3 Hunger (1966)

****
Country: Denmark-Norway-Sweden
Director: Henning Carlsen

One doesn't have to be mad just because one is sensitive. There are people who live on trifles and die because of a harsh word.


The main character and narrator of the Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun's 1890 novel Hunger is one of the great outsider figures of literature, ranking in importance right alongside Dostoevsky's Underground Man, Kafka's Gregor Samsa, and Camus's Meursault. In the 1966 film version of the novel, this character, who is unnamed in the novel, is called Pontus and is played by the Swedish actor Per Oscarsson. In adapting Hamsun's book for film, Henning Carlsen, who directed the movie, and his cowriter, the Danish novelist and playwright Peter Seeberg, faced a number of daunting challenges. Yet in the end they succeeded in the nearly impossible task of creating a film that preserves the themes and atmosphere of the book and is at the same time fully cinematic.

0 Black Angel (1946)

***
Country: US
Director: Roy William Neill

Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968) was an American author who after writing several unsuccessful literary novels in the 1920s and 30s turned to genre writing and, sometimes publishing under the pseudonyms William Irish and George Hopley, became a prolific writer in the thriller and mystery genres. His eerie, convoluted tales, whose surprise endings were often based on far-fetched psychological premises, proved to be ideal fodder for the movies of the 1940s and early 50s, and according to Wikipedia more screenplays for films noirs (apparently using a pretty broad definition of the term) were adapted from his works than from those of any other writer. As a failed writer of serious literature, he reportedly had little respect for these commercial novels and short stories, considering them little more than potboilers. But he was unquestionably successful at producing them and earned a comfortable living from their sale. Robert Siodmak's early film noir The Phantom Lady was based on one of his novels as was The Leopard Man, one of the Val Lewton horror films. In the late 1960s François Truffaut made two movies adapted from his work, The Bride Wore Black and Mississippi Mermaid. Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window was an elaboration on Woolrich's short story "It Had to Be Murder."

In 1946 Universal released a nifty little psychological noir called Black Angel, based on Woolrich's 1943 novel of the same title. The film is essentially a murder mystery that centers on the killing of a blackmailing floozie named Mavis Marlowe. The two main characters of the film are a former nightclub singer, Cathy Bennett (June Vincent)—whose husband, Mavis's former lover and one of her blackmail victims, is arrested for the murder, then convicted on circumstantial evidence and sentenced to die—and Mavis's ex-husband, the alcoholic songwriter Martin Blair (Dan Duryea). Cathy is convinced that her husband, whom she still loves even though he was cheating on her with Mavis, is innocent and persuades Martin to join forces with her to find the real murderer. As the execution date draws nearer, the two locate intriguing clues that at first seem to be drawing them closer to the real killer but always end up leading them down blind alleys.

The most promising clues have to do with the shady owner of a nightclub, Marko (Peter Lorre), another of Mavis's blackmail victims. To get more information about Marko, Cathy and Martin audition for, and get, a job performing at Marko's club as a singer and piano accompanist. A great deal of the action takes place at the club, and highlights include their humorous audition—a bizarre touch of black comedy in an otherwise somber movie—a couple of good song performances, some imaginative camera work in the eye-poppingly elaborate nightclub set, and a very suspenseful sequence with Cathy trying to burgle the safe in Marko's private office before he returns.

The cast is uniformly good. The attractive, sweet-natured Vincent is a bit lacking in charisma but still makes a determined heroine and is quite a good singer too. This was the biggest movie role she ever got, but she did a great deal of work in television in the 1950s and 60s. Lorre, of course, is a reliably sinister presence. Broderick Crawford, in one of his first roles after military service in WW II, plays the detective investigating the murder, and his performance is a revelation. He acts with uncharacteristic restraint, giving the quietest, most controlled, and most sympathetic performance I've ever seen by him. This movie makes it clear that Crawford's physique and vocal timbre resulted in typecasting that severely limited the range of characters he was allowed to play. Best of all is Duryea, whose atypically introspective performance is quite affecting. Duryea made a career of playing despicable rats in movies like Scarlet Street and Winchester '73, and he was great in those roles. But this film makes it clear that, like Crawford, he was capable of much more. He succinctly underplays his part and convincingly comes off as a nice guy. He is in a sense the real victim of the movie—a hapless loser whose creativity is stifled by his alcoholism, a man in love first with a woman who despises and exploits him, then as he falls in love with Cathy, with a woman who cannot return his affection.

This was the last film directed by Roy William Neill (he died in 1946), best known for Universal's Sherlock Holmes series with Basil Rathbone. Like the best of those movies, Black Angel shows him as a craftsman-like director capable of finding and revealing the strengths and subtleties in his material and especially suited to atmospheric stories of crime and suspense. If he had lived longer, he might well have become one of the more dependable directors of the American noir movement of the late 1940s.

0 Richard Boleslawski's Les Misérables: An Exemplary Hollywood Literary Adaptation

When I saw Richard Boleslawski's Les Misérables (1935) recently I was mighty impressed. Nominated for an Oscar as best picture, the film was called by David Thomson "the best version of Hugo's novel," and Dave at Goodfella's Movie Blog, who is doing a year-by-year countdown of the best movies of each year, named this his own pick as the best movie of 1935, citing many of the things about it that I found praiseworthy. The movie simplifies Victor Hugo's massive novel about the ex-convict Jean Valjean and his relentless pursuit by the obsessive Inspector Javert but retains most of the novel's essential themes and still manages to cover a lot of narrative ground in under two hours. In some ways—especially the richer development of its two main characters and its overall concision—it even betters the massively detailed, nearly five-hour long French version directed by Raymond Bernard that was made just the year before and seems in comparison rather unnecessarily drawn out, with its far slower pacing and elaborations of tangential plot lines that divert attention from the conflict between Valjean and Javert.

The movie opens with Jean Valjean (Fredric March) in court, being sentenced to ten years' hard labor in the galleys for stealing a loaf of bread for his sister's children. His heartfelt plea to the unsympathetic judge about being unable to find work anywhere and the inhumanity of letting children starve must have had a powerful resonance with Depression-era audiences. At the same time, Inspector Javert (Charles Laughton), the son of criminals, is receiving his commission—but, because of his questionable background, only through the kindness of a sympathetic official. Ironically, his response to this act of kindness is to systematically purge any manifestation of human kindness from himself. Javert swears always to uphold the letter of the law, becoming an emotionless human law enforcement machine. He is assigned to the galley where Valjean is serving his sentence, and it is here that the two become lifelong antagonists.

Valjean is finally released a broken and disillusioned man. Shunned by society, he is given shelter one night by a kindly and trusting bishop (Cedric Hardwicke). When Valjean steals the bishop's silver plate and absconds in the night, he is caught by the local gendarmes. But the bishop insists that he gave Valjean the silver and even adds to the takings a pair of silver candlesticks. This act of faith and kindness by the bishop transforms Valjean's life. Those silver candlesticks become the emblem of forgiveness, trust, and the bishop's admonition to Valjean always to treat others with kindness and dignity. Valjean keeps those candlesticks with him always, and they are conspicuously displayed in many scenes throughout the movie.

The rest of the movie follows Valjean through several successive stages of his life. At each stage a chance encounter with Javert forces him to flee and assume a new identity, leading to a new life. (As an ex-convict, he has broken the conditions of his release by not reporting to the police and is considered a fugitive who will be returned to prison if caught.) He becomes first the prosperous owner of a glass factory. Then as the surrogate father of an orphaned child he has adopted, Cosette (Rochelle Hudson), he pretends to be a gardener at the convent where she is being educated, and finally in Paris impersonates a rich retired merchant. It is here that Cosette becomes involved with student radicals pressing, among other things, for prison reform during the 1832 uprising. By this point Javert is a member of the secret police ferreting out revolutionaries and again discovers Valjean.

At the end of the movie, Valjean must resolve several personal and ethical dilemmas. He plans to use the disorder of the rebellion as an opportunity to escape with Cosette to England and finally be free of Javert. But Cosette wants to stay behind with Marius, the leader of the student revolutionaries, with whom she has fallen in love. Valjean must face the truth about his true feelings for the now-grown Cosette, and it is clear that these are more than just fatherly. He makes two difficult decisions in rapid succession. He saves Marius from the gendarmes on the barricades rather than using the occasion to rid himself of a romantic rival. And when given the opportunity to kill his nemesis Javert with impunity, he lets him go free instead.

In Valjean and Javert, we have two men of a strikingly similar mindset. Both are men of strong principles who stay true to those principles in every situation despite their personal feelings. The conflict of the story arises from the fact that those two sets of principles stand in direct opposition to each other. Valjean represents tolerance, forgiveness, and adaptability of rules to circumstances. Javert represents inflexibility, obsessive pursuit of the guilty, and the merciless punishment of transgressors. Each is in a sense the product of his experiences. The bishop's treatment of Valjean has instilled in the embittered ex-convict a deep-rooted humanity, whereas Javert's shame at his origins has caused him to repress all feelings of humanity, transforming him into an inhumane fanatic.

One of the reasons Les Misérables succeeds so well at examining the paradoxical relationship between these two men is the performances of the two leads. Laughton has the smaller and clearly less sympathetic role. Yet he makes the character of Javert far more than the two-dimensional martinet he might have been. Psychologically, his Javert is an example of the type of individual attracted to totalitarianism: In his slavish devotion to conformity and rectitude, he voluntarily surrenders freedom of thought to a higher authority in order to escape the responsibility and risk of making his own decisions. His actions are always reflexive and unquestioning.

Laughton conveys the unyielding self-control Javert must exert to suppress all feelings of empathy for those he pursues and the enormous personal cost—the forgoing of any possibility of meaningful emotional growth—of adhering so single-mindedly to a set of principles. And he suggests that Javert's almost pathological need to control criminality is actually an attempt to destroy in others what he regards with dread as potential flaws in his own character—a sort of pre-emptive strike against self-corruption. His Javert is outwardly a self-assured professional dedicated to the law. But inwardly he is a deeply insecure man equally afraid of both his baser and his finer impulses and terrified of the dangerous possibility of loss of control over himself. That Laughton was in real life a gay man living and working in an environment where he was obliged to conceal his sexual orientation adds an extra dimension to the element of emotional repression in his interpretation of Javert.

Laughton, an actor prone to overemoting (David Thomson attributes to him "some of the most recklessly flamboyant characterizations the screen has ever seen"), gives one of his most subdued performances. It is amazing to think that in the same year this picture was released, he also played the Jeeves-like Ruggles in Ruggles of Red Gap and the nefarious Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty. In temperament his Javert falls somewhere between those two characters, balancing the unfailing self-control of Ruggles with the cold hatefulness of Captain Bligh.

Even more impressive is Fredric March as Jean Valjean. The more I see of March in his movies of the 1930s, the more convinced I am that he is the pre-eminent American movie actor of that decade. He is expert at both comedy—in films like Lubitsch's Design for Living and Wellman's Nothing Sacred (interestingly, he turned down It Happened One Night)—and drama. In serious films like this one, his Oscar-winning turn in Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Anthony Adverse, and especially A Star Is Born, he conveys depth, sensitivity, focus, and superior modulation of technique without ever becoming self-consciously actorly. His artistry is closer to the surface than in purely naturalistic, instinctive actors of the time like Spencer Tracy or Clark Gable—not surprising in a trained stage actor who alternated between films and the theater for much of his long career. But nothing about his movie performances ever seems stilted.

March portrays Valjean as a character whose personality evolves during the course of the movie as the result of his experiences. His Valjean is a man who begins with an innate sense of decency and caring (you can see this in his incomprehension of the impersonal cruelty of the law in the opening sequence), only to see those qualities nearly crushed by his treatment at the hands of a soul-destroying social and legal system. Yet those qualities are never quite extinguished even by his dehumanizing experiences in a brutal penal environment. The bishop's act of kindness is enough to rekindle in him his vestigial humanity, setting him on a course of lifelong growth.

March's interpretation of Valjean really makes you sense the continuous refinement and ennobling of the character's personality. As Valjean refuses to let any of the setbacks he suffers destroy the sensitivity at his core, March shows you the character growing stronger and more whole year by year. It is by any measure an extraordinary performance, the best by an actor I've seen in any American film released that year: Just when you think the character of Valjean is fully defined, March adds yet another layer.

Besides those two key performances, Les Misérables has several other things to recommend it. For one thing, it was photographed by perhaps the greatest of all Hollywood cinematographers, Gregg Toland, a man with one of the most identifiable visual styles of the studio era. His accomplished use of highly defined light and shadow, one of the constants of his style, is used here not for stylized effect, as it is in Citizen Kane, but rather for a softer look that realistically simulates natural lighting, particularly in indoor scenes and in outdoor scenes that take place at night. Toland does, however, go for a more emphatic, almost expressionistic look in one sequence in which Valjean is pursued through the sewers of Paris, a sequence reminiscent of the famous sewer chase in The Third Man but which predates that film by nearly 15 years. Toland received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for his work in Les Misérables and probably was set to win. But he unexpectedly lost to Hal Mohr for A Midsummer Night's Dream, a write-in candidate—the only time a write-in candidate has ever won an Oscar.

The director was Richard Boleslawski, who died at the age of 47 just two years after this movie was released. Born in Poland, Boleslawski studied acting at the Moscow Art Theater and was for several years its assistant director before coming to New York in the 1920s, where he directed plays on Broadway and taught the Stanislavksi style of acting he had learned in Russia (forerunner of Method acting) to students like Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. He came to Hollywood in 1929 and directed all kinds of movies but especially glossy, big-budget pictures like The Painted Veil with Greta Garbo and The Garden of Allah with Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer. He also made comedies like Operator 13 with Marion Davies, the delightful screwball comedy Theodora Goes Wild with Irene Dunne, and his final film, The Last of Mrs. Cheney, with an all-star MGM cast that included William Powell, Robert Montgomery, and Joan Crawford.

With such a varied output, Boleslawski would never be considered an auteur by devotees of that concept and isn't even mentioned in Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema. But he does an exemplary studio-style job on Les Misérables, forging into a professional if slightly impersonal whole the diverse technical and artistic elements necessary for a successful literary adaptation in 1930s Hollywood—production design, acting, staging, and rather formalistic composition. Toland's trademark deep-focus photography is little in evidence here. Boleslawski prefers to use focus to emphasize people and objects in the foreground. He is adept at action sequences like the nighttime escape of Valjean and Cosette in a horse-drawn cart with Javert and a group of horsemen in pursuit, as well as intimate scenes and conversations. Especially striking is his staging of scenes of the uprising in the streets of Paris near the end of the movie. These have the complicated composition, spatial organization, and choreographed chaos of paintings on similar subjects by Delacroix.

The history of 1930s Hollywood contains many examples of adaptations of classic novels by European authors—movies like David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, Wuthering Heights—the ultimate prestige project of the Hollywood studios of the time. Les Misérables is in all respects an exemplar of this kind of movie and easily holds its own with the best of the genre. There is nothing stodgy about the movie. It tells a thoughtful, compelling story in a dynamic way, with brisk pacing (especially in the first section, with its rapid succession of concise scenes that quickly propel the movie through ten years of narrative), meticulous production values, and forceful performances by two of the major actors of the 1930s at the top of their form.

0 No Sympathy for This Devil

Turning a short story into a feature-length movie can be even trickier than adapting a novel. Unlike the novel, the short story is a compact piece of writing with all its elements compressed and, as Edgar Allan Poe defined it, designed to create a single impression. Short stories tend to have a limited number of characters, their concise plots telescoped into a few brief scenes, sometimes as few as one or two scenes. So the task of adapting a short story for the screen is largely one of expansion, of elaborating on what's already there by adding more details and often entirely new elements to create a fuller and more complex plot.

One common way of doing this is to use the original story as a framing device and invent an entirely new middle explaining how the situation described in the story came about. This approach was especially popular in the 1940s, with that decade's fondness for flashback plots that begin by showing the conclusion of the movie first. It was used in The Killers (1946), a brilliant film noir based on the story by Hemingway, and in My Foolish Heart (1949), based on J. D. Salinger's story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut," the only one of his works ever filmed. No wonder Salinger hated the movie, since 90% of it was the creation of the screenwriter, who turned Salinger's bleak story of post-World War II suburban frustration and alcoholism into a sentimental wartime romance with a happy ending.

The 1941 film version of Stephen Vincent Benét's O. Henry Prize-winning short story "The Devil and Daniel Webster" (originally released under the title All That Money Can Buy but now generally referred to by the story's title) eschewed the flashback approach and stuck with the chronological structure of the story. Set in the 1840s, it is about Jabez Stone, an unlucky New Hampshire farmer who in a moment of exasperation impulsively blurts out that his misfortunes are "enough to make a man want to sell his soul to the devil . . . for two cents." When a mysterious stranger appears and offers to take him up on this offer, Jabez signs a "contract" in blood and sees his bad luck turn to good. When the contract comes due in seven years, Stone panics and turns to the renowned orator and statesman Daniel Webster for help.

The first half of Benét's story is quite sketchy, almost a summary of events that happen over those seven years. The second half is one long, fully developed scene of Daniel Webster demanding a jury trial for Stone and getting it. The movie kept this basic plot, using the diabolical trial as the dramatic concluding sequence. To get a 107-minute movie from a story little more than ten pages long, the screenwriter, Dan Totheroh, did the conventional thing—to embellish the plot with details of his own creation. The plot he devised remained faithful to the spirit of the story but amplified its nature and focus in significant ways and gave German-trained director William Dieterle the opportunity to fully exercise his considerable visual storytelling skills.

The movie emphasizes the essential nature of farm life: how the success or failure of a farmer is closely connected to the success or failure of his farm and so often determined by natural forces beyond his control. When the film opens, Jabez Stone's farm is mortgaged to a greedy money lender named Miser Stevens, and the mortgage payment is due. Stone, who doesn't have the money to make the payment, intends to use products from the farm to barter for an extension. But everything goes wrong for him. A prize piglet he plans to offer to Miser Stevens breaks its leg; he drops a sack of grain seed in the mud and it splits, spilling the seed and ruining it.

It is obvious that the economic problems of farmers and their helplessness in the face of bankers and mortgages have been added to the plot to make it more timely. When the movie was released in 1941, the country was just coming out of the Great Depression. This period in American history had begun not much more than a decade earlier with widespread agrarian economic disaster caused by crop failure and the massive amount of debt owed by farmers to lenders and lending institutions. Audiences of the time would have been well aware of this recent situation, and the realization that these are the very problems that drive Jabez to sell his soul to the devil must have resonated powerfully with them.

After Stone's pact with the devil, which occurs in April, he has enough money to pay off his entire mortgage and buy seed for a new crop. Stone's good fortune is signaled by a striking montage of springtime fertility reminiscent of those idealized views of collective farms coming out of Russia in the 1920s and 30s. In rapid succession we see simple shots of wheat being sown, growing, maturing, and ripening, along with shots of farm animals with their young—a group of chicks following a hen, newborn piglets suckling. And his young wife Mary (Anne Shirley), a sweet-natured but plain-looking and modest woman, announces that she is pregnant with their first child.

While Stone seems to have extraordinarily good luck, his neighbors seem to have extraordinarily bad luck. A freak storm late in the growing season wipes out their crops but leaves his fields untouched. So abundant is his crop that he hires his neighbors to harvest it. The sense of power produced by this ostensible act of charity initiates a marked change in Jabez Stone's personality. He becomes arrogant and greedy. He exploits his neighbors by lending them money at crippling rates of interest. He refuses to join the new Grange they have founded to pressure Congress into extending bankruptcy laws to farmers to protect them from predatory lenders like Miser Stevens and now Jabez Stone himself. He becomes a shallow social climber who goes fox hunting like a landed English aristocrat. He builds an ostentatious new mansion and moves into it without his neglected wife and disgusted mother (Jane Darwell), who prefer to stay on at the family's simple little farmhouse.

Not only does Stone lose his humanity, but he also loses his religion. Incidents added to the plot by Totheroh show him breaking, either directly or indirectly, nearly every one of the ten commandments of his Protestant faith. The God he now worships is money, which at this time was not the paper bills of today but minted gold coins (in a way, graven images). An extremely attractive and openly erotic woman named Belle (Simone Simon), clearly an emissary of the devil, mysteriously shows up as nursemaid to Stone's newborn son, and it is obvious that she quickly becomes his mistress. Jabez stops going to church, preferring to stay at home on Sunday with Belle playing cards and gambling with his dissolute cronies. He covets his neighbors' land and soon acquires it, symbolically stealing it through his money-lending. His formerly respectful attitude toward his mother becomes rudeness and ridicule of her religious faith. She is especially offended by his repeated use of the oath "Consarn it," an obvious euphemism for "Goddam it." (Neither Belle nor the mother appears in the story.)

But even with all these potent thematic elements, it is Walter Huston as the devil who dominates the movie. In Benét's story he is described only as a "soft-spoken, dark-dressed" man who "smiled with his teeth." Huston takes this terse description and runs with it, creating an innocuous-looking character neatly dressed in a dark suit and tweed hat, always smiling, always speaking in a gentle voice, but somehow exuding quiet menace. He is less a threatening demon than a mischievous leprechaun secretly amused by his invisible power over humans, confident that his inducements are too tempting for most humans to resist. His role, in truth a supporting one (even though he gets top billing and received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for best actor), is still the most prominent one in the movie from the sheer force of his presence. He regularly visits Jabez and frequently shows up in the background, nodding and smiling merrily in crowd scenes and scratching his bearded chin. (The first time he appears, he introduces himself as Dan Scratch.)

Huston is also prominently featured in the movie's most visually exciting sequences. When Jabez, standing in his barn, makes that crack about selling his soul to the devil for two cents, he opens his hand and finds himself holding two coins. At that moment the wall of the barn seems to open up and becomes flooded with brilliant light. Slowly the form of a well-dressed man scratching his chin emerges from the light, walks up to Jabez, introduces himself, and holds out a business card, which promptly bursts into flames in his hand. It is Huston. Later in the year at the harvest dance, he shows up as the grimacing fiddler, manically sawing away at his instrument faster and faster while Jabez and Belle whirl in a frenzied dance and in the house Mary Stone is delivering her child. (At this point I should mention Bernard Herrmann's Oscar-winning score which, like Joseph August's equally brilliant lighting and photography and Robert Wise's editing, contributes immeasurably to the picture.)

Huston also turns up when Jabez invites the whole town to a housewarming party at his gaudy new mansion. Nobody else comes except Mary, who is immediately turned away by Belle. "You're in my house," Belle says to her. When Jabez walks to the window to look for people arriving, he sees an eerily silent horde of the damned from hell lurking outside. As he walks away from the window, he turns around to find the damned crowding around the lavish buffet laid out in the dining room and the devil sitting in a chair by the fireplace.

Mr. Scratch has come to remind Jabez that the seven years of his contract are nearly up. As he and Jabez sit across from each other, a large moth flutters from the devil's pocket and lands on Jabez. "Neighbor Stone, help me!" a tiny voice pleads. It is the voice of Miser Stevens. Huston explains that he was another client and that the moth is his soul. This incident has been transposed from early in Benét's story and is a clear allusion to the attraction of moths to flame. In fact, fire is a recurring motif in the movie, from the devil's calling card, to the indoor scenes that take place before open fireplaces, to the destruction by fire of the grand mansion at the end of the movie. Huston reaches out, scoops up the moth, and wraps it in a handkerchief. When Jabez begs for an extension of his contract, Huston says he might consider it . . . if Jabez will deliver him the soul of his young son. (Is this a parallel to the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, but intended to test Jabez's allegiance to the devil?) Killing is just about the only commandment Jabez has not yet broken, but this suggestion is too much even for him.

And Huston shares the spotlight in that famous trial sequence when Daniel Webster (Edward Arnold) argues for Jabez Stone before a "jury of the damned" chosen by the devil. Webster's chief argument is that as an American, Jabez Stone is entitled to freedom, and that for the devil to claim him would be a violation of that freedom. This leads to the most stinging bit of dialogue in the movie, taken directly from the story and still relevant today. When Webster calls the devil a "foreign prince," the devil takes exception: "Who calls me a foreign prince?" he asks. "Well, I never heard of the dev—of your claiming American citizenship," says Daniel Webster. "And who with better right?" the devil replies. "When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on her deck. . . . I am merely an honest American."

As a studio product of the 1940s and with its strong element of patriotic Americana (although to be fair, this comes from the story and is actually downplayed for the film), the movie's outcome is never seriously in doubt. On its own, The Devil and Daniel Webster is a very entertaining movie, a narrative and visual treat that should please anyone interested in the best motion pictures of the American studio era. But for those interested in literature as well as film, and in the process of adapting literature for film, its interest is more than cinematic. The movie follows the structure of the story respectfully and yet finds ways to expand it to feature length that are equally respectful. Little that I have described, aside from the trial and a very few details, can be found in the story, yet the movie is wholly consistent with the spirit and intent of its source material. It is a true exemplar of the tricky craft of transforming a great short story into an outstanding movie.

0 Hiroshima, Mon Amour: The Necessity of Remembering

Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour—along with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless—is one of the three films that in 1959 launched the French New Wave movement in cinema. Although lumped together as New Wave films, each has a distinct character that expresses the personal vision of its director, an illustration of the auteur theory the New Wavers believed in so ardently. But as different from each other as these movies are, what they all have in common is the way they take the conventional elements of film narrative and synthesize them in unconventional ways—if you will, the way they take the language of movies and rearrange its syntax in unexpected and inventive ways.

Truffaut's The 400 Blows is in style the most conventional of the three. Godard's Breathless is more daring in its startling modulations of tempo: uptempo passages of rapid action filled with jump cuts are juxtaposed with mid-tempo passages of long, fluid tracking shots and slow, nearly static passages consisting largely of lengthy conversations between Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Of these three seminal films, Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour is the most innovative departure from cinematic conventions and the most highly stylized.

The movie concerns a French actress (she is never named) played by Emmanuelle Riva, who is in Hiroshima, Japan, to play a nurse in a movie about the aftermath of the nuclear bombing of the city, and the brief romance—two nights and one day—she has with a Japanese architect (also never named) played by Eiji Okada. In the first section of the movie, Resnais, at the time a well-known maker of documentary films, creates a long montage composed of several elements: tight close-ups of the intertwined limbs and torsos of Riva and Okada, archival newsreel-style footage of the ruined city (along with what appears to be some re-creations, possibly intended to be from the movie Riva is making), documentary shots of the victims of the bombing—burned, maimed, and deformed from birth defects as a result of the radiation—more documentary shots of the historical museum and its exhibits of the effects of the bombing on the city and its inhabitants, and shots of the modern city taken from a moving vehicle.

During this section of the movie, Riva narrates in voice-over the horrifying details of the bombing, which were followed in the days afterward by spontaneous demonstrations by the residents of Hiroshima, in which she says they expressed their "anger against the inequality advanced by one people over another . . . by certain races against other races . . . by certain classes against other classes." These sentiments, taken with the scarifying images of the devastated city and the horribly mutilated victims of the bombing, leave no doubt about the anti-war and anti-nuclear weapons sentiments of Resnais and Marguerite Duras, who wrote both the screenplay and the novel on which it is based.

It is only well into the movie that the camera finally pulls back to reveal the faces of Riva and Okada; until this point they have existed only as isolated body parts and disembodied voices without identity. This second section of the film, which begins around daybreak, concentrates on the romance between its two main characters, and gradually something resembling a plot begins to emerge. The next morning they breakfast, bathe, dress, and leave the hotel together—she in her costume, a nurse's uniform—for the movie set, where it is her last day of filming. Later that day they return to the hotel, and during this third section of the film we learn from their pillow talk much more about the two characters.

From this point on, the focus of the movie becomes Riva's character. Earlier that morning, just after she got out of bed but while Okada was still in bed, she walked back into the room and saw him lying stretched out on the bed. Just for an instant we saw, from her point of view, another man stretched out in the same position, this time clothed and with what appeared to be blood on him. Now as the two lovers spend their last day together in the hotel room, we begin to learn more about Riva's past as she tells Okada about herself, her reminiscences initiated by the confession that she once had a nervous breakdown.

Scenes from the present in the hotel room alternate with scenes from Riva's past as a teenager in rural France during World War II. The scenes set in the present are presented chronologically, while the scenes from the past are presented in a non-linear, stream-of-consciousness order. The details Riva tells Okada about her past allow the viewer to piece together incrementally a complete backstory that explains her present psychological state. Resnais and Duras do this in such a way that what might have been a confusing jumble slowly becomes a coherent narrative as bits and pieces of her experiences are revealed.

Today such an approach doesn't seem all that startling; it's even seen in more artistically daring television shows. But when this movie was made, it must have seemed a radical experiment. Movies had been starting at the end of the story, using frame stories and flashbacks, and jumping back and forth in time for quite a number of years. (Think of Le Jour se Lève and Citizen Kane, the more intricate screenplays of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, or any of a number of movies from the 1940s.) But such shifts were carefully cued to viewers by devices like voice-over narration, slow fades or dissolves, the image going out of focus, montages, or superimposed titles. Hiroshima, Mon Amour was perhaps the first movie to expect the viewer to follow the spontaneous stream-of-consciousness shifts of twentieth-century literature.

The character Riva plays is a fascinating and complex one. As she reveals more about herself, she becomes more agitated and more disinhibited, and we are able to see that she is a mercurial person subject to sudden moodswings and that the origins of her present emotional instability lie in her wartime experiences. Her intimacy with Okada and her presence in Hiroshima have liberated buried emotions and allowed her to relate them, possibly for the very first time, to another person. Like the city of Hiroshima itself, she is still suffering the devastating aftereffects of almost unimaginable wartime trauma.

The ultimate revelations—which involve a love affair with a German soldier, his killing by the Resistance, her discovery of his body (the brief flash we saw earlier), being shunned by the villagers as a collaborator, having a nervous breakdown, and being locked in a cellar—are made to Okada that night in a tea room in the city. During this episode, the film reaches its climax when Riva becomes hysterical and begins to lose control of herself. Up to this point, Okada has been essentially a passive character, acting as a catalyst to encourage Riva to tell her story and confront the horrific memories that have had such a devastating effect on her. Now he takes an active role to prevent her from going over the edge into madness again.

In desperation, he suddenly reaches out and gives her two sharp slaps on the face. These slaps resound on the soundtrack like thunderclaps. and at that moment all the ambient sounds of the tea room—the noises from the kitchen, the conversations of the other patrons, the juke box, the street noises from outside—are suddenly heard at quite loud volume. We realize that during the last parts of this sequence the only thing on the soundtrack has been Riva's voice. In a kind of aural equivalent of the subjective camera technique, where the camera shows the viewer what a character is seeing, the soundtrack has taken on the aural subjectivity of Riva. So hypnotized has she become by the experience of finally telling her story that she has withdrawn completely into her memories. With the slaps that break her reverie, we literally hear her re-enter the present, the here and now.

The concluding section of the movie shows the aftermath of the experience in the tea room. Shattered and disoriented, Riva wanders the nighttime streets as Okada follows her. For the last day he has been imploring her not to return to Paris but to stay in Hiroshima with him, and she has consistently refused. Around dawn she returns to her hotel room, where Okada finally catches up with her. Here she confesses to him that losing him would have as profound an effect on her as losing her first lover did; in a way, her emotional state has taken on a circular aspect, her emotional past merging with her emotional present.

In the enigmatic final scene, the couple are finally given identities of a sort: he says that he will call her Nevers (the name of the French village she came from), and she says that she will call him Hiroshima. Is it possible that the emotional gulf she has placed between them is at last closing? Whatever else this exchange may mean and whatever it may foreshadow for the future of the couple, it clearly indicates that at last they grasp the point Resnais and Duras have been aiming for: that we are—each of us—our own past, that our present identities are inseparable from our past experiences.

To say that Hiroshima, Mon Amour is about recovering repressed memories would, I think, be an oversimplification. It is more accurately about finding memories that have been lost, about rediscovering memories that have been forgotten. "Like you," Riva says to Okada at one point, "I have struggled with all my might not to forget. . . . I forgot." In the years since the events of her girlhood, Riva's traumatic memories have been assimilated and relegated to the background. But the experience of being in Hiroshima, where the reality of the past is inescapable, compels her to see that the same is true of her own life, that her past will always coexist with her present. "Why deny the obvious necessity of remembering?" she asks.

This is why the idiosyncratic style of Hiroshima, Mon Amour is not just a contrived stunt. Resnais's blending of documentary and fictional film and his non-linear and non-logical intermingling of events from Riva's present and her past replicate the subject and theme of the movie. Whereas Truffaut and Godard looked to American movies for inspiration, Resnais looked to literature. Hiroshima, Mon Amour is a very conceptual and very literary movie. It attempts to translate the literary techniques of the writers of the French nouveau roman movement, with their extreme authorial subjectivity and stream-of-consciousness fusion of past and present, into cinematic terms. Alain Robbe-Grillet, who wrote the screenplay for Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1961), was the initiator of the movement, and Marguerite Duras one of its best-known practitioners. There is moreover a history of preoccupation with the nature of time and memory in both French philosophy (Henri Bergson) and French literature (Marcel Proust).

Hiroshima, Mon Amour was not the first film in which Resnais explored the way the past coexists with the present and constantly exerts influence on it. His best-known earlier documentaries Night and Fog (1955) and Toute la mémoire du Monde (1956) explored variations of this theme: the former in its examination of the Holocaust as viewed from a contemporary perspective, the latter in its examination of the Bibliothèque Nationale of France in its role as repository of the history of written knowledge. Nor would Hiroshima, Mon Amour be the last film in which Resnais dealt with the complicated relationship between past and present, forgetting and remembering.

With its unexpected shifts in time and place, tone, emphasis, and style, Hiroshima, Mon Amour is not a movie to watch casually. The only way to watch it is to surrender yourself to the film, to let it carry you along until you become acclimated to its style and rhythms and its story begins to emerge. This is not a filmmaking approach I would care to see often, particularly in less capable hands than those of Resnais. Occasionally both the forcefulness of the style and the sometimes overwrought pitch of the narration do threaten to overwhelm the emotions expressed in the story. But it is a unique movie, a real one-of-a-kind, a movie which is not only part of a historically important movement in film, but which has in its own right had great influence that can still be seen in movies today. As such, it should be watched by anyone seriously interested in film as an art form.

0 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

William Faulkner is one of the great American writers of the twentieth century. So it is not surprising that from the early days of sound pictures, his works have attracted the attention of moviemakers. One of the earliest pictures adapted from his work was The Story of Temple Drake (1933), from his novel Sanctuary. In 1949 Clarence Brown directed the film version of Faulkner's just-published novel Intruder in the Dust, a superb picture, among the best American films from that year that I've seen. In the 1950's and 60's Faulkner again attracted the attention of prominent directors: Douglas Sirk (The Tarnished Angels, 1958, adapted from Pylon), Martin Ritt (The Long, Hot Summer, 1958, and The Sound and the Fury, 1959), Tony Richardson (Sanctuary, 1961, a remake of The Story of Temple Drake), Mark Rydell (The Reivers, 1969, from Faulkner's recently published posthumous novel). An excellent version of "Barn Burning," the short story that forms part of the plot of The Long, Hot Summer, was adapted by Horton Foote (To Kill a Mockingbird) and filmed in 1980 as a short feature for the PBS series The American Short Story, with Tommy Lee Jones as the sociopathic Abner Snopes.

It is well known that Faulkner lived in California and worked as a studio screenwriter in Hollywood in the 1930's and 40's. (One of the characters in Barton Fink is said to have been based on Faulkner.) He worked on many screenplays (sometimes uncredited), notably two for Howard Hawks, To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946). As a writer of prose fiction, Faulkner was unconventional and often experimental, and his style was at times quite cinematic. A good example is the short story "Dry September," published in 1932 in his first collection of stories. Its plot is fragmented into short scenes with sudden shifts in place and time, some separate sections even occurring simultaneously in the cross-cutting technique of cinema, in contrast to the linear and continuous plot of the typical short story.

In 1972 the movie that Leonard Maltin has called "the best-ever screen presentation of [Faulkner's] work," Tomorrow, based on a short story and scripted by Horton Foote, was released to excellent reviews but little other attention. I've wanted to see this movie since it was first released, but I never had the opportunity until it was recently shown on the Turner Classic Movies channel. I can now confirm that the critical kudos the film received on its initial release was well deserved.

The director of Tomorrow was Joseph Anthony, who directed six feature films beginning with The Rainmaker (1956), with Katharine Hepburn and Burt Lancaster. Tomorrow was his last movie and his least typical. Filmed by a crew of unknowns on location in Mississippi in black-and-white and not even in stereo or widescreen, it looks and feels nothing like the slick studio fare that Anthony had previously directed, but more like what today would be called an independent production. The only performer in the movie who is well known today is Robert Duvall. A veteran of dozens of television shows and a handful of small roles in films, he was not well known for his movie work at the time. (The Godfather was released the same year.) The only major movie in which he had had an important role was MASH, in which he plays the despicable Major Frank Burns. Duvall had played the lead in George Lucas's first feature, the science fiction movie THX 1138, but this was a low-budget production expanded from a short feature Lucas had made as a film student at USC and was not widely released, despite good reviews and high praise for Duvall's performance.

Other members of the cast of Tomorrow are obscure performers and in some cases appear to be non-professionals who worked in this one film only. Nonetheless the performances in the movie, by professionals and non-professionals alike, are uniformly first-rate—understated, restrained, and absolutely convincing. And Duvall's performance—with his thick Southern accent and his voice lower, more nasal, and more constricted in the throat than his normal speaking voice—is so natural that it blends unobtrusively with those of the other actors.

In both its visuals and plot Tomorrow vividly depicts Faulkner's dark view of the rural South, with the region's poverty and its casual brutality born of ignorance and of social and economic frustration. The movie begins with an act of violence. Outside a modest house at night a young couple are getting into the young man's car to elope when suddenly the girl's father bursts out of the house with a rifle. The young man aims a pistol at him but is shot dead before he can fire. The scene shifts to the jury room of the local courthouse, where the jury are deliberating the fate of the father, who has stood trial for murder. The jurors seem to agree that the victim was a scoundrel and petty criminal and that when he raised his pistol, the accused man was justified in shooting first. They seem ready to vote for a quick acquittal. But one juror, Jackson Fentry (Robert Duvall, in what is reportedly his favorite role), obstinately declares that he will never vote not guilty, and the trial results in a hung jury. The accused man has not been found guilty, but neither has he been exonerated.

The movie then flashes back a number of years to tell the story of Fentry and how he came to this stubborn and entirely symbolic decision. At this point Fentry, an uneducated Mississippi farmer, has just left his father's farm to become the winter caretaker at an isolated seasonal sawmill. On Christmas Eve, as he is leaving to visit his father for the holiday, he finds an unconscious pregnant woman collapsed in his woodpile. Fentry, a gentle, laconic man, rouses the woman, whose name he finds out is Sarah, and takes her back to the shabby cabin where he is temporarily living.

Canceling his plans to visit his father, Fentry invites Sarah (excellently played by Olga Bellin, who flawlessly projects the character's sweetness, passivity, and enervation) to stay until she is stronger and devotes himself to caring for her. Sarah reluctantly agrees to stay just until she feels better. During the next weeks a deep attachment grows between the two and Fentry persuades her to stay until the baby is born. He discovers that Sarah has been disowned by her father and brothers for marrying a man of whom they disapprove, and that her husband deserted her as soon as he learned she was pregnant. Although they share the small cabin, their relationship is never sexual. But it is clear that the two slowly come to love each other.

Fentry at last asks Sarah to marry him in a memorable sequence. One day when the weather has improved and the winter chill is relenting, Fentry asks Sarah to accompany him to the place where his employers have promised to build him a house in the spring. He has already selected the site, a lovely clearing surrounded by trees, and planned the design for the three-room house. As the two sit comfortably in the sunlight at the building site, Fentry suddenly blurts out, "Marry me, Sarah." Sarah refuses because the marriage would be bigamous. If Fentry is disappointed he certainly doesn't express his feelings in either his speech or his facial expression. His face remains as impassive as Buster Keaton's, and they simply return to the cabin and carry on as before.

A few weeks later Sarah goes into labor, and Fentry rushes to get the midwife. The delivery is successful, and the baby is a boy. But the midwife tells Fentry that she is doubtful Sarah will survive. The severely weakened Sarah, sensing that death is near, finally agrees to marry Fentry and barely makes it through the brief bedside ceremony before dying. After burying Sarah, Fentry returns to his father's farm with the boy that he loves as if her were his own. In a touching montage, we see a few idyllic years pass as Fentry and the boy, whom he names Jackson and Longstreet Fentry, grow closer and share their obvious love for each other. This is the only time in the entire movie that the stoic Fentry shows any discernible emotion.

But as Faulkner said in an interview that appeared in the Paris Review in 1956, "[Art] has no concern with peace and contentment." One day Sarah's father and brothers arrive with legal papers to claim the child. After being physically forced to give up the boy, Fentry lies immobile on the ground, no longer resisting what he must resign himself to accept as inevitable. Eventually he simply gets up and goes on about his business. In that same interview Faulkner said, "My favorite characters [in literature] . . . coped with life, didn't ask any favors, and never whined." This is exactly what Fentry does and the way he lives the rest of his life—until, that is, he is called to serve on the jury at that murder trial. Fentry knows that he can't do anything to change the past or rectify the painful injustice he suffered all those years before when he lost the boy he considered his own son. But the movie makes it clear that he has never forgotten the sorrow of that experience and that in stubbornly refusing to follow the other jurors in condemning as worthless the life of the young man who was shot that night, the otherwise powerless Fentry at last finds his own way to make one small symbolic gesture to honor the only few brief years of joy he will ever experience in his life.

As the narrator of the movie says at the end, Fentry is one of the "invincible" people who simply continue to endure "tomorrow . . . and tomorrow . . . and tomorrow." What a quietly poignant summation of a quietly poignant and movingly honest film, one that anybody interested in movies, literature, or what Faulkner called "the truth of the human heart" must see.

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The quotation "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" comes from Shakespeare's Macbeth, where it is spoken in a soliloquy by Macbeth (Act V, scene v). The fascinating Paris Review interview with William Faulkner can be found at http://www.theparisreview.com/viewinterview.php/prmMID/4954