Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/11/18

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, December 11, 2018

The Day the Earth Stood Still (Robert Wise, 1951)

Lock Martin, Michael Rennie, and Patricia Neal in The Day the Earth Stood Still

Klaatu: Michael Rennie
Helen Benson: Patricia Neal
Tom Stevens: Hugh Marlowe
Prof. Jacob Barnhardt: Sam Jaffe
Bobby Benson: Billy Gray
Mrs. Barley: Frances Bavier
Gort: Lock Martin

Director: Robert Wise
Screenplay: Edmund H. North
Based on a story by Harry Bates
Cinematography: Leo Tover
Art direction: Addison Hehr, Lyle R. Wheeler
Film editing: William Reynolds
Music: Bernard Herrmann

It's a truism that the science-fiction movies of the 1950s are really about the Bomb, the nascent Cold War, communism, McCarthyism, and other social and political crises of the era. All of that is apparent in perhaps the most celebrated film of the genre -- though I prefer The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951) -- Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still. It has the virtue of being a straightforward fable: A being from another world comes to Earth to warn us that our bellicosity threatens the existence of the planet itself. And naturally, the reaction to his arrival is one of hysteria. But what the film really seems to me to be about is the disappearance of religious faith, something it rather clumsily suggests by having the messenger take on Christlike attributes: i.e., he performs miracles, dies, and is resurrected. The movie seems to suggest that we need a community of belief to survive, and not the fractured dialectic that has taken the place of a universal creed. The denizens of the other planets who have sent Klaatu to warn Earth have decided that true peace depends on a community guarded by robot policemen, of which Gort is the film's representative. For those of us now contemplating the warnings that artificial intelligence could produce sentient machines capable of developing a simulacrum of life, self-maintenance and reproduction, and hence of evolving into beings that might dominate humanity, this vision of submission to squads of robocops is rather chilling. Still, though The Day the Earth Stood Still is rather naive in its trust in technology, it's a well-made and provocative film that shaped the consciousness of my own generation, even if all we took away from it was a magical phrase: Klaatu barada nikto.

And God Created Woman (Roger Vadim, 1956)

Marie Glory, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Christian Marquand, and Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman

Juliette Hardy: Brigitte Bardot
Eric Carradine: Curd Jürgens
Michel Tardieu: Jean-Louis Trintignant
Antoine Tardieu: Christian Marquand
Mme. Morin: Jane Marken
M. Vigier-Lefranc: Jean Tissier
Mme. Vigier-Lefranc: Jacqueline Ventura
Lucienne: Isabelle Cory
Mme. Tardieu: Marie Glory
Christian Tardieu: Georges Poujouly

Director: Roger Vadim
Screenplay: Roger Vadim, Raoul Lévy
Cinematography: Armand Thirard
Production design: Jean André
Film editing: Victoria Mercanton
Music: Paul Misraki

For an exploitation film, which is what Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman surely must be called, the director and his co-screenwriter, Raoul Lévy, certainly devote a lot of attention to crafting something of a plot and a smattering of characterization. But what the movie is really about is Brigitte Bardot's body, which upstages everything else, including a determined performance by the young Jean-Louis Trintignant, on the brink of a distinguished career. Trintignant struggles to make sense of the infatuated Michel, but there's not much written into the character beyond his status as the middle of three brothers, caught in a hormonal web. Bardot's Juliette is so obviously meant to mate with the virile oldest brother, Antoine, that the film seems to be marking time before the consummation of the obvious. And when that happens, there's little else for the story to do but either erupt in a violent fraternal conflict or trail off into unhappy uncertainty. It does a feint at the former before fizzing out into the latter, substituting an extended scene of Juliette flaunting her stuff for some musicians as the real climax. Bardot had genuine acting talent, as her work in Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963) would reveal, but it was usually hidden beneath the other gifts that nature gave her, and Vadim did his worst to keep it hidden. Cinematographer Armand Thirard seems constrained by the aspect ratio of CinemaScope, frequently grouping his characters on one side of the screen while filling the rest with inessentials, like the staircase on the right side of the scene shown above, although he occasionally pulls off some interesting deep-focus compositions with this approach. Still his work on the film is probably most famous for a screen-wide shot of the nude Bardot that American censors slashed at ruthlessly.