DIRECTED BY: Luis Buñuel

FEATURING: Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, Pierre Clémenti, Michel Piccoli, Geneviève Page

PLOT: Séverine is a wealthy young newlywed who proclaims she loves her husband, but refuses to sleep with him. Her erotic life consists of daydreams in which she is bound, whipped and humiliated. She decides to secretly work as a prostitute during the day, taking the stage name “Belle de Jour”; in the course of her adventures a macho young criminal becomes obsessed with Belle, and he sparks sexual passion in her, as well.

BACKGROUND:

• The movie was based on a scandalous (but moralizing) 1928 novel of the same name by Joseph Kessel.
• Belle de Jour marked Buñuel’s return to France after his “Mexican exile.”  It was the 67-year old director’s most expensive production to date, his first film in color, and his biggest financial success.
• The director did not get along with the star, and the feeling was mutual. Buñuel resented Deneuve because she was forced on him by the producers. For her part, the actress felt “used” by the director.  Whatever their differences, however, they made up enough to collaborate again three years later on Tristana.
• Séverine’s courtesan name, “Belle de Jour” (literally “day beauty”) is the French name for the daylily; it is also play on “belle de nuit,” slang for a prostitute.
• Too spicy for critics in 1967, Belle de Jour won only one major award at the time of its release: the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.  It now regularly appears on critics top 100 lists (Empire ranked it as the 56th greatest film of world cinema).
• Martin Scorsese was behind a 1995 theatrical re-release of the film.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The ecstatic look on Catherine Deneuve’s face as, tied up and dressed in virginal white, she’s insulted and spattered with shovelfuls of mud (or is it cow dung?).

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Although the movie weaves in and out of dreams and reality until we

Original trailer for Belle de Jour

don’t know which is which, by Buñuel standards Belle de Jour is a straightforward dramatic film.  Even the dream sequences are relatively rational, unthreatening, and easy to follow, making Belle the favorite “Surrealist” film of people who don’t like Surrealism.  But something about the dilemma of Séverine/Belle’s divided personality, and her uncertain denouement, sticks with you long after “Fin” appears.  The movie’s weirdness is subtle but persistent, like the scent of a woman’s perfume that lingers in the air long after she’s departed the room.

COMMENTS:  Cinematographer Gil Taylor famously said “I hate doing this to a beautiful woman” while filming Catherine Deneuve cracking up and dreaming about imaginary rapists in every corner of her deserted apartment in Repulsion.  I wonder how he would have felt about shooting this same beautiful woman being tied up, whipped and raped, whored-out, and spattered with mud in Belle de Jour.

Actually, he probably would have been fine with it if he wasn’t forced to use a wide-angle lens on her closeups—the source of his misread complaint in Polanski’s film—but stick with the accidental metaphor for a moment.  Appearing in these two movies in the space of three years, glacially blond Deneuve risked becoming typecast as a frigid Freudian pinup girl.  Unlike Repulsion, however, where cruel irony emerged from the union of Deneuve’s unworldly beauty with her asexual disgust for men, Belle de Jour allows the actress to be a sexual creature, of a twisted sort. When the beautiful Séverine is abused and degraded in Belle de Jour, it is at her own insistence, in fulfillment of her hidden fantasies.

The unusual name Séverine is the feminine of Severin (meaning “severe”), which Joseph Kessel chose for the self-abusing heroine of his novel as a tribute to the masochistic protagonist of “Venus in Furs.” But besides “severe,” the name also connotes “sever” or “severed”: a woman divided. This secondary meaning is accidental, of course, but it must have pleased Buñuel, for whom the deepest and purest meanings are always a result of coincidence. Séverine is torn between her split desires for chaste love and sexual lust, between her husband Pierre and her lover Marcel, between the comfortable life of a bourgeois housewife and the sensual adventures of working girl, and most importantly between dreams and reality.

Séverine is a dreamy girl—inscrutable Deneuve often looks half asleep and detached from her surroundings even during her waking hours—and through Buñuel’s eyes her subconscious world, full of lucid masochistic fantasies, is every bit as significant as her pampered Parisian reality of ski trips, dinner engagements and tennis matches. Belle de Jour begins with a horse-drawn carriage and the sound of jingling bells, and these two elements (along with cats and lilies) recur throughout the film as a clue that Séverine is in a dream state—although, as we will see, Buñuel may only set up these rules so that he can violate them later.  Not counting the finale, there are four scenes that are clearly Séverine’s daydreams.  The opening scene features a romantic carriage ride with her husband that turns into a whipping; as Séverine is being beaten by footmen at her husband’s request, she begs him “don’t let the cats out!” (Like “pussy” in English, the French “chatte” has a vulgar connotation as a euphemism for female genitalia). The “mud” fantasy again features Denueve bound, and again begins with bells (this time cowbells instead of carriage bells); more feline references abound, as Pierre asks his rakish friend Husson (Piccoli), “do cows have names, like cats?” Husson features again in the third obvious fantasy, a short bit at a restaurant; being the most absurd of all, its impossible to mistake for reality and therefore needs no bells to announce it (there is talk of lilies, but no cats).  The carriage appears again for the fourth bondage-related daydream, which involves a duel and which marks a crucial change in Séverine’s attitude that sets up the final act.

So much for the obvious erotic reveries.  But there are two other sequences, both involving Belle’s kinky clients, and both highly unusual but apparently real, that incorporate imagery from Séverine’s fantasies; the appearance of these dream-motifs make us doubt whether the incidents really occur.  The first involves a Japanese businessman who visits Belle at the brothel.  He has a box which he shows to one of Belle’s co-courtesans.  The box buzzes when he opens it.  She shakes her head and refuses him, but Belle accepts his broken-French assurances that she should not be afraid of whatever secret is buzzing inside.  When he strips, he flexes his arms and shakes a cowbell, making a sound exactly like the jingling Séverine’s fantasies.  The second ambiguous liaison finds a carriage pulling up to a cafe where Séverine is sitting alone.  An aristocratic man pops out, walks to her table, introduces himself, and propositions her to come to his manor.  His fetish is particularly weird: he wants Séverine to dress in a black see-through nightie and lie in a coffin while he places lilies on her bosom and bemoans his dead love.  In the middle of the ritual the butler breaks in and asks, “Can I let the cats in?”

Belle de Jour‘s famously enigmatic ending is the apex of this technique of muddying the line between dream and reality. Buñuel is the master of the ambiguous ending (see also The Milky Way). He sets up scenarios where the audience doesn’t merely chose between equally plausible plot options A and B, but where the contradictions coexist; A and B merge and synthesize into something new and mysterious. Belle de Jour‘s last two minutes, announced by the tinkling of bells, mewing of cats, and arrival of a horse-drawn carriage outside her her Parisian home, are obviously another of Séverine’s dreams. But, the last ten minutes, from the point she’s awakened by a gunshot, may also be a dream, and the final moments only a dream inside a dream.  And the resolution, which like a Möbius filmstrip ends where it began, suggests the possibility that the entire movie may have been a dream.  Perhaps the incident with the aristocrat and the carriage and the bells and the lilies and the strange dialogues about cats really happened, and Séverine incorporated all those elements into subsequent fantasies? Who knows? (Not Buñuel, who insisted he did not know what the ending he had written meant, just as Séverine repeatedly explains that she does not understand the reasons for her own compulsions). In the end, the entire plot is thrown into confusion, but Séverine’s character never changes: she began as a divided woman and she ends as a divided woman.  But, perhaps she finds a way to reconcile her conscious and subconscious conflicts in her dreams.

The only thing that is clear is that Buñuel views Séverine’s fantasies as a crucial part of her being; they are, in fact, more interesting to him—and to us. Her dirty dreams are as much a part of her character as is her bourgeois propriety. And Buñuel treats the dreams with as much respect as her waking moments—and with more love.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The story is a kind of fantasy cryptogram, with countless clues—verbal puns about cats, nonsense syllables, bells, speech with motionless lips, time cues, and so on—as to when we are in a fantasy, and whose… The movie ends with a dark ambiguity about how we are to regard what has gone before, but every detail has been so carefully thought out that seeing it again is like seeing it in another key.”–Renata Adler, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“…a radical work that reimagines some of the director’s earlier surrealist impulses and anticipates the work of David Lynch… Buñuel understood that dreams, the language of the subconscious, often tell us more about ourselves than our reality. Belle du Jour comes to understand this language too and, because of it, perseveres.”–Ed Gonzalez, Slant (DVD)

“…[a] surrealist masterpiece, a serio-comedy of manners which exposes the neurotic and artificial foundations beneath normal identity and behaviour.”–Rob Mackie, The Guardian (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Belle de Jour (1967)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Belle de Jour (1967) – The Criterion Collection – The Criterion Collection release page contains scholar Melissa Anderson’s essay, clips from the film, and links to other items of interest

Belle de Jour::Great Movies – Roger Ebert’s essay on the film for his “Great Movies” series

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Belle De Jour – Joseph Kessel’s 1929 (an erotic novel which is by all reports quite different from the movie)

Belle de Jour (BFI Film Classics) – Critic Michael Wood’s companion to the movie for the British Film Institute series

DVD INFO: Belle de Jour was an obvious candidate for the Criterion Collection, and in 2012 they finally landed the rights (buy).  The edition features a remastered print, a new audio commentary by Buñuel scholar Michael Wood; “That Obscure Source of Desire,” a featurette with sexologist Susie Bright and Surrealist expert Linda Williams discussing the film’s sexual politics; a interview with frequent Buñuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière, who worked with the director to adapt the screenplay from the novel; an excerpt from the French TV show “Cinéma” with Deneuve and Carrière as guests; trailers; and a booklet with an essay by Melissa Anderson and a Buñuel interview. The Blu-ray offering (buy) contains the same features.

The 2002 Miramax release is out of print but may still be available (buy). It has no extras but features a different commentary track, by film scholar Julie Jones.  Unlike the Criterion disc, t is not presented in anamorphic widescreeen format.

Island of Lost Souls deviates from the original story (which, predictably, prompted H.G. Wells to voice his disapproval), but the film is simply told.  Like 1932′s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Island  is a pre-Hayes code film, and it shows.  Of course, both films were taken from  literary sources, and that too is apparent.  Lost Souls‘ literacy is due to screenwriter Philip Wylie, who also adapted Wells for James Whale‘s The Invisible Man (1933).  The inimitable Charles Laughton, one of the great classic screen actors, plays Dr. Moreua with a classicist’s relish.  Laughton is one of the major reasons for this film’s success, and as director Kenton shows atypical subtlety. These factors, combined with well-crafted sets and make-up, add up to a striking milieu.

Island is almost an old-dark-house genre film, except that the stranded visitor, Edward Parker (Richard Arlen) ends up in a sort of kinky, contemporary Eden.  God is present in the symbolic persona of Dr. Moreau and although he is the antagonist, he is a three-dimensional one.  He is intelligent, crafty, and that naughty twinkle in the divine eye is ever present.  God is creating again, although this time he’s attempting to correct his previous mistake by making man from the image of Eden’s animals.  Eve (a Wylie addition) appears in the exotic Lota (Kathleen Burke, who notably showed up in the following year’s pre-Code Murders in the Zoo).  Lota, AKA Panther Girl, alternately projects innocence and unbridled sexuality, and she is utilized by Moreau to usher forth a new Adamic age, with Parker as the new Adam.  Of course, in every Eden there’s a rotten apple or two, and here it’s Parker’s abroad girlfriend (Leila Hyams, from Freaks) and the Beast Men, Moreau’s ungrateful children who hold a grudge against their creator for little things like torture, brutality, and vivisection.  The Beast Men are led by the Sayer of the Law (Bela Lugosi, who is well-directed). The Sayer calls the creator out for hypocrisy and original sin.  The Beast Men are well sketched here, which is a sharp contrast to the mere animalistic portraits drawn in subsequent versions.  The finale is natural jolt, so much so that no other celluloid interpretation of the tale can match it.  This lucidly told imaginative spin on Dr. Frankenstein’s Eden still holds up remarkably well.

As for the Criterion treatment, most welcome authoritative commentary is given by historians Gregory Mank and David J. Skall, along with filmmaker Richard Stanley (the original director of the 1997 version, who was replaced by John Frankenheimer).  Stanley offers entertaining, honest insight.  A little less welcome are reflections by John Landis and Devo.  Production stills and the theatrical trailer are excellent supplements.  This is a superb release that is essential for classic film lovers.

DIRECTED BY: Jean Vigo

FEATURING: Delphin, Jean Dasté, Louis Lefebvre, Gilbert Pruchon, Coco Golstein,Gérard de Bédarieux

PLOT: Schoolboys stage a revolt at a French boarding school.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  Zéro de conduite is an important historical film.  It founded the boarding school subgenre, creating a template used by Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows) and more weirdly by Lindsay Anderson (If…)  With it’s dwarf headmaster, disappearing balls and drawings that come to life, the film is as playful and experimental as a mock rebellion staged by schoolboys before Sunday dinner.  Its mildly surreal oddness nudges the needle on the weirdometer, but, despite its near-legendary status, it’s not thoroughly strange enough to make its way onto the List on the first ballot.

COMMENTS:  Jean Vigo’s extraordinary backstory is almost as fascinating as his films.  The son of an anarchist who died in prison, the auteur left a tiny (about three hours worth of film) but extremely impressive body of work before succumbing to tuberculosis, the age-old nemesis of romantic poets, at the age of 29.  Adding to his mythological stature is the possibility that he may have contributed to his own demise by laboring on his final film up until his last moments, instead of getting much needed bed rest; he may have actually worked himself to death, literally giving his life for his art.

By banning Zéro de conduite, the director’s film about an imaginary rebellion in a boys’ boarding school, for thirteen years, the French censors only augmented Vigo’s legend.  From the perspective of patrons who are used to seeing political leaders openly mocked and clitorises graphically snipped off in movie theaters as they munch on popcorn, the idea of a movie with only a single “merde!’ and no violence, fetal rape, human centipedes, or even an obvious political target would be banned for over a decade is almost unimaginable.  The film contains hardly audible whispers of schoolboy homosexuality, but it was suppressed not for these but for its “anti-French spirit” and “praise of indiscipline.”  Vigo’s anarchic, anti-authoritarian philosophy, which pervades the film’s 44 minute running time, was too hot and subversive for 1933 sensibilities.

Today, of course, the movie is notably tame.  In fact, if you’ve been exposed to any of the anti-authority movies made since Vigo’s film, you may go in expecting to see Nurse Ratchet-styled psychological abuse and sadistic cane lashings.  But there isn’t even one blow delivered in Zéro, much less 400.  The student’s major complaints are being awakened early in the morning and served beans meal after meal.  Their teachers aren’t madmen and dictators, but ineffectual buffoons.  The headmaster is a dwarf with a fake beard; far from being an imposing figure, he’s at eye level with the boys he lords over.  The lack of any real oppression and outrage here expresses Vigo’s libertarian philosophy far better than if  had overplayed his hand and identified authority with excessive cruelty.  What the school is guilty of imposing on the children isn’t tyranny, but a dreary, drab, linear conformity: the rows of beds, the marching in lines, the short-pants uniforms.  The boys don’t revolt against a corrupt social order; they rebel against the ridiculous notion of order itself.  It’s the purest ideal of anarchy.

Vigo wasn’t a card-carrying Surrealist, despite being a contemporary of the movement.  He nonetheless relied on a few of the same shocking, reality-busting techniques as the Un Chien Andalou crew.  His philosophical anarchism extends to the movie’s form; Zéro de conduite refuses to be restrained by logic or possibility.  There’s a scatterbrained teacher who breaks into a Charlie Chaplin impersonation during recess; a ball that magically disappears and reappears; and a cartoon sketch of a “Mr. Beanpole” who animates and morphs into Napoleon.  The children’s first revolt is a dreamlike pillow-fight with slow-motion and backwards sequences, scored to eerie music: a wordless anthem accompanied by a back-masked accordion.  (The music for this scene was actually written out first, then inverted and performed by musicians in reverse, then played backwards on the soundtrack to restore the original melody in a distorted form).  The ridiculous headmaster keeps his hat under a glass dome on a mantlepiece that’s too high for him to reach without standing on his tiptoes.  The weirdest touch of all may occur at the final ceremony that the boys disrupt as their pivotal act of rebellion: the principal and his honored guests and associates sit in chairs in front of bleachers, watching soldiers performing on pommel horses.  The bourgeois dignitaries arrayed behind them are a row of life-sized dolls.

The seldom-seen Zéro de conduite is one of those films you once read about in musty old reference books (or, these days, on a cached blog entry buried deep in your bookmarks) that turns out to be somewhat underwhelming when you finally see it.  The pacing is creaky, the drama underdeveloped.  The grand revolution the film has been building towards consists of about thirty seconds of the boys throwing coconuts and pots down on the heads of the established order, who meekly depart, stage left, without putting up a fight.  It’s a noteworthy and original work, but had the French not banned the film, I doubt it would carry the legendary reputation it has today.  Censors are the best marketing department a movie can have.  Zéro is worthwhile to see for its historical importance, and it’s a work of art, to be sure; but to my mind, it falls just short of masterpiece status.

While it’s combination of weirdness and reputation make Zéro de conduite the most significant title for our purposes, it’s not the headliner of the Criterion Collection’s “The Complete Jean Vigo.”  That honor goes to L’Atalante, Vigo’s only full-length feature, a masterpiece of sentimental romance about a barge captain who takes his young wife to live on board his vessel.  While this tale of love and betrayal is a surprisingly conventional work from the anarchistic Vigo, there are a two famous impressionistic sequences that have a weird-ish poetry to them.  In one, the captain (Dasté, the sympathetic teacher from Conduit) sees a vision of his wife floating in the muddy depths of the Seine; the other is a wispy, sadly erotic montage of the two lovers writhing in separate beds, connected only by a shadowed polka dot motif.  The Criterion disc also contains Vigo’s only two shorts.  Taris is a profile of a French swimming champion.  It features beautiful underwater photography, but shows little true passion, and feels like work done for hire.  Far more interesting is À propos de Nice, an experimental pseudo-documentary (some scenes are staged for comedic effects) on the vacation city of Nice, filmed partly during a street carnival.  Nice features lots of crazy Dutch angles and pans, strange faces, juxtapositions (a shot of a primping woman is followed by an ostrich), and a healthy interest in sex (dig that upskirt camerawork!)  There are a few sequences that qualify as lightly surrealist: tourists who turn into dolls and are raked along with the chips by a roulette croupier, a man with a politically incorrect case of sunburn, and a surprising nude scene.  Like the rest of the disc, Nice won’t be to most modern tastes; but it’s fascinating because it was made before the rules were laid down, by a director making up a visual language as he went along.  It’s novel and enthusiastic enough to catch the interest of anyone serious about cinema.  Vigo scholar Michael Temple provides commentary on each film in the set.  A second disc is full of interviews and documentaries about Vigo, and also contains a (very short) animated tribute by fellow filmmaker Michel Gondry.

Zéro de conduite is in the public domain and may be viewed or downloaded at the Internet Archive, among other venues.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a series of vignettes lampooning the faculty climaxed by a weird, dream-like rebellion of the entire student body. These amorphous scenes, strung together by a vague continuity may be art but they are also pretty chaotic.”–A.H. Weiler, The New York Times (1947 re-release)

Comparisons to Dickens are apt, but Sjostrom’s film casts an even more complex and lugubrious milieu.  The movie is based on Selma Lagerlof’s novel “Korlarlen” and, in contrast to the expressionism popular during the period, Sjostrom opts for a naturalistic setting.  While The Phantom Carriage does not take the easy route of escapist fantasy for adolescent boys, that does not mean it is lacking in intensity.  One scene clearly seeded Stanley Kubrick‘s idea for Jack Torrance in the unsettling “Here’s Johnny” scene from The Shining (1980) .

The cinematography, by Julius Jaenzon, is exquisitely haunting.  Jaenzon’s use of double exposure in the ghostly carriage holds up impressively for a 90 year old film.  The Phantom Carriage was released the same year as Charlie Chaplin‘s groundbreaking The Kid.  Both films are, rightly, considered spiritually progressive, humanist films of the silent era.  However, Sjostrom’s film does not fall into the maudlin sentiment that occasionally mars Chaplin’s premiere feature.

Along with Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, The Phantom Carriage is one of the most important releases of the year.  Sjostrom’s influential classic is also among the most long-awaited Criterion releases of early cinema.

DIRECTED BY: Ingmar Bergman

FEATURING: Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Nils Poppe, Bengt Ekerot, Bibi Andersson

PLOT:  A disillusioned knight and his cynical squire return to a 14th century Sweden ravaged

by the Black Plague; Death comes for the knight, but he entices the Reaper to play a game of chess for his soul.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  The Seventh Seal is undoubtedly a great movie, but its weirdness is in doubt.  In fact, trying to decide if this film is strange enough to make it on the List almost makes me feel like Antonius Block wondering if there’s a God out there.  As an existential allegory, the film has a significant amount of unreality in its corner; although much of the movie is a starkly realistic portrait of medieval life, Bergman often ignores logic in minor ways when necessary to make his larger metaphorical points.  He also incorporates the fantastic in one major way, by making Death a literal character in the film, a “living, breathing” character who not only plays chess but also poses as a priest and chops down a tree with his scythe.  That’s not much weirdness to go on, though, and the best external support I can find for considering the movie “weird” is the fact that it’s been (inaccurately) tagged with “surrealism” on IMDB.   I’m torn; the weird movie community will need to chime in on this one.

COMMENTS: The Seventh Seal has a big, imposing reputation as a masterpiece of world cinema, but if you haven’t seen it yet, you may be surprised to find that most of what you think you know about it is wrong.  In the first place, it’s not nearly as gloomy as you may have heard.  True, every frame of the film is suffused with the foreknowledge of death—Bergman is very in-your-face with his message that you are going to die, and it’s going to be horrible—but the grim scenes alternate with lighthearted, comic ones.  The entire dynamic between the drunken smith Plog, and his unfaithful wife Maria, and her unlucky paramour Scat, for example, has a tone of bawdy Shakespearean comedy.  The idyllic scenes where the knight enjoys a meal of milk and wild strawberries with the juggler Jof and his family have a warmth that temporarily drives away the chill—even though there is a skull peering over the picnickers’ shoulders.  The movie is also not as challenging or enigmatic as you may have been led to believe.  While Seal is an allegory, it’s not exactly an obscure one: you don’t need to scratch your head and try to figure out which character represents death.  It’s the guy in the black robes with the skull face who says, “I am Death.”  Characters have deep thoughts about the meaning of life, but they don’t hide them under layers of poetic obfuscation: they say exactly what they think (in fact, they say what we all sometimes think, but are afraid to say out loud).  One final thing that may surprise you is that, despite the fact that the knight’s chess game with Death makes a powerful plot hook, Max von Sydow‘s troubled paladin doesn’t dominate the film.  The Seventh Seal is a true ensemble piece, full of episodes and subplots that simultaneously evoke a believable medieval milieu and give each cast member a moment to shine.  There’s Bergman’s recreation of what a Dark Ages variety show might have looked like, an amazing pageant of flagellants, and a minor villain who threads his way in and out of the story and gets his comeuppance. Von Sydow’s performance is actually a bit theatrical, and the best thing about it is the way at a mere twenty-six years of age he projects a much older figure, one who’s been crushed by the weight of the world. As the earthy squire, Gunnar Björnstrand, a calmly atheistic counterpoint to von Sydow’s tormented agnostic, makes a bigger impression.  He’s more nuanced than the one-note knight, capable of singing a bawdy song one moment and rescuing a damsel in distress the other, and we suspect that Bergman admires the squire’s unflinching defiance of death and refusal to grasp at existential straws (even when he’s about to fall into the void, he exults that he is still able to roll his eyes and wiggle his toes).  One thing about the film that doesn’t belie its reputation, of course, is the imagery.  Gunnar Fischer’s cinematography, with its many subtly unnatural lighting schemes, is a triumph.  The bookend images of Death playing chess, then leading his new conquests on a macabre dance on a hillside by a fjord, burn themselves into your mind’s eye and endure through the ages.  There’s a reason they’ve been parodied in everything from Woody Allen’s Love and Death to Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, and it’s not because they’re risible or easily forgotten.

The Criterion Collection 2-disc DVD contains all the usual bells and whistles plus a bonus feature, the documentary Bergman Island, an 83 minute series of interviews with the venerable director shot after his retirement to the remote island of Fårö.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The actor’s faces, the aura of magic, the ambiguities, and the riddle at the heart of the film all contribute to it stature.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

(This movie was nominated for review by “Nightingail,” who said, “it’s on a lot of critics’ lists as one of the greatest movies of all time, but it’s also wonderfully weird, I think :-)” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Andrei Tarkovsky

FEATURING: Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, Jüri Järvet, Anatoli Solonitsyn

PLOT:  In the indefinite future, mankind has set up a space station orbiting Solaris, a mysterious planet covered by an ocean that exhibits signs of consciousness.  Several of the crew members studying the planet demonstrate eccentric behavior and possible signs of mental illness, and psychologist Kris Kelvin is sent to the station to evaluate them and decide whether the program studying Solaris must be scrapped.  On board the satellite Kelvin discovers an incarnation of his wife, who has been dead for seven years, and falls in love with the hallucination.

BACKGROUND:

• For information on director Tarkovsky, see the background section of the entry for Nostalghia.
• Solaris was based on a 1961 novel by Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem.  Tarkovsky’s version was actually the second adaptation; the story had been filmed previously by Boris Nirenburg for Soviet television.  Steven Soderberg created an American version in 2002 starring George Clooney; it was a modest success with critics, but a commercial flop.
• Solaris won the Special Jury Prize (the second most prestigious award) at Cannes; the Palme d’or was shared by two realistic, political Italian films (The Working Class Goes to Heaven and The Mattei Affair) that are now almost forgotten.
• Although commentators frequently claim that Solaris was created as a reaction to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, cinematographer Vadim Yusov says that the director had not seen the 1968 space epic until filming had already begun.  We can safely assume, however, that Soviet authorities were aware of the film, likely viewed it as propaganda for the American space program, and were more than happy to finance a 2001 response with cosmonauts as the cosmic heroes.
• Tarkovsky liked Natalya Bondarchuk’s initial audition for the role of Hari, but thought she was too young for the role (she was only 17 at the time).  He recommended her to another director for a different part and continued casting.  A year later Bondarchuk had completed her movie, Tarkovsky still had not cast Hari, and she still wanted the role.  The director was impressed enough with her work and persistence to relent, ignore the age difference between  her and leading man Donatas Banionis, and make her his Hari.  Later Tarkovsky would comment in his diary that Bondarchuk’s performance “outshone them all.”
• The weird seascapes of Solaris’ surface were created in the studio using an acetone solution, aluminum powder, and dye.
• American reviewers gave Solaris largely negative reviews on its Stateside release in 1976; in their defense, however, the version then screened here was badly dubbed and had a half-hour cut from the running time.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: During thirty seconds of scheduled weightlessness, Kris and Hari slowly rise in the air.  A chandelier tinkles, a slow Bach organ chorale plays, and a lit candelabrum and open books float past them as they embrace.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Though Solaris is far from Tarkovsky’s weirdest movie—in fact, it

Original Russian trailer for Solaris (1972)

may be his most accessible—any movie in which a cosmonaut falls in love with an avatar of his dead wife that’s been created from his memories by an intelligent planet starts off on an oddish note.  When Tarkovsky points his dreamy camera at this scenario and applies his typically hypnotic and obliquely philosophical style, the weird notes push to the forefront.  The currents rippling in psychologist Kris Kelvin’s troubled subconscious turn out to be as mesmerizing as the ultramarine undulations of the surface of Solaris itself.

COMMENTS: Thirty minutes into Solaris Burton, a minor character, takes an almost five minute, silent, monochrome drive through the “city of the future” (actually contemporary Tokyo, which looked alien and advanced to Soviet audiences in 1972).  He’s just returned from trying, and failing, to convince Kris Kelvin—the psychologist who will be traveling to the space station orbiting Solaris to assess whether the “Solaristics” project should be shut down—that the planet is self-aware and that we as a species must continue to try to contact it.  The camera focuses on his worried face, shot in blue-tinted monochrome, as he speeds through the “futuristic” city with its tunnels, elevated highways and cloverleafs.  In the background is nothing but ambient highway noise, but as the trip continues, weird electronic acoustics creep into the sound mix.  As his car accelerates the pitch is manipulated, and sounds of unidentified whirring machinery blend with the increasing traffic noise.  Slowly, the alien sounds invade the mix as the audio environment grows more random, anxious and abrasive, until the scene snaps to a close and the action cuts to a silent pond.

I begin a review of Solaris with a description of this scene because it’s indicative of what the average person hates about a Tarkovsky film: the slow, slow pace, the director’s insistence on including long, challenging scenes where it appears that nothing whatsoever is happening (compare the scene where the tree principals sit quietly before the pool in Stalker, or the scholar’s nine-minute attempt to carry a lit candle across a drained pool in Nostalghia).  The point of Solaris‘ long driving scene mystifies even the film’s defenders.  There are theories that the director insisted on footage as necessary in a post-production attempt to justify the budgetary expense of sending a film crew to Japan.  The less charitable propose that the scene is Tarkovsky’s deliberate, anti-entertainment attempt to alienate the audience, to separate the wheat from the chaff and drive impatient patrons out of the theater.

Personally, I doubt both interpretations of the driving scene.  I suspect that, to Tarkovsky, it simply wasn’t that strange of an idea to focus on a single pensive face for four minutes in order to impress a mood of dreamy disquiet.  Did he even comprehend what an audience might have to complain of, when they had ample stimulation in the form of Eduard Artemyev’s sublime ambient electronic experiments humming quietly in the background?  This director thought on a different, more contemplative plane than other filmmakers.  To watch a Tarkovsky movie is to be slowly absorbed into the director’s ponderous dreams, until his subconscious almost imperceptibly becomes your waking reality.

This is not to say that Tarkovsky’s indifference to normal human pacing is unequivocally a good thing.  Solaris suffers from its slow prologue set on Earth.  Little crucial information is divulged during this long introduction, and what clues we do receive are told us in lectures rather than shown to us.  In archival film footage, a younger Burton describes his encounter with the hallucinatory consciousness of Solaris; he flies his craft through a thick colloidal fog cloaking the planet’s surface, and sees a giant naked baby rising from the ocean surface.  Tarkovsky’s budget obviously wouldn’t have allowed him to paint this mysterious vision in any convincing way; still, with the action being conveyed via dialogue we (as non-Russian speakers) are reading on the screen, Solaris seems much like a filmed novel, rather than a movie.  We get more background information on Solaris via a documentary glimpsed on TV, and the long Earthbound sequence, which gives us information that probably could have been conveyed in twenty minutes rather than forty, finally ends with that maddening driving sequence.  But fortunately better, and stranger, times are coming for the viewer, as the action and sense of mystery picks up significantly once Kris lands on the Solaris space station.

When Kris arrives, the sense that he has left Earth’s reality far behind is immediate.  He’s not greeted on arrival, but must wander through the ship’s curved halls alone looking for the crew.  When he discovers the scientist Snaut, the doctor is nervous and elliptical, explaining to Kris that only he and a Dr. Sartorius are left alive but, oddly, warning him not to react too rashly if he sees other figures roaming the station’s corridors.  Sartorius is even less helpful, only willing to speak to Kris through a cracked door—through which a dwarf escapes, only to be swiftly scooped up by the scientist and stuffed back into the room.  Kris then sees a woman in a blue nightgown walking through the ship, though he cannot catch sight of her face; she leads him to the corpse of one of the crewmembers.

Things definitely get weird from this point on, although there is always a “logical” sci-fi explanation for the strangeness—the hallucinatory interludes result from the interfacing of human minds with the consciousness of the planet Solaris, which overlaps the ship like a cloud.  After his disturbing welcome to the space station, Kris retreats to his room and barricades the door with footlockers.  He watches a black and white videotape left by one of the scientists, but Kris’ own reality is now monochrome, just like the video he is watching.  Black and white film stock is often used in color films to denote either memories, flashbacks or dreams, and Tarkovsky follows this convention in his other films.  Here, the sudden introduction of black and white in “reality” suggests that the line between the dream world and the waking world is breaking down.  Indeed, our expectations are subverted when Kris falls asleep and awakens in color: our expectations have been frustrated.  Are we now back in reality, or in a dream?  Complicating matters is the fact that there is now a beautiful young woman in the room, who walks over to Kris’ bed and kisses him; sleepily, he treats this event as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, but then he rises from his bed with a worried look on his face.  He reaches for a gun that’s lying near the apparition’s foot, but she kicks it away as he brushes her heel, saying “that tickles!”  Wandering the room, she discovers a picture of herself among his belongings and asks, “who’s this?”  She appears jealous.  Warily, he tells her he’s going out, but she protests that she can’t bear to be separated from him even for an instant.  He tells her that she can accompany him but she must put on a spacesuit and he tells her to undress.  She asks him to help her and he approaches to undo her dress, only to discover the frock has laces and threads, but no seam.  As he’s cutting her out of the clothes with scissors, he sees the sleeve of her dress is torn and there’s a puncture mark on her arm.

The relationship between Kris and this young woman—soon revealed to be a convincing replica of his dead wife, Hari, created by the planet below, for reasons unknown—becomes the core of the movie.  Hari is an illusion, a hallucination, but a convincing one, and an illusion who is completely devoted to, and dependent on, Kris.  Real or not, she arouses memories and longings in Kris both beautiful and painful.  Their burgeoning romance is even more complicated than a real life affair, for Hari carries metaphysical as well as emotional baggage.  She acts human, but we know she has been created by Solaris.  How human is she?  Is Kris falling in love with a memory, an illusion, a wisp?  Or, since she reacts like a real woman, since she appears to be a self-aware being craving love and acceptance, is it cruel to treat her as something less than human?  Things become even more complicated when the simulated Hari, herself, begins to understand what she is.  She paradoxically becomes more human to us when she begins to grasp and question her own existence.  Yet, there is a tragic fairy tale quality about her doomed love for Kris which echoes myths and folktales of spirits, ghosts and mermaids falling in love with human men.

Kris’ adventures on the satellite grow increasingly feverish as the film goes on; he begins to hallucinate about his mother, whose identity is confused with the similarly dressed Hari.  However strange things get for Kris, however, the central enigma of the movie remains Solaris itself.  What is this planet that seems to be alive, and how and why does it read the minds of those who study it and recreate figures from their past?  Who are the dwarfs that peripherally plague Sartorius? Is Solaris, that blue boiling ocean under a yellow sky, tormenting the cosmonauts, attempting to please them, or just experimenting on them in an attempt to understand them?  Its powers to create realistic, but flawed, homonculi are nearly omnipotent, almost godlike; and the film’s ambiguous ending implies it has even greater abilities, and perhaps even bears some love for humanity.  Is the planet Solaris, for Tarkovsky, an image of the God he was strictly forbidden to mention in film due to the Soviet state’s official materialism?  By making a science fiction picture, is he attempting an end-around on the ban on spirituality, by cloaking it as speculation on the nature of nearly omniscient alien lifeforms?  Tarkovsky’s films exhibit an odd, obscure and indirect mysticism, one that is more concerned with mystery, ambiguity and wonder than with clear answers or dogma.  He would push the obsessions begun in Solaris even further in Stalker, Solaris‘ weirder cousin, a fable about a journey to a strange room that can grant a man’s deepest wish.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a strange, slow but absorbing parable on life and love in the guise of a sci-fi theme…”–Variety (contemporaneous)

“Promising as all this may sound, it becomes apparent after the first few moments that the movie is going to remain stubbornly earthbound. The effects are scanty, the drama gloomy, the philosophy of the film thick as a cloud of ozone.”–Jack Cocks, Time (contemporaneous)

“…Tarkovsky’s eerie mystic parable is given substance by the filmmaker’s boldly original grasp of film language and the remarkable performances by all the principals.”–Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader (DVD)

OFFICIAL SITE:

Solaris (1972) – The Criterion Collection – Features two clips from Solaris, as well as Phillip Lopate’s liner notes for the Criterion release and news snippets about the movie

IMDB LINK: Solaris (1972)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Andrei Tarkovsky on Solaris, Lem, Fellini, and Polanski – 1973 interview with Tarkovsky about the movie.  Many other Solaris tidbits can be found on nostalghia.com, an academic Tarkovsky fan site, though the wealth of articles on the director are not yet organized by movie

The Great Movies: Solaris – Roger Ebert’s essay on Solaris for his “Great Movies” series

Solaris – Information on the original novel from Stanislaw Lem’s official site

DVD INFO: The Criterion Collection DVD (buy) and Blu-ray (buy) releases contain exactly the same features. Criterion originally released a Solaris DVD in 2002.  In 2011 they released a Blu-ray that corrected an error in their original transfer: certain scenes that Tarkovsky had originally intended to be shown tinted blue had been presented in black and white instead. They simultaneously reissued a corrected version of the DVD, with the proper tinting restored.  Other than that change, the updated version is identical to the 2002 release, including the commentary track provided by Tarkovsky scholars Vida Johnson and Graham Petrie (coauthors of “The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue”).  Their reflections are enormously informative, but stiff—the pair sound like they’re reading passages from their book rather than spontaneously commenting on the action unfolding on screen.

On DVD extra features are hosted on a separate disc.  They include nine deleted or alternate scenes; a touching interview with star Natalya Bondarchuk; insightful conversations with cinematographer Vadim Yusov, art director Mikhail Romadin, and composer Eduard Artemyev; and an excerpt from a documentary about novelist Stanislaw Lem wherein the writer discusses his creative differences with the director.  Altogether, the supplementary materials run almost two hours.  The accompanying booklet contains an essay by Phillip Lopate and a Tarkovsky appreciation by no less an authority than Akira Kurosawa, who was touring the Mosfilm studios when Solaris was being made.

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “236 Design.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Catherine Demongeot, Philippe Noiret, Vittorio Caprioli, Carla Marlier, Annie Fratellini, Yvonne Clech, Antoine Roblot, Jacques Dufilho, Hubert Deschamps

PLOT: Young Zazie goes to Paris and stays with her exotic dancer uncle; the only thing she

wants to see is the Metro, but the workers are on strike, so she explores the city instead.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: It might make the List thanks to its insane, anarchic soul. A minor character casually kills a waiter by firing a woman’s high-heeled shoe at him, and a parrot transforms into a dog when it’s sprayed with seltzer water; something of this sort happens in just about every detail-packed frame of the film.  Zazie’s transvestite uncle proclaims the film’s manifesto: “All Paris is a dream, Zazie is a reverie, and all this is a reverie within a dream…”

COMMENTS: Raymond Queneau’s 1959 comic novel “Zazie dans le Metro” was a surprise sensation in France; with its wordplay, neologisms and nonsense passages, it earned the author comparisons to a French James Joyce.  When Louis Malle decided to adapt it, he wanted to fracture the language of film in the same way that Queneau twisted words.  Malle used a constant barrage of editing and camera tricks as his main strategy for achieving this goal: speeding up and slowing down the film (sometimes within the same shot), having people unexpectedly pop into and out of the frame, and using rear projection effects and tricks of perspective.  There’s a shot where Zazie’s uncle talks to her as she sits on his right, and then the camera seamlessly swings around to show her now seated on his left; in another bit, one speaker in a conversation nexplicably appears in blackface in a reaction shot lasting under a second.  These editing pranks fit perfectly with the movie’s absurd scenarios: this is a film where the protagonists climb the Eiffel Tower and find a sea captain and a shivering polar bear at the top.  As she wanders about Paris, Zazie encounters a strange cast of characters, starting with her uncle (an artiste who dances in drag) and his wife Albertine (who has a mysterious power to hypnotize men with her beauty), and eventually including a dirty old man, an amorous widow with white and lavender hair, a parrot (who complains about the other characters’ yakking) and the aforementioned polar bear, among other eccentric denizens of Paris (the city is virtually a character itself).  Zazie almost has the form of a satire on 1960 Parisians, but it doesn’t work that way, because the outsider—the little tomboy from the provinces—is actually nastier than the adults she torments.  She has a foul mouth (by 1960 standards) and a habit of kicking her elders in the shin or tossing lit bombs at them; she’s inherently sadistic, and wants to grow up to be a teacher so she can torment France’s future brats: “I’ll make ‘em eat chalk!  Jab compasses in their rear!”  In the context of the film—a child’s dream of the big city—Zazie still emerges as a likable ancestor of Bart Simpson, a prankster whose job it is to destabilize an already crazy world.  One facet of Zazie that may mildly disturb modern American viewers is the film’s attitude toward childhood sexuality.  Ten year-old Zazie’s curiosity about sex is mostly charming: she wonders what a “hormossexual” is, and brags about being a woman already.  But there are darker undercurrents.  She’s stalked by a pervert from the Humbert Humbert school, who butters her up by buying her blue jeans; over a lunch of fries and mussels she frightens him with a tale of how her mother buried a hatchet in her father’s head, and got off scot-free.  This strand of the tale doesn’t exactly come off as wholesome family entertainment, but it is surprising how innocent Malle manages to make it; from the freewheeling, slapstick tone of the film, we realize that no harm can come to Zazie.  This “disturbing” scene is followed by an extended chase that plays like nothing so much as a live-action Bugs Bunny cartoon.  In true slapstick tradition, Zazie climaxes with a pie-fight; true to its own off-center style, the “pies” are actually plates of spaghetti with sausages on top.  Malle may have attempted to “fracture” contemporary cinema with this comedy, but what  he ends up fashioning isn’t so much revolutionary as reactionary.  The camera tricks he uses hearken back to the earliest days of cinema, when every film was an experimental film; the comedy routines are in the tradition of vaudevillians like Charlie Chaplin (an avowed Zazie fan) and Buster Keaton, mixed with the anarchy of 1941′s mad musical Hellzapoppin’ (an explicit influence).  Thank goodness the Metro was closed during the story, because courtesy of Queneau and Malle, Zazie takes a much wilder ride above ground.

Though a cult hit in France, Zazie was all but forgotten in the rest of the world.  The Criterion Collection rescues it from obscurity with the usual top-notch transfer and collection of extras including contemporaneous interviews with Queneau, Malle, and a shy Catherine Demongeot and her parents, as well as reflections by screenwriter Jean-Paul Rappeneau, art director William Klein, and the mini-documentary Le Paris de Zazie.  Criterion issued Zazie as a companion piece to Malle’s other excursion into weirdness, Black Moon (1975), released on the same day.  Both films feature young female protagonists who don’t fully understand the absurd adult sexual world.  Compared to Black Moon, Zazie is less weird, less dark, and (I think) a lot more entertaining to watch.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“To Americans, Zazie seemed to go too far—to be almost demonic in its inventiveness, like a joke that gets so complicated you can’t time your laughs comfortably… some critics have suggested that for Americans this comedy sets off some kind of freakish, fantastic anxiety.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

DIRECTED BY: Louis Malle

FEATURING: Cathryn Harrison, Therese Giehse, Alexandra Stewart, Joe Dallesandro

PLOT: A 15-year old girl flees a shooting war between the sexes and ends up at a farm estate

inhabited by a bedridden old woman, a brother and sister both (like her) named “Lily,” a gang of naked children who herd pigs and sheep, and a unicorn.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:   If we were making a list composed only of European-style arthouse surrealism, Black Moon would easily make the List.  Here at 366, Black Moon has to fight for its space not only with other Buñuel-based concoctions, but also with the mutant species of crazed B-movies, the maddest of midnight movies, and intentional and unintentional oddities of every stripe; the competition makes this (admittedly very weird) experimental art movie a more marginal choice.

COMMENTS:  Mercurial auteur Louis Malle (Au Revoir les Enfants) had dabbled in light absurdity with 1960′s Zazie dans le Metro, but audiences weren’t prepared for the sudden onslaught of full-on surrealism he unleashed in 1975 with Black Moon.  The movie concerns a young girl’s flight from an absurd world—where camo-clad men line up female prisoners of war and execute them, with gas mask-wearing ladies returning the favor to their male captives—into a totally irrational one.  With Malle behind the camera, we know that this will be a deliberate, quiet, beautifully-shot film.  Indeed, there are lots of long atmospheric shots and no dialogue at all for the first fifteen minutes, until Lily, the fleeing girl, finally comes upon the villa hidden deep in the woods and meets its insane inhabitants.  Her adventures are loosely inspired by that old weird warhorse, “Alice in Wonderland.”  There’s a pig /baby that may be an explicit reference to “Pig and Pepper,” and the characters Lily meets have the casually insulting demeanors of the denizens of Wonderland: the bedridden old lady says she looks “stupid… and she has no bosom, no bosom at all!’  In a Caroll-esque exchange, the unicorn accuses her of being “mean” for trampling some daisies (who, disturbingly, scream), while the myth is munching down on the selfsame flowers.  But don’t let the Alice references confuse you into supposing Malle’s film is a light absurdist comedy; although there are funny moments (as when Lily’s panties keep magically falling around her ankles while she’s trying to keep up a dignified conversation), Moon frequently shows its darker, adult side.  The old lady dies and is resurrected when her daughter breastfeeds her.   A chicken eats the heart of a corpse.  Joe Dallesandro decapitates an eagle.  Black Moon warbles back and forth between humor and nightmare, with lots of pauses for abstruse meditation, and it never nails down a tone; that lack of consistency may be intentional, but it doesn’t make the movie easy to get a hold of, or to fall in love with.  Pure, unstructured surrealism is tough to pull off at feature length—even Buñuel and Lynch rarely attempted it—and, as exceptional a filmmaker as he is, Malle doesn’t prove ready to step right into the dream genre.  Black Moon is a movie with some great individual visions—breastfeeding the unicorn, the concerto for nude children—not a completely immersive and enchanting experience.  It’s uneven, but it’s definitely worth a look for fans of the outrageously, unapologetically weird.  It makes you wonder how wonderful it would have been if every great director had indulged himself by unleashing one completely surreal film on the world (I’d love to see what Hitchcock would have come up with).  Cathryn Harrison is very pretty, petulant and appealing as the star; it’s surprising that her future acting career involved mainly small-screen roles in made-for-BBC movies.  Wisely cast as a mute, Joe Dallessandro adds another notch to his cool belt by becoming the only actor to work for both Andy Warhol and Louis Malle.  After the commercial (and, to a large extent, critical) failure of Black Moon, Malle would return to relatively mundane subject matter with the arthouse hits Pretty Baby and Atlantic City, before unleashing another (this time, reality-based) experiment with the literal conversation piece My Dinner With Andre.

After an uneventful theatrical release Black Moon quickly became a seldom seen curiosity in Malle’s canon.  In 2011 The Criterion Collection selected it for release, together with Malle’s second weirdest film, Zazie dans le Metro.  The Criterion edition features the exceptional technical quality you expect; extras are light, however, including only the original trailer (which is surprisingly uninspiring), a booklet essay, and ten minutes of contemporaneous insights from the auteur courtesy of the French television program “Pour le Cinéma.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The movie evokes the dream state without once resorting to the use of fuzzy filters, slow-motion photography or even lap dissolves… baffling and beautiful and occasionally very funny.”–Vincent Canby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

Chaplin later said that if he had known the actual extent of the horrors perpetrated in Nazi Germany, he could never have made The Great Dictator.  His detractors went so far as to accuse him of merely being angry at Hitler for stealing his mustache.  Of course, Chaplin had been making films against government oppression and the struggle of the little man almost from day one.  Additionally, Chaplin’s half-brother’s father was Jewish, giving him further motive to lampoon the dictator.  Chaplin’s mistake was that he spoke out against Hitler and the Third Reich before the United States entered the war.

Whether or not the Jewish Barber is the Tramp has been debated for years.  He is not referred to as the Tramp, but he is certainly a Tramp-like character, and that is really enough.  But, for the first time, Chaplin is uneasy with his iconic character.  After seeing the Tramp in all of his silent eloquence for years, hearing him speak in the opening WWI sequence is  greatly disconcerting.  This opening is awkward, and Chaplin reveals that verbal humor is not his strength.  Jokes about gas and, later, plays off the words “Aryan” and “vegetarian” fall embarrassingly flat.  His Tramp doughboy had done better lampooning the Great War in First National’s uneven Shoulder Arms (1918), which may be the first anti-war film.  Still, the Marx Brothers bested Chaplin in both of his anti-war films with their hilariously surreal and biting Duck Soup (1933).

When The Great Dictator picks up in Nazi Germany, the film improves, albeit sporadically.  Not surprisingly, Chaplin’s best moments are in two and a half silent vignettes.  In the first, the Jewish Barber is in a scuffle when Paulette Goddard’s Hannah accidentally hits him over the head with a frying pan intended for one of the bullying Nazi soldiers.  The Barber’s brief, dazed dance trot down a ghetto street, past shop windows painted with the word “Jew,” evokes anxious humor.  Unfortunately, this brief scene is only half silent.  The scene is framed with slapstick interplay between the Barber and the stormtroopers—ranging from buffoonery with a paint dipped brush to an attempted lynching—which further weakens its impact.  All of this is akin to Keystone Cops antics.  Something more unsettling was desperately needed.

The second and third silent vignettes are shared between the Barber and the Great Dictator (also played by Chaplin).  The Barber’s shaving of a customer, choreographed to the music of Brahms, is a brilliantly polished bit of quicksilver business and has nothing to do with the rest of the film.  (The shaving sequence had been attempted in a previous short and is a good example of how Chaplin re-worked ideas).  It is the Tramp’s best moment in the film, however.  In the final silent vignette, The Great Dictator nearly copulates with a balloon globe of the world.  Oddly, it is in the portrayal of Hitler, rather than the Barber, that we see more of Chaplin’s Tramp shining through.  The Dictator hearkens back to the earliest Keystone Tramp characterizations, when the little fellow could be cruel, selfish, and remarkably antagonistic.  (Later in his career, Chaplin’s First National Tramp has a moment, in The Pilgrim [1923], when he delivers a sermon in a hyperkinetic, uncannily Hitler-like stance).  Chaplin clearly invests most of his energy into this new character.

The Barber’s cutesy relationship with Hannah is forced and occasionally irksome, although through no fault of Goddard, who is probably Chaplin’s best leading lady.  Her role here is not the level of her compelling Gamin in the Modern Times, but she is Chaplin’s equal in ways that Edna Purviance, Georgia Hale, and Virginia Cherril, good as they were, could not be.

In 1917 Chaplin lost his great on-screen nemesis, Eric Campbell, to a car accident.  Chaplin’s films thus lost the sense of rudimentary mystery that Campbell’s foil gave to the Tramp.  The closest Chaplin came to having a worthwhile nemesis again was in Jack Oakie’s “Napolini” (i.e. Mussolini.).  Although Oakie has been rightly praised for his performance here, time  has also somewhat rusted his Chico Marx-like caricaturization.  Almost as good, although his appearance is brief, is Henry Daniel’s Herr Garbitsch (likely based on Joseph Goebbels).  Daniel, as usual, supplies macabre precision to his villainous role, although he is, overall, too sophisticated for the part.  The Great Dictator benefits from Chaplin’s attention and development of his co-stars Goddard, Oakie, and Daniel, but the film also frequently flounders by being littered with flat, obvious jokes.

The speech at the end is as naive and as heart-felt for its age as John’s Lennon’s “Imagine” was three decades later.  Chaplin steps out of character here, and critics of the period were right in their assessment that the speech throws the film off.  In hindsight, the oration is a  coda of sorts for Chaplin’s Tramp, although, again, verbal expression amounts to a new, nervous language for the actor.  The creation and the creator merge into a persona of maudlin sentimentality and extravagant social satire.  To criticize Chaplin for either is to criticize Chaplin as a whole.

Chaplin said if the Tramp ever spoke, he had to say something important.  Imagine, a filmmaker actually believing a film needs to have a point.  For all of its flaws, The Great Dictator is an important and enjoyable film.  Whether it’s important or enjoyable enough is debatable.

*The Criterion extras are sprinkled with The Great Dictator‘s seeds.  “Chaplin’s Napoleon” is a short “visual essay” detailing an abandoned film on the French dictator.  More interesting is the short King, Queen, and Joker, directed by Chaplin’s brother Sydney. It contains one of two blueprints for the barbershop sequence (the second is a scene cut from First National’s Sunnyside).

Another fascinating document in this impressive criterion package is film critic Michael Wood’s impassioned essay in defense of the film. Chaplin was probably grateful, considering all the negative heat he received from other quarters.

DIRECTED BY: Samuel Fuller

FEATURING: Peter Breck, Constance Towers, Hari Rhodes, Larry Tucker

PLOT: Johnny Barrett is a journalist obsessed with reaching the pinnacle of his profession—winning a Pulitzer Prize—and convinced that an unsolved murder at a mental institution will provide him the investigative opportunity his career needs.  Barrett arranges to have himself committed so he can interview the three patients who witnessed the crime, over the objections of his stripper girlfriend, who fears that he will lose his mind if he enters the asylum.  Once inside, Barrett tries to pry the information he needs out of the three witnesses during their rare lucid moments, but his constant intercourse with madmen, electric shock treatments, and a traumatic incident in the nympho ward take a toll on his own sanity.

BACKGROUND:

• Samuel Fuller, who had made successful and stylish B-pictures like I Shot Jesse James (1949), The Steel Helmet (1951) and Pickup on South Street (1953) for Twentieth Century Fox, began producing his films independently in 1956 to escape studio control.
• Fuller’s script was inspired by journalist Nellie Bly, a journalist who deliberately had herself committed to the Women’s Lunatic Asylum in 1887 in order to write a piece exposing conditions there.
• Fuller’s first career was as a journalist; he was a crime beat reporter for the New York Evening Graphic at the age of 17.
• Shock Corridor was made back-to-back with The Naked Kiss (1964), also starring Constance Towers and also dealing with potentially exploitative, shocking subject matter (in Kiss, prostitution and pedophilia).  The two films are usually considered to be spiritual siblings and are often screened together.
• The corridor set (the “street”) ended in a painted backdrop meant to give the illusion of stretching off to infinity.  Dwarfs were hired as extras to mill about at the end of the hallway to create a false perspective.
• Cinematographer Stanley Cortez had previously shot The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and The Night of the Hunter (1955), but ended his career lensing schlock like Madmen of Mandoras, Ghost in the Invisible Bikini and Navy vs. the Night Monsters.
• The film was shot in about ten days; Fuller friend John Ford dropped by to visit the set and asked, “Sammy, why are you shooting on this two-bit set?” to which Fuller replied, “No major would touch my yarn, Jack.  It’s warped.”
• The color scenes are composed of unused Japanese location-scouting footage from Fuller’s House of Bamboo, from an unreleased documentary on the Karaja tribe of Brazil, and home movies from a vacation.
• Fuller claimed that producer Samuel Firks never gave him his promised share of the profits, but was nonetheless happy with the arrangement because the producer allowed the director complete creative control.
• When Shock Corridor was awarded a special Humanitarian Award at the San Sebastian Film Festival, Fuller reportedly declined with the words “this isn’t a goddamn humanitarian film, it’s a hard-hitting, action-packed melodrama. Give your award to Ingmar Bergman.”
• Shock Corridor was selected for the National Film Registry in 1996 (the prestigious list of films preserved because of their cultural significance stands at only 550 titles as of 2010).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Though it’s hard to beat the thunderstorm in the corridor, it’s the scenes of Constance Towers as a naughty angel doing her hoochie-coochie dance in a feather boa on Peter Breck’s shoulder while he tries to grab some shuteye that make the biggest impression.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Though it features it’s fair share of stormy strum und drang

Original trailer for Shock Corridor

hallucinations, Shock Corridor would be a weird movie even without the dramatic schizoid interludes. Fuller’s film imprisons us inside a mental hospital full of odd patients who act nothing like normal people—but the uncanny thing is that they don’t act anything like lunatics, either; they act like symbols.  Drenching the film with melodramatic performances, expressionist visuals, outlandish dialogue, and blatant sensationalism, Fuller (consciously or unconsciously) constructs a uniquely nightmarish vision of Cold War America as a hyperreal asylum.

COMMENTS:After nearly 50 years, Shock Corridor has lost much of its power to shock  audiences; but what it retains is its amazing ability to make the average viewer completely miss the point.  In 1963, many, if not most, critics dismissed the film as exploitative trash with clumsy artistic pretensions (though they might have been impressed by its energy, and considered it a guilty pleasure).  Today, many first time viewers see Shock Corridor as campy trash, with clumsy artistic pretensions.  They complain about the histrionic performances; the overblown dialogue; the fact that the mental patients aren’t clinically convincing (like the ones in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest); the schematic nature of the plot; and the naïveté of the notion that schizophrenia could be caught from exposure to lunatics, like the flu.  Inevitably, the movie’s detractors conclude that Shock Corridor is bad because its unrealistic.  Conditioned to believe that the only way socially conscious films can be relevant is through realism, they expect an “important” film to look like The Blackboard Jungle or To Kill A Mockingbird; they believe a film dealing with the plight of the mentally ill should be a retread of The Snake Pit, with delusion and reality clearly distinguished.  They never stop to consider how appropriate it is that a movie whose central notion is that America in 1963 is a madhouse is more than a little bit crazy itself—that the film’s consistent unreality may be a case of form following function.

The film’s persistent strangeness can be subtle enough to pass over viewers’ heads; they mistake the film’s oddness for incompetence.  Everyone comments on the absurdity of the unforgettable “nymphomaniac ward” sequence, and its not clear whether the campy humor (Breck’s hilarious silent alarm as he alerts himself to the presence of the dreaded “nymphos!”) is intentional or not.  But, given the deliberately strange way Fuller handles some of the early scenes—sequences that supposedly occur before Johnny loses his mind—I think there’s reason to give him the benefit of the doubt that the “nymphos!” scene is deliberately, rather than accidentally, crazy.

Consider the first time we see Cathy dancing the striptease onstage.  Her face is completely covered by her feather boa, which moves as she exhales the first few breathy lyrics of her song.  This is an odd enough vision, but it’s subtly strange that the number she performs for the leering patrons isn’t a bump n’ grind burlesque tune, but a yearning ballad called “Someone to Love.” The girlishly chaste material, performed before sequined hearts, is tonally out of sync with Cathy’s provocative gyrations.  Further, the performance requires an overdub (she answers herself with an echo-chambered “Johnny!” after she sings “I need somebody to love…”), a technical amenity that the strip club she’s supposedly performing in would seem unlikely to provide.  And add to that the fact that the audience is never shown, and remains completely silent (no calls of “take it off!”) until they break into applause at the conclusion.  Although the number is supposedly set in a nightclub, it’s an expressionistic scene that tells us more about Cathy’s internal feelings and character than it does about her work life; the entire performance may as well occur entirely inside her head.

Another odd early scene also involves Cathy—her first (of two) memorable miniature appearances dancing on top of Johnny’s head as he dreams.  As he thrashes in his sleep, she taunts him that a local critic called her mouth “a lush tunnel,” and warns him that she doesn’t like to be alone and may have to “find a new Johnny.”  The scene is important because it shows us, for the first time, that Cathy is on Johnny’s mind (literally!), and that he cares for her as much as she does for him (up until then, it appears that he’s merely been using her for career advancement, to pose as his sister so that he could get himself committed as an incestuous fetishist to investigate the unsolved murder).  The voiceover in a dream (accompanied by the traditional harp arpeggios) is a form of cinematic shorthand for revealing a character’s interior state, so it may not strike the viewer as exceptionally strange at first blush.  But, in context of the story, it’s important that the way this crucial character information is divulged is through a hallucination—a delusion inside of a mind that’s been warned that, by playing at being insane, it is risking his own sanity.  And this hallucination occurs before Johnny has been committed to the hospital (the dream of the dancing stripper will return when he’s inside the asylum, in an even stranger form).

So, even before we’ve stepped across the threshold of the asylum, Fuller has already begun accustoming us to strangeness.  It’s expected that, as Johnny loses his grip on sanity, he’ll hallucinate—as he undergoes electric shock therapy, for example, or in the insane climax where he sees the thunderstorm in the corridor.  But the movie has been slowly loosening its grip on reality almost from the very first scene; Johnny’s slide into madness occurs gradually, and—like him—we may not even notice it at first.  That’s why the “nympho” scene, strange as it is, seems perfectly in place.  Isn’t it weird that this nympho ward—where the women are so unstable and insatiable that we were told that an orderly was taken off duty there because it became “too dangerous”—is right next door to the room in which the inmates undertake their dance therapy?  That the door only locks from the inside, that there’s no sign on it warning that it’s a restricted area, that Johnny decides to wander in that strange door looking for water, rather than going back through the hallway the way he came?  That Johnny, whose sexual psychology is in question both in fiction (he’s pretending to be a pervert) and in reality (he fantasizes guilt-tripping visits from his stripper girlfriend), suddenly finds himself inside a nest of beautiful but fearsome carnal vipers?  The nympho scene may be, as the film’s critics contend, just an absurd exploitation moment that’s awkwardly shoehorned in to the plot for shock value.  But if it is, it’s a happy accident, because it keeps the viewer off guard, reminding us that anything can happen in this movie, and adds immensely to the atmosphere of mounting lunacy.

The nympho sequence is one of a few delusional digressions from the main plotline, which is often criticized for being too “schematic.”  Once Johnny enters the asylum, he quickly falls into a pattern.  He targets one of the three witnesses to the unsolved stabbing that occurred in the hospital kitchen.  Each witness is suffering from an ironic delusion that mirrors some aspect of 1963 America.  The first man was raised a xenophobic bigot, was captured and brainwashed by Chinese communists, and now believes he is a Confederate general.  A black man who broke under the pressure of being the first Negro student to integrate a university now believes he is the founder of the Ku Klux Klan.  (Hari Rhodes donning a pillowcase and standing on a bench to deliver a hate-filled rant against integration is one of the few scenes that still has the power to shock modern audiences).  Finally, there is the Oppenheimer-like nuclear scientist whose guilt over helping to build the Bomb has driven him to adopt the persona of an innocent six-year old boy.  Each of the witnesses is introduced in turn (they don’t exist before or after Johnny interrogates them), has a hallucination in color which briefly shocks him into sanity, and divulges a clue to the murderer’s identity.  The plot tick-tocks like a clockwork mechanism—ironic delusion, color hallucination, moment of lucidity—repeat, repeat, repeat.  (When the pattern is broken once, and it’s actually disconcerting).  Of course, the real world doesn’t work in this diagrammatic fashion.  But the blatantly artificial order that’s imposed on the plot, which allows Fuller to climb on his soapbox using the three witnesses as mouthpieces for what he sees as wrong with his country, utilizes the logic of a mad prophet.

Of course, real insanity doesn’t work the way it’s depicted in Shock Corridor; real madmen don’t adopt such conveniently symbolic and didactic delusions.  Fuller doesn’t care, because, despite the promises of the trailer to expose “the medical jungle doctors don’t talk about,” the film is only incidentally about mental illness.  There’s implicit social criticism of therapeutic atrocities in the electroshock sequence, but that’s about as far as the movie goes as an institutional exposé.  Fuller is far more interested in exploring his metaphor of Cold War America as a madhouse, using the story to diagnose the hypocrisies and neuroses of the American dream: xenophobia, bigotry, racism, hysteria.  Of course insanity isn’t really “catching”: in reality, you don’t become a schizophrenic yourself by hanging out with schizophrenics, and Cathy and Johnny have little realistic reason to fear for the reporter’s sanity.  But in Shock Corridor, madness doesn’t result from a mental defect, it results from moral stress.  You go insane from being shunned by your fellow citizens for having unwittingly been a Communist, from being unable to bear the weight of an entire race’s expectations on your shoulders, from guilt over using your intellectual gifts to bring unspeakable horror on your fellow man.  In this symbolic world—though not in the real world—it makes sense that Johnny would go mad merely from the intense strain of trying to figure out what’s going on inside the asylum’s twisted corridors.  (The electroshock treatments probably don’t do much for his tenuous sanity, either).

Shock Corridor‘s shortsighted critics also condemn the movie for its unrealistic, hysterical performances.  Everyone in the movie either shouts or delivers their lines with solemnity that seems ridiculous; violence erupts every few minutes; and even a tender kiss results in angry accusations and flailing limbs.  But, though melodrama, particularly the soap opera-ish melodrama fashionable in early Hollywood, gets a bad name from being associated with popular trash, reflection suggests that it’s the proper tool to tell this particular story.  Everything in the movie is so consistently unreal—insanity is part of the movie’s bone structure—that only a strident tone fits right.  Melodrama deliberately seeks to exaggerate and heighten reality, particularly emotional reality.  Not only do the performers speak feverishly, the lines they are given are often absurdly overwrought.  Nobody speaks at all like a real person, and the words they say can verge on nonsense.  Cathy asks “do you think I like singing in that sewer with a hot light on my navel?” (why “navel”?), and advises “don’t be Moses leading your lunatics to the Pulitzer Prize.”  She tells Johnny, “Hamlet was made for Freud. Not you.” (What is this supposed to mean?  Johnny was not made for Freud, or Hamlet was not made for Johnny?  Does either alternative make much sense?)  Johnny tells Cathy (in a dream), “my yen for you goes up and down like a fever chart.”  No one talks this way, but it adds to the accumulation of oddities that make Shock Corridor the utterly unique, deranged, and beautiful motion picture that it is.  Just as Sam Fuller intended it to be.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The dialog is unreal and pretentious, and the direction is heavyhanded, often mistaking sordidness for realism. The performers labor valiantly, but in vain.”–Variety (contemporaneous)

“…an allegory of America today, not so much surreal as subreal in its hallucinatory view of history which can only be perceived beneath a littered surface of plot intrigue… a distinguished addition to that art form in which Hollywood has always excelled: the Baroque B-picture.”–Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

“…the total effect remains strange and harrowing, particularly in Shock Corridor‘s strongest images: the linear patterns of the ward’s corridor and barred windows; the stripper’s breath blowing through a boa wrapped around her face; a climactic thunderstorm that rages in the reporter’s deteriorating psyche; and the twisting of a catatonic man’s rigid hands into a facsimile of an embrace… the disturbing, singular vision of Sam Fuller still generates heat.”–Bill Weber, Slant Magazine (DVD)

OFFICIAL SITE: Shock Corridor (1963) – The Criterion Collection – includes three essays and a selection of press clippings on the film

IMDB LINK: Shock Corridor (1963)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Samuel Fuller, Eccentric Stylist of Poverty Row – The Criterion Collection’s re-releases of Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss inspires the New York Times‘ Dave Kehr to pen this Fuller primer

The Films of Samuel Fuller – Mike Grost lists some common features of and connections between Fuller films, and makes some observations about Shock Corridor in particular

MPP: Shock Corridor – Cartoonist Rick Trembles’ one panel comic treatment of Shock Corridor from his series “Motion Picture Purgatory”

DVD INFO: In 1998 the Criterion Collection released a bare-bones edition of Shock Corridor with no special features to speak of.  In 2011 they rectified this shameful slight with a lavish edition (buy) featuring a beautifully remastered print, illustrations by comic book artist Daniel Clowes, and a thirty page booklet with an essay by poet and critic Robert Polito.  The disc contains two excellent special features.  The more impressive is the hour long documentary The Typewriter, the Rifle and the M0vie Camera, which introduces us to the larger-than-life, cigar-chomping Sam Fuller by examining his three separate careers as a newspaperman, World War II solider and movie director.  The doc is narrated by Tim Robbins and features tributes to Fuller from Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese and Jim Jarmusch.  The second feature is an interview with the classy and elegant Constance Towers, who reflects on her experiences with Fuller and with director John Ford.  The Criterion Blu-ray (<buy) contains the same features.