Trash, Art, and the Movies (III)

Let’s clear away a few misconceptions. Movies make hash of the schoolmarm’s approach of how well the artist fulfilled his intentions. Whatever the original intention of the writers and director, it is usually supplanted, as the production gets under way, by the intention to make money—and the industry judges the film by how well it fulfills that intention. But if you could see the “artist’s intentions” you’d probably wish you couldn’t anyway. Nothing is so deathly to enjoyment as the relentless march of a movie to fulfill its obvious purpose. This is, indeed, almost a defining characteristic of the hack director, as distinguished from an artist. The intention to make money is generally all too obvious. One of the excruciating comedies of our time is attending the new classes in cinema at the high schools where the students may quite shrewdly and accurately interpret the plot developments in a mediocre movie in terms of manipulation for a desired response while the teacher tries to explain everything in terms of the creative artist working out his theme—as if the conditions under which a movie is made and the market for which it is designed were irrelevant, as if the latest product from Warners or Universal should be analyzed like a lyric poem. People who are just getting “seriously interested” in film always ask a critic, “Why don’t you talk about technique and ‘the visuals’ more?” The answer is that American movie technique is generally more like technology and it usually isn’t very interesting. Hollywood movies often have the look of the studio that produced them—they have a studio style. Many current Warner films are noisy and have a bright look of cheerful ugliness, Universal films the cheap blur of money-saving processes, and so forth. Sometimes there is even a spirit that seems to belong to the studio. We can speak of the Paramount comedies of the Thirties or the Twentieth-Century Fox family entertainment of the Forties and CinemaScope comedies of the Fifties or the old MGM gloss, pretty much as we speak of Chevvies or Studebakers. These movies look alike, they move the same way, they have just about the same engines because of the studio policies and the kind of material the studio heads bought, the ideas they imposed, the way they had the films written, directed, photographed, and the labs where the prints were processed, and, of course, because of the presence of the studio stable of stars for whom the material was often purchased and shaped and who dominated the output of the studio. In some cases, as at Paramount in the Thirties, studio style was plain and rather tacky and the output—those comedies with Mary Boland and Mae West and Alison Skipworth and W. C. Fields—looks the better for it now. Those economical comedies weren’t slowed down by a lot of fancy lighting or the adornments of “production values.” Simply to be enjoyable, movies don’t need a very high level of craftsmanship: wit, imagination, fresh subject matter, skillful performers, a good idea—either alone or in any combination—can more than compensate for lack of technical knowledge or a big budget. The craftsmanship that Hollywood has always used as a selling point not only doesn’t have much to do with art—the expressive use of techniques—it probably doesn’t have very much to do with actual box-office appeal, either. A dull movie like Sidney Furie’s “The Naked Runner” is technically competent. The appalling “Half a Sixpence” is technically astonishing. Though the large popular audience has generally been respectful of expenditure (so much so that a critic who wasn’t impressed by the money and effort that went into a “Dr. Zhivago” might be sharply reprimanded by readers), people who like “The President’s Analyst” or “The Producers” or “The Odd Couple” don’t seem to be bothered by their technical ineptitude and visual ugliness. And on the other hand, the expensive slick techniques of ornately empty movies like “A Dandy in Aspic” can actually work against one’s enjoyment, because such extravagance and waste are morally ugly. If one compares movies one likes to movies one doesn’t like, craftsmanship of the big-studio variety is hardly a decisive factor. And if one compares a movie one likes by a competent director such as John Sturges or Franklin Schaffner or John Frankenheimer to a movie one doesn’t much like by the same director, his technique is probably not the decisive factor. After directing “The Manchurian Candidate” Frankenheimer directed another political thriller, “Seven Days in May,” which, considered just as a piece of direction, was considerably more confident. While seeing it, one could take pleasure in Frankenheimer’s smooth showmanship. But the material (Rod Serling out of Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II) was like a straight (i.e., square) version of “The Manchurian Candidate.” I have to chase around the corridors of memory to summon up images from “Seven Days in May”; despite the brilliant technique, all that is clear to mind is the touchingly, desperately anxious face of Ava Gardner—how when she smiled you couldn’t be sure if you were seeing dimples or tics. But “The Manchurian Candidate,” despite Frankenheimer’s uneven, often barely adequate, staging, is still vivid because of the script. It took off from a political double entendre that everybody had been thinking of (“Why, if Joe McCarthy were working for the Communists, he couldn’t be doing them more good!”) and carried it to startling absurdity, and the extravagances and conceits and conversational non sequiturs (by George Axelrod out of Richard Condon) were ambivalent and funny in a way that was trashy yet liberating. Technique is hardly worth talking about unless it’s used for something worth doing: that’s why most of the theorizing about the new art of television commercials is such nonsense. The effects are impersonal—dexterous, sometimes clever, but empty of art. It’s because of their emptiness that commercials call so much attention to their camera angles and quick cutting—which is why people get impressed by “the art” of it. Movies are now often made in terms of what television viewers have learned to settle for. Despite a great deal that is spoken and written about young people responding visually, the influence of TV is to make movies visually less imaginative and complex. Television is a very noisy medium and viewers listen, while getting used to a poor quality of visual reproduction, to the absence of visual detail, to visual obviousness and overemphasis on simple compositions, and to atrociously simplified and distorted color systems. The shifting camera styles, the movement, and the fast cutting of a film like “Finian’s Rainbow”—one of the better big productions—are like the “visuals” of TV commercials, a disguise for static material, expressive of nothing so much as the need to keep you from getting bored and leaving. Men are now beginning their careers as directors by working on commercials—which, if one cares to speculate on it, may be almost a one-sentence résumé of the future of American motion pictures. I don’t mean to suggest that there is not such a thing as movie technique or that craftsmanship doesn’t contribute to the pleasures of movies, but simply that most audiences, if they enjoy the acting and the “story” or the theme or the funny lines, don’t notice or care about how well or how badly the movie is made, and because they don’t care, a hit makes a director a “genius” and everybody talks about his brilliant technique (i.e., the technique of grabbing an audience). In the brief history of movies there has probably never been so astonishingly gifted a large group of directors as the current Italians, and not just the famous ones—or Pontecorvo (“The Battle of Algiers”) or Francesco Rosi (“The Moment of Truth”) or the young prodigies, Bertolucci and Bellocchio, but dozens of others, men like Elio Petri (“We Still Kill the Old Way”) and Carlo Lizzani (“The Violent Four”). “The Violent Four” shows more understanding of visual movement and more talent for movie-making than anything that’s been made in America this year. But could one tell people who are not crazy, dedicated moviegoers to go see it? I’m not sure, although I enjoyed the film enormously, because “The Violent Four” is a gangster genre picture. And it may be a form of aestheticism—losing sight of what people go to movies for, and particularly what they go to foreign movies for—for a critic to say, “His handling of crowds and street scenes is superb,” or, “It has a great semi-documentary chase sequence.” It does, but the movie is basically derived from our old gangster movies, and beautifully made as it is, one would have a hard time convincing educated people to go see a movie that features a stunning performance by Gian Maria Volonte which is based on Paul Muni and James Cagney. Presumably they want something different from movies than a genre picture that offers images of modern urban decay and is smashingly directed. If a movie is interesting primarily in terms of technique then it isn’t worth talking about except to students who can learn from seeing how a good director works. And to talk about a movie like “The Graduate” in terms of movie technique is really a bad joke. Technique at this level is not of any aesthetic importance; it’s not the ability to achieve what you’re after but the skill to find something acceptable. One must talk about a film like this in terms of what audiences enjoy it for or one is talking gibberish—and might as well be analyzing the “art” of commercials. And for the greatest movie artists where there is a unity of technique and subject, one doesn’t need to talk about technique much because it has been subsumed in the art. One doesn’t want to talk about how Tolstoi got his effects but about the work itself. One doesn’t want to talk about how Jean Renoir does it; one wants to talk about what he has done. One can try to separate it all out, of course, distinguish form and content for purposes of analysis. But that is a secondary, analytic function, a scholarly function, and hardly needs to be done explicitly in criticism. Taking it apart is far less important than trying to see it whole. The critic shouldn’t need to tear a work apart to demonstrate that he knows how it was put together. The important thing is to convey what is new and beautiful in the work, not how it was made—which is more or less implicit. Just as there are good actors—possibly potentially great actors—who have never become big stars because they’ve just never been lucky enough to get the roles they needed (Brian Keith is a striking example) there are good directors who never got the scripts and the casts that could make their reputations. The question people ask when they consider going to a movie is not “How’s it made?” but “What’s it about?” and that’s a perfectly legitimate question. (The next question—sometimes the first—is generally, “Who’s in it?” and that’s a good, honest question, too.) When you’re at a movie, you don’t have to believe in it to enjoy it but you do have to be interested. (Just as you have to be interested in the human material, too. Why should you go see another picture with James Stewart?) I don’t want to see another samurai epic in exactly the same way I never want to read “Kristin Lavransdatter.” Though it’s conceivable that a truly great movie director could make any subject interesting, there are few such artists working in movies and if they did work on unpromising subjects I’m not sure we’d really enjoy the results even if we did admire their artistry. (I recognize the greatness of sequences in several films by Eisenstein but it’s a rather cold admiration.) The many brilliant Italian directors who are working within a commercial framework on crime and action movies are obviously not going to be of any great interest unless they get a chance to work on a subject we care about. Ironically the Czech successes here (“The Shop on Main Street,” “Loves of a Blonde,” “Closely Watched Trains”) are acclaimed for their techniques, which are fairly simple and rather limited, when it’s obviously their human concern and the basic modesty and decency of their attitudes plus a little barnyard humor which audiences respond to. They may even respond partly because of the simplicity of the techniques.