Beck #1: Inspector Kafka Calls

The first Martin Back novel, Roseanna, came out in 1965 (it’s set the previous year — the novels chart the changes in Swedish society over a decade). The film emerged in 1967. It’s pretty faithful to the story, but has notable differences.

ROSEANNA was directed by Hans Abramson, who also adapted the script. He came from TV, and would go back there just a few years later. A shame, he’s quite deft, stylistically. His movie begins, like CHINATOWN would later, with a series of b&w photographs in extreme close-up, and the images are shuffled before us. This time, though the images show a woman’s naked dead boy on a slab. She’s supposed to have been retrieved from a canal after several days, but of course she looks great. This is pretty near the beginning of the crime show trope of corpse porn, where nude cadavers are lovingly lingered over by the camera. The next example I can think of is Makavejev’s THE TRAGEDY OF/LOVE AFFAIR OF THE SWITCHBOARD OPERATOR, the same year.

Moviemakers have an unfortunate tendency to see the phrase “sex crime” and automatically translate it into “sexy crime.” On the page, Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall’s stories are defiantly anti-erotic, with their clinical descriptions of pubic hair, and they’re at pains to point out that their murdered girl did not have appetising breasts. Nothing is glamourised.

I was immediately cheered by the sight of this gloomy Gus, and felt that at any rate Abramson had somehow found a perfect Beck. Our hero constantly has a cold or seasonal illness, is dyspeptic, smokes and drinks coffee too much, doesn’t eat, has no sex life. He’s a walking example of the unhealthiness of the policeman’s lot in the western world.

Unfortunately, this guy, Tor Isedel (what mocking fate named this glum grey accountant type, essentially, Thor?) is playing Gunnar Ahlberg, the local cop who helps Beck. Beck himself is played by the saturnine and suave Keve Hjelm (Zetterling’s NIGHT GAMES). This is all wrong. But he’s a good actor, so it still kind of works. It’s just a shame to make the character sleek like that. Beck in a Van Dyke beard? No no no. And having the right actor for the part standing right beside him the whole time just reminds to. It’s like Bronagh Gallagher having a small part in MARY REILLY beside the woefully miscast Julia Roberts.

Hjelm does eventually get the sniffles, which was good to see. Well, what actor can resist the opportunity to blow his nose in the middle of someone else’s line? (Donald Pleasence, stand up, and put that hanky away. And no, the nasal inhaler is no better.)

In the novel, Roseanna McGraw, homicide-victim-to-be, comes from the American midwest. Abramson evidently wasn’t lured by the fleshpots of Nebraska so he relocates her to Puerto Rico and gets Svensk Filmindustri to pay for his vacation. Maybe he is a cinematic genius.

One person who definitely is is Sven Nykvist, who shot this, in an airy, light, slightly washed-out summer style. A dark story filmed in a bright manner. The novel tells you about the summer, but you don’t feel warmed. The action of the book covers months, and so Sjöwall and Wahlöö get to write passages like “7 January arrived and looked liked 7 January. The streets were full of grey, frozen people without money.”

Now, I’m watching ROSEANNA without subtitles, because the Swedish DVD has none. But chunks of it are in English because Beck has the assistance of American detective Elmer B. Kafka (!), who interviews Roseanna’s lover and former flatmate. The latter is played by Diane Varsi, the film’s most familiar face (to me — PEYTON PLACE, COMPULSION, BLOODY MAMA). The English language scenes are NOT GOOD. The laid-back, informal style of the Swedish dialogue (dunno what they’re saying but it sounds l-b. and i.) yields to hilariously stiff, robotic delivery much like the English-speakers in Japanese movies who I always enjoy. Varsi is actually fine but Michael Tolan as Kafka is one for the ages. Blame the language problem (lack of direction) because he had a long, perfectly successfully acting career and was no just some bozo off the street as the performance would suggest.

Needless to say I enjoyed greatly the ineptitude, which was all the more amusing since it would burst into the film intermittently, with everything else very professional and slick. I also enjoyed the film’s use o/f pseudodocumentary techniques grafted onto the police procedural form and looking like they were made for it: home movie footage, interviews with witnesses that play like movie interviews. Even the soft, reassuring purr of the camera motor, a near-constant presence on the soundtrack, brings a vérité vibe. Also, the most cups I’ve ever seen on a ceiling:

Someone once described my old acquaintance David McKenzie’s YOUNG ADAM as an “existential barge thriller” and at long last I’ve found another film that fits that sub-sub-genre. Oh, I guess Compton Bennett’s beautiful DAYBREAK (1948) is another.

Deciding to cast an angelic, baby-faced young actor as the killer is a nice touch — the book’s psycho seems a little harder. And it makes me think — around this time Hitchcock was planning his own sex killer pic, the never-made KALEIDOSCOPE, which would have borrowed much of its look and technique from European art cinema, notably Antonioni. Hitchcock remarked that it was hard to tackle this kind of story without falling into the convention of the police hiring a girl to act as bait, which is exactly what Beck does in this story. In the book, a chance traffic accident hinders the cops from getting to the scene: professionalism is continually undermined by the ridiculousness of happenstance in the Beck novels. That slightly conventional suspense device is jettisoned here, which is OK, but I feel they deal a blow to authenticity by having their decoy welcome the killer into her bed. Good luck getting a conviction against him after that.

ROSEANNA seems pretty fine, from what I could tell — it makes the shrewd decision to fragment time, as if were being shown a case file in cinematic form, full of stray bits. An early case of Resnais and Godard’s innovations getting pumped into more mainstream cinema. It allows Abramson to unfold a slow story without much looming jeopardy (detectives are rarely in danger in a true story) while keeping things lively and unpredictable. It’s just a shame they didn’t have the nerve to reproduce the book’s most radical elements, the uncharismatic hero and unglamorous victim. Maybe if they had, they’d have gotten a series out of it. That would have to wait…

Martin Beck will return in THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE — soon!

Cut the Cheese: or, Dino’s Mighty Wind

A week of posts inspired by my recent reading. Here’s an excellent book by Sam & Bobbie O’Steen — Cut to the Chase: Forty-Five Years of Editing America’s Favorite Movies.

Sam O’Steen cut THE GRADUATE and ROSEMARY’S BABY and became Mike Nichols and Roman Polanski’s go-to editor. His book, “as told to” his wife and edit-room assistant, is full of good creative advice, often encapsulated in handy mottos — “Movie first, scene second, moment third,” — and also full of terrific gossip and anecdotes, as O’Steen was frequently on-set and witnessed the activities of a lot of very strange, talented, obnoxious people…

Some of the best stories arise from one of the worst films O’Steen was involved with, HURRICANE — Dino De Laurentiis’ epic turkey remake of John Ford’s group jeopardy potboiler, which was already not very good, despite sharing a lot of credits with Ford’s next film, STAGECOACH. The rehash was planned by Polanski but dropped due to his legal difficulties — it’s tempting to say that Polanski dodged a bullet, but you can’t really say such things, can you?

Jan Troell landed in the hot seat, with Lorenzo Semple on script, Sven Nykvist shooting, Danilo Donati designing, and stars Mia Farrow, Timothy Bottoms, James Keach, Jason Robards, Trevor Howard, Max Von Sydow and non-star Dayton Ka’Ne. And with all that talent, it’s deadly dull to watch. David Wingrove disagrees with me, and suggested that the film was a promising one that had been butchered in the edit, as evidenced by awkward jumps in the story and huge sets that are barely used. But O’Steen’s account makes it clear that many scenes were never actually filmed, and the imposing but underused sets are a regular result of Donati’s work — the crew on FLASH GORDON also complained that Donati never read the script, just a breakdown of scenes, so he would spend his budget freely on whatever interested him, building vast interiors for scenes that might only play for moments in the film, and skimping on others so you might find yourself shooting twenty minutes of action in a broom closet.

Many of the problems O’Steen was vexed by didn’t strike me as terribly serious — Mia’s hair and makeup may not be flattering, but I’ve seen worse. O’Steen had to create passion between the leads where none existed — Farrow eschewed any on-set romance with her unknown co-star, instead bedding Troell, then Nykvist, then (it’s heavily implied) Bottoms, leaving a trail of broken hearts in her wake. And they were all stuck in Bora Bora for six months while this was going on. There’s a big swimming scene which isn’t sexy or romantic (because it’s not there in the script or performances) but sure looks nice. It’s bloody looong, though. I guess O’Steen had to lay it on thick to compensate for the chemical inertia.

The crew arrived at a specially built hotel… that was still being built.

Franco Rossi was leading a second unit shooting waves, but they all got drunk and left their film cans to get flooded on the rocks.

Mia was seen at dinner with her beautiful son Fletcher on her lap… and all her adopted kids sitting on the floor, ignored.

Jan Troell’s love for Mia resulted in him ignoring the scenery and the story and shooting endless close-ups of his adored star. In the final film, O’Steen must have used every camera move he could find, because he complains Troell wasn’t shooting any.

Bottoms urinated on De Laurentiis’ shoes in a fit of pique, then hastily wrote an apology, in fear for his life.

Troell was promised final cut… then paid off with $25,000 to stay out of the edit room.

When Mia was feeding poor Dayton lines for his close-ups, she wouldn’t bother looking at him. She could read lines and do crosswords at the same time. Well, he’s no Jon Hall.

“Four down, nine letters, a mighty wind.”

She was also reportedly heard to refer to him as “the animal.”

Dino: “All directors are stupid. Anybody who gets up so early every day to say ‘Good morning’ to all those sons-of-bitches has to be stupid.”

Symbolism! God caber-tosses a crucifix at Trevor Howard!

With all this, and the drink and drug consumption, the VD outbreak (“You’d be surprised who has it,” said the unit nurse) and the malfunctioning toilets, plus all the grade-A talent, it’s amazing how dull the film is. The actual hurricane is good, especially as it wipes out a lot of the characters who have been boring us for two hours, but the natives are used as colourful cannon fodder, as usual, so it’s also kind of offensive. When our young lovers are left alone on a lifeless, flattened atoll at the end, it’s questionable whether we’re meant to expect them to survive or not, though we don’t actually care one way or the other.

Worse than KING KONG. But the behind-the-scenes action might make a good movie.

The Godless

I sort-of disliked THE GODDESS, even though it’s maybe John Cromwell’s last major film — his last in Hollywood — and scripted by the great Paddy Chayefsky.

(Cromwell directed two more movies, a mediocre B-thriller in Hong Kong & the Philippines, THE SCAVENGERS, and a drama in Sweden, A MATTER OF MORALS starring the versatile Patrick O’Neal and shot by the mighty Sven Nykvist — I have been unable to locate a copy.)

THE GODDESS is a roman a clef about Marilyn Monroe and how she’s doomed by the loveless emptiness of her existence — made while Monroe was still alive and working.

Apparently this movie was hacked down considerably in post — some character called George Justin gets a credit as “supervisor.” For all the talent involved, nothing seems in sync. Kim Stanley is the first problem — we have to believe her, in some way, as a teenager when we first see her (Patty Duke gives a beautiful, melancholic performance as the child version of “Emily Ann Faulkner”). She then ages to 31, Stanley’s true age during filming. It’s a cruel observation, but at no point does she suggest the allure of a screen goddess or the freshness of a newcomer.

There are two ways to go wrong with casting a Monroe-like part: you could cast someone gorgeous who can’t act, or cast a strong actor who does not evoke glamour and youth and gorgeousness. Based on THE GODDESS, the second may actually be the more serious mistake, since it throws off all the other actors, removes the motivation for most of the story.

Not to pick on Stanley too long — there’s something more interestingly amiss. Chayefsy was a writer who, justifiably, fought to get his words on the screen as written. Here’s Stanley on her way to the casting couch —

As photographed by Arthur J. Ornitz, THE GODDESS is full of powerful, expressive wides. A real hallmark of Cromwell’s style, going back to the early thirties. We know exactly what is going to be suggested in these scene — the shot speaks so clearly of patriarchy, power, sleaze. It’s as explicit as fellatio. So the fact that the scene continues into closeups and dialogue is redundant, boring, depressing. Arguably it’s Cromwell’s fault for saying everything the scene needed to say in a single image. But the old cliché about a picture vs. a thousand words applies, doesn’t it?

Some strange line flubs from Stanley late in the show. This is when her character is supposed to be disintegrating, so somebody may have decided they would seem appropriate, excusable. But humans misspeaking sound different from actors, usually — they correct themselves, or fail to, in different ways. Only very rare actors can stumble on a line and make it seem like a natural mistake in casual speech. And Chayefsky’s stuff is so precise, and in a way non-naturalistic (all that monologuing!) it really doesn’t benefit from people tripping over their tongues.

And oh my God the trailing hand. THAT one hasn’t been seen since Barrymore’s day, and HE was spoofing it in TWENTIETH CENTURY.

Fiona has read more on Monroe than I have, and gave the film credit for acknowledging MM’s spiritual side, a real and overlooked aspect of her life. Chayefsky is the poet of emptiness, though, and religion in the end is another crutch, useless if it can’t forge a bond between the goddess and her distant mother (Monroe’s real mother, of course, suffered mental illness). Horrifyingly, Chayefsky diagnoses exactly where Monroe is going — more pictures, because it’s all she knows to do, with the likelihood of drink or pills or both getting her in the end. In an act not even as meaningful as suicide.