L'Eclisse (1962)

****
Country: Italy
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni

The first time I watched Antonioni's L'Eclisse was years ago, and I remembered so little about it—two brief scenes and the amazing silent coda which lasts several minutes—that when I recently watched it again I was essentially seeing it for the first time. The greatest impression the film left with me was what a completely visual filmmaker Antonioni was. Paul Cézanne once said of Claude Monet, "He's nothing but an eye, but what an eye." I think this comment could equally be applied to Antonioni, for here incident is less important and has less impact than visual detail. Each shot in L'Eclisse is masterfully composed, at once abstract and fraught with significance. The choice of objects and people; their placement and movement in the frame; the geometry, perspective, and depth of the intricate yet crisply delineated compositions; the subtle tonal gradations of the black-and-white images; the purposeful transitions from one image to the next; the architecture of buildings, rooms, and streets—all visual aspects of each image in the movie are carefully and precisely planned by Antonioni.

In contrast to this complete control of the visual elements of the movie, the most important elements of conventional narrative—character and plot—seem startlingly casual. The main characters, Vittoria (Monica Vitti), a translator, and Piero (Alain Delon), a stock trader, are only sketchily defined. She is a detached observer of her own life living almost entirely in the sensations of the moment, while he is a shallow materialist driven by an ethos of competition and acquisition. The events of the movie seem almost self-propelled, unfolding in an episodic way that defies conventional narration in which one event leads to the next as the plot proceeds to its conclusion. Antonioni instead simply lays out a series of incidents whose impact is essentially cumulative.

The movie does have a clear beginning, as Vittoria breaks off her engagement and her relationship to Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) in a long, elaborately choreographed and edited sequence as self-contained and visually distinctive as the lengthy montage at the end. But from that point on events, although presented chronologically, seem to evolve spontaneously as the movie meanders from episode to episode. Events occur almost in isolation from one another, and the most memorable parts of the movie have little causal connection: The evening Vittoria spends with her girl friends, chatting, dressing up, and fooling around. The eerie episode when Piero's car, having been stolen by a drunk, is lifted from the river where it has crashed, with the drowned thief still in it. The frenzy of the stock exchange where Piero works, at one point interrupted by a minute's silence for a dead colleague before the trading bell rings and pandemonium instantly resumes. A quiet interlude in a small private airplane, where Vittoria seems to come unmoored from her ordinary existence and float free for a brief time, a sequence that more vividly than any other in the film gives a sense of the contrast between interior confinement, with four people crammed into a tiny airplane, and the openness of exterior space, with the plane floating through the sky and clouds.

Even the ending is wholly ambiguous. After their last tryst, Vittoria and Piero vow to meet again that evening and every day after that. Yet after they part, Piero replaces all the telephones he has taken off the hook for the duration of the tryst and resumes his normal commercial life, while Vittoria wanders down the staircase hesitatingly, her facial expressions hinting at indecision and conflict, actions that mirror those of the first sequence when she was working up the nerve to tell her fiancé she had decided to end their relationship. Yet there is method to this apparent narrative randomness: it corresponds exactly to what I take to be the point of the film, that in the modern world people's lives simply proceed from one stage to the next without clear meaning or purpose. Tellingly, Antonioni declines to do with his narrative what storytellers traditionally have always done—impose form where there is none inherent.

The one element of conventional narrative that Antonioni does not minimize is setting. In fact, he makes this the centerpiece and the unifying element of the movie. Always there is the emphasis on space—the lack or surfeit of it—and the contrast between overfilled interior spaces and empty exterior spaces—the vast, soulless ultra-modern postwar suburbs where Vittoria lives, places that are nearly silent except for the rustling of foliage, the spooky vibration of metal fence posts in the breeze, the clang of metal gates as they open and shut.

All this attention to visual detail is not just decorative, but profoundly thematic. The places where these people live and work, the landscapes through which they move tell us more about them than do their words and actions. The people in the foreground and what is happening to them are less important than the buildings, streets, objects, even other people in the background and on the periphery, for it is through location that Antonioni reveals his preoccupation with mood. The movie is ultimately more about the shifting moods of its characters than about their personalities, problems, or motivation. The people in the movie are almost vacuums. The places where they exist have greater substance and form than they themselves do, in a sense standing in for the vacancy of their inner lives.

Then there is that stunning final montage (Antonioni's version of Ozu's pillow shots?) when we revisit outdoor locations where scenes in the movie have taken place, but without any of the main characters present, ending as the streetlights come on and night falls. Containing no dialogue and with no obvious narrative connection to the rest of the film, this sequence is still perhaps the most meaningful in the entire movie. Antonioni seems to be saying that people and events are transient, that only places last. This is most strongly expressed in recurrent images of a barrel of water in which Vittoria earlier dropped a stick and which has now sprung a leak. As Antonioni repeatedly returns to the barrel we watch the water slowly emptying from it and flowing down the street and into the gutter. Life simply goes on, he seems to be saying, slowly flowing away, leaving behind only the empty vessel that once contained it. It is to Antonioni's credit that he has made a film about ennui that itself is never boring, a quality due largely to his astounding ability to use the camera to evoke mood and to transfer that mood almost subliminally to the viewer.

The strongest memory of a living person we take from the film is of Monica Vitti, whose Vittoria—in her aimless drift through life, unable to connect for long with anyone or anything—is the human focus of the movie. And the strongest human images that remain behind are the many lingering shots of her unreadable face, her expressions enigmatic yet hauntingly suggestive of a woman lost in a strange, bewildering, and apparently meaningless world.

---

1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 5

The Summing Up

In the previous installments of this series I've written on the five movies that for me are the unequivocal American masterpieces of 1962: Lawrence of Arabia, Long Day's Journey into Night, The Miracle Worker, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and Ride the High Country. In truth this is not all that large a number of great American movies for any single year. What really distinguishes the year 1962 in American pictures for me, though, is the addition to these five masterpieces of an unusually large number of films that fall just short of masterpiece status but are nonetheless excellent works.

Although many knowledgeable film lovers consider To Kill a Mockingbird a great movie, I would add it to this latter group, probably as first runner-up. Mockingbird has many fine qualities, but I don't think it quite reaches the level of the five I have identified as the great American movies of the year. Its condemnation of racism is laudable and important, but in narrative terms I find that the emphasis on this theme essentially turns the movie into a courtroom drama that proceeds in lockstep to its inevitable conclusion. I prefer the greater emphasis of the novel on the less dramatic but more moving childhood memory aspects of the story.

I am also not a big fan of Gregory Peck, and for me his rather wooden acting style makes the nobility of Atticus Finch seem stiff and just a bit dull. (I realize that I am likely in the minority here.) I would have preferred a warmer actor like Henry Fonda or Joel McCrea or even William Holden as Atticus Finch. I do think, however, that while Mockingbird falls short of masterpiece status, it is still an excellent movie and am including it on the following list of other notable American movies of the year:

• Cape Fear
• Days of Wine and Roses
• Experiment in Terror
• Hatari!
• Lolita
• Lonely Are the Brave
• The Longest Day
• Lover Come Back (shown in Los Angeles in late Dec. 1961, probably to qualify for the Oscars—it did receive a nomination for best original screenplay—but not in general release in the US until Mar. 1962)
• The Manchurian Candidate (a good year for John Frankenheimer, who also directed All Fall Down and The Birdman of Alcatraz)
• Sweet Bird of Youth
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
  

For the record, here are the five films nominated for the Oscar as best picture of 1962:

• Lawrence of Arabia (the winner)
• The Longest Day
• The Music Man
• Mutiny on the Bounty
• To Kill a Mockingbird
  

Several notable British and foreign language films were also first released in the US in 1962. Some of these presage the directions American films would take later in the decade—on the one hand, greater realism; on the other hand, a greater degree of auteur-inspired stylization.

• Through a Glass Darkly (Sweden)—Oscar winner as best foreign film of 1961
• Divorce, Italian Style (Italy)
• L'Eclisse (Italy)
• Shoot the Piano Player (France)
• Jules and Jim (France)
• Last Year at Marienbad (France)
• Sundays and Cybèle (France)—Oscar winner as best foreign film of 1962
• The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (UK)
• A Taste of Honey (UK)
• Whistle Down the Wind (UK)
  

Finally, a few observations about some of the memorable performances of the year. This was an especially fine year for acting—another reason 1962 was such a great year—and when Oscar time came, all the nominations for best actor and best actress were for once well deserved. But several other nomination-worthy performances didn't make the cut, especially in the best actor category: James Stewart and John Wayne, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; Joel McCrea, Ride the High Country; Kirk Douglas, Lonely Are the Brave (according to Michael Douglas, his father's favorite movie he ever made); James Mason, Lolita (he was the very personification of Humbert Humbert); Jason Robards and Ralph Richardson, Long Day's Journey Into Night; Robert Mitchum's menacing psycho in Cape Fear; Paul Newman, Sweet Bird of Youth; Robert Preston's exuberant Prof. Harold Hill in The Music Man; Tom Courtenay's sensitive performance as a juvenile delinquent in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

As for actresses, even though I'm a huge fan of Bette Davis and consider her without question a superior actress to Joan Crawford, I feel Crawford—restricted to acting largely with her facial expressions and voice—gave an unusually thoughtful and controlled performance in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? that compared quite favorably to the Oscar-nominated Davis's flamboyant gargoyle. And what about Jeanne Moreau's unforgettable Catherine in Jules and Jim? After all, performances in foreign language films were just beginning to be recognized by the Academy: Sophia Loren had won the year before for her performance in the Italian film Two Women, and Marcello Mastroianni received a best actor nomination that very year for Divorce, Italian Style.

In the supporting categories, the following noteworthy performances were overlooked by Oscar: Lee Marvin, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (the definitive version of his early villains); Ross Martin's chilling psychopath in Experiment in Terror; Charles Bickford, so touching as he mourns the loss of his daughter to booze in Days of Wine and Roses; Edgar Buchanan, Ride the High Country; Brandon de Wilde, All Fall Down; Brock Peters, To Kill a Mockingbird; Walter Matthau as the genial sheriff in Lonely Are the Brave, a performance more subtle and sincere than his later hammy ones; Charles Laughton and Don Murray, Advise and Consent; Eva Marie Saint, All Fall Down; Vera Miles, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; and Shelley Winters, hilariously vulgar in Lolita.

---

1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 4

An Elegy for the Western

The fifth American masterpiece of 1962 is another Western, Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country. Like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (which I wrote about in Part 3 of this series), this is a movie that emphasizes theme more strongly than the traditional Western, and that theme is strikingly revealed in its very first scenes. The movie opens with Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) ambling down what seems to be the typical street of a town in a typical Western movie. But Judd, gazing intently all around him, is clearly puzzled, for something is wrong here. The street is deserted; there is no traffic on it, no horses, wagons, or people. The sidewalks, though, are crowded with people expectantly watching the street, and the buildings are festooned with flags and bunting. It almost looks as though the whole town has turned out to welcome Judd.

Suddenly a uniformed policeman hurries up to Judd, shouting, "Get out of the way, old man. Can't you see you're in the way?" And a few moments later a camel bearing a cowboy comes thundering down the street, followed by several more cowboys on horses. The circus—or in this case, the Wild West show—is in town and Judd has just witnessed the end of a race between a camel rider from the show and a group of local cowboys. When Judd is then nearly run down by a primitive automobile, the point of the movie becomes clear: This is not a movie glorifying the Old West, but a lament for its passing; what for Judd is a way of life has become for everyone else a sideshow. Ride the High Country is not just another Western, but an elegy for a movie genre that has lost its relevance.

Judd, a retired U. S. Marshall, has come to town to do a job. He has been hired by the local bank to travel to Coarsegold, a mining camp in the Sierras and bring back $250,000 worth of gold bullion from the miners there. But he needs help to do that, and he finds it in an unexpected place. While visiting the Wild West show, he encounters an old friend, Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott), who is performing as a sort of imitation-Buffalo Bill Cody sharpshooter called the Oregon Kid. Westrum volunteers himself and his young friend and fellow performer (he was the camel rider) Heck Longtree (Ron Starr) to accompany Judd on his mission to the Gold Country.

When we next see Westrum, he looks completely different. Gone are the long hair and beard he wore in the show. Has he gotten a haircut and shaved? Or, which seems more likely, has he simply shed a long-haired wig and false beard along with the elaborate buckskin costume and stage make-up he was obviously wearing when we first saw him? Either way Westrum's whole Wild West persona was plainly just a disguise used while performing as part of a nostalgic Wild West fantasy. This pretense seems an appropriate touch, for it is quickly revealed that Westrum and Longtree plan to rob Judd on the way back and take the gold for themselves.

Within fifteen minutes of the first scene, the men are on their way. From that point on, the movie follows a classic structure dating back to Greek mythology: the two-part, mirror-image division into a journey in and a journey back, like Orpheus descending to hell and returning. When the men spend their first night in the barn of a ranch, they unexpectedly pick up a traveling companion, Elsa Knudsen (Mariette Hartley), the ranch owner's young daughter, who wants to escape her puritanical and overly protective father to join her fiancé, who lives near Coarsegold.

Arrival in Coarsegold reveals that nothing is what the travelers anticipated. It is clear that Elsa's fiancé and his brothers are a family of lascivious degenerates who plan to share Elsa and use her essentially as a sex slave. Coarsegold itself is a hellish place, a tent city run by the owner/madam of the local saloon/brothel, Kate, and her crony, the alcoholic Judge Tolliver (Edgar Buchanan, who is terrific). And the expected $250,000 in gold turns out to be only $11,000 worth.

The "marriage" ceremony the drunken judge performs for Elsa is a surreal farce, taking place in the scarlet-walled saloon/brothel with Kate as Elsa's "bridesmaid" and the prostitutes as her "flower girls." Judd, Westrum, and young Longtree (who has developed a crush on Elsa) cannot allow the sham marriage to be consummated. Judd coerces the judge into invalidating the marriage, and the three men and Elsa leave Coarsegold, pursued by the angry bridegroom and his brothers, and begin their return journey, passing the same landmarks they had encountered previously.

When Westrum and Longtree make their move to seize the gold, Judd overpowers them and now has to contend not only with the vengeful pursuers but with two prisoners as well. After one shootout with the pursuers, they manage to make it back to Elsa's ranch, only to find that the surviving pursuers have reached it first, killed Elsa's father, and are waiting to ambush them. Westrum uses his sharpshooting skills to help Judd overcome the remaining pursuers and redeems himself by promising the dying Judd, who has been wounded in the shootout, to complete their mission and deliver the gold to the bank.

Ride the High Country was hardly the first anti-romantic Western. The demythologizing of the Old West in movies began at least as early as 1948 with John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (although admittedly that film is set in Mexico). This reappraisal of the genre continued with the Anthony Mann-James Stewart Westerns and the Budd Boeticcher-Randolph Scott Westerns of the 1950s. These were tough, cynical movies whose main characters were no longer unambiguously heroic, but had paradoxical and sometimes outright undesirable qualities and motivations. Happy endings in which unequivocally good people defeated unequivocally evil people were no longer a given of the genre. Desirable outcomes, if they occurred at all, came at a high price and were balanced by sacrifice and loss. And sometimes, even when bad people were overcome, the victory was a hollow one that left an unpleasant aftertaste.

In John Ford's Westerns most people are decent and peaceful. Ford doesn't deny the existence of villains like Liberty Valance who seek to victimize these decent people, but the villains are the exception and are subject to control by the collective resistance of ordinary people and the heroic actions of extraordinary people like Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The Mann and Boetticher Westerns begin to blur the distinction between hero and villain, with each of these opposing forces sharing some traits of the other. The villains have their own warped code of honor while the heroes are ruthlessly dedicated to achieving their aims at any cost, and ordinary people are often unfortunately caught in the middle of this conflict.

In Ride the High Country Peckinpah takes the concept of the Old West as idealized myth and gives it his own slant. He darkens the Western genre even further than Mann and Boetticher by superimposing on the traditional formulas of the John Ford-style Western his own unrelentingly bleak view of humanity, in which people are almost without exception driven by their most ignoble qualities. His characters are motivated by greed, revenge, the desire to exploit others, or just plain self-interest rather than conscience, a sense of right and wrong, or a belief in justice, as Ford's characters are. He doesn't seem to be denying altogether that idealistic people and selfless actions existed in the Old West, but rather that they were the rare exception. In Ride the High Country there are precious few morally neutral people. Judd and the innocent Elsa are the only unalloyed forces of honor and truth in the entire movie. Everyone else is, if not openly corrupt, then false and covertly corrupt. And Peckinpah seems to be saying that the force of their corruption makes them juggernauts able to smash nearly everything in their path.

Peckinpah also seems to be suggesting that in addition to the baser human motivations, time and change are destructive forces as well, a theme he further explored in 1969's The Wild Bunch. Judd is a man out of time, a noble but quixotic figure whose adherence to a code of honor makes him an anachronism. In his Westerns Peckinpah's brand of cynicism is expressed in the belief that any potential for good in the Old West was swept aside by the passage of time before it was able to be fulfilled. This strikes me as the cynicism not of the born nihilist, but of the disillusioned idealist. Perhaps that explains the one bit of hope he allows in this dismal view of humanity: the rare instance when someone like Westrum is inspired by the example and self-sacrifice of someone like Judd to undergo a transformation for the better and, at least temporarily, master his most unethical instincts and impulses.

---

Next week I'll be concluding my series on the year 1962 in American movies.

1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 3

Fact vs. Legend in the Old West

In my two previous posts on the great American films of the year 1962, I discussed a historical epic, Lawrence of Arabia, and two brilliant adaptations of stage plays, Long Day's Journey into Night and The Miracle Worker. The fourth American masterpiece released in 1962 was a Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Directed by the undisputed master of the genre, John Ford, the movie was at the time dismissed by most critics as a throwback, a relic of an outdated genre. Since then the reevaluation of the films of Ford and his recognition as one of the major American auteurs have led to the reevaluation of this movie. It is now rightly regarded as his last great work, and of the same caliber as his greatest Westerns: Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), and The Searchers (1956).

The film begins with the arrival by train in the small Western town of Shinbone of a distinguished U.S. Senator, Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), and his wife, Hallie (Vera Miles), who have returned to Shinbone for the funeral of an old friend—and onetime rival of Stoddard for Hallie—Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). Stoddard is known as the man who first gained fame for killing the notorious gunman Liberty Valance in a gunfight in Shinbone, an event that launched his political career. When newspaper reporters pressure Stoddard into giving an interview, he agrees in order to set the record straight about his own history and his friendship with Doniphon. Most of the rest of the movie consists of a flashback that begins with Stoddard's arrival in the town decades earlier as a recent graduate of law school.

It is on the stagecoach ride into Shinbone that Stoddard has his first encounter with Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) when Valance and his cronies rob the stagecoach. Valance, a vicious sadist, not only robs the passengers but also humiliates Stoddard and vandalizes his most prized possession, his set of law books. With this irruption of violence and cruelty into the orderly world of Stoddard, the thematic concern of the movie is immediately established (and will be elaborated on in many variations for the duration of the film): the conflict between might, represented at this point by Valance, and right, represented by Stoddard, the enduring conflict between anarchy and the rule of law.

In the restaurant/saloon in Shinbone, Stoddard first meets his future wife, Hallie, who works in the kitchen, and Tom Doniphon, who comes there to visit her. When he hears of the encounter with Valance, Doniphon offers Stoddard a pistol and tells him, "Out here, a man settles his own problems." Stoddard refuses the gun. Amused by the naiveté of Stoddard and his idealistic belief in the power of the law, Doniphon nicknames him—half-affectionately, half-condescendingly—Pilgrim. Is he alluding to the self-righteous innocence of Christian Pilgrim in The Pilgrim's Progress, or perhaps to the Pilgrims of New England, who came to settle a new continent and encountered more difficulties than they had ever imagined?

Lee Marvin, James Stewart, and John Wayne

Embarking on a campaign to civilize and bring democracy to the Old West, Stoddard quickly gains many followers. He founds a free school in the town to teach literacy to both children and adults. He organizes a town meeting to discuss the territorial convention to petition Congress for statehood. He befriends the local newspaper editor, the alcoholic Dutton Peabody (Edmond O'Brien), and persuades him to write articles and editorials in support of statehood.

But Liberty Valance is hired by the big cattle ranchers, who feel threatened by the regulation that statehood would bring to their industry and by the Constitutional rights that the people of the territory would gain. The school is destroyed, the newspaper editor Peabody savagely beaten after he writes in support of statehood, and the town meeting disrupted. The cattle barons and their hired gun, Liberty Valance, have set themselves in opposition to the most hallowed institutions of democracy: the rights to universal education, free speech, a free press, and free elections.

This is all too much even for a pacifist like Stoddard, who declares, "When force threatens, talk's no good any more," arms himself, and goes looking for Valance. It is this decision that leads to the nighttime showdown between the two men in the streets of Shinbone. It seems certain that Stoddard, no match for a practiced gunman like Valance, will be killed, but he miraculously manages to shoot Valance dead. In the rowdy town meeting that follows, Stoddard, treated like a hero, is elected to be the town's representative at the territorial convention.

At the convention Stoddard, whose reputation as the man who shot Liberty Valance has preceded him, is nominated to present the convention's petition for statehood to Congress. However, appalled at being lionized for committing an act of violence, an act that in retrospect he feels went against his conscience, he declines the nomination and walks out of the convention. Outside, he finds himself face to face with Doniphon, who has followed him, and who drops a bombshell: It was he, hiding in the shadows, who actually shot Liberty Valance, and we are shown the true version of events in flashback from Doniphon's point of view, Rashomon-style. Stoddard is at first stunned and then, relieved at last of the guilt he felt over killing Valance and becoming a celebrity for committing an act that violated his personal ethics, he returns to the convention and accepts the nomination.

As the film returns to the present, Stoddard has finally told the truth to the newspapermen and acknowledged that it was actually Doniphon who was the hero. He is unprepared for their reaction. They refuse to print the story, preferring to preserve the false version of history that has become accepted as the truth. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," they tell Stoddard, a line that itself has become almost legendary.

The truth behind the legend

One of the reasons this movie was dismissed when it was released is that much of the black-and-white picture was shot in the studio and very little on location. Because of this it lacks the pictorial grandeur of Ford's other Westerns shot in the Monument Valley and Moab, Utah, an essential element of those movies and one of the things that give them their distinctive character. But to make up for its lack of spectacular scenery, Liberty Valance has a far greater emphasis on theme than any of Ford's other Westerns. In his last great movie, Ford chose to explore larger issues than the character-centered conflicts of his earlier Westerns, specifically the question of the proper role of force in a democratic society. One critic, Richard Brody, writing about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in a recent issue of the New Yorker (Oct. 26, 2009), went so far as to call it "the greatest American political movie."

Doniphon's revelation at the territorial convention causes Stoddard to modify his position on the use of force. Stoddard learns that where force is concerned, things are not as simple as he thought. He learns that force is in itself neither right nor wrong, but that it is the application to which force is put that makes it right or wrong. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Ford suggests that force is necessary to create and maintain order, that force and the rule of law must work together to defeat anarchy and deflect destructive violence. Without force, the rule of law is powerless, but the controlled use of force and the rule of law working together can create an environment in which democratic institutions are able to flourish and civic stability is assured.

And Ford the storyteller seems to argue that the element of meaning created by mythology is just as important in forging a sense of community and civic identity as the facts of history. No matter how an individual viewer reacts to Ford's views—if indeed this is Ford's view, for equating the ideas of Ford with the ideas expressed by the characters in his movies can be a risky thing for a viewer to do—he makes a reasonable case that at the least must be given serious consideration. And as Peter Bogdanovich, perhaps the greatest Ford scholar and interpreter, points out, in Liberty Valance Ford does expose the facts behind the mythology, and one could argue that the idea that the facts don't always correspond to the myth is actually another important theme of the film.

In casting John Wayne and James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford achieved a real coup. The familiar screen persona of each makes him the ideal embodiment of the attitude his character represents. As the embodiment of force, the ultra-masculine Wayne is the ideal Tom Doniphon, a realist, a stolid loner who lives outside society but uses his strength to protect its most cherished values. As Doniphon's opposite, the embodiment of the rule of law, Stewart (the man who played Destry, the sheriff who refused to carry a gun) is the perfect Ransom Stoddard, an idealist who longs to establish and become part of a community based on order and democratic values.

Each man represents one of the elements essential to the maintenance of a civilized community: the power of reason sustained by the power of physical strength. And perhaps most important, by the end of the movie each man comes to see the philosophy of the other as complementary to his own and to incorporate in his own philosophy elements of the philosophy of his opposite.

---

In the next installment of this series, I'll be examining the final American masterpiece of 1962.

1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 2

The Play's the Thing

Lawrence of Arabia, which I wrote about in the previous installment of this series, is based on an original screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson, which in turn was based on the writings of T. E. Lawrence himself. But two of the other great American movies released in 1962 are film versions of stage plays. One of these is the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (itself the winner of the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for drama), directed by Sidney Lumet. Lumet came to movies from television, where he had worked as a director for nearly ten years before directing his first film, 12 Angry Men (1957).

Running nearly three hours in its unedited version, Journey is possibly the best film version of a stage play I have ever seen. Anyone who has seen it will understand when I say that watching it is an emotionally devastating experience, an experience comparable to watching one of the most emotionally intense films of Ingmar Bergman. By the end of the movie the viewer knows thoroughly the Tyrone family and the deeply flawed relationships of each of its members to the others. And what a family: a tyrannical, obsessively miserly father, a morphine-addicted mother, an alienated, alcoholic older son, and a sensitive younger son dying from tuberculosis.

Credit for the film's powerful impact must go, of course, to O'Neill, but also to director Lumet, who prudently resists the temptation to "open out" the play, keeping it confined to the Tyrone house and to the four members of the family and their maid. In doing this he emphasizes the isolation of the family and their self-created entrapment in despair. In addition, the black-and-white cinematography of Boris Kaufman (Vigo's Zero de Conduite and L'Atalante, On the Waterfront) must be mentioned, with its masterful use of light and shadow within the house, and its capturing of the subtly shifting intensity of light as the day progresses into night, and daylight progresses to lamplight. But above all, credit must go to the ensemble cast—Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell. At the Cannes film festival Hepburn was voted Best Actress, and Richardson, Robards, and Stockwell all shared the Best Actor award.

If I had to single out one of these brilliant performances for special recognition, it would be Katharine Hepburn's Oscar-nominated turn as Mary Tyrone. I greatly admire Hepburn's comedy and light dramatic performances, but her straight dramatic performances sometimes strike me as emphasizing her weaknesses as an actress. Her Mary Tyrone, though, is in a class by itself and unlike anything she had done before or has done since. It has none of the overly earnest histrionics or the idiosyncrasies and tics that can diminish the force of her weightier dramatic performances.

Here she poignantly makes you feel all of the pain, disappointment, and years of frustrated expectations that have broken Mary Tyrone and driven her to become a morphine addict. Hepburn constantly makes you see that trapped inside the dope-addled woman is the hopeful, naive girl who married the dashing older actor. Pauline Kael wrote of her performance that "Hepburn's transitions here—the way she can look 18 or 80 at will—seem iridescent." A comparison of her interpretation of Mary Tyrone to that of the British actress Constance Cummings in Laurence Olivier's 1973 television version—where Mary Tyrone is unsympathetically portrayed as rather self-pitying, petulant, and neurotic—shows how profoundly affecting Hepburn, forlorn and vulnerable, really is in this movie. The cumulative effect of her performance on the viewer is not unlike the terror and pity experienced by the viewers of Greek tragedy. As Pauline Kael put it, "[T]he screen's most beautiful comedienne of the 30s and 40s becomes our greatest screen tragedienne."

The other great movie of 1962 adapted from a stage play is The Miracle Worker, adapted by William Gibson from his play about Helen Keller (Patty Duke) and her teacher and lifelong friend Annie Sullivan (Anne Bancroft). The director of The Miracle Worker, Arthur Penn, had like Sidney Lumet come from television, and this was only his second movie.

The Miracle Worker was rightly described in promotional material as "An Emotional Earthquake!" When the movie begins, the nearly blind Sullivan, a graduate of and teacher at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, has been hired by Keller's wealthy, genteel Alabama family as governess to an essentially spoiled and untamed creature. Stricken at the age of nineteen months with an illness—possible scarlet fever or meningitis—that left her blind and deaf, Helen has been allowed to develop without any sort of training except for a rudimentary kind of sign language she has been able to acquire spontaneously.

In the early days Helen's reaction to her new governess and teacher alternates unpredictably between co-operation and hostility. Annie succeeds in making limited progress with her pupil only to experience sudden setbacks marked by violent tantrums and physical attacks by Helen. Her greatest success is in teaching Helen to spell with her fingers the names of objects. Yet Annie realizes that Helen is really only mimicking her without grasping the relationship between objects and words. "It's still a finger game to her—no meaning," she tells Helen's mother.

The uneasy relationship between Annie and Helen erupts into all-out conflict one day during the family meal, which as in most traditional Southern households of the time takes place at midday. Helen has never been taught to eat properly, instead roaming around the table while the rest of the family eat and picking bites of food off their plates. Finally Annie can stand this no longer and orders everyone else out of the dining room. What follows is a truly mesmerizing scene lasting nearly ten minutes and containing not a single word of dialogue.

Determined to teach Helen to eat at the table using a plate and spoon, Annie must physically subdue the intractable child. The scene is filled with a relentless physicality that almost borders on brutality on the part of Sullivan. This is in reality less a conflict than a war in which she must conquer her opponent if she is to have any chance of making progress in educating her. The scene occupies less than ten minutes of screen time, but in narrative time it goes on for several hours, until in fact it is time for the next meal of the day. By sheer persistence and force of will Annie does at last succeed at teaching the child to eat properly.

At a loss as to how to proceed with Helen's education beyond this point, Annie finally hits upon a plan to isolate the child from the family and live with her in a cottage on another part of the estate. "I don't think Helen's worst handicap is deafness and blindness," she tells her mother. "I think it's your love and pity." The family reluctantly agree to a two-week trial of the scheme. The two do grow closer as Helen gradually accepts the situation and learns to trust her teacher. But Annie is frustrated in her chief desire, to teach Helen the concept of language. "One word and I can put the world in your hand," she says to Helen in frustration one day.

The two weeks, however, come to an end without this happening, and the family refuse to extend the trial period. At dinner on the first night after their return, things are going badly. Helen is behaving willfully, defying Annie and testing her limits. After she throws a pitcher of water in Annie's face, Annie physically drags her from the dining room in front of the horrified family. Outside at the well Annie tries to force Helen to re-fill the water pitcher using the old-fashioned hand pump. In the unforgettable scene that follows, the breakthrough that Annie has been working for suddenly happens.

Helen's mother has already told Annie that at the age of six months Helen had actually vocalized the word for water, saying "wa-wa." As Helen holds her hand under the stream of water, Annie recognizes in Helen the dawning of awareness of the relationship between objects and words, the birth in Helen's consciousness of the concept of language. Helen, in truth an extraordinarily intelligent child, is somehow able to remember her first experience with language from babyhood and like an unimpaired infant learning her first word, finally vocalizes her first word, "wa-wa." The emotional impact of this scene on the viewer is almost overpowering.

The Miracle Worker has numerous cinematic virtues that make it far more than just a filmed version of a stage play. Repeated images of water throughout the film foreshadow the climactic scene. Penn's use of sound is brilliant. To form a transition between scenes, he frequently overlaps sound and image, beginning the sound from the next scene before the actual cut to it. At the end of the dining room scene, we hear a clock begin to chime; Penn then cuts to the family waiting outside, and the clock finishes chiming. His use of the hand-held camera and of grainy or slightly out-of-focus images superimposed on Annie's face, instead of the conventional flashback, to tell us details about Annie's sad history suggest that Penn had been carefully watching the early films of the French New Wave directors like Alain Resnais and François Truffaut.

But the movie really belongs to Bancroft and Duke. So fully do they inhabit their roles (both had played them in the Broadway production, also directed by Penn) that it is impossible to imagine anyone else playing Annie and Helen. Both were deservedly rewarded with Oscars, Bancroft for best actress and Duke for best supporting actress. Duke became the first child ever to win an Oscar in competition.

The award was a special triumph for Bancroft, who after years spent in Hollywood in the 1950s making cheesy movies like Gorilla at Large, had finally deserted Hollywood for the New York stage, where she won two Tony awards. After The Miracle Worker Bancroft became a bona fide movie star, turning in memorable performances in several other movies, including The Pumpkin Eater (1964), The Graduate (1967), in which she played the iconic Mrs. Robinson, Agnes of God (1985), and 84 Charing Cross Road (1987). In the process she received four more Oscar nominations. For me Bancroft was the pre-eminent American actress of the 1960's.
________________________________________________________________________________________
I'll be discussing more masterpieces from 1962 in future installments and remarking briefly on the other noteworthy American movies of that year.

1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 1

A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma

This year marks the 70th anniversary of that landmark year in American movies, 1939, and the year has been observed in a number of ways, including a new documentary on Turner Classic Movies and a slew of the notable films of that year shown on the channel. Much has been written about the year 1939 and how it was Hollywood's greatest year in terms of the sheer number of great American films released that year. Entire books have been written on this subject. When you read a list of the memorable movies from that year, it is difficult to disagree with the premise. Gone With the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Wuthering Heights, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Ninotchka, The Women, Love Affair, Destry Rides Again, Midnight, Only Angels Have Wings, Dark Victory, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Roaring Twenties, Goodbye Mr. Chips— it really was a year filled with wonderful movies of all genres and also with remarkable performances by some of the greatest stars of the studio era.

Although no other year quite equals 1939 in the history of the American cinema, several others come close. The years 1937, 1940, 1941, 1949, and 1950 also strike me as remarkably strong years in American film. But at the very end of the studio era—in fact, after the studios had reached their peak and were already in decline, doomed by television, independent productions, and the newfound interest in foreign-language films—Hollywood had as a last gasp a year that to me arguably ranks second only to 1939 for the number of memorable films released. That year is 1962.

Of all the great movies of that year, Lawrence of Arabia (technically an Anglo-American production, produced by Horizon Pictures for Columbia) is universally considered the greatest. This is the movie that defines the term epic and was indeed named by the American Film Institute as the best epic movie ever made. Running in excess of three and a half hours and filmed, according to the Internet Movie Database, in 34 separate locations including, among other places, Morocco, Jordan, Spain, England, and even the Imperial Desert of southern California, Lawrence of Arabia is monumental in every respect.

No movie had ever looked quite like this one. Photographed by the great Freddie Young (Goodbye Mr. Chips, Lust for Life, Doctor Zhivago, Ryan's Daughter), the film would have been inconceivable without Technicolor and the widescreen format. Wrapped in Maurice Jarre's rapturous, exotic theme music, it created in the cinematic collective consciousness the archetypal images of the deserts of the Middle East—sun-drenched light; radiantly blue, cloudless skies; vast, empty, horizontal landscapes where "lone and level sands stretch far away"—as vividly and indelibly as the Westerns of John Ford did for the American Southwest.

David Lean, the director of Lawrence of Arabia, had been directing for nearly twenty years when this movie was released. Sharing directing credit for his first film, In Which We Serve (1942), with Noel Coward, who also wrote and starred in it, Lean continued to work for several more years with Coward. His next three movies were all adapted from plays by Coward and included the classic romance Brief Encounter (1945). In the late 1940s Lean aimed higher than the relative simplicity of his earlier work, escalating the scale of production values in two excellent adaptations of novels by Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1947) and Oliver Twist (1948, although not released in the US until 1951), the former in my view the best screen adaptation ever made of a work by Dickens and one of the greatest movies of any kind ever made.

For the next several years, although he occasionally revisited period projects such as Madeleine (1950) and Hobson's Choice (1954), Lean returned to movies of more modest scale. In 1955 he made Summertime, the delightful story of an unmarried, middle-aged American librarian traveling to Venice and having a brief but ultimately unhappy love affair there, starring Katharine Hepburn. Summertime marked a return to the pronounced emphasis on pictorial values of Lean's earlier Dickens films. In Summertime the setting was restricted to Venice, and the city, ravishingly photographed in Technicolor by Jack Hildyard, became almost the second lead character in the story, sharing equal importance with Hepburn. Yet the spatially confined settings never threatened to overwhelm the rather simple story.

It was two years before Lean's next movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), was released. With this film Lean returned to the outsized production values of his works based on Dickens and clearly attempted to match an epic-scale story with epic-scale production values. The movie was a huge success, winning both the Oscar and the New York Film Critics Circle award for best picture, and Lean won the best director award from both groups as well. Many film critics, though, especially those of an auteurist bent including Andrew Sarris and David Thomson, view this movie as the beginning of Lean's artistic downfall, a slide marked by Lean's preoccupation with visual grandiosity over personal expression, what Thomson calls "the Selznick syndrome." (I have to admit that I find some justification in this view, although at this point in Lean's career it was still more of a possibility than a certainty. For me the rot didn't really set in until 1965's Dr. Zhivago.)

Lawrence was Lean's next project after Kwai, and this time a full five years passed before the film's release. Lawrence also won the Oscar for best Picture and Lean the Oscar for best director. (The New York newspapers were on strike that year, and the New York Film Critics Circle, who were all newspaper critics, chose not to give any awards. If they had, Lawrence almost certainly would have won, and Lean would have received his third best director award, having also won previously for Summertime. In 1984 he did receive his third best director honor from the group for his last movie, A Passage to India.)

The film critic Andrew Sarris was one of the few who was not bowled over by Lawrence or by Lean. (Nor, apparently, was New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, possibly the most influential critic of the time. Lawrence did not even appear on his list of the top ten films of the year, and he later wrote that if the New York Film Critics Circle had given awards that year, he would have voted for the British film A Taste of Honey.) In The American Cinema Sarris rather sarcastically opined that Lean's "modest virtues . . . have been inflated with the hot air of Lawrence of Arabia." With his rigidly dogmatic bias in favor of the auteur view of films and film directors, Sarris observed that the "sheer logistics of Lawrence . . . cannot support the luxury of a directorial point of view."

Of course he was correct in this assessment. With its intricate structure that begins with Lawrence's death ride on his motorcycle, its large cast of consummately professional actors, and its purposefully chosen stylistic grandeur, the movie would have caused any director to engage in an ongoing struggle with his simultaneous roles of project manager, cinematic construction engineer, and film artist. But does it really matter with a movie as magnificent as Lawrence of Arabia? I think not. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and Lawrence is one mighty impressive pudding filled with unquestionable movie artistry and a profusion of unforgettable images.

Lawrence of Arabia is dominated not only by its imagery, but equally by the stunning and star-making performance by Peter O'Toole as the title character. Here is one of those instances of an actor being the embodiment of the role. I find it impossible to imagine Lawrence of Arabia without O'Toole as T. E. Lawrence. Yet that was very nearly the case, for O'Toole was not Lean's first choice to play Lawrence and was offered the role only after Albert Finney, a sublime actor in his own right, turned it down. Some have criticized the movie and its star for not offering a more specific point of view about who and what Lawrence really was. But isn't that really the point of the movie and the person himself—that Lawrence, with his self-created mythological persona, was ultimately an enigma who defied any precise explanation or definition?

My only regret about O'Toole is that he did not receive the Oscar for best actor that to me he so plainly deserved. The winner that year was Gregory Peck—to my mind one of the most wooden of all major American movie actors—for To Kill a Mockingbird. I have always believed he won more for the noble character he played than for superior acting ability. The Academy voters evidently preferred a modest, prejudice-defying American civil rights crusader/martyr to a mysterious Brit of ambiguous sexuality and an oversized ego. Peck also had an advantage over O'Toole in that he was American, a big Hollywood star popular with his fellow professionals, and although nominated four times before had never won.

In the coming months I'll be writing about other great movies of 1962. But by any standard, Lawrence of Arabia must be viewed as the greatest American film of that memorable year.
________________________________________________________________________________________