[1936] [SJL]
The Petrified Forest
It is commonly observed that allegories are tolerable insofar as they are vague and inconsistent; this is not an apology for vagueness and inconsistency but rather proof, or at least a sign, that the genre of allegory is at fault. I said the “genre of allegory,” not elements or the suggestion of allegory. (The best and most famous allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come, by the Puritan visionary John Bunyan, must be read as a novel, not as a prophecy; but if we eliminated all the symbolic justifications, the book would be absurd.)
The measure of allegory in The Petrified Forest is perhaps exemplary: light enough so as not to obliterate the drama’s reality, substantial enough so as to sanction the drama’s improbabilities. There are two or three shortcomings or pedantries in the dialogue, however, which continue to annoy me: a nebulous theological theory of neuroses, the (meticulously inaccurate) summary of a poem by T. S. Eliot, the forced allusions to Villon, Mark Twain, and Billy the Kid, contrived to make the audience feel erudite in recognizing those names.
Once the allegorical motive is dismissed or relegated to a secondary level, the plot of The Petrified Forest—the magical influence of approaching death on a random group of men and women—strikes me as admirable. Death works in this film like hypnosis or alcohol: it brings the recesses of the soul into the light of day. These characters are extraordinarily clear-cut: the smiling, storytelling grandpa who sees everything as a performance and greets the desolation and the bullets as a happy return to the turbulent normalcy of his youth; the weary gunman Mantee, as resigned to killing (and making others kill) as the rest are to dying; the imposing and wholly vain banker with his consul’s air of “a great man of our conservative party”; the young Gabrielle, given to attributing her romantic turn of mind to her French blood, and her housekeeping virtues to her Yankee origins; the poet, who advises her to reverse the terms of such an American—and such a mythical—attribution. I do not recall any other movies by Archie Mayo. This film (along with The Passing of the Third Floor Back) is one of the most intense that I have seen.
[1936] [SJL]
Wells, the Visionary
The author of The Invisible Man, The First Men in the Moon, The Time Machine, and The Island of Dr. Moreau (his best novels, though not his most recent) has published in a 140-page book the detailed text of his recent film, Things to Come. Did he do this, perhaps, to dissociate himself from, or at least not to be held responsible for, the film as a whole? The suspicion is not unfounded. Indeed it is justified, or validated by his “Introductory Remarks,” which provide instructions. Here he writes that people in the future will not be rigged up like telephone poles or as if they had just escaped from some sort of electrical operating room, nor will they wear aluminum pots or costumes of cellophane glowing under neon lights. “I want Oswald Cabal,” Wells writes, “to look like a fine gentleman, not an armored gladiator or a padded lunatic . . . not nightmare stuff, not jazz. . . . Human affairs in that more organized world will not be hurried, they will not be crowded, there will be more leisure, more dignity. . . . Things, structures will be great, but not monstrous.” Unfortunately, the grandiose film that we have seen—”grandiose” in the worst sense of this awful word—has very little to do with his intentions. To be sure, there are not a lot of cellophane pots, aluminum neckties, padded gladiators, or madmen in shining armor, but the overall effect (much more important than the details) is nightmare stuff. I am not referring to the first part, which is deliberately monstrous. I am referring to the last, where order should counter the bloody mess of the first part: not only is it not orderly, but it is even more gruesome than the first part. Wells starts out by showing us the terrors of the immediate future, visited by plagues and bombardments-a very effective introduction. (I recall a clear sky stained and darkened by airplanes as obscene and pestilent as locusts.) Then, in the author’s words, “the film broadens out to display the grandiose spectacle of a reconstructed world.” That “broadening out” is rather poignant: the heaven of Wells and Alexander Korda, like that of so many other eschatologists and set designers, is not much different than their hell, though even less charming.
Another comparison: the book’s memorable lines do not correspond—cannot correspond to the film’s memorable moments. On page 19, Wells speaks of “a rapid succession of flashes that evokes . . . the confused inadequate efficiency of our world.” As might have been foreseen, the contrast between the words confusion and efficiency (not to mention the value judgment in the epithet inadequate) has not been translated into images. On page 56, Wells speaks of the masked aviator Cabal “standing out against the sky, a tall portent.” The sentence is beautiful; its photographed version is not. (Even if it had been, it could never have corresponded to the sentence, since the arts of rhetoric and cinema—oh, classic ghost of Ephraim Lessing!—are absolutely incompatible.) On the other hand, there are successful sequences that owe nothing at all to the text’s indications.
Tyrants offend Wells, but he likes laboratories; hence his forecast of laboratory technicians joining together to unite a world wrecked by tyrants. Reality has yet to resemble his prophecy: in 1936, the power of almost all tyrants arises from their control of technology. Wells worships pilots and chauffeurs; the tyrannical occupation of Abyssinia was the work of pilots and chauffeurs—and perhaps of the slightly mythological fear of Hitler’s depraved laboratories.
I have found fault with the film’s second half, but I insist on praising the first part and its wholesome effect for those people who still imagine war as a romantic cavalcade or an opportunity for glorious picnics and free tourism.
[1936] [SJL]
Two Films
I have seen two films on two consecutive nights. The first (in both senses), according to the director himself, was “inspired by Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent.” Even without his statement, however, I must admit that I would have stumbled upon the connection he reveals, but never that respiratory and divine verb inspire. Skillful photography, clumsy filmmaking—these are my indifferent opinions “inspired” by Hitchcock’s latest film. As for Joseph Conrad . . . There is no doubt, aside from certain distortions, that the story line of Sabotage (1936) coincides with the plot of The Secret Agent (1907); there also is no doubt that the actions narrated by Conrad have a psychological value—only a psychological value. Conrad unfolds for us the destiny and character of Mr. Verloc, a lazy, fat, and sentimental man who comes to “crime” as a result of confusion and fear. Hitchcock prefers to translate him into an inscrutable Slavo-Germanic Satan. An almost prophetic passage in The Secret Agent invalidates and refutes this translation:
But there was also about Mr. Verloc [. . .] the air common to men who live on the vices, the follies, or the baser fears of mankind; the air of moral nihilism common to keepers of gambling halls and disorderly houses; to private detectives and inquiry agents; to drink sellers and, I should say, to the sellers of invigorating electric belts and to the inven tors of patent medicines. But of that last I am not sure, not having car ried my investigations so far into the depths. For all I know, the expression of these last may be perfectly diabolic. I shouldn’t be sur prised. What I want to affirm is that Mr. Verloc’s expression was by no means diabolic.
Hitchcock has chosen to disregard this indication. I do not regret his strange infidelity; I do regret the petty task he has assigned himself. Conrad enables us to understand completely a man who causes the death of a child; Hitchcock devotes his art (and the slanting, sorrowful eyes of Sylvia Sidney) to making that death reduce us to tears. Conrad’s undertaking was intellectual; the other’s merely sentimental. That is not all: the film—oh complementary, insipid horror—adds a love interest whose characters, as chaste as they are enamored, are the martyred Mrs. Verloc and a dapper, good looking detective, disguised as a greengrocer.
The other film is informatively titled Los muchachos de antes no usaban gomina [
The Boys of Yesteryear Didn’t Slick Their Hair] . (Some informative titles are beautiful: The General Died at Dawn.) This film—The Boys of Yesteryear, etc.—is unquestionably one of the best Argentine films I have seen, that is, one of the worst films in the world. The dialogue is totally unbelievable. The characters—gangland bosses and hoodlums in 1906—speak and live solely as a function of their difference from people in 1937. They have no existence outside of local and historical color. There is one fistfight and another fight with knives. The actors do not know how to thrust and parry nor how to box, which dims these spectacles.
The film’s theme, “moral nihilism” or the progressive decline of Buenos Aires, is certainly appealing, but is wasted by the film’s director. The hero, who ought to be emblematic of the old virtues—and the old skepticism—is a citizen of Buenos Aires who has already been Italianized, a porteño cloyingly susceptible to the shameful seduction of apocryphal patriotism and sentimental tangos.
[1937] [SJL]
An Overwhelming Film
Citizen Kane (called The Citizen in Argentina) has at least two plots. The first, pointlessly banal, attempts to milk applause from dimwits: a vain millionaire collects statues, gardens, palaces, swimming pools, diamonds, cars, libraries, men and women. Like an earlier collector (whose observations are usually ascribed to the Holy Ghost), he discovers that this cornucopia of miscellany is a vanity of vanities: all is vanity. At the point of death, he yearns for one single thing in the universe, the humble sled he played with as a child!
The second plot is far superior. It links the Koheleth to the memory of another nihilist, Franz Kafka. A kind of metaphysical detective story, its subject (both psychological and allegorical) is the investigation of a man’s inner self, through the works he has wrought, the words he has spoken, the many lives he has ruined. The same technique was used by Joseph Conrad in Chance (1914) and in that beautiful film The Power and the Glory: a rhapsody of miscellaneous scenes without chronological order. Overwhelmingly, endlessly, Orson Welles shows fragments of the life of the man, Charles Foster Kane, and invites us to combine them and to reconstruct him. Forms of multiplicity and incongruity abound in the film: the first scenes record the treasures amassed by Kane; in one of the last, a poor woman, luxuriant and suffering, plays with an enormous jigsaw puzzle on the floor of a palace that is also a museum. At the end we realize that the fragments are not governed by any secret unity: the detested Charles Foster Kane is a simulacrum, a chaos of appearances. (A possible corollary, foreseen by David Hume, Ernst Mach, and our own Macedonia Fernandez: no man knows who he is, no man is anyone.) In a story by Chesterton—”The Head of Caesar,” I think—the hero observes that nothing is so frightening as a labyrinth with no center. This film is precisely that labyrinth.
We all know that a party, a palace, a great undertaking, a lunch for writers and journalists, an atmosphere of cordial and spontaneous camaraderie, are essentially horrendous. Citizen Kane is the first film to show such things with an awareness of this truth.
The production is, in general, worthy of its vast subject. The cinematography has a striking depth, and there are shots whose farthest planes (like Pre-Raphaelite paintings) are as precise and detailed as the close-ups.
I venture to guess, nonetheless, that Citizen Kane will endure as certain Griffith or Pudovkin films have “endured”—films whose historical value is undeniable but which no one cares to see again. It is too gigantic, pedantic, tedious. It is not intelligent, though it is the work of genius—in the most nocturnal and Germanic sense of that bad word.
[1941] [SJL]
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Transformed
Hollywood has defamed, for the third time, Robert Louis Stevenson. In Argentina the title of this defamation is El hombre y la bestia [The Man and the Beast] and it has been perpetrated by Victor Fleming, who repeats with ill-fated fidelity the aesthetic and moral errors of Mamoulian’s version—or perversion. I shall begin with the moral errors.
In the 1886 novel, Dr. Jekyll is morally duplicitous in the way all men are double, while his hypostasis—Edward Hyde—is relentlessly, unredeemably fiendish. In the 1941 film, Dr. Jekyll is a young pathologist who practices chastity while his hypostasis—Hyde—is a sadistic and acrobatic profligate. For the sages of Hollywood, Good is the courtship of the chaste and wealthy Miss Lana Turner, and Evil (which similarly concerned David Hume and the heresiarchs of Alexandria) is illicit cohabitation with Fröken Ingrid Bergman or Miriam Hopkins. It would be futile to observe that Stevenson is completely innocent of such limitations or distortions of the problem. In the book’s last chapter, he asserts that Jekyll’s vices are sensuality and hypocrisy; in one of his Ethical Studies—in 1888—he tried to list “all the displays of the truly diabolic” and proposed the following: “envy, malice, the mean lie, the mean silence, the calumnious truth, the backbiter, the petty tyrant, the peevish poisoner of family life.” (I would add that ethics do not include sexual matters so long as they are not contaminated by betrayal, greed, or vanity.)
The structure of the film is even more rudimentary than its theology. In the book, the identity of Jekyll and Hyde is a surprise: the author saves it for the end of the ninth chapter. The allegorical tale pretends to be a detective story; no reader guesses that Hyde and Jekyll are the same person. The very title of the book makes us assume they are two. There is nothing easier than shifting this device to the screen. Let us imagine any detective mystery: two well-known actors figure in the plot (let us say George Raft and Spencer Tracy); they may use analogous words or refer to events that presuppose a common past. When the mystery seems inexplicable, one of them swallows the magic drug and changes into the other. (Of course the successful execution of this plan would require two or three phonetic adjustments, such as changing the protagonists’ names.) More civilized than I, Victor Fleming avoids all surprise and mystery: in the early scenes of the film, Spencer Tracy fearlessly drinks the versatile potion and transforms himself into Spencer Tracy, with a different wig and Negroid features.
Beyond Stevenson’s dualist parable and closer to the Conference of the Birds, which Farid al-Oin Attar composed in the twelfth century (of the Christian era), we may imagine a pantheist film, whose numerous characters finally become One, who is everlasting.
[1941] [SJL]
Two Films
The doctrine of the transmigration of souls and circular time, or the Eternal Return, was suggested (it is said) by paramnesia, by the sudden, disturbing impression of having already lived the present moment. No matter how forgetful, there is not a single moviegoer in Buenos Aires-at 6:30 and 10:45 P.M.-who has not experienced this impression. Hollywood, like the Greek tragedians, has stuck for many years to ten or twelve basic plots: the aviator who dies in a convenient catastrophe in order to save the friend whom his wife loves; the deceitful typist who does not refuse the gifts of furs, apartments, cars, and tiaras, but who slaps or kills the giver when he “goes too far”; the unspeakable and acclaimed reporter who seeks the friendship of a gangster with the sole motive of betraying him and making him die on the gallows. . . .
The latest victim of this disconcerting asceticism is Miss Bette Davis. They have made her portray the following romance: a woman, weighed down by a pair of eyeglasses and a domineering mother, considers herself ugly and insipid; a psychiatrist (Claude Rains) persuades her to vacation among palm trees, to play tennis, to visit Brazil, to take off her glasses, to change dressmakers. The five-part treatment works: the captain of the ship who brings her home repeats the obvious truth that not one of the other women aboard has had Miss Davis’ success. In the face of this endorsement, a niece, previously intimidating in her sarcasm, now sobs for forgiveness. Across the screens of the most remote movie houses, the film spreads its bold thesis: A disfigured Miss Davis is less beautiful.
The distorted drama I have summarized is called Now Voyager. It was directed by a certain Irving Rapper, who might not be stupid, but who has now unfortunately degraded
the tragic heroine of The Little Foxes, The Letter, and Of Human Bondage.
Nightmare is less ambitious and more tolerable. It begins as a detective film but wastes no time in lapsing into an erratic adventure film. It suffers from all the defects of both genres, with the sole virtue of not belonging to the genre of the boring. Its plot is the kind that has surprised every spectator hundreds of times: a pretty girl and an average man battle against an allpowerful, malicious society, which before the war was China and now is the Gestapo or the international spies of the Third Reich. The hapless directors of such films are motivated by two intentions, first, to show that Orientals (or Prussians) combine perfect evil with perfect intelligence and treachery, and secondly, to show that there is always a well-intentioned man who will succeed in outwitting them. Inevitably, these cross-purposes cancel each other out. Various impending dangers threaten the heroine and hero, which turn out to be imaginary and ineffectual since the spectators know very well that the film must last an hour—a well-known fact that guarantees the characters a longevity or immortality of sixty minutes. Another convention that spoils pictures of this sort is the protagonists’ superhuman courage: they are told they are going to die, and they smile. The audience smiles too.
[1943] [SJL]
On Dubbing
The art of combination is not infinite in its possibilities, though those possibilities are apt to be frightening. The Greeks engendered the chimera, a monster with the head of a lion, the head of a dragon, and the head of a goat; the second-century theologians, the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are inextricably linked; the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a bright red, supernatural bird equipped with six feet and six wings but with neither face nor eyes; nineteenth-century geometrists, the hypercube, a four dimensional figure enclosing an infinite number of cubes and bounded by eight cubes and twenty-four squares. Hollywood has just enriched this frivolous museum of teratology: by means of a perverse artifice they call dubbing, they devise monsters that combine the famous face of Greta Garbo with the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo. How can we fail to proclaim our admiration for this bleak magic, for these ingenious audio-visual deformations? Those who defend dubbing might argue (perhaps) that objections to it can also be raised against any kind of translation. This argument ignores, or avoids, the principal defect: the arbitrary implant of another voice and another language. The voice of Hepburn or Garbo is not accidental but, for the world, one of their defining features. Similarly, it is worth remembering that gestures are different in English and Spanish.84 I have heard that dubbing is appreciated in the provinces. This is a simple authoritarian argument, and as long as they do not publish the syllogisms of those rustic connoisseurs from Chilecito and Chivilcoy, I, for one, shall not let myself be intimidated. I also hear that people who do not know English find dubbing delightful, or tolerable. My understanding of English is less perfect than my ignorance of Russian, but I would never resign myself to seeing Alexander Nevsky again in any language other than the original, and I would see it eagerly, nine or ten times, if they showed it in the original or in a version I believed to be the original. The latter is important: worse than dubbing or the substitution that dubbing implies, is one’s general awareness of a substitution, of a fake.