Young Cassidy(Jack Cardiff, 1965) The titles say "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer presents a John Ford Film." But John Ford only completed five minutes of it. Ford was 71 when he tackled what would be his last "Irish" film, based on "Mirror in My House", the autobiography of Irish playwright Sean O'Casey (Ford had directed a film of his The Plough and the Stars in 1938—the result of which, due to studio interference, neither the director or author liked—and Hitchcock directed Juno and the Paycock the same year). For the film's purposes, the author's name is changed to John Cassidy (O'Casey was born John Casey, but Gaelicized his pen name to Seán Ó Cathasaigh), but it's O'Casey's story, and first, Richard Harris, and then, Sean Connery were in line to play him in a cast that also included Julie Christie (ever so briefly, despite her prominence in the release poster), Edith Evans, Sian Phillips, Michael Redgrave (as W.B.Yeats), Maggie Smith and previous Ford players Flora Robson and Jack McGowran. Connery, however, was in the midst of his Bond commitment (betweenGoldfinger and Thunderball) and barely had time to squeeze in Hitchcock's Marnie. So Rod Taylor, an actor too under-appreciated for his consistently good work, took the role instead (and probably contributed a more accurate accent than Connery's Scottish burr), turning in what may be his best performance.
It's a good film with a great cast, and an unconventional script, and one wonders what it would have looked like if the septuagenarian Ford had not fallen ill and been replaced by The Archers' favorite cinematographer Jack Cardiff.*Ford prepared the film, after all, doing the location scouting all in advance of shooting, so there are touches here and there—shots of mourning women, lots of colorful townsfolk, a brutally rapacious pair of undertakers, and a subtle death scene all feel like Ford, even if the painterly framing is missing, replaced with something a little more fussy: for example, there's a worker's strike that Ford would have probably shot using a few master shots, whereas Cardiff's style is all inserts and quick shots ala Eisenstein. Still, the man got it completed at a moment's notice, something of a miracle. And as some of the film is centered around The Abbey Theater—whose company Ford used when casting his Irish films, the film is steeped in Ford's sense of Irishness.
The film follows Johnny Cassidy (Taylor)—laborer by day and pamphleteer by night, caring for his elderly mother (Robson) trying to improve their lot through hard work and political action, training with revolutionaries in the hills, but leaving when the concern is more about uniforms than tactics in fighting the British. Pubs are the center of activity for drinking and for the airing of grievances which can result in fisticuffs. At least it's in the neighborhood, as in the streets, the fighting gets serious and deadly. Cassidy takes solace in books, though his rough appearance is out of place in book-stores, which leads to a relationship with a clerk, Nora (Smith), who finds a living example of a book worth more than its cover indicates.
Through it all, Cassidy writes, both to celebrate and inspire the Irish working class, from pamphlets to newspaper articles and poems, getting published and then turning his attention to theater-plays, where he attracts the attention of The Abbey Theater and its artistic director, W.B. Yeats (Redgrave). But, Cassidy is conflicted: he wants to be a success as a writer, but as his world and his ambitions grow, they take him further and further from his roots. And that conflicts with his romance with Nora, who sees Cassidy's true spirit, but fears she may never be a part of it...not in a lasting way.
The story, the cast, the locations are amazing. There is just a slight lack of lyricism to the enterprise that might have been readily apparent if things had been different on-set. There's just that element of magic that's missing that would have made this a must-see, instead of a pleasant movie-watching experience.
* Ford would complete one more film, the studio-bound 7 Women (featuring Anne Bancroft in a gender reversal of "the John Wayne role"), before Hollywood put him out to "Awards Pasture" where they say they honor you, but don't hire you ("We love ya, Pappy, and you made us a lotta money and Oscars, but we don't think you should make films anymore. Have a plaque.").
Ford said after this scene: "You son of a bitch Aussie," he said. "You made me cry. That's a wrap!"
This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a bit of a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts. McCabe and Mrs. Miller(Robert Altman, 1973) It is very rare when two examples of great artistic achievement can be combined to make something greater than the sum of the parts--where the two complement each other, instead of distracting from each other. But in the first sequence of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, director Robert Altman achieves such a moment. While Altman and master cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond float their camera onto the form of John McCabe (Warren Beatty) riding through a wintry landscape, Leonard Cohen's "The Stranger Song"* mystically describes the scene and the man. You know when you see this inspired piece of film that Altman has a special kind of vision as regards this project and he pursues this vision throughout with the result that McCabe and Mrs. Miller is Altman's finest film. I'm adamant about this, despite the number of Nashville fanatics who try to convince me otherwise.*
After doing the frenetic M*A*S*H, Altman felt that he was financially secure enough to try artistic projects. McCabe... was his first.** It is a slowly paced, beautifully photographed, acted and edited film about the formation of a western town, a town whose foundations are two rather dubious persons: McCabe, a gambler by trade, and Mrs. Miller (Julie Christie), a madam. It is their vision that gives birth to the town and turns it into a self-sustaining community, a town that will soon displace their once-prevalent position and grow over them, just as surely as the snows accumulate over time.
But if Altman were to show the growth of the town as that, the growth of a town, what sort of movie would that be?*** So, as it does with more traditional westerns (a term I'm not too comfortable with), the interest of the story falls on the people, in this case, the cornerstones of the community, McCabe and Mrs. Miller. And like most Altman films, there are many characters, many occurrences, but all in the whole of the community--it's a very satisfying film, by a sometimes exciting, sometimes exasperating, but certainly the most innovative of current directors, Robert Altman.
Broadcast on KCMU-FM on Novermber 19th and 20th, 1975. Altman would continue to be innovative and sometimes exasperating, but never less than assured in the tricks he'd play with the camera and with the perspective he allowed us to see, right up to his final film. And McCabe and Mrs. Miller continues to be (after a recent re-viewing) a wonderfully dreamy frontier film, despite the usurping of some of Altman's strategies in various TV shows since its debut in 1971. Certainly, it feels like a more realistic film about building a community—the town of Presbyterian Church, its most prominent structure, in isolation in the West than most Western films would have you believe. And Vilmos Zsigmond's innovative cinematography set a high standard that most film-makers can only achieve with CGI and post-gradation.
I find it amusing that this movie didn't find that much of an audience, especially in the West, where the story probably mirrors the origins of every town out in these parts. It certainly does Seattle, where larceny and luck...and women imported from the East Coast...were part and parcel of the city's foundation. But, as in this review, is it his best film? That would be hard to say. Altman was an iconoclast and rebellious, attempting to subvert film genres and even the organized standards for making films, being more free-wheeling and improvisational, even with a script that was as focused as, say, The Player or Gosford Park.
* And yet I just found a glowing "Olde Review" of Nashville that I'll be putting up in a couple weeks. Nashville certainly has more reach and is a more ambitious project than McCabe... But I did love the dreamy aspect of this revisionist western. Thinking about it the last few minutes I'd be hard pressed to pick "the best" Altman film, or even to a lesser degree, my favorite. How can you compare such disparate films as M*A*S*H, McCabe..., Nashville, Short Cuts, Gosford Park, The Player, and on and on right up toA Prairie Home Companion? Like comparing apples to sweet potatoes. ** I think I might have forgotten the quirky Brewster McCloud in there, and who's to say that M*A*S*H or that film aren't artistic?
Fahrenheit 451(Francois Truffaut, 1966) As long as we're looking at movies with dystopian society speculations, we should look at an unusual one from the 1960's with a different "take" on things. "Fahrenheit 451" is Ray Bradbury's conjecture, inspired by past Nazi practices during its Third—and final— Reich, the then-current McCarthy era (at the time of its writing) and future projections of thought-control, of a society where the written word is banned as subversive, and "firemen," in a time when houses are fire-proof, are, instead, tasked with burning contraband books. That is, all of them. In the society of "Fahrenheit 451" (supposed to be in the American mid-West post-1960), books are considered bad, as they offer a different perspective from the government's social engineering efforts to keep the populace passive and controlled. Books stir everything up, confuse and enervate (and inspire), so they are suppressed to keep people placid and "equal" (although some more than others).
Bradbury's book was first published as a novella "The Fireman" in the Galaxy Science Fiction magazine in early 1951 (written on a rented typewriter in UCLA's Powell Library) and expanded for Ballantine Books in 1953. It became a classroom perennial to teach students metaphorical concepts and to keep a wary eye on sponsored group-think (in a time before they all graduated to Facebook).
In 1966, French director Francois Truffaut, part of the French "New Wave," chose Bradbury's book to be the subject of his first English-language film (a language barrier that created a slight frisson with the European actors taking direction from an artist (talented, though he may be, visually) for whom English was an unfamiliar language (is that the reason the dialogue is all dubbed?). On the top of that, Truffaut's version of the future is clean, sterile, upwardly mobile, very "white" and slightly robotic, and heavily influenced by Albert Speer's monolithic, concrete city blocks.
The film's title sequence is a nifty introduction to the concept; over tinted zoom shots of roof-tops with broadcast aerials with no title-text, the credits, instead, being narrated by actor Alex Scott. It sets you up for a world without words, and the movie-proper starts with a call to the local fire-house and a small team of fire-men raiding a book depository, finding hidden books, creating a pile of them and setting them ablaze with ruthless efficiency.
Fahrenheit 451 tells the story of Montag (played by Oskar Werner, whose role in Truffaut's Jules et Jim made him an international star), who mans the flame-thrower on the fire-man raids on hidden libraries. He is mentored by Capt. Beatty (Cyril Cusack), who coaches him on the purpose and philosophy behind their fiery task. But Montag is pulled in other directions by two women: his wife Linda (played by Julie Christie), a willing product of the government's propaganda and desirous of an easy, uncomplicated life; the other is Clarisse (also played by Christie), an optimistic and inquisitive teacher who questions the status quo, and who elicits suspicion from the government.
Clarisse's curiosity infects Montag, who begins to question what he's doing, and even smuggles away a book during one of the raids, hiding it from his wife and painstakingly teaching himself to read.
He also begins to see the other side of what he's doing. seeing the devotion of the book-keepers, one of whom (Bee Duffel) chooses to be immolated, monk-like, with her beloved books. It shakes Montag right down to his bindings and he begins to see the whole society as having a broken spine, devoid of the passion that the books engender, and he begins to feel more isolated from his co-workers and his wife. After all, he is now a criminal...in his own mind, and in theirs, as well.
Truffaut's film is flawed—his published diaries reveal that is was a difficult "shoot," especially in dealing with actors (especially his former star Werner) and he was never satisfied with the English translation of the script, preferring the French version. Perhaps that is why the film seems to come most alive when he languishes his lens on all those montaged shots of books, as they explode into flame with an almost sensual fervor. Pages crisp and blacken among the collections of controversial books—and even an issue of Cahiers du cinéma, the magazine where Truffaut began his film criticism career—with all the unblinking fervor that Carl Theodore Dreyer used filming The Passion of Joan of Arc. Truffaut mixes the titles notorious at the time of the film with familiar classics long past their time of controversy ("David Copperfield" for instance) to show the wide spectrum of time and how it can outdistance objections of long-ago melted snowflakes.
There are moments that are dodgy—technically, on the effects side, the jet-packed police are clumsily wired in front of a projected back-drop that exposes the searchers as not moving independently in flight. But, on the other hand, the movie does forecast flat-screen television monitors (interactive ones!) and the way the media can invade one's life. Such things are much less jarring in current perspective than jet-packs (however poorly supposed).
Fahrenheit 451 does have an aspect to it that makes me regard it fondly, seeing past its flaws—its ending. In it (FLAMING SPOILER ALERT), once Montag has escaped his puppeteered pursuers—and is dramatically and fraudulently "killed" for the cameras—he makes his way along an abandoned railway track to his ultimate destination—a secluded wood that has become the home of the "book-people" who each devote their lives to a single book, memorizing it, archiving it in their minds, so that it can never be destroyed except by death (and even that is maintained with a hand-me-down oral history to the next generation).
It is one of my favorite sequences in film*augmented by an exquisite strings-only score by Bernard Herrmann. As the spken words commingle, Herrmann, whose score has previously gone turgid in moments of action and pursuit, breaks free and creates a delicate melancholy theme that is one of his loveliest compositions, certainly one of the most beautiful in cinema since the sound era. That he ends it with an unresolved blast of strings that resembles a cry of anguish finishes the film with an appropriate flourish of emotion previously not realized in the film. It moves me no matter how many times I've experienced it. After a couple of decades of an update being planned, HBO has produced a new version starring Michael B. Jordan, Michael Shannon, Sofia Boutella and Keir Dullea to be directed by Rahmin Bahrani (director of Man Push Cart and Goodbye Solo) which sounds very intriguing. They'll start showing it May 19th of this year.
Away From Her(Sarah Polley, 2007) Julie Christie did her homework when it came to portraying early-stage Alzheimer's--the intense concentration, and the thousand yard stare, the polite smile to the intimate stranger. And the film does a remarkable job of putting the viewer into the "Alice-in-Wonderland" world of the Alzheimer's care-giver who must endure the pain of dealing with losing the relationship while still having to deal with the patient. The commitment is still there, even though the disease has severed the knowledge of it from patient to care-giver. Sacrifice without reward--makes you realize what being a nurse is like.*
And there's an aspect to Alzheimer's care-giving that's a bit like a lab experiment. Divorced from the ties that the disease has unpinned, one can observe the effect it has on the human being, given the prior knowledge of the sufferer. You can check off what goes, see the timeline disappear, the brain functions narrow and fluctuate, enjoy the false encouragement of "good days." For the Alzheimer's patient, it's a slow-motion float to death—at some stage they're not even aware of their condition. For the caregiver, it's a bit like watching a frog (a very dear frog) sitting in slowly heating water—you can only wait helplesslyand steel yourself for the inevitable, as memory, identity, and life slips away. It's a slow death and a long good-bye.
So, in that way, Away from Her is a good primer for the best-case Alzheimer's scenario. Christie's character, Fiona Anderson, is aware of the onset, and in an act of unselfishness, rather than go into denial and paranoia makes the decision to place herself in an assisted living facility, voluntarily giving up the freedom that so many patients cling to, kicking and screaming.
Her husband of 40 years, Grant (Gordon Pinsett, he's wonderful, too) sees the relationship go away in an accelerated fashion when the facility insists on isolating the patient from family members for a required thirty days (I've never heard of such a rule, but then it takes place in Canada).
By the time of Grant's first visit--one he highly anticipates--Fiona has already separated from their relationship, and he struggles mightily to regain it, a combination of wanting to halt the progress of the disease and his own selfishness.
Where that yin and yang pulls him forms the crux of the story, and in my household it led to some pointed discussion about responsibility and relationships, but one must also look at the brutal reality of the disease and the unique way that it eviscerates normalcy.
As I've said Away From Her paints a best-case scenario that is still far from rosy, but as a toe-dip into the issues surrounding dementia and Alzheimer's, it's a pretty effective film, and actor/director/savant Sarah Polley has found a fascinating way of deriving a positive and interestingly nuanced life-lesson out of the experience. Like Orson Welles with Citizen Kane, she was all of 25 when making it.
* The author lost his Mother to Alzheimer's in 2001, if one is so churlish to look for authority. The movie has received a lot of criticism from care-givers who think the movie soft-pedals the disease, and although it does present a best-case scenario and never goes further (actually) than early-stage Alzheimer's it does show, in a perfunctory way, the severing of emotional ties and history a patient can experience and the effect it can have on the care-giver.
