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Toni (1974 review)

This review appeared in the October 1974 issue of Monthly Film Bulletin. —J.R.

Toni

France, 1934                                                   Director: Jean Renoir

Neither a major nor a minor work in the Renoir canon, Toni demands to be regarded more as an adventure of the director in contact with his material than as an integral and “finished” composition. If the symmetrical framing device of  the train arriving with fresh immigrants at the beginning and end of the film appears somewhat forced in relation to the whole, this is likely because Renoir began with notions of a social thesis and a Zola-derived sense of fatality from which his better instincts subsequently deviated. And it is the instinctual rather than the conceptual side of Toni that renders it a living work forty years after it was made -– a distinction that might serve equally well for Zola and Stroheim. Over and around the largely melodramatic plot is draped an expansive mood of leisurely improvisation, like an ill-fitting but comfortable suit of clothes, often permitting the accidental and random to take precedence over the deliberate, the individual detail over the general design. Thus the fleeting glance of a child at the camera in the opening prologue (when the newly-arrived immigrants walk into town), the grey haziness of Sebastian’s funeral procession, the muddy fadeouts and slightly bumpy pans are all part of the film’s charm and integrity. They are intimately related to what makes the film historically important: the choice of milieu and exclusively natural rural locations, the use of unknown actors and local non-professionals, and the risks and beauties of direct sound within this rough-and-ready context. Small wonder, then, that many of the strongest moments and scenes center round the physicality of brute encounters: Toni’s sucking of wasp poison from Josefa’s neck, Albert’s boorish seduction of her while she does the laundry, the quarry explosion glimpsed and joked about by workers from a hillside, and the death of Toni in Fernand’s arms. Possibly another such scene would have been the transportation by cart of Albert’s corpse, hidden under a pile of laundry, from  cottage to forest (described by Renoir in a 1957 interview with Rivette and Truffaut), which presumably would have counter-balanced the laundry seduction with a certain Stroheim-like irony; but as Renoir explains, this scene had to be cut — apparently because of the censor — before the film could be released. Apart from this lack, an occasional choppiness in the narrative as it carries us over three years tends to make the pleasures of the film more localized than continuous, but at the same time there is an effective play of “internal rhymes” that strives to bridge the gaps. A kitten incidentally glimpsed around the vineyard cottage in the first part of the film becomes a cat two years later. Even more strikingly. Albert’s grumbling about the food Josefa fixes him and his demand for a tin of sardines is obliquely and sardonically recalled just after she shoots him, when we observe the cat licking clean the open tin not far from his cadaver. Such details help to override the sense of awkwardness and sense of strain that crops up from time to time in some of the performances –- notably those of Max Dalban [Albert] and Celia Montalvan [Josefa] — when the actors seem called upon to offer more than they can comfortably deliver. Yet even these lapses often serve the positive function of bringing us closer to the people in the film, if not the characters. What one ultimately carries away from Toni, in fact, is a memory of felt presences rather than incarnations. One remembers heat and light -– the warmth of the sun as well as that of the characters with their broad Midi, Italian, Spanish, and African accents, denoting generosity and luminosity in a bleak and difficult environment; the crackling fire beside which Fernand attempts to console Toni no less than the shiny grapes that Toni and Josefa share; the gentleness of Toni and the empathy of Fernand as well as the more volatile passions of Marie and Josefa; and the lighted window of the vineyard cottage that serves as a beacon to Toni’s longings as he dreams of love and escape.
JONATHAN  ROSENBAUM

La Gueule Ouverte

From Oui (October 1974). — J.R.

La Gueule Ouverte. A 5O-year-old Frenchwoman named Monique (Monique Melinand) is dying of a painful disease. She gradually loses the ability to communicate with any ease, and finally the power to speak at all. Eventually she’s moved from the hospital to the family’s house in Auvergne, where her husband Roger (Hubert Deschamps), along with her son Philippe (Philippe Leotard) and his wife Nathalie (Nathalie Baye), take care of her and wait for her to die. It’s a painful and less-than-inviting subject for a film, but somehow Maurice Pialat works wonders with it. Too recognizable and embarrassing to be strictly sentimental and too inventive and observant to be predictable. his story moves like a string of terse epiphanies, beautifully recorded by Nestor Almendros’s camera. The characters are neither bigger nor smaller than life: Roger is a drunken grouch whose idea of kicks is to cop a feel from a pretty girl while she changes sweaters in his clothing shop, yet he is the one most affected by Monique’s death. Philippe screws Nathalie and then goes hunting up prostitutes in his desperate flight from the fact of death. Father and son don’t like each other much, and when Philippe and Nathalie drive away at dusk– an extraordinary extended shot that encapsulates a lifetime into a few miles — we can be confident that they won’t be coming back again. This is only Pialat’s third feature to date, but we’ll be hearing a lot more from him. –- J.R.

Juggernaut (1974 review)

This review originally appeared in the October 1974 issue of Monthly Film Bulletin. —J.R.

Juggernaut

U.S.A., 1974                                              Director: Richard Lester

A disconcerting aspect of Richard Lester’s last feature, The Three Musketeers, was the evidence of a director trying to play several separate games — and please several separate audiences — at the same time, often leading to a diffusion of interest as the film briskly bounced from one tone or style to another. Juggernaut, clearly designed as nothing more or less than  yet another ship-disaster blockbuster, is a marked improvement in this respect, because however unoriginal its base ingredients, it hardly ever slackens its pace or diverts attention from its central premises. After a rather deceptive Petulia-like opening — the camera panning up the legs of a girl trombonist in the band celebrating the Britannic’s launching, followed by a string of typical Lester vignettes extracted from the surrounding fanfare (mainly “overheard” one-liners singled out on the soundtrack and disembodied somewhat from the visuals, giving them a certain resemblance to comic-strip bubbles) — the plot settles down to the cross-cutting techniques common to the genre, and the short gags (e.g., two children on the boat playing a flipper machine called “Shipwreck”) are used thereafter a bit more sparingly. Within such a structure, requiring fairly constant movement from home office to police investigation to hero-expert to Captain to ship’s passengers, with additional side-trips on the way, it is scarcely surprising that many of the sub-plots never develop beyond their initial expositions. On the other hand, this limitation serves to highlight the increasing importance of Fallon in the story, thereby enhancing the carefully defined gradations in Richard Harris’ fancy and effective performance from a low-keyed, pipe-smoking functionary to a sweaty old-fashioned hero blessed with rhetorical powers, super-human courage, and a tense, sardonic philosophy of life as the tension mounts. Obeying a cleverly plotted curve, the character and film form the centerpiece of what might otherwise have registered as a dozen or so mini-plots in search of a catalyst. Notwithstanding the absurdities of a plot whose every facet can be recalled from other films in the genre, where every “moral truth” is inserted in eye-dropped fashion as a wisecrack and nearly every passenger on the ship seems to have emerged out of some sort of Grand Hotel central booking, Lester still has plenty of occasions in which to demonstrate his skills. The disastrous ship’s party, presided over by a strenuously jubilant Roy Kinnear, takes on an affecting bitter-sweet turn when Kinnear’s demeanor drops and the guests unexpectedly begin dancing, and Lester knows precisely when to cut to a helicopter shot over the ship at night to encapsulate the moon of impending doom. A showier and arguably less justifiable cut -– from a bolb exploding in Braddock’s [David Hemmings’] face to an attendant igniting a pocket lighter in the air terminal baggage check -– can easily be forgiven as a gimmick because it is executed so smoothly. Apart from such polished fillips and his usual abbreviated (if uneven) array of filler gags, Lester mainly shows his expertise by keeping his warhorse of a plot moving, gliding efficiently from one point to the next and accumulating a respectable amount of suspense along the way.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

–Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1974 (Vol. 41, No. 489)

Review of Dwight Macdonald’s DISCRIMINATIONS (1974)

From the Village Voice (October 10, 1974). — J.R.

Discriminations

A book by Dwight Macdonald

Grossman, $10

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Dwight Macdonald’s latest collection of articles is a sequel of sorts to his Politics Past — political-cultural and incidental literary criticism that composes a loose chronicle of the times, taking in a span of nearly five decades.

I blush a little to admit it today, but Dwight Macdonald was the first film critic I ever took seriously. He liked Citizen Kane, Breathless and Shadows and so did I, but I think the clincher was his prose — a rare kind of magazine writing, bursting with energy, that danced or sang or clowned regardless of what it was saying, with a fine ear for polemics and invective. This latter talent has gradually become known as his specialty. More humanistic and less of a school marm than John Simon and a lot more folksy and homespun than Gore Vidal, he shares with them the status of Master of the Chopping Block. (For the best whacks, see my favorite Macdonald collection, Against the American Grain [much of it recently reprinted, in 2011, as Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain].)

But he usually takes on a different coloration in his political writing, where his loves and hatreds become more personal and complex — more mutable and prone to reversals or other kinds of second thoughts. They become part of a living tissue rather than a fixed grid to lay over works and cultural phenomena, and they exhibit more of the writer — for better and for worse — because they engage a lot more than just his wit or his aesthetics.

When Macdonald takes on Norman Cousins, Tom Wolfe, and Marshall McLuhan in the present book, the results are pale reflections of his best diatribes: One mainly feels that he’s going through familiar motions. But he confronts the Constitution, the Warren Report, and the Columbia Student Strike here with a lot more than tweezers. One senses something much closer to a whole man responding, and not merely a set of programmed cultural stances. (As Harold Rosenberg pointed out years ago, “Macdonald’s taste for kitsch is largely negative, but it is genuine…”)

Discriminations is an embarrassing and honest and valuable book because it revels so openly in its own contradictions and vacillations. Chart the political changes of Macdonald over the 45 years traversed in this book — all the way from skeptical Trotskyite to skeptical anti-Communist, with plenty of side-trips in between — and you wind up with a series of zigzags, and even a few wiggles. Read the many footnotes and afterwords appended to the articles, and you frequently get explicit auto-critiques. (”In general the above wasn’t one of my higher prophetic flights.”)

The book is reliable in another way, too. I find the most trustworthy critics are those who are aware of and candid about their own areas of ignorance. Macdonald’s one of the few critics around who can cheerfully acknowledge both his vanity and his ignorance on a given topic and then use both points in his favor, as badges of authenticity.

This disarming tactic prevents any of his political writing from becoming simply doctrinal. It works less well in Dwight Macdonald on Movies, where he seems relatively unaware of the contradictions involved. On the first page he’s assuring us that “I know something about cinema after forty years [of writing about it],” but 20 pages later he’s parenthetically noting in all innocence that it’s taken him “forty years to realize” that “lap-dissolve” doesn’t mean holding a camera in one’s lap. All proportions guarded — to appropriate a favorite Macdonald phrase — that’s a bit like saying you know something about literature after 40 years, only you just learned that a semi-colon is something other than half a section of the large intestine.

I trust Macdonald a lot more when he’s writing about politics, because there even his eclecticism is always in flux. And better informed — at least he appears to read the Times every day. Of course there are many constants in his prose as well: A penchant for quoting from De Tocqueville, Dostoevsky, Lewis Carroll, and, particularly, himself, with some of the same aphorisms and anecdotes reappearing to serve duty on very different occasions. Yet whenever he sets out to tackle a new subject — whether it’s poverty in America or Egyptian tourist attractions — he brings to it the sustained energies of an ambitious amateur sleuth, full of curiosity and initiative.

Despite his heavy credentials as a New York Intellectual, and his long record of Inner Circle squabbles (to which Discriminations devotes more than enough space), he is nonetheless a lone dog in the twists and turns of his arguments. One can agree or disagree with each of his proposed amendments to the Constitution — a wonderful piece that leads off the collection — but seldom simply. One can enjoy and agree with much of the anti-American invective and Anglophilia of “America! America!” and still find the overall viewpoint very American indeed. Or one can question his overall trust in Earl Warren’s report on the Kennedy assassination, yet recognize that Macdonald eloquently anticipates and speaks to those reservations.

Best of all, nothing seems to faze him. He keeps right on fighting the good fight, basking in the brightness of his personality. And he loves to talk about himself. I haven’t read any of his stuff for Fortune (1929-1936), but his style seems to maintain the same consistent high level from 1938 to today, powered by much the same amiable, contagious self-ingratiation.

Blackmail (1974 review)

This appeared in the October 1974 issue of Monthly Film Bulletin. This was long before the silent version of Blackmail was rediscovered and restored. –J.R.

Blackmail

Great Britain, 1929                                 Director: Alfred Hitchcock

The extraordinary plateau attained by Hitchcock’s first sound film in relation to his overall development is the sum of many accomplishments: above all, a decisive mastery in moving back and forth between objective and subjective narrative modes. If the point-of-view is one of the cornerstones in Hitchcockian syntax, the film quite likely represents the first time in the director career that it is woven so seamlessly into a plot that all notions of stylistic “touches” gives way to a sustained psychological density. Beginning virtually like a documentary, Blackmail provides a quick foretaste of subjective truth in its early glimpses of the anonymous criminal, which subtly veer from the police’s viewpoint to his own – shifting, that is, from one kind of fear and apprehension to another. The complex overtones and ambiguities of the film are informed throughout by this kind of duplicity and intimacy, which oblige us to identify with rapist along with potential victim, murderer along with corpse, and detective along with blackmailer, at the same time as we are asked to regard them all with a certain amused skepticism. The shifting trajectories composing the plot work hand in glove with the moral ambivalences. After taking us from police to criminal and back again, the film directs us to a single policeman (Frank [John Longden]),  abandons him to trace his girlfriend’s infidelity, invites us to “participate” in both her potential ravishment and her act of murder, then in her sense of guilt (starkly delineated in a neon sign, London streets at dawn, a beggar’s outstretched hand, and the idle chatter of a neighbor – each brilliantly rendered as a subjective impression echoing the crime), next encourages us to identify with her and Frank when Tracy appears, only to shift to Tracy himself as he is hounded to his death, and at last reverting to the couple again. But even they are supplanted by the final image: the mocking face of a joker in one of the artist’s paintings, making its last appearance as the police carry the canvas away. This leitmotif might recall (or anticipate) the sardonic disdain expressed for all the characters in Hitchcock’s late work, but the irony here is never allowed to block compassion. It assumes as much a leavening as a leveling function, often ridiculing heroes and humanizing villains in single strokes – as in the cut from the satisfied police inspector ordering Tracy’s arrest to Tracy himself, seen in an identical posture and looking equally satisfied as he polishes off a free meal served by Alice. Such equations (and the film has many) suggest a moral framework similar to that in subsequent films by Renoir, where everyone has his own reasons. Renoir is further evoked in the remarkable spatial continuity and depth maintained in the shop and connecting dining room, the frequent use of off-screen sound as counterpoint to image (Alice’s cries of distress in the studio heard over a shot of an oblivious policeman outside, previously glimpsed by her as an assurance of safety; Tracy’s leap through the dining room window audible before a pan makes it visible), and even the sensually nuanced performance by Anny Ondra -– dubbed during the shooting by Joan Barry – who frequently recalls Winna Winfried  in La Nuit du Carrefour. More generally, Renoir’s universal perspective is matched by Hitchcock’s expert cross-fertilization of various stylistic strains in the silent cinema: the camera movements and expressionism of Murnau, the surrealist object (e.g., the giant Egyptian mask in the British Museum) in Clair and Buñuel. Hitchcock wasn’t able to film the ending he wanted – the arrest and incarceration of Alice, which was intended to “double” the opening sequence –- but he established another symmetrical pattern in its place. Beginning and concluding the story proper with Alice and a constable laughing together (which initially marks the transition from “silent” film with music and sound effects to full-blown talkie), he carries us from the general to the specific and back again, framing his plot within a pirouette. For the record, the version of under review contains two minor if irritating technical blemishes:  occasional shifts and dubious stretches in the sound’s volume that seem accidental rather than intentional (including an awkwardly over-recorded bird song heard in Alice’s bedroom), and a short break in continuity in the build-up to the rape, which has the appearance of a censor’s cut.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

–Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1974 (vol. 41, no. 489)