The Mill and the Cross

"Every Picture Tells a Story, Don't It?"
or
"Framing the Argument" (The Uncanny Valley to Cavalry)

Anyone who tries to do something new in films should be applauded, no doubt about it.  But one should not come away from the experience calling to mind other films and experiences—then you merely get the sound of one hand clapping. Or the white-noise bustle of a disinterestedly browsing museum-crowd (with which the film begins and ends).

Not that film-maker Lech Majewski didn't try something new. His new film The Mill and the Cross takes as its subject matter Flemish painter Peter Brueghel's painting "The Way to Calvary," and constructs the scenario inside the painting, with the artist (played by Rutger Hauer) and his patron (Michael York) walking through the painting as the artist sketches, puts it all together in his mind and takes it to completion.

Films are, themselves, like paintings, if you can go with the analogy—both are contained in frames and there is the implied understanding that those frames are the limitations of our vision, that maybe without the frame they might go on to dimensions of breadth or depth and that what we see is the scope of the artists' vision, directing us to what is important, the focal point of the subject matter.  Some of the most gorgeous films I've seen, like Barry Lyndon or The Leopard, inspire a wish to merely hang images from them on my wall. 

No such thoughts crept to mind during The Mill and the Cross, as ingeniously as Majewski endeavored to bring the many facets of "The Way to Calvary" to life.  Rather than having any "life" to it, it feels like a passionless exercise, the characters impenetrable cyphers, meandering around trying to "inspire" the moment of the painting (which holds far more activity than the film seems to want to evoke). All those new ideas are solely in the design and conceptual stage and not in the actual realization of the film. Pretty much limited to sets and blue screen, there is a flatness of tone that sometimes occurs when actors are restricted to surroundings that are uninspiring. And even with the technical wizardry required to pull it off, there is a tendency for the actors to appear visually separated from their backgrounds (as if the lighting were off) in the same way that the blue-screened citizens of Tokyo seemed like they were never in danger of being trampled by Godzilla.

But, it's not only technically that the movie falls...as flat as a canvas. There's a paucity of dialogue for any of the characters, so that their motivations and actions are completely unclear. Things happen, people are tortured, bread is baked, Christ is crucified—then what that's over, everybody gets up and dances away like the fools at the end of The Seventh Seal, but without Death leading the way. It is, after all, only a painting (no one was killed in the making of this picture, all the subjects got up and went home).

Besides The Seventh Seal, The Mill and the Cross also reminded me of a graphic novel that I've long admired, Neil Gaiman's "Signal to Noise,"* in which a dying film-maker decides to make his one last epic, a project that he knows will never be put to celluloid.  And so, because it remains in script-form, it will be as close to his original vision without the compromises of budget or time...or collaboration.  It is as pure as it can be, only susceptible to the impressions it forms in the reader's mind.  In a sense, all the barriers—technical, budgetary and time—that must be overcome from written word to image on film or video are opportunities for compromise that can erode that concept from its inception as inspiration to its final presentation.  In attempting to get below the paint of "The Way to Calvary," Majewski, rather than explaining, expanding, and presenting the process of the artist and the "life" of the art only gets further afield of the source in an intellectually safe, shallow interpretation.  We get the surface and never the depth of the characters that he presents, and so, The Mill and the Cross is an exercise of adaptation—just as a film-maker adapts the written word (a novel, say, and part of Majewski's source for the film is Michael Francis Gibson's analysis of the painting)—that fails.  The only thing unique and laudatory about it is that it attempts to "realize" another medium.  But the result—technically savvy but paper-thin—makes it a kindred spirit with so many of the current CGI blockbusters—an art-house version of a "Transformers" movie.

"The Way to Calvary"—far more interesting than the movie

* In pre-digital audio terms, "signal to noise" is the ratio of pure program sound to static or interference inherent in the analog medium on which it is imprinted.  It is a measure of signal quality, a meter (if you will) for perfection, which Gaiman then ascribed to purity of vision).

Murder on the Orient Express (1974)

Murder on the Orient Express (Sidney Lumet, 1974) There's a new version of Agatha Christie's "bottle mystery"* coming at the end of the year (directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh). I'm not sure why it's necessary as it was remade in an excellent version of the British television series featuring David Suchet in his long-running portrayal (24 years) of Christie's eccentric Belgian detective with the extremely effective "little grey cells." 

We'll discuss that very interesting version a little later. For now, we'll turn our attention to the all-star version produced by EMI and distributed in the U.S. by Paramount, with Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot. Producers John Brabourne and Richard B. Goodwin wanted to "pull out all the stops" on the production just to get the film rights from Dame Christie, who was still alive at the time and had expressed that, after the Miss Marple movies of the 1960's starring Margaret Rutherford, she was "allergic" to filmed adaptations and clutched her film-rights to her like a precious jade statue. The two producers enlisted Brabourne's father-in-law, Lord Mountbatten, to reassure Christie of the producers' elevated intentions and she gave her guarded approval.**

Sidney Lumet was hired to direct—he was acknowledged to be a "tasteful" director, one who could supervise good performances out of most actors, and he'd recently had success with Serpico—and he began the process of casting, first hiring Sean Connery (with whom he'd worked often and whom Connery had hand-picked for movies he had some creative control over) in order to attract other A-listers, who, with Connery's presence, flocked like seagulls. Lumet had fond memories of making Orient—he centers most of the anecdotes in his book "Making Movies" around that production and how smooth it was. Lumet focused on "elegance" hiring cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, production and costume designer Tony Walton, and to touch up Paul Dehn's script, playwright Anthony Schaffer—who went uncredited. 

There are some movies that can only be described as a "souffle" and Murder on the Orient Express is one of those. Hercule Poirot (Finney) must catch the Orient Express at the last minute, but his conductor-friend Bianchi (Martin Balsam) manages to find a room for him in coach when a Mr. Harris fails to appear. Because the Express is unusually crowded for the time of year, Poirot is grateful for the consideration and settles in for a pleasant trip. The passengers are a mix of the rich—the Princess Dragomiroff (Wendy Hiller), the Count and Countess Andrenyi (Michael York and Jacqueline Bisset)—the nouveu riche—actress Harriett Belinda Hubbard (Lauren Bacall) and Col. John Arbuthnot (Connery)—and the humble—missionary Greta Ohlsson (Ingrid Bergman), governess Mary Debenham (Vanessa Redgrave) and servants McQueen (Anthony Perkins) and Beddoes (John Gielgud),*** in the employ of an uncouth American businessman Samuel Rathcett (Richard Widmark).

Ratchett strong-arms Poirot into dinner to ask for his protection—he believes his life to be in danger and that he might be murdered on the train. As Poirot happenstantially is in the room next to his, the detective thinks it highly unlikely, and retires to his cabin, where he has a restless night punctuated by a scream, Mrs. Hubbard complaining about a stranger in her room, and a mysterious woman in a red kimono. Oh yeah, and the train has come to a stop due to an impassable snow-drift. 

It turns out Ratchett is not only uncouth, but rather psychic, as well. In the morning, he is discovered in his locked and chained compartment—the window open—dead from multiple stab-wounds, by his servant Beddoes and secretary McQueen. Now, I'm no detective, but I've seen lots of movies, so seeing as how the secretary is played by Anthony Perkins and the victim died of multiple stab-rooms, it makes him the most likely cinematic culprit—especially given the mysterious woman in the red kimono.

Clues start to appear that Poirot tracks like a pig hunting truffles. He interviews all the passengers on the train, who react in varying degrees between timidity and righteous indignation and the train's kitchen seems to be having a run of red herring. What's an Agatha Christie detective to do?

Why, pull everybody into the dining car and start a spirited game of musical murder motives that touches on every single passenger sweating in the dining car, intercut with highlights from the interviews that Lumet now has in one of his more obvious tropes—the flash-backs now occur in his trademark wide-angle lens close-up's distorting the faces into disturbing emphasis****—as if the cut-aways themselves weren't enough to make us pay attention to them. If you watch enough Lumet, you can tell when he wants you to really notice something—by bending the world into unfamiliarity. It's as subtle as being hit with a hammer.

Murder on the Orient Express is unique in the Christie mysteries—the detective comes up with two possible solutions to the murder and must decide which of the alternatives to present to the authorities. It is a case of literally choosing the lesser of two evils—now, that would have been a hell of a title—and Poirot must weigh the consequences of the morality of his choice—one of the few instances where Poirot feels himself morally compromised and must live with his conscience for his choices. The only other time that happened was his last case, "Curtain."

But, not so much here. Lumet and Dehn and Schaffer are having such a grand ol' time, such moral ambiguity never comes up, only a sense of self-satisfaction in an extended curtain call of sorts (Vanessa Redgrave even winks sassily!) all to a frothy, jaunty Richard Rodney Bennett score that sound like it would be a good accompaniment to a Victorian ferris wheel.

And that's the problem. Lumet's first choice as a composer was one of the great film-music masters, Bernard Herrmann. Lumet expressed interest in him creating something fun and opulent after Herrmann screened the film and Herrmann became apoplectic. "That train," he roared "is a train of DEATH!" 

And just so. It doesn't matter how much you gussy up a corpse, it's still rotten. Herrmann, who had scored many a murder—and much passion—in his career (and who would close out his career, and life, scoring Taxi Driver) could not and would not put music celebrating getting away with murder. But, Lumet, who excelled at details but could miscalculate spectacularly in The Big Picture, just didn't see it. He—and the producers—wanted an all-star romp. And that's just wrong. Evil, even under the guise of self-righteousness, even when practiced in the most opulent of board-rooms and Presidential Suites, is not a parlour game. It is what makes Christie's work—emanating from such a source as she—is so perverse.

I much prefer the 2010 ITV production starring David Suchet as Poirot, which is darker, grittier, and less concerned with glitz and star power—despite a meticulous production design and a cast that includes Eileen Atkins, Barbara Hershey, Hugh Bonneville, Jessica Chastain, David Morrissey and Toby Jones. In a darkened Orient Express—power has gone out on the snow-trapped train—the suspects huddle in the dark and tensions are high. It is also mentioned (with Christie's inherent class-prejudice) that such a polyglot of like-minded people could only emanate in the melting pot of America. Suchet's Poirot is far more conflicted, and the last shot is of the detective walking away from the scene of the crime, his eyes tearing from the cold, maybe, but probably for the same reason he clutches a rosary in the fervent hope of forgiveness.

So, again...Kenneth Branagh is doing a new version to be released in November of this year, and one can only speculate where it falls on the morality question, as it is written by Michael Green who's had a hand in the scripts for Green Lantern, Logan, Alien: Covenant and Blade Runner 2049. It's hard to say, but it will probably depend on whether it's written by one hand...or by committee.

* "Bottle mystery" because the setting is restricted to the train—the many suspects contained in a single space from which they cannot escape, the fabled Orient Express. Christie's story was published in the U.S. under the title "Murder in the Calais Coach" to avoid confusion with a Graham Greene book that, itself, had its title changed for the American market.

** She quite enjoyed the film with one caveat—as much as she enjoyed Finney as Poirot, she didn't like his mustache.

*** There are also character actors Colin Blakely, Rachel Roberts, Denis Quilley, and George Coulouris (of The Mercury Theater). As the jokes goes: "Any names?"

**** Examples of Lumet's technique—initial and flashback: Wendy Hiller and Sean Connery.

Logan's Run (1976)

written September 5, 1976

Logan's Run (Michael Anderson, 1976) Logan is a movie I'd like to have been a part of. There are so many steps where someone should have taken Saul David, Michael Anderson, or David Zelag Goodman by the hand with a warm glass of milk and a cookie and explain to them that what they wanted to do wouldn't work, and that the slip-shod way they were planning to realize it wasn't going to help it, either.

Mind you, there are some things I like. The Jerry Goldsmith score (what, I'm going to desert Goldsmith now? Herrmann's dead and Barry's comatose!)* Jenny Agutter is in it, and provides some moments of acting that actually seem natural in this spectacle of the unnatural (unnatural matte shots, etc.) (Why, in God's name has it taken Jenny Agutter five years since her last movie to appear in another one? The insight and wisdom displayed in her performances in The Railway Children, and in (Nicholas) Roeg's Walkabout should have made her much more in demand, since she is undoubtedly the best young actress since Pamela Franklin--and have you seen what's she's been in lately?)** Peter Ustinov comes in and says his lines like he just thought them up, and makes Michael York et al. look like The Reader's Theater.

I was in love with Jenny Agutter and this is an angle from which you should never see Michael York.

The film brightens up a bit once York and Agutter reach outside, not only because we, the audience, are on familiar ground, but also because we're out of those God-awful sets.

Washington D.C. has returned to swamp-land at the time of Logan's Run.

A friend of mine who's read the book says that book and movie have only the title in common. It's too bad that this should be such a turkey. I remember Bruce Dern's plaintive cry in Silent Running--"What happened to the flowers?" Walking out (of Logan's Run), echoed in my mind "What happened to the $8 million?" Sleazy matte shots. Cruddy model shots. And from the company that put 2001 together.***It has been said that we are about to be engulfed by a resurgence of sci-fi movies, their popularity expanding in the fifties, and then dwindling out to be revived when someone came out with a new special effect technique. Now, unfortunately, it looks like Logan predicts a resurgence of '50's technique. What happened to Magicam that was supposed to be so revolutionary? Is everything being used on the Star Trek film?****

The city-scape of Logan's Run looks like it could have been built in somebody's rec-room

But, lest it be mistaken that I am concerned only with special effects, let me say that "Special effects are worthless unless the ideas presented are special, as well!"***** Or else we get things like "Space: 1999" which looks gorgeous, but its scripts have the consistency (and intelligence) of tapioca pudding.******  (I'm writing this in a camper-pickup truck bouncing over Wyoming's dirt roads). We must have intelligent writing! (and I'm not helping!)

Logan (and Jessica) running

Ah, youth. Pretty bad and squirrelly writing here (and I was complaining about intelligent writing—heh), even for the back of a pick-up truck, but my sentiments about Logan's Run haven't changed one jot. The sets are cheesy (although setting the city in a mall was, in retrospect, a particularly good idea--we'll probably all live in hermetically-sealed malls in the future), the effects ARE bad—the city-scape miniatures wouldn't pass Gerry Anderson "Thunderbirds" muster and the matte shots have edges that disappear—and the original story is fairly trashed. Director Michael Anderson's idea of composition is to make an impressive proscenium arch set and put the actors in the middle of it. Not exactly inspired work here.

Reflective of the tawdry set-design of Logan's Run
(and, yes, that's Farrah Fawcett walking in the foreground)

Clearly, he didn't think about improving the screenplay much. The dumbest decision by the movie-makers is to make the central theme of the book, the lottery for "renewal"—that is, the chance for those turning 30, (21 in the book) to be given a few more years of life or "renewed"—a spectator sport. You'd think that after watching weekly events that destroy every participant taking part that one of these young people would come to the conclusion that NOBODY ever got renewed. I don't care how self-absorbed or de-sensitized or drugged-out they are, someone would notice. If they were looking for a war-draft metaphor, it doesn't get past a glancing consideration before it falls apart.

"Renewal" is staged like a sporting event, but nobody's keeping score.

They're working on a remake now, which might be the perfect thing for a youth-dominated movie market of kids barely out of their teens. In the meantime, the film had an unofficial distillation of themes in Michael Bay's The Island.

Some more of the bad set-design...and WHAT are these people wearing?

The latest: I wrote that last bit in 2008—and they are (in 2015) STILL talking about a re-make of Logan's Run—this time with Ryan Reynolds starring (too old, actually) and Simon ("X-Men" series) Kinberg writing and possibly directing (He's a big fan of this movie, so I don't hold out much hope for it). The next time I run this piece it will be probably still be un-made, despite recent press hyping the relatively short novel into a Hunger Games/Divergent/Maze Runner-type movie series. 

And by the way, how's that Fahrenheit 451 remake going?

* I've written about Goldsmith here. Composer Bernard Herrmann had recently died (his last released score--for DePalma's Obsession would be released a scant two weeks later. And John Barry was not comatose--I was being facetious--but he had relaxed his movie composing style to a slow dirge pace orchestrated for a massive number of strings.

** I wrote this when I was 21. All I can say in my defense is I had the "hots" for Jenny Agutter, so I was partial. I think it was because she didn't mind doing nude scenes. And there wasn't five years between movies--I just hadn't seen any of the ones she'd made in that time.  Agutter continues to act occasionally--to show how time passes, she actually played the mother in a remake of The Railway Children, and had a role in the excellent "Mi-5" series (aka "Spooks"). She can currently be seen as a nun on the BBC series "Call the Mid-wife" and she's also one of the shadowy S.H.I.E.L.D. heads in the Marvel Film Universe. 

Pamela Franklin (who I also found attractive) had just appeared in The Legend of Hell House (hence the remark).  I still think both actresses are very talented, now given the objectivity of years (hell, decades), and I see myself whenever I read some inexplicably passionate comment in IMDB that says that (say) "Selena Gomez/Jennifer Lopez/Jena Malone/Rachel Bilson/Nicola Peltz/Emma Watson/NameSomebodyHere is teh best actress ever and should win an Oscar!!!" Mm-hmm.

*** The distributor has nothing to do with it, kiddo. It's the producer and the director and the design team. 

On the road-trip where we saw this movie, we stopped by the
Ft. Worth Water Gardens where this was filmed. We didn't visit the Mall
where a lot of the interiors were shot.

**** The plight of the science-fiction film would be resolved (or made worse, depending on your view) the next year with the release of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The success of these films kick-started the on-again/off-again Star Trek film and its resultant film series. And Magicam is not the hardware or the app, it was a VFX company that was attached to the first still-untitled Star Trek movie that would become Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

***** This was originally bolded in big block letters. The sentiment is still good (if obvious everywhere except Hollywood), but, really, there's no need to shout!

Jenny Agutter O.B.E. today—from Captain America: Winter Soldier

****** In my dotage, I have acquired a taste for tapioca pudding.

The Three Musketeers/The Four Musketeers

The Three Musketeers: The Queen's Diamonds/
The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge (Richard Lester, 1974/1975) These rollicking films were originally planned as a two and a half hour epic (no matter what the Producers now say!) may just be one of the best adventure films (and adaptations of a classic novel) ever adapted, balancing the demands of the story, the tenor of the times in which it was made and the idiosyncrasies of its director.

When approached, Richard Lester (who hadn't made a film since The Bed Sitting Room in 1969) wasn't enthused. Then he read the story, and did some research...and heartily agreed. One can see why. For The Three Musketeers, as Lester and his screen-writer George MacDonald Fraser envisioned it, is a story of intrigue done in high places, but carried out by the lackeys and foot-soldiers who live only to serve. Forget that the palace-dwellers are either snakes or dullards—they provide an opportunity for income and adventure--two qualities lacking amongst the citizens of France and England, who, at the time, are at war. The opportunities for thrills, humor and rapier-pointed satire are rich and mined well by the film-makers.

And Lester's direction is masterful—simple set-ups and multiple cameras are used during the swash-buckling to make sure there's a glimpse of every buckled swash. And those scenes are choreographed as a group participation so that every Musketeer has "business." Lester also worked to make sure that the fights were inelegant affairs--not balletic, as had been the tradition, but more like street-fights, with few rules and the use of landscape and surroundings as equal strategies to the sword technique (and every part of the sword is used, as opponents are sometimes conked with the ornate handles). And, as Lester was renowned as a "one-take" director, opportunities for mis-haps, mess-ups and stumbles only added to the verisimilitude. Sure, the action was rehearsed, but any imperfections made things seem more real.

Reed, Finlay, Chamberlain, York and Kinnear enjoying the fruits of their labors.

Lester surrounds the royalty with games and idle amusements that have a slight tint of mindless cruelty to them, and that extends to the villains, whose elaborate machinations involving the Royals are merely extensions of those same games, with regime-toppling consequences.

A royal chess-game with dogs and capuchins

And the cast! As the musketeers, Oliver Reed as the surly Athos, Richard Chamberlain as the effete Aramis, Frank Finlay as the clownish Porthos, and Michael York as the young and naive D'Artagnan. As the Royals, Jean-Pierre Cassel as the foppish King Louis XIII, Geraldine Chaplin as the frail Queen Anna of Austria, and Simon Ward as the rakish Duke of Buckingham. As the villains, Faye Dunaway as Lady De Winter, Christopher Lee as the villainous Rochefort, and Charlton Heston in one of his best performances as the Machiavellian Cardinal Richelieu. Rounding out the cast are Raquel Welch as the Queen's seamstress, the accident-prone Constance de Bonacieux,* Spike Milligan as her randy husband, and Lester regular, the great Roy Kinnear as D'Artagnan's man-servant, Planchet. A superb cast, rarely equalled.

Welch and Dunaway as good girl/bad girl

It's long been contended that the film was supposed to be one movie, but that the Salkind's split it into two to maximize profits. That's the rumor—there is a natural split of the film at the half-way point that features almost all the actors for a sort-of bow, but it could have easily been used as the starting place for an intermission. It's born out by the fact that there is less movie in The Four Musketeers, it being padded with an "up-to-that-point" narrated prologue.

Charlton Heston in one of his best performances as Cardinal Richelieu

 

The two-film scheme is helped by the fact that there are two very distinct stories of different tones, both of which are resolved, the first being the intrigue-filled, but relatively light-hearted The Queen's Diamonds story (in which Athos, Aramis and Porthos are wounded, but not killed), and the second, Milady's Revenge where the Palace forces seek to disrupt whatever kept them from succeeding in the first one. That story, with its be-headings, extended back-story and several prominent deaths, is less fun (although certainly as clever) and considerably darker. Where Part 1 is rollicking fun with minimal consequences, the stakes in Part 2 are very high, passions flare, and the sword-play becomes deadly and fraught. The humor is darker than the first, too. Despite the same cast and crew,** the two are very different films. The combination of the two of them would have left audiences winded and less ebullient (and more anticipatory of a continuance).

Two other highlights: David Watkins' exquisite cinematography
and the hysterically ornate costumes.

Taken together, they have a moralist's sensibility of the costs of frivolity and duplicity; adventure can be fun, but in a poisonous political atmosphere, one adventures at one's own risk. You can have a good time watching The Three Musketeers, but the story is incomplete without the paid dues in The Four Musketeers. Together, they make one of the finest adaptations of a classic novel ever put to film.

* Welch, not the most versatile of actresses, won the Golden Globe for her hilarious performance in The Three Musketeers and tearfully told the crowd "I've been waiting for this since One Million Years B.C.!"

** ...except for the score composers--Michel Legrand for The Three Musketeers and Lalo Schifrin for The Four Musketeers.