Look out! The result of a long-term plan bears fruit, as the latest issue of The Believer hits stateside newsstands. Cradled within its crackling leaves, a new piece by me, detailing the work of William Cameron Menzies.
You can buy it via Amazon here ~
The Believer, Issue 79: March/April 2011 Film Issue
Thanks to David Bordwell and Glenn Erickson for their trailblazing work here and here and here and here.
…in a nice way, of course.
It’s easy to see why, in the face of all the evidence, people always assumed INVADERS FROM MARS was shot in 3D. Menzies’ particular way with deep focus and forced-perspective sets, coupled with extreme angles and discombobulating editing, make his films seem like 3D extravaganzas even when they’re not. Or rather, like 3D extravaganzas viewed under the influence of certain psychoactive mushrooms.
(WCM did make a proper 3D film, the Scottish-set monsterpiece THE MAZE, whose plot synopsis, were I to attempt writing one, would surely melt your minds and cause them to flow down the backs of your necks. So I won’t do it, OK?)
ADDRESS UNKNOWN is a striking bit of wartime agit-prop, with an epistolary narrative that seems designed to defeat dramatization. But Menzies, unperturbed, just spews deep, off-kilter compositions all over the screen and makes us like it. Every minute or so there’s another “WOW” moment, and sometimes they follow directly on top of each other until you feel like tiny bombs are detonating in your frontal lobes.
It’s PVE!
Against all this, Paul Lukas and Peter Van Eyck both do pretty well at holding the eye where it belongs, when our natural response is often to go skittering off around the edges of the frame, looking for rational angles. Lukas, a really terrific actor, is especially fine, humanizing a monstrous character without asking for sympathy. His is a bad guy activated by weakness rather than malice, but weakness is next door to wickedness in the dyslexic dictionary of vice.
A real 3D moment, as Nazis come bursting through the screen at us!
I’m thinking that I’ve overestimated Sam Wood as director, because his terrific IVY, produced and designed by Menzies, bears all the visual hallmarks of this film, and none of Wood’s other work (apart from those Menzies designed). Still, Wood did have good taste in scripts, and maybe more interest in performance than WCM.
This piece might have been longer, but as I was taking my time with it, David Bordwell posted an awesome essay/history/appreciation of The Great Man. I’m thrilled to be a footnote in it, referencing my review of IVY. I’d urge you all to read it, and of course bookmark DB’s astounding blog if you somehow haven’t already.
The wit and wisdom of Steven Spielberg:
On William Cameron Menzies’ INVADERS FROM MARS: ‘Whew, that movie just, it just undid my world… because it got to a primal place which basically says that the first people not to trust is your father and mother.’
When Worlds Undo!
‘That’s a shattering, primal attack on all of us when we went to see this movie. But I went to see this movie five times, because I kept expecting the parents not to turn against the kid. Somehow — I was like, eleven or ten years old when I saw it the movie — I thought, “Well, maybe the fourth time I see it the parents will be nice.” I was like thinking that maybe film is like that, film, you know, doesn’t, isn’t a set story locked in cement, but it can actually change.’
Word for the day: primal. Halfway through the above he obviously hits on a silly lie and decides to tell it because it’ll make a ‘great story.’ I don’t believe Spielberg was that dumb at ten. It’s taken him years to get that dumb.
‘I think Menzies gave himself the license to do some very Bertolt Brechtian sets, because it was a dream. And only he knew that, the audience didn’t know that.’
He says ‘Brechtian’ when he means expressionistic, or else he doesn’t KNOW what he means. Humm. The time has come for me to point out what I’m sure you’ve all noticed already but just been too polite to say: nothing Spielberg says makes any sense.
‘What really unseats you as a child when you see that movie, at the very end it’s all a dream.’
I don’t recall INVADERS FROM MARS unseating me as a child.
He wasn’t always this incoherent. I seem to recall some sensible utterances in the past, and he can still just about manage a sentence that hangs together when he’s talking about his work, which after all he should know something about, but most of the time he’s just painful:
On THE SPACE CHILDREN: ‘You would just think that if our parents are going to destroy the world, children would never do that, because we really have all the tools of tolerance and, like, global understanding and that’s why we, the children, need to be empowered, to tell the parents what they need to know to protect all of us, as a whole. And that’s what that movie kind of was saying at the end.’
Kind of. It’s like his head is a big tombola and random crap just comes tumbling out.
‘Every science fiction movie I have ever seen, any one that’s worth its weight in celluloid, warns us about things that ultimately come true.’
Yeah, like remember when 2001 came out and now you can’t move for monoliths?
‘A director is first and foremost a storyteller before everything else. And to tell a story you have got to have, you know, access to be able to move things around in — not just in your world, but in your life.’
Pieces of brain tissue are flaking off with every word he says.
‘What you see is what I can pretty much interpret through me from what the writer writes, because I have always said that without a screenplay, without a story, without a writer we have nothing.’
You said it.
‘Yes, it’s actually good to be a director and not know who the director is.’
WHAAAAA?
‘I do as much homework, I like to think, as the actors do when they come to meet me halfway.’
Halfway? I think S.S. has a tendency to witter on for a bit, then find that one word of what he says intersects with a well-known phrase or saying, so he just throws that in, regardless of whether it actually means anything.
On SCHINDLER’S LIST: ‘I think it’s the most honest acquittal of a subject by taking my own impulses to upstage the subject, and where I force myself into the background of the subject matter. And I think that’s the first time I’ve ever done that before and I think it really benefited the movie.’
The last sentence would be fine without that rogue “before” in there, but the first one? I think even he doesn’t know what he means by “acquittal”, and then, if I read him correctly, he starts by saying the exact opposite of what he means, then says something that I sort of get, but which conjures up the weird image of Spielberg in baseball cap standing in the background of SCHINDLER’S LIST, as if doing a Hitchcockian walk-0n.
Is it just because he’s so big and powerful nobody in his life can stand up and say, ‘Hang about, Steve, that doesn’t make sense,’? Ifonlyifonlyifonly somebody had said that when he proposed the wretched HAUNTING remake he produced, with the words ‘It’s a great opportunity to use digital effects!’ Is this why all his movies now overshoot their endings and drag on for a superfluous half hour?
He needs a court jester!
shadowplay 