The Laughton and Altman books came from the All You Can Eat book shop, which is rarely open but always affordable. £1 each. I know Simon Callow’s Laughton book is probably better than Charles Higham’s, but a cursory glance revealed this one to have some merit, and Elsa Lanchester cooperated in it. The Altman book is great and makes me think I should spend a week just catching up with oddities from his long career which have hitherto escaped me, from Combat to THE COMPANY.
I figured I’d read a few snatches of the Laughton — page 17, maybe, and in fact I did read the bit on Sternberg — and then forget it was there, but Fiona grabbed it and devoured it cover to cover so it’s paid its way. Also, there are some wonderful artists’ impressions of the Great Man:
Two by Elsa, and —
One by James Mason and one, a collage, by Brecht.
The Polanski book came from a nearby charity shop. A pretty handsome volume for £5. Polanski provides quotes on each film. There’s not a lot of meat to it — I read it in an afternoon — but it’s glossy and handsome. Many many of the pictures show Polanski doing other people’s jobs — sewing or arranging fights, swinging a log at an outsize opponent.
The Tod Browning one cost the most, from secondhand record-and-bookstore Elvis Shakespeare, a regular stop on my constitutionals. It happened to tie in with a little project I have on the go, so I couldn’t very well pass it up. £15. It’s pretty good — a series of essays on different aspects of Browning’s work. There are some howling factual errors — Roger Corman directing Christopher Lee in DRACULA — but they’re all sort of off-topic. On Browning’s films, the book is informative and insightful.
Fiona was enthused about seeing THE BIG SILENCE, because as it’s a snowy western, she assumed the people would be less orange. The orangeyness of everyone in spaghetti westerns, their pores clogged with tangerine pancake makeup, really bothers her. She really liked this one.
Before that, we had quite a good time with THE PRICE OF POWER, an interesting, unusual and original spag western from 1969 — the first film, as Alex Cox points out, to directly tackle the Kennedy assassination — though there are all those weird foreshadowing films like SUDDENLY and THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE — and then there’s Mr. Zapruder’s magnum opus, which really wins first place.
But Tonino (MY NAME IS NOBODY) Valerii’s film, written with Massimo Patrizi and gothic/giallo specialist Ernesto Gastaldi, really goes for it, in the oddest way. In order to make the story of actual president James Garfield’s actual assassination feel a bit more resonant, they jettison all the facts and transport the event to Dallas, represented by standing sets from ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST. Van Johnson is imported to play the doomed prez, and the basic events we can all agree upon — sniper kills POTUS, patsy is arrested and assassinated, shadowy cabal of political/business interests pays the bills — are recycled all’Italiana, with many additional massacres featuring electronically amplified gun blasts (every gunshot has a ricochet PANG! even if there’s nothing around for the bullet to carom off of. And I generally liked the racial politics — there’s much talk of slavery and the slimy businessmen led by Fernando Rey are trying to undo the outcome of the Civil War. I loved the way the trauma of the actual hit-job causes the camera to come off its tripod and Zapruder around, panic-stricken. Valerii also throws in a lot of wacky diopter shots.
What, to me, stopped the film from really coming off, was the role of Giuliano Gemma, not because he’s absurdly handsome and has five hundred teeth, but because he wins, saves the day for democracy, and all is well. Alex Cox observes that “The necessary assumptions of the conspiracy film (almost-universal racism, total corruption of the police, double-dealing by the forces of authority) are already those of the spaghetti western, so there’s no conflict of interest.” But the Italian western mainly follows the required pattern of good guy versus bad guy, good guy wins. It’s just that usually, or in Leone anyhow, the good guy is less good. Even so, it’s impossible to imagine Leone ending a film with Volonte offing Eastwood (though he wanted to start OUATITWEST with all three of his stars from TGTBATUGLY being shot down by his new hero).
There are some stories, however, that don’t benefit from the popular and gratifying heroic triumph ending. Polanski noted that for the audience to care about CHINATOWN’s story of corruption, it shouldn’t end with the social problems being cleared up. They’re still with us, after all — capitalism, corruption and abuse — so suggesting that a lone private eye with a bisected nostril solved them in the 1930s would be dishonest.
This is where THE BIG SILENCE comes in. I’ve resisted Sergio Corbucci after being underwhelmed by the original DJANGO — the mud, the coffin and the sadism were all neat, but it was extremely poorly shot, and how dare anyone compare a poorly-shot film favourably to Leone?
THE BIG SILENCE is also photographically iffy, but at the same time has many splendid wide shots, thanks to the snowy Tyrolean locations. What uglifies Corbucci’s shooting is the messy, out-of-focus, misframed and herky-jerky closeups. Like Tinto Brass, Corbucci seems to position his cameras at random, stage the blocking without regard to what can be seen, and throw the whole mess together in a vaguely cine-verita manner. And one of his operators here is incompetent. What beautifies it is the costumes, actors, settings, and wide shots. And he has Morricone (with Riz Ortolani) providing a unique, wintry, romantic score.
The set-up is stark and simple: outside the aptly-named town of Snow Hill, a raggletaggle band of outlaws is starving, picked off by bounty hunters. A new sheriff (Frank Wolff) has been sent to impose order. A military man, he means well, but is of uncertain competence: on his way to town he’s robbed of his horse by the desperate outlaws, who eat it.
The movie’s sidelining of the “new sheriff in town” is amusing — our main characters are to be Loco (in the original language version, Tigrero), a preening, psychopathic bounty hunter played by Klaus Kinski, and Silence, a mute killer of bounty killers, played by a Mauser-wielding Jean-Louis Trintignant in what’s apparently his favourite role. Silence has no dialogue but he does have a traumatic flashbackstory, as was becoming de rigeur in Leone films.
There’s also Vonetta McGee, later borrowed by Alex Cox for REPO MAN, rather magnificent as a widow who hires Silence, paying him with her body, to kill Loco. And the usual corrupt manager of the general store. Spaghetti westerns are communistic in a low-key way, the business interests are usually the real bad guys.
The body count is high, as we’d expect. The blood is very red. The bad guys are very bad, and they have it mostly their own way. The typical baroque whimsicality of the genre’s violence is in evidence: rather than shooting his opponent, Kinski shoots the ice he’s standing on, dropping him into the freezing water. But, unusually, none of this is funny. The sadism is intense: even our hero has a tendency to shoot men’s thumbs off when they surrender (stops them from unsurrendering). There’s a really intense focus on INJURY TO THE HAND, which goes back to Django but becomes demented here. Paul Schrader attributed this motif to writers’ anxiety — hands are what you write with.
Cox points out that, though the film is terse and devoid of subplots, the author of the English dub, Lewis Ciannelli (son of actor Eduardo Ciannelli), has used the Utah setting to insert some stuff about the outlaws being victims of religious persecution, suggesting they’re Mormons. At least they’re treated more sympathetically than in THE BIG GUNDOWN… up to a point.
Introducing the film on Moviedrome back in the day, Cox remarked, “And the ending is the worst thing ever.” Meaning it as praise, you understand.
The movie’s ending is its most astonishing element. It stands comparison with CHINATOWN, and is even more startling in a way since there are, after all, plenty of noirs with tragic endings (but none quite like the one Polanski imposed on Robert Towne — Towne’s ending was a tragedy that solves the social problem — Polanski’s instead sets it in cement).
Corbucci came up with the story, penning the script with the usual football team of collaborators. His widow, says Cox, “told Katsumi Ishikuma that her husband had the deaths of Che Guevara and Malcolm X in mind.” Che’s murder happened right before the shoot. This gives the film its unusual seriousness, and what makes it more effective than THE PRICE OF POWER is Corbucci upends the genre conventions that would prevent the horror from staying with us.
THE PRICE OF POWER stars Erik the Viking; Dr. Randall ‘Red’ Adams; and Don Lope.
THE BIG SILENCE stars Marcello Clerici; Don Lope de Aguirre; Proximates the Tyrant; Father Pablo Ramirez; Chico; Fregonese the Tyrant; Principe di Verona; and Marlene.
As mentioned before, the new THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH is very good, at least much of the time. There are lots of things about it I don’t think work, but lots that do and in unfamiliar ways. It has a nice blend of the cinematic and the practical. Its version of the Macduff news scene (Act IV, Scene II) isn’t the most interesting, but the bland shot-countershot approach is actually fairly good for clarity. I shows the three versions of this scene to my students and they found the cutting helped them read it as an argument, back-and-forth, question-and-answer. They found the Polanski version more emotional though.
Joel Coen seems to have copied Polanski & Tynan’s idea of making Ross a traitor, but takes it even further and makes him the third murderer who lays in wait for Banquo. Alex Hassall plays him as one sneaky bastard. Harry Melling is Malcolm and Corey Hawkins is Macduff.
In keeping with the film’s grey, misty, stylised look, Coen sets the scene along an avenue of curiously 2D trees. Any time you have an avenue of trees, you want to track, so that’s how he starts the scene. He’s also making a nice transition from the previous scene, the massacre at the Macduff home, so we start with smoke filling the screen, which becomes mist, which lifts to reveal first the trees and then Malcolm and Macduff.
It could be a little hard to figure out why these two guys are out for a stroll in this cultivated area, if we were encouraged to think about that, but we’re not. Shakespeare doesn’t really provide any clues, though it’s likely he imagined a road, but probably not one that’s had the services of a landscape gardener. We can dimly see other trees, so the idea seems to be that this path is cutting through a forest, but the evenness of the foreground trees make them seem deliberately planted, not wild.
Our chaps stop as they notice someone approaching. It’s Ross, power-walking in their direction, with long floppy sleeve-ribbons flapping by his sides. He’s apparently out for a stroll too — since it makes sense that we’re safe in England, he’s apparently power-walked from Dunsinane, a distance or a hundred or so miles, depending on how far south we are. But again, this needn’t matter.
The effect of Ross’s costume is oddly priestly, harkening back to the Welles version.
Coen has now set up a symmetrical shot/counter-shot scenario. He has a gentle track towards Ross, which suggests the POV of Malcolm and Macduff but isn’t, since they’ve stopped walking. Ross stops in medium shot and decides that M&M are a little ways screen right, so that’s where he looks. When we cut to them, the view is no longer so symmetrical and they look screen left. This ties these two shots together and means we don’t feel the immediate need for a master shot showing all three dudes.
As in the Polanski, Ross’s speech about how terrible it is in Scotland has to be played convincingly, but the audience knows it’s not really sincere, since Ross is playing both ends against the middle.
This creates a difficulty, potentially, when Macduff asks “How does my wife?” Ross looks very uncomfortable, as well he might, and says she’s fine. Well, he has to, because that’s what Shakespeare’s written, but asides from it being in the script, WHY? In both the Polanski and Coen, Ross has been rewritten as a traitor, so it’s a little hard to impute to him the delicacy of feeling that could cause him to fail to break the bad news at his first attempt.
I don’t hugely like Hassall’s perf, which mostly seems to telegraph sinister intent and insincerity. And, as in the Polanski, psychology gets flung out the window at this point, with Ross dithering about the facts for no good character or narrative reason. Hassall does at least get to be on camera for this moment, though, which was more than John Stride got in the Polanski, and he shows discomfort, uncertainty, which helps.
Unlike in the Welles and Polanski versions, there’s no attempt to provide visual evidence that Malcolm is raising an army in England. Welles inserts a chunky English knight and throws him some secondhand dialogue, Polanski comes up with an entire army in training, even if it’s quite small (maybe a hundred men?). Coen just has the principles stand and talk about it in the abstract.
So far the coverage is quite boring, I have to say. You can hardly imagine Coen being bothered storyboarding this. We now get a closeup on Macduff, balancing Ross’s shot for the first time. Melling also now gets a CU. So we have three talking heads in front of a photograph of trees. In fairness, there are much more interesting scenes in the Coen film. It’s like he resents having to leave Macbeth’s moral decay behind in order to carry on the plot here.
Forced to come to the point, it’s Hassall who turns his back on us, pirouetting away in angst and bounding back to deliver the fatal thrust.
Hawkins as Macduff now follows the familiar pattern or retreating into a longshot, rear view, but not before a long lingering reaction in closeup. Which I think he does quite well. You see the tremors as he tries to maintain control. It’s a subtle, intelligent rendering of an emotion that would, in reality, be much uglier, more unbearable to see, but it’s not certain that Macbeth would benefit from hysteria at this point. And does it make sense to do iambic pentameters while hysterical? The underplaying seems like a smart choice.
A reverse angle eventually shows us Hawkins’ face again, with everyone lined up geometrically. Malcolm consoles Macduff with a hand on the shoulder, just as Stephan Chase had done for Terence Bayler in the Polanski. Hawkins delivers “HE has no children,” with real rage, and better still, Melling shrinks back from this in mild alarm and shame. As well he might.
Hawkins does the rest of this with a smart study in grief and rage, building nicely to the determination to seek revenge. He turns away again so we can go back to the figures in receding sequence, then turns back and strides forth into a fresh composition, over Ross’s shoulder.
This is very stand-and-deliver standard delivery. It’s just basic coverage. Nothing is really emphasised by creative or expressive choices, though elsewhere in the movie there is more of this. It does foreground the performances though, even if the people seem sort of nailed to the ground, occasionally moved around like chess pieces, which is maybe a downside of storyboarding everything and just shooting the boards.
There are better scenes in the Coen film — some are inspired. Maybe I should compare the second witches visits in each film? At any rate, I hope you’ve enjoyed this little sequence of posts. Something I might do again with different film adaptations of a different source.
shadowplay 