skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Yesterday, Katie-Bar-The-Door and I finally got around to seeing writer-director Christopher Nolan's latest blockbuster, Dunkirk, in 70mm down at the American Film Institute in Silver Spring, Maryland.
If you know your history, Dunkirk is a place name that conjures up one of the most pivotal moments of World War II, the evacuation of the British army during the fall of France in June 1940.
Surrounded on three sides by the advancing Nazi armies and on the fourth side by the sea, the British found themselves on the verge of annihilation. Rather than negotiating terms, however, thousands of civilians took to fishing trawlers, tugboats, and pleasure craft, crossed the Channel, and pulled 300,000 men off the beach to safety.
This "heroic defeat" rallied the British people to stand alone against Hitler's armies, a stand now rightly regarded as "their finest hour."
Dunkirk is not a typical history lesson, however, with Churchill and Hitler barking orders at the strategic level.
Instead, the tale is told from three very intimate points of view — a week in the life of a British soldier (Fionn Whitehead) stranded on the beach; a day in the life of a weekend boater (Mark Rylance) and his son sailing from England across the Channel to rescue said soldiers; and an hour in the life of a British fighter pilot (Tom Hardy) tasked with protecting sea and sand alike from marauding German bombers.
Each moment is observed in extreme close-up — that is to say, limited strictly to details within the character's immediate line-of-sight or concern — without any backstory, exposition, humor or any other traditional storytelling device to provide context or lighten the load. In that sense Dunkirk reminded me of the interstitial chapters in Hemingway's first short story collection In Our Time where a single paragraph served as a drop of water from which to extrapolate the existence of an ocean.
The movie crosscuts continuously between stories, but not on simultaneous action as you've been taught to expect since the days of Griffith, instead on simultaneous emotions running along converging narrative arcs.
It's an audacious storytelling device, but then Nolan has spent his entire career — from Following to Memento to Inception to Interstellar — playing with chronology and narrative.
The action is intense, the mood desperate. There is no respite, no breather. If you have a fear of drowning in a tightly enclosed space, either alone or with a hundred men screaming out their last around you, this movie may not be for you. If you have claustrophobia or abandonment issues, if you're afraid of heights or fire or the dark, stay home. If you don't like the idea of getting blown up or shot at, rent a nice rom-com instead.
Katie-Bar-The-Door found the experience relentless and a bit exhausting. On the other hand, my fourteen year old niece has seen it three times.
One question that kept buzzing around in my head before the movie, was why Dunkirk? Why now? It's not an anniversary, it hasn't been in the news. Afterwards, I added to that, why such a tight focus on a handful of nearly anonymous characters? Not that it doesn't work, but stripped almost entirely of its historical context, the story becomes an abstract outline — a compelling outline, but an outline nevertheless.
And then it hit me. An outline of huddled masses yearning to breath free, fleeing the horrors of war, hoping against hope for a rescue from across the sea. Stripped of the filigree, Dunkirk is at its heart not a war story but a refugee story. And what are there millions and millions of right now?
Refugees.
It's the great moral and humanitarian crisis of our generation, and our failure to act, our indifference, our outright hostility in the face of a tidal wave of desperation and human misery flowing out of the Muslim world threatens to crack the very foundation of the West as we know it.
Suddenly Dunkirk seemed to me very timely. Timeless, too. If you pull back even farther, you see not just the historical battle of Dunkirk, and not just a parallel to today's world, but the story of mankind writ large — the never-ending battle between chaos and culture, cynicism and compassion, cowardice and courage.
That Nolan can take such a grim story, tell it in such a radically experimental style, and still sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of tickets, well, that's not just genius, that's art.
Dunkirk isn't a perfect movie, only, I suspect, a great one. Stay tuned, it just might be the best picture of the year.
On September 14-16, In The Good Old Days Of Classic Hollywood is hosting The Lauren Bacall Blogathon. For reasons I won't go into here, I can't post on the day of, so instead I offer up this early post as my way of encouraging you to please make a note on your calendars and check out the blogathon.
At the heart of every Howard Hawks action movie is the concept of the professional doing his job, and doing it well, despite the imminent threat of death, an idealized code of conduct Hemingway called "grace under pressure." We're all going to die sooner or later, Hawks seems to be saying, can't we at least do it with a bit of dignity and honor and laughter and good company?
That, above all, I think, is at the core of what is known as "a Hawksian woman," one who can laugh and provide good company in the face of death.
Whatever else a Howard Hawks drama is about, usually a woman meets a man and grows up enough to prove worthy of him and his cadre of professional associates (what one might loosely think of his family).
His comedies, in contrast, are about a man proving worthy enough of a woman to start a family (through marriage).
To Have and Have Not, so far as I can remember, is the one Hawks movie that takes that comedy formulation — the man proving worthy of the woman — and applies it to a dramatic situation. Do you know To Have and Have Not? In it, Harry Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) has retreated from the messy political world into a cocoon of isolationism so complete he's willing to ignore the fascists in charge of the local government even as they are shooting his clients and making his life and the lives of his friends miserable.
Into that mix comes Marie "Slim" Browning (Lauren Bacall in her first film role), teaching him how to whistle and forcing him to realize that no matter how much he thinks he's successfully avoided sticking his neck out, his neck is out there, on the block, along with the necks of his "family" (Eddie, Frenchy, Cricket and, finally, Slim herself).
Whether he likes it or not, the Cause is his and he can either fight for it or go down the tubes anyway. So he fights, and in so doing, becomes worthy of Lauren Bacall, the toughest of tough young broads ever to grace the screen.
On this the seventieth anniversary of our forefather's supreme sacrifice on the beaches of Normandy, my good friend Mister Muleboy and I drove down to the AFI-Silver to see Castle Keep, a 1969-vintage war movie starring Burt Lancaster, Peter Falk and Bruce Dern, directed by Sydney Pollack.
With a pedigree like that, what could go wrong? Well, as it turns out, everything.
The story: During the Battle of the Bulge, Burt Lancaster and his eyepatch defend a Belgian castle that sits on a road leading through a beautiful countess's underpants to Bastogne. The problem is, Lancaster can't defend said underpants without risking a priceless collection of art.
In various subplots, Falk makes a separate peace with a baker's wife, Dern gathers twelve disciples and preaches the gospel, and the rest of Lancaster's platoon takes up a strategic position in the world's most chaste brothel.
Told straight, Castle Keep might have been The Train (also starring Lancaster) or at the very least, last year's Monuments Men. Instead, we get a half-assed knock-off of the French New Wave—soft-core porn with no nudity, black comedy with no jokes and more religious allegories than you can shake a stick at.
Throw in lots of 14-century lute music, random editing and one man's unconsummated romance with a Volkswagen, and you have the worst war movie I've ever seen, and probably one of the ten worst movies I've ever seen in a theater. And I've seen Brooke Shields in Endless Love!
I won't presume to say what my father or Mister Muleboy's believed they were fighting to protect when they served in World War II (both in the Pacific), but I'm pretty sure Castle Keep wasn't it.
My rating: 1 star (out of 5).
Maybe the critics aren't as fond as I am of those history lessons Golden Age Hollywood used to serve up—e.g., The Life of Emile Zola, The Story of Louis Pasteur, The Pride of the Yankees—but I thought George Clooney's movie The Monument Men, about the real life efforts to rescue stolen art from the clutches of the Nazis, was a pretty interesting yarn.
Okay, it's not that old Burt Lancaster movie, The Train, which is both a great action picture and a great think piece, but I learned stuff I didn't know, never looked at my watch and didn't feel like I'd wasted my money. As Freud said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
With Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray, and a bunch of other people.
3.5 stars out of 5.
Saw this yesterday with Mister Muleboy at the AFI-Silver. In case you've never seen it, it's based on the true story of the mass escape of British prisoners from a German POW camp during World War II. A couple of Hollywood's biggest stars, James Garner and Steve McQueen, were shoehorned into the story—and thank God for studio interference. Garner is merely great while McQueen gives the most exciting performance of his career. His love affair with a motorcycle is justly legendary.
5 stars out of 5.
Also starring Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson, James Coburn, Donald Pleasence, James Donald, David McCallum, Gordon Jackson, Hannes Messemer, Angus Lennie, Nigel Stock. Produced and directed by John Sturges. Elmer Bernstein wrote the iconic score.
[SPOILERS] I don't know how many times I've seen this movie, but I never fail to watch white-knuckled thinking this time McQueen is going to make it over that fence.
Bonus Trivia: Donald Pleasence, who plays the nerdy, half-blind forger, was in real life an RAF officer who was shot down and spent the war in a POW camp. Also, thanks to the miracle of film editing, one of the German soldiers chasing Steve McQueen on a motorcycle is Steve McQueen.
When America went to war in 1917, Hollywood—motivated by a mix of patriotism and profit motive—went to war with it. Some made propaganda pictures (Mary Pickford's The Little American and Winsor McCay's The Sinking of the Lusitania), some made serious drama (Thomas Ince's Civilization), Chaplin even made a classic comedy (Shoulder Arms). And everybody made one-reel shorts promoting the purchase of war bonds.
So it's no surprise that D.W. Griffith—still regarded in 1918 as the world's greatest director—should also enter the fray. And he would seem to have been a natural for the job. He was already a proven master at staging battle scenes. His fame gave him and his cameras access to the front lines. And you would think that a man so devoted to Victorian morality would have something to say as war daily blasted the Old Order into dust.
Too bad, then, that the resulting movie, Hearts of the World, is such a lousy picture.
Griffith billed the movie in an early intertitle as "[a]n old fashioned play with a new fashioned theme." He wasn't lying as it turned out. Hearts of the World is not my first D.W. Griffith movie—including the Biograph shorts, this was in fact my 70th—and I can tell you that the story of a young couple torn apart by war is cobbled together from the plots of several early Griffith films, particularly The Unseen Enemy, In The Border States, Swords and Hearts and, of course, The Birth of a Nation.
The result is stale, overly sentimentalized and unconvincing.
The couple in question is played by Robert Harron and Lillian Gish as two Americans living with their respective families in a small French village on the Franco-German border. War breaks out days before the couple's impending nuptials, which proves inconvenient for everyone involved—the Boy volunteers for the French army, is soon wounded in battle and is presumed dead; the Girl is trapped behind enemy lines and put to work in the fields; and the conflict that consumed all of Europe is reduced to the question of whether the Boy can rescue the Girl before the evil German officer "von Strohm" has his way with her.
This wasn't the first (or last) time Griffith reduced a complex historical event to a question of who would get into Lillian Gish's underpants first, and as propaganda, the rallying cry of "Quick, boys, join the Army and save Lillian's virginity!" pales next to such classics as "The Yanks Are Coming" and "Uncle Sam Wants You!"
Hearts of the World does not represent Gish at her best. I've praised her at length before (in my review of The Wind, for example), but here she uncharacter- istically overacts. Rather than allowing her pain and suffering to well up gently from some hidden inner source, as she did in the wonderfully understated manner of Broken Blossoms, Way Down East and The Wind, Gish offers up a grotesque pantomime of grief, panic and temporary insanity.
Her co-star, Robert Harron, is, if anything, even worse. In previous pictures such as Judith of Bethulia, Hoodoo Ann and Intolerance, Harron was highly effective playing a young man in love, but in those movies, he was paired with Mae Marsh, not Gish, and while Marsh could never match Gish's ability to project pain and anguish—no one could—she had a mischievous light in her eye that made her good girls exciting. Marsh made Harron seem much more interesting than he really was—he must have something on the ball, the viewer figures, to send Marsh into such a tizzy—and when he falls for her and fights for her, it's to his credit. But by 1918, Marsh had moved on to greener pastures, and against Gish's reticence and rectitude, Harron could strike no spark.
Hearts of the World might have overcome the limitations of its bland central romance, though, if the battle scenes had lived up to their claim of authenticity. As a short prologue trumpets, the British government had allowed Griffith and his cameras unprecedented access to the front lines, but aside from some brief documentary footage of tanks, dirigibles and trench mortars, the battle scenes are flat and with no sense of the realities of trench warfare. Armies run back and forth as easily as school boys playing Capture the Flag, and with a cavalry charge, a bayonet thrust and the toss of a grenade, the bloody stalemate that in reality lasted for years and cost millions of lives is decided—and just in the nick of time. Hooray!
If you want to see how to do it right, I'd suggest either The Big Parade (1925) or All Quiet On The Western Front (1930).
And yet for all its flaws, there's a story worth telling hidden in Hearts of the World in the form of Dorothy Gish—Lillian's little sister—who here provides the film's comic relief. "The Little Disturber," as she is called, is a traveling street musician who takes a fancy to Robert Harron on the eve of his betrothal. Like the actress who played her, the Disturber is a gawky free spirit, funny and flirty and full of life. She knows what lips and hand grenades are for, and she does plenty of kissing and killing in her twenty minutes or so of screen time.
In fact, Dorothy reminded me a bit of another war film heroine, Scarlett O'Hara, and it occurred to me that the problem with D.W. Griffith as his career wore on is that he was the kind of guy who would read Gone With The Wind and think the story was about Melanie.
What Lillian did well, she did better than anybody, but she couldn't play a conventional romantic lead and anyway, nobody could play Griffith's idea of a Victorian dream woman, part saint, part virgin goddess. It's a consistent failing of Griffith's that he failed to see that the "bad" girl was more interesting than the "good" one. Like a grumpy grandpa hectoring the kids to "get off the damn lawn," Griffith's insistence that girls who wear perfume and lipstick and fashionable hats are harlots luring our pure boys away from the joys of wholesome domestic drudgery was already comically out of date by 1918. By the height of the Jazz Age, it would be downright archaic.
Fortunately, audiences could see what Griffith couldn't. Her supporting performance made Dorothy a star in her own right and in 1919, she was offered a $1 million contract to do five films. (She turned it down, saying, "At my age all that money would ruin my character.")
Like Lillian, Dorothy's off-screen personality matched her on-screen persona: she was funny and roguish and fun, and mostly played in comedies during the silent era. Despite their different temperaments, though, the two sisters remained close and never considered themselves rivals.
When talkies came in, Dorothy departed Hollywood for the stage where she performed for the rest of her life. She made only four sound movies and a smattering of television, making her final appearance in Otto Preminger's 1963 film, The Cardinal. After a long illness, Dorothy died in Italy at the age of seventy.
Artistically, Hearts of the World was Griffith's first serious stumble, and though he would right himself with such classics as Broken Blossoms and Orphans of the Storm, the writing was on the wall. Increasingly, the public found Griffith's Victorian morality tales stuffy and old-fashioned and his audiences melted away. Griffith made his last film in 1931.
In honor of Deborah Kerr's 90th birthday, Sophie of Waitin' On A Sunny Day is hosting the "Darling Deborah Blogathon." This is my contribution ...
John Huston's Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison is a decidedly odd entry in that seemingly endless parade of World War II movies to come out of Hollywood in the last seventy years. More Brief Encounter than Saving Private Ryan, this low-key, tender would-be romance between a marine and a nun is as talky as a Woody Allen movie, and chaste even by Production Code standards, but it's also as good as anything its stars ever did and is one of my favorite movies of the era.
The Allison of Mr. Allison is Robert Mitchum as a marine who's separated from his unit during a naval battle and washes up on the shore of a remote South Pacific island. With no means of communication or escape, and very little chance that anyone will ever find him, he may be there for years.
And then to his shock he discovers that marooned on the island with him is a nun, Sister Angela, played by the disconcertingly beautiful Deborah Kerr.
"That's my luck," he complains. "If ya gotta be a nun, why ain't ya old and ugly? Why do ya gotta have big blue eyes, and a beautiful smile—and freckles?"
Despite the fact that they are both already in committed relationships—him to the Marines, her to Jesus Christ—Allison asks Sister Angela to marry him. She turns him down, of course, but, her protestations to the contrary, it's a close run thing.
And then the Japanese army shows up.
Although the plot of Mr. Allison is simple, the material is delicate, and in the hands of different actors could easily have turned into something comical, something cynical, or something hopelessly sentimental. In fact, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison sounds like the set-up for some kind of joke: "A marine and a nun are stranded on an island together—"
But far from turning into a romantic comedy or a traditional war movie, Mr. Allison instead becomes a meditation on the war between the spirit and the flesh, between the darkness and the light, or, if you will, between man's natural depravity and the better angels of our nature. Rather than favoring one over the other, though, the film suggests that we can only reach our true potential when we are well acquainted with and comfortable with both.
Here, Kerr's Sister Angela begins the movie wholly ignorant of what human beings are capable of—lust, fear, anger, hatred, murder—while Mitchum's Allison has known little else. Before the movie is over, both end up with an appreciation of the full range of human behavior to their immediate salvation and their lasting benefit.
This wasn't the first nun Kerr played. Her performance in Black Narcissus in 1947 is a classic and paved the way for her move to Hollywood. It also serves as a counterpoint to her performance in Mr. Allison. In Black Narcissus, her Sister Clodagh is all too acquainted with the human heart and its complications, and in fleeing from that terrible knowledge, she becomes, if not a bad nun, then a tragically ineffective one. Here, she learns to look reality straight-on, and just as Allison's acquaintance with the spiritual makes him a better Marine, so, too, I suspect will Angela's acquaintance with human frailty make her a better nun.
To get a sense of the different direction this set-up could have gone in, look at Huston's take on a similar story, The African Queen. His Oscar-winning tale of a drunken riverboat captain and a starchy New England missionary who sail down a river together is essentially the same odd couple set-up as Mr. Allison—only there, the film's stars, Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, played the material for laughs, with the loutish Bogart bumping up against the patrician Hepburn to great effect. The result was one of the best romantic comedies of the decade.
But Bogart and Hepburn were playing over-the-top, larger-than-life characters—Hepburn said later that director Huston told her to imitate Eleanor Roosevelt—and much of the pure pleasure of watching The African Queen comes from knowing that they're never in danger, not really. War is a lark and the threat of death by drowning, disease or a hangman's noose is simply foreplay—what fun! I mean, it was either this, Kate and Bogie seem to be saying, or dinner and dancing and maybe a nightcap up in her apartment.
At least they get an A for originality.
In Mr. Allison, though, Kerr and Mitchum play their roles absolutely straight, with a sincerity and vulnerability that's actually pretty rare for a star vehicle. If you're at all familiar with Deborah Kerr's work, that should come as no surprise—she was the gentlest, most guileless actress ever to grace the big screen, and I can't imagine her ever holding any part she played at arm's length.
That Robert Mitchum also leads with his chin comes as a surprise only if you've bought into the laconic, insolent facade he presented on screen and in interviews. The fact is, under those heavy, drooping eyelids and that weary, disinterested demeanor, there beat the heart of an artist, and in his best work—Out of the Past, The Night of the Hunter, The Friends of Eddie Coyle and this one—Mitchum was exposed, vulnerable and completely authentic.
Of all his great performances, Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison was Mitchum's personal favorite.
Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison was the first of four movies Mitchum and Kerr made together. In 1960, they made both The Sundowners (for which Kerr received her final Oscar nomination) and The Grass Is Greener (co-starring Cary Grant and Jean Simmons). In 1985, they starred in Reunion at Fairborough, a made-for-television movie about a veteran who returns to England and rekindles a wartime romance.
Of his co-star, Mitchum said, "The best, my favorite—life would be kind if I could live it with Deborah around."
For her performance in Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison, Kerr was nominated for an Oscar, but she lost, of course, this time to Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve. It was the story of Kerr's life. In all, she was nominated for six Oscars and lost every time, still a record in the best actress category. I think more than anything, she was a victim of bad timing. A list of those she lost to is a veritable Mount Rushmore of actresses from the post-war era: Olivia de Havilland, Audrey Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Joanne Woodward, Susan Hayward and Elizabeth Taylor.
And maybe also she was too unassuming and what she did on screen looked too effortless. The Academy has always tended to reserve its top prizes for those who remind us what a terribly difficult and lonely job acting is—even when it isn't.
In fact, maybe that's Mr. Allison in a nutshell: you expect fireworks and instead get something as quiet as a whisper. Don't make the same mistake the Academy did and fail to listen closely.
The Birth Of A Nation—A Deeply Flawed, Would-Be Masterpiece
Introduction
Not entirely by coincidence, my series on the early silent era has arrived at the year 1915 on the day of the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War. What better time then to review the most notorious Civil War film in history, D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, which premiered in the United States on February 8, 1915.
The Birth of a Nation was the most celebrated film of its era. Critics gushed in their praise, audiences gladly lined up to pay $2 to see it at a time when the average ticket cost a nickel, and when it played at the White House, President Woodrow Wilson was moved to comment, "It was like writing history with lightning."
It was the top grossing film of the silent era, with estimates of its box office take ranging from $10 million to $16 million during its initial run, more than twice that of any other silent film. With its budget of $250,000, The Birth of a Nation still ranks as one of the twenty most profitable films in history.
It's also, in my opinion, the most controversial movie ever made. The film includes sequences—for example, Ku Klux Klansmen riding to the rescue of white women being raped by actors wearing blackface—that are so grotesque in their depictions of race and their distortions of history that you can't believe that you are seeing them. In 1915, its exhibition sparked protests in cities across the nation. Riots broke out in Boston and Philadelphia, and it was banned outright in Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh and St. Louis. After allowing the film's premiere in Los Angeles, city leaders banned it there as well. And even where it did play, Griffith was forced to make cuts to get the film past local censors.
The reaction so stung Griffith, he spent the rest of his life apologizing, both through his films and in private.
While films such as Life of Brian and The Last Temptation of Christ generated controversy at the time of their release, can you imagine anyone turning out to protest them a hundred years from now? Yet nearly a hundred years after its release, The Birth of a Nation still generates controversy. In 2000 and 2004, plans to show the film were cancelled after complaints, and as recently as last year in Rome, New York, the film's exhibition drew a crowd of protesters that included the city's mayor.
Let's Pretend—For A Moment
Reviewing The Birth of a Nation is never an easy task and I suspect many film critics and historians secretly (and not so secretly) wish they could just skip right over it and talk about something else. The film's reputation as being virulently racist is well deserved; and its story and its views on race are inextricably linked—every character on the screen is defined by their race and their attitudes about race and most are motivated by racial animus. So to review the movie without reviewing its racism and its distortions of history—always touchy subjects—is impossible
I won't shirk my duty, I promise, but nevertheless, let's pretend, for a moment, that we're visitors from another planet, and that issues of race and history are lost on us.
The Birth of a Nation tells the story of two families, one Northern, the other Southern, torn apart by war and its aftermath; and of a nation torn apart by the "peculiar institution," slavery. Beginning in 1860 with the election of Abraham Lincoln and running through the end of post-war Reconstruction (1865-1877), the movie covers the major events of the era—the South's secession from the Union, the resulting civil war, the emancipation of the slaves, the assassination of Lincoln, the chaotic post-war attempts to ensure the civil rights of newly-freed slaves, and finally, the white backlash that led to a century of segregation.
In the foreground of all this history is a simple love triangle involving an abolitionist senator's daughter (Lillian Gish); the senator's protegee, a free black (George Siegmann in blackface) who will eventually be named lieutenant governor of an unnamed Southern state; and a former Confederate officer (Henry Walthall) who remains unreconciled to the South's defeat. As the film builds to a climax, the senator's daughter rejects the black politician's proposal of marriage, he reacts by unleashing his wrath on whites everywhere, and the Confederate officer forms the Ku Klux Klan and rides to the rescue.
The movie is split into two halves—war and peace—and when it focuses on the former, it excels. The battle scenes play like Matthew Brady's photographs brought to life and those sequences must have seemed like a time machine to audiences in 1915. Indeed, they still rank high on a short list of well-staged combat scenes.
Also worthy of high praise is Griffith's staging of Lincoln's assassination, as well as the film's sets, cinematography, costumes and film editing, all unsurpassed in their day.
The problem with the film lies in its second half, the depiction of the post-war peace. Not only is it racist and an unforgivable distortion of history—a point we'll get to in a moment—it's also essentially ludicrous, because as the film presents it, the fate of the entire post-war South, indeed, the nation, pivots on the rival ambitions of two men—the former Confederate officer and the black lieutenant governor—to get into Lillian Gish's underpants.
The Birth of a Nation was not the first film to reduce complex historical issues to a simple question of who's humping who (although come to think of it, it may well have been), but that the fate of a nation could come down to a romantic obsession with the freakishly coy Gish—who in one scene flinches from a man's smile the way another woman might flinch from a blow—is preposterous.
The casting of Gish should have been the film's greatest strength. She was, as I've said before, the finest actress of the silent era, and her performances in Broken Blossoms, Way Down East and The Wind are as good as any ever essayed on film. But great as she was, Helen of Troy she was not, and while two men's obsession with Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara—essentially a modern flapper in a hoop skirt—could turn Gone With The Wind into one of the greatest romances ever made, Griffith's idealized conception of Gish as a virginal 19th century dishrag was old-fashioned even by 1915's terms.
Thus, without war or the saintly Lincoln or a compelling romance to carry the film's second half, The Birth of a Nation depends purely on its racial politics—and the action related thereto—to supply its forward momentum. And there's the rub: if you don't bring an inate fear of blacks into the theater with you, if the thought of blacks voting, owning property, marrying whomever they want and even, gee whiz, running the country doesn't inherently scare the pants off you, the last ninety minutes becomes unbearably tedious.
I have to admit that even though I'm a veteran of over 600 silent movies, once The Birth of a Nation reached its second half, I found my eyelids growing heavy.
So let's talk about the film's racial politics.
Race And Racism
There's no sidestepping the racism at the heart of The Birth of a Nation, and watching it and claiming not to have an opinion is like saying you only read Playboy for the interviews—you're either a fool or a liar. (Turn-ons: movie bloggers, Netflix. Turn-offs: pan-and-scan.)
There are two types of racism on display in The Birth of a Nation. One you might call "common practice racism," that is to say, the sort of racism that arose from the habitual practices of the day. The use of white actors in blackface, for example, is a prime example. Studios of that era believed that audiences—and maybe more to the point, state and local censorship boards—would object to seeing blacks and whites together on screen, particularly where, as here, violence or sex was involved. So what were clearly white actors in blackface makeup were substituted for black actors.
Too, racial minorities commonly served in film as comic relief, and were most often portrayed—when they were portrayed at all—as ignorant, fearful and subservient clowns. You'll see plenty of that here and while I've argued in the past and will argue again in the future that to ignore every image or performance that a modern audience might find objectionable today would be to present a history of film even more lily white than it already was, I won't pretend that such depictions in The Birth of a Nation aren't as bad as you're ever likely to see.
But ultimately, it's the film's second type of racism, what I'd call "propagandist racism," that is so deeply troubling. For the racism of The Birth of a Nation was not merely an unfortunate, unintentional side effect of the early 20th century's societal ills—it was the point. Thomas Dixon's novel, The Clansman, on which the movie was based, was an unapologetic exercise in white supremacist propaganda, stacking the deck against blacks to foment rage in its intended white audience and garner support for segregationist policies.
The Birth Of A Nation turns history on its head, telling us that after the Civil War a "helpless white minority" lived under the boot heel of black oppression and that the United States didn't become a nation, indivisible, once again until all white people, Northerner and Southerner, Unionist and Confederate, abolitionist and ex-slaveholder, rallied together to combat the single biggest threat to civilization—black men with equal rights.
The film is a white supremacist's wet dream. As history, it's ridiculous. The landed, slave-owning gentry that had led the South out of the Union and into the Civil War may have feared losing its iron-grip on power after the war, but it never feared losing its right to exist; whereas the reality for freed slaves was that their most basic freedoms—to vote, to own property, to walk down the street without fear of being murdered at the whim of a white man—were fragile at best and easily taken away again. The notion that the Klan was the only thing standing between civilization and a marauding hoard of rape-hungry blacks is not only racist, it's a bald-faced lie.
And don't get me started on its views of the Civil War's causes, which are fanciful if by no means unique—meddling abolitionist firebrands, motivated by naked ambition, pious naivete and interracial lust, launch a pre-emptive and unconstitutional war to impose their radical racial views on a peaceful, idyllic South, upsetting the delicate, harmonious balance between benevolent plantation owners and their loyal, contented slaves
In reality, Southern slave owners were more than happy for the federal government to intervene to quash state's rights when it acted in favor of slavery. (I refer you, for example, to the Fugitive Slave Act, the Supreme Court's Dred Scot decision and the Missouri Compromise, among other historical events.) The foundations of secession, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stevens said in his famous Cornerstone Speech, "are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition."
That later some would say the South seceded for any other reason than to preserve slavery would have come as a great surprise to the men who led it out of the Union.
Admittedly, the South presented in Gone With The Wind isn't any more accurate, but that movie never purports to explain the war or its aftermath except in terms of their colossal inconvenience to Scarlett O'Hara. If she could have bedded Ashley Wilkes by freeing all the slaves she would have done it, and if she could have bedded him without freeing any slave she would have done that. Everything else is irrelevant.
Here, race and racism are pretty much the only point. That Griffith saw the film's source material only as a rousing tale that reminded him of the folksy stories his Confederate grandfather used to tell on the front porch of their rural Kentucky home is a testament to just what a blinkered existence the man led. He was a workaholic who lived only to make movies and he rarely walked beyond the narrow limits of the studio except to shoot yet another movie on location.
Well, he's dead now and has thus paid the ultimate price for his sins. No point in my piling on. He wouldn't feel it anyway.
You, on the other hand, have no excuses. Watch The Birth of a Nation if you want—I've seen it three times—but don't kid yourself as to what you're watching.
The Film's Legacy
One of the most cherished myths of film history (or perhaps just its laziest) is that The Birth of a Nation represented a revolution in filmmaking technique, that with it Griffith invented the feature film, basic editing techniques such as cross-cutting, camera shots such as the close up, and above all, exciting action sequences and chase scenes.
As Roger Ebert has written, "[A]udiences in 1915 were witnessing the invention of intercutting in a chase scene. Nothing like it had ever been seen before: Parallel action building to a suspense climax. Do you think they were thinking about blackface? They were thrilled out of their minds."
Except he was wrong. As I have written previously (here), when I traced the evolution of film technique between 1906 and 1914, audiences had not only seen everything Ebert is describing, they had seen it enough that Mack Sennett felt comfortable spoofing it in a Keystone Kop comedy made two years before Griffith directed The Birth Of A Nation, with Mabel Normand barricaded in her house, fending off "burglars" who turn out to be her parents while the world's most inept policeman tries to ride to the rescue in a balky automobile. You don't spoof what you've never seen; you only spoof what you've seen so many times that humor arises from subverting the expectations of the audience. (See it here.)
Ebert's misunderstanding is not unique and I shouldn't pick on him—his was the common (mis)perception among film historians for decades. The error is understandable: until recently, very few films made prior to 1915 were available, and when your film library skips the entire decade following The Great Train Robbery (1903), The Birth of a Nation tends to look more startlingly innovative than it really is.
The fact is, while audiences responded to Griffith's film in record numbers, what they weren't doing, at least not for the first time, was seeing the groundbreaking technical breakthroughs that tend to justify The Birth Of A Nation's reputation as a great film. Yes, all those techniques were there, and yes, Griffith put them all together in epic form to tell the most rousing story yet told. But cross-cutting, close-ups, battle scenes—they were already staples of Griffith's filmmaking style, techniques he had developed while making some five hundred shorts for Biograph between 1908 and 1913.
And if you've seen any of those feature-length films I wrote about yesterday (here), you know that these techniques were shared by directors the world over as well.
Which is not to say that The Birth of a Nation wasn't important. It was a huge box office hit at a time when the jury was still out on the commercial viability of the feature-length film. After its release, there was never again a question about whether an audience would pay to sit through a long-form film.
Even more importantly, The Birth of a Nation woke audiences and critics alike to the reality that motion pictures weren't just a novelty, but were in fact an artistic medium, one that would turn out to be the most important of the 20th century. The film's reception inspired a generation of filmmakers, and as a result, we are blessed now with feature films from Charlie Chaplin, John Ford, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and many others who publicly acknowledged a debt to D.W. Griffith.
Maybe that's not everything that's been claimed for The Birth of a Nation, but it's not nothing either.
To Watch Or Not To Watch
I've been tough on The Birth of a Nation. It's a film a critic needs to be tough on. But I haven't answered the essential question: should you see it?
The answer, as always, is it depends.
As I mentioned earlier, I've watched The Birth of a Nation three times, and my reaction has been different every time. On the first viewing, I think my reaction was the typical one—I was appalled by the film's racist propaganda. The second time through, I was able to see both the power of the film's action sequences and the tedium of its romantic triangle.
But then I watched it a third time, and found that after I had peeled back the racism, after I had peeled back the tedium, what I was watching was the tragedy of American apartheid—"Jim Crow," we called it—as told through the imperfect, unwitting eyes of a triumphant white racist. Why, that's almost Faulkneresque, an Absalom, Absalom on film, if you will, albeit without the genius of William Faulkner's language or his insight standing between you and the deeply-flawed man narrating the story. That Griffith didn't understand the implications of what he was saying doesn't make the tale any less tragic. It's a little like listening to some ignorant blowhard tell a long story all the time not realizing he's the villain of the piece. You listen to him with a queasy look on your face and think, "You dumb bastard," but his blindness doesn't stop you from seeing glimmers of the underlying truth.
Ultimately, Griffith isn't Faulkner and what you're left with is a deeply-flawed would-be masterpiece. If you've never seen a silent movie before, for crying out loud, don't start with this one. It's hard enough to decipher the unfamiliar storytelling techniques of silent film without also having to struggle with the film's racism.
But if you're an amateur film historian, silent film fanatic, budding critic, Civil War buff, or want to get a sense of just how deeply interwoven the issue of race is with America's national character, then the answer is yes, you should eventually see The Birth of a Nation—once you've become well-enough versed in American history to separate the fact from the nonsense.
And if you're a Saturday night movie fan with only a limited interest in silent movies? I'd say there are a lot of other movies you should see first. Click here for my silent movie starter set, see those, then branch out.
To continue to Part Two, a review of the best movie(s) of 1915, Les Vampires, click here.
From my post about the best picture of 1929-30, All Quiet On The Western Front
In the Twentieth Century, no war seemed like a better idea beforehand and a worse idea after than the First World War. Most of Europe, and eventually the United States, marched merrily into what turned out to be a highly-efficient meat grinder destroying for many nations an entire generation of young men, all in the pursuit of what turned out to be not much. I think we Americans don't fully grasp to what degree war ravaged Europe in the Twentieth Century. Britain, for example, during World War I suffered 2.6 million dead and wounded out of a population of 45 million; and France's loss of 6 million dead and wounded out of 40 million would be the equivalent of 45 million casualties for the present-day U.S., losses not only unthinkable today but incomprehensible.
Afterwards, the debate centered not so much on the question of "Should we have fought the war?" as on "How did we get suckered into it?" The level of disillusionment, grief and revulsion was so great, the key European powers sat back while Hitler gobbled up one country after another, and even after the Nazis had overrun most of Europe, invaded Russia and were bombing Britain on a daily basis, America's president, Franklin Roosevelt, had a hard time convincing the nation to even prepare for war, much less fight it. By the time the United States entered the conflict, it was damned near too late—and was, in fact, too late for millions of people.
The effort to make sense of World War I and the political, social and economic upheaval of its aftermath inspired some of the finest art and literature of the Twentieth Century—cubism, surrealism, Picasso, Hemingway, Proust. Possibly the best novel about the war itself was Erich Maria Remarque's best-selling novel, All Quiet On The Western Front, the story of a classroom of German schoolboys on their journey from enthusiastic volunteers to disillusioned veterans to buried corpses.
Carl Laemmle, the legendary head of Universal Studios, quickly bought the rights to the novel. Laemmle had worked as a bookkeeper for twenty years before investing in a string of nickelodeons, eventually founding his own film distribution company, Laemmle Film Service, which after a merger with three other film studios became Universal. He put his son, Carl, Jr., in charge of production and it was "Junior," as he was widely known, who produced All Quiet On The Western Front.
In adapting the novel for the screen, writers George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Del Andrews retained the story's focus on the boys who fought and died in the war rather than on the generals and politicians who sent them, a focus that gave the book so much of its power. Director Lewis Milestone made the significant and (given that the studio was investing more than a million dollars in the production, a huge amount for the time, just weeks after the crash of the New York stock market) risky decision to cast young unknowns in the primary roles—and not in a J.J. Abrams, populate-the-bridge-of-the-Enterprise-with-GQ-pretty-boys sort of way either.
This choice, casting schoolboys to play schoolboys, is nearly unique in the history of Hollywood.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Slaughterhouse-Five that the problem with war stories is that instead of being about the children who actually manned the front lines, they all pretend wars were fought by grown men, "played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men" which he said made war "look just wonderful, so we'll have lots more of them." And indeed, Frank Sinatra and John Wayne and William Holden and many others were too old, too mature, too poised, too experienced, for the parts they played. Even the superb Saving Private Ryan relied on a cast—Tom Hanks (42), Tom Sizemore (37), Edward Burns (30), Matt Damon (28)—too old for the parts they played.
With the exception of Louis Wolheim, a veteran of fifty movies including the Oscar-winning Two Arabian Knights, the cast of All Quiet On The Western Front is nearly as young as the parts they are playing. When the film went into production in November 1929, Russell Gleason and William Bakewell were twenty-one, Lew Ayres was twenty, Ben Alexander, eighteen. Richard Alexander (no relation) was the old man of the group at twenty-five.
These are boys, raw recruits who soil their under- wear during their first patrol, kids who've never been away from home, never had a drink, never so much as kissed a girl. Played by grown men, you might feel regret at their deaths, but you'd never get the same sense of how much is lost, how much of even the most basic aspects of life they've missed out on as when these parts are played by boys. The effect is tragic and poignant even now almost eighty years on.
The other significant choice Milestone made was to focus strictly on the war from the point of view of the unglamourous foot soldiers who fought it. No strategic overviews, no explanations of political objectives, not even a crane shot of the battlefield to let you know where the men are headed. Just a boot's level view (often literally) of the hunger, sleeplessness, fear, filth, lice, loneliness, rats, madness, amputations, shelling and unheroic death that was the daily routine for millions of men. Without a greater sense of the war's purpose, Milestone forced his audience to focus on the only goal that mattered to these boys, their survival.
At the same time, however, while Milestone is effective at making you feel the confusion of war, he himself is never confused about what he's trying to show you—and if you've seen some recent movies, where directors hide the limitations of both the action and their imaginations with a rapid blur of edits, you understand there's a big difference between the two.
A good example of this comes during the first great battle sequence, one the greatest cinematic achievements up to its time. The camera sweeps low to the ground, almost always at the eye level of the men in the trenches. Cinematographer Arthur Edeson—as anonymous these days as Milestone despite also working on Casablanca—reminds you once again of the power of live action over cartoonish computer-generated images, particularly with the shot of a machine gun panning down a line of charging soldiers, then the reverse shot of the charging soldiers falling as the camera sweeps past, human bodies falling in the unpredictable ways an animated image, unbound by gravity, cannot replicate.
The sequence includes an impressive artillery barrage, with real explosions running down the line, throwing fine particles of dirt and the dead into the air, and you feel an adrenaline rush as an overwhelming enemy charges. From the point of view of the soldier, it's all churning legs and rifles, bayonets suddenly at one another's throats as the line is breached and the men engage in hand-to-hand combat, and then as the battle rages, men collapse in exhaustion, gasping for breath, their faces grimy with sweat, blood, wincing in pain, Milestone showing you something you don't often see in a war film, the real sense of physical exertion, the weariness and thirst, just taking the time in the middle of battle to show a man knock the throat off a bottle of wine for a badly needed drink.
Milestone strove for an unprecedented level of realism as he directed the action, drilling his actors like soldiers and casting veterans of the German army in supporting roles. The effort especially paid off in an extraordinary sequence late in the film: an attack, counterattack and counterattack repulsed, nearly all of it shown from Lew Ayres' point of view as he shelters in a bomb crater, with, first, French soldiers leaping the hole in one direction, then leaping it in the other as the Germans drive them back, finally one unfortunate French soldier leaping on top of Ayres leading to a desperate struggle with a bayonet. Then during the day and night that follow as Ayres is trapped in no man's land between the two lines, he watches the French soldier's life slowly drain away, the plight of the Frenchman told in sound from his screams, his cries and finally his silence.
The movie concludes with a shot long thought lost but rediscovered in 1998 when the film was finally restored to its original length: the silent, ghostly image of the boys we've come to know marching off to war superimposed over acres of white crosses.
All Quiet On The Western Front premiered in Los Angeles on April 21, 1930, and was a critical and commercial success, grossing $3 million, more than twice its budget. The National Board of Review named it one of the ten best movies of the year, Photoplay magazine awarded Laemmle, Jr. the Medal of Honor for producing the best movie of the year. The movie even won Japan's Kinema Junpo Award for best foreign language film. On November 5, 1930, the Academy awarded it two Oscars, for best picture and best director.
Decades later, the National Film Preservation Board included All Quiet On The Western Front in the National Film Registry. In 1998, the American Film Institute included the film on its list of the 100 best American movies ever made and ten years later ranked it seventh among the list of best "epic" features. Steven Spielberg later acknowledged its influence on Saving Private Ryan. In my opinion, not only was All Quiet On The Western Front the best picture of 1930, it's one of the five best (anti-)war movies ever made and arguably was the best film of the entire Early Sound Era (1927-33).
Lew Ayres was so moved by the experience of making All Quiet On The Western Front that he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War, a controversial stand that led the U.S. military to broaden its definition of conscientious objection. After serving in the Medical Corps in the South Pacific, Ayres returned to Hollywood and was better than before he left. Already a star of the Young Dr. Kildare movies, Ayres went on to receive an Oscar nomination in 1949 for his role in Johnny Belinda. He worked steadily until 1994 and died in 1996 at the age of eighty-eight.
Posts
