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Then and Now: The San Sebastian International Film Festival

This article appeared in the April 1989 issue of The Independent (vol. 12, no. 3); slightly tweaked in late January, 2010. –J.R.

Having attended the San Sebastian Film Festival on two separate occasions 16 years apart — in 1972 and 1988 — I find it surprising how little the basic ambience of the event has changed.. Apart from the fact that the festival has grown, the major differences that I noticed are those between Franco and post-Franco Spain. One no longers buys a copy of the International Herald Tribune on the Avenida de la Libertad only to find that a state censor has neatly clipped out an article or two from every copy. Even more noticeable, to the eyes as well as ears, is Basque, a language that was rigorously outlawed under Franco. One now sees it on street signs and hears it on TV. One of the many sidebars of the 36th International Film Festival at San Sebastian was even devoted to Basque films.

Sidebars, in fact, have for a long time been the festival’s strength. In 1972 there was a Howard Hawks retrospective, with Hawks himself attending as a jury member for the films in competition. Back then, the festival was held in July, and was still small enough to offer excursions for all the guests” a bus ride to Pamplona to attend the bullfight encouraged Hawks to divulge some of his favorite Hemingway stories.

In contrast, the main selections at San Sebastian tend to be relatively mainstream and unexceptional. A few titles that I recall from 1972 are Sam Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner, Carol Reed’s Follow Me (his last film), Alastair Reid’s Somthing to Hide, Tom Gries’ The Glass House, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze’s L’homme au cerveau griffé, and Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? These selections were shown at the Victoria Eugenia, a large opera house that continues to show the films in competition and also houses the festival’s offices, press room, video screening facilities (for the market), and a large café-restaurant. The Victoria Eugenia is located directly across from the Maria Cristina, the hotel which puts up the festival’s VIPs and houses the press conferences (which are televised daily). Visitors who want to stick close to the main events tend to mill about the same large block and around the same plaza.

Some visitors, like myself, find reasons to stay away from the main events. To attend one of the evening galas usually means a bit more than just dressing up.It entails walking up a grand stairway under a line of crossed swords held by uniformed soldiers. If one decides to leave a film before it’s over, there’s no easy way of doing so unobtrusively. As I recall from 1972, the side exits tend to be locked, and one has to leave down the same grand stairway, flanked by the same soldiers and other evidences of festival pomp. Once outside, it is no unusual to be approached by children and asked for an autograph, regardless of who one is. Because of my memories of all this, as well as a strong interest in the sidebars, I stayed away from all of the galas in 1988. Various friends and colleagues, however, testified that this aspect of the festival largely remains the same. The festival has a substantial annual budget, and putting on a display for tourists is part of what the event is all about.

All three of the major sidebars in 1988 were exciting: a Jacques Tourneur retrospective (accompanied by the publication of a 250-page, large-format book on the director), and broad and multifaceted retrospective devoted to “The ABC of Latin American Cinema,” and a novel series called “You Only Live Once,” devoted to filmmakers who had made only one film — a varied, eclectic group that included, among many others, Marlon Brando (One-Eyed Jacks), Albert Finney (Charlie Bubbles), Jean Genet (Chant d’amour), Charles Laughton (The Night of the Hunter, see above), Leonard Kastle (The Honeymoon Killers), André Malraux (L’espoir), Karl Malden (Time Limit), Lorenzo Llober (Vida en sombras), and Peter Lorre (Der Verlorene).

Jacques Tourneur, mainly known for his remarkable films made for producer Val Lewton  in the forties (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man) and his classic film noir Out  of the Past (1947), was previously honored with a retrospective at the Edinburgh Film Festival in the 1970s and has long been a cult figure in France. In the U.S., he remains a neglected and barely known figure. The son of the very cultivated (and equally neglected) directed Maurice Tourneur, who began and ended his career in France (1912-1914 and 1928-1948, respectively), but worked as a major Hollywood director for most of the teens and twenties, Jacques also worked on both sides of the Atlantic. (His first five films were made in France during the thirties.) Unlike his father, however, he did virtually all of his major work outside of France.

Known as the director who almost never turned down an assignment, Tourneur left behind a variable and uneven body of work, a surprising amount of which remains distinctive as well as personal. Ironically, for a filmmaker who habitually insisted on using on-screen lighting sources, he is deservedly known as a master of off-screen space. This trait comes to the fore in his Lewton films (see above still, The Leopard Man) and the remarkable English horror film  Curse of the Demon/Night of the Demon (1957), where the unseen becomes the “open, sesame” of the spectator’s imagination, but it is equally pertinent in much of his other work.

His own personal favorite among his movies — a nostalgic small-town idyll with Joel McCrea, Ellen Drew, and Dean Stockwell called Stars in My Crown (see above) — was improbably made at MGM in 1950. A film that bids comparison with John Ford’s The Sun Shines Bright, Stars in My Crown focuses on a local parson (McCrea) and his family, but has none of the conservative religious piety one associates with Louis B. Mayer’s MGM. Tourneur rightly prided himself on his progressive treatment of blacks in his films. One episode in the film that deals with the refusal of a poor local black man (Juano Hernandez) to sell his property to well-to-do whites is especially striking for the wit and economy of its acting, scripting, lighting, and mise en scène.

Some of Tourneur’s most interesting and visually striking pictures were adventure films in color: The Flame and the Arrow (1950), Anne of the Indies (1951), and Way of a Gaucho (1952) are three strong examples [see below].The even more conventional and formulaic Appointment in Honduras (1953) is striking in the particularly Tourneuresque way it is set mainly in exteriors while conveying the cozy atmosphere that one usually associates with interiors. Westerns such as Canyon Passage (1946) and Wichita (1955) are equally deserving of rediscovery. While Tourneur seldom seemed to have much of a hand in the scripts he directed, his best work conveys a finely tuned sense of ethics and a sensitive feeling for human interactions — both hallmarks of his direction. While the San Sebastian wasn’t quite exhaustive, it did manage to include a few of Tourneur’s TV films. A 30-minute show for General Electric Theater in 1960 entitled The Martyr, for example, offers a directorial feat of the first order: coaxing an unusually sensitive and subtle performance out of Ronald Reagan.

Of particular interest in the “ABC of Latin American Cinema” program were various films with considerable reputations but hardly known at all in the U.S. The best of these that I saw was a wonderful early black and white Cine Novo film by Ruy Guerra, Os cafajestes (1962, see below), an erotic tale about two petty blackmailers packed with filmic invention and energy. Very close in look and spirit to the early films of the French New Wave which were being made around the same time, the film was popular in Paris when it was released there. It seems like a historical accident that it never surfaced commercially in the U.S.

Others in the series that I saw or sampled included Raul Ruiz’s first completed feature in Chile, Tres tristes tigres (1968, see below), which intermittently demonstrates that his interest in “illogical” camera angles was there in his work from the beginning; an enjoyably lurid camp Mexican musical/melodrama, Alberto Gout’s Aventuera (1949, see below), starring the flamboyant Ninón Sevilla; and a revolting Argentinian exploitation cult item, Armando Bo’s Carne (1968, see below), which principally consists of the buxom heroine being repeatedly raped.

All of the sidebar events were held in a cozy multiplex cinema in the old section of town, an area surrounded by relatively cheap restaurants and frequented mainly by students. Shortly before the end of the festival, after a Basque terrorist was killed in a skirmish with the local police, a burning bus was ignited in protest, blocking one of the nearby streets. A couple of miles away and a few hours later, at the festival’s swank closing night party held at the Palacio de Miramar, San Sebastian glittered with a very different kind of light, sound, and fury.

–The Independent, April 1989 (vol. 12, no. 3)

Reasons to Believe [SEE YOU IN THE MORNING & SAY ANYTHING…]

From the Chicago Reader (April 28, 1989). — J.R.

SEE YOU IN THE MORNING

*** (A must-see)

Directed and written by Alan J. Pakula

With Jeff Bridges, Alice Krige, Farrah Fawcett, Drew Barrymore, Lukas Haas, David Dukes, Frances Sternhagen, George Hearn, Theodore Bikel, and Linda Lavin.

SAY ANYTHING . . .

*** (A must-see)

Directed and written by Cameron Crowe

With John Cusack, Ione Skye, John Mahoney, Lili Taylor, Amy Brooks, Pamela Segall, and Jason Gould.

Optimistic movies that are halfway believable — that base their hope on plausible characters and events rather than Hollywood magic — have become something of a rarity. These days the only optimism we seem able to abide comes from “inspirational” fantasies such as E.T. and (to cite a more current example) Field of Dreams, which offer little more than the satisfaction of infantile wish fulfillment. So the appearance of two better-than-average movies with optimistic attitudes, both of them personal romantic comedies credited to single writer-directors, is an encouraging sign at a time when the commercial American cinema seems to be teetering on the edge of a faceless, mechanical void.

There’s nothing really startling about either Say Anything. . . , Cameron Crowe’s first feature, or See You in the Morning, Alan J. Pakula’s 12th, except that neither one is a bore, an insult to the intelligence, or a remake of something else; and both have fairly large groups of well-defined characters and a central love story that is at once believable and positive.

Say Anything, which opened two weeks ago to favorable press and good word-of-mouth, in spite of its very unbeckoning title (which I’m not alone in not understanding), will probably be around for some time. See You in the Morning, which opened last week, is in some ways more ambitious; it seems to have less of a chance of acquiring an instant reputation and audience, so I’d recommend going to see it first — before it disappears to await resurrection in the video graveyard.

See You in the Morning deals with the diverse emotional adjustments and complications that ensue when a divorced psychiatrist and a widowed photographer, who each have two children, fall in love and get married. It has the unusual distinction of successfully delineating at least a dozen important characters in about two hours, not one of whom is a stock figure, but this pleasure is secondary to the revelation of seeing what Jeff Bridges, who plays the psychiatrist, Larry Livingston, can do when he is working full throttle and with the right kind of material.

While Bridges has always been reliable in intelligent, nice-guy performances, his range and density as an actor have been gradually diminishing into predictable typecasting. Last year’s Tucker represented the apogee of this tendency, flattening Bridges’s cheerful persona into a kind of one-dimensional icon (which served the movie’s preoccupation with promotional images) while freezing his shit-eating grin into what almost amounted to a death’s-head rictus. Perhaps attributable in part to executive producer George Lucas’s concern for image and design over substance, the characterization served fair warning that Bridges’s ability to represent something more complex than a magazine illustration — the kind of depth that he brought to his part in Cutter’s Way, for example — was in danger of evaporating.

Pakula’s part for him in See You in the Morning is clearly the kind of role he’s been needing, although interestingly enough it builds upon rather than departs from the frozen rictus image. Early on in the movie, his character is identified deceptively as a relatively flighty and nonserious sort of fellow. Eventually, though, when we see him working as a psychiatrist, we realize that his compulsive levity is a serious part of his professional equipment — his bedside manner, so to speak. And still later, when we come to understand better the insecurity and even despair that lurk behind this cheerfulness, his behavior comes across not simply as a false cover but as an active tool of negotiation between warring impulses.

The brilliance of Bridges’s performance here, which deserves the much-abused adjective “Brechtian,” is that as it illustrates Larry’s feelings and his diverse ploys for dealing with the world, it comments on them as well. Like André Dussollier’s performance as the lawyer in Eric Rohmer’s Le beau mariage, it allows us to see the wheels of calculation that turn behind every tactful gesture, as well as the wavering uncertainties, the barely perceptible cracks that are never quite papered over. The movie’s title refers to a popular ditty that Larry likes to sing to himself, and in a way this song functions for him just as his habitual smile does — it’s an expression that is sincere, yet also somehow willed rather than natural.

None of this would be very meaningful if it weren’t for the elasticity of Pakula’s script and direction and the caliber of the other performers that Bridges plays against — a wide-ranging group that includes the effective Alice Krige (a South African whose American accent is flawless) as Beth Goodwin, the photographer; Farrah Fawcett as Larry’s first wife; Lukas Haas and Drew Barrymore as his stepchildren; and even an emotional family dog. All of these actors (and several others) furnish Bridges with various behavorial tests, just as their characters present various challenges to Larry; much of what’s interesting about the movie is the degrees of ingenuity with which Bridges fields their different appeals.

The movie’s milieu is surprisingly close to that of certain Woody Allen films such as Hannah and Her Sisters and Another Woman — that is, the world of the educated upper crust of American society. Even the use of songs like “When I Fall in Love” (sung by Nat “King” Cole), “Embraceable You” (played by Clifford Brown), and “Our Love Is Here to Stay” (performed by jazz violinist Paul Peabody) conjures up a comparable ambience. But the difference between Pakula’s and Allen’s approaches to the same privileged world is telling.

While Allen’s movies are hyperbolically and self-consciously set in Manhattan, Pakula’s movie is incidentally and unobtrusively set in Manhattan. Where Allen’s characters are usually earmarked as either Jewish or WASP, Pakula’s could just as easily be one or the other. In contrast to Allen’s characters’ compulsion to analyze and discuss their psychic conditions at laborious length, Pakula’s characters simply act theirs out. Finally, and most important, while Allen is crippled by his slavish dependency on Bergman and Fellini as stylistic reference points — as a friend recently pointed out, even his delightful episode in New York Stories can be traced back to the Fellini episode in Boccaccio ‘70 – Pakula seems here to rely more on personal experience to block out his story. The net result is that while Allen’s material remains semitheoretical — a sketch for a movie rather than the movie itself — Pakula manages to bring the same sort of material to life: life as it is lived, not as it is theorized about.

Part of the appeal of Say Anything is its refreshing freedom from most of the cliches and conventions found in so many other recent teen movies. Interestingly enough, the project grew out of conversations between Cameron Crowe and executive producer James L. Brooks about an intense father-daughter relationship, with the teen romance for the daughter only developing later. In the finished product, the father-daughter story is background and the romance comes to the fore.

Diane (Ione Skye) is a brilliant biochemistry student who wins a fellowship to study in England; her devoted, divorced, and well-to-do father (John Mahoney), with whom she has an intense and open rapport, manages a nursing home. Lloyd (John Cusack) — a year or two older than Diane but less ambitious and accomplished — is an Army brat; his parents live overseas and he lives modestly with his older sister (Joan Cusack, John’s sister in real life) and young nephew (Glenn Walker Harris Jr.). Lloyd’s only apparent interests are kickboxing — a form of boxing that incorporates kicking — and dating Diane. He and Diane are an unlikely match, and at first neither Diane’s father nor Lloyd’s friends Corey (Lili Taylor) and D.C. (Amy Brooks) think it has any chance of working.

Apart from some dubious information about the way Internal Revenue Service officials operate, and some overly neat and symmetrical business with a fountain pen, Crowe’s script is as fresh and insightful as his direction. Much of the credit for the film’s overall assurance is undoubtedly also due to the producer, Polly Platt (who collaborated on most of the best Peter Bogdanovich films, mainly as production designer, as well as on James L. Brooks’s Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News), and to the sensitivity of Cusack, Skye, and Mahoney.

If I’ve avoided saying anything much about the plots of either See You in the Morning or Say Anything, it’s because they’re relatively meaningless without the actors’ performances to tell us what they mean, emotionally and intellectually. In the case of Say Anything, which a friend has rightly compared to the early films of Truffaut, it’s the sheer delight in people that registers more than the specific events that occasion this delight — details like the irrepressible giggles of Diane (or the equally energetic and ecstatic cries of Lloyd’s nephew when he kickboxes with his uncle), or the wordless understandings that occasionally crop up between Lloyd and his friend Corey (as well as between Diane and her father). The love story is a central part of this delight, but far from the whole enchilada.

In See You in the Morning, on the other hand, the director’s emotional interest gravitates around Beth and Larry. It’s not that the others — their former spouses, Larry’s mother-in-law (Frances Sternhagen), Beth’s kids, Larry and Beth’s mutual friend Sidney (Linda Lavin), the dog, and even the houses that the families live in — aren’t accorded a lot of care and attention by Pakula. It’s that the film is a love story first and foremost, and it is basically the effect that these people and these houses and this dog have on Beth and Larry that determines the curve of the plot.

Whether a crowded love story of this kind is something of a contradiction in terms is an open question that the movie as a whole seems to be implicitly raising — how much, for instance, Larry’s success as a father and stepfather is or isn’t a part of his relationship with Beth. It’s a middle-aged issue in contrast to the more youthful perspective of Say Anything, and the emotional registers that are explored are every bit as nuanced.

Powwow Highway

The unusual thing about this pleasant (if at times formulaic) shaggy-dog road movie set in Montana, South Dakota, New Mexico, and environs is that it’s all about contemporary Cheyenne Indians. The story of a huge traditionalist Cheyenne named Philbert (Gary Farmer) and his beat-up wreck of a car (purchased with pot), which he regards as his “pony,” the movie follows the wayward adventures that ensue when Philbert’s political friend Buddy (A Martinez) gets him to drive the two of them from Montana’s Lame Deer reservation to Santa Fe, to get Buddy’s sister Bonnie (Joanelle Romero) out of jail. Directed by Jonathan Wacks from a script by Janet Heaney and Jean Stawarz based on David Seals’s book, there’s more pleasure to be found here in character and incident than in plot per se, but in addition to offering an interesting cross section of Cheyenne life and attitudes, there’s a fair amount of fun to be had along the way–including attractive scenery and some good laughs. With Amanda Wyss. (Fine Arts)

84 Charlie Mopic

The title refers to a cameraman (Byron Thames) who accompanies a six-man reconnaissance unit in the central highlands of Vietnam in 1969 (”Mopic” is an abbreviation for “motion picture”). A tour de force, this first feature by Patrick Duncan shows us only what the cameraman records–an intensely physical rendering of the unit’s experiences on a mission, with the sound often carrying as much impact as the images. By “dedramatizing” the material and at the same time contriving to hold an audience’s interest, Duncan takes a courageous dive straight into the contradictions of what makes an honest yet compelling film about combat in Vietnam; what we see and hear certainly registers as real, although the verisimilitude seems at times to get in the way of story telling (we don’t always make out everything that the characters are saying). Effectively shot in super-16-millimeter (by Alan Caso) and persuasively acted (by Jonathan Emerson, Nicholas Cascone, Jason Tomlins, Christopher Burgard, Glenn Morshower, and Richard Brooks), this uncompromising bug’s-eye view of its subject may not be for everyone, and it’s far from an unqualified success, but it certainly commands respect and attention. (Oakbrook, Old Orchard, Webster Place)

Money Changes Everything [GREED on video]

From Movieline (April 21, 1989, Vol. V, issue 99). — J.R.

It is a strange, grim tale, not typical of 1920s Hollywood entertainment.A gentle, burly dentist from the California mines named McTeague (Gibson Gowland) moves to San Francisco, where he befriends Marcus (Jean Hersholt), who works at the local dog hospital, and falls in love with Trina (Zasu Pittts), Marcus’s cousin and prospective fiancée. Out of friendship, Marcus relinquishes all claims on Trina, who gets engaged to “Mac”. But when she wins $5,000 in a lottery, Marcus feels cheated, and ruins Mac’s career by revealing that he has been pulling teeth without a license. After her marriage, the shy and frigid Trina becomes obsessed with the money she has won, refusing to spend any of it, and driving the impoverished Mac to drink and eventually to violence and murder….

Perhaps the least glamorous movie ever to have come out of a major studio, Greed (1924) is more than just a polemic about the power of money to destroy love and friendship. Finally appearing on video 65 years after its commercial release, it remains one of the most powerful of all silent movies, as well as one of the most modern in style and substance. It is also a monument to the perseverance of its writer/director, Erich von Stroheim, who had wanted to film Frank Norris’s 1899 novel McTeague ever since he had come across it in 1914.

By 1923 Stroheim was famous as an actor and director for his studio-shot Blind Husbands and Foolish Wives, in which he portrayed decadent rogues who seduced American women on the Continent. He received a hefty $347,000 budget from legendary independent producer Sam Goldwyn to film his first American story in real California locations, a principle he followed with a vengeance, mobilizing entire blocks of San Francisco to shoot in the actual settings specified in the novel, forcing his actors to live there, and eventually dragging cast and crew to the worst part of Death Valley at the hottest time of the year to film the horrific climax.

After shooting for 198 days and going $238,000 over budget, Stroheim put together a nine-hour workprint, then a version about half as long. Finally he got a friend to pare away about a third more. But by this time, the film belonged to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and studio chief Louis B. Mayer was far less sympathetic to auteur sensibilities; the already heavily cut Greed was reduced by still another third, to slightly over two hours. According to Stroheim, “The rest of the negative” — 35 of the 45 reels in the original workprint — “was burned to get the 43 cents worth of silver out.”

Fortunately, the Greed that remains is a lot more than a tantalizing fragment. Viewers who want to get a better idea of Stropheim’s intentions can read Norris’s novel or the published screenplay. But even without these backups, the storytelling is lucid and compelling, the view of human existence is both tender and corrosive (there are no villains in sight), and the richness of detail in every frame testifies to Stroheim’s obsessive brilliance.

Ironically, some of the intertitles that produce titters today — like “Such was McTeague” (after Mac has thrown a fellow miner into a ravine for causing him to drop a wounded bird) and Trina’s “Let’s go over and sit on the sewer” — are the work of MGM’s editors, who used them to patch up the missing continuity. But the scenes and images belong only to Stroheim, and none of the cuts can seriously diminish their elemental power. The performances, moreover, are like nothing else in movies. In major and minor roles alike, one gets a remarkable sense of fully rounded characters existing, not merely talented actors playing parts. Stroheim’s dense portrayal of the lower depths burns into the mind like acid. (MGM/UA, $29.95, May 23)