Vengeance Is Mine (1984)

Writer/director Michael Roemer

actress Trish Van Devere

actress Brooke Adams

VENGEANCE IS MINE – made for TV                  A-                                                               aka: Haunted from PBS American Playhouse                                                                               USA  (118 mi)  1984  d: Michael Roemer

We’re all innocent.      —Donna (Trish Van Devere)

Born in Berlin, evacuated at age 11 through the Kindertransports, educated at the private Bunce Court boarding school in England, originating as a German Jewish school for refugees, before emigrating to the United States in 1945 where he graduated magna cum laude at Harvard University, a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971 and author of four books, while his film Nothing But a Man (1964) may be the best film ever made about the black experience in America.  This is something totally different, originally released on television as an American Playhouse episode under the title Haunted, where it never received much critical acclaim, seen only by a few, taking nearly forty years to be theatrically released under a new title, debuting earlier this year at New York’s Film Forum with a newly struck 35mm print from The Film Desk, accompanied by an interview with the 94-year old director, Life Is Hard: Michael Roemer on Vengeance Is Mine, while the film was only just recently shown in Chicago in a one-time screening.  Something of a major discovery of an unknown work by a director who made few films, finding it difficult to distribute those few, failing to follow commercial trends, considering himself part of the independent East coast establishment that included documentary filmmakers Frederick Wiseman and Albert Maysles, spending four years making nearly 100 educational films for the Ford Foundation in the early 60’s while working as a film professor at the Yale School of Art from 1966 until he retired in 2017.  Initially shot on Super 16mm by Franz Rath, blown up to 35 mm, giving it a sumptuous, yet grainy look, it uses actual Massachusetts and Rhode Island locations, offering a remarkable feel of life in small New England towns, escalating into a psychological family drama with rare intensity.  With family dysfunction providing the theme, Roemer delves into a blisteringly real storyline of two women in conflict, accentuating a subversively rich tapestry of hidden emotions.  All of Roemer’s works explore tenuous relationships with a literary complexity, as there’s a sadness and unspoken cruelty that permeates throughout this film, typically disguised, deeply embedded in unexpected places, expressed with a subtle delicacy of poetic restraint, offering indelible insights not normally found elsewhere.  Featuring two amazing performances from Brooke Adams as Jo and Trish Van Devere (married at the time to George C. Scott) as Donna, Jo returns to her East coast childhood home to heal old family wounds, only to discover her ailing adoptive mother withdrawn and distant, basically aloof to any attempts for reconciliation, driving her next door in frustration, hoping to find a place of refuge, discovering Donna, who is herself undergoing a family crisis of her own, yet Jo is drawn to her precocious young daughter Jackie (Ari Meyers), a stark reminder of the child she never had.  Opening and closing with shots of Jo on an airplane, a montage of facial expressions, with the camera fixed on her face in a long shot while the music of Django Reinhardt can be heard, Moonglow - YouTube (3:00), breaking the 4th wall at the end and staring straight at the camera.   

We quickly learn about Jo’s miserable childhood, viewed as a bad seed by her mother, believing she is evil incarnate, treated as an outcast, while her sister Franny (Audrey Matson) received all the love and attention, developing a healthy relationship, trying to act as a go-between in Jo’s quest for redemption, with Jo expressing to her mother that not every adoption is a success, refusing to cast blame, claiming it’s nobody’s fault, it just happens sometimes, but her mother is not so forgiving, still holding a grudge, finding her utterly loathsome to be with.  After a disastrous standstill, events come to an abrupt halt when her mother dies shortly afterwards.  Among the more powerful scenes are the stark realism of a bedside unction and the devout severity of a Catholic religious service where certain rituals must be followed, but Jo defers, refusing to genuflect, clearly not a believer, establishing a link between the entrenched orthodoxy of the church and her mother’s oppressive views of her daughter.  Never resorting to gimmicks or overt symbolism, the carefully calibrated Roemer is a master of realist understatement, where his stories tend to meander and take detours, only to end up back in the beginning with this film, yet they are unvarnished and unfiltered, unmistakable truth bombs, conveying how the extreme weight of this experience weighs heavily on Jo.  Running into her divorced husband, Steve (Mark Arnott), his obnoxious behavior quickly reminds her of the abusive relationship she left behind, including a teenage pregnancy given up for adoption, taking salvation in the young innocence of Jackie, though her parents are splitting apart as well, as her father Tom (Jon DeVries) may be moving to Pittsburgh, taking his daughter along with him.  Donna is an aspiring artist with questionable talent, desperately wanting a gallery exhibit to showcase her work, but it appears what she really wants is an ego boost from the deflating family experience that leaves her feeling abandoned.  In the spur of the moment, Donna seizes upon an opportunity and invites Jo to share an island experience with her daughter on Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island, taking a short ferry ride to get there, as Donna has a home overlooking the sea.  They are surprised by the unexpected arrival of Tom, who needs Donna to sign divorce papers, placing some urgency on this request, something that leaves Donna cold, evading him at all costs, heading to the nearest roadside bar with Jo, finding a random young man to take comfort, which startles Jo, completely caught offguard, taking a bit of offense by the absurdity of the situation, leaving her feeling emotionally hijacked.  When they return back to the house, tempers flare, with marital accusations hurled fast and heavy, sending Jo and Jackie in retreat to a bedroom, with Jo trying to shelter her from the obvious anguish of parental discord.  Donna goes through dizzying mood shifts, grabbing her daughter affectionately, to the point of hurting her, then angrily blaming her for choosing to live with her father, as Donna’s life is an emotional rollercoaster of extreme highs and lows.      

We quickly discover Donna has a history of psychiatric difficulties, having previously been institutionalized, and is wary of discussing this or revealing any signs of emotional weakness, doing everything she can to avoid a return, passively acknowledging a willingness, before erupting in fierce resistance, where her outlandishly paranoid behavior sends a chilling pall on family life, clearly targeting Jackie in a relentless campaign of continuing abuse, with Jo acting as a protective shield, which only sends Donna spiraling even more out of control.  While Jo was intending on returning to her life in Seattle after making a quick stop here, which includes tracking down her birth mother, never letting on who she is, yet this alternative family dynamic is luring her in, initially befriending Donna, but begrudgingly comes to the realization of just how thoroughly she betrays those closest to her, always suspecting the worst, accusing Jo of trying to steal her husband and daughter, at one point attacking her with scissors and cutting her hair.  With the threat of violence, precautions are taken, separating her from Jackie, with Jo suspecting her erratic behavior will eventually bring harm, yet the more measured and calmly reserved Tom never seems alarmed or agitated, as if he’s seen all this before.  Nonetheless, she urges them to lock their doors.  Going full haunted house in a Gothic thriller, Roemer shoots a vividly creepy scene in a rainstorm, as Jackie is awakened in the middle of the night, hearing strange noises outside, so when Jo investigates, she sees Donna outside, like a ghoulish prowler peeping in.  Intentionally planting an image, cruelly punishing her for the hurtful threats that are aimed at Jackie, Jo is seen mysteriously lying down in the same bed where Tom is sleeping, which can visibly be seen through a window, enraging the spying Donna, who is helplessly engulfed in a torrent of rain.  Yet morning brings an incurably cheerful Donna, showing no resistance to receiving help, agreeing to sign herself into a facility while helping herself to the breakfast they made.  It’s a stunning transformation, with Jackie obviously moved by her mother’s affection, yet just as suddenly we discover she never makes it to the institution, as promised, while Jackie is also discovered missing.  In full alert, they go on a mass search, believing she may be heading for the last ferry to the island, trying to cut her off, discovering she is there, yet has no recollection of being with her daughter earlier, even though they were reportedly last seen together in town.  Jo jumps on the ferry, while Tom will continue the search for his missing daughter, turning into a frightful night on the island, a psychological nightmare, as Jo is convinced she’s somehow harmed or even killed Jackie, likely having abandoned her somewhere, with Donna feigning ignorance, admitting to nothing, claiming she simply can’t recall.  Yet when Jo tries to call Tom, Donna rips the telephone cords out of the walls, with a crazed look of terror in her eyes, leaving them isolated and completely cut off from the world.  What follows is a battle royale of inflamed emotions, neither one striking a false note, with Donna looking more demented by the second, eerily veering into horror, laying down the wrath of anger, while Jo finds her behavior more and more unhinged, utterly repulsed by what she may have done, continually taking unexpected detours, incorporated into an always inventive narrative that takes us down a deep abyss.  Turning into a kind of ghost story, one’s worst psychological suspicions are realized, as if coming to life, haunting each one of them, elevated into a supremely intense display of dramatic entanglement that can send chills down the spine.  The film’s understanding of mental illness and the cycle of abuse simply transcends its time, conceived during an era when domestic violence as a term was not commonly utilized.  Roemer refuses to make this a genre film, following each of the characters closely, developing a human conundrum of continually shifting points of view.      

Nothing But a Man

Director Michael Roemer

NOTHING BUT A MAN        A+                

USA  (95 mi) 1964  d:  Michael Roemer

One way for local whites to take the strut out of a black man's step was to put him in prison...Southerners who had just lost a war managed to convince courts to put hundreds of black men in prison, including black soldiers.          

—from the book Ain’t Nothing But a Man, by Scott Reynolds Nelson

But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people...then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
—Martin Luther King Jr. from April 16, 1963, Letter from Birmingham Jail full text

I ain’t fit to live with no more. It’s just like a lynching. They don’t use a knife, but they got other ways.    —Duff Anderson (Ivan Dixon)          

One of the better films that reveals what it means and how it feels to be black, reportedly Malcolm X’s favorite film, this is arguably the best black film ever made in America, set in Alabama’s Deep South in the early 60’s, though interestingly enough it was actually made by a white guy, Michael Roemer, born in Berlin, Germany, who fled the Holocaust as an 11-year old child on the Kindertransports, coming after his mother’s family shoe store was destroyed during Kristallnacht.  In the early 30’s Nazis organized boycotts of Jewish businesses in Germany, publically burned Jewish and non-German books in Berlin, established quotas for non-Aryans in schools, and excluded Jews from public parks and swimming pools, with the director remembering having to sit on separate yellow benches when Jews were denied entrance into movies theaters, circumstances eerily similar to blacks in the Jim Crow South, with white supremacy resembling Nazi racialization, especially in its impact on families.  Made on a $300,000 budget during the dawn of the Civil Rights era, the production coincided with the civil rights insurgency and benefited from input from activists, shot during the tumultuous summer of 1963 simultaneous to the Medgar Evers’ assassination, George Wallace preaching “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” while standing in the doorway blocking the entrance of two black students at the University of Alabama, the March on Washington, the site of Martin Luther King’s infamous “I Had A Dream” speech, and they were still filming the day four young girls were killed by bombs at the Sixteenth Street Church in Birmingham.  Both Roemer and his co-writer and cinematographer Robert M. Young were Jewish, educated at Harvard University, and wrote the script after traveling through the South together, with Roemer directing the black-and-white film using a neorealist style, giving it a near documentary look.  What distinguishes the film is the remarkable ease in telling the story without a hint of condescension or manipulation, no preaching, no moral crusading, no underlying political message, and never resorting to caricature or exaggeration for added emphasis.  Instead it just tells it like it is.  Never once do we hear music swelling to emphasize a poignant moment and the end credits play without a sound.  There’s not a false step anywhere in this landmark picture, beautifully directed with an assured, understated style that reeks of authenticity and serves as a time capsule that holds up unusually well even after 50 years.  With no sympathetic white figures in the film, it was misunderstood and undervalued by white critics, largely ignored at the box office, with viewers finding it underwhelming, but the film was years ahead of its time, with Ebony magazine listing the film among their Top Ten Black Films of All Time in a 1995 poll, revealing essential truths about being black that other films ignored, effortlessly conveying a poetic depiction of everyday black realities, a predecessor to small black independent films like Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1979) and Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1983), which received greater acclaim, largely due to their accessibility, part of an academically studied movement, the LA Rebellion, catalog (pdf), while this harder-to-find film has continually been relegated to the obscure.  Ivan Dixon as Duff Anderson gives one of the great unheralded performances in American film, smart, proud, a sexy swagger to his step, extremely dignified, never overreaching, usually calm and quiet, a strong, silent type, but his life is a neverending series of exasperating events, continually referred to as “boy” and “trouble” while being goaded into unwelcome confrontations from racist taunts where he refuses to buckle under the patronizing humiliation of ignorant whites who expect him to “act the nigger” and play the subservient game of bowing down to white authority, as that’s what’s always been expected in this neck of the woods. 

It ain’t pretty, but it’s real, where the film does an excellent job laying a foundation of his well respected and confident demeanor working and joking among fellow black men as a nomadic railroad worker, making good money, a loner out on his own not beholden to anybody.  But when he falls for a preacher’s daughter at a church social outside Birmingham, Alabama, Josie (jazz singer Abbey Lincoln), a proud and irresistibly beautiful woman, their romance is accompanied by a backdrop of contemporary Motown songs playing on a jukebox or the radio, like Martha and the Vandella’s “Heat Wave” Martha & the Vandellas - (Love Is Like A) Heat Wave YouTube (2:43) or Little Stevie Wonder - Fingertips. (Part 2) - YouTube (3:13), adding an overall sense of upbeat optimism, like seeing the couple develop an interest in one another dancing on a crowded dance floor, which predates the use of culturally relevant rock music in movies like Easy Rider (1969) or early Scorsese movies like Mean Streets (1973).  When they decide to get married, there’s little fanfare, as her father (Stanley Greene) is openly suspicious of a man who never went to college and doesn’t go to church, believing that his daughter deserves better.  But they’re happy in an easy going kind of way, despite the objections of her father, developing a low key relationship not usually shown in motion pictures, with a distinct class difference, as she grew up in a middle class background and teaches elementary school, having gone to college.  But their marriage suffers as he experiences a series of job setbacks where he’s forced to endure local insults, always being labeled a troublemaker for refusing to shuffle and jive for the white man, losing one job after another which puts them in desperate straits financially.  Usually he’d just hit the road, but now he’s part of a marriage.  Each time he runs off, he comes face to face with his seldom seen father (Julius Harris) who abandoned him at a young age, a bitter, broken down alcoholic who has nothing but rage against the world around him, unfortunately maimed by an industrial accident, no longer able to work, who would probably be dead were it not for the care of the strong woman beside him, Lee (Gloria Foster), continually railing against his own son as well, telling him to “get lost.”  He also visits a little 4-year old boy born out of wedlock, whose mother has taken off and left the child behind with another woman, viewing his father with that sad, fearful look of distrust.  Yet when he’s angry, he denies that’s even his child, but he nonetheless sends money regularly.  Interesting that Josie’s father gives Duff a word of advice, suggesting he “act the part,” calling it a form of psychology to “make ‘em think you’re going along and get what you want.”  Duff has a few words of his own for the preacher, “You’ve been stooping so long, Reverend, you don't know how to stand straight.  You’re just half a man.”  Like De Niro in a Scorsese film, Duff’s refusal to compromise his pride is what distinguishes his character, and his strong sense of self-respect is precisely what Josie finds so remarkably attractive about him, though he’s tested to the limits, behaving atrociously at times when his back is against the wall, undermined by generations of black passive indifference to the demeaning arrogance of white supremacy that has ruled since slavery days, exploiting black work aspirations and destroying family lives, refusing any suggestions of blacks aligning together, as that means losing their livelihood, leaving him singled out and isolated, placed on a do not hire blacklist around town for similar jobs, Nothing But a Man YouTube (2:32). 

Despite the bleak and unforgiving landscape for blacks in the Jim Crow South, described in great detail by American novelists William Faulkner and Richard Wright, or adapted movie novels like To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), blacks remained subject to white-controlled work places in town, along with a constant reminder that a lynching occurred in town eight years ago, perhaps a reference to the horrific 1955 murder of Emmett Till in nearby Mississippi, yet what’s ultimately so revealing is the discovery that Duff is living in a world that belongs to others, who set the rules and conditions, and define the allowable parameters of his existence.  This has never been so plainly and so sensitively revealed, as it defines black existence in America then and now, continually living under the thumb of white majority rule.  The film doesn’t so much tell a story as let one unravel before our eyes, conveyed with understatement, accenting naturalism and authenticity, though mostly shot on location in New Jersey, yet the images of low-down bars, streets and houses overrun by children, and rows of dilapidated tenements represent Birmingham’s poor black district, while the opening montage of a railroad section gang laying tracks was filmed during their earlier travels through the South.  Special recognition must be paid for the attention to black faces in the many close-ups, producing a depth and intimacy of images rarely seen before in filming black characters, where much of the underlying power of the film comes from the brilliant performances that allow viewers to immerse themselves in the predominately black cultural themes, like juke joints and church (featuring a brilliant gospel solo by Dorothy Hall), men getting blacklisted for standing up for themselves, where the only work available for blacks is back-breakingly hard labor that physically wears people out, where if they get injured or old, they’re of no use to anyone anymore, including themselves.  Without a job, forced to wallow in their worthlessness and self-loathing, their lives consist of sitting on their front stoops doing nothing, wasted in the mind-numbing void of alcohol abuse, where the only places blacks are allowed to live are dilapidated neighborhoods, where neglected children are the product of so many uncaring or absent fathers that a sense of worthlessness becomes synonymous with their deplorable living conditions, producing a righteous anger that eventually comes to define them.  This cycle of generational dysfunction hits Duff in the face like a ton of bricks, and he’s determined not to let it happen to him, where he chooses to be different, to be a responsible man, refusing to defer to white men, even at the cost of a job.  The film reflects the obstacles he faces, the anger, the indignation, the wretched helplessness he feels as he attempts to wade through the minefield of daily disasters waiting for him.  But never does he feel sorry for himself, or give up hope, but he does feel the sting of rebuke.  Their marriage is no picnic either and there are some rocky moments, but perhaps most significantly, this film offers no easy solutions.  Yet the profound depth of character is strikingly lucid, casting a harsh light on those blacks who do abandon their families, only making things that much more difficult for those they leave behind, perhaps removing the only hope they have, which weakens the already fragile state of broken black families and community.  Offering a dissertation on black masculinity, the film impressively reveals an inherent capacity for love while enduring endless racial threats, while also highlighting the significance and stability of female support, both emotionally and financially, becoming a brilliant depiction of a troubled life mirroring the upheaval of social change during the Civil Rights era, with details specific to the story’s time and place, which remain universally impactful, with the film being selected to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1993.