[Originally published in Movietone News 40, April 1975]
Foreword
I don’t read a note of music, so the language of this article is necessarily interpretive rather than technical. Also, the here-today-gone-tomorrow Duck, You Sucker has thus far eluded my company, so I have recourse only to the first four westerns that Morricone scored for Leone. —RCC
A soundtrack score is rarely significant enough to make or break a film. Generally the least obtrusive music is the most effective in creating mood or building atmosphere—the kind of music the pianists and organists used to improvise to accompany silent movies. If a film score is overly assertive it can do severe damage to a film, as Miklos Rozsa’s did to Hitchcock’s Spellbound, or as most of Maurice Jarre’s post–LawrenceofArabia scores have done.
With this in mind, it is with the greatest of awe that I express my admiration for the brilliantly assertive yet totally un–self-serving scores that Ennio Morricone has composed for Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti westerns.” The unique, indefinable atmosphere which Leone’s films create is built in large part by the director’s tremendously personal style of mise-en-scène, shot composition, and montage, to be sure. But it is often Morricone’s music that turns the trick in creating that timeless, haunting aura, and lends an otherworldly, almost religious significance to the action it accompanies.
[Originally published in slightly different form in Movietone News 40, April 1975]
In Love and Anarchy, Lina Wertmüller incorporates many things Fellinian—Rotunno’s gorgeous camerawork, Rota’s characteristic harmonies, thematic tidbits such as grotesques-made-lovable, prostitutes making music and selling their wares, and even an aging female character who pitiably begs her audience to respect her past stardom as an “artiste” (remember Mademoiselle Fifi in the harem sequence of 8 1/2)—but the director’s purpose could hardly differ more from Fellini’s; one has only to watch Amarcord and then LoveandAnarchy to understand how many worlds apart two narrative voices with similar stylistic articulations can be.
[Originally published in Movietone News 40, April 1975]
Only Angels Have Wings is one of Hawks’s “male adventurer” films, but it is also one of his comedies—and is perhaps best understood as such. It’s comedy in the sense that it has its share of wisecracks and a hint of slapstick—but also, and more importantly, in that it gives humor a place as a value and subtly undercuts “masculine” toughness in a way that parallels the rug-pulling comedy in Bringing Up Baby, I Was a Male War Bride, and other more obviously comic Hawks films.
[Originally published in Movietone News 40, April 1975]
I have to be on the side of any film in which Harry Dean Stanton is ordered to “Hoover the Navajos”—i.e., vacuum-clean the Indian rugs. The line could only have been written by Tom McGuane, who’s made a specialty in recent years of writing almost surreally funny sendups of the New West. The rugs belong to Elizabeth Ashley, bored but miraculously goodhumored wife of rancher Clifton James who, fresh out of empires to build, has recently focused his obsessive attention on apprehending a couple of one-steer-at-a-time rustlers. In this effort he is—or is supposed to be—abetted by horsethief–turned–stock detective Slim Pickens, who manifests a disconcerting preference for sitting in front of a TV set in the bunkhouse and ignoring the clues James finds and the theories he cooks up. The hard guys interfering with James’s peace of mind (or providing him with esoteric entertainment—take your pick) are about as dangerous as defanged garter snakes: Jeff Bridges, a poor little rich boy with a spoiled marriage behind him, and Sam Waterston, an Indian whose militancy is of a benignly comic strain and whose blood traces back to Ohio Cornplanters rather than the warriors who once rode the surrounding Big Skyline.
[Originally published in Movietone News 40, April 1975]
Vivid reds dominate this Quebec-made study of corruption, from its cruising opening night shot of a sleek black car, taillights aglow, arriving at contractor Vincent Padovani’s chic Montreal home, to the grayish morning-after tableau, wide-angle, in which bored dignitaries wait in the rain, under black umbrellas, for their infantile mayor to cut a long red ribbon spanning the expanse of Padovani’s brand-new slate-grey superhighway. The police-sergeant/chauffeur who jumps out of the sleek black car and scurries around to open the passenger door for his boss (a minister of transportation) wears French cuffs and a hood-y maroon shirt. The minister is ushered into Padovani’s tasteful diningroom where a small, genteel dinner party is underway to celebrate the completion of the highway, with its lucrative, business-as-usual “spreading of contracts.” Outside, the red-shirted cop leans on the limo, lights a cigarette, and prepares to wait it out. After a few moments, he too is ushered into the house, by Padovani’s righthand man Dominique—but his place is belowstairs. Here he meets a couple of other garishly attired policemen, attendant on other Padovani cronies, and an impassively babyfaced gunman apparently attached to the household, and two drinks-serving young women engaged for the evening to seryice one of the upstairs party guests: the mayor. The basement quarters where these flunkies congregate and await various summonses from upstairs are irregularly lit with patches of Mean Streets neon poolhall red. This opening sequence is absorbing, and the counterpoint between below- and abovestairs generates some suspense. But subsequent spurts of away-from-the-dinner-party action—an intimidating visit to a rival gangster’s lair, a vicious attack on militant students planning a protest demonstration against the highway, the roughing-up of two inquiring reporters—somehow fail to satisfy.
[Originally published in Movietone News 40, April 1975]
The first of the best films of 1975 has been and gone, and won’t be back, at least at your naborhood theatre. LoveamongtheRuins appeared on ABC-TV on March 6; reportedly, an agreement with Sir Laurence Olivier ensures that it will never be released theatrically. One can only hope that the film will soon be leaked quietly to 16mm nontheatrical distributors (as, for instance, is the case with Losey’s A Doll’sHouse), for it’s a treasure, a shining testimonial to the glories of memory and dreams that deserves better than to become merely a memory itself.
[Originally published in Movietone News 40, April 1975]
First things first: The way they say it in the movie is yaw-ku-zah and, as a headnote explains, the Yakuza were roughly parallel to the western’s good badmen—gamblers, con men, drifters with short swords and no samurai code of bushido to sustain them, sometime Robin Hood figures who stood between the defenseless and the marauders who would prey upon them. Yakuza stories within a modern gangster framework are immensely popular in the Japanese cinema, and Paul Schrader, former editor of the American film magazine Cinema, wrote a comprehensive survey of the genre for a Film Comment of about a year ago. Remarking therein that anyone who’d seen a few examples of this relentlessly formalized genre could write one himself, Schrader spoke from experience: his own TheYakuza, touched up a smidge by Robert Towne and formally permissive enough to incorporate some double-dealing American gangsters along with its Japanese pro- and antagonists, looked a likely enough successor to the kung-fu cycle in popularity that Warner Brothers paid a hefty price for the screenplay ($300,000, according to Newsweek).
[Originally published in Movietone News 40, April 1975]
She brought the bottle to his room and then he took the bottle to her room and now she has brought it back to his room without anyone having had a drink so far. He cocks an eye at their mutual pretext and remarks, “This is getting to be a problem.”
The line gets a laugh. And as you laugh at it, you can’t quite say why you’re laughing, but you know you’re laughing at a number of things at the same time. It’s more than two people getting set to play a love scene. It’s two people laughing at themselves for going through all this ritual to get at the scene, and it’s also two people digging the ritual and digging themselves for having set it up. It’s two canny actors, who are also people, enjoying and capitalizing on the happy fact that they are playing about the same scene they’d be playing anyway if there weren’t a camera crew standing around. It’s also Howard Hawks and his redoubtable extra-dialogue man William Faulkner and Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall—only recently Betty Perske, unknown fashion model—laughing at the way they’ve just said “Screw it” to the whole bothersome notion of following a scenario.
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall
For it must have been after the shooting of the second stage of the bottle’s progress that Bacall said—as James Agee recorded for Time and posterity—”God, I’m dumb.” Hawks asked why and she said, “Well, if I had any sense I’d go back in after that guy.” Hawks had to agree and that’s the way they went.
To Have and Have Not, then, is firstly and most durably a movie about the making of this particular movie. In his enormously suggestive book MovieMan, David Thomson has remarked that, with Hawks as with Jean Renoir, one so often has a feeling that the director and some friends of his have got together and, simply because they happen to be phenomenally talented people in the same line of work, made a movie. While there are moments implying breezy, spontaneous improvisation in virtually all Hawks pictures, no other has such an all-pervasive sense of a floating party where a couple of particular people keep bumping into the fact that there’s something lovely about each of them and something cosmically joyous about the two of them together.
[Originally published in Movietone News 40, April 1975]
The Four Musketeers cannot be recommended to anyone who hasn’t seen The Three Musketeers. On the other hand, you haven’t seen The Three until you’ve seen The Four; and once you’ve seen The Four, The Three becomes a much better movie. They’re all one movie, really, and one of the most enjoyable prospects the near future holds out to us is the chance, eventually, to sit down in some suburban auditorium and put the whole four-hours-minus picture back together. There’ll also, for those of us who inveterately worry about such things, be the problem of sorting out whether this is a great film or just a splendiferous film with greatness in it.
Perhaps I can get at the nature of that unmonumental problem by indulging in a little film-critical housecleaning. Last year, in MTN 31, I delivered myself of an unadulteratedly positive appreciation of Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers: The Queen’s Diamonds, which marked the director’s return to feature filmmaking after almost five years’ silence. The comeback itself was good news, and it was easy to find complimentary things to say about the picture. I didn’t—and don’t—retract any of them; but I also didn’t record my uneasiness about the movie, most especially its failure to achieve an overall structural integrity. Nice things would happen, and then other nice things would happen—some of them beautiful-type nice things, others comic-type nice things—but they didn’t go anywhere. I don’t know how many people paused to tell me how great it was when Athos, last seen grotesquely pinioned on a waterwheel, reappeared in bandages, stewed to the gills, to tip backwards down a country well; it was hohoho to swashbuckling and all that, and bring on the clowns. If it wasn’t that easy for Dick Jameson to go along with that, neither was it all that easy for Dick Lester. If you read around among various reviews of the film, you might find one commentator sneering at Lester for venturing to tell an anachronistic adventure story straight, while another would see him playing the same thing for facile laughs, and a third might detect the Musketeers and d’Artagnan casting the shadows of the Watergate plumbers. There isn’t necessarily any significance in the phenomenon of various commentators finding different points-of-view to take on the same film; but in this particular case I do feel the conspicuously divergent readings were at least partially accountable-for in the unresolved quality of Lester’s half-of-a-film. There was material there to qualify The Queen’s Diamonds as a sumptuously romantic extravaganza to out-Curtiz Curtiz, and there was evidence that this movie was made by hip Richard Lester, director of the Beatles films and The Knack, and a sense of muckraking revisionism laced with absurdism could also be sustained. Leaving such questions of tone and intention aside, one had still to contend with the basic dichotomy of spectacular period piece vs. high, middle, and low comedy. My own experience of Part One was that, after an intricately graded first hour or so, the laughs ran away with the show; and while there continued to be such headily ambivalent punctuation marks as the Musketeers-against-the-setting-sun-ride-to-the-rescue shot, d’Artagnan’s protracted—and much too undangerous—attempt to enter the palace and return the queen’s jewels tended to linger in my mind as more typical of the film’s failure of perspective. Hence, come year-end toting-up, I found myself discreetly omitting The Three Musketeers from what might have seemed, on the basis of my April review, a guaranteed slot on my Ten Best List.
Charlton Heston unexpectedly swell as Cardinal Richelieu
With that convoluted but by no means irrelevant self-account out of the way, I can return to saying that The Revenge of Milady not only makes good on the necessarily failed promise of The Queen’s Diamonds but even makes better. Part Two begins in media of rather bewildering res with Aramis, having summarized Part One in voiceover for the tardy arrival, announcing that the Musketeers have become involved in a war between the Catholics (the king’s forces) and the Protestants, that the latter hold the fortress of LaRochelle, and that the Musketeers’ old enemy Rochefort has been captured by the other side while spying. And so, since Musketeers rescue just about anybody, we find them preparing to foil Rochefort’s execution by firing squad—if they can just keep the fuses on their hand grenades lit, and if the firing squad doesn’t do such a thorough job of botching their own assignment that our heroes become superfluous. Once Rochefort is spirited away to make his apologies to the king and Cardinal Richelieu, we’re back where we left off last year: d’Artagnan stands in a marketplace with his hand up a goose’s ass.
Beside him is Constance Bonacieux, handmaiden to the queen and wife of d’Artagnan’s one-time innkeeper (Spike Milligan’s Bonacieux, alas, does not return). In Richelieu’s ever-shifting chess plan to retain control of the destiny of France, she, as the queen’s confidential emissary to her English lover, the Duke of Buckingham, has come to be a most strategic piece. Browsing in the market now, she pauses near a heap of melons. A hand reaches out from them and seizes her; another hand, gesturing from behind a cart across the street, directs the kidnapping; as a barrel is settled over Constance’s head, d’Artagnan leaps to her assistance. The hand behind the cart belongs to Rochefort, who moves to cross swords with the young Gascon—but slips in a pile of grapes, thereby running himself—his wrist, anyway—onto the blade of someone who has no business wounding the greatest swordsman in France. D’Artagnan’s advantage is momentary at best and he ends up buried by a hill of potatoes. In the twinkling of a splice he’s being uncovered by the devious Milady de Winter. Constance is nowhere to be seen.
The movie is changing on us already, although the seriocomic deftness of this sequence is not apparent until we’ve seen the next. Milady has taken d’Artagnan to her apartments. Under her soothing hand and four inches from her enticing and mostly unlaced bosom, he reminds himself that he really must be going—er, mustn’t he?—to find his sworn lady. Amid a cacophony of falling candelabra he departs, Milady waving a benediction that also directs her maid to see him safely out. Then, completing the untying of her robe, she turns her back to the camera and starts toward a waiting bathtub mere feet away from the couch where she almost seduced the new Musketeer. The lens, with Thirties quaintness, drops with her robe. A discreet closeup follows her foot into the bath. The water is red. In shock closeup, Milady gasps. In closeup equally large, Rochefort, concealed behind a screen the whole while, smiles. They embrace, murmuring of artful treason, as Lester cuts once again to the water reddened by Rochefort’s wounded hand.
That this shot dissolves into the surreally comic image of a l7th-century “submersible” breaking the surface of the English Channel does not alter the drift events—and filmstyle—are taking. Increasingly, and with the beauty of aesthetic and moral necessity, death begins to reclaim its own in this narrative by Lester out of Dumas. Characters formerly separated by the sprawl of history and Dumas’s teeming invention are drawn together in fatal compacts. Planchet, d’Artagnan’s servant, a terrified wheezing fat man ill-made for travel of any sort, heaves on horseback across a richly flowered field; moments later the man he is riding to meet and warn lies dead at his feet, sprinkled with well-wishers’ posies, his stomach showing through a gap in his fine clothes with boyish and unaccustomed gaucherie. Foppish Aramis, ever making flip references to his preparations for the priesthood, gratuitously slides his blade between the ribs of a winded and disarmed enemy, then closes the fellow’s eyes and makes the Sign of the Cross. The Musketeers occupy a shattered bastion in no-man’s-land at LaRochelle because they need to have a private chat and they’re safer in the middle of a battle where the Cardinal’s spies and Milady’s tricks can’t reach them; they play games with bombs and loaves of bread, and let the enemy obligingly shoot the necks off their champagne bottles, and playfully graze a cannoneer’s rear with a pistol shot; but when they finally retaliate in earnest against their attackers by pushing a masonry wall down on them, the victims don’t get up to roar in comic protest.
Where all this is building, finally, is toward one of the most harrowing and beautiful climaxes I’ve witnessed in films. The ending of “a story to cure a man of love”—and perhaps romance in a larger sense—honors romantic aspiration in fiction, in filmmaking, and in life, and exacts fair payment in audience pain. Comic exceptions are not permitted, though, even here, Lester’s film does not forswear humor: grim (an arquebusier is incinerated in a haywagon set afire by his own fuse), triumphant (Porthos saving Aramis’s life with a preposterous move Aramis had once ridiculed), grotesque (d’Artagnan screaming for Constance and a nun blithely admonishing sssssshh while in the next room a murder may be taking place). There are several devastating payoffs in the last moments of the film; one I can safely mention without giving too much away—for those to whom Dumas’s plot remains unfamiliar—is d’Artagnan’s cosmically enraged, lunging duel with Rochefort, and the moment when he loses his balance, stumbles, and gasps “Oh!—”, the syllable charged with hate, frustration, the fear of failure and a sense of the comic absurdity of taking a pratfall in the midst of the most crucial action of his life; almost four hours of film have prepared for the awesome complexity of that instant on the brink—the stylistic brink The Three Musketeers, in toto, exists to define.
THE FOUR MUSKETEERS, or: The Revenge of Milady Direction: Richard Lester. Screenplay: George Macdonald Fraser, after the novel The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas. Cinematography: David Watkin. Production design: Brian Eatwell. Costumes: Yvonne Blake. Fight direction: William Hobbs. Editing: John Victor Smith. Music: Lalo Schifrin. Executive Producer: llya Salkind.
The Players: Michael York, Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, Richard Chamberlain, Faye Dunaway, Christopher Lee, Charlton Heston, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Geraldine Chaplin, Roy Kinnear, Simon Ward, Michael Gothard, Raquel Welch, Angel del Pozo, Nicole Calfan
