Poe-faced

The Pale Blue Eye. Harry Melling as Edgar Allen [sic] Poe in The Pale Blue Eye. Cr. Scott Garfield/Netflix © 2022

The history of Edgar Allan Poe on screen is patchy, when one looks at adaptations of his work — there are lots of really good films, though it’s questionable how many of even the best ones really understand or capture the essence of the writer’s work.

The history of Poe on screen as a CHARACTER is much, much patchier still. I haven’t seen THE LOVES OF EDGAR ALLAN POE. Shepperd Strudwick, anyone? I do suspect that if Poe had had anyone like Linda Darnell in his life, literary history might be very different. He would have done less writing, let’s say.

Asides from the biopic, whose strictures Poe seems disinclined to conform to, there are those films that attempt to fold the author into his own work, or works inspired by it. This gets started early on with D.W. Griffith’s EDGAR ALLAN POE of 1909, which is mostly a garbled and romanticised version of aspects of Poe’s life, but shows him inspired to write The Raven by the arrival of an actual raven which sits upon a bust of Pallas and you know the rest. Poe decides to become a costumed crime-fighter who dresses up as a black, flying animal. (He doesn’t. But he should.)

Charles Brabin’s 1915 THE RAVEN juggles most of the same elements, but takes longer to do it.

1951’s THE MAN WITH A CLOAK, based on a story by locked-room obsessive John Dickson Carr, has Joseph Cotten as Poe, unnamed until the end, who turns up out of the blue to solve a murder. This goes way beyond the Griffith idea of speculating how life must have informed Poe’s work, and makes a stab out of creating a faux-Poe story that Poe can inhabit, making him the prototype of his own detective hero, C. Auguste Dupin. An amusing conceit, but the film, directed flatly by TV man Fletcher Markle (great name, though), is mostly a snooze, despite the presence of Cotten, Stanwyck, and the walking fontanelle Louis Calhern.

Poe had encouraged the idea that he had a detective’s mind, basing The Mystery of Marie Roget around a real case which he claimed to have solved, but when it turned out he was wrong, he rewrote the story. But most authors and screenwriters enlisting Poe as detective hero have preferred to see him as an unerring truth-magnet. Poe was also an alcoholic whose metabolism caused him to get very drunk very fast, but Carr (all of whose heroes are spectacularly skilled boozers) makes him a man who can soak up impossible quantities of liquor without any side-effects beyond melancholia and loquacity.

CASTLE OF BLOOD/DANZA MACABRA (1964) and its remake WEB OF THE SPIDER (1971) airdrop Poe into a haunted house mystery, which proves far more conducive terrain. Though the Dupin stories are exercises in logic, creating order out of a chaotic and sometimes terrifying world (especially Murders in the Rue Morgue), Poe’s stories are more usually MAD, with insanity or the paranormal gnawing at the very foundations of their reality.

I haven’t seen THE RAVEN from 2012, directed by James V FOR VENDETTA McTeigue, with John Cusack as Poe, joining forces with a Baltimore detective (Luke Evans) to stop a serial copycat killer who bases his murders on those in the author’s works. The idea is an amusing one, and one can see why one might need to pair the writer slash amateur sleuth with a professional — access to the official investigation, entertainingly contrasting modus operandi, conflict, etc.

But I HAVE seen THE PALE BLUE EYE, a new Netflix movie from director Scott Cooper (BLACK MASS, HOSTILES) which does almost exactly the same thing, only here Poe is a young cadet at West Point and the pro detective is a mature ex-cop employed by the Academy to investigate the death and mutilation of another cadet.

I hadn’t done my homework — if I’d know this was the BLACK MASS guy I doubt I’d have watched it. The films have a lot in common: the tone and pace are depressingly consistent., not much light or shade; the cinematography is moody; the direction is flat; Cooper does nice, atmospheric establishing shots with a slowly gliding camera, but then everything is just static headshots. At one point, a man who has been holding a rock, threatening to bash another man’s head in, drops the rock, and we only know it’s happened because of the sound effect. His hand is out of shot while the camera films his face. We can all, I’m sure, immediately see the dramatic potential of the suddenly empty hand in close-up, or the rock falling to the snowy ground, or even falling THROUGH a shot that’s focused on the fallen victim. If you’re just shooting coverage, not thinking dramatically-pictorially, the irony is you just cover faces and miss what else might be important.

The director, in other words, has not learned to SEE.

Christian Bayle as Augustus Landor, detective, is as dour as you might expect, but does bring some strangeness to his performance — based on this being a man from the nineteenth century, who needn’t be exactly like us. Harry Melling is a magnificent Poe, I think the first man to play the part who seems as neurasthenic, obsessional and weird as one imagines the author of The Fall of the House of Usher must have been (and not just because it’s a weird story, but because we have a lot biographical info). Again, though, this version of Poe has an astonishing head for drink, the very opposite of the real guy.

Cooper has filled the supporting roles with colourful thesps like Simon McBurney, Timothy Spall and Toby Jones, but they’re all playing stiff-necked military men so, although Spall pulls some extraordinary faces, their flamboyance is a touch constrained. Gillian Anderson has looked at what the main boys are doing and decided that she’s going to have some fun too.

Everything takes quite a long time to happen, and yet none of the characters has quite enough time to make themselves felt. Melling’s Poe has to fall in love with Anderson and Jones’ daughter, Lucy Boynton, but their few scenes together don’t make us feel it. He asks her out and there’s a fairly long negotiation about this which ends with the date and time of their next meeting undecided. It’s to be in a cemetery. Somehow, we next see them in a cemetery, but never learn which of them stood around in the snow for three days waiting for the other to show up (but I’d guess it was Poe). Then she collapses in a fit — that seems to be what confirms Poe’s love for her, which is somewhat credible for a guy like that, but the audience is left out in the cold — we don’t get to feel with or for him, and we don’t know the romance has blossomed until it’s suddenly life-or-death.

The trouble with literary detective stories is they’re usually not well enough written. And then they have to fit their silly stories into the author’s actual bio. At the climax of this one, Poe’s life is in danger, and I wondered if it shouldn’t have been Landor’s. Because a good part of the audience knows Poe didn’t die at West Point. But maybe that doesn’t matter, there are lots of stories where we know the hero isn’t going to die but we still feel suspense in life-or-death crises.

As whodunnits go, it’s not quite a fair play mystery. It breaks more than one of Ronald Knox’s 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction, and not one of the silly or dated ones like “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable” or “No Chinaman must figure in the story.” Also, Knox forgets to include an eleventh commandment, which to me should go something like, “The reader/audience must be provided with the clues that could allow them to discern the killer’s means, motive and opportunity.” In other words, you can create a mystery where the crime seems to be impossible, but then you need to plant the clues that could allow the reader/viewer to guess the solution, but you hide them in plain sight (like Poe’s purloined letter) in hopes that nobody will figure it out. And you could write a mystery in which nobody seems to have any motive to do the victim in, but then you have to plant that motive, positioning it in such a way that the reader won’t spot it. Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d is a particularly nasty example of that.

Well, Cooper doesn’t do that in THE PALE BLUE EYE. There’s a key motive that hasn’t been stated or even implied. Some clues have been planted which eventually RELATE to that motive, but nobody could guess the motive, even if you cut away everything else and told them to assemble the puzzle from just this one minute of footage. He hasn’t done the mystery writer’s job.

Decent resemblance but couldn’t they part his hair on the correct side?

Also, the title doesn’t relate to anything in the film. OK, it’s a line from Poe. There’s a discussion about how Bayle’s Landor once got a confession out of someone by just looking at them. “The guilty party will interrogate himself.” But that never happens. Bayle gets information by asking questions and sometimes by asking questions while berating the subject with a knobbly stick or shillelagh. The Paddington hard stare is never attempted.

I can’t recommend this film. Charlotte Gainsbourg and Robert Duvall are in it, but they have nothing to do, they just deliver exposition. That’s kind of what everybody does, though some find funny ways to do it. When Michael Powell saw a film he disliked, he would storm out, saying of the director, “He didn’t teach me anything!” That’s how I feel about Cooper based on the two films I’ve now seen. He’s not bad enough to be interesting and he’s not good enough to be interesting. His work saps my enthusiasm.

The Origin of Speeches

A filmmaker donated a big box of DVDs to the Art College so I took a few home. One was CREATION, directed by Jon Amiel, produced by Jeremy Thomas, telling the story of Charles Darwin’s struggle to write his magnum opus in the face of his deeply religious wife’s opposition, and while reeling from the death of his eldest child. I thought it might be terribly middlebrow, and in part it is, but it’s also well worth a look. I knew Fiona would be interested because it has Bambidirk Counterbath Benedict Cumberbatch and Toby Jones in it, both of whom rick up in the same carriage at one point, and Jeremy Northam for good measure. We don’t get enough Northam these days.

Chas. D. is played by Paul Bettany, in a succession of unattractive wigs (the very first shot of him displays an unwise amount of cheesecloth), who’s very good in a tough role. The character is anguished more or less throughout — Darwin was plagued by horrible, possibly psychosomatic discomforts during the writing of his famous book , and Bettany has to display suffering in every scene without getting monotonous. He just about succeeds. His real-life wife, Jennifer Connolly, plays Mrs. D, with impressive toughness, never apologising for the way the character is or trying to win excessive favour from the audience.

Jeremy Thomas is attracted to classy literary adaptations and subjects that can easily seem middle-brow and uncinematic, but when he’s working with a Bertolucci or a Cronenberg the risk is obviated. Jon Amiel isn’t in that league — he benefited from working with the inherently idiosyncratic Dennis Potter in TV, bringing a restless, kinetic pizzazz to the proceedings. Here, adapting a novel himself along with John Collee, his style seems merely commercial, over-eager to keep things moving and be big and fancy. Slow motion shots, hand-held, steadicam, crane shots, jump cuts — everything is thrown at it, and not everything sticks. Fiona complimented the film for the moments which seem simplest — in fact, there’s a lot of craft and cunning going on even in these moments, but the quieter tone WORKS in a way that the more hectic and pushy style doesn’t. You can’t tart up a middlebrow think piece and pass it off as slam-bang entertainment.

The one really disappointing element of the disc was the extras, which all sounded really interesting but were horribly made — the thing called Debating Darwin wasn’t a debate at all, but a series of statements, filmed separately, by a pro-evolution guy, another pr-evolution guy who was also a Christian, and a creationist. Giving that guy a platform and pretending that he was a proper scientist on an equal footing with Lewis Wolpert was a travesty. Like inviting a holocaust denier to take place in a piece called Debating Hitler. People with these views exist, regrettably, and it’s perfectly fine to acknowledge this, but putting them on an equal footing with actual intellects who actually respect the facts is irresponsible in the extreme. Deduct ten points.

Fiona thinks further points should be deducted for the fact that the baby orangutan who appears costumed in Victorian garb as Jenny the Ape receives no screen credit, despite being prominently featured even unto the movie poster and DVD cover.

Video Nasty

V/H/S is a faux-found-footage anthology film featuring the work of a number of directors associated with modern horror, such as Ti West (HOUSE OF THE DEVIL) and one who has no such associations, Joe Swanberg, who stars in one episode and directs another.

One thing than has to be said is that any anthology will benefit if the writers read each others’ scripts. Two of the shorts feature scenes where a guy trips and falls downstairs while being chased by an undead ghoul, which then slowly descends upon him. Worse, nearly all the shorts either hinge upon or make reference to the idea of shooting nude footage of women — both the framing structure and the first episode feature scenarios where loutish males try to film their sexual encounters without the knowledge of their partners. The repetitiveness is uninspiring.

In fact, it strikes me as harmful that all the army of directors and writers are male. “Are so many of the characters in these things obnoxious and dumb because the filmmakers are obnoxious and dumb?” asked one critic friend. Maybe not, but it seems to me a Bad Thing to have a horror movie where we’re rooting for the characters to die as swiftly and horribly as possible.

There’s a moderately amusing spoof slasher here, which is the first faint ray of light after ugly and uninspired early episodes, but then Joe Swanberg’s episode as director, scripted by Simon Barrett, turns out to be the best story and the scariest film — twisty and twisted, suspenseful, and with a unique Skype-inflected take on the found footage gimmick. I never thought I’d like Swanberg’s work, but this was funny and gross and creepy. Then the last episode, directed by Radio Silence (a bunch of guys who work together under that collective name) is an effects-laden thrill-ride with a lot of neat visuals and, for once, a group of male characters who aren’t total dickwads.

Horror of an altogether more subtle timbre was on display in BERBERIAN SOUND STUDIO, the new film from Peter Strickland, who made the acclaimed KATALINA VARGA, which played Edinburgh a couple of years back. This one stars the renowned actor/pouch Toby Jones as a sound mixer at work on a horror movie in Italy in the seventies, whose grasp of reality seems to disintegrate under the oppression of his nasty employers. Very atmospherically shot, with beautiful sound design and a trippy way of messing with reality that recalls THE TENANT, this ultimately feels a touch overlong and repetitive, and once the film’s tenuous hold on reality has been relinquished, there’s nowhere left for it to go in narrative terms. But the analysis of the dynamics of workplace bullying is dead-on, and often funny. There’s also a terrific fake title sequence (for a SUSPIRIAesque thriller called, wonderfully, THE EQUESTRIAN VORTEX) which seems to cram in a decade’s worth of spaghetti horror tropes without tumbling into broad pastiche. Despite the total lack of onscreen violence, the serious giallo fans in attendance — and there were many — seemed well satisfied.

Katalin Varga [DVD] (2009)