Beck #2: Long Distance Call

THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE is an outlier — Martin Beck is sent to Hungary in search of a vanished journalist, his stated mission being to avoid an international incident, and spends his time wandering about in a desultory manner. The Beck books’ rich supporting cast do get to take part a little, though, via phone calls, investigations back in Stockholm, and for the last act when Beck returns home and (spoiler) solves the case.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö were evidently well-read in crime fiction and had seen a lot of movies: the next volume in the series seems to show the influence of Fritz Lang’s M, one of the first procedurals (predating Anthony Boucher’s coining of the term “procedural” in 1956, and his earliest literary example, V as in Victim, written by Lawrence Treat in 1945).

Big spoiler follows in the invisible (up in smoke) para below. Highlight it with your cursor if you want to read it.

(The central twist of TMWWUIS is that the journalist who has vanished in Budapest never actually went to Budapest. He was murdered at home in Sweden the night before his scheduled departure. His killer, an approximate lookalike, decided to throw investigators off the scent by stealing the victim’s passport and plane ticket, flying to Hungary and then mysteriously disappearing (sneaking back home and resuming his own identity). It’s a neat trick, and was still neater when James M. Cain thought up the basis for it in Double Indemnity. Maj & Per not only change the details, but plays the story backwards, following the investigator deceived by the trick, rather than the perpetrator/s.)

As a reading experience, TMWWUIS is maybe the least compelling of the series (Steady on: I’ve only read the first five, there may be other low points to come, but so far they seem to be improving if anything.) Even Beck marvels at how disengaged he is from this case, after becoming obsessed with the Roseanna McGraw murder the year before. But the twist is great, and the short appearances by the supporting cast of cops are very enjoyable: Kollberg is shaping up very nicely, and there’s a tiny appearance by the bumbling duo of Kristiansen & Kvant, lazy and stupid patrol cops, who will go on to provide much of the comedy relief and satirical slant that leavens the dour crimey aspects.

DER MANN, DER SICH IN LUFT AUFLOSTE is a 1980 German coproduction based on the book, starring Derek Jacobi, surprisingly enough, as Beck. I got hold of a low-res rip of a VHS pan-and-scan of a scratchy and discoloured print, dubbed into Russian, with no subtitles. As with ROSEANNA, however, the plot follows the book closely enough for me to vaguely follow it. Unlike ROSEANNA, it wasn’t possible to appreciate the work of director Péter Bacsó or cinematographer Tamás Andor — it seemed zoom-happy and undistinguished, but must have looked nicer when new. Was it always sicklied o’er with a green cast? It’s pretty unpleasant, not at all like the US film of THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN, which makes something eerily beautiful out of the tendency of fluorescent lights to photograph green.

Jacobi/Beck is called away from his summer holiday to go on this urgent investigation. We see him at his holiday home with his wife and his topless teenage daughter, but we don’t get much sense of Beck’s disenchantment with his marriage, which he allows to slowly disintegrate as the books go on. It might be implied in the dialogue, though. Did I mention I don’t speak Russian?

The film is a bit of a Europudding, which in fairness the novel invites. Jacobi is surrounded by real Swedes (at least one of whom went on to appear in the long-running Beck TV series and in Wallander) and Hungarians, making his presence a bit odd, but since everyone has had Russian voices transplanted into their throats, he doesn’t particularly stand out. I think he’s the wrong actor for the part, though. Bob Peck would have been good, if you want a British Beck. He even rhymes. But Bob Peck wasn’t particularly on the world’s radar in 1980. (I miss Bob Peck.)

Jacobi is great at nerves. Beck doesn’t really have nerves, he has sinuses and acid indigestion and a sort of grinding low-level glumness. He isn’t colourful, which Jacobi is by nature. Jacobi is an actor who wants to add to what’s on the page, whereas a good Beck actor should want to subtract. You need a man with the legendary minus factor — the kind of guy, as Ken Campbell put it, who is useful because you can bring him into a scene just as it’s threatening to get too interesting.

Jacobi knows what’s called for and gives an admirably low-key performance, but it’s still him giving it.

It being 1980, the fashions and settings are truly hideous, the rather admirable excesses of the 70s falling into a state of sartorial putrefaction. The settings don’t even seem particularly convincing. The white and gold trim of the Swedish Foreign Office strikes me as lurid. It rather smacks of roller disco.

Whenever I see a shot of a jet plane landing, I generally get a sinking feeling. It always feels like a dire way to convey the fact of travel, but cutting to the protagonist at passport control would be lame too, and airports are depressing. Herr Bacsó duly cuts to Jacobi getting his passport checked. The belt and braces approach.

When the film gets to Budapest and the cityscapes get slightly more interesting, the Russian dubbing abruptly gives out, and now the film has a UN-style simultaneous translation, a single Comrade talking over all the Hungarian dialogue in Russian. This, I admit, threw me for a moment. Then the dubbing returns, so it’s only the Hungarian bits this has been done to. So it’s going to keep alternating for most of the rest of the film. That should be fun.

A detective’s life is not actually full of jeopardy — he’s usually at the scene AFTER the unpleasantness has taken place. Sjöwall and Wahlöö have some neat strategies to get around this — by turning over stones in Budapest, Beck will eventually uncover some nastiness not directly related to his case, leading to some suitably unappealing sex and violence. But to keep the audience engaged in the meantime, a filmmaker is going to need (a) an unobtrusive but attractive visual style, and a good theme tune and (b) characterful supporting players. Here, I feel like only the music is good. It’s by Jacques Loussier (JEU DE MASSACRE, DARK OF THE SUN) and it sounds like the death spasms of a drunken dulcimer. Jangly.

The ever-present danger of the police procedural is the plod factor. This film plods. Only the music gives you any sense that anything’s going on. It’s amazing it succeeds so well.

Some of the book’s best stuff involves the Hungarian (secret?) policeman Major Szluka, played by Ferenc Bács here. The whiff of cold war paranoia seems heavily diluted here, perhaps because it’s a Hungarian coproduction with a Hungarian director (should perhaps have been a Swedish or German director so Budapest could be viewed through an outsider’s eyes, aligning us with Beck). In the book, Beck and Szluka come to an understanding as fellow professionals, but the edgy, uncertain start of the relationship is one of the key sources of tension in what’s otherwise quite a pedestrian investigation.

Derek Jacobi, action hero! The fight scene is as flat as everything else — though Sjöwall and Wahlöö are quite capable of describing things from a detached perspective, the (highly unusual) assault on Beck by members of the European underworld is properly hairy and suspenseful. Here, it’s just coverage. It needs to feel subjective, I think. One nice angle where a train passes over a bridge in the background… Then we just cut to a police car speeding to the rescue, flattening all suspense and taking us out of Beck’s experience. Must remember not to watch any more Bacsó films, unless anyone has any really passionate recommendations.

Bacsó has either greatly toned down the attempted seduction of Beck, or some Russian state TV censor has done it. A little bit of sex wouldn’t have hurt things, though the authors have a clinical, even forensic way of dealing with bodies, and Jacobi seems as unlikely an erotic hero as he does a punch-up artist. Anyhow, Beck declines the offer.

Excitingly, incompetent coppers Kristiansen and Kvant, who appear for the first time in this volume of the series, but only as a mention, get an actual walk-on here. But they’re not cast to resemble the books’ hulking idiots. Still, it’s nice to see the supporting cast — ROSEANNA, while fairly faithful to its source, left out most of Beck’s rather loveable colleagues. Though this scene doesn’t appear in the book, and though I can’t understand Russian, this seems like a very faithful reproduction of the kind of Kristiansen and Kvant scenes we get in The Fire Engine That Disappeared and Murder at the Savoy: called to account for their latest fuck-up, the two idiots lie pathetically, get caught out, throw one another under the bus, fall into humiliating recriminations. I’m prepared to give Bacsó some credit here, and note that he seems to have made more comedies than dramas.

They’ve changed the ending, though — instead of the depressing flatness of Beck’s solution — the crime turns out to be incredibly ordinary, with only the method of concealment lending it a certain panache — Bacsó concocts a crime passionelle and folie a deux, injecting a certain Gallic romance into the denouement. He also chooses this late point to introduce realistic gore, which isn’t inappropriate but is rather late in showing up.

And then the truly awful theme song comes in. “So confused / I donno what I’m gonna do / Ween or lose / I godda gedda new from you…” Good, I guess, to know that Hungary or Sweden has it’s own Shirley Bassey. Though it may be unfair to blame Bacsó for this musical intrusion, just as Neil Jordan doubtless isn’t responsible for the sudden invasion of MONA LISA by Phil Collins (“I really hate rock ‘n’ roll,” Jordan has said), the theme tune ends the film in the most gloriously inapposite way, and makes me glad I stayed the course. And I don’t scorn the fact that one of the minor actors slips comically on his way out of the penultimate scene, that’s the kind of muddy deflating comic realism the film needed more of.

Hitting the Wall

Jul 2nd — Mercoledi as they call it in Italy. And I ran out of stamina in Bologna, temporarily.

The day began well with FANTOMAS. I wasn’t completely sure of my ability to take the two-and-a-half hour SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT at 9am, so I opted for Feuillade’s serial, tempted by Ehsan Khoshbakht’s praise for the restoration. And indeed, so clean was the picture that it looked like a modern pastiche. When Rene Navarre looked into the camera he seemed to be RIGHT THERE with you.

In Edinburgh I had met Christoph Huber, curator of the Domenik Graf retrospective. Here he was again, in company with fellow donkey enthusiast Olaf Moller. Christoph wore a golden donkey T-shirt. Olaf, more discrete, had on a donkey pendant. And both made the revolutionary claim that Donkeys Make Everything Better. The donkey is an axiom of cinema.

So both were in ecstasy at the screening of scenes from the Ottoman empire — Turkish travelogues from the teens. Many exciting shots of donkeys, including a donkey photobombing a shot of camels at a trough. The ships of the desert are slurping away, and things are looking picturesque, and then the donkey sweeps majestically into frame in closeup profile, like Charles Bronson in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, and wipes them off the screen.

But for true Donkey Heaven we would have to wait a day…

After lunch I made, i think, a mistake, dropping in on a Heinosuke double-bill — these early Japanese talkies tend to foreground sound and the voice in quite literal ways — the one I eventually stayed awake for was all about music, and featured a blind character for whom sound was particularly significant. These two, THE BRIDE TALKS IN HER SLEEP and THE GROOM TALKS IN HIS SLEEP were mild screwball comedies in which the voice plays a key role. Anyhow, I lapsed into unconsciousness for the first one and bailed on the second, which was apparently the better of the two. Makes me wish I’d discovered the Italian compendium films sooner, or opted for THE EPIC OF EVEREST, which cause quite a bit of excitement, or MIDNIGHT MARY, which is a SUPERB Wellman. When sleep threatens, you need a certain kind of movie.

I should have gone to see GIANT at this point, but opted for Barbara Steele’s video appearance, which I thought might be live and interactive but proved to be a pre-record. Beautiful Babs was speaking with regard to the Riccardo Freda season and was very entertaining and there is no danger of falling asleep when SHE is on the screen.

I followed this with DER LETZTE AKTE, (THE LAST ACT, 1955), which deals with Hitler’s last days and is maybe the first big film to do so. It’s directed by GW Pabst and, as Olaf Muller said in his intro, comes from the post-war period when Pabst’s international reputation was and is very low, partly due to some inferior films but mostly because he had failed to get out of Germany during the Nazi era. Not that he ever made anything with pro-Nazi sentiments. The print was pure grindhouse — as Olaf put it (I paraphrase), “After seeing a lot of digital restorations that have all the charm of a hastily-done boob job, we are about to see source material that corresponds more to sagging skin and clumps of grey hair — to my body, in fact.”

The movie was indeed in ratty condition, but that somehow fit the low-ceilinged, oppressive claustrophobia of it. After two hours in the sweaty Sala Scorsese with intermittent, flirtacious air-conditioning, an exhausted simultaneous translator struggling in our earpieces, we all felt like we’d spent ten days in a bunker.

Albin Skoda played Hitler, and Oskar Werner played an obligatory Good German, perhaps not so much a sop to bruised national sensibilities as a sop to commercial cinema, which always feels more comfortable with a sympathetic character around. I was also dubious about whether Hitler really flooded the Berlin Underground to prevent the Russians reaching him by tube, but according to Wikipedia he may have done just that — the movie definitely inflates the resulting tragedy for dramatic purposes, though. I guess the idea of Hitler deliberately massacring the wounded who were sheltering below ground works as a metaphor for what he did to Germany.

A leisurely dinner and then — carbon lamp projection! Germaine Dulac’s LA PRINCESSE MANDAINE is an elegant slice of exotic comedy, with a very funny camp central performance by either Edmond or Ernest Van Duren (IMDb and the Ritrovato catalogue disagree). It’s got a very slender plot and might not have sustained interest, but the added drama of an ancient projector belching poisonous fumes into the air, illuminated by blasting beams of light, and the resulting smooth, chocolatey picture shimmering on the screen, made up for quite a few deficiencies.

Dulac could be quite cheeky — at the end of his Michael Strogoff-inspired dream, the hero rescues the princess only for her to run off with her maid. “I’ve sold myself down the river for a couple of dykes,” complained Bob Hoskins in MONA LISA, and we were supposed to agree (and not wonder what happened to the girls afterwards). Actually, MONA LISA has one of the worst endings of any otherwise quite-good British film of the eighties. Whereas even my most soporific day in Bologna was a treat.

Intertitle of the Week: the living intertitle

Lois Weber’s TOO WISE WIVES features an unusual device — intertitles with live action footage incorporated. Mrs. David Graham (Claire Windsor) sits embroidering as the intertitle assures of her domesticity. It seems like a very good idea, since a common use for the intertitle was to introduce the dramatic personae. In some films, the actor’s name would also be given in parenthesis, making the title cards work as a sort of running credit sequence.

But, since TOO WISE WIVES was made in 1921, and I haven’t seen this approach in other silents, it look like an experiment that didn’t catch on.

(Incidentally, Mr. David Graham is played by Ambassador Trentino himself, Louis Calhern.)

Lois Weber is fascinating because of her mixture of bold experimentation with lapses into woodenness. Her devotion to enlightening the public about social issues makes her the kind of didactic do-gooder modern cinephiles often scorn, but her equal devotion to trying new things (see SUSPENSE, 1913, for a barrage of exciting tricks and first-time techniques) mean she cannot be lightly dismissed.

TOO WISE WIVES features some impressive special effects rooms — the ceilings are paintings, probably on glass, allowing a lighting rig to do its work, unseen ~

Unfortunately, Weber rests on her laurels somewhat, re-using the same master shots of each room, again and again, at various points in the story. It’s as if the house were fitted out with 1920s CCTV, so that each room has one wide shot and one wide shot only. Fortunately, the closer shots show more variety.

It was from David Mamet that I first heard the dictum “Never repeat composition in a longshot,” and despite not caring much for his movies, I think it’s a very sound argument. By returning to the same set-up, you are saying to the audience, “Nothing has changed since the last time you were here,” and thus, by extension, “You have no reason to be watching.” Sometimes a return to a wide shot at the end of a scene can be justified, if the characters have struggled during the scene and wound up at an impasse, the repeated angle can affirm that. That depends for its effect on a lot of dramatic power shifts within the scene, and is probably overused because it’s economical: if the director has shot a master of the whole scene, the beginning and the end are probably the only times he can get away with using it.

Weber’s problem is doubtless that her master shots, with their special effects, took so long to set up that she couldn’t possibly shoot variations on them for each scene. Also, since the tableau style of shooting has only recently been replaced by the more montage-based approach, directors are still experimenting with what works, on the most basic level.

Not much seems to be known about this beauty, who rejoices in the name of Mona Lisa.