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Fats Waller (1976 review)

This appeared in the July 1976 issue of Monthly Film Bulletin (vol. 43, no. 510). 8/25 correction/ postscript: Ehsan Khoshbakht, who provided me with some more illustrations, informs me that (a) Sedric is playing tenor sax, not alto, (b) that a fourth Waller soundie that wasn’t included in the compilation I reviewed, “Your Feet’s Too Big ,” was actually the first one, and that (c) the photo at the bottom of this post, which I included just because I like it, actually comes from Stormy Weather. —J.R.

Fats Waller

U.S.A., 1941                                                                                   Director: Warren Murray

Dist—TCB. p.c—Official Films. m/songs–“Ain’t Misbehavin’”, “Honeysuckle Rose”, “The Joint is Jumpin’” by Thomas “Fats” Waller. performed by–Fats Waller (piano, vocals), John Hamilton (trumpet), Gene Sedric (alto sax), Al Casey (guitar), Cedric Wallace (bass), Wilmore “Slick” Jones (drums), Myra Johnson (vocals). No further credits available. 314 ft. 9 min. (16 mm.).

A collection of three “soundies” made in the early Forties — mini-films designed to be shown on tiny screens inside jukeboxes — this entertaining short displays Waller’s showmanship at its flashiest. All three numbers are played in the midst of enthusiastic crowds — a bevy of women in the first two, a wild party in the third — and the visible responses, however jokey and concocted (one woman hugs Waller while another gets jealous; an angry female neighbor throws a shoe through the window and phones the police), never compete too seriously with the rollicking tunes. Waller dominates throughout with his piano, vocals, quizzical eyebrows, hand gestures, eyerolling, and asides (”Pat me on my back and call me Shorty”), but Gene Sedric, Al Casey, and Myra Johnson are all accorded solos, and drummer “Slick” Jones comes close to stealing the screen in the final number with his frantically synchronized gum-chewing.

JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

–Monthly Film Bulletin, July 1976

The Ring (1976 review)

This was originally published in the July 1976 issue of the Monthly Film Bulletin (vol. 43, no. 510), to coincide with the release of Hitchcock’s Family Plot (illustrated on the cover, and reviewed in that issue by the editor, Richard Combs).  — J.R.

Ring, The

Great Britain, 1927                                                                Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Dist—BFI. p.c–British International Pictures. p–John Maxwell. asst. d—Frank Mills. story/sc—Alfred Hitchcock. continuity—Alma Reville. ph—John J. Cox.  a.d—Wilfred Arnold. l.p—Carl Brisson (“One Round” Jack Sander), Lillian Hall-Davies (Nelly), Ian Hunter (Bob Corby), Forrester Harvey (Harry), Harry Terry (Barker), Gordon Harker (Trainer), Billy Wells (Boxer). 3,179 ft. (at 16 f.p.s.) 132 min. (16mm). Original 35 mm footage—8,400 ft.

At a traveling circus, prizefighter “One Round” Jack Sander is knocked out and defeated for the first time in his show by Bob Corby, an Australian heavyweight, and a mutual attraction develops between the latter and Nelly, Jack’s ticket-seller fiancée. With his prize money, Bob buys Nelly an arm bracelet which she hides from Jack, and Bob’s manager offers Jack the chance of a job as the champion’s sparring partner if he wins a trial match, which he grudgingly accepts. The next day, when Nelly’s bracelet accidentally falls in a pond and Jack retrieves it, she explains it is a gift from Bob, and he slips it on to her finger, proposing that they marry when he returns from the trial match. He wins the fight, and they have a church wedding with their circus friends and Bob and his manager attending. But afterwards her flirtation with Bob continues unabated, and Jack broods increasingly about his own inferior position. Told by Bob’s manager that he has a chance to become champion if he defeats Kid Gunn, a black fighter, and leaves Nelly to go into training, and wins the match. But when he returns home with his circus friends to celebrate, Nelly is out partying with bob. When she comes home late, she and Jack quarrel and Jack goes out, finds Bob in a night-club and knocks him down, challenging him to formal match; when he returns home, he discovers that Nelly has left him. But she returns to watch the climactic fight and eventually gives all her support to Jack, who knocks Bob out after several rounds, reunited with Jack, she abandons her bracelet, which is found by Bob’s friends beside the empty fighting ring.

Made not long after his visits to Berlin and Munich in the mid-Twenties, The Ring is probably the most Germanic in style of Hitchcock’s silent films; in terms of its technique and elaborate formal symmetries, it is also arguably the one that is worked out most conscientiously in strictly film terms. Recalling the applause that greeted one of its montage sequences, the director is fond of terming it the second real “Hitchcock picture” after The Lodger — despite the fact that it eschews suspense for most of its running time, and was more a critical than a commercial success; significantly, it is the only film in his career with an original script credited to himself alone. Fluid without being at all fast, the film emerges as something closer to a contemplation than an exposition of its subject: as Raymond Durgnat aptly notes, “A potentially strong conflict…is so handled as to avoid, for long periods, any easily climactic confrontation, and so produces something more petty, edgy, unnerving”. With a dramatic situation which mainly remains static between the opening and closing fights, the film’s expressiveness is thus largely restricted to its formal repetitions, bracketed by a consideration of the mechanisms of spectacle whereby prizefighting becomes a virtual metaphor for the cinema itself –- a role assumed rather differently by the séance in  Family Plot, half a century later. Although the cruel bloodlust of the crowds is only made apparent in the two major fight scenes, it is sufficiently underlined there to affect one’s reading of all the intervening events. At the first, Jack Sander’s trainer (Gordon Harker — a splendid deadpan type suggesting a cross between Hoagy Carmichael and Percy Kilbride) blandly holds out Bob Corby’s jacket, expecting the challenger to be flattened at short notice; at the second, a bored spectator with a cigarette holder resignedly puts on his own dinner jacket, with the equally false expectation that Sander is on the verge of collapse. The fact that the former occurs under a circus tent, and the latter in a theatre complete with box seats, emphasizes the spectacle’s universality, and the prominence given to cameramen filming the second event broadens the metaphor to include Hitchcock’s own medium. A lighter aspect of spectacle comes to the fore at the delightful wedding ceremony – where the doubling images include Siamese twins vying for seats in opposite pews and a button accidentally replacing the wedding ring, and the view of spectators here and immediately afterwards (e.g., Harker’s ‘drunken’ focus at the marriage feast) registers less cynically. But an early episode showing a boy throwing an egg at a clown leaves little room for doubt about the director’s usual view of audiences; and it is worth recalling that the celebrated recurrences of ‘ring’ images in the film – circular rides at the carnival, boxing ring, bracelet and the marriage band – also include the spinning roll of tickets sold when Corby starts to give Sander a fight for his money, and the barker exploits this fact to attract bystanders. Other formal repetitions, including images of desire or humiliation, suggest exchanges between the antagonists within this wider context: Corby’s first glimpse of Nelly, in long shot, is superimposed with a dreamlike camera movement towards her face in close-up, and Sander’s climactic visualization of her infidelity with Corby, framed in a mirror, is represented almost identically; Nelly’s view of Sander’s initial defeat, caught over the crowd’s shoulders, is echoed by Sander’s sudden glimpse of her over Corby’s shoulder while nearly passing out in the final match. Early kissing scenes between Nelly and each man are cut in the same manner – from medium-shot to close-up and back again – although the second, with Sander, is pointedly made shorter and less passionate. Like the reflection of Nelly and Sander in a pond that is repeated as a memory image in Sander’s water bucket at the final bout, all these symmetries translate ways of looking into modes of feeling, with a sensitivity rare for Hitchcock during this period. If the formalism occasionally suggests a sense of determinism about the characters’ fates — an intimation embodied by a circus fortune-teller who seems to step straight out of Kammerspiel — the unexpected happy ending alters this impression somewhat by absolving the plot of evil intentions: to all appearances, the defeated Corby seems to wish the couple well, and in retrospect most of the film’s darker elements seem to relate less to facts than to subjective states of mind. But framing this ambiguous terrain are the ironclad laws of spectacle itself, where triumph or defeat becomes a wholly objective matter — an overlit stage where all the  consequences of status are determined, and a fighter’s life is legislated for the sake of an evening’s entertainment.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

–Monthly Film Bulletin, July 1976

Black and Tan (1976 review)

The following was written for the Monthly Film Bulletin — a publication of the British Film Institute, where I was serving at the time as assistant editor — and it follows most of the format of that magazine by following credits (abbreviated here) with first a one-paragraph synopsis and then a one-paragraph review. (For his resourceful photo research, thanks once again to Ehsan Khoshbakht.)–J.R.

Black and Tan

U.S.A., 1929                                                                          Director: Dudley Murphy

Dist—TCB. p.c—RKO. p. sup—Dick Currier. sc—Dudley Murphy. ph—Dal Clawson. ed—Russell G. Shields. a.d—Ernest Feglé. m/songs—“Black and Tan Fantasy” by James “Bubber” Miley, Duke Ellington, “The Duke Steps Out”, “Black Beauty”, “Cotton Club Stomp”, “Hot Feet”, “Same Train” by Duke Ellington, performed by—Duke Ellington and His Cotton Club Orchestra: Arthur Whetsol, Freddy Jenkins, Cootie Williams (trumpets), Barney Bigard (clarinet), Johnny Hodges (alto sax), Harry Carney (baritone sax), Joe Nanton (trombone), Fred Guy (banjo), Wellman Braud (bass), Sonny Greer (drums), Duke Ellington (piano), (on “Same Train”, “Black and Tan Fantasy”) The Hall Johnson Choir. sd. rec—Carl Dreher. with—Duke Ellington and His Cotton Club Orchestra, Fredi Washington, The Hall Johnson Choir. 683 ft. 19 min. (19 mm).

Duke Ellington rehearses his “Black and Tan Fantasy” for a club date in his flat with trumpet Arthur Whetsol until interrupted by two men from the piano company, sent to remove the instrument because he has fallen behind in the payments. Dancer Fredi Washington bribes the movers with a bottle of gin into telling their boss that no one was home. Duke tells Fredi that they can’t take the job at the club because of her heart condition, but despite her faintness, which causes her to see multiple images, she insists on performing her dance and collapses at the end of her number. A chorus of other dancers is brought on, but Duke stops their band in the middle of their tune so that he and his men can stand by Fredi on her deathbed. There, at her request, they play the “Black and Tan Fantasy” as she loses consciousness.

Dramatic films which use jazz organically (To Have and Have Not is a supreme example) are few and far between, while jazz films which feature the music dramatically are perhaps even rarer. The singularity of Black and Tan, which comprises the first appearance of Duke Ellington on film, is that it fuses both categories — developing a sort of  poetic synthesis in less than twenty minutes that, while clearly awkward and dated in many of its ingredients, nevertheless demonstrates, at the very onset of the sound period, that the two new art films of this century don’t necessarily have to trample on one another. Written and directed by Dudley Murphy, who made a short with Bessie Smith (St. Louis Blues) earlier the same year –- apparently with some of the same sets and uncredited bit players –- and previously executed Fernand Léger’s ideas in Ballet mécanique, Black and Tan uses arty trappings and a creaky plot, but has a sharp enough sense of form to turn both of these liabilities into assets. After the title tune is presented embryonically in rehearsal — unfortunately without the participation of Bubber Miley, the remarkable trumpeter who played a substantial role in Ellington’s early conceptions, but well-performed by Arthur Whetsol in the Miley manner — the action is temporarily pre-empted by some low comedy involving the piano movers, racist stereotypes with a surreal, inventive use of language (“Bro-ther, re-move yuh anatomy from that mahogany”, one announces to Ellington, remarking that he hasn’t paid anything on it since last “Octuary”; his jockey-sized sidekick is variously called “Action”, “Sarasparilla”, and “Eczema”). But this is quickly bypassed when the scene shifts to the club, where two eerie dances are performed by five men  of ascending height in tuxedos, making strict linear formations on a mirror-like floor while the Ellington band plays behind them. Even more strangely, when the point of view shifts to Fredi Washington, the first number is repeated precisely, immediately upsetting one’s sense of linear time, while one’s visual bearings are confused by the splitting up of the musicians and already duplicated dancers into a myriad mosaic. By the time Washington has made her own entrance and gone into her wild shimmying number, the mood and music have both turned fairly demonic, and a sudden shot of her gyrations from beneath the glass floor, echoing L’entr’acte, increases the dislocation. Soon afterwards, the scene shifts once again to her death chamber, where the chiaroscuro effects, compression of space (the entire Ellington band and Hall Johnson Choir appear to be crowded around her bed, and silhouetted on the far wall), and powerful, relentless thumping of Wellman Braud’s bass heard against the ensemble on “Same Train” are so extreme that the effect is truly unsettling. When the assemblage goes into a “full-dress” version of the title tune at her dying request — complete with solos on trumpet, trombone, and Bigard’s piercing clarinet — the spare, growling blues with which the film began, which literally quotes the famous “Funeral March” from a Chopin piano sonata in the fifth and sixth bars, and again the eleventh and twelfth, has grown into a Dionysian lament. Assuming once again Washington’s viewpoint, the camera focuses on Ellington in an image that gradually blurs, like a guttering candle. Then she dies, and the camera cuts to the last and most disturbing image — another blurred shot of Ellington that is no longer justified by Washington’s viewpoint, thereby collapsing the film’s co-ordinates of space as well as time into the realm of pure idea, or pure music; and both slowly fade away in the same flickering breath.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

– Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 43, no. 510, July 1976

London and New York Journal

From Film Comment (July-August 1976). In some respects, I think this may be the best of all my many Journals for Film Comment, but for my readers who feel that my work is sometimes (or often) marred or even ruined by my strident tone, it may also be legitimately regarded as my worst. Among other negative consequences, Truffaut read my comments about THE STORY OF ADELE H. and wrote me an angry letter about them (which can be accessed, along with my response to it, on this site), I suspect (without actually knowing) that my passing comment about Pauline Kael may have sabotaged any hopes I’d had about ever becoming friends with her, and my friend (at the time) Gilbert Adair, cited just before the end of this piece, was furious about the over-the-top way I expressed my displeasure with Charles Barr in Movie. For better and for worse, I think this shows my writing at its most intense. -– J.R.

March 25 (London): A KING IN NEW YORK. Even on a Steenbeck, Chaplin’s penultimate feature and last extended performance has such a naked power of embarrassment and assault that one can see right away why so many have recoiled from it. Chaplin himself avoids any mention of it in the text of his Autobiography; most reports refer to it as a shameful debacle; and even such an indefatigable enthusiast as Bazin virtually threw in the towel. So far as I can gather, only Rossellini — seconded by some of his wilder Cahiers disciples — had the perspicacity in 1957 to call it the film of a free man. Clearly the objections can’t be traced back to any failures of expression: how many films are more expressive than Chaplin’s? No, the discomfort seems to be with the things that are expressed, more autobiographical and candid in their revelations than anything we are ordinarily accustomed to; and without this “personal” reading, the film is almost meaningless.

In other words, Chaplin’s letter of spite and sorrow to America asserts personal indignation — perhaps the least palatable form to an audience, because it is the most honest, consequently the most apt. In place of generalized invective, we largely get Chaplin’s own experience, which includes his complex and ambivalent implication in the American dream: the King’s own silliness in the presence of Dawn Addams. But the horrible taste of the plastic surgery episodes, which immediately derive from this, is not only Chaplin’s transgression, but America’s too; and the charge that most of the film isn’t very funny should be met with the reply that, as at the end of THE GREAT DICTATOR and throughout much of MONSIEUR VERDOUX, there are times when laughter is beside the point. The implication of Chaplin being hounded out of America was that he didn’t deserve to stay; the implication of a KING IN NEW YORK (made four years later) is that America didn’t deserve Chaplin. And maybe it didn’t. How could McCarthy-crazed America have possibly appreciated the lucidity that the film has to offer, which, going beyond Tashlin, reveals the true moral and aesthetic tackiness of the U.S. in the mid-Fifties, without any digestible sweetening? That America in the mid-Fifties had more than this is obvious, and one can look elsewhere to find it. But one can’t go anywhere else to find the devastating accuracy or justice of his last testament.

March 27 (New York): THE STORY OF ADELE H., or GIDGET GOES HEGELIAN. Truffaut’s pretty, non-obsessive postcards about obsession are a gift to the eye in Nestor Almendros’ photography, but a dull bromide to the mind. Apart from offering a veritable film festival to the spectator who wants to wallow in self-pity and call it literary, the camera’s habit of cutting away to another quaintly posed set-up every time the heroine’s perversity starts to become interesting only underlines how steadily Truffaut has been veering away from any serious risks. A crowd-pleaser in the tradition of Chaplin, he has yet to make his VERDOUX or KING because he always looks for the easy way out.

Much as his collected movie pieces (Les Films de ma vie, published by Flammarion last year) exclude all his polemical writing, and his editing of Bazin has tended to follow suit — with comparable implications of historical whitewash — this takes the tang out of its heroine’s madness by giving us a healthy, talented ingenue in place of an actress. Of course, one can understand Pauline Kael believing this to be a great work of art, just as one can understand many American intellectuals believing that Kael is a great aesthetician. Given the right sort of climate and training, anything’s possible, even the Nixon Administration and snuff movies.

March 29: Which brings me to TAXI DRIVER, another Kael favorite. Great Bernard Herrmann score, great performances, the best Scorsese direction to date — turning New York into an expressionist moonscape and another Capital of Pain — all pressed into the service of…what? Check out Paul Schrader’s marathon interview in the March-April Film Comment, which tells you the exciting answer: a transcendental movie about his gun collection influenced by Bresson. But better than Bresson (whom Kael finds “perversely academic”), because it also gives you a simulated snuff movie (Scorsese’s endearing monologue) and an exceptionally arty My Lai massacre sequence — obligatory to all Serious American Films, because all Serious American Films are about America, right? Just as Bresson’s films, according to Schrader’s transcendental mystifications, are about what you don’ t see or hear in them, rather than anything so mundane as their own ingredients.

God forbid anyone should make a serious movie about something a little less all-encompassing and metaphysical than “God” or “Grace” or “America”– like, say, sound or image or Chaplin and America; that’s for cultists. Stick to the Gospel and you’ll be rewarded hugely, as long as you keep it watchable. And TAXI DRIVER is very watchable. But for hip insight into ideology, give me MANDINGO any day.

(A marginal fact about the latter may be of some interest: while seeing it in London in early May -– appropriately double-featured with ROSEMARY’S BABY — an American acquaintance pointed out to me that Susan George’s mulatto baby, visible in the version we saw, wasn’t in the prints she saw in L.A. Could this be because Americans prefer to keep their nightmares in the realm of pure metaphysics? For the record, the baby looks like any other.)

***

April 9: FAMILY PLOT. Hitchcock, on the other hand, has made a movie about his own sexy forms of duplicity and deception, which include sound and image, sumptuous musical scores and cuddly Hollywood types . . . what better subject for him? But to judge from a lot of local remarks, this gem is apparently one of the Master’s lightweights because it doesn’t contain any guilt (unless one discounts the wealthy dowager’s regrets about the past which set the double-plot in motion) or murders or contemporary gloss. Apparently death, sex, and money aren’t as significant as New York City or Watergate unless they’re seen through a stained glass, darkly.

Three separate friends have complained that the sequence with Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern in the brakeless car is “embarrassing”: I’m not sure whether this means corny or old-fashioned or something else, although this clearly wasn’t the experience of the three audiences I saw it with during the first eight days of its run. If by “embarrassing” they mean that it makes its own strategies evident and obvious, I can only concur. In a rare burst of candor, Hitchcock finally places the transcendental where it belongs — in a crystal ball — and devotes his energy to showing us how a thriller works. That the film’s visual structure is witty enough to rhyme its crystal ball with a religious amulet and symbol of wealth (the giant diamond), and to suggest elsewhere that both are like TV screens — so that Hitchcock’s own appearance consists of his video silhouette, behind glass-only helps to show that FAMILY PLOT’s true lucidity (like Lang’s in SPIES or THE 1000 EYES OF DR. MABUSE) is its manner of equating its own narrative devices with its characters’ actions, creating a mirror- surface which lets an audience watch its own responses rather than get lost in them. AII mirrors, to be sure, are potentially “embarrassing.”

And if the devices in question are old-hat or corny, a thin coating of contemporary gloss is all that conceals the same qualities in TAXI DRIVER or ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN behind their “significant” subject matter. From this standpoint, it’s the latter films which are really escapist, not FAMILY PLOT, because the experiences they offer contain practically no self-reflecting mechanisms — merely “food for thought” in the grand old Sunday supplement tradition of Stanley Kramer.

***

April 12: I purchase a copy of Michael Snow’s Cover to Cover, which, along with the Hitchcock, is the most interesting filmic experience America has afforded me so far this trip. It costs a hefty $12.50 in soft cover, $20.00 in cloth (co-published by the presses of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and New York University), but unlike filmic experiences which cost a fraction as much, you can take it home with you. As with FAMILY PLOT, it is essentially concerned with its own manipulations, but on the other hand it isn’t a movie but a book.

Or is it? A lot of the fascination inherent in this singular object of 320 pages is its curious hybrid nature, halfway between book and film in the experience it offers. Rumor has it that Snow himself regards it exclusively as a “bookish” book, but part of its value as an open work is that it imposes no precise itinerary in how one “reads” it. One can flip through the photographs/pages on either the right or left, forward or backward, or take them more slowly and consecutively — in which case it becomes apparent that the reverse side of each page is a reverse-angle, with the frequent visibility of each camera only foregrounding the processes that much further.

Rather than attempt to spell out the book’s narrative and continuity (which Regina Cornwell has already helpfully done, despite a faulty page count, in the March-April Studio International), l’d rather draw attention here to its playful dialectic between “reading” and “watching,” which includes such “bookish” traits as the upside-down flip-overs on pages 163 and 171, and such pure “movie” tricks as the disappearance of the stray male onlooker between pages 189 and 191. (The pages are unnumbered, alas, so one must count from the cover to reach these examples, as I did.) The ambiguities of such transitions bring to mind another unique hybrid: André Hodeir’s extraordinary jazz composition based on a James Joyce text, Anna Livia Plurabelle (available on the French Epic label, EPC 64695), which explores the differences and relationships between musical and literary logic through an intricate series of jazz pastiches and verbal puns, developed simultaneously. Cover to Cover embarks on an analogous adventure, with pages serving as the equivalent of film frames, in an exhilarating exploration into the nature of narrative continuity in both mediums.

***

April 15: My first opportunity to re-see PLAYTIME in over three years comes courtesy of Lucy Fischer’s undergraduate film course at NYU. In Europe, the film remains tied up in litigation due to Tati’s bankruptcy and ensuing misfortunes — such as his having to auction off the original negative-and even the last time I saw it was at a private screening. I realize that most people couldn’t care less about such information (or the fact that, according to a Paris friend, the original negative of Bresson’s DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST can no longer be traced), but it does seem worth noting that PLAYTIME is still available in 16mm in the States. So it’s with an unnatural amount of expectation that I return to a film which I consider to be the most remarkable accomplishment in mise en scène in the history of narrative cinema.

I’m not trying to traffic in hyperbole here, so I’ll stick to specifics. The film’s first hour is markedly inferior to its second — however useful much of it may be as preparation — and the sequence at the gadget exhibition mainly looks ugly and loosely structured now, particularly in relation to the rest. I also find myself preferring, in retrospect, the separate version of the sound track Tati prepared for France (which also contains a lot of English), if only because I recall the former seemed even more abstract in its vocal sonorities and stresses, at least to me. But in terms of the systematic control of all its elements, the long restaurant sequence and its aftermath does more than surpass everything else I know in narrative cinema for its complex organization; it leaves the rest far behind. One can speak of Mizoguchi for [what Rivette calls]  “modulation,” IVAN THE TERRIBLE for compositional rigor, GERTRUD for rhythmic control, or RULES OF THE GAME for social density, and early Welles for narrative fluency; but for the sheer number of elements that are organized in single shots and their accompanying sounds, this hour of film has no competitors at all.

And with the possible exception of Snow’s non-narrative LA RÉGION CENTRALE, which I’ve experienced only once, I know of nothing in cinema which physically exhausts me as much. Fifteen minutes after it’s over, I find myself inadvertently crashing into a wall like one of Tativille’s inhabitants, still overwhelmed by the notion that any slab of sound and image — reality included — can be so richly orchestrated. The crucial catalyst, I’ve come to feel, is the music played in the restaurant by two successive orchestras, then sung by a chanteuse who is later joined by all the people present — an element which ultimately helps one to deal creatively with Tati’s overload of invention by supplying one with a rhythmic base to work from. Thanks to this music, each set of visual options offers a different choice of rhythmic trajectories in relation to the underlying pulse, a number of evolving figurations through which spectators can join Tati in charting out their own choreographies, improvising their own organizations of emphasis in relation to the director’s massive “head arrangement.”

What other film converts work into play so pleasurably by turning the very acts of seeing and hearing into a form of dancing? And what is the glorious triumph of PLAYTIME’s ending but the implications stemming directly from this, the capacity to make “fantasy” and “documentary” wholly compatible — a carousel of traffic, and a tilting window-pane reflection causing bus riders to rise from their seats, both dovetailed effortlessly into “real” shots of traffic and Orly airport at night?

Yet facts remain facts. Somehow I must reconcile this indecent experience with acquaintances who remark, “I don’t think Tati’s all that funny” or “PLAYTIME’s okay, but it’s not as good as TRAFFIC,” or make meaningless comparisons with Chaplin or Keaton, which is rather like comparing a Brueghel landscape with a portrait by Rembrandt or Van Dyck. I have to inhabit a universe where, in a temple of aesthetic enlightenment like Movie, Charles Barr can write (in the seventeenth issue) about the “formal and thematic” unity Blake Edwards can bring in THE PARTY “to what might — very superficially — appear just a series of incidents and gags strung out to feature length. Like PLAYTIME, for instance,” and where countless critics who claim to be interested in radical innovation won’t give this film the time of day.

But the film remains, and the proper investigatory work on it has scarcely begun. In the meantime, I can only look forward with comparable eagerness to Rivette’s DUELLE, the first feature in his four-part SCÈNES DE LA VIE PARALLÈLE (formerly known as LES FILLES DU FEU), which has already had the honor of being rejected by the Main Selection at Cannes, and which may or may not be visible in Paris by the end of May. My two collaborators on the Rivette interview in the September-October 1974 Film Comment — Gilbert Adair and Lauren Sedofsky — have seen it at a private screening, and both describe it as his greatest achievement to date; whether or not I’ll agree with them will have to wait until my next Journal.

Family Plot (1976 review)

I still seem to be in a minority in preferring Family Plot to Alfred Hitchcock’s other late films, but after reseeing the film a few nights ago for the umpteenth time, I’m not about to change my opinion. It would appear that some of Hitchcock’s biggest champions, such as Robin Wood, tend to dismiss the film because it isn’t sicker. I tried to respond to their criticism at least provisionally in the opening of this review, written  for the summer 1976 Sight and Sound, which they ran as their cover story for that issue and which I’ve now revised, but only minimally. —J.R.

Family Plot

“Everything’s perverted in a different way,” Hitchcock has noted; and perhaps no other filmmaker has illustrated this postulate better, by starting from precisely the opposite premise. Without a well-established sense of the normal, the abnormal doesn’t even stand a chance of being recognized, and the director has always made it his business to offer all the right signposts and comforts to guarantee complacency before proceeding to unhinge it. Yet one of the rules of the game is deception, and if the Master’s artistry has been identified more with rude shocks than with the subtler conditioning which makes them possible, one can be certain that this too plays a role in his overall strategies. Since Psycho in 1960, his public image has largely been construed as a relish for nastiness that invariably associates violent death with the stylish flourish, the director’s “touch” with the grandstanding set-piece –a tendency culminating in the rape-murders and potato-sack maneuvers in Frenzy.

If in fact the public equation of Hitchcock with mayhem has established its own form of complacency, one of the triumphs of Family Plot is to turn this cherished notion — along with several others — squarely on its head. A marvelously fluid light comedy with scarcely a slack moment, it blithely omits murder entirely, and its only death — of a secondary villain — pointedly occurs off-screen. In striking contrast to the sour distaste expressed for food, sex, and practically all the characters in Frenzy, the mood could hardly be more benign; and with explicitness systematically transposed from a visual to a verbal plane, practically every relationship in the film carries a pronounced erotic undercurrent.

Grasping after precedents, even most of the film’s champions have labeled it only a minor achievement, commonly tracing its virtues back to The Trouble with Harry and regarding it as a kind of septuagenarian’s garden sport. But apart fromn a certain echo of Shirley MacLaine’s delicious kookiness in Barbara Harris’ performance, and an uncharacteristic excellence in the acting throughout, it could be argued that the earlier comedy (one of Hitchcock’s personal favorites) has more importance in his work than is usually admitted, as an oblique commentary on -– and critique of –- his more “official” classics. And within this context, Family Plot can be seen as a veritable testament -– a measured assessment by the director of his methods that, by evaluating which is and isn’t essential to them, clarifies everything in his career preceding it. A central clue to this enterprise is offered by the film’s working title, Deceit; its climactic expression is Barbara Harris’ wink to the audience in the final shot.

The main title credits grow out of shimmering green shapes in a crystal ball while strings and a heavenly choir are heard off-screen; then the face of Blanche (Harris) appear inside the ball, and we find ourselves present at a fake séance -– Blanche intermittently speaking in the male voice of her other-worldly “control” Henry while catering to the needs of Julia Rainbird (Cathleen Nesbitt), a dowager of 78. A brief cut to Blanche peeking between her fingers instantly alerts us to the deception -– a dramatic form of illusion-making not unrelated to Hitchcock’s -– and we soon discover that Rainbird is offering her $10,000 to find her dead sister’s illegitimate son, on whom she wishes to bestow the family fortune. Leaving the house, Blanche steps into a cab driven by her shaggy boyfriend George (Bruce Dern), a self-professed “actor” reduced to hacking who scoffs at her references to Henry as though he were real — reminding her of the sleuthing he does to furnish her séances with facts -– before she mentions the $10,000, and alludes to his future “performance” that night on the waterbed. “Tonight,” he promises, “you’re gonna see a standing ovation” – and there is an abrupt cut to a mysterious blonde in  black crossing the street in front of them, literally slicing into the plot at a right angle and thereby preempting the narrative.

The second plot features another couple, another deception: the blonde is Fran, a brunette Karen Black in disguise, collecting a huge diamond as payment for the return of the kidnapped Mr. Constantine, then returning by car with her own boyfriend Arthur (William Devane) to their upper-class house, where they clean up the secret basement chamber recently vacated by Constantine. Sexual references run through their own dialogue: clearly more at ease with crime and violence, Arthur gloatingly remarks that initially danger makes you sick, “then it makes you very, very loving.” As they start upstairs to bed, he coyly alludes to the diamond he’s just hidden, stressing that she’ll have to torture him to find out its location; and as the camera moves into a large closeup of the jewel, hanging from the chandelier, she says that she intends to do just that.

This comprises only the first movement of the film, with a great deal of plot yet to come including the discovery that Arthur, a jeweler who long ago murdered his foster parents, is Rainbird’s long-lost nephew. But already an intriguing double structure is well underway, with diamond echoing crystal ball, each couple counterpointing the other in terms of class and behavior, and allusions to off-screen sex implying in both cases some of the contrasting power relations, with Blanche and Arthur in the dominant roles. (Significantly, the bedrooms of both couples are never even glimpsed.) Further developing a visual/narrative rhyming structure first noted by Truffaut and Godard in Shadow of a Doubt and The Wrong Man respectively, and more recently appropriated by Rivette in the giddy construction of Céline et Julie vont en bateau, Hitchcock creates a rigorous framework for demonstrating that deception and seduction are opposite sides of the same coin, and that every piece of exposition regarding one couple immediately affects our perception of the other. And whether it’s Arthur picking lint off a policeman’s jacket, Fran fixing gourmet meals for the kidnapped victims, or Blanche and George quickly devouring a hamburger supper, the behavioral charm of all four runs agreeably thick.

Thanks to the precision of Ernest Lehman’s script, the movie proceeds like an immaculately polished mechanism that continually bears witness to the fact and wit of its own operations. Eliminating not only murder from his formula (and from the pedestrian Victor Canning novel The Rainbird Pattern, which served as his starting point), Hitchcock has pared down his devices to the point where whole areas of his expertise can be covered in single, functional, shorthand notations. The hilarious gag of a headstone being carved to loud pop music is also an establishing shot into a scene at the caretaker’s office; and just as the ringing of a doorbell at a crucial juncture registers as a terse summary of all his experiments with sound, a few inches of a bishop’s red habit “leaking” out under a car door suffice as a recapitulation of his inventive uses of color. Best of all is a hair-rising sequence with Blanche and George in a car without brakes barreling down a steep mountain road. An ultimate expression of Hitchcock’s storyboard technique — clearly devised at a desk rather than during shooting or editing –- its suspense derives from algebraic essentials, where the purest kind of “musical” variations can be played on the threats of passing cars, culminating in a wonderfully timed procession of motorcyclists.

At the same time, it defines a pivotal moment in relation to our feelings for the heroic couple: a team of dotty bumblers in contrast to the suave elegance of Arthur and Fran –- perpetually embroiled in domestic spats, and usually figuring like  seedy, not very bright opportunists as they clumsily follow the trail left by the missing heir –- their absurdities are brought to a head in this moment of crisis, with Blanche nearly strangling George in hysterical efforts to hold her balance and George howling his irritation as he struggles to guide the runaway car. But it is precisely amidst all this low comedy and frenzy that we realize how little we want this crazy, lovable pair to die. When they subsequently emerge undamaged from the wrecked car and he lifts her into his arms, for once the old-fashioned Hollywood cliché has been proudly earned: the romantic couple from such earlier films as The 39 Steps has improbably been resurrected before our very eyes.

And where does Hitchcock himself figure in all this? We glimpse him earlier on, chatting with a woman in his familiar TV silhouette at the Registry of Births and Deaths, in a rural courthouse where George goes to collect a clue; and it might not be too far-fetched to identify him directly with Henry, Blanche’s alleged “control”. Who else is it, after all, who leads Blanche in a mysterious trance up the stairs in Fran and Arthur’s house after the villainous couple have been safely locked away at the end, tracing a bee-line in a long dolly-and-crane shot to the hidden diamond on the chandelier? The films ads declare:” “You must see it twice!”, and sure enough, an earlier clue is dropped in the adjacent garage as to how she theoretically might have discovered the jewel’s whereabouts. Yet the issue of her psychic powers is deliberately left open, and perhaps a more apposite clue is offered by the strings and voices accompanying her trance-like walk – the same music heard during each of her former séances, and the epitome of that Hollywood “mood” music justly famous for its fostering of illusions. But this time we become another one of her clients, along with George. Concluding this sunny tale of sex, money, and death with her wink at the camera, Hitchcock cheerfully acknowledges his full hand ad his trump card in the same play, slyly suggesting that the real question isn’t whether we’ve been deceived but whether we’d like to have been. Either way, his luminous crystal ball provides all the answers.

–Sight and Sound, Summer 1976