The Spirit of the Beehive (El Espíritù de la Colmena)

yoke and arrows emblem

 

Director Victor Erice

 

THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (El Espíritù de la Colmena)         A                                     Spain  (97 mi)  1973  d: Victor Erice

“It's me, Ana...It's me, Ana.”   —Ana (Ana Torrent)

Something of a memory play, a poem of awakening, a reconstruction of a past that’s been stolen from an entire generation, that needs to rediscover itself through this slowly realized, hauntingly beautiful Spanish film set in the shadow of Franco during the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in 1940 (the year of the director’s birth), showing how the world of adults and the world of children intersect, told from the point of view of a young 6-year old girl Ana (Ana Torrent), who like Linda Blair in THE EXORCIST (1973) has been haunted by this role ever since.  Having earned a living writing film criticism, directing television, and filming commercials, this is a project co-written with Ángel Fernández-Santos, shot in the small town of Hoyuelos on the open plains of Segovia, told without any narrative, but from an abstract series of impressions, where the strength of the film is its refusal to explain exactly what anything means, as the adult lives of her mother and father are in quiet turmoil, where they barely speak to one another and instead remain totally isolated in the rural countryside with little contact from the outside world.  Her intellectual father (Fernando Fernán Gómez) obsesses over the inner workings of his beehives, keeps a scientific journal, and remains sequestered in his study, often seen alone pacing in his room lost in thought, while his wife Teresa (Teresa Gimpera) narrates a letter she is writing to a long lost lover in exile, indicating that “the news we get from the outside world is so scant and confusing,” Spirit Of The Beehive, The (1973) -- (Movie Clip) My Constant ... YouTube (4:35), basically preventing any cultural contamination from the democratic world.  Their mutual indifference leaves the two children, Ana along with her older 10-year old sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería), alone to their own devices most of the time, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) by Víctor Erice, Clip: Ana and ... YouTube (1:26).  Much of this feels like personal recollections, where during the Franco era, people were afraid to open their mouths for fear of political reprisals and instead lived secret lives, turning this into an eloquently hushed experience, so simple, quiet, and dreamlike, yet utterly compelling.  Accentuating the silence immediately after the war, released two years before the death of Franco, when his health was already failing, this was the first Spanish film to portray a freedom fighter, someone on the losing side of the Civil War, with any degree of sympathy.  Much of the film is wordless, or is spoken through whispers, where the muted exterior world has an impact on an equally disturbing interior world which at times resembles the horror genre, tapping into our deepest fears, using Ana’s personal journey to parallel that of the Spanish people, where the director has a habit of making quick cuts away from scenes that haven’t yet played out, leaving the audience to wonder, like Ana, as if stuck in a perpetual dream state not being able to recognize real life from an imaginary world.  This has become a familiar metaphoric representation of the Franco era, more recently expressed through Guillermo Del Toro’s PAN’S LABYRINTH (2006), which is a much more violent and sadistic portrait lacking some of the poetry of this film.  If you look closely in the opening shot after the credit sequence, a truck drives into town carrying cans of film, where you can observe an emblem of the fascist Falange with the yoke and arrows symbol decorating the wall of the first building as you arrive into town, an unmistakable reality in a world precariously balanced between “Once upon a time…” and “Somewhere on the Castilian plateau, around 1940…”   

Erice offers no clues about what’s going on until well into the picture when we see Ana paging through a family album and deliberately leaves much to the imagination of the viewer.  Their home is a manifestation of the beehive, with its honeycomb-shaped stained glass windows and the golden-hued light filtering through.  In one of the more traumatic sequences, Ana finds her sister lying on the ground, possibly dead, which is highly disturbing when no adult can be found.  Perhaps more than any other scene, this slowly calibrated revelation is fraught with menace, shot almost like a ghost movie, where the world becomes a shadowy existence.  Ana is not amused when she discovers her sister has been playing tricks on her.  Adults and children alike are excited when a truck arrives bringing an exhibition of cinema, which for most is their first exposure to moving pictures, and happens to show James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN (1931), where an indelible image of Frankenstein and the little girl sticks in Ana’s mind, completely identifying with her, wondering why he killed her (both girls are told by their parents to be good and follow expected behaviors), while a ringing line of dialogue from the film can auspiciously be heard, “What if we never went beyond the limits of what’s known?”  When she asks her sister, Isabel reminds her that everything in movies is fake, that no one was actually killed, but takes her to an abandoned stone hut in the middle of an open wheat field where she claims she can conjure up images of a spirit that can take human form if she closes her eyes and identifies herself.  Ana returns there regularly, as fantasy begins to mirror reality when she is pleasantly surprised to find a real partisan holed up there with a wounded leg, so she befriends him and brings him clothes and food, sympathizing with a societal outcast, believing he is a manifestation of Frankenstein.  When he later disappears, having been hunted down and shot in the middle of the night, the police inspector discovers items belonging to Ana’s father.  In terms of the fugitive’s death at the hands of others, the FRANKENSTEIN film and reality coincide, where his corpse is even laid out in the same building where the movie was shown.  When Ana finds that he’s disappeared, finding blood in the location where he had been, it causes such confusion that she runs away from the presence of her watchful father, blatantly disobeying his paternal authority, undermining the patriarchy associated with fascism.  Without any family connection left, Ana is out on her own lost in the countryside for several days and nights, having to fend for herself as the FRANKENSTEIN scene with the little girl replays itself, where the real and the imagined become inseparable, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973 Victor Erice) YouTube (6:55).  The original music by Luís de Pablo is playfully childlike, a mix of flute and guitar, with luminous cinematography from Luís Caudrado (who discovered he was going blind from an inoperable brain tumor during the shoot and killed himself a few years later), also an unforgettable child performance by Torrent, who’s so bewildered and confused that we rarely get to see her smile.  A treatise on the transformative power of the imagination, the evocative mood is delicately elusive and quietly mesmerizing in this impressionistic vignette of secrecy and lost innocence.  

The use of such a young girl to lead viewers through the trauma of turbulent times has been done before with 6-year old Scout (Mary Badham) in Robert Mulligan’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), whose innocence stands in stark contrast to the prevailing lynch mob mentality of a segregated society hellbent on railroading an innocent black man for a crime he didn’t commit.  The evils of the world are man-made, like the depiction of a Frankenstein monster causing panic, yet in each film both Scout and Ana have a defiantly uncompromising commitment to understand the unspoken dangers that lurk under the surface, with Scout discovering that the socially reclusive neighbor next door, Boo Radley, is not the monster she thought he was, that all the other kids believed him to be, but was just extremely shy and different, making him unmistakably human, while Ana has an unquestioning belief in the existence of the mythical monster and refuses to turn a blind eye in her quest to find “the true spirit” of the creature whose onscreen presence projects so much fear.  The children in the film perceive the world as an enigma, with Erice unlocking a magical vision of the mysteries of the world, where the title apparently comes from a book by Maurice Maeterlinck, a Belgian poet and playwright and author of the 1901 book The Life of the Bee, where the swarm of a bustling beehive is described as “the mysterious, maddened commotion,” which the father views as a monotonous, mindless, and well-organized collective that works continuously, void of any imagination, much like the power that had taken hold of his country.  There is also a tribute to 19th century Galician poet Rosalía de Castro, a remarkable woman with a strong social conscience, whose eloquent poem is read aloud in class, Rosalía De Castro's poem in The Spirit of the Beehive YouTube (36 seconds).  At the time the film was made, it was impossible to tell the true tale of the devastatingly harmful effects of living under such a heavily repressive dictatorship, given a steady drumbeat of fear, propaganda, and helpless despair, so Erice cloaks the film in allegory and creates an innocent who bears witness to hidden catastrophes, who tries to make sense of it all, becoming an ode to the dream world of childhood.  Winner of the top prize at the 1973 San Sebastián International Film Festival, coming on the heels of Javier Antonio Bardem’s Death of a Cyclist (Muerte de un ciclista) (1955), and currently listed at #85 on the 2022 BFI Sight and Sound Poll for The Greatest Films of All Time, the spiritual awakening of a new artistic vision mirrors Ana’s own astonished viewing of the film, utterly enraptured by what she sees, given a newly sparked imaginative engagement with the world around her through cinema, subjectively seeing things in a completely different way, as revelations will play out in a world beyond cinema.  Ana is in the act of discovering, a powerful and visually poetic message in a fascist society that represses all creative thought, leaving a society divided and intimidated into silence in the years following the Civil War, not altogether different than the impact of Russian director Mikhail Kalatazov’s The Cranes Are Flying (Letyat zhuravli) (1957) after the death of Stalin, following the Stalinist purges and the gulag labor systems, publicly revealing information that was previously forbidden, which opened up new doors, bridging the gap between art and life, coinciding with the filmmaker’s desire to transcend the creative limitations that had been imposed by the Franco regime.

Trouble Every Day

TROUBLE EVERY DAY                    B                     

France  Germany  Japan  (101 mi)  2001  d:  Claire Denis

Following the unanimous acclaim for Beau Travail (1999), arguably the director’s most erotic and deeply romantic work, this boldly challenges viewers with what must be what is described as an adult film, as it’s certainly not for everyone, revealing far more than the eye can see, significant as the only Claire Denis film that dabbles in the horror genre, something of a modern era vampire film, a graphically violent and thoroughly disturbing vision of carnal desire as a form of cannibalism. becoming something exquisitely revolting and truly frightening by the end, equating sex with death, and not like anything else out there.  Panned at Cannes and critically dismissed in America, the film has undergone a certain revival among cinephiles who recognize rarity when they see it, but the slow and languid pace of the film will likely turn off horror lovers, while the excruciating blood-letting will turn off art film devotees.  Despite the raw and graphic subject matter, this remains a Claire Denis film, expressed with an artful flourish and filled with poetic ambiguity throughout.  Only a more recent film like Tomas Alfredson’s LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008) conveys a similar attention to detail when it comes to flesh-eating monsters starved for blood, while at the same time offering a haunting sensuality behind the camera.  Beautifully filmed by Agnès Godard, this must be viewed as one of her triumphs, as this is a visually stunning film that operates out of its own unique conception, where it lives by its uncompromising rules even as it references vintage horror films.  At heart, this is a FRANKENSTEIN (1931) movie, where the tropical experiments of Doctor Léo Sémeneau (Alex Descas) went awry while researching experimental brain medicine and have now altered the human gene pool, creating vampire-like creatures with a ravenous need not only for blood, but for human flesh. 

The film may also be traced to THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU (1977) and CAT PEOPLE (1982), both films with earlier Black and White versions, as the first deals with the grotesque and disfigured effects of medical experimentation gone wrong, while the second deals with erotic transformation, where the sex urge turns humans into blood devouring, flesh eating beasts, returning to human form only after feeding.  However, in the hands of Denis, a consummate artist known for her poetic subtleties, much of what’s displayed onscreen is graphically disconcerting.  Opening with the music of Tendersticks, it’s one of their better scores, especially the hauntingly beautiful funeral dirge that opens and closes the film and has a way of burrowing under your skin, Trouble Every Day Opening Song Tindersticks - YouTube (3:13), while it’s also extremely effective the way Denis opens with a darkened kiss that fades to black for a lengthy period of time, leaving the audience in a state of suspended animation.  Once the picture returns, the familiar face of actress Béatrice Dalle is seen as Coré, flagging down truckers on the side of the road, where all we see is the bloody aftermath, where her husband (Sémeneau) tracks her down and brings her home, tenderly washing the blood off of her, then locking her into a boarded up room in their mansion.  Simultaneous to this event, an American couple on their honeymoon are flying to Paris, medical researcher Shane Brown (Vincent Gallo) and his overly delicate wife June (Tricia Vessey), where Shane is inflicted with the same disease, having to continually hide from her every time he’s aroused.  While he’s using the honeymoon as a pretext to track down the infamous doctor, June only knows he’s hiding some deep, dark secret, and when she hears him violently masturbating in the bathroom, her pounds on the door evoke sheer terror. 

While this is a thoroughly confounding film, one that makes great use of Béatrice Dalle's physical features, giving her an animal-like presence, the film pushes the boundaries of cinema, much of it without dialogue, but using screams of hysteria, reflective of the Silent era, where it weaves in and out of dream states seemingly at will, and where half of this French-language film, including the title, is spoken in English, contributing to an otherworldy effect, like something out of Dreyer’s VAMPYR (1932).  When a young man’s (Nicolas Duvauchelle) curiosity leads him to Coré’s door, words can’t describe the sense of grim bewilderment overcoming the audience when they realize she is incredulously eating him before our eyes, smearing his blood all over the walls afterwards.  While the audience is aware something is not right with Shane as well, none of the people he meets have a clue, as he spends most of the film popping pills and hallucinating his blood-drenched wife, searching for a cure, but to no avail.  A seemingly innocuous event leads to the savage finale, as the maid (Florence Loiret-Caille) lingers in their room after making the bed, leaving her scent on the bedcovers.  Throughout the film this scene has been set up by shots of the back of the young maid’s neck, which Shane has obviously been tracking, like wild prey on the loose, eventually unleashing a wild, animalistic hunger that will not be denied.  It is this exploration of man’s basest rape instincts that prove to be the most deeply unsettling images of the film, like the horrors of IRREVERSIBLE (2002), complete with blood curdling screams and graphic sexual bloodletting that are among the most difficult scenes to endure in a supremely grotesque finale, as Shane finally gives in to his bloodlust, Claire Denis - Trouble Every Day...  YouTube (5:39).  A haunting shadow of doom overwhelms the senses along with a Tendersticks refrain, sending the audience out the door in a shivering fright.      

Keyhole

KEYHOLE                  B+

Canada  (94 mii)  2011 d:  Guy Maddin           Official site

A Guy Maddin film is likely to be weird and creepy, among other things, although weirdness is his state of normalcy.  Maddin is one of the more original filmmakers working today, a highly inventive guy who thrives on Silent black & white movie techniques, where watching his films resembles sleepwalking, as his imagery is very dreamlike, usually writing his own scripts, using original German Expressionist lighting and set designs, where early in his career he actually hand painted each colorized celluloid frame.  He infuses a wonderful sense of surrealistic mystery with an audacious sense of humor, often intermixing graphic nudity with bizarre hallucination sequences, and makes frequent flashbacks to childhood.  His films often create a sense of chaotic confusion, blending fiction with non-fiction, using a stream-of-conscious, experimental style where there’s little or no narrative, no character development, rather wooden acting, where a sense of the ridiculous predominates the mood along with a heightened melodramatic hysteria.  Frequent themes include the trappings of love, murder, mental anxiety, Russia, hockey, homoeroticism, his perennially absent father, not to mention everpresent references to his hometown of Winnipeg, where all his films are shot.  His best films may be CAREFUL (1992), where the residents of a small town in a snowy mountain village have to be quiet and keep their voices down or risk being consumed in snow from a lurking landslide, so all the characters keep whispering, or his recent MY WINNIPEG (2007), which is a hilarious tribute to his hometown.  If you'd like proof of his film mastery, check out his award winning 6 minute short The Heart Of The World - Guy Maddin - YouTube (6:08) premiering at the 2000 Toronto Film Festival, where his film condenses so much into so little time, averaging two shots per second, a masterclass in film editing that literally shocked the world, many feeling it was the best film released that year.  There is no one on the planet that makes films like Maddin, an abstract modernist whose film puzzles are as intelligible as Cubist paintings, where the uninitiated often have a hard time making sense out of his highly condensed and extremely rhapsodic film expression, shot on Digital here for the first time, offering unrestricted freedom of mobility.    

KEYHOLE is largely a haunted house film, told in a murder mystery style, where a collection of oddball characters starts piling up, some obviously ghosts, but others who have the capacity to see and feel these haunting spirits who are easily spoken to, though they often disappear before your eyes.  This film does have a slightly demented narrative form that keeps challenging the audience’s reference points, as the eccentric goings-on in this ghost house don’t always make sense, though the opening is right out of John Huston’s KEY LARGO (1948), where a wanderer in the night named Ulysses, no less (Jason Patric), walks in out of an electric storm returning home where his gang has gathered and his first order of business is to have all the characters line up against the wall, the dead ones facing the wall and the live ones facing forward.  The dead ones are told they’ll have a pleasant police escort to the morgue, where they’re ushered out the door to the sound of rapid gunfire.  Gangster life was never easy.  Ulysses is the top dog who gives the orders around the house, where the film seems to be a collection of incidents that largely take place in his head, like an evolving memory piece where he wanders through various reflections of his own imagination, interacting with ghosts from his past, where it’s hard to tell if any are still living, as all have a deep connection to death.  Certainly since Maddin’s first short film, THE DEAD FATHER (1986), Guy Maddin - the Dead Father Clip - YouTube (2:00), the director has mixed absurd humor with surrealist flourishes, where mingling the living with the dead is a familiar theme, where here Ulysses actually carries around with him, wherever he goes, a bound and gagged blind prisoner strapped to a chair, who turns out to be his (very much alive) dead son Manners (David Wontner), also his own personal psychic (Brooke Palsson), who may be his daughter Denny, who walks around in a weakened and collapsing state of exhaustion from drowning, which certainly doesn’t prevent her from taking her clothes off frequently, apparently swooning from the heat. These three set out to explore the house (and their family) through a secret passageway.

Meanwhile, waiting upstairs, Isabella Rossellini as Hyacinth (his wife) lays covered in her bed with her naked father (Louis Negin) held hostage on the floor chained to the bed, “There will be no forgiveness, that's why I keep you chained to my bed,” while her lover Chang (Johnny Chang) lurks in the shadows, where at least the father offers an attempt to explain what’s going on via a recurring narration, though it’s clear they don’t wish to be disturbed by Ulysses and that racket he’s making in the house, so they have locked the door, where Ulysses can only stare in at her and speak through a keyhole.  The connections between the deadpan Ulysses and his family remain forever distant, as at times he doesn’t even recognize them, himself an absent father.  The morbid noirish atmosphere within the house is all drenched in claustrophobic detail, with other characters continually moving in and out of the scene, where there is always a new storyline to follow along with resurfacing family legend.  There’s even a Cinderella character continually scrubbing the floors, where someone gets electrocuted when they attempt sexual favors, and a brief appearance by Udo Kier as a dismissive Freudian era medical practitioner, also a James Whale FRANKENSTEIN (1931) style electric chair sequence powered by stationary cyclists, which has the effect of recharging many of the dead memory cells for Ulysses, while others who try are less fortunate.  An earlier Maddin short Guy Maddin - Send Me to the 'Lectric Chair (2009 ...  YouTube (6:53) with Louis Negin adds a familiar allure, even including the continued reference to the clock about to strike midnight.  Basically, KEYHOLE is a tour de force blitzkrieg of phantasmagorian Maddin images, often incoherent, somewhat in the manner of the infamous James Joyce stream-of-conscious novel, a masterful piece of editing that often resembles subliminal clues interspersed throughout that offer keys to Ulysses’ fragmented memory.  “Remember, Ulysses, remember,” calls the voice of the narrator, as if there is a secret code.  Forced to continually turn back the clocks, this is a conceptual exercise where in his search to get up the stairs into his wife’s bedroom, Ulysses is repeatedly frustrated by recurring thoughts and memories and has to continually contend with ghosts of the past, where often, even in our own lives, the living and the dead may feel interchangeable.     

One Minute of Darkness (Dreileben 3 – Eine Minute Dunkel)

DREILEBEN TRILOGY III                       B+                  

ONE MINUTE OF DARKNESS (Dreileben 3 – Eine Minute Dunkel) – made for TV

Germany (90 mi)  2012  d:  Christoph Hochhäusler

While Christoph Hochhäusler is an established German filmmaker, it may be his writing about contemporary German cinema as co-editor and publisher of his film magazine Revolver that has brought him to international acclaim, as it was here that The Dreileben Trilogy took form, where Hochhäusler publicly challenged fellow Berlin School filmmakers Christian Petzold and Dominik Graf to express their thoughts about a lack of genre films as well as the changing German aesthetic emerging from the mid 90’s that has taken a distinct interest in German locations while also examining political and/or cultural ramifications.  It’s only fitting then that Hochhäusler provide the concluding episode (shot in digital) and the segment that is most genre driven.  Dreileben is a small town in the German countryside engulfed by nature, where the enormous surrounding woods have a way of culturally isolating the inhabitants, creating an almost fairy tale and mythic illusion, which are frequently referenced through the Grimm Brother’s Hansel and Gretel, explored in the initial episode, but also Wagner’s Ring cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, loosely based on characters from Norse mythology where giants and dwarves thrive in the darkness of the Thuringia woods, often finding themselves at odds with one another.  It is here the focus has finally shifted from a peripheral role to the featured attraction, as the concluding episode is largely seen through the eyes of a mentally disturbed escaped killer, Frank Molesch, played by Stefan Kurt in a simply extraordinary mix of innocence and deranged confusion.  Molesch seeks refuge in the forest and spends most of the film roaming aimlessly through the woods, but Hochhäusler also retraces how easily he initially escaped from the hospital, as the police allowed him to visit his dead mother in the Dead Room at the hospital, but only guarded one of the two exit doors. The concluding episode, like Kieslowski’s RED (1994) in his Three Color Trilogy, has the most connecting links to previous episodes, and although each claims to be an independent, stand alone film, it helps if one is familiar with the earlier references, as the finale sheds new light on everything that has come before. 

The finale also introduces us to a new character, the chain-smoking Marcus Kreil (Eberhard Mirchberg), a Columbo-like seasoned police inspector who is on medical leave, but can’t stay away from tinkering with the case, as the town is under siege from strange attacks and unresolved murders, where the audience is treated to gruesome forensic photos of the deceased.  While we get a taste of his family life, where his overbearing wife berates him for not staying in bed and his dim, constantly demanding son wants his approval for another hair-brained business proposition, hoping his dad can interest the police department into using his exercise equipment that is otherwise sitting dormant in an empty gym collecting dust.  Marcus is often seen alone scrutinizing the video security tapes of the hospital, including the evidence used to convict the killer, the last man to see the girl alive, where the title is based on the tape going blank just prior to a young girl’s murder, leaving lingering, unanswered questions, where he is hoping to discover new clues, but he’s also interested in changing the focus of the investigation, trying to fathom why Molesch would go on a murder spree, trying to understand how he thinks, where he often visits Molesch’s mother’s vacant home in the middle of the night hoping to pick up new information, where the constantly wandering Molesch is also seen hovering nearby.  In fact, the latest police strategy is to form tightly connected search lines combing through the woods, where Molesch can frequently be seen just out of reach desperately trying to escape, reminiscent of Peter Lorre’s frantic attempts to escape the police manhunt in Fritz Lang’s M (1931).  When he’s flushed out of the forest, he often meanders into various pieces of the preceding episode, where despite a sighting, his detection was appropriately misidentified, a clue to the filmmaker’s goal of challenging the audience’s expectations.

This finale has a rhapsodic approach when the convict is free to roam through the countryside, feasting on wild berries, talking to himself, his mind often wandering to thoughts of his dead mother, where instead of a vicious monster of the loose, Molesch seems more like a simpleton, a manchild who has been tossed out into the world, frightened and alone, where his mood shifts and nervous body language are often inexplicable.  Perhaps the highlight of the film is a sequence in the woods where Molesch has amusingly stolen sandwiches from a picnic table of visiting tourists enjoying the hillside view of the town nestled in the valley below, where he retreats into the woods to first identify and label the contents of each sandwich before gobbling them down, when he is unexpectedly interrupted by a young girl (Paraschiva Dragus) hanging from a tree limb above who is also hungry.  She immediately trusts and protects him, warning him where the police are, quickly escorting him to safety, developing a tender bond between the two where they sit by an evening fire as he sings a silly song in a beautifully realized tribute to FRANKENSTEIN (1931).  The dual narrative tracks of the finale center upon exposing the heart of each character, the cautiously circumspective police inspector and the gentle giant, often maligned monster in the woods, where at one point the police dragnet forces his retreat into the hidden confines of a cave, which turns out to be a historical witch’s cauldron, where he has to hide from another tourist group as they listen to legendary tales of witch burnings and witches capturing unsuspecting hikers.  Still in the cave when the evening fog rolls in, Molesch can be seen trying to squirm under the enveloping layer quickly filling the empty spaces, obviously threatened by a fear of the unknown.  This all too human quality, ironically from a monster regarded as a deranged serial killer, described by Hochhäusler as “a man who became a murderer only because he was hounded,” becomes a major theme of the film, how easily we jump to the wrong conclusions, as if anything, this Trilogy suggests humans are continually prone to making mistakes.     

Among the Living

(Hollywood10.jpg‎  photo taken November 1947). Front row (from left):  Herbert Biberman, attorneys Martin Popper and Robert W. Kenny, Albert Maltz, and Lester Cole. Middle row: Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, Alvah Bessie, and Samuel Ornitz. Back row:  Ring Lardner Jr., Edward Dmytryk, and Adrian Scott

AMONG THE LIVING           B                     

USA  (67 mi)  1941  d:  Stuart Heisler

This is a rarely screened, oddball hybrid of a movie that is a mixture of film noir and horror, that seems to have seeds of political subversiveness as well, where what’s especially memorable is the portrayal of mob hysteria, no doubt the influence of screenwriter Lester Cole, a writer who unashamedly joined the American Communist Party in 1934, later blacklisted, writing both the story and the script.  Cole wrote more than 40 screenplays that turned into movies, but after he refused to testify in 1947 about his political affiliations before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, one of the Hollywood Ten, he was sentenced to a year (serving 10 months) in federal prison for contempt of Congress.  After the blacklisting, only 3 screenplays were made into movies, the most successful of which was BORN FREE (1966), written under the pseudonym Gerald L.C. Copley, an adaptation of Joy Adamson's 1960 non-fictional book about raising orphaned lion cubs in Kenya.  This movie also features a scintillating early performance by actress Susan Hayward, something of a vivacious young vixen, eventually known as the Queen of Melodrama in the 1950’s, winning an Academy Award as Best Actress playing a tough, wise-cracking prostitute charged with murder and condemned to the gas chamber in the tearjerker I WANT TO LIVE (1958).  Seeing her so early in her career is a special delight, as she’s a joy to watch, stealing nearly every scene she is in.     

Shot in a Southern gothic setting, the film opens with a memorable shot peeking through an iron gate at the small funeral service for the industrialist owner of the town’s mill, while kept outside the gates are hoardes of striking or unemployed workers who can be seen taunting the deceased.  As a storm approaches, we soon learn the secret identity of a twin brother long thought dead, Paul Raden, the deranged identical twin of the more respectable John Raden (Albert Dekker in both roles), who lost his mind as a child when his father, the recently deceased, threw him against a wall when he tried to stop his father from beating his mother, where the last sounds he heard before going insane was his mother screaming, sounds that he has never gotten out of his head, constantly holding his hands to his ears whenever trouble sets in.  In our initial view of him he’s wearing a straightjacket, living in a secret room locked up in the basement of the old family plantation quarters, where Ernest Whitman as Pompey, a black family servant, has been looking after him for 25 years, assisted by Dr. Saunders (Harry Carey), who fabricated a death certificate for a fake funeral service that kept everyone from asking questions.  Following the camera down the stairs into the bowels of this dilapidated home resembles how we discover FRANKENSTEIN (1931), one of the original monster movies that co-screenwriter Garrett Fort helped script.  In each case, the monster breaks free from their imprisonment before wreaking havoc on the town.

The interesting twist is how Paul arrives in a rooming house in town with a wad of cash and is treated as a “respectable gentleman.”  The landlady’s daughter is Hayward, who is herself imprisoned by her mother, never allowed to escape from the claustrophobic confines of the rooming house.  So she’s a free spirited woman just waiting for someone to sweep her out of this dead end town, where she, and all the rest of the local folk, see no prospects for the future now that the mill has closed.  Hayward’s flashy and flirtatious behavior is the best thing in the film, an exaggerated expression of sexuality in contrast to the rather sexless behavior of the twin brothers, and the completely dull and lifeless appearance of Frances Farmer as John’s wife.  Hayward takes the unsuspecting Paul on a shopping spree, allowing him to buy her a giant bottle of perfume and a slinky new dress before he wanders into a happenin’ dance club where he engages in weird, completely inappropriate conversation with one of the hostesses, discovering an electrifying, foot-stomping jump joint where the swing dancer’s jitterbug energy is so frenetically wild that the world starts spinning out of control, beautifully photographed by Theodor Sparkuhl in what could easily have been a dry run for the sensational teen dances in John Waters’ HAIRSPRAY (1988).

Paul unexpectedly turns into Jack the Ripper, the town’s serial killer, who can only silence the sound of women screaming by strangling them.  In typical noir fashion, the family’s shameful past has been uprooted, like opening Pandora’s Box, producing a secret so vile that it can only be viewed as a monster on the loose who can’t help himself.  The town is in an uproar, where their public frenzy is unleashed with the radio announcement of a $5000 reward for finding the killer, where the hysteria of a mob scene is so overwhelmingly over the top, it’s like the unleashing of panic in every direction, as if the world was invaded by aliens.  The lynch mob mentality is quite a spectacle, shown with a great deal of flair, where they want to string the guy up right then and there, dragging a judge out of his home to perform the public trial.  But the man they have caught is John, mistaken for his evil twin Paul, instantly condemned by the mob, despite John’s desperate pleas which fall on deaf ears.  Hayward herself leads the public condemnation of the man, where all are turned against him.  Fritz Lang’s M (1931) reveals a similar public trial, where the outlaws judge the criminal actions of a sexual pervert who preys on little girls, while FURY (1936) creates the same lynch mob hysteria, not to mention the psychological dread that accumulates throughout Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956).  At just over an hour, the film is brief but surprisingly complicated and far reaching for 1941, touching on the Nazi madness that was marching unchallenged throughout Europe while America sat on its hands in a position of neutrality until Pearl Harbor happened a year later.  This is a film seething with social discontent, public outrage, hysteria, as well as madness, all equally intense, bizarre, delightful, and terrifying at the same time, something rare and quite unique, easily one of the darkest depictions of American society on record.