A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

The Wrong Man (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)

Vera Miles, Henry Fonda, and Anthony Quayle in The Wrong Man
Manny Balestrero: Henry Fonda
Rose Balestrero: Vera Miles
Frank D. O'Connor: Anthony Quayle
Det. Lt. Bowers: Harold J. Stone
Det. Matthews: Charles Cooper
Tomasini: John Heldabrand
Mama Balestrero: Esther Minciotti

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Maxwell Anderson, Angus MacPhail
Cinematography: Robert Burks
Art direction: Paul Sylbert
Film editing: George Tomasini
Music: Bernard Herrmann

Alfred Hitchcock's docudrama The Wrong Man is not so anomalous in his career as his rather portentous backlit introduction suggests: It may be based on an incident about a real Manny Balestrero, but there are lots of wrongly accused men in his movies, and this time he simply landed on one who happened to be an actual person. And Hitchcock's gravitation to the theme of undeserved punishment and consequent mental anguish (in this case Rose Balestrero's) was something we could expect from him if we knew of the trauma caused by the notorious childhood incident in which his domineering father had the local constabulary lock young Alfred in a jail cell for five minutes. The lesson learned was less "be a good boy" than "fear the cops," who loom large in many of his films. But the real novelty of The Wrong Man is its tone: There's virtually no leavening of gloom in the film by the usual Hitchcockian humor. Only at the very ending, when we are assured that Manny and Rose and the kids moved to Florida and lived happily ever after, is there any attempt to mitigate the rather oppressive quality of the black-and-white, location-shot tale of the struggling Balestreros. And anyone who knows much about the difficulty of "curing" depression, which Rose suffers from, is likely to feel a little skeptical about that. That said, it's a very good film, making especially fine use of Henry Fonda -- his only appearance for Hitchcock -- whose naturally haunted look is a perfect fit for the victimized Balestrero. Vera Miles, whom Hitchcock was grooming as a replacement for Grace Kelly after her recent elevation to Princess of Monaco, gives a convincing performance as Rose, managing to suggest that her depression was in the cards even before Manny's arrest. The realism of the Balestreros' financial struggle is also well-handled, as is the climactic revelation of the "right" man, accomplished by a double exposure in which he walks into and fills the image of Balestrero in closeup. For me, the other only false note besides the oversimplified happy ending is the invocation of religion as a cure to Manny's dilemma: Mama Balestrero's urging him to pray for strength and his gaze at a rather kitsch picture of Jesus is too swiftly followed by his deliverance. It turns a serious emotional and spiritual struggle into a cliché as old as the movies. The Wrong Man has been favorably compared to Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1956), a distinction I don't think it quite merits, but then what film does?

Death by Hanging (Nagisa Oshima, 1968)

Do-yun Yu and Akiko Koyama in Death by Hanging
R.: Do-yun Yu
Warden: Kei Sato
Education Officer: Fumio Watanabe
District Attorney: Hosei Kamatsu
Doctor: Rokko Toura
Chaplain: Ishiro Ishida
Chief of Guards: Masao Adachi
Sister: Akiko Koyama
Narrator: Nagisa Oshima

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Screenplay: Michinori Fukao, Mamoru Sasaki, Tsutomu Tamura, Nagisa Oshima
Cinematography: Yasuhiro Yoshioka
Music: Hikaru Hayashi

It's becoming clearer to me that Nagisa Oshima is one of the great artists of the second half of the century whom nobody has heard of. That's an exaggeration, of course: Lots of cinéastes and students of Japanese film obviously know Oshima's work, but ordinary people who pride themselves on their knowledge of Kurosawa or Mizoguchi or Ozu often know little about him. Maybe it's because Oshima doesn't lend himself to easy description: You can't take any one of his films as representative of the style and content of any of the others. There's a vast difference between the harrowing upperclass family drama The Ceremony (1971) and the poignant account of an abused child's initiation into crime, Boy (1969), or between the scathing look at rootless Japanese young people in Cruel Story of Youth (1960) and what is probably Oshima's best-known film in the West, the sexually explicit In the Realm of the Senses (1976). His willingness to experiment has tagged Oshima as the Japanese Jean-Luc Godard, but he seems to me more the heir to the great modernists of the early-to-mid-20th century: Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, Brecht, Genet. Certainly Death by Hanging has been singled out as "Brechtian" for its outrageous transformation of politically charged subject matter, capital punishment, into something like tragic farce. It's also "Kafkaesque" in its lampoon of bureaucrats. But mostly it's an audacious transformation of a polemic into an uproarious and finally sad satire. The protagonist is called "R.," which immediately brings to mind Kafka's "K."  He has raped and murdered two young women and is about to hang in the Japanese prison's scrupulously neat death house. But the hanging doesn't take: R. simply doesn't die, and in the ensuing confusion, none of the prison officials knows what to do. There's a flurry of arguments about whether, having survived the hanging, he's even still R., his soul presumably having left the body after the execution. Things grow still more problematic after R. emerges from a post-hanging coma and doesn't remember who he is. Can they hang him again? Much of this hysteria is over-the-top funny, especially the determination of the Education Officer, played with farcical broadness by Fumio Watanabe, to restore R.'s memory by re-creating his past and his crimes. He was the son of poor Korean immigrants, and the satire shifts away from capital punishment to the Japanese treatment of Koreans, as the prison staff voices some of the worst prejudices and stereotypes that the Japanese have of Koreans. Eventually, the Education Officer, trying to re-create one of R.'s crimes, murders a young woman himself. But by that time, the film has departed from any resemblance to actuality into symbolic fantasy. It's a very theatrical film in the sense that even when it departs from the confines of the death house, where most of it takes place, and explores the outside world, talk dominates action. But where that might have been a strike against the film, it adds to its claustrophobic quality, the feeling of being plunged deeply into an absurd but entirely recognizable situation. Maybe that should be called "Oshimaesque."