2017 Top Ten List #9 In the Fade (Aus dem Nichts)

Director Fatih Akin (left)and actress Diane Kruger

IN THE FADE (Aus dem Nichts)          A-                       
Germany  France  (106 mi)  2017  ‘Scope  d:  Fatih Akin     

A rare film that couldn’t be more timely, especially in Germany, where the European refugee crisis has given rise to a nationalist anti-immigrant movement, specifically the neo-Nazi National Socialist Underground (NSU), which has carried out a series of bombing attacks targeting immigrants living in Germany.  Akin himself is a Turkish-German immigrant, where he views himself as a potential target.  According to information discovered on a neo-Nazi website known as Nuremburg 2.0, Akin’s name appeared on a list of artists and politicians targeted by them, which provoked him to write this film, co-written by Hank Bohm, a lawyer, better known as an actor affiliated with Rainer Werner Fassbinder.  In some respects, this is a contemporary update of Fassbinder’s ALI:  FEAR EATS THE SOUL (1974), where an older German woman and a young North African black were the targets of racist actions, literally ostracized by their respective families and friends, as well as the surrounding cultural communities, while this film also has a German woman and a Turkish immigrant husband, with the husband, along with their young son, becoming the target of a neo-Nazi bombing attack.  In the 60’s and 70’s the bombing campaigns in Germany were led by radical left extremists, the Baader-Meinhof gang, becoming the Red Army Faction (RAF), while a half century later the movement is comprised of radical right extremists in the NSU.  In an interview at Cannes with Alissa Simon, Director Fatih Akin on Returning to Cannes With Competition ... - Variety, Akin points out a recent scandal taking place in the German military where right-wing extremists created fictional personalities pretending to be Syrian refugees, actually planning bombing attacks so refugees would be labeled as terrorists.  This caused huge headlines of outrage against the refugees, where the government, in response, stopped letting refugees into the country, which was the precise goal all along.  While this paints an ugly picture of Germany, other nations are facing a similar surge of right-wing, neo-Nazi’s leading a wave of anti-immigrant hatred.  This is basically how Hitler got his start, by demonizing and then criminalizing anyone that wasn’t a member of the Aryan race.  It would be foolish to think these movements don’t have an impact, or that they don’t fabricate stories meant to instill fear and panic, as they helped elect the current President of the United States, who, thus far, has been averse to denouncing white supremists and neo-Nazi’s, as they helped get him elected.  Few other films are dealing with this issue head-on. 

While this is a fairly mainstream film with an arthouse sensibility, it received horrible reviews when it premiered at Cannes, calling it insipid, disappointing, average, predictable, by-the-numbers, or heavy-handed, with Richard Porton of Cinema Scope even calling it a con job, all undeserved, with critics really missing the boat, as many continue to have their heads in the sand over the ugly rise of fascism and the neo-Nazi movement.  And while Akin does resort to cliché’s or stereotypes, it is only because those stereotypes are becoming more prevalent in influencing public sentiments.  After WWII, who would have thought, despite a German educational campaign to eradicate the depiction of Hitler as a hero, in just 50 years there would be such a resurgence of fascism not only in Germany, but around the world.  While the film may ultimately take a fatalistic view, this is not so strange in the world of cinema, which doesn’t pretend to have answers, but instead seeks to provoke audiences out of a sense of complacency, where the status quo tends to ignore home-grown extremist groups, preferring instead to target Muslim extremist groups like ISIS or al-Qaeda, as they’re easier to blame, where an international consensus already denounces their actions.  Not so easy when it comes to your own citizens, as denouncing them is eliminating some of your own potential voters.  The problem is convincing them to take an alternative path, but many who gravitate to neo-Nazi movements have nothing left but prejudice and hatred, misguided ideas that are not easily changed, where violence is the only outlet for their deep-seeded anger.  Western societies always think education is the key, that we can eradicate racism through knowledge, but extremist groups target the disinterested and less educated among us and fill their minds with inflammatory rhetoric, giving them a false perception of power.  Akin’s film is not a political exposé, and there is no mention of al-Qaeda or ISIS, instead it is an individual journey through the personal hell of having to live with terrorists wiping out your family.  While there is a lengthy courtroom sequence that attempts to address the legal issues, which in itself is unique, as we’ve rarely seen the German legal system in action, where not only the state is prosecuting, but the victims’ wife and mother is considered a co-prosecutor, using a conversational style that can be eye-opening for the uninitiated, yet this is the tool where society holds the murderous accountable for their actions, but due to an imperfect quality of justice, the system doesn’t always work.  Nonetheless the courtroom sequences are gripping, especially the back and forth sparring between the two opposing lawyers, Denis Moschitto and Johannes Krisch.  

One of the more intriguing aspects of the film, and there are many, is the introduction of German actress Diane Kruger to a German audience, where she is largely seen as a model, not an actress, as she has never made a German-language film before.  Awarded Best Actress at Cannes, the film is primarily seen through her eyes, though this is no ordinary character study, as it doesn’t delve into her background or life history, but simply presents her response to the incendiary incident at the center of the picture, initially wracked with agony and pain, going through inconceivable personal anguish, made all the worse by the bickering and infighting between the family and in-laws, where she is blamed for poor mothering skills, allowing her child to be at work with his father and not taking care of him herself, then trying to hold it all together at the trial, unleashing a personal fury against the defendants at one point, as they refuse to even look at her, where viewers don’t ever really know her, but we certainly get an idea what she’s going through, as it’s written all over her face.  She’s a bit of a bad-ass, coming off as a biker chick, with a variety of tattoos, but we have no backstory.  The opening sequence is actually hilarious, as Nuri (Numan Acar), dressed in a white suit, is cheered like a soccer star that just scored the winning goal as he walks down the gangway of what turns out to be a prison, eventually entering an isolated room where his bride-to-be (Kruger) is all dressed in white.  The auspicious beginning is followed by a deluge of rain, as every single introductory shot takes place in a downpour, yet they seem to have a happy marriage, producing an adorable young son, who’s kind of a geek, but their lives are lost early in the film, where the rest is all about the ramifications, the various phases of grief, anger and outrage, holding out hope for justice, where it all takes place on her face, everything you need to know, culminating with a controversial flame-out at the end, though not nearly on the level of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), yet equally as provocative.  Antonioni’s film was also trashed by the critics.  Akin is known for his brilliant use of music, and this film is no exception, though it’s more low key, downbeat, and even self-destructive as interpreted by Josh Hamme from the American band Queens of the Stone Age.  This time Akin has made a film of social conscious that rages against right-wing extremism with its own impassioned fury, showing how easily law enforcement gets sidetracked, reinforced by its own bias and prejudice, yet ultimately they’re what we’ve got to pursue criminal investigations and any hope of justice.  Not an easy film to deal with, exposing open wounds along the way, yet illuminating, especially the skewed angle of the final shot, turning the world upside down, actually imagining other, perhaps even worse, possibilities.  In the meantime, white neo-Nazi’s continue to be the most troubling of all the extremist movements, but overlooked because they’re not Muslim or ISIS, just part of the prevailing racist worldview that insists dark skinned terrorists are more lethal.  They couldn’t be more mistaken.    

The Grapes of Wrath

 

THE GRAPES OF WRATH        B                 

USA  (129 mi)  1940  d:  John Ford 

Clarksville and Ozark and Van Buren and Fort Smith on 64, and there’s an end of Arkansas. And all the roads into Oklahoma City, 66 down from Tulsa, 270 up from McAlester. 81 from Wichita Falls south, from Enid north. Edmond, McLoud, Purcell. 66 out of Oklahoma City; El Reno and Clinton, going west on 66. Hydro, Elk City and Texola; and there’s an end to Oklahoma. 66 across the panhandle of Texas. Shamrock and McLean, Conway and Amarillo, the yellow. Wildorado and Vega and Boise, and there’s an end of Texas. Tucumcari and Santa Rosa and into the New Mexico mountains to Albuquerque, where the road comes down from Santa Fe. Then down the gorged Rio Grande to Los Lunas and west again on 66 to Gallup, and there’s the border of New Mexico.

And now the high mountains. Holbrook and Winslow and Flagstaff in the high mountains of Arizona. Then the great plateau rolling like a ground swell. Ashfork and Kingman and stone mountains again, where water must be hauled and sold. Then out of the broken sun-rotted mountains of Arizona to the Colorado, with green reeds on its banks, and that’s the end of Arizona. There’s California just over the river, and a pretty town to start it. Needles, on the river. But the river is a stranger in this place. Up from Needles and over a burned range, and there’s the desert. And 66 goes on over the terrible desert, where the distance shimmers and the black center mountains hang unbearably in the distance. At last there’s Barstow, and more desert until at last the mountains rise up again, the good mountains, and 66 winds through them. Then suddenly a pass, and below the beautiful valley, below orchards and vineyards and little houses, and in the distance a city. And, oh, my God, it’s over.

—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

The definitive work of the Great Depression, John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel is one of those rare books that was the best selling book of the year while also winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, which along with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, may well be the most thoroughly discussed and best analyzed books currently being taught in American classrooms.  It immediately captured the nation’s attention, becoming a lynchpin of cultural history and also one of the most beloved novels of American literature.  Steinbeck was a California writer who grew up in the Salinas Valley, where he wrote a series of seven articles about migrant worker communities for The San Francisco Chronicle, as tens of thousands of Americans were migrating to California during the Dust Bowl era of the mid 30’s, where Steinbeck spent time getting to know families living in the various migrant worker camps.  Infuriated by the amount of inhumane suffering he witnessed, he turned his disgust into a novel, which from the outset was controversial, showing unmitigated sympathy for the plight of the poor by exposing the cruel aspects of capitalism, which lead to a backlash against the author close to home, where the Associated Farmers of California denounced the book as a “pack of lies,” and labeled it “communist propaganda.”  Actually, the novel is to a large degree an outraged response to a government ideology of fear steeped in the paranoia of red scares, where immigrants and outsiders are deemed unpatriotic, where government propaganda demonizes and marginalizes unions out of greed and indifference.  This “realist” aspect of the novel is only hinted at in the movie, which was seen as an Oscar hopeful, so Hollywood could not present a supposedly true story about the government in this light.  It’s also interesting to note that at this stage in his career, director John Ford (who won the Academy Award for Best Director) was a leftist, describing himself in 1937 as “a definite Socialist Democrat, always left,” supporting liberal causes of the 30’s, such as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi league, and sent money to the anti-Franco, anti-fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War, while also becoming one of the founding members of the Screen Director’s Guild, a union that was extremely unpopular with studio executives.  Ford aimed to reproduce the Depression era style of photographers like Oklahoma-born Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White, and New Deal U.S. Resettlement Administration, government-produced documentaries like The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), becoming one of the first films selected to be in the National Film Registry in 1989. 

Twentieth Century Fox producer Daryl Zanuck, who purchased the rights to the book, actually hired a detective agency to investigate the migrant labor camps in California to see if the conditions were as bad as Steinbeck claimed in the book, and to no one’s surprise the agency reported back to Zanuck that the conditions were actually worse than what was portrayed in the novel, where Eleanor Roosevelt took it seriously enough that she called for congressional hearings on migrant labor camp conditions.  Zanuck then gave Ford free reign to make the film as brutally realistic as he could.  One assumes Ford took this project very seriously by his approach to the visual style, hiring Hollywood’s best cinematographer, Gregg Toland (who wasn’t even nominated for an Academy Award), who the following year filmed Orson Welles’ legendary masterwork CITIZEN KANE (1941), and incredibly the production was completed just 6 months after the book was originally published.  Set during the Great Depression, the story follows the Joads, a poor Oklahoma family of sharecroppers in the early 30’s who must move as the bank is kicking all the tenant farmers off their land, claiming dire circumstances brought on by Dust Bowl drought and economic hardship.  Along with literally thousands of other Okies who are in the exact same predicament, they migrate West to California, where they hear jobs are plentiful.  While Steinbeck alternates chapters describing the land, the people and their hardships, painting a picture touching on all the things the country was going through with the story of the Joad family, focusing upon their epic journey West, where part of the beauty of the book is a fascination with all the places they traveled through and certainly the wonderfully descriptive language:

The concrete highway was edged with a mat of tangled, broken, dry grass, and the grass heads were heavy with oat beards to catch on a dog’s coat, and foxtails to tangle in a horse’s fetlocks, and clover burrs to fasten in sheep’s wool.

The first part of the film version accurately follows the book, with the dialogue almost intact from the page, though instead of joining up with other families, the Joads remain on their own and arrive in California more quickly, while the second half veers into different territory, creating a more uplifting, visionary ending, as the downbeat and miserablist original ending is something that recollection suggests has never been shown on a movie screen.  A few striking observations from the outset, for such a realist drama with documentary style elements, one is surprised to see so much of the film take place in the restricted confines of a studio movie set, and minimally showcase the vast endless landscapes of the great outdoors (which surface later in Ford’s Westerns), shots that might reflect the majestic character of America, and the extraordinary beauty of the book’s language.  Instead, much of the early shots take place at night, where faces are lit like flittering ghosts when Tom Joad (Henry Fonda), just out of prison on parole after killing a man in a barroom brawl, discovers his family has left their homestead, and instead finds Muley (John Qualan) and former preacher Casy (John Carradine) on the premises, where they’re seen talking by candlelight.  Despite the impressive cinematography, what stands out is the artificiality rendered in these early shots, where there’s little hint of realism, while the repeated orchestral refrains of “The Red River Valley” only grow monotonous.  Even more surprising is the exaggerated and wildly uneven sense of caricature from all the actors involved with the exception of Fonda as Tom Joad, who is one of the great characters of literature, and one of the great portrayals in American film as well, as this is arguably Fonda’s greatest performance, especially since Tom is a flawed individual with such a checkered past.  His Midwest, folksy inflection literally breathes authenticity into these lines of such a plain speaking man, making the iconic character come to life, becoming synonymous with fair play and social justice, as he always defends the principles of small town morality, where rewards are based upon honesty and hard work, where no man is better than any other.  “Maybe it’s like Casy says.  A fella ain’t got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul.  The one big soul that belongs to everybody.”     

As they cross the country among the legions of others, this sense of ordinary human decency is on display in a local restaurant when the owner and waitress give Pa Joad a break on the prices for a loaf of bread and a few pieces of candy, where their kindness represents the generous spirit of those who willingly help others in a time of need.  By the time they get to California, however, the ultimate conflict of the film is the violation of those simple American principles, where the Joad family symbolizes the casualties of the Depression, where the openhearted kindness of the Joads runs up against heartless authorities of the bank, but also includes the police and their paid deputies who represent the farm interests, where neighborhood trust is replaced by suspicion and blunt force.  Our first look at one of the destitute migrant camps still leaves a picture in our heads long afterwards, and it’s one of the best shots in the film, showing hordes of people living in squalor, passing by crowds of people that literally give them cold, haunting stares, vividly expressing the fear of not knowing where your next meal is coming from, and reveals the extent of the cruel labor exploitation, as there is an oversupply of workers who are forced to work for next to nothing, and anyone who tries to organize or warn workers of the potential hazards of quick wage cuts has to answer to rogue deputies with guns and nightsticks.  At one point, they’re led in secret, under police escort, into a fenced-in and locked living compound at a peach orchard, where they’re not told the circumstances but immediately ordered to work, forced to buy food supplies at the inflated prices of the company store, where without realizing it, they’re actually strikebreakers filling in at half the wages of the striking workers.  Things only go from bad to worse, where Tom’s friend Casy is murdered right before his eyes, where he wants to strike back, but its clear California doesn’t want this influx of migrant workers, where law enforcement seems determined to drive these unwanted “outsiders” into slave wages and servitude.  Pitted against these brutally deteriorating conditions, Tom Joad becomes a symbol, an identifiable everyman character who must rise up and stand against this enveloping madness, personifying a desperate hope for people who struggle, becoming a clarion call for economic justice, embodying the spirit for social justice that will live on for generations to come, as if that is our patriotic duty.  In the film, however, it’s Ma Joad (Jane Darwell, winner of Best Supporting Actress) who has the last word, voicing an uplifting, anthem-like vision of a new day ahead, led by a “We the people” reference to our nation’s founding principles.

A Separation (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin)

A SEPARATION (Jodaeiye Nader az Simin)           B+                                              

aka:  Nader and Simin, A Separation

Iran  (123 mi)  2011  d:  Asghar Farhadi           Official site

My finding is that your problem is a small problem.                         

—Judge (Mohammad Ebrahimian)

A thoughtful, slowly developing film that is largely sustained by scenes set in small, inhabited rooms where people actually talk to one another, where in this film what they choose to openly acknowledge makes all the difference in the world, as tiny omissions are the secret ingredient that add essential drama to this often subdued story.  Not sure why all the unanimous praise for this film, as his earlier efforts are equally superb, but it’s a small, completely unpretentious film, largely one giant squabble that opens the film and continues unabated until the supposed justice is rendered in the lingering final shot, told in an extremely realistic style, mostly through piercingly honest, nonstop dialog written by the director, where there are few traces of stylistic flourish, simply an exposé of everyday life, easily comparable to KRAMER VS. KRAMER (1979), though without the histrionic element, as this doesn’t highlight post divorce aftereffects, it deals with all the pre-divorce ramifications.  In fact, had people paid attention, as there are opportunities for reconciliation all throughout this story, the results would largely be different.  What makes this film so essential is the degree to which choices matter, and not in larger-than-life, long drawn out fights to the finish which are obviously contentious, but in the kind of ordinary talk that takes place every day in people’s lives.  In this film, it’s the small moments that matter.  Never passing judgment, which is key, the director allows people and their various points of view to interact, where the accumulation of small details eventually escalates into something larger and potentially life threatening, where all reason seems to explode into thin air and self-preservation takes over.  While there are small, honorable moments throughout, they are matched by equally despicable moments of lies and deceit where human behavior can become an endurance test for the last one standing.  What’s especially unusual is the high quality of acting by all represented parties, where no one really plays the lead, as everyone becomes equally significant, also the relaxed and informal view of Iranian justice at work, as there are no lawyers used and each side is free to speak directly to the judge or one another, but will be removed by a guard if they threaten violence.    

    

Opening in an unpretentious room where a judge calmly listens to an otherwise well-educated and loving mother and father offer their disagreements about their family’s future, where the wife Simin (Leila Hatami) wants to take their teenage daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, yes, daughter of the director) out of the country in pursuit of a better life, while the husband Nader, Peyman Moadi, who wrote the screenplay to Saman Moghadam’s excellent  film CAFÉ SETAREH (2006), agrees to let her go, if she insists, but their daughter stays with him, as he must stay to look after his own father who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.  Since there is no unanimity of decision, the judge orders them to go home and work it out between themselves.  What’s clear from the outset is that is something neither one of them intends to do, as Simin anxiously packs while Nader tries to find a housekeeper to look after his father during the day while he’s at work, both avoiding one another while their daughter sits in the corner and trembles.  Perhaps the initial sympathy lies with the husband, as he can’t simply abandon his father, and the daughter has chosen to live with him, so the mother is the odd one out when she leaves, though never ventures far and remains involved.  The beleaguered Razieh (Sareh Bayat) is the housekeeper, obviously over-challenged on the first day, as she can’t keep up with full-time demands of an incapacitated elderly patient and look after her own small daughter at the same time, where she’s stymied by the idea of having to clean up after he soils himself, wondering if it’s a sin, a violation of Islamic law which forbids the touching of any man except your husband.  Her harrowing experience is made all the more difficult due to her own pregnancy, where lifting this guy around all day is just not possible, agreeing to stay on for a few days until they can find somebody else.

After the initial introduction of the principal characters, the rest of the film is a continual shift of truth and perception, where events occur that require lawful intervention, where the courts attempt to determine the truth, but the testimony offered may not be the full truth, where there’s an interesting difference in class division pitting a modern, more affluent family against a more oppressed, fundamentally religious, and economically challenged family, where friendships may sway a neighbor’s or family member’s testimony, where the injured parties feel slighted and dismayed at some of the counter accusations, where both sides continually place blame on others, rarely taking responsibility themselves, where escalating charges may be brought and people imprisoned.  In this nightmarish scenario of quickly shifting events, the audience’s sympathies are challenged due to each individual’s circumstances, where the idea of blood money is raised, an ancient idea of reaching an honorable accord between families through the payment of money, which supposedly wipes the slate clean, but individuals have reservations, often hiding something from loved ones.  The court has interests in pursuing the truth, investigating and interrogating various parties, each family has their own needs and interests, and there’s a moral or spiritual truth that each individual must answer to.  All of these interests collide in a stunning web of moral complexity where no one wants to admit they’re wrong, or see someone wrongfully charged, but people take desperate measures, where children are used as battering rams in the pursuit of justice, where all they want is for their parents to stay together, no matter the cost.  It’s an intricate design how all these pieces of the puzzle, when moved in a different manner, will result in a differing outcome.  But how can anyone predict the future or know what’s best?  And even once justice is rendered, is this any kind of acceptable outcome?  A microcosm of society at large, this flawed and deeply humane view of how people’s lives and interests intersect becomes a highly personalized view of the pursuit of justice.     

Native Son (1951)

NATIVE SON             B       
USA  Argentina  (104 mi)  1951  d:  Pierre Chenal 

Anyone who’s read Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son realizes what an incendiary work it is, actually divided into three sections, Fear, Flight, and Fate, an intensely engaging work where much of it is told in a naturalistic, stream-of-conscious style taking place inside the mind of the lead character Bigger Thomas, a poor and uneducated black youth from Chicago in the 1930’s charged with the murder of a wealthy white woman, where his second murder of a black woman is almost completely ignored, where Bigger is very much aware of how racial stereotypes play in the minds of white society, where historically blacks are routinely charged for rape in order to justify a white hysteria around any alleged crime.  In Wright’s mind, Bigger Thomas stands for that historical black male figure in both the North and South who has been picked up by police and hauled off to jail on trumped up rape charges, leading to a public outcry of condemnation, much of it fueled by racial overtones, described by Wright as a compilation of young black men “who consistently violated the Jim Crow laws of the South and got away with it, at least for a sweet brief spell.  Eventually, the whites who restricted their lives made them pay a terrible price.  They were shot, hanged, maimed, lynched, and generally hounded until they were either dead or their spirits broken.”  Anyone familiar with The Central Park Five (2012) case realizes how prevalent this persistent social pattern continues into the present, often leading to wrongful convictions of black males, where the jails are filled with similar convictions, often cast in racist overtones best summed up by “Well, it’s only a nigger,” where in their zeal to obtain high conviction rates, prosecutors have been known to cut corners and convict convenient subjects, often teenagers, many of whom have been bullied into marathon interrogation sessions leading to confessions.  Ten to fifteen years later, when DNA evidence shows they’ve convicted the wrong men, few in the criminal justice system seem to care anymore, as all they remember was the all-important conviction, which suits the law-and-order mentality of the electorate.  Wright’s novel challenges the idea of justice in a racist society, where white perceptions determine the outcome, from the newspaper reporters, lawyers, judges, and jury, where few, if any blacks could be found in the Jim Crow South.  The 1940 novel appeared on the “Book of the Month Club,” though in an edited version, the first bestseller by a black writer, while the film faced similar censorship and was cut from its original listing of 104 minutes in the Argentine version, streamlined to 91 minutes in the American version. 

The importance of the novel was particularly evident in the era in which it was written, as it lit a fuse that shocked many people, including people of left-leaning sympathies who were called out in the book as selling out the black man just as much as the deeply rooted racists in the South, as in the end, arrested black males continued to be stigmatized in the press by left-leaning white press publications that used racially lurid and inflammatory headlines to attract interest and sell papers, at the expense of those arrested.  Wright’s story was inspired by the 1938 arrest and trial of Robert Nixon, who confessed to five slayings and multiple assaults, though the Chicago police alternately beat him and offered him sweets and strawberry soda, depicted with racist imagery in the mainstream press with lurid descriptions of sex crimes, eventually executed in the electric chair at the Cook County jail in 1939.  The social controversy surrounding the book, prompting a scorching defending essay by the author himself "How Bigger Was Born" in March of 1940, made it impossible to ever make and/or release a movie in the United States, in much the same way author Richard Wright, a former member of the Communist Party and an avowed black Marxist, whose works were blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios in the 1950’s, and fellow author James Baldwin, an avowed black homosexual, both outspoken intellectuals disappointed in the nation’s inability to hear voices of social protest, emblematic of what this book represents, were eventually forced to leave America altogether and move to France, which seemed to tolerate racial diversity without all the race hatred.  So it’s perhaps appropriate that the filmmaker chosen to make this film is, in fact, French, but also Jewish, where he was forced to leave Nazi-occupied France during the war and emigrate to South America, making several movies in Argentina where this film was eventually made. 

With that in mind, it might surprise people that the film’s opening is a veritable time capsule of Chicago in the late 40’s and early 50’s, capturing the architectural skyline and the fully lit-up downtown movie marquees at night which are seen repeatedly through rear projection images in various car rides.  The thriving street life, the Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower, the CTA busses and elevated trains, the old Conrad Hilton Hotel and Buckingham Fountain are all given elaborate recognition, where people can see this and immediately relate to the Chicago they know.  But then the images shift to the South Side of Chicago, the poor black neighborhoods where people are stacked on top of one another, where kids play openly in the alleyways and on the streets, with dogs running freely, but also newspaper pages are left in the breeze on the sidewalks, where dirt and broken glass are more prevalent, also abandoned buildings and empty lots, as this is a decidedly poorer and filthier neighborhood than the picture postcard view of an immaculate downtown.  One of the things this film does well is differentiate between the two different worlds, presented almost as if they can’t coexist.  While Bigger is only twenty in the book, living at home in a one-roomed apartment with his younger brother and sister under his mother’s roof, he’s seen as little more than a sullen teenager whose constant anger and moodiness leave him drifting in a world of poverty and unemployment, alienated from the larger world around him.  Instead of an exasperated kid who doesn’t have the words to explain his inner anguish, in the movie he is played by author Richard Wright himself, where at 42 years of age he’s already a full grown man whose chief characteristic is being an overbearing bully, particularly to his girlfriend Bessie (Gloria Madison), always ordering her around, while remaining docile and submissive in the white world.  Wright’s performance in particular, the only one of his career, was singled out as being wooden and ineffectual, never conveying the complexity of the character, though this version of the film, both the American and the Argentine, was preserved by the Library of Congress in 2004, where the historical influence of the material outweighs any cinematic limitations, such as being made on the cheap.  Of interest, Native Son was directed by Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater and ran successfully on Broadway from 1941 – 43, and was Welles’s last real triumph on the New York stage.

Like the book, the film is presented in three segments, though they are untitled and run continuous, where the initial sequence is easily the best, where a series of events lead Bigger into employment as a chauffeur for a rich white family living in Hyde Park who have liberal feelings about blacks, seeing them as a disenfranchised people, so they give Bigger a chance even though he’s had a few run-ins with the police.  Bigger is stupefied by the behavior of their college-age daughter, Mary (Jean Wallace), whose sympathies for blacks (in the book) leave Bigger to believe she’s making sexual advances, toned down here, stripping the story of any Communist subplot and a scene where Bigger kisses the white girl, where instead she gets dead drunk and can’t stand on her feet, forcing Bigger to carry her upstairs into her room, where her blind mother walks in on them.  Bigger’s blind fear of getting caught in a white girl’s bedroom, growing up and hearing all the stories, knowing that’s the one thing that can get a black man killed, causes an overreaction, where he accidentally suffocates her while trying to keep her quiet.  Making matters worse, he throws her body in the incinerator and begins covering up his tracks with a series of lies.  Up to this point the film is a marvel of social provocation, and even interesting cinema, using several clever tracking devices, until it seems to run out of money and disintegrates into predictable territory.  Once the detectives and the white press get involved, exaggerated and way over the top, the story turns into a series of stereotypes, using cardboard characters whose opinions hardly matter.  Besides Bigger, Bessie is probably the best developed character, a singer in a jazz nightclub and crazy about her man, as evidenced by a unique scene of black lovers at the beach on Lake Shore Drive, but by the end she is overshadowed by Bigger’s turbulent world coming apart.  Nonetheless, his race to elude the police resembles Raoul Walsh’s earlier White Heat (1949) and Cody Jarrett’s climb to the top of a water tower, where the water hoses used by the police foreshadow the firehoses used during the Birmingham campaign in the lead-up to the 1963 Civil Rights demonstrations.  By the time Bigger is arrested, however, the story is dominated by his Communist Party attorney, Don Dean as Max, whose spirited defense of Bigger at the spectacle of his trial becomes, in effect, Wright’s own Marxist assessment of racial relations in America.  While not excusing the crimes committed, Bigger’s destiny is seen as inevitable, along with other black Americans who find themselves in similar circumstances, a byproduct of a racially hostile society that created them and formed them in the nation’s own thoroughly defective image. 

Despite leaving the Communist Party in 1944 and help found the literary Paris Review in Paris in 1949, Wright constantly reevaluated and transformed his Marxist thinking, where the influence of this book remains controversial, stirring up criticisms on every front, not the least of which was a literary war.  Baldwin wrote his own response in a 1949 essay called Everybody’s Protest Novel that was later published in 1955 as a collection of essays Notes of a Native Son initially published in various magazines, where he repudiates Wright’s novel for portraying Bigger Thomas as an angry black man, which he felt lacked psychological complexity and painted a bulls eye on the backs of black Americans in a majority white society, an essay that effectively ended their friendship.  Former Folsom State Prison inmate and Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver took both Baldwin and Wright to task in his book Soul on Ice (1968), much discussed during the 60’s, using arch conservative and homophobic views to pit the feminine side of gay writer James Baldwin against the masculine side of Richard Wright, who he felt was a more liberating example for the Panthers and the next generation of young blacks.  Irrespective of one’s views, the work defined 20th century discussions on racial relations in America, where Wright’s intention seemed to be to redefine blacks more accurately for white readers, destroying the myth of smiling and submissive Uncle Tom black men, where Bigger’s internal rage is in full view, even at the more sympathetic liberal whites who he hates with equal relish, especially the way they flaunt their wealth, as they represent everything that remains unattainable to blacks.  Once ensconced with the existentialists in Paris including Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, Wright wrote his second novel The Outsider (1953), which critics found too existential and pessimistic, while blacks felt it was a deviation from his black roots, but in effect, he was attempting to transform his original more provincial American ideas onto the world stage, joining forces, one might say, with (another key influence on the Black Panther Party) Frantz Fanon’s idea of blacks actively struggling against societal oppression, where violence and anger are products of opposing racial oppression, spending much of his later years supporting nationalist movements in Africa, dying penniless in Paris at the age of fifty-two.  Along with Wright’s earlier works, his autobiography Black Boy (1937) and Uncle Tom's Children (1938), a collection of short stories, these are his crowning achievements, seminal works in attempting to destroy white myths and provide a complex understanding of a profoundly different view of blacks in today’s modern society.  

Wild Girl

WILD GIRL        B+              

USA  (78 mi)  1932  d:  Raoul Walsh

This is actually a remake of several earlier Silent film versions, all based on the 1898 Bret Harte novella Salomy Jane’s Kiss, from William Nigh and Lucius Henderson’s SALOMY JANE (1914) starring Beatriz Michelena, and George Melford’s SALOMY JANE (1923) starring Jacquelyn Logan, to this early 1932 Pre-Code Raoul Walsh version starring Joan Bennett, where all three versions are adapted from Paul Armstrong’s 1907 four-act stage version called Salomy Jane.  Set out West after the Civil War during the mid 19th century, it takes place entirely in the redwood forests of California’s Sequoia National Park, a supremely beautiful location that only adds a unique element to this film.  Walsh grew up in New York City as childhood friends with John Barrymore, becoming an actor for the stage and screen before being hired by D.W. Griffith, working as his assistant director while also playing John Wilkes Booth in Griffith’s racially controversial but also highly influential epic film THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915), the first film to ever be shown in the White House under Woodrow Wilson.  Walsh lost an eye in a car accident while making the film IN OLD ARIZONA (1928), where actor Warner Baxter went on to win the Best Supporting actor in the part Walsh intended to play, effectively ending Walsh’s acting career, but he wore an eye patch for the rest of his life while still directing well over 100 feature-length films.  Walsh discovered Marion Morrison, an unknown prop boy at the time working on THE BIG TRAIL (1930), turning him into the star of his film while also changing his name to John Wayne, after Revolutionary War General Mad Anthony Wayne, who happened to be the subject of a book the director was reading.  Walsh became known as one of the most competent craftsmen during the heyday of the studio system, specializing in adventure stories, a director who knew how to utilize outdoor locations and drive the action through pace, composition, and editing sequences, becoming a classical Hollywood filmmaker. 

This early talking film shows how effortlessly Walsh made the transition from Silent to talking pictures, using the opening credit sequence with photograph album photos introducing the cast, but the characters come to life on camera humorously introducing some little tidbit about their character, “I'm Salomy Jane, and I like trees better than men, because trees are straight,” a clever and charmingly amusing aural and visual cue that not only introduces sound, but enhances the audience’s appreciation for the cast even before the movie begins.  Another clever device is an optical page-turning effect, where each transitional dissolve into the next scene is a rarely used technique reinforcing the storybook aspect of the movie.  And the opening of this film is a true delight, somewhat dated with a black Mammy character, but there’s never the least inference of bias or mistreatment, as she becomes the mother figure, best friend, and playmate of Salomy Jane, Joan Bennett as a feisty young frontier woman who is something of a tomboy in perfect harmony with the natural world around her, at home among the trees, the creatures in the woods, and playing with little children.  When she sees the stagecoach arriving, she waves to the driver before running home through the woods, grabbing Louise Beavers as Mammy, where the two have to fend off a half a dozen or more live bears en route, which is a dazzlingly filmed sequence as they are all in the same frame together, no computer graphics, making this a most impressive opening.  Eugene Pallette as stagecoach driver Yuba Bill is another revelation, as he’s a hearty old soul who loves to tell stories, something of a Shakespearean Falstaff character with his rotund girth, his gift for gab, his embellishments of stories making him the true hero, and of course, his ultimate cowardliness.  Again, when making the transition to talking pictures, it helps to have such a natural born raconteur and scene stealer who is as thoroughly entertaining as Pallette, who eventually became too physically large for screen roles, building a secondary career just doing voice effects.  His best scene here is when he describes a conversation between horses, using hysterical voice inflections to describe the different animal’s sound as well as their intentions.  If that’s not inventive enough, Bennett, alone in her element, even goes skinny-dipping in the river showing her bare backside where of course she’s discovered by someone she knows only as Man, continually calling him that until the final frame of the film, turning out to be Billy, aka the Stranger (Charles Farrell), who in the opening credit sequence indicates he fought with Robert E. Lee.   

A stranger in the midst is enough to arouse people’s suspicions, as it matches the unusual occurrence of the stage getting robbed, so the sheriff rounds up a group of men folk to hang by a tree whoever the culprit is before the night is done.  That’s quick and efficient justice in this outland Western frontier.  And if that’s not enough trouble, Jane is constantly pursued by an assemblage of men competing for her affections, including card shark Jack Marbury (Ralph Bellamy), the man in black always seen curling his waxed moustache, or a contemptible swine Rufe Waters (Irving Pichel) who believes he has an early claim on her, or an overly pious man running for Mayor who secretly molests women, Phineas Baldwin (Morgan Wallace), none of whom really catch her interest.  But when she hears the handsome Stranger tracked down Baldwin and shoots him on the spot, settling an old score, apparently from Kentucky, where the two are seen running over rooftops, she develops a sudden attraction for the man.  So the sheriff adds another noose for his double lynching of a stage robber (the poorest man in town) and a murderer (a stranger), which sends Jane into a swooning depression, only to later find a renewed sense of optimism.  Walsh evidently witnessed an actual lynching as a child, adding some degree of authenticity to this sequence, beautifully shot with quick edits and offscreen sound, with the shadow of the hanged man all that’s seen on the ground, a chillingly effective moment in what is otherwise a rather humorous tale, told with a tongue-in-cheek style from the outset, using plenty of exaggeration and understatement mixed together, almost as if the audience is being told a bedtime story, as in subsequent tellings other aspects might be emphasized.  It’s all blended together with a deft hand and a unique mystique, where the simplest of stories is the least of our interest, but the embellishment of the redwoods, the calm and collected Stranger, a man with few words, the joyous energy of Jane, who is the picture of innocence, yet strong-willed and independent enough to stand up to any man, and the mystifyingly beautiful natural setting is an authentic natural treasure.  The enchanting tone gives this an upbeat feel throughout, even when real human issues are addressed like starving, poverty, vengeance as justice, or crime and punishment are ultimately addressed, giving this a mythical feel of living in Divine Eden, a perfect, picturesque world, where early signs of civilization are the purest forms of human expression, where sin is seen as violating the laws of nature, not God or the laws of man, making this something of a Pantheist western.

West of Memphis

 
(Left to right) Damien Echols, Jesse Misskelley and Jason Baldwin speak to the media after being released following an 18-year imprisonment in the murder of three boys in 1993 in West Memphis
 
















 

WEST OF MEMPHIS             B             
USA  New Zealand  (147 mi)  2012  d:  Amy Berg                   Official site

WEST MEMPHIS THREE is a film that has the luxury of twenty year hindsight and a bankroll of celebrities, that was originally brought to the world’s attention on HBO TV by filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky in an astonishing film PARADISE LOST:  THE CHILD MURDERS AT ROBIN HOOD HILLS (1996), a film with a limited budget that outlines the details of a gruesome triple murder in 1993 of three 8-year old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, including the arrest and subsequent trials of three accused teenagers, best friends Damien Echols (18) and Jason Baldwin (16), along with Jessie Misskelley (17) from the same high school, who were all supposedly involved in a Satanic cult.  Based on the horrific brutality involved, where the boys were sexually mutilated, the region was in an uproar, stirred into a hysteric frenzy vowing blood, demanding the electric chair for whoever did it, eventually convicting all three in an atmosphere resembling a public witch hunt.  Berlinger and Sinofsky went on to make two follow up films, PARADISE LOST 2:  REVELATIONS (2000) and PARADISE LOST 3:  PURGATORY (2011).  It’s impossible to separate this new film from the earlier Trilogy, as they’re all dealing with the same subject matter.  What’s unique about this film is the active involvement of the producers, specifically New Zealand filmmaker Peter Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh, where Jackson actually hires a private detective to uncover background evidence that the police overlooked, also hiring a forensic team in 2007 to examine the existing DNA on the case, while Walsh is an unseen narrator heard throughout the film.  In addition, co-defendant Echols and his wife Lorri Davis are co-producers, so there is nothing to suggest this film is remotely impartial.  While the forensic tests reveal there is no DNA evidence whatsoever connecting any of these three defendants to the crime, a motion filed to have the case reconsidered in 2007 was denied, as the state of Arkansas refused to consider new evidence, including one of the primary witnesses, Vicki Hutcheson, who in 2003 recanted her original testimony that a Satanic ritual was involved, claiming she made it up in exchange for local police dropping suspected credit card theft charges against her.   

It was only then that the case drew public attention, not only LORD OF THE RINGS (2001–3) director Jackson, but high profile actor Johnny Depp, the Dixie Chicks, and Pearl Jam singer Eddie Vedder, all raising money and drawing public attention.  Questions raised about the original trial reveal the State brought in an expert on the occult to testify the murders were in fact a Satanic ritual, while a knife was brought into evidence as the murder weapon, though the prosecution had prior knowledge that it had been thrown into the river a year before the murders took place.  Perhaps most egregious was the biased testimony of the Medical Examiner, a supposed forensic specialist that in the state of Arkansas works for the office of the prosecution, so no independent inquiries were ever conducted, concluding the knife was responsible for the sexual mutilations and the large quantities of blood on the victims’ bodies.  It was Peter Jackson who hired 7 of the top forensic experts in the nation to examine the evidence, all of whom concluded there was no evidence of a knife at all in the murders, that there was instead inflicted head trauma where the cause of death was drowning, suggesting the mutilations occurred after death, most likely animal bites, specifically snapping turtles that were known to be in the vicinity, leaving various bite wounds on the body consistent with animal bites.  A more considered approach to examining the evidence instead reveals none of the 3 defendants were present at the murder scene, there was no Satanic cult, and there was no sexual mutilation inflicted by human hand, which is certainly a different scenario than what was presented at the trial.  Even the parents of the children were beginning to believe the three convicted kids had nothing to do with the killings, but they continued to languish in prison anyway, as Arkansas refused to grant them a new trial. 

In a highly unorthodox documentary approach, Jackson himself unleashes his own investigation, which uncovers two other potential suspects whose DNA was present at the scene of the crime, including Terry Hobbs, the stepfather of one of the boys killed (Stevie Branch) as well as his alibi witness.  While Hobbs informed police of nothing but marital harmony, the private investigator revealed otherwise, uncovering battery charges against both a former spouse and the murdered child’s mother, who years later divorced Hobbs due to the inflicted beatings.  In fact, he has a trail of uncontrolled violence and possible sex abuse, as he likely abused his stepdaughter from a young age, but she’s so acutely damaged by drugs she can hardly remember if it’s real or all in a dream, currently undergoing treatment, but not altogether off drugs yet which she uses to forget the nightmarish things that happened to her.  Hobbs inflicted plenty of brutally harsh punishments, especially to Stevie, inducing welts from a belt, where he often hid in the closet due to his extreme fear of Hobbs.  Nonetheless, even after this uncovered information, the State of Arkansas has never really brought Hobbs in for serious questioning, as in their eyes, they already convicted the killers.  Raising many of the same questions as The Central Park Five (2012), where convicted teenagers spent as many as thirteen years in prison for crimes they never committed, these three spent 18 years behind bars for crimes they never committed before they reached a deal with Arkansas prosecutors in August of 2011, a somewhat archaic and questionable agreement called Alford pleas, where they have to admit guilt while still pleading innocence, but are immediately released from prison, where the State has a guilty plea on the books and is not liable for subsequent lawsuits.  Perhaps the most devastating revelation is hearing the Arkansas prosecutor Scott Ellington gloat afterwards about their all-important guilty plea, which will be hoisted on a law and order banner of honor come election time, where political ads will run showing a prosecutor who gets tough on crime, where wrongful convictions hardly seem to matter to an uneducated electorate in Arkansas that will be sold a bill of goods.  This kind of win at all costs mentality lacks any moral authority and is a hollow charade parading around as justice.  There wasn’t a hint of remorse or contrition for sending three innocent men to prison for 18 years, so the real crime is he’d do it all over again in a heartbeat, and probably has already several times over, where it’s the State that is a repeat offender.