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May the Force Leave Us Alone [on THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK]

From The Soho News, May 21, 1980. –J.R.

The Empire Strikes Back

Story by George Lucas

Screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan

Directed by Irwin Kershner

Let’s face facts. Whether you or I love, hate or feel indifferent to The Empire Strikes Back – or any of the seven sequels and “prequels” to Star Wars slated to interfere with our lives over the next two decades — doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference in the long run, on the cosmic scale of things. Nor does it matter all that much in the mundane short run, either. Even if you stay away from the movie, manage to shun the novel and T-shirt and comic, avoid the soundtrack album and toys and video cassette, you can bet that a skilled team of disinterested humanitarians and technocrats, working round the clock with computers has decided that it’s so good for you and your kids that there’s no way you can prevent it from being crammed down your throats, in one form or another.

You’d better grin and bear it, if you know what’s good for you. The celestial machinery that has already turned Star Wars into the biggest grosser to date (”of all time” might seem a little excessive in forestalling the future) isn’t taking any chances in its investment by branching our or experimenting much. We’re basically stuck with the same formula as before, even down to the identical opening title (”A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”) and John Williams theme music. A closely monitored Irwin Kershner — who directed A Fine Madness, Loving and Eyes of Laura Mars — is in charge of direction, and if the budget is a whopping $22 million in contrast to Star Wars‘ $10.5, this is probably because three years ago, in an economy far, far away, there was a lot less inflation to contend with.

What are some other differences? Mark Hamill as Luke has aged even more visibly than the economy since Star Wars, and this change, along with Kershner’s direction, appears to have humanized him a little; the old Southern California insolence is pleasantly absent. A form of stop-motion animation associated with the original King Kong seems to motor some of the improbable prehistoric beasties on the planet of Dagobah — a rather lifeless setting stitched together out of apparently vague memories of Tarzan and Kong. (Like most of the other sets, it comes across as peculiarly placeless, too — a given number of predesigned shots, angles and effects that never add up to more than the sum of their parts.)

***

In deference, perhaps, to last summer’s Alien, a bit more ooze, slop, and pucker is added to some of the gore; and amputation freaks will have the kick of seeing both See-Threepio and Luke Skywalker deprived of certain limbs before being comically and/or magically reassembled. The violence, in general, tends to be as throwaway as the comedy — virtually designed to be forgotten as soon as it elicits the desired immediate effect, so that after Han Solo (Harrison Ford) is tortured at Darth Vader’s orders, in a baroque manner reminding me of torture in Vietnam, Brazil, Chile or elsewhere (a long timr ago, in a galaxy far, far away), the movie quickly turns into a disposable goof by having Han remark, for laughs, “I feel terrible.”

At least two major characters have been added to the intimate circle of humans, machines and animals that formed the front line of Star Wars. Yoda, the most significant and ambitious of these, is a squat green snome with pointed ears like giant peapods — a sort of cross between Wallace Shawn and a gigantic peyote button (although, in the Marvel Comics version, where he’s colored lavender, he looks more wizened and less whimsical) –who turns out to be Luke’s Jedi master, the original instructor of none other than Ben Kenobi (Alec Guinness) himself. Operated by Muppetmaster Frank Oz (who usually handles Miss Piggy), Yoda comes across as a concept more than a character. The same can’t quite be said for Lando Carlrissian (Billy Dee Williams), an old crony of Han on the planet of Bespin — a token black whose presence can perhaps be partially explained by the concern of producer Gary Kurtz, voiced in these pages three years ago (”In the Wake of the Wars,” R.M. Whyte, June 2, 1977), that the treatment of aliens in Star Wars as “surrogate ethnics” might cause some distress. (”Yes, we may run into the race problem.”)

***

The frantic, rather demagogic tempo of The Empire Strikes Back expand son the overall principle of its predecessor, whereby a succession of cliffhangers is nearly all that’s needed for a plot, just as a smoargasbord of visual styles (The Wizard of Oz, King Kong, Forbidden Planet, Things to Come, This Island Earth, 2001: A Space Odyssey) is broadened still further to substitute for an imaginatively created universe. Notwithstanding the claim of Time and a few academics that Lucas is merely carrying on the great tradition of Homer, the Old Testament, Virgil, the Koran, and Walt Disney, the overall ambience of this adventure often seems mechanical, willed and needlessly fussed over. If most of the movie is too fast to be boring, very little of it is slow enough to capture the attention more than fitfully, in the sort of bite-sized chunks rationed out by most TV shows.

The contemporary flavor of the dialogue, decor and costumes — from the banter of Han Solo and Princess Leia Organa (Carrie Fisher) to the jive-ass cape of Lando Carlrissian to the carbon-freezing chamber resembling a disco lounge — testifies to the movie’s glib confidence that today is like forever. (Insofar as money talks, it may be right. And if the cover of last week’s Time is anything to go by, The Empire Strikes Back is approximately sixteen times more important to the present than the recent influx of Cuban refugees — apparently because of the anticipated revenues involved.)

Nevertheless, one might ask, is it fun? In a manner of speaking, yes. The movie begins with the assumption that everyone in the universe has already seen Star Wars, and I doubt that anyone who hasn’t will be able to follow the plot without some confusion — although the relative absence of exposition does keep things speeding along at a breakneck clip. Writing this review only three days after seeing the film, I’m amazed — not to say delighted — that I can remember so little of it, apart from a neat little surprise ending that I won’t give away, even though you’ve probably already heard about it. But not remembering is in a way what this movie is all about: it helps to prime us for the next bloody spinoff sequel.

–The Soho News, May 21, 1980

The Greening of Switzerland

This book review was the first thing I ever wrote for The Soho News, a small-time competitor of The Village Voice that I wrote for every week for about a year and a half (1980-81), reviewing books as well as movies on a fairly regular basis. I did 68 pieces for them in all, and this first effort, as I recall, was a kind of trial balloon. —J.R.

The Greening of Switzerland

by Jonathan Rosenbaum
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Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party
By Graham Greene
Simon and Schuster, $9.95

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“The meat is excellent, but I have no appetite,” remarks the noble, grief-stricken narrator of Graham Greene’s opulent 21st novel—plain old Alfred Jones, a middle-class voyeur like us—at the climactic title party, in response to a query from the wealthy title host and villain. Then he adds more confidentially, to the reader, “I helped myself to another glass of Mouton Rothschild; it wasn’t for the flavor of the wine that I drank it, for my palate seemed dead, it was for the distant promise of a sort of oblivion.” The same sort of delicious oblivion, one might add, that we normally expect from a new Greene novel—which is the sort that the latest one amply supplies.

Nobody but nobody offers sexier, more glamorous Catholic guilt than Greene at his best. Thirty years back, George Orwell was already noting that Greene seemed to share the Baudelaire-derived notion  that “there is something rather distingue in being damned” whereby “Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub…” That was around the same time that Greene was scripting The Third Man, a thriller whose charismatic, amoral villain, Harry Lime (Orson Welles), was a postwar profiteer trafficking in diluted penicillin in Vienna’s black market. The leering Mr. Lime had a neat way of summing up Switzerland—the ostensibly “neutral” setting of Greene’s latest version of Faust. It occurred in a speech reportedly furnished by Welles himself, who claimed to have copied it from an old Hungarian play.

“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love. 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Graham Greene, on the other hand, produces metaphysical fairy-tale thrillers about innocence and damnation—which might be described roughly as flirtation contests between the two. And the uncommon pleasure of Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party (only 156 pages long, and I defy you to read them in more than one sitting; lots of snowy landscapes, perfectly timed for hot summer reading) is that it knows exactly what buttons to push to get its sleek effects.

***

Like certain other septuagenarian craftsmen—the Hitchcock of Family Plot, the Bresson of Lancelot of the Lake, or even the Matisse who devoted himself to paper cutouts—Greene is smart enough to realize that all he has to do to is reduce his gestures to irreducible signs, nothing more, and everyone will catch the signals. He can tenderlyh give his hero an artificial hand to replace the one he lost in the London blitz, bestow his heroine (and her late mother) with a passionate love of Mozart, and virtually the rest of their trembling vulnerability can be sketched in by us, who naturally want to protect them.

Alfred Jones, fiftyish translator for a chocolate factory in Vevey (the fashionable resort of Daisy Miller in the James novella), meets Anna-Luise, twentyish daughter of evil millionaire Dr. Fischer, mysterious inventor of Dentophil Bouquet toothpaste. The rest is artful plotting, casting, and set decoration. And because it’s Greene who’s delicately pulling all the strings, we can be made to believe that it’s genuinely love at first sight—with Alfred becoming the kindly father that Anna-Luise never had, and she becoming both the wife and daughter that he lost in childbirth 20 years before.

Dr. Fischer—playing a sort of elsuive giant lemon here in relation  to The Third Man’s Lime (another “natural” cameo part for Welles when the inevitable movie adaptation gets made)—is variously identified with God Almighty and Satan, even by the secular romantic couple, and provides as much gratuitous nastiness as any fairy-tale bogeyman. An embittered sadist who spends most of his visible time humiliating a circle of rich acquaintances at specially planned parties—concocting diverse endurance tests for them to undergo in exchange for lavish presents, in order to demonstrate their unlimited greed and hypocrisy—he registers with a compositional purity rarely found in mortals. A sour version of the artist as frustrated tycoon, he hovers over the action like a malignant presence even when he isn’t around physically, through the cruelty of his deeds.

Greene’s shapely plot is a delight to experience, and none of the game should be given away here. For Greene, plot is character, and the brief portraits sketched above are scarcely more than his narrative starting points. (I’ve omitted the court of grotesques surrounding Fischer at his fancy bashes: already a veritable cast of character actors—including an American widow with blue hair, an alcoholic movie actor, and an international lawyer shaped like the number seven—they line up rather symmetrically in dramaturgical terms, like Twelve Angry Men or the Boys in the Band.)

If, dramatically speaking, the book peaks a few pages before it ends—arguably, a serious flaw in a miniature—this might be due to an odd surfeit of liberal sanity that unexpectedly overtakes Greene’s apocalyptic fantasy at the last minute. Mutatis mutandis, it’s a little bit like calling in Kurt Vonnegut Jr. to write an epilogue to Sophie’s Choice.  But Greene can be forgiven for diluting his splendid nonsense with sense and trafficking in bromides, for he wants to let us off easy. How can we find it in our hearts to refuse him?

—The Soho News, May 14, 1980