond that. So over the next few weeks I will be discussing an individual Renoir film, providing production info gleaned from Mérigeau‘s exhaustively researched tome. First up is the hypnagogic melodrama Whirlpool of Fate (the original French title is La Fille de l’eau, The Girl in the Water, 1925), starring his Gloria Swanson-worshipping wife Andree Heuschling (using the screen name Catherine Hessling). Though he received a co-directing credit on 1924′s Catherine (aka Backbiters), Fate is the first film where he had complete control, and he used it to experiment with a range of tones and techniques, from poetic realism to flights of expressionist fancy.

The scenario for Whirlpool of Fate was written by Renoir’s friend Pierre Lestringuez, and was shot in and around Paul Cézanne’s property, La Nicotiere, in the town of Marlotte. Cézanne was a family friend, and Jean spent many afternoons there as a youth, counting his Sundays there “among my happiest memories” (as recalled in My Life and My Films). So he was intimately familiar with the grounds, and he gets a fairy tale beauty out of the streams running through the area. The film opens with a houseboat cruising down a waterway on a sun dappled morning, shot by cinematographers Jean Bachelet (who would later shoot The Rules of the Game) and Alphonse Gibory.

On board are Gudule (called Virginie in some versions, played by Heuschling), her father and her roustabout uncle Jeff (Pierre Lestringuez). The father dies in a freak accident, and Jeff squanders the family inheritance on booze, and often shows up drunk and physically abusive towards Gudule. So she runs away from home, and takes up with a small time crook nicknamed “The Weasel.” They travel the countryside together, nicking food from nearby farms when they can get away with that. Just when Gudule is acclimating herself to a new life, she falls down a steep quarry wall and loses her memory. The Weasel disappears, and instead she is cared for by Georges (Harold Levingston), the son of a bourgeois family who brings her food and drink to stay alive. Suffering from terrible fevers, Gudule begins experiencing severe hallucinations – or incredible lucid dreams, in which Renoir experiments with double (and triple) exposures, associative editing and random shots of lizards. Once she comes to, Gudule regains her memory, only to run into Jeff again. She can’t fully re-emerge into adulthood until Jeff agrees to let her go.

The film is a charming travelogue of La Nicotiere, with a barely-there episodic narrative guiding Gudule through the wooded paths. Heuschling/Hessling was a great admirer of Gloria Swanson, and she applies her lipstick into a pert bowtie shape that mimics that of Swanson’s in Zaza (1923). She admirably underplays her melodramatic role, and her calm carries the film through it’s many twists and turns. Already Renoir was operating a film set like a family get together, emphasizing fun above all. Mérigeau writes that “A team was being put together, and with it one of the essential prerequisites of a Renoir film: Jean Renoir at the head of the gang, whose members constituted a kind of family, producing a self-organizing system.” It was shot at the familial locale of La Nicotiere and filled with friends and family, including painter André Derain, who plays a distressed innkeeper with a toothache.

What reputation the film has today rests on its dream sequence, which Renoir directed “in a studio where he had had a cylinder built and painted completely black so that a camera placed on a dolly permitted a 360-degree panoramic view and could follow a horse at a gallop. On the same roll of film, he next shot superimposed clouds.” This sequence has the charm of a Melies short in its analog magic. In its most abstractly beautiful section, Gudule is floating against a black sky, her translucent gown fluttering in the wind. Then she flutters back down to earth, emerging from a columnar set from which a lizard just poked out its head. It conveys weightlessness above all, appropriate for Gudule, whose body has brought her nothing but pain and sorrow thus far. An enterprising theatrical producer named Jean Tedesco would book programs of excerpts from feature films, essentially mixtapes of his favorite sequences. In 1925 he included the dream sequence from Whirpool in one of his programs. At first Renoir was annoyed at the bootlegging, but the scene was wildly applauded at the screening, which grew even louder when they saw the duo in the theater. This for a film that had received minimal bookings in Paris, to muted response. It was the same abroad. Tedesco continued to play the dream sequence in Paris to much acclaim.

Renoir considered Nana (1925) to be his first true feature, and I will write about that one next week, but Whirlpool of Fate is not worthy of disavowal, what with its inventive cinematography (both the natural light of the “realist” outdoor sequences and the madly expressionist studio dream sequence) and the laid-back brio of the performers. Renoir already seemed to have a knack for eliciting relaxed performances, and it was a pleasure to spend time with the Renoir family on this intimate affair.

Hollywood Babylon: The Big Knife (1955)

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April 18, 2017

To view The Big Knife click here.

In The Big Knife (1955) Jack Palance is a blunt instrument, barreling his way around a Bel Air living room set like a finely chiseled bull in a china shop. He plays Charlie Castle, a self-loathing movie star being blackmailed by the head of his own studio. So he signs whatever contracts are put in front of him, and his Bel Air home becomes a gilded prison, a well-appointed depository of his rage. The film never strays far from his living room, giving it a claustrophobically theatrical feel. It is an adaptation of the Clifford Odets play, done faithfully by director Robert Aldrich and screenwriter James Poe. The first independent feature Aldrich directed, for his newly formed The Associates and Aldrich Company, it is a relentless, and at times exhausting, jeremiad against the dehumanizing manipulations of Hollywood executives. Shot quickly and simply, it is a showcase for the performers, and Palance is matched against Rod Steiger as studio president Stanley Hoff, a Mephistophelean string-puller with a flair for the dramatic pause. Even more unsettling is Hoff’s reptilian assistant Smiley Coy, who Wendell Corey portrays with a smooth monotone, unfurling both compliments and death threats in the same uninflected hiss. The only human in the house is Castle’s long-suffering wife Marion, who Ida Lupino instills with a stubborn, sandpapery grace. The Big Knife is now streaming on FilmStruck with five other features under the “The Lives of Actors“ theme.

While in New York City filming episodes of Four Star Playhouse in the early 1950s, Robert Aldrich approached Clifford Odets with the idea of adapting The Big Knife, which premiered on Broadway in 1949 with John Garfield in the lead. It had been Odets’ first Broadway production in six years, after a stay in Hollywood. According to Alain Silver’s Whatever Happened to Robert Aldrich?, Aldrich and producer Bernard Tabakin offered to option the play for $500 for a film version with a budget “not to exceed $100,000.” A modest offer to be sure, but Odets was eager to see his work on-screen again – and he was thrilled with the result, writing in The New York Times in 1955 that it was the “best of all” the film adaptations of his plays.

Charlie Castle is introduced working out in his backyard with his personal trainer, keeping his leading man figure in tune. His wife Marion is readying to leave him again unless he refuses to resign with Hoff, a craven businessman who keeps Castle under his thumb due to a portfolio of incriminating acts he could use against Castle at any time. After minimal prodding, Castle signs the deal. Though seemingly carved out of granite, Castle is a bundle of insecurities and preternaturally eager to please – he is able to shift from arguing with his wife to smooth-talking a gossip columnist with disconcerting ease. Hoff has turned Castle into an actor 24/7, and the man that Marion describes, one of artistic spirit and intellectual curiosity, seems to have departed from the earth.

It is Marion who hung up the Rouault painting of a clown up on the wall, which Castle is eager to over-analyze and prove his worth. He is in a permanent state of self-justification, but eventually runs out of excuses. He makes garbage movies for good money to keep Hoff’s film factory rolling. To ensure his loyalty, Hoff reminds Castle of his crimes – he was involved in a hit-and-run years ago, and the studio pinned the act on his former associates. It was a monstrous act, and now Castle is kept by monsters like Hoff and his assistant Coy, who show up as specters of his lost freedom.

Aldrich and screenwriter James Poe keep the action restricted almost entirely to Castle’s house, putting enormous pressure on Palance to inject dynamism into a small set. It was shot in two weeks on a budget of $400,000, with nine days of “intense” rehearsal beforehand, per The New York Times. Aldrich claimed it made $1.25 million but that all the profit went to the distributor. It’s difficult to retain dynamism in a single set over the course of a feature, and it puts enormous pressure on the actors to deliver something new in every shot. It creates a cramped hothouse atmosphere, made even more so by the small set. According to the AFI Catalog, “In order to fit the main set, that of Charlie’s living room, on the small stage at the Sutherland Studios, art director William Glasgow came up with a ‘combination of wild walls.’ The article reported that ‘as a result, the camera can be placed anywhere in a complete circle around the set, permitting shooting from any angle.’” Even with that technical shortcut, there is not a lot of different set-ups that can be made over the course of a one-location movie, by the end you know every nook and cranny.

The Big Knife has what you might call “unlikable” characters – it’s lead is a murderer, and his bosses blithely discuss committing some of their own. It can become an issue, though, if you don’t buy Castle’s central dilemma – whether he should take lots of money, or not take lots of money. Robert Aldrich recalled his dad reacting to the premise: “Am I to understand that [Castle’s] choice was to take or not take $5,000 a week? Well then, you’ll never have a successful picture. Because there is no choice.” This criticism followed around the play and the film, but it received plaudits elsewhere, including the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Looking at it today, it’s a film of swirling male hysteria, with Palance and Steiger taking turns chewing the minimal scenery. In The Big Knife Hollywood has turned these men into ogres, fighting to the death over a few scraps of dignity.

The Bank Job: Perfect Friday (1970)

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April 11, 2017

There is a blessed simplicity to a heist film, with its basic elements of planning and execution. Last week I looked at an elaborate cat-and-mouse variation of this trope, The Silent Partner (1978), while today I’ll discuss a streamlined version, the lighthearted British heist film Perfect Friday (1970). They are two of the six films FilmStruck is streaming in its “How to Rob a Bank” theme (alongside The League of Gentlemen[1960], Max and the Junkmen [1971], Revanche [2008], and The Robber [2010]). Perfect Friday is shorn of any backstory or subplot, focused entirely on the robbery at hand. Stanley Baker stars as a mild mannered bank clerk looking to retire on one big score. He recruits a money hungry Lord (David Warner) and his wife (Ursula Andress) to pull off the job. But every word they speak is a lie, from promises of an equal split to the husband telling his wife he loves her. The scene is set for multiple betrayals, it is only a matter of who is holding the money-stuffed suitcase last.

Perfect Friday was one of the projects financed by London Screenplays Ltd., brainchild of producer Dimitri de Grunwald. After the collapse of the studio system, new financing systems were emerging. Grunwald built his company on pre-selling distribution rights and getting financing off of those commitments. He described it this way to the New York Times in 1970: “In the past, other producers, especially in Europe, have lined up distributors in various countries to provide minimum guarantees in advance for a particular film that can be used to obtain production funds. What we’ve done is to set this up on a permanent basis through our International Film Consortium.” They had a deal where 59 countries agreed to distribute eight London Screenplays productions via the International Film Consortium a year. In order to satisfy the distributors, he tried to cast international stars in these productions, so in this one he included the Swiss Ursula Andress as the foil to Brits Stanley Baker and David Warner.

Stanley Baker plays Mr. Graham, a prim and proper assistant bank manager whose life is perfect arranged, from his plucked mustache to his ascetic glass box office. But he’s single and without romantic prospects, and the middle-class life doesn’t hold as much promise as it once did. He sees an opportunity in the cash inspections performed by the local authorities. This exercise, to keep a check on the banks’ books, is undertaken by random government officials throughout the year. Since the faces keep changing, Graham is convinced he can recruit some schlub to impersonate one and easily rob the bank of cash. Mr. Graham settles on the unlikely couple of Lord Nicholas Dorset (David Warner) and his wife Lady Britt Dorset (Ursula Andress). The Lord is a down-at-heel ponce who would do anything to replenish his coffers, at least enough to match the prestige of his title. The Lady, played with diabolical panache by Andress, can flirt her way through any difficulties, and often does. She is introduced trying to sweet talk Graham into a loan, as well as an extension on repayment.

Baker said that, “What I like about Perfect Friday is that everybody lies to each other and everybody believes each other’s lies. I don’t know if the audience realises it, but every time the characters speak to each other, they’re lying.” Director Peter Hall, who made his name in the theater (directing the UK premiere of Waiting for Godot), keeps the plot moving swiftly so there isn’t time to ponder the veracity of all the players’ claims. The editing shifts timelines from recruitment to execution, keeping the viewer slightly off balance, withholding some details of the robbery until the event unfolds. Graham seems unflappable, Nick a scoundrel, and Britt a gold digger. These impressions shift and realign as the movie pipes along. The whole film is a well carpentered thing thanks to production designer Terence Marsh (The Shawshank Redemption [1994]), and the bank office is a glass-walled marvel, a glum panopticon in which the office drones are fully visible throughout the day. This extreme visibility is another key to Graham’s plan. He has to see when his colleague moves to a phone in order to orchestrate phone calls from his fake administrator.

The robbery itself is a precisely timed mechanism. Graham thinks it foolproof, but it requires a number of costume changes, prank phone calls, dummy suitcases and counterfeit cash. It’s quite a convoluted plan for an inside job, but whatever works. It is thrilling to see it all come off, however absurd, especially the David Warner quick changes from schlubby bank patron to stuffy government employee with starched shirt and plummy accent. He’s almost doing an impression of Baker’s Graham. Baker, usually overflowing with rowdy machismo, is here a fastidious “t” crosser and “i” dotter, his most aggressive move is roughly cleaning his glasses. But he’s wonderful playing against type, and that hint of menace and physicality that Baker can’t help but bring through his sheer presence, gives Graham a sneering malevolence that would otherwise come off as merely snotty.

It’s a show for the actors – and Andress gets plenty of time to shine. Not just a beach Bond girl, here she lets those tumbling blond locks work for her as a conniving con woman. She was the highlight of the film for Pauline Kael, who said she, “comes across as a witty deadpan comedienne. With her face and figure, the addition of technique makes her dazzling — she’s seductive and funny, like the larcenous Dietrich of Desire…” Though I can’t quite go that far, Andress is deliciously funny throughout, especially in a last act twist I won’t give away. There is no comeuppance, and no lessons are learned. These perpetually scheming backstabbers are simply content of dreaming of the perfect robbery. If they don’t come up with the cash, so be it. There’s always next year.

Robbing Them Blind: The Silent Partner (1978)

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April 4, 2017

In The Silent Partner, the devil is in the details. Elliott Gould’s mild-mannered bank teller Miles is transformed into a criminal strategist because he notices a scrawl of handwriting on a deposit slip. This causes his analytical mind to pivot its attentions from customer accounts to an elaborately unfolding heist. The script by Curtis Hanson is relentlessly logical as it pits the chess-playing, game theory wielding Gould against the brute force of a sociopathic thief named Harry, played with dark charisma by Christopher Plummer. Their pas de deux takes place all over Toronto (this was one of the early Canadian Tax Shelter films – 100% of costs were tax deductible), and what began as a teasing game becomes something elemental. The Silent Partner won six Canadian Film Awards, including Best Picture, but had trouble finding screens in the United States – but now The Silent Partner is streaming on FilmStruck as part of its six-film “How to Rob a Bank” collection.

Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna’s fledgling Carolco Pictures bought the rights to the Danish crime novel Think of a Number, and Curtis Hanson was hired to write the adaptation, and also had the intention of directing it. But Hanson was invited to adapt Romain Gary’s White Dog for Paramount (eventually directed by Sam Fuller), and while he was working on that job Carolco pushed Think of a Number into production as The Silent Partner and hired Canadian director Daryl Duke – mainly to qualify for the tax break. In order to receive it, among other things, the production had to have two-thirds of its crew be Canadian (John Candy appears in an engagingly dopey supporting role), and Duke fit the bill. He was a longtime director for the CBC, and had also made a feature, the hell raising Rip Torn country music movie Payday (1973). Duke was removed from the job late in the production process after refusing to shoot a sequence of exploitative violence. I won’t spoil it here, but it’s tonally out of whack with the low key tension the rest of the film is building. Curtis Hanson recalled that “I wound up going up to Toronto while they were filming and getting very involved in it…and after it was wrapped, they brought me back for a week of pickups and to completely re-edit it. I did all the post-production on it as well.”

The Silent Partner is set during the Christmas season, opening in the Eaton Center mall as Miles’ bank is slammed with deposits. As he idly, awkwardly flirts with his office crush Julie (Susannah York), he doodles on a carbon deposit slip. As he is about to throw it in the garbage, he notices a message on the discarded slip: “The Thing In My Pocket is a Gun. Give Me All the Cash.” In addition, he recognizes the unique way the “G” is written on a slant – it is the same “G” he saw on a sign held by the store Santa. His observant eye, which made him an efficient if dull teller, now leads him to a path of crime.

His suspicion becomes a certainty, that Santa tried and abandoned an attempt to rob the bank and will try again soon, if not tomorrow. Miles is a meek bachelor whose sole passion is tropical fish, anxiously lonely, Julie says he is “less than the sum of his parts.” But something shifts in his psyche at the sight of the slip, and he sees an opportunity to reinvent himself. He plans to skim from the Santa’s robbery, keeping the majority of the day’s take in a lunchbox under the desk – so when he is held up, Miles takes home the majority of the cash, and Santa is the only one wanted for armed robbery. The only issue is that the Santa, Harry Reikle (Christopher Plummer) is a bit of a psychopath who beats up underage girls for kicks. Reikle won’t let Miles get away with the ruse and begins to stalk and harass him for the rest of the cash, believing his violence will cow him as it does everyone else. Plummer plays Reikle as a sinuous smooth-talker with a stone face, his torrent of silken words not matching the emptiness in his face. Not to mention his long sharp fingernails that seem like they could cut glass. It is a uniquely unsettling performance.

Miles, reading The Principles of Chess by James Mason, is not terribly concerned with his physical well being, more so with staying multiple moves ahead of Reikle. Miles discovers untapped wells of duplicity, from lying to the cops to grand theft auto to improvised corpse disposal. Miles is not a killer but an adapter to circumstances, and his moral slipperiness, while preferable to Reikle’s abject depravity, is impossible to pin down. The nervous smiles that Gould cracks in the beginning of the film seem like normal anxious guy tics, but by the end they are a finely tuned mask so his opponents underestimate him. The “Miles” from the opening scene is a distant memory, this new one is a blank space, one that Reikle is prone to praising by the final reel. SPOILER ALERT: In the faux-happy ending Miles gets the girl and the money, but it is unclear if Miles wants anything anymore. He has emptied himself out for the dream of escape.

The Killer is Loose: He Walked By Night (1948)

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March 14, 2017

He Walked By Night (1948) strips the police procedural to the bone. There are no backstories or love interests, just the case at hand, rigorously filmed by director of photography John Alton and directors Alfred Werker and Anthony Mann (FilmStruck is streaming five Anthony Mann/John Alton Noir collaborations: T-Men [1948], Raw Deal [1948], He Walked By Night, Border Incident [1949] and Devil’s Doorway [1950]). Inspired by the 1946 crime spree of former Army Lieutenant Erwin Walker, the movie is obsessed with process, of both the cops and the killer. The police methodically trudge through witness interviews and crowdsource a sketch of the suspect, while the equally conscientious criminal attempts to wipe his identity from public record. Made in the semi-documentary style popularized by The Naked City (1948), though on a lower budget, it can be no-frills to the point of abstraction, as both sides of the law disappear into the shadows of Los Angeles’ sewer system. In late 1945, after his discharge from the army, Erwin Walker began stealing electronic equipment. He pulled off over a dozen such jobs, but he didn’t get into the news until he shot two LAPD detectives when they tried to arrest him for selling stolen goods. He then became one of the most wanted men in Los Angeles, and during the manhunt killed a Highway Patrol officer. From the court transcripts it was revealed the reasons for Walker’s burglaries: “Defendant told his friend of an idea he had of inventing an electronic radar gun, which by shooting a beam would disintegrate metal into powder, and by which they could seize control of the government and enforce legislation which would increase the cost of war to a point where it could not profitably be waged, effecting this primarily by raising to a high level the salaries paid to soldiers.” He was convicted of murder in 1947 and let out on parole in 1974.

The script by John C. Higgins, with original story by Crane Wilbur, uses the broad outlines of Walker’s case history, though changes around some details. The Erwin Walker character is named Roy (Richard Basehart), who is introduced trying to jimmy open the lock of a jewelry store, before a black and white cop car cruises by and Roy becomes a cop killer as well as a thief. The investigation of the crime is led by Police Captain Breen (Roy Roberts) and his team of surly hulking detectives. The movie goes to great lengths to emphasize the hard work put in by the police force, which is depicted as a finely tuned watch cycling through witnesses with precision, as the voice-of-god narration nails home over and over. But as Raymond Chandler notes in one of his published letters, the police’s activities in the movie seem to skim the boundaries of legality, as they seemingly arrest everybody in the city with a passing resemblance to Roy’s description, regardless of evidence. Chandler wrote, “to me the really shocking thing about the picture was the assumption that the gestapo methods of the police are natural and proper. By what authority do they mark off an area and bring everyone inside it for questioning? This is nothing but arrest without warrant…”

This aggressive dragnet dredged up plenty of shady characters, but no one connected to Roy’s crimes. So next they create a composite sketch of Roy from all the burglary and hold-up witnesses who glimpsed his face, using slides of different facial features to jog their memories. This is orchestrated by the forensics guy Lee, played with “just the facts” bluntness by Jack Webb, who would later produce and star in Dragnet (which lifts “only the names are changed – to protect the innocent” from the opening crawl). Webb’s work on He Walked By Night led directly to the TV show, as Webb got to talking with technical advisor Detective Sergeant Marty Wynn. Those conversations turned into Dragnet, which took He Walked By Night‘s minimalist approach to television.

The cops’ big break comes on a random interview with a milkman, who had seen a man of Roy’s appearance on one of his routes. So it is a combination of new technology (the sketch slides) and old fashioned shoe leather that finally encircle Roy. Richard Basehart has very little dialogue in the film – he’s mostly reacting to noises and other stimuli that might give away his identity. It is a performance of watchful intensity, seen in gruesome detail when he has to remove a bullet from his gut. John Alton trains his camera on Basehart’s face, beads of sweat coalescing on his brow, his lips set in a line of grim determination. What makes this one of the great bullet removal scenes is the fact that it plays against silence. There is no score blaring in the background manipulating the tone, the filmmakers force it all into Basehart’s face, and it is terrifying, no more so than the little flicker of a grin that flashes across his faces after he finishes.

There has always been a question as to the film’s authorship. The directing credit is given to Alfred Werker (Repeat Performance [1947]), though there have been numerous reports that Werner was removed (or had to step down) early in production, and that Mann directed the majority of the feature. Mann collaborated with John Alton throughout this period (twice before in 1948), and the brutal physicality of the bullet removal scene, unflinching as it stares into Roy’s face, is a hallmark of Mann’s unflinching kind of cinema. But it could also be at the suggestion of John Alton, one of those cinematographers whose signature is obvious a few frames into a movie, and He Walked By Night is filled with serrated shadows thrown by blinds in cheap offices. Max Alvarez, in The Crime Films of Anthony Mann, goes farthest in trying to assign credit for the feature. He interviewed dialogue director Stewart Stern, who said, “I don’t remember the reason Tony took over. I think Werker got sick. I think I got a call telling me that I would have to replace Werker the next day. Then Tony appeared and I’ve never been more relieved in my life! I don’t think Werker worked a day on that, but I’m not sure.” So while the timeline is unclear, and Werker may have had some influence for an early part of the shoot, it seems clear that Mann directed the majority of the film, and it is generally considered part of his filmography, part of his incredible 1948 that also includes Raw Deal and T-Men, two other crime docudramas that push the illusion of reality.

For most of its running time He Walked By Night is relentlessly focused on process, on the next clue or the next interview. The remarkable closing sequence in the sewers, which precedes a similar scene in The Third Man by a year, finds Roy using the underground tunnels as his getaway, though the cops have been sealing off the exits. Alton streams in shafts of light offscreen that reflect off the pooled water but keep Roy in shadows. Roy keeps searching for a manhole cover to emerge out of but they are stopped up by the cops. This elusive cipher, who always had an alternate escape route, is now trapped and mortal. His death is framed not as a triumph but as the natural result of an effective police force. It is a clinical and menacing end to this brutally efficient noir.

Mad Men: Putney Swope (1969)

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March 28, 2017

In 1969 Robert Downey Sr. waited outside a screening of Putney Swope (1969) at the Cinema II in NYC to see if the film was still working as intended. As reported by Stephen Mahoney in Life magazine: “Two couples emerge. A woman is tearing at a handkerchief. ‘Tasteless. An exhibition…Filth’, she stammers. Under the cowboy hat Downey’s face lights up with joy.” Mahoney’s article was entitled “Robert Downey Makes Vile Movies,” a takeoff on a particularly outraged review by the New York Daily News (“Vicious and vile, the most offensive picture I’ve ever seen.”). Putney Swope is a clattering joke-stuffed satire both hilarious and exhausting. It begins as a spoof of ad agency racism, and keeps widening its targets until it takes itself down, a circular firing squad of comedy. Downey wanted his audiences to leap out of their seats, preferably with shock and disgust, and so it includes a horny and despotic little person president, an office flasher and the takeover of an ad agency by black militants who get co-opted by the business they wanted to overthrow. No one gets away unscathed. Putney Swope is streaming on FilmStruck, along with four other Downey films.

Downey Sr. was aligned with the group of underground filmmakers in NYC who were proselytized by Jonas Mekas in The Village Voice. Mekas was an early champion of Downey’s work, who wrote after seeing Chafed Elbows (1966) that, “Bob Downey is the Lenny Bruce of the new cinema,” and that the movie was, “as good as anything done by nouvelle vague.” Chafed Elbows was a bad-taste La Jetee (1963), an incest comedy visualized almost entirely in still photographs. It gained him enough notoriety to secure financing for Putney Swope, his highest budget production by far (Downey put it at $250,000). Putney Swope the character (played by Arnold Johnson and dubbed by Downey because Johnson couldn’t remember the lines), is the only black employee at a large ad agency. After the chairman of the board keels over in the middle of the meeting, there is a hastily arranged vote to elect the new head, with the body cooling on the table. Swope wins and executes wholesale changes, replacing all the executives with black activists aside from one token member (who complains he doesn’t get paid the same rate). He tells the entire staff to write and create commercials, regardless of the department they’re in.

These brilliantly demented commercials air in color, while the rest of the film is in black and white. Freed from any market research, or any relationship to the product at all, these ads are gleeful bursts of pure nonsense. “Ethereal Cereal” executes a slow zoom to a curious black eater responding to the white narrator , “No Shit!” The ad for Fan-A-Way electric fans is even more bizarre. With a funky guitar-organ riff on the soundtrack, a woman in gold lamé sashays past a homeless man in an alley. She stops in front of the camera and says, “You can’t eat…an air conditioner,” and then retreats into a smoke machine. The ad for Lucky Airlines is an absurdly long orgy sequence, while that for Face Off acne cream (the favorite bit of Henry Louis Gates, a Putney Swope fan) shows an interracial couple on a bicycle built for two as they sing, “You gave me a dry hump/behind the hot dog stand.” These are all fabulous wastes of money and disconnect the product from the images on-screen. They aren’t selling but destroying.

Though Swope’s company is initially something of a socialist enterprise, with everyone pitching into the creative, eventually Swope does steal credit, and seemingly marries his mistress just so he can use her ideas for campaigns. He gets so successful he is fielding calls from the President (played by little person Pepi Hermine). But in an abrupt and brusquely violent end, he distributes the profits to his employees and then burns the place down. For a black intellectual like Henry Louis Gates, who called it the first blaxploitation film, Swope “was our secret hero. What we wanted to do…our self-styled revolutionary vanguard that integrated Yale in large numbers-was to go in the system and transform it from the inside.” It’s unclear from the film what Swope actually changed in the system itself, as the greater society in the film is depicted as rotten, corrupt and ridiculous. That is why Swope presumably burns it all down, to start back at zero. But it’s a film of energetic messiness and ideological ambiguity, one can take what they want from it. For example, Louis C.K. is a vocal admirer who has used it as an inspiration for making uncompromising work that doesn’t court a specific audience. On WTF With Marc Maron he recalled finding an old VHS copy of Putney Swope and being amazed something like that could be made. Days later he started getting money together to shoot a movie.

Putney Swope was enormously successful for distributor Donald Rugoff, who told Life, “Once we had this James Bond thing, Thunderball, at Cinema II, and it did this fantastic box office, more than we’d ever supposed possible for any movie, and now Putney Swope is way ahead of it. Isn’t that terrible?” It is not hard to envision its success, considering how outrageous it is (its sketch comedy structure anticipates the Zucker Brothers’ The Kentucky Fried Movie and Mel Brooks’ History of the World) and its eye-catching middle finger theatrical poster. But in its time writer Stephen Mahoney had a more convincing argument for its popularity: “Alice’s Restaurant makes the point that kids could get on fine if it weren’t for funky adults. There’s More, which makes the case that kids could get on fine if it weren’t for funky adults…. In Putney Swope there is no generational self pity. The point to Downey’s film is that nobody could get on fine in any circumstances.”

Street Grand Prix: Ronin (1998)

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March 21, 2017

An Audi S8 sluices through the country roads outside of Nice, running down a trio of anonymous sedans. With the aid of pinpoint braking and navigational support, the Audi sideswipes its final target in the center of the city, taking out an outdoor cafe with it. This brutally exciting sequence halfway through Ronin (1998) typifies its fuel-injected virtues, one in which the cars are the stars just as much as Robert De Niro. It’s been years since I’ve seen it, but I could still recall the make and model of that Audi S8 before the wheelman (Skipp Sudduth) requests it from his handlers. But while the cars are the main attraction, the rest of the film is a slyly elliptical bit of post-Cold War spycraft, as a group of out-of-work spooks are hired to steal a MacGuffin that both the IRA and the Russians are after (Ronin is streaming on FilmStruck as part of its nine-film series “A Movie History of the IRA”). The script was heavily re-written by David Mamet (credited as Richard Weisz due to WGA wrangling), and the film is filled with his weighted repetitions, tangy slang and allusive phrasing, the ex-agents communicating in code, trying not to give themselves away. As on his 1966 racing film Grand Prix, director John Frankenheimer required all the stunt driving to be done at full speed with no special effects. The results are pleasurably stressful, as reflected in De Niro’s white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel – he was actually in a car going 100mph, with his stunt driver operating the vehicle in the opposite seat.

Ronin came near the end of Frankenheimer’s long and volatile career in Hollywood. It had been a long journey from the live television experiments of Playhouse 90 and The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to his infamous The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) remake. He had long battled alcoholism, which crippled his career and his health throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. But it was his return to television that revived his fortunes – he won best director Emmys for Against the Wall (1994), The Burning Season (1995), Andersonville (1996) and George Wallace (1998). These prestige, rather stuffy productions made him a viable name again, and producer Frank Mancuso Jr. offered him the gig on Ronin. Frankenheimer had lived in France and could speak the language, so was considered a natural choice for the movie, which would require a lot of location shooting in Nice and Paris.

The script was written by J.D. Zeik and spruced up by David Mamet. There were conflicting claims about the extent of Mamet’s changes. Frankenheimer told the Los Angeles Times that, “The credits should read: ‘Story by J.D. Zeik, screenplay by David Mamet. We didn’t shoot a line of Zeik’s script.” Zeik’s attorney, however, claimed that “Mamet was brought in at the last minute before production to beef up De Niro’s role,” and that the majority of the script was Zeik’s work. Mamet remained silent, and took co-writing credit under the Weisz pseudonym (he only wanted to use his name on scripts he wrote alone). I’m inclined to trust Frankenheimer on this, and the film is filled with scenes that sound like Mamet’s combative slangy dialogue, especially the film’s “getting-the-team-together” first half.

Robert De Niro plays Sam, an ex-CIA operative in need of work. He is recruited by a never-seen “man in a wheelchair” to take part in the heist of a steel case, contents unknown. His fellow heisters include the American wheelman Larry, French materials procurer Vincent (Jean Reno), British weapons trader Spence (Sean Bean) and German computer whiz Gregor (Stellan Skarsgård). Their contact is Deirdre (Natasha McElhone), who doesn’t try to hide her Irish lilt and implied IRA allegiance. Their first attempt to steal the silver case goes haywire, and it leads them to Paris and to the Russian mobster who is also in pursuit. In the grand tradition of Kiss Me Deadly (1955) or Pulp Fiction (1994), the contents of the case are a MacGuffin, an unexplained excuse to keep the story propelling forward.

De Niro is in fine recalcitrant form, his Sam a stubborn bastard who questions the plan at every turn. Like all the other mercenaries, he used to be aligned with a major power and has been cut loose to wander the black spy markets of the world (hence the title, a reference to the story of the 47 Ronin, or masterless samurai). They are all bitter for the loss of direction (and steady paycheck), and so they poke each other for information, responding in riddles. An early exchange between Sam and Gregor goes like:

Gregor: So what brought you here?
Sam: A fellow that doesn’t work so well.
Gregor: The man in the wheelchair? How did he get there?
Sam: Seems to me that was in your neck of the woods back in the late unpleasantness.

None of this is explained or followed up on. The “man in the wheelchair” could be code or a flesh and blood human, and there is no referent for “How did he get there?” Where is there? Is the “late unpleasantness” a reference to the Cold War or a specific mission? Information is restricted from the characters and even more so from the viewers. This allows Ronin to keep its air of mystery, its dialogue obscuring rather than explaining. The most talkative character is a Michael Lonsdale cameo, an eccentric in oversized sweaters and leonine hair, painting mini-samurai in his palatial estate, giving long speeches on the significance of the “ronin,” or masterless samurai. He also is in charge of sopping up Sam’s blood as Vincent removes a bullet from his gut. Like the similar scene in He Walked By Night (1948) I wrote about last week, this sequence is unflinching, focusing on the emergent perspiration on De Niro’s face as Reno digs around in his belly.

While a brutal and memorable entry in the bullet removal scene canon, it’s the car chases that will keep Ronin on clickbait car chase listicles until the end of the internet. Frankenheimer hired French DP Robert Fraisse, who was then best known for his work with Jean-Jacques Annaud (Seven Years in Tibet [1997]), not exactly an action film resume. But Frankenheimer was impressed with his work on the HBO cop thriller Citizen X (1995), and moved ahead. Fraisse spoke to American Cinematographer about the pre-production conversations: “When we started working on the movie, we talked about the style, and John said, ‘I want a lot of setups, I want the shots to be very short, and I want to work with very short focal lengths,’” Fraisse recalls. “John wanted this movie to appear on screen almost like reportage, as if we shot things that were really happening, so we didn’t want to be too sophisticated. Instead, we tried to convey an ambiance, an atmosphere.”

This short lens “reportage” style carried over to the car chase sequences, which Frankenheimer wanted to run at full speed – he hired stunt drivers from Formula One to push the vehicles to their limit. Since they are used to driving at 180 mph, at 100 mph they were able to pull off astonishing hairsbreadth turns and escapes. In one breathtaking shot, a crash ahead has sent a vehicle spinning, and with no room for error the BMW speeds around the car as if going through a revolving door. I don’t know how many times they had to stage it, though it was reported 80 cars were totaled during production.

The most complicated sequence occurs in Paris, where a BMW and Peugeot are chasing each other down the wrong way of a one-way highway. They had multiple cameras covering each shot, with some mounted on the cars themselves. Fraisse again in American Cinematographer: “Most of the time, we used three or four normal cameras, plus one or two remote crash-box cameras, which were cheap cameras with cheap lenses inside very heavy and resistant metal blimp. With that kind of camera, we got very brief but incredible shots. When you shoot car chases with long focal lengths, you can shoot for 20 seconds, because you see the car far into the depth and you can let it come toward camera. But with very short focal lengths, the cars cross the frame very fast, which I think is a very strong effect. We also shot in Nice, which is an old city in the South of France with very narrow streets, so the shots automatically didn’t last a long time. We needed to shoot many setups to have the continuity of the cars going from one street to another.” That continuity achieved through this chaos is a testament to the talents of Frankenheimer, Fraisse and the editor Tony Gibbs, who conducted these brief flashes across the screen to create a thrilling symphony of destruction.

Best Friends Forever: Girlfriends (1978)

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March 7, 2017

Claudia Weill described her companionable film Girlfriends (1978) with a quote from the Eleanor Bergstein novel Advancing Paul Newman: “This is a story of two girls, each of whom suspected the other of a more passionate connection with life.” Or to put it in modern parlance, it’s a comedy of FOMO (fear of missing out). Girlfriends portrays the NYC friendship between the Jewish brunette Susan Weinblatt (Melanie Mayron) and the WASP blonde Anne Munroe (Anita Skinner). Susan is delaying family life to pursue a career in photography, while Anne speeds into marriage and kids while putting her writing to the side. They envy the other’s freedom and security, respectively, and their once unbreakable bond begins to fray. Girlfriends began as a documentary project on Jewish American identity, with funding from the AFI, but instead Weill funneled all her research into an independent feature, one so well-received it was picked up by Warner Bros. for distribution. Though the set-up can be a bit schematic, Weill has the patience of a documentarian and allows the actors to build their characters from types into complex personalities (shooting on location in shabby NYC apartments helps with the verisimilitude). The cast is superb all around, from Mayron and Skinner to the men who pursue them with varying degrees of success (an anxious Bob Balaban, flighty Christopher Guest and a charismatic Eli Wallach). Girlfriends is streaming on FilmStruck, and is also airing on Turner Classic Movies Wednesday March 8 at 9:15am.

Claudia Weill studied Modern European History and Literature at Harvard, but decided to pursue the arts. She took painting classes from Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg and studied still photography under Walker Evans at Yale. Her facility with the camera led her into documentary filmmaking, and she shot and co-directed (with Shirley MacLaine) The Other Half of the Sky — a China Memoir (1975), which was nominated for an Academy Award. Afterward she was looking for a new challenge, as she told the Institute of Contemporary Arts: “I had spent years following people around with my camera, kind of waiting for them to say what they wanted to say and then spending months in the editing room manipulating that into a film. So all I wanted to do was to make a film that had a script first.”

After abandoning the documentary project, Weill sketched out the idea of a fiction feature with her friend Vicki Polan (who receives screenwriting credit). The story starts with Susan and Anne sharing their lives together in an Upper West Side apartment. They are mutual support systems working in tandem, cocooning each other with overlapping dialogue. They are always cutting each other off, trying to restate what the other is thinking better than they can articulate. This friendship is punctured when Anne falls fast for Martin and gets married. Their whole system collapses, and their mode of communication shifts. Now there are boilerplate “how are you doing” phone calls, awkward vacation photo sessions on couches where Susan is the third wheel and passive-aggressive fights about who is not keeping in touch with whom. So instead Susan focuses on her photography. She starts out shooting weddings and bar mitzvahs for Rabbi Gold (Eli Wallach), and they engage in playful flirtation until it gets too inconvenient for the married man. Men in power are always obstacles to be parried or endured, though the Rabbi is a particularly sympathetic one. Before the rushed split, Wallach is delightfully desperate as the hip rabbi, even trying out a smooth Marcel Marceau impression, which charms Susan (maybe because she was drinking).

But without a roommate Susan is barely making ends meet in the Upper West Side apartment, and she feels abandoned and alone. Susan is a bit of a self-dramatist and whiner, so she receives every setback as a mortal blow. Melanie Mayron plays her with a perpetual slouch, as if anticipating bad news before it happens. With her frizzy hair and sarcastic attitude Susan makes the ideal of the sassy supportive girlfriend in the run of the mill romcom. But Weill makes her the centerpiece. So while nice-girl Anne buggers off to the Middle East on vacation with mousy Martin (Bob Balaban), the film stays with Susan, pitching her work to sleazy magazine editors, taking on a spacey performance artist roommate and throwing herself at the witty-ish, good-looking enough Eric (Christopher Guest) at a party. She would rather not make life-altering decisions so she delays them until they resolve on their own or force her to respond. Like Eric inviting her to move in, or even what photos she should show in her first solo exhibition. She’d prefer to float than to focus. But a switch in her thinking is reflected in the interior design – the array of unpacked boxes and hastily tacked-up posters of the undergrad slowly shifts into the arranged life of an adult, with honest-to-god furniture and a hammock. She now seeks comfort from home instead of just a place to crash. While Susan stresses and redecorates, Anne is trying to restart her writing career with a toddler crawling up her leg and a caring if ineffectual husband. They reconnect as if no time has elapsed, though on different terms. Instead of living inside each other’s thoughts, they have become alien to each other, and so more fascinating. This sparks curiosity and openness, and that friendship sparks anew.

Weill received $80,000 from the NEA and New York State Council on the Arts to make the film, which The New York Times reported was “the first independent American dramatic film to be primed with grants.” The shoot took six weeks in 1975, but the post-production process dragged on for years because they ran out of money. It stopped and started depending on what private funding they could cobble together, until it was finally completed and sent on the 1978 festival circuit. It was an immediate success, and within two weeks of screening for distributors, it was acquired by Warner Bros. In 1978 there was a moment where films for, by and about women were finding success. Studios were trying to replicate the success of Annie Hall (1977), An Unmarried Woman (1978), and The Turning Point (1977). There were also a group of female filmmakers coming out with films, including Joan Rivers’ Rabbit Test (1978), Joan Micklin Silver’s Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), Joan Wagner’s Moment by Moment (1978) and Joan Tewksbury’s Old Boyfriends (1979). The New York Times wrote an article, “Women Directors: Will They, Too, Be Allowed to Bomb?” It turns out the answer is no, not really. Weill would make one feature with Hollywood support, It’s My Turn (1980, starring Jill Clayburgh and Michael Douglas), before turning to a long career in television.

Workin’ Man’s Blues: Man is Not a Bird (1965)

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February 28, 2017

Dušan Makavejev made his directorial debut with Man is Not a Bird (1965), a raucous portrait of a Yugoslav mining city currently streaming on FilmStruck as part of the Directed by Dušan Makavejev theme. Made with the full cooperation of the residents of Bor, an industrial town in eastern Serbia, the movie is filled with hypnotist acts, marriage breakdowns, circus routines and brief, bitter affairs. It is based on the real lives of people that Makavejev interviewed before shooting, while indulging the director’s love of the carnivalesque, injecting Makavejev’s absurdist humor into a film that, by subject matter anyway, inherits the tradition of the Communist social realist films of previous decades. But these worker-heroes, while awarded and celebrated by the local government, have made messes of their personal lives. Makavejev said that with this film he “was trying to explain that you can have global changes but people can still stay the same, unhappy or awkward or privately confused.”

Makaveyev grew up in Belgrade and graduated college with a degree in psychology, though he was attracted to film ever since he saw a German dub of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)when he was a child. He became associated with a group of filmmakers named novi film, or later the “black wave,” which sought to break free of socialist realism and its cheery, patriotic depiction of labor. The Avala Film Studio was looking for first-time filmmakers and gave Makaveyev a chance. The director, according to biographer Lorraine Mortimer, compiled “more than three-hundred pages of facts and anecdotes from factory heads, unions, party members, policemen, technicians, miners, metalworkers, and others.”

The story’s main character Jan Rudinski (Janez Vrhovec), a celebrity metal refinery engineer, known for reducing installation times by miraculous amounts. He’s come to Bor to install a turbobooster which will supposedly speed up the processing time at the copper refinery. Jan takes a room with a local family, whose beautiful daughter Rajka (Milena Dravic) begins a bored and successful flirtation. Circulating around this main spoke is the story of Barbulovic (Stojan Arandjelovic), a stoker at the factory, and his wife (Eva Ras). Barbulovic is a bibulous type, prone to drooling over the local nightclub singer. His wife sees his mistress wearing her dress in town, and a very public beating ensues. Their relationship disintegrates from there, as the wife is emboldened to wrench herself away from her husband’s ironclad rule. All the while Jan’s tryst with Rajka fizzles out due to Jan’s devotion to his job. As these relationships self-combust, the factory promotes its record-breaking copper production, and the town attracts a famous hypnotist and a traveling circus act to while away the hours.

Man is Not a Bird was shot in thirty-six days under what Makavejev described as “horrible” working conditions – he recalled that there was acid smoke that dissolved the stockings of his female film crew within an hour. But, he would go on to say that this “strange and literally dark and dirty place” exuded a “charming vitality and unexpected humor.” There are scores of charming throwaway moments, as when a random worker is shown smuggling out copper wire by twirling it around himself like a prima ballerina, or when a hypnotist convinces these hard-bitten men that they are weightless cosmonauts, and they flop around like loosed guppies. But Makavejev and his cinematographer Aleksandar Petkovic get a lot of mileage out of the smoke plumes and dirt constantly emanating out of Bor, a place of no illusions (or amenities). There is a mix of dollied long takes, hand-held shakiness and bird’s eye views, getting every possible perspective and texture of the town, getting everything from street scenes to factory machinery montage.

Jan Rudisnki is a fascinating character, an engineering superstar who could have headlined the social realist Communist films of the 1940s, but now he has aged into apathy. He enters into the affair with Rajka reluctantly, performs his work with gruff speed and agrees to speed up the installation process only to prop up the Rudinski brand, which is enough to win him another medal. To Rajka he’s a diversion and possibly a ticket out of town, but when he displays more interest in copper than her, she moves on to her next suitor, a slick mustachioed worker who keeps flirting with her at the barbershop she works at. While not as wealthy, he at least expresses interest in her existence. So after Jan receives his latest medal from the government, at a ceremony of pomp and Beethoven that the workers barely tolerate (Barbulovic stumbles through it looking for his wife – who has taken a cue from the hypnotist and broken his spell over her), he goes to an empty restaurant to get serenaded by a sarcastic Serbian folk troupe. It ends with Jan breaking a mirror and getting reflected in a shard, one of the showier shots in an otherwise “gritty” film. He is a shattered man, though only for one night. He puts himself together again before he’s off to the next emergency job, where he can be celebrated by another local pol.

Throughout the film the workers are celebrated in words while ignored in reality. Throughout the film two giant photographs of a workers’ worn and calloused hands are being ferried through the neighborhood, moving slowly towards the auditorium. They appear as non sequiturs in the background, but turn out to be backdrops for Jan’s awards ceremony. But at the final rehearsal, as the stagehands are erecting them, an anonymous producer asks what they are doing there and demands they be taken down. They are swiftly removed and the classical choir stands in front of a blank wall instead. The local government lionizes labor and work, but prefers it to be invisible. Makavejev’s film aims to restore something of a work-life balance to his characters’ lives, however dirty and dark and funny.

This coal-dark gem was just the beginning of Makavejev’s career – five more of his features are streaming on FilmStruck if you’d like to see more.