Who do you want? Barabbas!

Oops! Major mistake in my previous post on Feuillade’s 1919 serial BARABBAS: the murdered woman was not a sex worker, but the mistress of a rich American banker, previously introduced, but whom I inexplicably failed to recognize.

Anyway, an innocent man — innocent of this crime, anyway — is now under sentence of death. Now read on.

The recap intertitles in episode two seem to clarify points not fully made in part one, which is either sheer narrative cheek and impudence or a fault in the translation. Strelitz, the head of the underground organisation, is now revealed to be Barabbas himself, whereas I got the impression that this was merely the name of his group. Also, the innocent man bound for Madame Guillotine’s sharp caress is an aristocrat — I did think his country house was rather nice for an ex-con.

At “the registry” they snip off the prisoner’s shirt neck. Any guillotine that could be jammed up by a starched collar is not worthy of the name, in my view, but I suppose this is to stop condemned men from smuggling iron rings under their chemises, deflecting the blade with a mighty SPANG! into the assembled dignitaries, which would never do.

As he heads for the basket, his daughter experiences Griffithian telepathy. (In some examples of Griffith, intercutting is not used solely for suspense, but to imply some kind of preternatural awareness or relationship between incidents at far remove — what Einstein would probably call spooky action at a distance.)

With a kind of restraint that is nonetheless slightly tacky, Feuillade portrays the fatal chopping indirectly, by showing one of his heroes, the noble cheese shop proprietor, peeking over his hat and then fainting away. Comedy relief even in a moment of high tragedy.

And then we cut back to the daughter looking tragic, as if the tone had NOT just been shattered.

The cheese man is one of several heroes meticulously established in part 0 but who have not yet really done anything: there’s the lawyer, a friend of the murder victim who at least TRIED to defend the falsely accused decapitee, and his chum, a journalist. And there’s cheese shop block and his wife and daughter. They’re all concerned about the missing American banker who MAY have been abducted. But now we’ve had two deaths so things are on a more definite dramatic footing.

A message from beyond the grace! The executed man has underlined in pencil certain letters in the prison library’s copy of The Three Musketeers (a suspiciously slim volume: either the text is microscopic or it’s an abridged edition of Dumas’ doorstop). This he gifts to the lawyer, who finally notices the encoded j’accuse. The message tells him to turn up at a Barabbas club meeting, where the password is, naturally, Barabbas. And all doors will be opened…

Our hopes of an EYES WIDE SHUT clusterfuck of enhanced orgiasts are dashed — Barabbas himself even keeps his silk hat on at the planning table.

Barabbas/Strelitz is one Gaston Michel, a Feuillade fave also featured in JUDEX, TIH MIHN, and LES VAMPIRES. A great face! His nose cuts through the shadows like a hunting knife.

A shame his big villain role doesn’t have the iconic status of Fantomas or Irma Vep, though I have no doubt the dude would look magnificent in a catsuit.

As the lawyer is recruited, forcibly, into Barabbas’ cult, Biscotin the cheese shop proprietor is plagued by uneasy dreams — is it the memory of witnessing a decapitation, is it just all that cheese, or is it that Griffithian psychic connection again?

TO BE CONTINUED

The Sunday Intertitle: “I am the arm, and I sound like this…”

I bought a bunch of classical music CDs at 20p a throw, and then I got my hands on Louis Feuillade’s serial BARABBAS, which has no soundtrack, so I put the two together with results varying from the remarkable to the plain wrong. One bit of Shostakovich’s First Piano Concerto, featuring a prominent trumpet, is obviously fat guy music, and unfortunately the character onscreen, ex-con “the pseudo-Rougier,” is of trim build.

Not enough is said about the real good acting in Feuillade’s films. The characters are all simple woodblocks, but the performers give them passion and conviction. A mannered, theatrical kind of passion and conviction, but it holds. Pseudo-Rougier (Albert Mayer) is particularly fine.

After chapter 0, the prelude, sets up a bunch of nice characters and their circumstances, chapter 1 introduces the ex-con, codenamed Rougier, as he’s released from stir, still in thrall to the criminal cult known as Barabbas, but determined to go straight. He looks with such a wistful eye upon that little tent of blue that prisoners call the sky, so we can’t help but like the old jailbird.

His daughter asks him the meaning of the strange cryptogram on his arm. She can pick out the letters B,R, A and S.

He tells her it means BRAS — “arm.” Having a tattoo on your arm that says “arm” could be useful in all manner of situations, for instance if you got accidentally disassembled and your arm was mangled into a state where it wasn’t readily identifiable. You don’t want them thinking it’s a leg and attaching it to your hip. Though if the arm is that badly crumpled the tattoo might not be legible.

Anyway, it’s a pretty good code — BARABBAS, an eight letter word, contains only four distinct letters, so it’s cunning and deniable.

For defying his boss, the pseudo-Rougier will soon be framed for the murder of a coded sex-worker (in loose drapings she wafts around her hotel room, sniffing pot-pourri, so we know she’s a fallen woman). The murder, the first in the serial, is shown and is suitably shocking. I contrast this with the similar frame-up in GODFATHER II, where we never meet the victim and are not encouraged to feel anything for her. By contrast, we’ve been made to regard the senator being framed as a racist idiot, so his fall is rather gratifying. The murder itself is offscreen, so as not to detract sympathy from Robert Duvall’s character, who has arranged it.

So, Feuillade is a greater humanist and less of a misogynist than Coppola, I guess.

On trial for murder, the phony Rougier is unwilling to talk about Barabbas, for fear of retaliations against his family. The O.J. defense, that the sexy strangler gloves found at the scene don’t fit him, is brushed aside, and the guillotine is prescribed.

His best hope would appear to be that he maybe has TETE tattooed somewhere on his noggin. A HANDS OF ORLAC type undismemberment wouldn’t be beyond the bounds of what passes for realism in Feuillade’s oeuvre, I feel….

TO BE CONTINUED

Sniper at the Gates of Dawn

Sergio Sollima’s VIOLENT CITY (1970) is one hell of a thing. As with the same director’s BIG GUNDOWN, I was familiar with the score for decades, but have only just heard it in context. And what context!

The title is misleading, semi-irrelevant. It’s not about any particular city. What you need to know is, Charles Bronson IS Jeff Heston. And you will know it, because everyone calls him Jeff in every single line of dialogue, it feels like. And we also know that Telly Savalas is Al and Jill Ireland is Vanessa.

Jeff is a hitman — the kind of character who was only just becoming possible as protagonist — spaghetti western amorality spreading its web over the urban thriller — though Seijun Suzuki was there first with BRANDED TO KILL (an influence? — Leone and Morricone certainly exerted a big influence in Japan, did it return to Italy, more twitchy and psychotic?) — and I guess there’s the remarkable MURDER BY CONTRACT (“To buy one of these things you have to be a civilized country. Are you a civilized country?” “Me? I never even finished high school.”)

Anyhow, Jeff is pretty ruthless and Bronson is the right guy to play him. Sollima delivers extended setpieces of pure cinema in eye-searing colour, with or without Morricone’s slamming electric guitars. It’s as sexist as any pulp fiction potboiler — the director’s only technical weakness is his bizarre cutting of Jill Ireland’s body double scenes, as if he really really wants us to know it’s not her. Jeff H. is pretty well a rapist as well as a murderer, but Vanessa doesn’t hold that against him.

Jeff Heston, put your vest on!

The (fuzzy) political edge of REVOLVER — this thing goes all the way to the top! — is mostly absent, except a wildly misjudged scene meant to show the corruption of powerful men. The film’s geography is crazy — Jeff drives from New Orleans to Michigan by way of the Florida Keys, but this one scene finds him in a Southern version of the Playboy Club where the Bunnies are Mammies. It’s absolutely horrific, ludicrous — some kind of satire is evidently intended and it lands as grotesquerie but actual people had to wear those costumes…

This all suggests hard limits to Sollima’s political awareness, and my sense that he’s at heart somewhat superficial intensifies — but I’m more impressed than ever by his image-making, and that of cinematographer Aldo Tonti (BARABBAS, THE SAVAGE INNOCENTS, NIGHTS OF CABIRIA).