Revisiting a Classic

This past weekend three quarters of my family drove up to Minnesota to look at colleges for our youngest child. Killing time during the six-hour drive, on her cellphone my wife opened up a random list of the 100 greatest films ever made. I'm kind of a sucker for these lists for many reasons, not the least of which is they provide an endless source of discussion, controversy and argument, due to their sins of commission and omission.

For starters, the film I brought up in my last post was not to be found on the list. Do you really mean to tell me that the comedies This is Spinal Tap and Airplane, funny for their time but not nearly as much today as when they were made, are deserving to be among the 100 greatest films ever made, but the sublime Local Hero is not???

You know, that kind of stuff. 

Frankly I could never put together a list like this as I don't think I've seen one hundred films in my life truly deserving of such a distinction. I mean, there are probably dozens of films by great directors like Kurosawa, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, Varda and scores of others I haven't seen yet that simply have to be better than say, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which might come in around number 100 of the top movies I have actually seen.

But in the end it's all subjective isn't it?

Well no, not really. There's a reason why certain films like Citizen Kane are always on these lists.

But not Casablanca, which some critics place at or near the top of their lists of greatest films ever made, while others like the authors of this list, don't think it even merits a spot in the top 100. I wasn't surprised by the snub as the 1942 Hollywood classic is somewhat polarizing; people either love it passionately or think it's overrated. Foremost among the latter group are the followers of the Auteur School of film criticism which places the worth of any film squarely upon the shoulders of its director, whom they consider the true author (auteur) of the work. Auteur criticism places a film within the context of its director's body of work and judge it primarily by whether it contributes to the particular vision and style of that director. Alfred Hitchcock would be a prime example of a director admired by the auteur critics as he has a unique vision and a definite visual and thematic style. *

Not so Michael Curtiz, who before directing Casablanca, already had dozens of Hollywood films and before that, many more in Austria and his native Hungary to his credit. Curtiz (an Americanization of his true surname Kertesz, a name familiar to anyone who is acquainted with the art of photography), made films in practically every popular genre at the time, from horror to mystery to film noir, from thriller to adventure, from love story to comedy to musical, including the Elvis Presley vehicle King Creole (probably the star's best film). Because of his tremendous output, Curtiz is often considered the ultimate Studio System director, one of many workers in the industry who were assigned films as much or more for practical reasons like his technical chops, his reputation for working within schedule and never going over budget, rather than for his personal vision. 

And because of that, as his output was all over the place stylistically and thematically, most auteur critics feel Curtiz represented the studio's vision rather than his own. To them he is a craftsman rather than an artist. In less generous terms, some would call him a studio hack, albeit a very, very good one. 

So where does Casablanca stand with the auteur critics? Respect, but often in the form of backhanded praise. This is from none less than Andrew Sarris, the American film critic who expanded upon the auteur theory from its origins in France:

...the director’s one enduring masterpiece is, of course, "Casablanca", the happiest of happy accidents, and the most decisive exception to the auteur theory.

Not all of the detractors of Casablanca were subscribers to the auteur theory, here's Paulene Kael:

It's far from a great film but it has a special appealingly schlocky romanticism, and you're never really pressed to take its melodramatic twists and turns seriously. 

Responding to that comment, in an essay for The Atlantic celebrating the 70th anniversary of the film in 2012, David W. Brown, himself a great fan of Casablanca writes this:

Nobody ever walked away from a screening of Casablanca and said, "Well I don't get it."  Not with regard to its reputation as a great work, nor to the nature of its characters or plot. It's not a challenging work. But its universal themes and accessibility are inseparable from its place in the American film canon.

Therein lies the issue with the movie, it's a great film because its themes are universal, we all get it; it's less than great because it doesn't challenge us.

Brown points out in his essay that greatness of any work of art comes from either smashing accepted standards to bits to create something entirely new, or taking those established standards to heights never realized before.  

Citizen Kane would fit into the first category, and Casablanca into the second. 

If you've seen the movie, you might be interested in this shot by shot analysis of Casablanca by one of its greatest supporters, the late Chicago based film critic Roger Ebert.

Ebert does a nice job putting everything into place. What the auteur critics seem to ignore is that film making is perhaps more than any other art, a collaborative effort as anyone who has ever sat through the closing credits of a movie realizes. Without minimizing the efforts of Curtiz one bit, Ebert points out that the greatness of Casablanca lies in the efforts of everyone involved from its producer Hal Wallis who probably shaped the final product more than anyone else, through the writers, (Julius J. Epstein, Phillip G. Epstein and Howard Koch), the cinematographer, (Arthur Edison), the editor, (Owen Marks), the music director, (Max Steiner), the costume and set designers (Orry-Kelly and George James Hopkins), the rest of the technical staff and of course, the amazing cast all the way down to the extras, truly one of the greatest collections of talent ever gathered for one film.

I admire Ebert for his point of view and keen sense of observation but there are a few points he makes here that I have some issues with.

THE SCREENPLAY

 

It's no secret that Casablanca is probably the most quotable movie ever, at least in American cinema. In his analysis, Roger Ebert says the true sign of a successful screenplay is when the audience leaves the theater quoting lines from the movie. I'm not sure I agree, it's kind of like saying the sign of a great work of music is if you're able to hum tunes from it after leaving the concert hall. That would certainly disqualify most western classical music written after 1850.

Regardless, for all its memorable snippets of dialog, Casablanca also has more than its share of roll-your-eye inducing lines as well. Consider the following:

"Was that cannon fire or is it my heart pounding?"

One would be hard pressed to write a cheesier line.

The son of actress Joy Paige who played the young Bulgarian bride in the movie, recounted in her 2008 obituary in the LA times that his mother, in 1942 a high school senior with family connections to the film industry, read an early draft of the screenplay but was not impressed. She told her son she felt it was "corny and old fashioned." Fortunately for her despite her reservations, she got and accepted the role which turned out to be her one true shot at silver screen immortality.

You be the judge. The following is a transcription of the screenplay highlighting Page's one big scene in the movie where her character, Annina, is looking for some advice from Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart). The action takes place in the dining room of Rick's Cafe Americain:

 

Annina meets Captain Renault, Chief of Police, in the hallway as she leaves the gambling room:

RENAULT: How's lady luck treating you? 

Annina looks down.

RENAULT: Aw, too bad, you'll find him over there.

 

Renault points in the direction of Rick. Annina sees him and goes to his table as Renault watches her attentively.

ANNINA: Monsieur Rick?

RICK: Yes?

ANNINA: Could I speak with you for just one moment please?

Rick looks at her.

RICK: How'd you get in here? You're underage.

ANNINA: I came with Captain Renault.

RICK (cynically): Oh I should have known.

ANNINA: My husband is with me too.

RICK:  He is? Well Captain Renault is getting broadminded. Sit down.

Will you have a drink?

Anina shakes her head.

RICK: No of course not, you mind if I do?

ANNINA: No.

Rick pours himself a drink.

ANNINA: Monsieur Rick, what kind of a man is Captain Renault?

RICK: Oh he's just like any other man, only more so...

ANNINA: No I mean, is he trustworthy, is his word...

RICK:  Now just a minute, who told you to ask me that?

ANNINA: He did, Captain Renault did.

 

RICK:  I thought so, where's your husband?

ANNINA: At the roulette table trying to win enough for our exit visa.

Well of course he's losing.

RICK:  How long have you been married?

ANNINA: Eight weeks, we come from Bulgaria.

Oh things are very bad there Monsieur, the devil has the people by the throat.

So Jan and I we, we do not want our children to grow up in such a country.

RICK (wearily): So you decided to go to America?

ANNINA: Yes but we haven't that much money and,

traveling is so expensive and difficult, it was much more than we thought to get here.

And then Captain Renault sees us. and he is so kind he wants to help us...

RICK: Yes I'll bet...

ANNINA: He tells me he can get us an exit visa but, but we have no money..

RICK: Does he know that?

ANNINA: Oh yes.

RICK: And he's still willing to give you a visa? 

ANNINA: Yes monsieur.

RICK: And you want to know...

ANNINA: Will he keep his word.?

RICK: He always has.

There is a silence. Annina is very disturbed.

ANNINA: Oh monsieur you are a man, if someone loved you very much so that your happiness was the only thing that she wanted in the world, and she did a bad thing to make certain of it, could you forgive her...

Rick stares off into space.

RICK: Nobody ever loved me that much.

ANNINA: ...and he never knew, and the girl kept this bad thing locked in her heart,

that would be alright, wouldn't it?

RICK (harshly): You want my advice?

ANNINA: Oh yes please.

RICK: Go back to Bulgaria.

ANNINA: Oh but if you knew what it means to us to get to America...

oh, but if Jan should find out, he's such a boy, in many ways I am so much older than he is.

RICK: Yes well everyone has problems in Casablanca maybe yours will work out. You'll excuse me.

Rick abruptly rises.

ANNINA (tonelessly): Thank you Monsieur.

He quickly goes off, leaving Annina alone at the table. She remains seated, too demoralized to move.

And... cut.

Are you moved to tears by reading that? Probably not.

The sincerity Joy Page brings to the role of Annina kind of sort of pulls off all that wonky dialog ("The Devil has people by the throat" really???). But I'm afraid even a more seasoned actor could never take that claptrap beyond grade B level melodrama. Conversely, Rick's one-line responses, at least on paper, convey the level of indifference and snarkiness we've come to expect from his character up to that point, not much more.

You wouldn't know it just from reading the dialog, but this is the pivotal scene in the movie, there's a lot going on here. 

First, Rick is defining for us his complicated relationship with Renault (Claude Rains). He knows full well that Renault is a scoundrel as his snide comments suggest. The conversation is rapid fire, both actors starting their lines before the other has a chance to finish, except for one time not indicated in the script. When Annina asks if Renault will keep his word, Rick pauses only for a second, but it seems much longer. For the first time in the scene, he speaks without irony:

"He always has."

Rick and Renault share a mutual admiration, even affection, yet neither would hesitate throwing the other under the bus if it were necessary. Here Rick withdraws his glance from the young woman as if to wash his hands of the sordid affair. He tells the young woman in not so many words that yes Renault, a man of his word, will indeed grant her and her husband the exit visas, after he fucks her. The way Bogart delivers that line, he conveys both fondness for the man, and contempt.

Talk about complicated. 

Then Rick exposes his vulnerability in the middle of Annina's sad confession about her dilemma.

His face changes from an expression of compassion to anguish when her words hit close to home as she talks about a woman loving a person so much she would do anything to make him happy. Rick has just been reacquainted with the love of his life Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) in the arms of another man. He allows himself a moment of self-pity when he responds: "Nobody loves me that much."

Then fatalism sets in as he crushes Annina's dream of a better life by advising her to just give up and go back home.

After some more mushy words from the poor girl, Rick abruptly gets up and leaves her in the lurch, telling her dismissively that everybody's got problems in Casablanca, so leave me alone and have a nice day.

Same old Rick sticking his neck out for no one.

At least that's what we're led to believe as the scene shifts to another part of Rick's place where back to business, he welcomes Ilsa and her husband Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) back to his nightclub. This scene is so filled with tension between Rick and Ilsa that we forget about poor Annina. 

But not Rick. In the subsequent scene Rick enters the gambling room where Annina's husband Jan is sitting dejectedly at the roulette wheel. The croupier Emil (played by the great French actor Marcel Dalio in an uncredited role) asks Jan, who is only holding a few chips, if he'd like to place another bet. "I'd better not" he says, those chips probably representing the last of the couple's savings. Rick, looking over his shoulder says: "have you tried 22?". "I said 22" he repeats a little louder, speaking to Jan but looking at Emil who gets the message. 

 

Of all the memorable lines from Casablanca that are quoted endlessly, the last one Rick says to Annina before darting out of the room...

Yes well everyone has problems in Casablanca maybe yours will work out.

... is not one of them. But it dawned on me after having seem the film for the umpteenth time this week that it should be.  When he says everyone has problems in Casablanca, perhaps he is referring to his own. Thinking of it in those terms, in his mind he is first diminishing his own suffering by empathizing with another person's pain. Doing his part to help ease that pain is step two.

In that gesture at the roulette wheel, coming at no small cost to both Rick and his business's reputation, he solves Annina'a dilemma, much to Renault's consternation. And there in one fell swoop, the pathologically guarded Rick at last reveals who he really is for all to see, including himself.

That seemingly dismissive line to Annina foreshadows the greatest line of the film:

I'm not good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that.

Screenwriters provide the architecture of a film, not just the dialog. They don't write for the printed page any more than an architect designs for the blueprint. They depend on the cast, the director, the cinematographer, the editor, and a whole cast of characters to make their words come to life. That's the magic of cinema.

Watch this clip of the two scenes involving the Bulgarian couple to see what I mean. Pay close attention to Bogart's physical reactions to Joy Page and especially to his exquisite timing. If you doubt what a great film actor he was, you have the script, give it a go yourself.

Unfortunately, the middle scene has been edited out of this clip. Better yet, watch the whole movie, watch it again if you've already seen it.

Do I consider this great screenwriting despite its not always stellar dialog? 

You bet I do, along with great acting directing, cinematography and you name it.

VICTOR LASZOW

Roger Ebert claims in his analysis that Casablanca is a near perfect movie. Then he points to some small issues such as continuity errors and the many parts of the story that challenge one's suspension of disbelief, all of which he admits, don't really take anything away from the film.

I agree.

It seems Ebert's main objection to the film is the performance of Paul Henreid in the role of the unassailable resistance hero, Victor Laszlo. Laszlo, a Czechoslovak with Hungarian name**, is a continuous thorn in the side of the Nazis. He has escaped from a concentration camp and found his way to Morocco, then part of unoccupied France.*** From there he hoped to obtain two official letters of transit that would permit him and his wife Ilsa to leave the country for neutral Portugal, then on to the United States, where he could continue his work in relative safety. 

If you've seen the movie you can skip the next paragraph. If not and you're interested in how Rick got involved in all this, read on:

FOR THAT WE MUST GO TO FLASHBACK, cue the harpist...

PARIS-1940: It turns out that while Victor was in Nazi captivity, Ilsa mistakenly learned that he was dead. Thinking herself a widow, Ilsa met Rick in Paris, fell in love with him, hears the first of many "here's looking at you kids", yadda yadda yadda, then in march the Nazis. Rick, himself no friend of the Third Reich, decides to skedaddle, but not before Ilsa finds out that Victor is very much alive, has escaped from the concentration camp, and is back in Paris. She can't face Rick with the news so instead of joining him on the last train out of town, she sends a note with Sam (Dooley Wilson, more on him later) telling Rick without explanation that she can never see him again, have a nice life. 

So back to the present and Victor and Ilsa end up unbeknownst to them at the club of Ilsa's lover and now we've got ourselves one barnburner of a love triangle.

So what's wrong with Henreid's performance according to Ebert? There's no chemistry between Victor and Ilsa, he claims. I believe at one point Ebert says that Henreid is too stiff, apparently not realizing the mixed message that term sends.

Anyway, stiff or flaccid, it hardly matters, the character of Victor is all about his work. He certainly loves Ilsa, we know that because he says so, even if Ebert is not convinced. Ingrid Bergman always said that when they were making the film, she asked director Michael Curtiz which character Ilsa was supposed to really be in love with. He reportedly told her to dole out the loving equally between the two and that they'd sort it out at the end of the story, which legend has it, was not determined until the day they shot the final scene.  

But it's clear to me in the final cut that Ilsa worships Laszlo (perhaps more like a father), but loves Rick.**** That is what defines her conflict. Had there been more "chemistry" between Laszlo and Ilsa as Ebert and others suggest, and all else had been the same, she would have chosen her husband in a heartbeat without all the drama.

Not a very interesting ending.  

AND SPEAKING OF THAT ENDING (spoiler alert!!!)

If you've read anything about the making of Casablanca, you know that the filmmakers were flying by the seat of their pants, making everything up as they went along. At times it is said, any given day's shooting could have included dialog that was written that very morning and rushed over to the set. As I mentioned above, Ingrid Bergman didn't know which man she was supposed to be in love with. Some suggest even the screenwriters had no clue which of the two, Laszlo or Rick, she would end up with in the end. 

Roger Ebert points out quite logically that there is no way Ilsa could have ended up with her lover Rick rather than her husband, as it would have been strictly forbidden by the enforcers of the extremely conservative Motion Picture Production Code, the self-regulating moral police force better known as the Hays Office. With its intimations of extramarital goings on, and even a not too subtle suggestion of latent homosexuality, (remember this is 1942), Casablanca was already pushing the envelope, and the producers had to do several end-runs around the censors to get the more titillating scenes on the screen. But an ending where Ilsa leaves her husband for her lover and not getting her comeuppance for it would have been a non-starter in 1942 Hollywood, strictly on moral grounds. *****

But there is a vastly more profound reason why Ilsa got on that plane with Victor and not Rick. It would have made no sense insofar as the trajectory of the story.

For decades, Casablanca has been described as a love story set to the backdrop of war. But the war was not a backdrop, it wasn't even the proverbial 800 pound gorilla in the room. World War II was the story. Without it, the film would not have been Casablanca, it would have been Paris, Oslo, Prague, New York, Berlin, Sophia and all the other places the characters escaped from to end up in Casablanca. In other words, without the war, there would be no Casablanca the movie because nobody in it would have met each other.

More important, the film was made during the war. When Rick in a perplexed drunken stupor cynically asks Ilsa how the story of their love triangle ends, she responds, "I don't know, the ending hasn't been written yet." That response has a double meaning clearly not lost to the people who were watching the film at the time of its release. On the surface she's saying she doesn't know which man she'll end up with. In a much deeper sense, she, everyone watching the film in 1942, and for that matter anyone alive all over the world at the time, had no idea how the only important story of the day would turn out. It certainly wasn't looking good at the time for those who preferred freedom, justice and democracy to fascism, tyranny and genocide.

By the time the film was released, the United States government was demanding sacrifice from every single American, Tragically and unjustly, Americans of Japanese descent were forced to sacrifice more than any other group. The government was drafting American sons (the daughters went voluntarily), asking of them the biggest sacrifice of all. 

Imagine an ending where Ilsa and Rick, both it turns out with skin in the game, throw away all their commitments and values to run off together and live happily ever after, while the rest of the world was sacrificing, suffering and dying.

Preposterous.

What most people who have written about Casablanca for the past fifty years or so seem to miss is its unmistakable role as a propaganda film.

As usual, I've gone on much too long, so we'll save that part of our story for another day.

Stay tuned, les jeux sont faits.

NOTES:

* There's definitely an auteur theory bias to this list. For the record, three Hitchcock films made the list but surprisingly none are in the top ten. Stanley Kubrick has five including number one, 2001: A Space Odessey.

**The writers probably thought a truly Czech name like Jiři Dvořák would be too hard to pronounce. Ebert could have commented on Henreid's Austrian accent too, but like the inappropriate name, that didn't seem to bother him either. Fortunately, none of the actors in the international cast bothered to fake an accent to mimic the nationality of the character they were supposed to be playing. I guess having any kind of foreign, i.e. non-American accent was enough to lend the film a hint of authenticity, at least to the American audience. The one exception is June Page, one of only three Americans in the credited cast, (Bogey and Dooley Wilson were the other two). Given the diverse accents in the film, Page's American accent is a little off putting when she says she's from Bulgaria. 

***A little history lesson. Roger Ebert claims one of the biggest inaccuracies in the film is the idea that Victor Laszlo, an enemy of the Third Reich, could arrive in French controlled Morocco and not be immediately arrested by the Gestapo as by this time France was occupied by the Germans. This is not quite so. While the northern portion of contiguous France, including Paris was occupied by the Nazis, the southern part of the country and its North African colonies were governed by l'État français (The French State) better known as Vichy France, named after the city which was its capital. While Vichy had signed a peace treaty with Germany and collaborated with the Nazis, it was still an independent state at the time the film takes place, and the Germans despite their influence, would have had no official jurisdiction there. Of course, to paraphrase Carl (S. K. Sakall) the ex-pat German waiter at Rick's: "being Germans they would have taken him anyway."

**** All the chemistry on screen may have been between Ilsa and Rick, not Ilsa and Laszlow, but in real life, legend has it that Ingrid Berman and Paul Henreid had an affair, while she and Humphrey Bogart barely spoke to each other off the set. I guess that's why they call it "acting."

***** The Hays Office did let another moral transgression slide, in our day a far greater sin, the sex crimes of Captain Renault. I'll get to that in my next post. 

Whiplash

Here's another one for the day late and dollar short file.

At my daughter's suggestion, we watched a movie I could have sworn was only a year or two old. Wasn't it just recently that I saw J.K. Simmons accepting the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as the abusive (to put it mildly), music teacher in the film Whiplash? No, my wife said having looked it up, the movie was made in 2014. So either the pandemic is really messing with my sense of time, or it's my age. Probably both.

Anyway, Whiplash has received many accolades as being a contemporary classic. On this site it is ranked as the 298th best movie of all time. You can take that or leave it. Judging by the list's top twenty two movies which includes zero movies NOT made in Hollywood, and top thirty six films which were NOT made in this century, I prefer to leave it. But the film must have been very well received critically to rate so highly on a list of the best movies ever made since the year 1900!

Does it deserve all the praise? 

Whiplash is a tightly directed (by Damien Chazelle who also wrote the screenplay) and edited (by Tom Cross) psychological thriller featuring two outstanding performances by Simmons and Miles Teller in the lead role as Andrew Neyman, a talented young musician enrolled in a fictional New York music academy.

The premise is this: Andrew, a drummer, becomes involved in the school's premier jazz band led by the Simmons character, the notorious Terrence Fletcher. Fletcher is mean to everybody, but really seems to have it in for drummers, especially Andrew. But Andrew is fiercely driven to be the next Buddy Rich, (yes Buddy Rich) and willingly puts up with the abuse, accepting it exists only for the purpose of teaching him to be the best drummer he can possibly be.

Given that setup, you can probably fill in the rest of the plot and get it about ninety percent right, as it has been a formula for countless stories told over the ages.. 

It's the remaining ten percent that makes the film worth watching.

If by chance you haven't yet seen this eight, check that, nine-year-old movie and still plan to see it, you may want to stop reading now as much of what I have to say from here on contains serious spoiler material.

OK GOT THAT? 

Don't say I didn't warn you. 

My first criterion for what makes a good movie is that I think about it long after the closing credits. One way of doing that is being left with more questions than answers. Whiplash is open ended, it doesn't leave you with a sense of resolution at the end, even though it has a closing scene for the ages.

Films with premises such as this one, at least American ones, usually end in one of two ways. Either the Andrew character despite all the heartbreak, struggle, and fits and starts along the way, triumphs over adversity and in the end, sometime later, thanks his mentor for all the "tough love" making him what he is today. Or he triumphs despite the mentor who gets his comeuppance in the end. In both cases, the Andrew character gets the girl, and they live together happily ever after, at least until the sequel.

Does any of this happen in Whiplash? Well, with the exception of what happens with the girl, we don't know, it's up to us to decide.

Just like real life. 

It turns out, I seem to have a much different take on the story than many folks, including my family. After having digested the movie for a day or so, I asked my wife, daughter and son if they thought the movie had a happy ending. To a person they said yes.

I said no, I didn't think so. 

OK, HERE"S YOUR LAST SPOILER ALERT.

If you're still reading this, I'm assuming you've either seen the film or don't care. So this is how the movie ends, last chance, here goes:

With a band directed by Terrence Fletcher, Andrew performs a prolonged, no-holds-barred drum solo at Carnegie Hall which leaves everyone, including Fletcher, in awe. When he finishes, Fletcher gives the band it's cue for the closing chord, then the screen fades to black.

Andrew wins, he has proven to his abusive mentor that he's truly got what it takes, he has earned his rightful place in the pantheon of musicians, and presumably what he expressed a desire for earlier in the film, a shot at being remembered long after he's gone. More important perhaps as many have pointed out in reviews, in the end Andrew proves that he is the equal of Fletcher. 

On that last point I agree.

But what did he have to give up getting to that point and in reality, in which direction did he have to go to get there?

My view is that Andrew did not climb the heights in order to achieve equal status with Fletcher but rather, sank deeper and deeper into the depths to get there. In other words, in my view Whiplash is a modern-day Faust story, where the protagonist sells his soul to get something he desperately wants. 

So, if Andrew is Faust in this updated version, does that make Fletcher the Devil? 

It isn't until the last reel (so to speak) of the movie that you realize Fletcher is truly an evil character. Up until that point he is simply an asshole who despite sociopathic tendencies, may actually give a rat's ass about his students. He does show a trace of humanity in a scene where he expresses what seems to be genuine grief after the tragic death of a former student. And outside of class he displays a bit of charm at times.

After their student-teacher relationship ends, Andrew runs into Fletcher as he's playing a gig at a New York jazz club. After his set, Fletcher explains to Andrew that there should be no hard feelings because he uses his controversial techniques only to achieve perfection in his students' work, pushing them to places they never expected to go. Despite having just finished playing what to my ears anyway, was an insipid set of music, Fletcher explains to Andrew that the real enemy is mediocrity. The most memorable line in the movie comes at this point when Fletcher justifies his methods by telling Andrew:

There are no two words in the English language more harmful than "good job."

Fletcher then invites Andrew to join him and his new band at the aforementioned Carnegie Hall gig.

Before going on stage, Fletcher tells his band that this could well be the make-or-break performance of their careers. The man's true nature becomes apparent the next scene when on stage, Andrew discovers that Fletcher has intentionally tripped him up by giving him the wrong score. Just before the band begins the number that Andrew didn't rehearse, on stage Fletcher reveals he knew all along it was Andrew who anonymously testified at a hearing against his former teacher, thereby costing him his job at the academy.

Does that make Fletcher evil?

Looking at his actions toward Andrew before that final scene, I'd say yes. Not a man of many layers, in my opinion, Fletcher is not a particularly complicated character. 

Fletcher recognizes Andrew's talent because upon hearing him play for the first time, he invites the new student to sit in with his elite band, when one would assume that normally, prospective band members would come to him. Before the first rehearsal, Fletcher acts as if he's taking the new member under his wing by expressing interest in Andrew's family, information he would soon use to humiliate Andrew. Fletcher learns that Andrew was brought up by his single father, a writer whose day job is high school literature teacher.  His mom left the family shortly after her son was born. Fletcher concludes the scene by telling the young man to take it easy and most of all, to "have fun." 

The easy-going manner continues briefly during the rehearsal, even after the first few times Fletcher stops the band, noting that Andrew is messing up the tempo. As Andrew continues to be not quite up to Fletcher's impossibly rigorous standards, the tide turns quickly and after about five starts and stops, Fletcher hurls a chair at Andrew's head. He then gets in Andrew's face, berates him, slaps him, and brings up for all to hear, the boy's family history, claiming his mother left her husband because he was a loser. 

Beyond the horrifying way in which the teacher hazes the pupil, it's a brilliant scene. As Fletcher picks up on mistakes in the band that are imperceptible at least to untrained ears, it gives the viewer the idea that while his methods may be way out of line, the guy sure knows his stuff, and that his perfectionism may in some way, justify his actions.

It's not until after the credits roll, when you realize that's nonsense. Well at least, in my opinion.

Putting everything together with a bit of dime store psychoanalysis, Fletcher is all about power, manipulation, control, and nothing else. From the outset Fletcher sees three things in Andrew that he could use to his own ends: his talent, immense drive, and perhaps most important of all, his vulnerability.

As we would learn later, Fletcher himself is no great shakes as a musician. Knowing that, in retrospect his comments on Andrew's father being a failure were really a reflection on himself. It's not a stretch to imagine that he despised Andrew because he knew form the start that his student had far more potential than he did. 

So, the extra "attention" he gave Andrew would result in one of two things, it would either turn the young man into a successful musician, which would look great on Fletcher's resume, or it would destroy him. Either way, Fletcher wins.

It's worth pointing out here that the student whose death inspired some human emotion from Fletcher, turned out before his death, to be a success story, a member of Wynton Marsalis's band, "first chair" no less. In retrospect, it's hard to imagine a less successful student eliciting that kind of response from Fletcher. It's also worth pointing out that the former student did not die in a car accident as stated by Fletcher, but rather took his own life, which some attributed to his experience with the monstrous teacher. 

In an interview, writer/director Chazelle, admitted that his character Fletcher had no redeeming qualities. 

Indeed.

Andrew's character is more complex, which also becomes apparent as the movie progresses. His vulnerability is on display early on when we see him work up the nerve to ask Nicole, the girl behind the movie theater concession stand, played by Melissa Benoist, out for a date. After he falls deeper and deeper into the clutches of Fletcher, he coldly dumps Nicole when he realizes his obsession, which at one point in the film nearly costs him his life, trumps everything else. 

In another telling scene, Andrew makes some snarky comments to his cousins at the dinner table, which seem out-of-line with the character we met at the opening of the film before he falls under Fletcher's spell.

Superficially, neither of these scenes make Andrew appear likable, no doubt, the influence of Fletcher. But like everything else in Whiplash, there is another side. As my wife pointed out, the comments to the family members, nasty as they may have been, were not undeserved. And as my daughter pointed out, beyond the obvious differences in their approach to life, there was little chemistry from the get-go between Andrew and Nicole. Come to think of it, he was doing her a great service by breaking up with her right to her face, rather than simply ignoring her, which I'm afraid is what most guys would do.

So in a sense, Fletcher's influence on the young man was not altogether negative.

No, it wasn't those two scenes that defined Andrew losing his soul as I thought at first. It was that damned drum solo at the end of the movie.

When Andrew is humiliated for the last time by Fletcher, he leaves the Carnegie Hall stage and runs into the arms of his father waiting for him in the wings. He then summons up the courage to return to the stage to take over the performance. "Follow me now" he says to the band which they willingly do, much to Fletcher's wrath.  

He then goes on to give a performance filled with bluster, death-defying velocity, theatrics, and pyrotechnics. In short, he does everything humanly possible on a drum kit except play with the sticks between his toes while standing on his head.

Maybe I'm tipping my hand here but to me, the only thing worse than a one-minute drum solo, is a two-minute drum solo. And the only thing worse than a two-minute drum solo is... well you get the idea. I have no idea what the running time of the last scene of the movie was, but it seemed to go on forever. In that sense, it was a fitting and even brilliant depiction of the conflict between the two main characters. 

But was it good music?

Well...

It probably doesn't matter as Whiplash isn't about music at all, as countless YouTube videos of real-life musicians commenting on the film testify. So it probably doesn't matter that any teacher no matter the discipline in the 21st Century using Terrence Fletcher's methods of humiliation, degradation, and emotional and physical abuse bordering on violence, wouldn't last a week in an academic setting, not even the great Wynton Marsalis himself.

And it probably doesn't matter that that kind of teaching style wouldn't produce the intended results anyway. Maybe that was the point. Fletcher's anecdote about (Chicago) Joe Jones throwing his cymbal at Charlie Parker's head, nearly decapitating him, is bullshit. What really happened was during a jam session with members of the Count Basie Band in the thirties, to express his dissatisfaction with a solo performed by the then very young Bird, Jones dropped a cymbal to the floor. Did that humiliation make Charlie Parker, Charlie Parker as Fletcher implied? 

I doubt it. 

That's not to say there isn't a tremendous amount of hard work, dedication and sacrifice that goes into becoming a successful musician. And yes, there is blood shed at times, usually from popped blisters, not the copious amounts the film would have us believe.

What I missed in a movie that is ostensibly about making music, is the real motivation behind all the hard work and sacrifice of musicians: the love and pure joy of making music. You see it in the faces of nearly all decent musicians as they perform, from the humblest to the most accomplished, from pop to the avant guarde, and everything in between.

It isn't until the end of Whiplash that you see that look on Andrew's face. But the way the film is cut, it's obvious that his satisfaction comes not from the music he's making, but the fact that he has finally gained the favor and acceptance of the monster whose spell he is under. And the look on the monster's face at that very moment says he's satisfied, having gained another victim. 

At the dinner table scene mentioned above, Andrew reveals his true motivation by recalling the Charlie Parker anecdote to his family. His father, beautifully underplayed by Paul Reiser, points out that Parker, a heroin addict, died at 34. He said that wasn't exactly his definition of success, but what do fathers know? It didn't matter to Andrew who claimed defiantly that he'd rather die young and be remembered than live to a ripe old age and be forgotten. 

What that comment brought to my mind was the fact that nearly 60 years after his death, the name Lee Harvey Oswald is more remembered today than that of practically every jazz musician, living or dead. It might have been a good comeback line for the dad if only he had thought of it in time.

But I digress.

Like I said, Whiplash is not at all about music but it does hint to what's important in life. What really made an impression upon me having thought about it for quite a while was that Terrence Fletcher's idea of success, (which would also become Andrew's), is fleeting and superficial.

We are left at the end of the move, with the two of them, Fletcher and Andrew, being one, hardly a happy ending, for me at least. 

Whatever happens after the final chord, one can only guess. Perhaps Andrew follows the path of Fletcher's other student who makes it big only to hang himself. Perhaps Andrew gets Fletcher's old job at the music academy and picks up where his mentor left off, beating the crap out of new, vulnerable students. Or perhaps Andrew and Fletcher, now BFFs, team up to take their maniacal act on the road.   

On the other hand, maybe Andrew leaves music altogether and follows the lead of another of the talented Mr. Simmons' many characters, the avuncular insurance salesman in those Farmers adds. 

Considering the other options, THAT would be a happy ending.

Silver Screen Taboo

Christmas came and went softly and gently the other day. We stayed at home just like practically every other day this year, yet had some much needed family togetherness, as nearly one year's worth of family togetherness has kept us anything but together. Funny but I can't remember ever in my life being less excited for Christmas and perhaps that lack of buildup made this one particularly enjoyable and special.

One of the things we did this December 25th was watch a couple movies together, normally a difficult task as finding something the four of us can agree upon is nearly impossible. But we agreed upon a recent film that my wife and daughter had both seen and had their stamp of approval. It was a movie I had my doubts about but was still curious to see.

Released a year ago, Jo Jo Rabbit is set in an unnamed town in Germany during the closing days of World War II. Its title character, 10 year old Johannes "Jo Jo" Betzler, lives alone (or so he thinks) with his mother in a beautifully appointed Jungenstihl era house. We quickly learn that his enigmatic father has been away fighting the war with questionable loyalty to der Vaterland for two years, and his older sister has passed away from an illness.

Home alone much of the time and pretty much left to his own devices, Jo Jo is swept up in nationalistic fervor and is as good a little Nazi as he can be. So much so that his imaginary best friend who provides Jo Jo comfort, advice and much of the humor in the film, is none other than Adolph Hitler himself, (played by the film's director, Taika Watiti).   

Ever since The Three Stooges mocked der Fuhrer with their film short, You Nazty Spy! in 1939, filmmakers have been getting chuckles out of perhaps the most evil person to have ever lived. Understandably however, not too many as the theme has been deemed to varying degrees depending on the current zeitgeist, to be too hot to handle.      

Perhaps the most famous, poignant, and brutally funny takedown of Hitler on film was Charlie Chaplin's 1940 classic, The Great Dictator: 

As with every attempt to portray abject evil in a comic manner, there is a price to pay, In addition to being Chaplin's first fully "talking picture", The Great Dictator marked the last appearance of "Charlot", the name the French gave his beloved Little Tramp character. No doubt Hitler's physical resemblance to Charlot, especially the cropped moustache, led to the character's demise.

The Great Dictator was an American film made during the war but before our entry into it. Many forget there were not a few Americans at the time who like the aviator Charles Lindburgh, were Nazi sympathizers, consequently the film was controversial at the time of its release. Clearly from the scene above, the whole world knew what the Nazis were up to but the true extent of the evil they would perpetrate was not fully revealed. Chaplin later said that had he known before the war what he knew after, he would never have made the movie. 

Nonetheless the film stands as a masterwork of social criticism. The final scene in the movie is a dead-serious speech delivered by Chaplin in the double role as a Jewish barber who is mistaken for the great dictator. Despite the scene having been criticized over the years for its preachy heavy-handedness and sentimentality, it has withstood the test of time:   

 

Another great film made during the war where laughs are had at the expense of Hitler and the Nazis was Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 To Be or Not to Be, starring Jack Benny and Carole Lombard. By this time the US was at war with Germany and much of the public, including Benny's own father were deeply offended, finding the film inappropriate and in bad taste. 

 

The period after the war saw loads of films based on WWII, but little can be found in the realm of humor for two decades as the wounds left over from the conflagration were still festering. That all changed in the mid-sixties with the introduction of the hit American TV sit-com, Hogan's Heroes. Set in a German prisoner of war camp, every episode featured an intrepid group of Allied POWS outsmarting their bumbling German captors, led by the foolishly inept Colonel Klink (Werner Klemperer) and the lovable Sergeant "I Know Nothing" Schultz (John Banner). The show had a long six year run, (longer than the US involvement in the war), testifying to its popularity despite being roundly criticized for being inappropriate and in poor taste. 

In the same era, the mother of all inappropriate Nazi slapstick movies was released, Mel Brooks' 1968 farce, The Producers. In that movie, for my money, one of the funniest ever made, bad taste is the whole point.

The film's two protagonists, an impresario who's fallen on hard times, Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) and his bashful accountant Leo Bloom (Gene Wilder) come up with a wild scheme to raise a boatload of money for a show by selling off 25,000 percent of the show's profit. In order to get away with that, they would have to produce the worst play in the world, a show that was bound to flop, guaranteed to close and never be heard from again after opening night. After that, the two would skip town with all the cash, leaving Max's investors, mostly wealthy love-smitten little old ladies in the lurch. 

After a tireless search, Max and Leo come up with their surefire flop: Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp With Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden.  

All goes along swimmingly during the opening number on opening night: 

       

Their fatal mistake was the "actor" they picked to play the title role. In the hilarious audition scene, the producers have their pick of sincere, third rate (if that) actors, any one of whom would have been an ideal pick for the disaster Max and Leo had in mind. But after rejecting every last one of the would be Hitlers, in walks Lorenzo St. Dubois, better known by his initials, L.S.D. (Dick Shawn), a stoned, long-in-the-tooth hippie who stumbles into the wrong audition. Despite objections from the play's director Roger DeBris, Max insists L.S.D. be allowed to audition for the role, where with his backup band, a trio of flower children, he sings an anthem to love and flower power which perplexes everyone in the room except for Max who closes the audition with a jubilant: "That's Our Hitler!!!" 

Here in one fell swoop, LS.D. saves the play and in doing so, ruins Max and Leo's dreams of fabulous fortune:

It should be noted that virtually everyone related to these works as writers, directors and actors including The Three Stooges, Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, Jack Benny, Werner Klemperer, John Banner, Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Dick Shawn, and on and on, were Jewish. Perhaps this gives these artists the street cred to pull this kind of thing off, something that members of other ethnic groups who were not victims of the Nazis would lack. 

Now we can add Taika Watiti to that list as well.

Not surprisingly, a lot of folks are turned off by Watiti's Jo Jo Rabbit. Either they understandably find nothing funny about Nazis, they feel that when the film does get serious, it's not appropriately serious, or that its message is not deep enough. 

I suppose the happy-go-lucky, light-hearted nature of the trailer with its upbeat soundtrack of The Monkees, The Beatles and David Bowie singing in German doesn't make it easy to take the film seriously. Neither does the fact that this film, like those mentioned above, is billed as a comedy, which I believe is a stretch.

While it's true that Jo Jo Rabbit doesn't give us the stereotypical, standard issue gravitas we've come to expect from films about its subject, it's certainly no Gay Romp in the Hitler Jugend either. There are some truly horrifying (albeit non-graphic) scenes, one of which is so heart-wrenching that it still haunts me 72 hours after seeing it, and I have no doubt it will stick with me for the rest of my days. 

Perhaps the biggest criticism leveled against the movie is Watiti's portrayal of a kinder, gentler, funny Hitler. However if you've been paying any attention at all, you know that he's not portraying Hitler at all, any more than Dick Shawn was in The Producers. In his case, Watiti is playing an imaginary person conceived in the mind of a ten year old child. That the child should happen to choose this particular "friend" shouldn't come as a surprise given the circumstances of growing up in Nazi Germany. Of course this is a highly personal and idealized Hitler, it would be ridiculous to imagine anyone, especially a child, conceiving the real Hitler as his imaginary friend. That critics take this Hitler mirage so literally is their problem, not the film's. 

What I think makes JJR so powerful is the relationships it develops between the child, played brilliantly by Roman Griffin Davis, and the characters around him, none of whom are exactly what they seem at first. His mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansen giving perhaps the most complex performance of her career), from the outset seems to be the perfect Nazi mom. After all how could a child develop such a fervent passion without the help of a parent? It turns out Rosie is anything but. We learn this first hand when the mother and child stumble upon a gruesome scene of the hanging corpses of several townspeople in the public square. "What did they do?" asks Jo Jo. "Whatever they could" was his mother's terse response. 

Why then one may ask, would Rosie tolerate Jo Jo's fanaticism? Like the film, the answer is both complicated and painfully simple, for his survival of course. Along those lines, Rosie enrolls Jo Jo in a camp of the Deutsches Jungvolk in der Hitler Jugend, sort of the Cub Scouts of the Hitler Youth. She entrusts his safety to another enigmatic character, the commandant of the camp, Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell) whose true relationship with Rosie remains one of the many unanswered mysteries of the movie.  

Jo Jo's second best friend after pretend Hitler, is Yorki (played by another scene-stealer, Archie Yates), an adorable, pudgy young man who is Jo Jo's bunkmate at Camp Nazi. Jo Jo is far more committed to the cause than Yorki, but his commitment we soon learn is superficial. When the camp counselors tell the children that a good Nazi has to be able to kill, Jo Jo is singled out to come forward, and then told to break the neck of a live rabbit. He can't do it, (hence his pejorative nickname), but with the help of his imaginary friend Hitler, he volunteers to do something that risks his own life, and pays for it dearly. His close encounter with a hand grenade disqualifies Jo Jo from military service and he is relegated to banal tasks such as posting leaflets, while in scenes that are both comic and heartbreaking, little Yorki ends up with a gun, serving with a group of children and old men enlisted to futilely defend the city from the advancing Russian and American armies.

The central relationship in the movie is between Jo Jo and Else (Thomasin McKenzie), a Jewish teenager whom he discovers hiding in the closet of his sister's bedroom. Much to Jo Jo's chagrin, he learns that his mother has been hiding Else, a friend of her dead daughter, in order to protect her from the fate of her parents, a one way ticket to the concentration camp. The good little Nazi in Jo Jo feels compelled to turn in the girl to the authorities but Elsa who is six years his senior and a few decades more mature, brings up the obvious fact that turning her in would expose his mother.    

I don't think I'm giving too much away here by saying the two of them come to share a bond which becomes stronger than the one with his pretend friend. Elsa sees right though to the boy's true self when she tells him: "You're no Nazi you're a ten year old kid who likes to dress up in a funny uniform and wants to be part of a club." For his part, all the official lies he blindly excepted about Jews were dispelled once he actually got to know one. The two young people end up risking their lives for each other, both of them making reckless mistakes that might have proven fatal had it not been for the selfless acts of an unlikely, but very real guardian angel.

One thing that makes Jo Jo Rabbit so interesting is that it is one of the few films I know of that deals with the subject of the lives of ordinary (non Jewish) German people during World War II.  Something I learned years ago that I'm afraid lots of people still don't realize today is that the majority of the German public did not support the Nazis. But like Rosie, those who didn't,  understood that subversion, rather than speaking out was the only practical means of remaining true to oneself AND surviving. 

There are very few real Nazis in Jo Jo Rabbit, most of the characters' loyalty to the party is superficial like Jo Jo's, they are just normal people doing whatever they can to survive the nightmare. Even the real Nazis depicted, six members of the Gestapo who come to ransack Rosie's house hoping to find evidence against her, appear more like exhausted tax accountants on April 14th, just counting the hours until quitting time. Their scene is one of the most interesting of the film, both hilarious with their endless stream of perfunctory Heil Hitlers (a gag borrowed from To Be or Not To Be), and chilling at the same time.

Talk about the banality of evil. 

  

As I said, Jo Jo Rabbit is not for everyone. Its simple story is off-putting to those who feel the subject deserves more gravity and depth. I have to admit being a little put off myself by its cheeky vibe at the beginning. My wife looked over at me several times during the first twenty minutes or so and commented that I looked like those audience members during the opening number of Springtime for Hitler.  But I became a convert as soon as I realized that complexity and depth does exist in the film, lying just under the surface. If you care to look beyond the superficial its right there for the taking.   

The film's message is simple as can be. It's the same as Chaplin's at the end of The Great Dictator: taking the time to get to know one another helps us understand that we all share a common humanity. In other words, we have more in common with each other than we have differences. Armed with this understanding helps us jettison fear, lies, mistrust, anger, prejudice and hatred of our fellow human beings out the window, just as Jo Jo ultimately does with his pretend friend.  

It's a message we've heard all our lives and should know like the back of our hands. But after the last four years of life under a "leader" who purposefully divided this country by promoting fear, lies, mistrust, anger, prejudice and hatred for his own benefit, clearly it's a message we all need to hear now as much as ever. 

The Ken Burns Effect

A recent posting on Facebook of A Trip Down Market Street, this mesmerizing film of a cable car ride down San Francisco's main drag, brought to mind a couple of things:

If this looks familiar, you've probably seen bits of it used as a device in documentary films that deal with a particular time and place: America at the turn of the last century. Coincidentally, this week PBS has been broadcasting the latest Ken Burns film based upon the lives of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. Sure enough, in The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, one of the thousands of clips from hundreds of films Burns uses is a clip from this movie which was actually shot during Teddy Roosevelt's administration. In fact if you look carefully, you can see the clip over and over again as it is used in a promo for the show and one of its sponsors. I'm quite certain that I've seen portions of this film over the years, used in other works of Burns and his contemporaries.

I suspect most people don't immediately recognize the city depicted in the film. As such it could represent virtually any big American city at the turn of the twentieth century, which is why using clips from it is so attractive to contemporary filmmakers. But there is a story behind this particular film that makes it in its own right much more interesting than the documentary films who exploit it simply to establish a time and place.

The film  was produced by four brothers, Harry, Herbert, Earle and Joe, collectively known as the Miles Brothers. It was shot entirely in one take, not a small accomplishment given that the cameraman, Harry Miles, had to hand crank the film traveling through his camera at a consistent rate for the entire thirteen minute cable car ride. Another not so small feat is the fact that the cable car does not come to a complete stop in the entire film. The film is beautifully choreographed as obstacles including folks standing on the tracks playing "chicken", not moving away until the last possible second, and daredevil motorists darting in between oncoming cars can't stop our cable car as it moves inexorably toward its destination, the San Francisco Ferry Building at the intersection of Market and the Embarcadero, the heart of the city.

One of the many interesting aspects of the film is the way it shows the traffic pattern of a major artery in an American city before the time when vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine reigned supreme. The cable car, itself powered by a mechanism gripping onto an underground cable moving at a constant rate of speed, had to compete with electric powered street cars, horse drawn vehicles of all types, pedestrians, bicyclists, and automobiles. When I first saw the movie in its entirety this week, I was surprised by the amount of cars, given that the number of automobiles in the entire United States in the first decade of the twentieth century was less than ten thousand. Turns out I was not off base, according to the 60 Minutes piece you'll find below, the Miles brothers employed local motorists to appear in the film, (in some cases more than once), so the depiction of Market Street traffic c.1906 is a little deceptive.

As you may notice, there are no traffic lights, they wouldn't come around until a decade later. I guess it's debatable whether they could have used them in 1906 as vehicles with different capabilities of speed and maneuverability are forced to compete for right of way while only tacitly adhering to accepted rules of the road. Yet here everybody seems to get along just fine as the top practical speed of the "horseless carriages" on the road at the time was probably not much more than that of a carriage-less horse.

The most remarkable thing about this film is not apparent from a casual viewing. It was originally assumed that A Trip Down Market Street was filmed in October of 1905. Film historian David Kiehn would become obsessed with the movie shot in his home town and by taking note of many visual clues and doing some historical research which is documented in the 60 Minutes piece, determined conclusively that the film was shot in late March or early April of 1906, only a week or two before the catastrophic earthquake that took place on April 18th of that year. In all around 3,000 lives were lost in that earthquake and the ensuing fire, roughly the same number who perished in New York City, Arlington, VA and Shankesville, PA as a result of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,

It's very likely that in a week or two, some of the people who appeared in the film would be dead and half of them would lose their homes. Most of the buildings would be gone. One exception is the Terminal Building visible throughout the entire movie, the ultimate destination of the cable car. The building survived the earthquake and today is still the focal point of Market Street. To all who care about such things, that building not only lives as a memorial to the 1906 tragedy, but also to the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake which took the lives of dozens motorists who were crushed when the double deck highway they were driving upon collapsed. A similar freeway which once stood immediately in front of the Terminal Building was significantly damaged during that earthquake and shortly thereafter was demolished.

But the building also survived that earthquake intact; it and the film stand today as testaments to a great city and the indefatigable human spirit.


If there is such a thing as an American documentary filmmaker with a household name, it would be Ken Burns. So popular is his work, many people consider his movies to be the final word on the topics he covers. His films which air on PBS, are devoted to American subjects such as the Brooklyn Bridge, Jazz, Baseball, Prohibition, the Civil War, and now of course, the Roosevelts. No matter what subject, Burns's formulaic style does not vary from film to film. In each work, an authoritative voice-over narration moves along the story line supplemented by readings of quotes from correspondence, speeches or text supplied by notable actors, and comments from experts in the field. To set the mood, a soundtrack of period music plays incessantly in the background from beginning to end.

The bulk of Burns's imagery consists of archive film footage and still photographs. Setting a tone, they serve the same purpose as the soundtrack. What little original footage he supplies are images of un-populated historical sites usually shot romantically at dusk, and the "talking heads" of the experts, speaking reverently about the subject at hand. Never content to allow his visual material to speak for itself, Burns cuts up films (such as A Trip Down Market Street), to suit his needs. In a similar fashion, he seldom shows us a still photograph in its entirety, rather  he selectively crops images then animates them by panning or zooming in and out, usually for dramatic effect.  Burns in no way invented the idea of panning across still images, but he has used and abused the technique so often that Apple Corporation has included what they call the "Ken Burns Effect"  in their video editing software.  The Burns Effect is so successful that it has become the default setting when users choose to include still photographs into their videos. In other words, if you want to show a still image in your video without any pans or zooms in Apple software, you have to turn off the Ken Burns effect. Given his reputation as "the people's historian", I can't think of a more suitable metaphor.

Despite being widely admired, Ken Burns has his detractors. His work has a well deserved reputation for being less than rigorous with the facts. Never content to leave any loose ends, many feel his films package their subjects in neat and tidy bundles, avoiding the inevitable lingering doubts and messy questions that real historians deal with on a daily basis. And then there's that inescapable, plug-in style of his which treats every subject exactly the same.

But my biggest gripe with Ken Burns is the way he appropriates the work of others, without giving the authors due credit. You won't have a hard time finding the names of the "talent" who provide the voiceover narration and readings, nor will you have a problem learning who wrote and produced the films. You certainly won't have a problem spotting Ken Burns's name all over his product. But if you're interested in who provided Burns with the visual theme (or as the fancy people call it, the mise en scène) of his films, that is to say the photographers and filmmakers who are responsible for about 90 percent of what you actually see in a Ken Burns film, not to mention the musicians who provided the soundtrack, forget about it. Burns only pays lip service, and that's a generous term, to the archives where the work was found, but never to the creators of the work itself.

Which in my opinion is inexcusable.

To rectify that if only a bit, as promised, here from a 60 Minutes piece broadcast in 2010, is the story of a work of art that Ken Burns has used and abused time and again. A work that in my opinion, far from being merely a brief clip used to establish a particular time and place, is more ground breaking, powerful, and enlightening than any of the films that the so called "most respected historian in America" has given us to date:

The Quintessence of Life

At the end of a particularly draining Saturday one month ago, my wife suggested we head to a Redbox machine in our neighborhood to find a DVD for an all too infrequent family movie night. Frankly there's little in those machines that interests me. Call me a snob but I just don't care for many contemporary Hollywood movies. With their one dimensional characters, predictable story lines, interminable chase scenes, incessant devotion to special effects, gratuitous violence and sex, (well violence anyway), and their target audience, the least common denominator, I'd take an old, a foreign, or an indie movie any day.

Out of the dozens of choices in the machine, only two movies appealed to me, and one was not appropriate for the children. The other was the new version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, directed by and starring Ben Stiller in the title role. I always liked the James Thurbur short story, probably because I can identify with a character who spends much of his time in a dream state which he prefers to reality. My kids like Stiller, especially from his role as the security guard in the two Night at the Museum movies. My wife was just happy we could find something to agree upon. I was prepared for a much needed, mindless evening chilling in front of the tube watching a pleasant, harmless movie. I figured the worst thing that could happen was that I'd fall asleep, which is what usually happens when I plant myself  in front of the TV.

That last thing I expected was to be engaged, enthralled and overwhelmed by a film that was not only entertaining, but also touched upon several issues that are close to my heart, issues that have been dealt with in this blog.

In this version of the Mitty story, our hero begins the movie late for work having missed his train as he becomes lost in a fantasy about the woman he has a crush on, a co-worker named Cheryl Melhof, (played by Kristen Wiig). Walter's tardiness does not bode well for him as he learns upon arriving at the office that his company has just been bought out and the transition team has already arrived to eviscerate the staff. We are soon to meet the chief antagonist of the story, the leader of the transition team, a pompous, self-serving weasel of a man named Ted Hendricks (Adam Scott), dressed in a suit and ridiculous beard, (the source of one of the funniest lines of the movie).

The business Ted Hendricks's company bought could have made cars, investments, or widgets; it hardly matters to people like him who are only interested in the bottom line. It so happens that the business in question is Life Magazine. Hendricks proves time and again that he is completely in the dark about publishing a magazine. While he lacks any knowledge of the industry he's just been thrust into, his people skills are worse. In the first meeting with his new staff he tells them the bad news: most of them are about to be fired. Then the good news: before they lose their jobs they are about to have the honor of creating the magazine's final print edition, as Life was about to go entirely online. *

While the Hendricks character is merely an apparatchik for the entity who bought out Life Magazine, he serves well as a metaphor for today's corporate world that cares little about what a company actually does and needless to say, less about the people who work for it. I wrote on this very subject a few years ago, about a corporate takeover specialist named Edward Lampert who bought out K-Mart and Sears. Despite his ostensible interest in saving the two struggling national icons, it became clear that Lambert's actions were motivated out of the profit gained by selling off those companies' vast holdings of real estate, rather than selling hardware, clothing, and appliances.

Anyway, Hendricks told his stunned audience that the last issue of Life Magazine was to feature on its cover a photograph made by the esteemed photographer Sean O'Connell, (Sean Penn). According to O'Connell, his picture which at that point had been unseen by anyone but its creator, depicted nothing less than "the quintessence of life." Hendricks had no idea what that meant but was told by his two goons, also in suits and ridiculous beards, that it meant something special.

Walter Mitty's position at the magazine was photo archivist, his official title in comically ironic corporate-speak, "negative asset specialist." In that role he and O'Connell had developed a close working relationship over the years, although the two men had never met face to face. In this capacity, Walter was entrusted with the roll of negatives, (yes O'Connell still shot film thank you very much), containing the important picture. The trouble was, the roll was completely intact except for the one important frame, #25.

The rest of the film depicts Walter breaking free of his dream life by embarking on an ever broadening journey to find the elusive photographer and his missing negative. As with most literary and cinematic quests, whether it be for the Holy Grail, Private Ryan, Mr. Kurtz, or Rosebud, this search reveals at least as much about the searcher as for what is sought.

This film received by and large, ho-hum reviews. Many of the critics didn't accept the premise of a search half way around the globe for one picture. Taking the premise quite literally, Richard Roeper said: "It's hard to get too excited in the digital age about a missing photograph." Not too surprising a comment I suppose coming from a reviewer who works for The Chicago Sun Times, the newspaper that recently laid off its entire staff of photographers.

The filmmakers who made this Walter Mitty story take the medium of photography more seriously than the Chicago tabloid and their reviewer, as their movie is liberally populated with important photographs. The halls of Life are covered with decades worth of iconic photographs that graced the pages of the magazine. Peering down at us from the walls of Mitty's workplace are the images of a generation, the likes of Ghandi, Martin Luther King,  JFK, John Lennon, Muhammad Ali and John Glenn (or is it?). We see the first moon launch up close, Mt. Everest from a little more of a distance, and Moses holding up the Ten Commandments on the screen of a drive in theater.

These are not images made by just anybody with their smart phone, they were made by artists who were the best in the business. Just as having an e-mail account doesn't make you a writer, having a phone with a camera doesn't make you photographer. That inherent truth is something beyond the grasp of a businessman like Hendricks just as it is to the current owners of the Sun Times. Throughout the film, as the photographs begin to be removed from the halls of Life Magazine, we learn what is about to be lost. In one scene, a particularly alluring Marilyn Monroe looks on from down the hall as the clueless boss surveys the institution he is about to disassemble. You can almost hear her say indignantly: "really?"

I keep thinking that the late Roger Ebert, Roeper's predecessor at the Sun Times would not have missed the significance of that scene.

An important part of the movie that many critics did not buy was the portrayal of the elusive photographer Sean O'Connell. He's clearly an eccentric character marching to the beat of his own drummer, an artist led entirely by impulse, creating work for himself above all others. I suppose the most difficult thing to understand about O'Connell takes place when we finally catch up with him in one of the remotest parts of the world. He is about encounter something he has traveled half way around the world to photograph. After a long wait, the camera trained upon his subject, he observes it through his telephoto lens, then shows it to Walter. Walter asks O'Connell if he's going to take the picture and the photographer answers no:

Sometimes I don't. If I like a moment, for me, personally, I don't like to have the distraction of the camera. I just want to stay in it.

It takes a true artist to understand that sentiment.

With his long hair, scraggly beard and disheveled appearance, O'Connell is cast as the stereotypical artist directly out of central casting. If people like Sean didn't exist, you'd have to invent him. In reality, Sean O'Connell is not much of a stretch, I just wrote about two artists who would make O'Connell look no more off-beat than Aunt Bea. One is Josef Koudelka, the other is Vivian Maier.

One frequent criticism of the movie is its simplistic message that it's better to do than to dream. One critic called Walter's break out experience nothing more than an extended Nike "Just do it" commercial. I think these critics miss the point. Walter is not, as some folks see him, a simple milquetoast, everyman of a character. There is depth to the guy as we learn early on that his more or less mundane existence is the result of circumstances beyond his control. Much like George Bailey, the central character of the classic film It's a Wonderful Life, the teenage Walter was forced to abandon his youthful dreams of exploring the world because of family responsibilities caused by the death of his father. As we meet him many years later, he still takes full responsibility for the care of his elderly mother (Shirley MacLaine) and his demanding sister (Kathryn Hahn).

Walter may lead what many consider a hum-drum life, but what slowly becomes clear if you pay attention, is that he is thoroughly engrossed and passionate about his work. It is the very thing that motivates him to go on his fantastic journey in the first place. Sean O'Connell entrusts Mitty with his work knowing full well that without Walter, he would be nothing. No, Walter is not escaping from his life and his "boring" job, rather he is taking his work to a higher level. When Mitty returns from his first journey empty handed, he tells his new boss that in 16 years on the job he has never lost a negative. The heartless response is: "put that on a plaque and hang it on the wall, at your next job." But after receiving another clue about the whereabouts of O'Connell, Walter embarks on his most ambitious adventure to find the negative, after he his fired. Hard to imagine your typical 9 to 5 office grunt doing that. This film teaches us that a person's job and a person's work, are not necessarily the same thing.

I suspect that most of the negative criticism of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty comes from the fact that the movie doesn't live up to the expectations of the reviewers. As it would be difficult in this day and age to revolve a feature length movie around a the daydreams of a man during a Saturday afternoon shopping excursion with his overbearing wife, this is definitely not James Thurbur's Walter Mitty. It's also not a remake of the the 1947 version of the story starring Danny Kaye, simply because Ben Stiller is not Danny Kaye. In fact, Ben Stiller in this movie is not even Ben Stiller, as a typical comedy featuring the popular actor is driven by a frenetic comedic pace where the setup for one gag begins as soon as the laughs from the previous gag die down. There are funny moments in this Walter Mitty story and some amusing lines in the screenplay written by Steve Conrad, but you would be hard pressed to call this introspective film a comedy. The two other stars of the movie, Wiig and MacLaine, best known for their characterizations of over the top characters, here downplay their roles so naturally that it hardly ever seems they're acting.

The one universal bit of praise this film has received has to do with the magnificent cinematography of Stuart Dryburgh. The film looks beautiful, especially after we leave the confining environments of Walter's Manhattan apartment and workplace for the great unknown, in this case shot on location in Iceland. To many critics, the scenes of these remote places, while stunningly cinematic, have little to do with moving along the story, they are eye candy at best. Here I reserve my harshest critique of the critics. To me, the most memorable scenes in what I consider to be a remarkable film, are three prolonged sequences containing no dialogue. They involve, a helicopter flight, an extreme skateboard ride, and a pickup soccer game.

These amazing scenes represent transcendent moments in Walter's life where he breaks free of the restraints he has placed upon himself, finds the freedom to do the thing that comes most naturally to him, and finally accepts and lets go of at least some of his old assumptions about they way he should live his life.

Save for jumping into shark filled waters and coming face to face with an erupting volcano, much to the chagrin of critics like Roeper, Walter's excursions abroad aren't filled with scene after scene of conflict and resolution. Instead they are filled with wonder and discovery. Some reviewers speculate that those scenes are just more of Walter's dreams, but clearly they are not. In the dream sequences which we see in detail at the beginning of the film, Walter is at the center in the role of hero, whether he's leaping into a building to save Cheryl's dog from an imminent explosion, or telling off his pompous boss in front of his co-workers. Far from it during his excursions abroad where he is continually dependent on the help of strangers, including a drunken lout in a Greenland bar and an Afghan war lord who is smitten with a piece of Mrs. Mitty's famous Clementine cake. Walter's encounters along his journey are for me the most poignant part of the story. These encounters with people who are vastly different than him, and by extension, us, speak to the fact that while we all may be different, there is an essential quality of the human experience that connects us all.

By the end of the movie, things are hardly resolved for Walter. He's back in New York without a job, his future uncertain, and he's failed to come through on the promise to his mother that she would never have to sell her most prized possession. The "feel good" ending is laced with not a small amount of melancholy. I'm not giving away anything by telling you that Walter gets the girl at the end. That should come as no surprise as it's already clear by the second reel that there is a mutual attraction between Walter and Cheryl; quickly enough she becomes both his muse and soul mate. The real payoff which I'm not going to give away, comes about a minute before the final frames of the movie where we see Walter and Cheryl holding hands for the first time. To some critics, the resolution of this movie was the biggest letdown since they discovered that Rosebud was only a sled.

Personally I found the resolution of this story nothing less than sublime. The real message of the film is more complicated than: "just do it." As I see it, the message is that it may be better to do than to dream, but in order to live a complete life, they're both important. And finally, that we all hold the quintessence of life right in the palm of our hands, but sometimes we have to go to the ends of the earth to find it.

Those may not be the most profound messages in the world, and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty certainly doesn't rank up there with the great films of all time. But for the life of me, I haven't been able to stop thinking about the movie since I saw it.



*The real Life ceased publication as a weekly magazine back in 1972. It resurfaces from time to time in commemorative issues published by its parent company Time INC.

The urban experience on film...

In the twilight of the golden age of American city, the movie On the Town gave us this spirited and ambitious tour of 1949 Manhattan plus a side trip to the Statue of Liberty, in just over three minutes! The three mugs are Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munchin. The lyrics are by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, music by Leonard Bernstein, and the film was directed by Kelly and Stanley Donen.

Incidentally, the lyrics from the original musical stage play are more appropriate coming out of the mouths of sailors on a one day leave; "New York, New York, a hell of a town."

The urban experience in film...

A huge gap in my film going experience has been the work of Buster Keaton. I've been a Chaplin fan for longer than I care to admit but Buster was just off my radar. Until this past week that is when the family saw Keaton's 1928 film The Cameraman. In addition to being a highly entertaining movie made by one of the true geniuses of cinema, it contains some great location work in New York City.

Here a somewhat long clip that is one of my favorite sequences in the film. It includes Buster running through live traffic up Broadway I believe, giving a terrific idea of what the city looked like in the late 1920s. I think the shot of the policeman is actually Los Angeles but I'm not sure.



Note the set of his apartment building where he runs up and down several flights of stairs waiting for a call from his sweetheart, played by Marceline Day.

The Cameraman also features this magical scene of Buster shot in what was at the time a brand new Yankee Stadium.

Enjoy!