The Masterpiece Test: The Turin Horse

Year of Release  2011

Country  Hungary

Length  146 min.

Director  Bela Tarr

Assistant Director  Agnes Hranitzky

Screenwriter  Laszlo Krasznahorkai and Bela Tarr

Cinematographer  Fred Kelemen

Editor   Agnes Hranitzky

Score  Mihaly Vig

Sound Recording  Janos Csaki, Csaba Eros, and Istvan Pergel

Sound Editor  Gabor ifj Erdelyi

Cast  Erika Bok, Janos Derzsi, Mihaly Kormos

Roger Ebert once famously declared that what a movie is about is less important than how it is about its subject.  There are few movies that demonstrate this paraphrased maxim more clearly than The Turin Horse, a film that remains riveting despite the fact that virtually nothing happens in it.  The information revealed about the few characters and their setting is so elemental that the film’s entire plot could be accurately captured in a wordless stick-figure flipbook.  A read-through of The Turin Horse’s script would probably be excruciatingly boring, but the work of art that was ultimately produced is mesmerizing, mysterious, and emotionally overpowering.

 Part of the reason that The Turin Horse remains compelling despite its utter lack of action is that the film shows so many parts of the main characters’ lives that more conventional movies leave out.  We are right there with the elderly farmer (Janos Derzsi) and his daughter (Erika Bok) as they go about their mundane and harsh daily chores.  Director Bela Tarr places an extreme emphasis on the duo’s hopeless struggle to go about their business during a brutal wind storm that lasts for the duration of the six days during which the film is set, and which doesn’t seem likely to stop after the credits roll.  Even a simple act like pulling water up from a well seems physically and psychologically draining under these circumstances, and Tarr and his collaborators don’t shy away from showing exactly how long it would take to perform such a task.  On a story level, The Turin Horse documents the struggles of two poor people in the simplest and most direct way possible, but Tarr’s unflinching, long-take style and carefully orchestrated sense of building dread make the film feel less like a work of minimalist neorealism than an epic vision of the apocalypse.

The Turin Horse has drawn a few comparisons to Chantal Akerman’s seminal minimalist film Jeanne Dielman (1975).  It’s true that both films feature an unusual emphasis on mundane daily activities, and both are built to a degree around repetition, but Akerman’s static compositions couldn’t be further from Tarr’s elaborate tracking shots.  The entire point of Jeanne Dielman seems to be to make the familiar activities of a housewife seem alien by offering a detached, practically unedited view of her daily actions, whereas The Turin Horse offers an enveloping sensory experience that makes the anguish of its protagonists almost physically palpable.  A number of filmmakers who have used the “aesthetic of boredom” lazily film scenes of their main characters performing mundane activities in a series of virtually silent, largely static shots meant to emphasize the alienation produced by the modern world, but The Turin Horse has a much more immediate impact.

 Indeed, it is rare to find a film that leaves as strong a sensory impression as The Turin Horse.  Outside of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943) and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966), I can’t think of another film where I’ve almost literally felt the weather that the characters are experiencing.  The events of the film feel practically as if they are really happening, which is all the more impressive considering that Tarr eschews any sort of conventional verite techniques in favor of a very carefully crafted illusory mise-en-scene.  The wind that engulfs the characters every time they step outside was likely created by large fans, or perhaps even low-flying helicopters, but the effect is completely convincing.  As with all of Tarr’s post-‘80s films, the sound is completely post-synched, though the connection between the sound effects and the visuals is utterly seamless.  On both an audio and visual level, The Turin Horse feels more real than real, which is perhaps why the film works simultaneously as an extremely simple story of a struggle for survival and as a mysterious, multi-layered fable.

 The Turin Horse remains intense from its opening scene to its last, because every small action that the protagonists take is treated, not unreasonably, as a life or death moment.  Even the film’s opening scene, a context-free but magnificent tracking shot of the farmer desperately whipping his ragged horse forward through the woods, conveys a strong sense of urgency and unease.  It isn’t exactly clear what the protagonists do for a living (they evidently use the horse to sell food in the distant, unseen town, but it’s never spelled out), but Tarr makes sure that the audience knows precisely how difficult it is for them to achieve even the smallest goal.  The film shows just enough to suggest the repetitive nature of the peasants lives to make the audience understand their daily routine – feed the horse, get water from the well, boil two potatoes that are then eaten joylessly with bare hands, sleep – without belaboring or repeating any of these events so often that the film ever becomes boring.  Perhaps this is why editor Agnes Hranitzky received an “assistant director” credit.  In a film with so few edits, every cut counts, and Hranitzky seems to have an innate sense of exactly how much the viewer needs to see of the characters’ actions, and how often we need to see them doing it.

 The editing is only one of the formal aspects of The Turin Horse that is handled with incredible precision and care.  Fred Kelemen’s extraordinarily crisp cinematography demands to be singled out for its incredible depth of focus, its wonderfully controlled chiaroscuro lighting, and the flawless execution of the film’s numerous complicated tracking shots.  (The aforementioned opening horse ride shot singlehandedly justifies the film’s existence).  Mihaly Vig’s repetitive organ-based score is the perfect soundtrack for the protagonists’ miserable lives.  And the sound mixing team deserves a lot of credit for making the film as grounded and visceral as it is.

 The Turin Horse is intimately focused on the slow disintegration of its main characters’ lives, so it is only appropriate that it feels like the end of an era for this particular style of film.  Uninterrupted black and white tracking shots achieved on film are rare these days, and with the increasing popularity of digital video (and the decreasing popularity of seeing films in a theatre), it seems unlikely that many upcoming filmmakers will continue the big canvas aesthetic of Andrei Tarkovsky, Miklos Jancso, and Bela Tarr. The Turin Horse is an ideal ending not just to the distinguished career of Bela Tarr, but to the era of traditional theatrical cinema.

The Turin Horse passes the Masterpiece Test

The Masterpiece Test: F for Fake

Year of Release  1973

Country  France/Iran

Length  88 min.

Director  Orson Welles

Screenwriter  Orson Welles

Editors  Marie-Sophie Dubus and Dominique Engerer

Cinematographer  Francois Reichenbach

Score  Michel Legrand

Cast  Orson Welles, Oja Kodar, Elmyr de Hory, Clifford Irving, Francois Reichenbach

Perhaps the most unfair and inaccurate piece of received wisdom in all of film history is the idea that Orson Welles spent the majority of his career attempting (and failing) to live up to his cinematic debut Citizen Kane (1941).  Aside from ignoring the fact that Welles spent much of his creative life as a major innovator in radio and live theater, as well as a highly charismatic and versatile performer in other directors’ films, this idea incorrectly suggests that Welles was interested in (or should have been interested in) replicating the look and feel of Kane rather than in constantly staking out new territory.  While Citizen Kane is undoubtedly on the shortlist of works that can even come close to living up to the burden of being the consensus “greatest film of all time,” there are a number of other Welles-directed films that one could argue are even more bold, ambitious, and distinctive than his outstanding debut.  Serious Welles scholars have made reasonable arguments for The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Lady from Shanghai (1948), Othello (1952), Touch of Evil (1958), or Chimes at Midnight (1966) as the director’s most impressive achievement, and it’s hard to imagine anyone who actually takes the time to watch less-acclaimed efforts such as Macbeth (1948), Mr. Arkadin (1955), and The Trial (1963) thinking that they are anything less than interesting.

My personal favorite Welles film is his final theatrically released feature (assuming that the mostly complete The Other Side of the Wind never makes it to the big screen), the wildly goofy and seemingly uncharacteristic F for Fake (1973).  I stress the playful charm of F for Fake because the economic circumstances surrounding the trajectory of Welles' filmmaking career (starting with a movie made with virtually unlimited studio resources and ending with a series of projects cobbled together with scraps of foreign and personal financing) have created a false conception of him as a “tortured artist.”  While Welles was as skilled a tragedian as anyone, he also had a highly irreverent sense of humor and was undeniably an inveterate ham.  Huge swaths of perverse humor are present throughout all of Welles’ films, even in tragedies like The Magnificent Ambersons and Othello – and, for its first hour or so, Citizen Kane is essentially a comedy – but F for Fake is animated almost completely by Welles’ enthusiastically jolly spirit.

F for Fake is somehow simultaneously the least characteristic and most personal of all of Welles’ film projects.  In place of the obvious hallmarks of Welles’ recognizable visual aesthetic – chiaroscuro lighting, slanted camera angles, rich black and white cinemtagoraphy – F for Fake features extremely rapid editing and frequent unpredictable shifts between documentary footage and various types of scripted material, mostly filmed in color.  Where Welles’ other released films all qualify, to greater or lesser degrees, as narratives, F for Fake is an “essay film,” which means that it is loosely related to other freewheeling documentary/fiction hybrids such as W.R. Mysteries of the Organism (1971), Sans soleil (1982), and A Tale of the Wind (1988).  But the aforementioned films are as different from each other as they are similar.  The unpredictable, stream-of-consciousness structures of essay films make their content inextricable from their creators’ personalities, meaning that each film belonging to this quasi-genre is utterly distinctive.

Welles’ film may appear at first glance to be a random jumble of sequences vaguely linked by a thematic interest in the slippery nature of the truth, and Welles certainly goes out of his way to keep the viewer from taking F for Fake too seriously.  An early scene involving the director treating a group of children to some magic tricks, including “finding” a key behind one of their ears, ends with Welles announcing “as for the key…it wasn’t a symbol for anything.  This isn’t that kind of movie.”  But despite F for Fake’s radical structure and lighthearted tone, the film actually presents a very intelligent and serious argument about the relationship of man to art and the indiscernible nature of the truth.  It would be too difficult to reduce the film’s arguments to words; the points that Welles makes here are too varied and too personal to be separated from F for Fake’s wildly discursive style. 

Suffice to say that F for Fake is primarily concerned with mocking “experts” of all stripes, from art critics to overly credulous members of the public.  Much of the running time is devoted to footage of professional art forger Elmyr de Hory, who successfully conned many of the world’s top museum curators into buying his convincing copies of famous paintings.  A key figure in many of these scenes is Clifford Irving, de Hory’s biographer who later wound up pulling his own hoax when he sold a news story about a fake meeting with super-recluse Howard Hughes to many major newspapers.  Cheerfully pronouncing himself a fellow “charlatan,” Welles spends many of his onscreen appearances performing magic tricks, telling outrageous (and quite possibly fictitious) stories about his own encounters with Hughes’ handlers, and enumerating a series of important hoaxes from his own career, from his lie-assisted entry into theatrical acting (in Scotland, a young Welles joined a theater troupe by pretending to be a famous actor from New York) to the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast. 

Despite F for Fake’s plotlessness and lack of an obvious throughline, its 88 minutes are packed with incident.  According to Jonathan Rosenbaum’s liner notes for the Criterion DVD, F for Fake took a year to edit, with Welles and credited editors Marie-Sophie Dubus and Dominique Engerer working five days a week to achieve the film’s uniquely spastic editing style.  The footage comes fast and furious, with periodic dynamic freeze frames that usually catch the people involved at moments where they have ridiculous facial expressions.  But the film’s joyous creativity isn’t found only in its unique structure and editing style.  The way that Welles stages the scripted material is often tremendously playful and original.  One lengthy sequence involves a supposed relationship between Welles’ mistress Oja Kodar (who reportedly had a large though uncredited role in shaping F for Fake’s script, as well as coming up with its title) and Pablo Picasso.  Welles continuously cuts back between footage of Kodar walking down a street in various stages of undress and reverse shots of photographs of Picasso gazing at her from behind a window shade.  As Picasso’s obsession grows, his photographed facial expressions become more extreme, until his photos are eventually replaced by funky Picasso-style paintings (still behind the window shade) showing a melting, disheveled face whose only recognizable facial features are enormous eyes.

The film’s rapid pace slows down and Welles’ tone becomes serious toward the end of the film when Welles visits Chartres, a massive unsigned work of art that was conceived as a union of God and Man.  As Welles melodramatically muses that there seems to only be room for Man in most modern discussions of art, a series of beautiful nighttime shots of the huge cathedral splash across the screen.  This mournful argument against authorship ironically recalls the opening images of Xanadu in Citizen Kane, bringing Welles’ filmic oeuvre full circle in the least likely way possible.  It’s just another paradox in a film that manages to be simultaneously frivolous and deep, documentary and fiction, difficult and entertaining, uncharacteristic and intensely personal.  Taking rare advantage of the full complex possibilities of cinema, F for Fake is a genuinely unique experience, a triumph as both an Orson Welles film and as a standalone piece of art.

F for Fake passes the Masterpiece Test

UP NEXT  From the jolly, rapidly paced F for Fake to Bela Tarr’s somber, austere epic The Turin Horse

The Masterpiece Test: A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Year of Release  2001

Country  USA

Length  146 min.

Director  Steven Spielberg

Screenwriter  Steven Spielberg (adapted from the short story “Super Toys Last All Summer Long” by Brian Aldiss)

Cinematographer  Janusz Kaminski

Editor  Michael Kahn

Set Design Rick Carter

Visual Effects  Stan Winston

Score  John Williams

Cast  Haley Joel Osment,  Frances O’Connor, Sam Robards, Jake Thomas, Jude Law, William Hurt, Brendan Gleeson

A.I. Artificial Intelligence had one of the most unique inceptions of any project in the history of cinema.  Initially the film was developed by Stanley Kubrick, who hired a small army of screenwriters and storyboard artists to help him adapt a Brian Aldiss story called “Super Toys Last All Summer Long.”  At various stages of the project’s three-decade development, the plan was for Steven Spielberg to produce while Kubrick directed, or vice versa.  After Kubrick passed away in 1999, shortly before the completion of post-production on Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Spielberg crafted his own screenplay based on the mountain of A.I. preparatory work completed by Kubrick and his collaborators.  Working with his usual ace technical team (cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, special effects wizard Stan Winston, composer John Williams), Spielberg managed to film the elaborate, decades-in-gestation production in a handful of months.

There has been relatively little collaboration between name-brand directors in the history of cinema, and fewer still made on a blockbuster scale.  Certainly there have been cases of filmmakers picking up where others left off, as when Claude Chabrol filmed Henri-Georges Clouzot’s unrealized script for Inferno as L’enfer (1994) or when Tom Tykwer took over the Krzysztof Kieslowski project Heaven (2002).  The closest comparison to Kubrick and Spielberg’s collaboration of A.I. is probably Robert Flaherty and F.W. Murnau’s co-development of Tabu (1931), though Flaherty left that project fairly early on after a number of disagreements with Murnau, and few traces of the pioneering documentarian’s aesthetic remain in Murnau’s final product.

 The oddest thing about the collaboration between Kubrick and Spielberg is not simply that two massively renowned directors worked together (and separately) on the same film, but that the two filmmakers in question seem completely at odds ideologically.  Kubrick and Spielberg’s films do share some common superficial traits, such as a virtuosic mastery of the technical side of filmmaking and a predilection for science fiction and military settings.  But the attitude that the two filmmakers have about those settings, and the way that they approach “perfectionism,” could not be more different.  Kubrick’s films are all, on some fundamental level, about complicated flaws in human nature, which ironically prevent “foolproof” plans (the heist in 1956’s The Killing, HAL in 1968’s 2001:  A Space Odyssey, the rules of society in 1975’s Barry Lyndon, the family unit in 1980’s The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut) from working despite the protagonists’ best intentions.  Spielberg’s films tend to be reassuring statements about man’s importance in relation to awe-inspiring nature (the shark in 1975’s Jaws, the aliens in 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1982’s E.T., the dinosaurs in 1993’s Jurassic Park), in which the audience surrogates are either able to conquer or befriend the forces of an unruly world.  Where Kubrick’s films deal with emotions so convoluted and discomfiting that we don’t have names for them, Spielberg’s works tend to be nakedly sentimental and comforting even when he is dealing with ostensibly heavy subject matter.  While 2001’s narrative structure pointedly (and reasonably) posits the human race as a mere “missing link” in an ongoing evolution, E.T. is a celebration of human compassion, with its titular alien functioning as a sort of pet/kid-brother hybrid. 

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about A.I. is that it consistently carries simultaneous traces of both Kubrick and Spielberg’s opposing aesthetics while maintaining a mostly coherent point of view that isn’t obviously the product of either individual.  Anyone hoping that A.I. would simply be another Kubrick or another Spielberg film would undoubtedly be disappointed – which probably accounts for the mixed reaction that the film received from critics upon its release, and the ambivalent stature that the film holds over a decade later – but the hybrid of two very different aesthetics creates an utterly distinctive tone that neither individual could’ve created on their own.  This makes A.I. difficult to analyze in some ways; with the idea of artistic intentionality thrown out the window (or at least made highly speculative), the film can’t be reviewed under traditional auteurist guidelines.  But the best works of art always make their own rules, and being confounded by complicated ideas is the first step to understanding them.  Whether the fusion of competing ideologies was part of either director’s intentions for A.I., the awkwardness that results registers, for the most part, as a purposeful and pointed embodiment of the film’s ambivalent and questioning attitude toward the philosophical and moral quandaries it proposes.

The odd clash of tonalities in A.I. aesthetic creates a unique tension not unlike that experienced by the people forced to deal with David (Haley Joel Osment), a robotic boy programmed to feel human emotions.  David is a walking contradiction; an unlikely cross between 2001’s HAL 9000 and E.T.’s titular alien, he is able to feel a superhuman amount of love for the human beings he worships, but is dangerous and destructive when he’s confronted by anything that confuses his basic emotional programming.  In the first act of the film, David is adopted by a couple (Frances O’Connor and Sam Robards) who are using him to compensate for the void left by their comatose son (Jake Thomas).  During the early scenes where the Swinton family is struggling to get used to their new living situation, David is consistently filmed in ways that emphasize his alien nature.  But after the robotic boy gains the trust of his mother, and undergoes an “imprinting” process that forces him to love her forever, the cute little boy half of his personality is brought to the fore, making it easy for the Swintons (and the audience) to perceive the protagonist as human.   This idealized vision of the nuclear family is frequently brought back to reality by startling flashes of David’s mechanical nature, such as when he holds a laugh for an uncomfortably long time at the dinner table. 

The complicated tone that the film establishes in its early scenes suggests a sentimental Spielberg film being interrupted with jarring frequency by the icy creepiness of a Kubrick film (or vice versa), and the unbalanced feeling that this creates in the viewer makes the Swintons’ ambivalence toward their robot son palpable.  It is unlikely that either director could have achieved this bizarre tenor – which might be referred to as “visceral ambiguity” – on their own.  Kubrick likely would have kept emphasizing David’s strangeness, while Spielberg would probably have humanized the character to the point that his robotic background would seem moot.  The once-in-a-lifetime combination of the two approaches is perfect for the character and for the film’s complex moral inquiry, because it destabilizes any attempts to read the character as obviously robotic or obviously human.  It should also be stressed that Osment’s outstanding performance is consistently tuned into the disturbing contradictions inherent in his character.  Osment’s portrayal of David is one of the most impressive child performances in all of cinema.

Of course, great science fiction is never merely about robots.  The genre’s great strength is its ability to defamiliarize certain aspects of humanity in order to tell us something about ourselves that we couldn’t learn from a more conventionally “realistic” story.  A.I.’s view of us is very dark indeed.  The film presents a disturbing vision of a human race desperate to receive love but categorically incapable of giving it.  Almost all of the human characters are defined by their pathological (though distressingly understandable) need to hang onto the feeling that somebody cares about them.  It is revealed in one scene that David’s creator, Professor Hobby (William Hurt), modeled the robot boy after his own deceased son, a plot point that simultaneously makes it easier to understand and harder to accept his smug joy in discovering that his experiment in emotional robotics was successful.  The toy boxes of the David model and his female equivalent feature the tagline “at last a love of your own,” a slogan that sums up the sadness that drives the characters to pursue a destructive form of one-sided love that backfires when the creature providing the affection becomes inconvenient. David’s relentless, unblinking affection is a nightmare version of the undying devotion that all of us want to feel from our loved ones, even though that type of obsessive love would inevitably prove untenable and insufferable.   

 Much of A.I.’s plot is set in motion when David’s mother/owner abandons him in the woods (in a wrenching, frightening scene that probably would’ve been too emotionally distanced in a Kubrick solo project, and too watered-down and sappy in a standard Spielberg film).  David’s quest to reunite with his mommy leads the film into a series of episodes that are admittedly a bit uneven, and sometimes awkward in unproductive ways.  A lengthy sequence devoted to a “flesh fair,” an elaborate carnival event where human/robot hybrids are tortured and destroyed for the amusement of an enthusiastic audience, is a didactic and garish blemish on an otherwise poetic and visually stunning film.  There are also a few distracting voice cameos by famous people (such as Chris Rock and Robin Williams) and a few uninspired visual homages to films such as Night of the Living Dead (1968).  At times, the film’s clash of ideologies produces out of place moments such as the one where an advanced alien species tells David that “humanity must be the key to the universe,” a sentiment that certainly doesn’t belong in a film with such a bleak view of the human race.

Ultimately, A.I.’s flawed moments are forgivable, and heavily outweighed by its many brilliant scenes.  Certain allowances need to be made for the film’s unusual production history, and the utterly distinctive tone that results from the partnership of two very different directors is more than fair compensation for the inevitable handful of incongruous bits.  The film works on a number of different emotional and intellectual levels simultaneously, combining traces of Kubrick’s and Spielberg’s very distinct aesthetics to create something that neither director could have made on their own.  This is the most emotionally visceral film in Kubrick’s oeuvre, and the most thoughtful and moral one in Spielberg’s filmography.  Spielberg’s gift for smooth blockbuster pacing allows the film to temporarily gloss over certain disturbing thematic suggestions that nonetheless are so heavily ingrained in the film’s very design that they inevitably surface when one thinks about the film later, in much the same way that David’s convincing boyish appearance can never entirely conceal his true nature. 

 The odd clash between Kubrick’s and Spielberg’s aesthetics reaches its height in A.I.’s controversial finale, which has the exact feel and appearance of a typically sappy Spielberg ending, and an undercurrent of the intense and uncomfortable ambiguity of a Kubrick climax.  David fails to reunite with his mother, and is trapped underwater for many years before being discovered by an advanced alien race.  The aliens explain that an ice age has killed off all of humanity, and that David’s memory banks provide the only remaining evidence of the human races existence.  The aliens grant David one wish, which of course is to be with his mother.  Naturally, David’s mother isn’t the real Monica Swinton, who died along with everyone else in the ice age, but a projection based on data retrieved from David’s memory.  David now has his own super-toy, an idealized version of his mother who exists solely to love him.  Monica and David lie in bed together, and the robot boy is able to shut his eyes for the first time.  The implication is that David has finally become a “real boy,” which would seem to be a happy fairy tale ending.  Except that the film’s suggestion of what a real boy is – obsessive, self-involved, wanting to be loved at all costs while being oblivious to the desires of others, full of raging and frustrated Oedipal desires – is not so sunny.  The ending of A.I. is all the more subversive because it isn’t even clear whether the film’s credited director understands its full, dark implications.

A.I. passes the Masterpiece Test

UP NEXT  A comparatively direct challenge to the Auteur Theory, Orson Welles’ F for Fake.

The Masterpiece Test: Greed

Year of Release  1924

Country  USA

Length  Studio-Edited Theatrical Cut:  140 min

TCM “Restored Version:”  239 min.

Lost Director’s Cut is rumored to have lasted at least 8 hrs

Director  Erich von Stroheim

Screenwriters  Erich von Stroheim and June Mathis (adapted from the novel McTeague by Frank Norris)

Cinematographers  William H. Daniels and Ben F. Reynolds

Editor  Joseph Farnham

Art Director  Cedric Gibbons

Cast  Gibson Gowland, ZaSu Pitts, Jean Hersholt

Greed is a tricky film to analyze, because MGM’s indifference to (or hatred of) director Erich von Stroheim’s original vision for the film lead them to burn the vast majority of the footage intended to be included.  Early preview screenings of Greed are said to have lasted anywhere from eight to nine hours, but the version that the studio released to theatres was less than two-and-a-half hours long, even though it included all of the footage that studio head Irving Thalberg deemed worthy of saving.  What survived is a powerful and impassioned statement about the corrosive damage that money lust can cause.  But because so many scenes have been lost forever, we can only speculate about what was lost with MGM’s mutilation.

Though MGM’s destruction of the majority of the footage that Stroheim shot makes a “director’s cut” of Greed impossible, there are still some clues that suggest what the shape and scope of his original cut might have been.  Various drafts of Stroheim and June Mathis’ adaptation of Frank Norris novel McTeague are still in circulation, as are a great deal of production stills depicting scenes not present in MGM’s edit.  In 1999, Turner Classic Movies broadcasted a “restored version” running approximately four hours long.  The extra 99 minutes don’t contain any rediscovered footage, since again, it has all been destroyed.  Instead, film restorer Rick Schmidlin took one of Stroheim’s early continuity screenplays and combined the original release version with hundreds of the aforementioned stills, which were rephotographed and occasionally treated with pans, zooms, and opening and closing irises.

The restored version is obviously of note to anyone interested in film history in general and Greed in particular, but while it clarifies some of Stroheim’s intentions, it obviously can’t be considered a full-blown restoration of his original vision for the film.  As film historian Stewart Klawans points out, “the film envisioned by Stroheim can’t be seen at all.  Greed therefore exists primarily as an idea about filmmaking, which has passed among directors and writers, critics and moviegoers, for three-quarters of a century.”

What exactly is this idea that Greed represents?  It has something to do with what Klawans describes as “exhaustive veracity,” which in this case means a passionate and obsessive dedication to accurately depicting the story’s settings down to their last detail, as well as an inclination to lovingly depict the minutiae of the main characters’ lives that more conventional narratives might ignore.  Stroheim was clearly driven by a desire to outdo the historical spectacles of his mentor, D.W. Griffith, whose Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916) are clear stylistic forbearers of Stroheim’s extravagantly detailed style.  This passion to get as much on the screen as humanly possible has led to such disparate works as Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (1975), which observes the day-to-day rituals of its titular character in excruciating detail; Bela Tarr’s Satantango (1994), which takes nearly eight hours to give the viewer the feeling that they are a part of the impoverished village where the film takes place; and many of the films of Jacques Rivette, who seemed to keep the cameras rolling until he had exhausted literally every angle of his narratives. 

The story detailed in Greed is actually fairly simple in its rough outlines.  Two men, Mac McTeague (Gibson Gowland) and Marcus Schouler (Jean Hersholt), have their friendship tested when Marcus’ cousin, Trina Sieppe (ZaSu Pitts), who marries Mac, winds up winning $5,000 in the lottery.  The fallout from this unexpected event irrevocably corrodes Mac and Trina’s briefly happy relationship, with Trina gradually going insane from her miserly paranoia and Mac letting his anger over Trina’s behavior lead him to alcoholism and spousal abuse.  Meanwhile, Marcus’ jealousy over the couple’s good fortune destroys his relationship with both of them.  Mac eventually murders Trina in a blind rage, and winds up on the run from the law in the middle of Death Valley, while Marcus leads the authorities in a hunt for his former friend.  The two heat-exhausted men meet up in the middle of the desert, with no water in sight.  Mac beats Marcus to death, only to discover that he has already been handcuffed to his friend, and the film ends with an image of the two men chained together in the middle of a desert with no hope for survival.

That story sounds like it could be told rather quickly, and the theatrical edit of the film does manage to depict it powerfully.  Though I would never want to defend MGM’s decision to defy Stroheim’s wishes, it should be noted that their streamlined cut of Greed is coherent and logically put together, with the story’s meaning and morality left more or less intact.  Where RKO cut out the brutally sad planned ending for Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and replaced it with an abrupt and unconvincing happy conclusion that seems utterly out of place with that film’s style and outlook, MGM retained Stroheim’s memorably bleak scorched-earth conclusion.  And where Universal’s “Love Conquers All” TV edit of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) turns that film into a wildly incoherent mess, MGM can at least be said to have retained the basic direction of Stroheim’s narrative, if not necessarily its radically digressive shape.

It isn’t possible to know for certain whether the lost cut of Greed would have ultimately been “better” than the final theatrical edit.  But while the theatrical cut feels more or less like a fully formed and relatively uncompromised film (considering that less than a third of it survived), it is important to note that the many digressions that Stroheim had planned for the narrative were clearly intended to give a holistic and specific weight to the main characters’ lives that would probably have made their gradual descent into outright barbarism all the more tragically powerful.  It is true that many of the departures that Stroheim had intended for the story – ranging from depictions of what the protagonists and their relatives enjoy doing on a Sunday afternoon, to entire rhyming storylines featuring happy and spiteful romances – are not strictly essential for the narrative to work, and they are the type of scenes that would be excised in a conventional adaptation of a novel.  But the bits and pieces of this digressive material that do survive in the MGM edit (and are much more evident in the TCM version) definitely add layers of weight and moral force to the depictions of the main characters.  One of the most memorable scenes in the film involves a down and out Mac attempting to beg the estranged Trina for some food which she refuses to give him.  This scene works in the theatrical cut, but has more emotional and ethical nuance in the TCM version, where there is more context for Trina’s cruelty, both because the extent of Mac’s recent physical abuse toward her is more evident and because more of their early happiness has been shown.  Who can say how much more nuanced and powerful this and other of the film’s most iconic scenes might have been in Stroheim’s original cut?

No matter what complexities may have been removed from Stroheim’s vision for the theatrical cut, the surviving footage is still undeniably powerful and gripping.  It could be argued that certain plot developments and character beats feel a bit abrupt or poorly motivated in MGM’s edit, but the movement of the narrative is mostly logical and consistent with the heightened realism of Stroheim’s aesthetic.  There is something iconic and definitive about well-performed pantomime, where the force of physical action makes the need for dialogue or method acting “naturalism” moot.  Gibson Gowland makes Mac the very embodiment of dumb, hulking sweetness, as well as its ugly flip side, blind brute force; he’s like a cartoon bulldog.  ZaSu Pitts does a great job of gradually stripping away Trina’s shy kindness and revealing the paranoia and spite underneath her demeanor; it is only in retrospect, or on repeat viewings, that it becomes obvious that those traits were there all along, and only exacerbated by her circumstances.  It’s difficult to think of dramatic silent performances that are more effective than those of Gowland and Pitts, aside from Falconetti’s justly revered portrayal in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).  It isn’t hard to imagine Mac and Trina existing in between their onscreen appearances.

Stroheim rarely moves his camera, but here he has mastered the art of the static shot invented by the Lumiere brothers and developed by D.W. Griffith.  There are countless moments of highly ornate physical beauty in Greed, from the glimpses of Mac’s cluttered and highly stylized dentist office to the final sun-scorched shots of the actual Death Valley.  Whether Greed is a great work of art is not really in question.  What we will always wonder is how much greater it might have been in Stroheim’s original conception.

Greed passes the Masterpiece Test

UP NEXT  A very different type of incomplete film, the Stanley Kubrick-Steven Spielberg collaboration A.I. Artificial Intelligence

The Masterpiece Test: Grand Illusion

Year of Release  1937

Country  France

Length  114 min.

Director  Jean Renoir

Screenwriters  Jean Renoir and Charles Spaak

Cinematographer  Christian Matras

Editors  Marthe Huguet and Marguerite Renoir

Art Director  Eugene Lourie

Costume Designer  Rene Decrais

Cast  Jean Gabin, Pierre Fresnay, Marcel Dalio, Erich von Stroheim, Dita Parlo

There was a time when Grand Illusion was considered one of the best, if not the single best, films of all time.  It was the first non-English language to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.  At the 1958 Brussels World Fair, the film was one of ten declared to be the most “artistically fulfilled” in the world’s first international poll of critics and filmmakers.  On The Dick Cavett Show, Orson Welles named it as one of the movies he would take with him of the “ark” (he couldn’t even come up with an equal choice, eventually blurting out “…and something else”).  Woody Allen frequently cites it as the best film ever made.  And it was the very first entry in the prestigious Criterion Collection, a group of DVDs that is as close as our cinema culture is going to come to an official list of the greatest films ever made.

While Grand Illusion is still generally considered by most serious cineastes to be a great film, its status has nonetheless decreased in recent years.  The reputation of Jean Renoir’s film has been eclipsed by that of his own Rules of the Game (1939), which Paul Schrader declared to be greatest film of all time in the essay that inspired this series of “Masterpiece Tests”, and by Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), the film that virtually always tops Sight and Sound’s once-in-a-decade critic and filmmaker poll of cinema’s ten greatest works.  In an issue of the seminal film magazine Cahiers du cinema Francois Truffaut described Grand Illusion as “the least eccentric of all of Renoir’s French movies,” and this seems to have influenced the way that most people think of the film today; a great film, sure, but a safe classic to be assigned for homework rather than something with any real contemporary resonance.

It is true that Grand Illusion is one of Renoir’s more classically styled films.  It doesn’t have the radical polyphonic structure of Rules of the Game, or the insouciant wit of Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), and it is not as flamboyantly quirky as something like La chienne (1931) or The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936).  Nor does the film qualify as a summation of everything that the cinema was capable of up to that point, the way that Citizen Kane does.  There is no flashy deep focus cinematography or rapid montage editing in Grand Illusion, and there is nothing in the film’s style that would obviously alienate a “bourgeois” audience.

And yet Grand Illusion is a war film without a single battle scene, a film made in the middle of WWII that features sympathetic characters on both sides, and from all social classes, of its WWI setting.  Renoir and Charles Spaak’s script quietly defies the usual three-act structure, featuring a final set of scenes too long and too integral to the film’s narrative to be considered an epilogue.  Practically all of the film’s characters are in the military, but they virtually never show open hostility toward each other or regard their foreign opponents as the enemy.  While some of the German soldiers betray early hints of elements of the future Nazi ideology, they are largely depicted as men just doing their jobs, and in some respects they seem to take the gentlemanly etiquette of old-fashioned war more seriously than their French counterparts.  In one scene the German prison guards are shown subsisting on bread, water, and gruel, while their French prisoners are allowed to eat full meals, Renoir simultaneously reminding the viewer of the civility of pre-WWII combat and empathetically suggesting one of the base causes of German frustration that led to the barbarism of WWII. 

Grand Illusion is about the importance of peace and human civility, and it is full of nostalgia for the gentlemanly code of behavior that existed among foreign soldiers prior to WWII.  (It’s no wonder that Welles loved the film, as the characters in his own movies were so often haunted by the loss of their personal Edens.)  Still, Renoir is no fool, and he knows that the layer of graciousness and good manners of by-the-book military protocol was only a thin cover up for the brutality of war.  The “grand illusion” of the title is the idea that international conflicts can be resolved by whichever side plays the game the best, and that both sides will simply go back to being friends when the mess of the war is over.  Although only one character is shot onscreen (while creating a distraction to allow two of his friends to make a prison break), and no actual battle is depicted, Grand Illusion doesn’t let viewers forget the violent toll that war takes on soldiers and their families – not that 1937 audiences would need to be reminded.

Renoir’s morally complex and multi-faceted attitude toward the human cost of war is perhaps best summed up in the character of German Captain Rauffenstein, portrayed by Erich von Stroheim.  Of all the characters in the film, Rauffenstein is the one who believes most deeply in preserving a gentlemanly code of conduct during wartime.  The Captain is first shown inviting two gunned-down French soldiers – the working-class lieutenant Marechal (Jean Gabin) and the aristocratic Captain Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay) – to a formal dinner, introducing them to their prison in the most polite way imaginable.  The festivities are interrupted by the awkwardly-timed news that another French soldier died during an aerial skirmish; this prompts Rauffenstein to insist with great solemnity on a moment of silence.  This ironic situation would’ve most likely been played for dark laughs in a post-Dr. Strangelove (1964) war film, as the contrast between the harshness of the situation and the aristocratic formality of Rauffenstein’s attitude toward it is indeed absurd.  But Renoir’s moral compass is too strong to make light of the deceased soldier’s plight, and he manages to poke holes in Rauffenstein’s attitude without holding him in contempt; indeed, Rauffenstein is simultaneously the character in the film who is most out of touch with the harsh realities of war, and the one who is the most sympathetic.  His ideals are noble, but they have no place on the battlefield, and they will be obsolete after his country is devastated at war’s end.

The complex characterization of Rauffenstein is aided immensely by the tragic weight of Stroheim’s performance.  With his monocle and regal military outfit, Rauffenstein is the very image of nobility, but his gloves cover burn marks and his clunky neck brace provides a constant reminder of how out of step the character’s aristocratic attitude is with the realities of his situation.  Although Renoir clearly recognizes the absurdity of Rauffenstein’s appearance, he refuses to ridicule the character – in much the same way that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger would go on to simultaneously satirize and emphasize with their militaristic main character in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) – and Stroheim’s sensitive, fully lived-in performance transforms this comic character into a tragic one.  It is one of the greatest performances in cinema history.  Rauffenstein’s final appearance, as he comforts Boedieu on his death bed after being forced (from the German Captain’s understandable perspective) to shoot him, is a real emotional knockout.

The aforementioned prison hospital scene is so strong, and so obviously an emotional climax, that it seems strange on first viewing that Renoir doesn’t simply end the film there.  He instead cuts to the story of the two French prisoners, Marechal and Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), whom Boeldieu gave his life for.  But while it might have been effective enough for the film to simply confirm that Marechal and Rosenthal escaped from the German prison camp, following their subsequent adventures proves crucial to the points that Renoir is trying to make.  Hungry, cold, and tired, the two French soldiers eventually manage to find lodging with a German farm woman (Dita Parlo) who agrees to hide them until they are ready to move on.  Aside from allowing for some of the film’s most stunning imagery (one doesn’t think of Grand Illusion as a particularly “composed” film, but cinematographer Christian Matras captures many casually beautiful shots), this section of the film provides more reminders of the toll that war takes on families.  In one heartbreaking moment, the farmer tells the soldiers about her various family members who have died in the war, the camera tracking across their pictures and finally settling on an empty dinner table far too big for just the farmer and her daughter. 

With the narrative structure of his film, Renoir is suggesting that the “grand illusion” of the aristocratic nobles represented by Rauffenstein is over, and that the true story of war lies with both the working grunts represented by Marechal and Rosenthal, and the suffering families represented by the farmer.  Renoir’s approach is not simplistically schematic; all of these characters are fully rounded and complex, with the working-class Marechal believing just as strongly as Rauffenstein that the end of the war will simply bring things back to “normal.”  Obviously that is not the way that history worked out, but Renoir ends the film on a graceful note of hope, with the German gunmen who have been hunting down Marechal and Rosenthal pausing and allowing them to live as they cross the border into neutral Switzerland.  The rules are absurd – as Rosenthal points out, the borders are manmade and unnatural – but at least they allow opportunities for the simple human decency that modern warfare tends to stamp out.  That lesson is still as vital today as it was in 1937, and so is Grand Illusion.

Grand Illusion passes the Masterpiece Test.

UP NEXT  From a film starring Erich von Stroheim to a film that he directed, Greed.

The Masterpiece Test: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Year of Release  1962

Country  USA

Length  123 min.

Director  John Ford

Screenwriters  James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck (story by Dorothy M. Johnson)

Cinematographer  William H. Clothier

Editor  Otho Lovering

Cast  John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Lee Marvin, Vera Miles, Edmond O’Brien, Andy Devine, Woody Strode

No one did more to define and redefine the traditional cinematic western than John Ford.  With his breakthrough Stagecoach (1939), Ford created what could be considered the definitive western film, and also established John Wayne as the genre’s biggest screen idol.  Later Ford westerns (many of which featured Wayne as their star) functioned as much as “state of the western” addresses as actual films.  Ford was at the forefront of virtually every technical breakthrough or stylistic change in the traditional western during the genres late-‘30s to early’60s heyday.  John Ford was to the popular western as Miles Davis was to jazz.

So it is entirely appropriate that Ford would be among the first to break down the archetypes and tropes of the western, challenging the very ideologies that he had played a massive role in establishing and popularizing.  It might not be accurate to call 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance the first anti-western (a couple of Anthony Mann’s ‘50s westerns could reasonably fit that description, as could Ford’s 1956 film The Searchers), but the fact that it is directed by Ford and structured around the offscreen funeral of Wayne’s character gives it a profound air of authoritative finality that wouldn’t have been possible under different circumstances.  Though Ford went on to direct several westerns after Liberty Valance, and Wayne starred in quite a few more, this may as well have been the last time that either of them worked in the genre.  They are saying goodbye to what they are best known for in much the same way that Charlie Chaplin marked the death of silent cinema with Modern Times (1936).

 Ford goes about dismantling the myths of the Old West by establishing a ragged settlement called Shinbone that is basically a physical embodiment of the traditional western – a place full of saloons, cowboys, and random gunslingers (and the home to many of the notable members of Ford’s stock company of actors, such as Andy Devine and Woody Strode) – and then introducing a city-boy outsider (Jimmy Stewart) whose personal set of values challenge and confound those of Shinbone (and therefore the genre itself).  Before he even gets into town, the outsider’s stagecoach is held up by a trio of bandits led by a notorious criminal named Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin, in the performance that justly made him a star).  The outsider finds that nobody in Shinbone is particularly interested in getting in Liberty’s way; the local sheriff (Devine) is too cowardly to go after Liberty, while the area’s top gunfighter (Wayne) seems to enjoy having a near-equal around to compete with, and the rest of Shinbone’s citizens seem to accept that the Liberty situation is the way that things always have been and always will be.  Early on, Wayne mocks Stewart’s idea that Liberty can be brought to justice through legal means, and suggests that the crook will only be taken down the old-fashioned way – with a gun.  Ford spends the rest of the film asking the audience whether Wayne or Stewart have the right solution to the Liberty problem, and to his credit, he makes both sides of the argument seem equally valid.

Both sides of the argument are given extra weight by the audience’s knowledge of what John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart represent as screen icons.  While the actors are playing characters named, respectively, Tom Doniphon and Ransom Stoddard, what matters in this film is that they are the embodiment of all that John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart represent.  Wayne of course is the definitive western hero, a no-nonsense man of action with enough conviction is his black-and-white sense of morality to defend it with bullets.  Though Wayne was never a particularly skilled actor, he had screen presence in spades and usually excelled in roles that required him to be a stand-in for the idea of the Old West.  This is perhaps Wayne’s best performance, outpacing even his work in Rio Bravo (1959) and True Grit (1969), two other films in which Wayne was asked to essentially be the physical embodiment of the ideals he represented.  Stewart was a much more skilled and versatile actor than Wayne, and his extensive list of credits did include quite a few westerns – including several Anthony Mann westerns such as Winchester ’73 (1950) and The Naked Spur (1953) where he played Tom Doniphon-style roughnecks – but he was (and is) most frequently identified as the gentlemanly and idealistic Democrat of Frank Capra films such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).  It is this polite version of Stewart that wanders into the outlaw world of Shinbone.

Stewart’s disruptive presence allows the film to get into some complicated and highly nuanced moral territory.  The risky ethical line that Ford is walking with this film – asking the audience to sympathize with a gruff redneck (Wayne) whose way of life is becoming obsolete, while making the kindly progressive (Stewart) occasionally seem like a weakling with unrealistic goals – is very intriguing, and forces the audience to engage in the film’s moral quandaries in a way that recalls Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942).  Wayne’s way of life allows thugs like Liberty Valance to function with relative impunity, but Stewart’s more modern viewpoint leaves Shinbone feeling a lot less lively. 

 Surprisingly, it is the gentle Stewart who finally comes to accept that Liberty can only be dealt with through force and decides to get the gun that will supposedly kill Liberty.  But everything comes to a head during a flashback that reveals that it was in fact Wayne who ambushed and killed Liberty from behind while Stewart and Liberty had their face-to-face showdown.  The legend of “the man who shot Liberty Valance” propels Stewart to the U.S. Senate, and presumably allows him to pursue his noble ideals, but it is a brutal act by Wayne that allows it to happen.  While it is shocking on a visceral level to see the traditionally heroic Wayne shoot the bad guy in the back of the head from a safe distance, what is really interesting about the scene is the way that it makes Wayne’s action feel simultaneously noble, cowardly, and tragic.  The last gasp of traditional western heroism is a primitive act of violence that paves the way for the modern form of legislative justice.  By the end of the film, Stewart is a famous and apparently well-liked politician while Wayne is a dead and forgotten soldier, and the film makes it clear that each man is in some way responsible for the other’s fate.

In addition to seriously grappling with some intriguing and complex moral ideas, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is simply a very entertaining and well-crafted film.  While critics of the time complained that the film lacked the epic visuals often associated with Ford – and it is true that there is nothing as memorably gorgeous in Liberty Valance as the Technicolor Monument Valley vistas of The Searchers or the fog-drenched final shootout in My Darling Clementine (1946) – it is still a well-shot film by any reasonable standard, and the lack of big widescreen setpieces is appropriate for this intimate, human-scale story.  Some people have complained about the film’s prominent use of studio sets as opposed to Ford’s typical location shooting, but the settings don’t seem any more or less artificial than in the average film – and even if they did, it could be argued that the phoniness of the surroundings reinforces the point that places like Shinbone no longer exist.

 For all of its formal pleasures, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance perhaps deserves to be best remembered for its engaging look at complicated issues of justice, legend, and progress.  Ford spends plenty of time pointing to the many positive aspects of the modern era that Jimmy Stewart ushers in, such as giving most of Shinbone’s citizens their first formal education, but he also conveys a profound sorrow for the lost world of John Wayne.  Ford acknowledges the best and worst aspects of both eras, and understands that the progress of democracy doesn’t ensure equality for everyone.  As Keith Phipps notes in his DVD review at the AV Club, “African-American actor Woody Strode recites the opening of the Declaration of Independence, as a portrait of Lincoln watches in the background.  Later, when the town meets to take a vote, Strode waits outside.”  Ford clearly loves the democratic principles that the United States was founded on, but The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance demonstrates his keen understanding that not everyone who fights for their freedoms will get to enjoy them equally – and that some will have no place in this new world at all.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance passes the Masterpiece Test

UP NEXT  Another film about changing times, Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion

The Masterpiece Test: Gun Crazy

Year of Release  1949

Country  USA

Length  86 min.

Director  Joseph H. Lewis

Screenwriters  MacKinlay Kantor and Dalton Trumbo (adapted from Kantor’s newspaper story)

Cinematographer  Russell Harlan

Editor  Harry W. Gerstad

Cast  Peggy Cummins and John Dall

On a purely visceral level, there are few films as powerful, entertaining, or effectively streamlined as Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy.  Every plot point, every line of dialogue, and every shot has been sculpted and sharpened for maximum efficiency and gut-level impact.  Lewis and his creative team take a basic outlaws-on-the-lam story and turn it into what is essentially a live-action flipbook of the seediest pulp novel covers. 

Gun Crazy is smartly paced in the way that only old Hollywood movies are, with each plot point and character tic lingering on screen only for as long as it needs to.  There is no fat here, and though the supporting cast is nicely populated with memorable bit performances, the only figures of any real importance are the central couple of Barton Tare (John Dall) and Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins). 

Stories of criminal couples on the run have been around as long as the cinema itself, but Gun Crazy distinguishes itself by avoiding any pretense of social responsibility and going straight for primal impact.  The romanticism of You Only Live Once (1937), They Live by Night (1949), and Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is nowhere in evidence here, replaced by a conflation of sexuality and violence so much in the forefront that it’s a miracle that a movie this raw was released in the late ‘40s (Barton and Annie meet during a shooting contest, where the lusty suggestiveness is so thick that it can hardly be called metaphorical).  Nor is there any pretension to cultural criticism, as in a latter film like Natural Born Killers (1994); Barton and Annie aren’t stand-ins for any idea so much as they are vessels for the audience’s most tawdry desires.

But while the lack of hypocrisy is appreciated, and the straight-to-the-point style of the filmmaking makes for tremendous entertainment, Gun Crazy may only be empty calories in the end.  There isn’t really any moral to the story beyond the token nod to “crime doesn’t pay,” and that idea isn’t terribly convincing in a movie where the criminal couple’s life is infinitely more glamorous and exciting than that of anyone else on screen.  Barton and Annie are even awarded the same dramatically fog-enshrouded death as Henry Fonda’s character in You Only Live Once, despite the fact that he was a wrongly accused man and they are unquestionably guilty.  It could also be argued that Gun Crazy is a bit sexist, with Annie using her charms to lure Barton into an amoral criminal underworld that a nice guy like him would’ve avoided if he hadn’t been tempted (the film’s working title was Deadly is the Female).  At any rate, Gun Crazy sacrifices morality for entertainment value.

Gun Crazy is a great film when viewed from a pure formal standpoint.  Action scenes like the climactic heist and car chase are enhanced by Russell Harlan’s documentary-style cinematography, which gives  you-are-there immediacy to each gun shot and quick turn of the car.  But the movie doesn’t leave you with anything to think about after it’s over, or any nuances to grasp on repeat viewings.  Gun Crazy is as enjoyable and exciting as just about any movie ever made, but the same things that make it thrilling prevent it from being anything more.

Gun Crazy fails the Masterpiece Test

UP NEXT  Another movie where guns play an important role, John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

The Masterpiece Test: Edvard Munch

NOTE:  I have been dissatisfied with the quality of the last several Masterpiece Tests.  My feeling is that the rigid structure of this series of posts – breaking the films down into the seven different categories (beauty, strangeness, unity of form and subject matter, tradition, repeatability, viewer engagement, and morality) proposed in Paul Schrader’s “Canon Fodder” essay, one by one – is to blame.  As a result, I’m changing the format of the Masterpiece Test posts.  I’ll still attempt to assess the films based on the seven aforementioned criteria, which will hopefully be evident even if some of those factors aren’t literally mentioned by name.  Ideally, this will eliminate the awkward repetition of points that demonstrate more than one criterion, and make for a smoother read overall.

Year of Release  1974

Country  Sweden/Norway

Length  174 min.

Director  Peter Watkins

Screenwriter  Peter Watkins (in collaboration with the cast)

Cinematographer  Odd Geir Saether

Editor  Peter Watkins

Sound  Kenneth Storm-Hansen, Bjorn Harald Hansen

Costume Designer  Ada Skolmen

Makeup  Karin Saether

Cast  Geir Westby, Gros Fraas, Kare Stormark, Alf Kare Strindberg, narration by Peter Watkins

The biopic is at once one of the most popular genres of film (with awards-giving bodies, if not necessarily with critics or audiences) and one of the most problematic.  People’s lives aren’t stories, but many filmmakers have attempted to force the shapeless trajectory of their subjects’ lives into the square hole of three-act narratives.  The sheer machinations of plot necessarily smooth out the contradictions that make many “great men” fascinating in the first place, while often vastly simplifying (or virtually omitting) the subject’s relationship to his society, his contemporaries, and his family.  Landmark events and personal relationships are given too much or too little weight, leaving many of these movies feeling awkwardly paced, manipulative, and inauthentic.  Conventional narrative is simply not suited to capturing the lives of famous or important people, but only a handful of filmmakers have come up with new methods for delivering biographical material.

For most of his career, British filmmaker Peter Watkins has been concerned with ways of dismantling what he refers to as the “monoform” (“the internal language-form used by TV and the commercial cinema to present their messages”).  Along with Kevin Brownlow (director of 1965’s It Happened Here, a documentary-styled piece of speculative fiction that imagined what Britain would look like if the Nazis had won WWII) Watkins pioneered a type of docu-drama that blurred the line between documentary and fiction.  Watkins’ breakthrough was The War Game (1965), a disturbingly plausible look at what would happen if a nuclear bomb dropped in England.  As Watkins’ career has gone on, he has moved increasingly further away from such manipulative monoform devices as emotion-stoking background music, rapid montage editing, and three-act narrative structure.

Edvard Munch (1974) is simultaneously Watkins’ first biopic and his first major break with the monoform.  While previous Watkins works like The War Game and Punishment Park (1971) draw their power from their focused outrage, there is no denying that much of Watkins’ early work is didactic and stubbornly humorless to a fault.  The grim tone of Privilege (1967) is almost laughably out of proportion to its pop music milieu, while The Gladiators (1969) is single-minded to the point of being banal.  The far more dynamic Munch is a watchable median between Watkins’ early didactic work and his later, more difficult material, which is often easier to respect than it is to watch.  (In fairness, I’m basing this assessment entirely on 2000’s La commune, a 6-hour exploration of a little-known piece of French history, but 1987’s The Journey, a 14-hour look at various civilization’s reactions to nuclear technology, hardly sounds inviting).  Edvard Munch is a radical and ethically sound biopic, but its avant-garde qualities serve to make the experience more gripping rather than to shut the audience out.

Where many biopics tend to suggest that the key to understanding their subjects’ extraordinary lives can be found in a single monolithic event or a significant relationship with another person, Edvard Munch instead overwhelms the viewer with contextual information that simultaneously makes the titular artist’s work easier to understand while allowing the man himself to maintain a dignified air of mystery.  Watkins’ narration occasionally pops in to make the viewer aware of the passage of time, and to flatly announce certain historical details (ranging from child labor statistics to developments in the art world to the birth of Hitler) that may or may not have any direct relevance to Munch’s life.  The film does include the expected staging of various important events from Munch’s life, but these are often broken up by scenes that either don’t include Munch or that feature him so far in the background that lead actor Geir Westby essentially becomes an extra.  Munch also has fairly little dialogue in the film, as if to suggest that he might simply have been a product of his times.  It seems equally likely that the great artist’s work could have been inspired by his tumultuous home life, his frustrations with women, his repressed upbringing, the influence of his socially progressive bohemian friends, the work of other artists, or the attacks of art critics, each with varying degrees of consciousness or unconsciousness.  Compare this lifelike complexity with the simplistic Oedipal urges that fuel the protagonists of Oliver Stone’s W (2008) or Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004), two recent examples of the monoform biopic.

It is unlikely that any two viewers would come away with the same interpretation of Edvard Munch, or even that an individual would have the same experience with it on multiple viewings.  Like contemporaries such as the great essay filmmaker Chris Marker, Watkins seems less concerned with imposing his own interpretation on the material than in getting at a greater but harder to define collective truth.  Watkins employs several stylistic techniques in Edvard Munch that are literally designed to prevent the film from succumbing to any one explanation.  He collaborated on much of the dialogue with the cast of non-professional actors, who, when they weren’t reciting things that there real-life counterparts said verbatim, were invited to write or improvise their scenes.  Watkins also used an innovative and dynamic editing technique that involved splicing bits of random footage, with no apparent relation to the dialogue or narration that it accompanies, at a number of points throughout the film, as if to suggest memories or thoughts that might be unconsciously influencing Munch’s developing artistic direction.

Of course it is essential for any film about a visual artist to possess a strong visual style, and Edvard Munch succeeds fully in this regard.  Odd Geir Saether’s cinematography initially seems a bit flat and grainy, like the work of a style-less craftsman doing functional work with subpar film stock.  But as the film goes on, it becomes clear that he has found the perfect middle ground between documentary plainness and painterly expressiveness.  In the sequences where characters are directly addressing the camera, they look equally like talking heads in a documentary and subjects of a Munch painting, fully justifying the potentially awkward intrusion of contemporary documentary techniques in this period piece.  The film also has a wonderfully tactile feel for the actual act of painting; the scenes where Munch scrapes away details from his in-progress works are perhaps the most riveting sequences of artistic creation outside of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso (1956).  Saether’s camera work brilliantly finds the middle ground between Munch’s stylish eccentricities and the plain reality of everyday Scandanavia.  At one point in the film, an art critic sites the frequent use of red skies in Munch’s canvasses as an example of his “insanity,” an opinion that the film quietly contradicts in separate scenes by filming actual red Norwegian skylines.

Edvard Munch passes the Masterpiece Test

UP NEXT  From high art to B-movie pulp, with Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy