It reminds me of Odets’ great love/confrontation scenes, particularly the ones between Lorna Moon and Joe Bonaparte in Golden Boy. Only with swears.
These are two tough people. Hard-boiled. They are not only not used to love and softness, they fear it and attack it in themselves and in each other. Jeff Bridges and Michelle Pfeiffer play the hell out of this scene, but it sure helps to have such good dialogue. I wrote a bit about Fabulous Baker Boys (screenplay by Steve Kloves, who also directed) in my 5 for the day piece about Jeff Bridges, and wrote:
It’s not an ingratiating part, Jack Baker, or at least not the way Jeff Bridges plays it. We are struck by his beauty in that film, his smoldering sexiness, his stoic tough-guy appeal. But he doesn’t let us in. It’s not in his nature. His beauty is a fortress, and whatever is going on behind it, is deeply private. He has set up his life that way. He’s not playing hard to get. He is hard to get.
It is said about Bach’s “Goldberg Variations” that the music is so mathematically perfect that if you understand the structure, then the piece plays itself. I play the piano, but certainly not with a level of competence that could help me understand that concept, but I will take the experts’ word for it. When a structure is perfect, then the fault would be in you if you can’t pull it off. It’s also true that you must rise to meet the challenge of the material.
The same is true for great acting scenes. Of course you must have talent. That’s a given. But often, if the writing is poor, even talented actors can’t justify what they are doing. The writer has abandoned them, the writer has given them too much clunky exposition, the writer doesn’t understand how emotions work, how one thing leads to the next, how a conflict can escalate, drastically, with one cruel remark, how conversations can swerve off course dramatically: conversations are organic, things don’t happen in a proper order. People are messy, we don’t always express ourselves clearly. A good writer can put dialogue on the page that begs to be spoken, to be filled out and lived. That’s what people mean when they say something “leapt off the page”. It doesn’t happen often. You know it when you see it.
Give two talented actors a scene like the following, however, and it almost plays itself. That’s good writing.
SUSIE: I told Frank I’m quitting.
JACK: Congratulations.
SUSIE: As of now.
JACK: Well, if you need a recommendation you let me know.
SUSIE: Jesus, you’re cold you know that? God, you’re like a fucking razor blade.
JACK: Careful, you’re gonna have me thinking you’re going soft on me.
SUSIE: You don’t give a fuck, do you? About anything?
JACK: What do you want from me? You want me to tell you to stay? Is that what you’re looking for? You want me to get down on my knees and beg you to save the Baker Boys from doom? Forget it, sweetheart. We survived for 15 years before you strutted onto the scene. 15 years. Two seconds, and you’re bawling like a baby. You shouldn’t be wearing a dress, you should be wearing a diaper.
SUSIE: Jesus, you and Egghead are brothers, aren’t you.
JACK: Let me tell you something. Over the years, they’ve dropped like flies in every fucking hotel in this city. We’re still here. We’ve never held a day job in our lives. He’s an easy target, but Frank’s done fine.
SUSIE: Yeah, Frank’s done great. He’s got the wife, the kids, the little house in the suburbs. Meanwhile, his brother is sitting in a shitty apartment with a sick dog, Little Orphan Annie upstairs, and a chip on his shoulder as big as a Cadillac.
JACK: Listen to me, princess. We fucked twice. That’s it. Once the sweat dries, you still don’t know shit about me, got it?
SUSIE: I know one thing. While Frank Baker was home putting his kids to sleep last night, little brother Jack was out dusting off his dreams for a few minutes. I was there. I saw it in your face. You’re full of shit. You’re a fake. Every time you walk into some shitty daiquiri hut you’re selling yourself on the cheap. Hey, I know all about that. I’d find myself at the end of the night with some creep and tell myself it didn’t matter. And you kid yourself that you got this empty place inside where you can put it all. But you do it long enough and all you are is empty.
JACK: I didn’t know whores were so philosophical.
SUSIE: At least my brother’s not my pimp. You know, I had you pegged as a loser the first time I saw you but you’re worse. You’re a coward.
One of the most essential pieces of writing about writing in existence. I would give this to any young writer, or writer hopeful, to say, “Read this and learn.” It’s difficult to write about the topic of bad writing without sounding like a bitch, but Orwell didn’t worry about that so I will try not to, either. In 1984, Orwell made his thoughts about language clear, and carried them to their furthest extreme. “Newspeak” in 1984 limited the number of words one could use for any particular thing, or idea/concept. Orwell’s criticism (in 1984 and here in “Politics and the English Language”) is that if you limit the words available (either by political fiat, or through your own incompetence with language), then you limit thought. It doesn’t go the other way around. When someone has a limited vocabulary, they have limited thinking power as well. Bad writers often are bad thinkers. You can see this on some of the political blogs, certainly, where the writer has a lot of feelings and opinions, but must rely on strung-together worn-out cliches, because 1. they do not have the writing skill to put their thoughts into words in any way that is fresh or their own or 2. there really isn’t a lot of thinking going on in the first place. With some of the more partisan blogs, you know what they will say before they say it. You even know the WORDS they will choose. Orwell suggests that this is not just a matter of poor writing, but poor thought, lack of any thinking whatsoever. Political writing is obviously the best example, because most of it is either preaching to the choir already in agreement with the sentiments expressed, or a battering ram against an easily-demonized opponent. But examples abound elsewhere, and it’s gotten worse since Orwell’s day, with post-modern lit-crit style suffocating academic writing (and writing about the arts, in general).
As I was getting ready to write this post, I remembered a long-ago (as in 2005 long-ago) group-project on my site that seemed relevant to Orwell’s thoughts about the deterioration of language. In 2005, the artist Christo put up all of these orange fabric “gates” through Central Park. If you aren’t in New York, you can see what The Gates were all about here. I thought they were a lot of fun, and loved walking around under them, because the landscape (already beautiful) was totally transformed into something magical, whimsical. I loved it. But it seemed to cause a lot of random anger in people, and that was baffling to me. Not everyone will like everything, but why are you PISSED about The Gates? Why are you AFFRONTED by The Gates? I wrote about it on my site a bit, and that was back in the day when more people actually, you know, commented on blogs, as opposed to hanging out on their own Facebook pages all day (no judgment, things change). So we started talking about The Gates, in the comments section, and it started to become a group joke: how to describe The Gates in the most suffocatingly obscure and pretentious “art critic” language we could. Everyone contributed. People were contributing whole sentences, and some people just contributed words that should be included.
I decided to put all of the contributions together, written by about 30 different people, into one piece: a review of The Gates. Here is the end result, which I still find uproariously funny (and very accurate). It’s a parody of the total degradation of language we are all now accustomed to. I suppose it’s good to laugh at it!
Orwell, in his essay, uses five examples of current-day writing and annihilates the horrible writing, point by point. One is a political piece from a Socialist newspaper, one is a literary review, one is a letter to the editor, etc. Orwell knows that the deterioration of language is merely a reflection of the deterioration of actual thought.
It’s pretty scary. But if you’ve read 1984, you know how right-on he is and was, in so many respects.
Here’s just one excerpt of this magnificent essay.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a “party line.” Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestoes, White papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
“While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of aspirins always at one’s elbow. Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against. By this morning’s post I have received a pamphlet dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he “felt impelled” to write it. I open it at random, and here is almost the first sentence I see: “[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a radical transformation of Germany’s social and political structure in such a way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.” You see, he “feels impelled” to write — feels, presumably, that he has something new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain.
Sylvia Scarlett (1935, George Cukor) is such a weird movie. There. That is my critical assessment.
Sylvia Scarlett has a strange charm, a weird dark magic, and it’s one of those films I actually want to live in. I want to crawl into the celluloid and hang out with those people. I want to be in that caravan and put on a Pierrot costume, and drive around in the fresh salty air, having meals under the starry sky. Dressed up as a boy. Being laughed at by the locals. Watching my father lose his mind. Well, maybe not that part of it.
It stars Katharine Hepburn, in a pretty bad performance (she admitted to that as well) and Cary Grant, in a very good performance. This was before their famous pairing in Bringing Up Baby, and pre-The Awful Truth, which made Cary Grant a giant and important star. He had been around Hollywood for a bit, hired as a scratching-post for Mae West’s lady parts a couple of times, hired as an eye-candy boy-toy, and also a couple of pre-Code films where we start to see the Cary Grant persona emerge (Hot Saturday and a few others). As we know, Cary Grant was, actually, English, and did, actually, speak with a Cockney accent, but he had gotten rid of that and acquired the “Cary Grant Voice” which was all his own creation. Here, in Sylvia Scarlett, Cukor cast him as Jimmy Monkley, a Cockney con-man, complete with music hall songs, Cockney rhyming slang, and accent. A sort of amazing transformation occurred, and everyone realized it while it was happening. Cary Grant was not an unknown, but certainly nothing he had done up until that point had given us a glimpse that he was going to be the biggest movie star Hollywood had ever known. And you can’t tell in Sylvia Scarlett, either, although it was, in many ways, the most important role in Cary Grant’s resume (then or after). It was the breakthrough. It made The Awful Truth possible, and The Awful Truth made all else possible.
Cukor said, many years later:
“Sylvia Scarlett” was the first time Cary felt the ground under his feet as an actor. He suddenly seemed liberated.
And Grant himself said:
“Sylvia Scarlett” was my breakthrough. It permitted me to play a character I knew. Thanks to George Cukor. He let me play it the way I thought it should be played because he didn’t know who the character was.
Sylvia Scarlett is exhilarating, seen in that context of Grant’s career. It is to watch someone become actualized as an actor. It’s to watch someone discover his own power, and discover that being himself was all he had to do onscreen.
“All”. As though that’s an easy thing. Don’t listen to anyone who scoffs about a performance, “He was just playing himself.” That person does not understand acting on the most elementary level, and doesn’t understand what it is, or how it works. It’s amazing how many critics use it as a negative. You spend your life watching movies, writing about movies, and you haven’t done your homework to actually understand the nuts and bolts of acting? Balls! When someone says, “He was just playing himself”, he/she usually means it as an insult, a dismissal, when actually what they are copping to (without knowing it) is that the actor in question is able to reliably and consistently bring himself to the screen, and before you can do all of the other stuff (emotions, gestures, behavior, accents), you have to be able to do THAT. And many actors cannot do THAT at all.
This whole “he was just playing himself” nonsense is one of my pet peeves, and it’s dismayingly common. John Wayne gets painted with that brush all the time, and it’s a travesty. Seen beside Wayne’s power and authenticity as a persona (and that power/authenticity lasted him for 40 years in his career), putting on fake accents and limping and “transforming” pale in comparison. Those things are “skills”, and necessary skills to be sure, but to dismiss a great actor like Wayne because that wasn’t his bag is to completely misunderstand what acting IS. Cary Grant also gets the “he was just playing himself” criticism – you know, his hair was always the same in his films, etc., his voice was the same, blah blah.
I mean, to this day, people say, “Oh so-and-so’s the new Cary Grant.” Cary Grant was acting in 1930. We’re talking 70 years ago. Almost 80 years ago, and we’re still referring to people as the “new Cary Grant”. Well, guess what, there’s no such thing. If 80 years later, you’re still trying to find someone to be the next so-and-so, there is nobody. It’s only him.
That is the potential staying power of someone who can convincingly “play himself” onscreen.
Beautifully, Cary Grant himself answered the “just playing himself” criticism, in words insightful and true:
To play yourself — your true self — is the hardest thing in the world. Watch people at a party. They’re playing themselves … but nine out of ten times the image they adopt for themselves is the wrong one.
Amen, Archie.
However, it is important to remember that an actor cannot “play himself” in a vacuum. Like everything else in the whimsical and sometimes cruel career of acting, you really need the Role to set you free and highlight you. You need a role that will show people who you are, what you can do. It’s always interesting to see Cary Grant in those Mae West movies. There are certain signatures there: the stiff ramrod walk, the tall sleek gorgeousness, but any beautiful man could have played those roles. There’s one glimpse of the Movie Star in Waiting in She Done Him Wrong, with his sudden burst of primal naughtiness in the final moment when he leans in to kiss Mae West, growling, “You bad girl …” It’s sexy as hell.
None of those roles could have made Cary Grant the star he needed to be, however. They didn’t highlight him enough. They understood his beauty and that we would like to look at him (ogle him, really). But they didn’t understand Cary Grant’s essential weirdness, and it was that weirdness that would put him on the map. He’s gorgeous, but he’s hilarious. He’s elegant, but brilliant at pratfalls and physical comedy. He’s romantic and tender, but also cranky and vicious. He could do it all. Hollywood, naturally, loves beautiful people, it is their stock-in-trade, but often the Beauties are pigeon-holed, trapped in a certain kind of role. Today, the Beauties have to put on warts and fake noses to get attention for their acting (and more often than not win Oscars for their “bravery”). But for Cary Grant, what needed to happen was to find a director to set Cary Grant free, to not box him in to his beauty, but to treat his beauty as incidental, a fact of life, peripheral to his real strengths.
George Cukor, who knew how to film beauty better than most, was that man.
Hepburn said later:
That was really the beginning for Cary. George Cukor had seen him and thought he was wonderful. George told me, ‘We’re going to have this unknown fella, but he’s absolutely great.’ Cary was grateful to George for that.
Sylvia Scarlett, as I said, is a bizarre experience, with a dumb script, and atmosphere so thick and gorgeous you could cut it with a knife. Cary Grant is not the romantic lead here, although his presence and charisma is so strong that you yearn for him to take his rightful spot. He should be the one kissing Kate Hepburn, not the constantly-laughing yet rather wonderful Brian Aherne, with his curly pipe, plush bathrobe, and decadent German girlfriend.
But it’s not Cary Grant’s turn yet. He’s the third lead in Sylvia Scarlett, he can’t “get the girl”. He plays a boisterous amoral con-man, who behaves reprehensibly at times, but he’s so likable we forgive him and want Katharine Hepburn’s character (Sylvia/Sylvester) to hook up with him. Grant’s final moment in the film, staring out a train window into the dark country landscape, fills our hearts with fondness for him, for his sudden altruistic gesture. Oh, the big lug has a heart after all! Although Grant would make about 7 more films until The Awful Truth, the birth of the true leading man is here, in Jimmy Monkley. The film wants us to look elsewhere, wants us to consider Brian Aherne, wants us to care about things other than Jimmy Monkley, but Grant is so charismatic the film suffers when he is not onscreen. It’s thrilling.
Hepburn wrote in her autobiography:
He was the only reason to see Sylvia Scarlett. It was a terrible picture but he was wonderful in it. He was very secure in his work. And God, he was fun. He had a tremendous vitality. He was heavier and huskier then. I liked the way he looked when he had that chunky, slightly pudgy face.
A star is (nearly) born.
But the weirdness of Sylvia Scarlett must be stressed. It can’t decide what it is, or what it wants to be. It’s a star-crossed love story. It’s a crime movie. It’s a family drama. It’s a silly slapstick romp. Katharine Hepburn plays it like it is a Greek tragedy performed by an amateur theatre troupe (which, considering the way Sylvia Scarlett progresses, may not be the poor choice it appears on the face of it). Sometimes all of these elements are present in the same scene. Everyone’s acting style is off the map. Nobody appears to be in the same film, and yet that’s one of the reasons why it works: Everyone is insane here, everyone is “acting” like they are someone else, so of course everyone seems like a phony-baloney. There is no anchor in reality. If there is an anchor, it would be Grant’s character, who, despite his criminal mind, is the most consistent, the most recognizable as, you know, human.
I love that it was a weird little movie that would set Cary Grant free. The pressure was off. He could dance and cavort and sneer and bark out annoyance, and speak in his actual voice, and Cukor “let” him. Grant was not just a boy-toy. He knew who this character was, and knew exactly how to play it. A less confident director would have put the reins on Grant, asked him, “Why are you speaking in that silly voice?” Cukor let Grant go, and, along with Hepburn’s overly-stylized terrible (yet strangely effective) performance (how does THAT work?), and the strange Midsummer Night’s Dream quality to the plot-line, Grant helps make Sylvia Scarlett the Celebration of Weird that it is.
A father and daughter (Edmund Gwenn and Hepburn), who appear to live in the Dickensian era in the opening scene, she with long braids and long black dress, her crazy stylized theatrical voice, and he with the waistcoat and the melodrama, must flee Marseilles because the father has embezzled from his own company. They weep and moan and gnash their teeth in anguish at the shame and the horror. (You would be forgiven for turning the film off in the first 5 minutes, if you haven’t seen it already! But don’t do so. Hang in there!) For reasons not at all clear, although it has something to do with escaping the notice of the authorities, the daughter makes the bold decision to travel as a boy, chopping off one of her long braids in the mirror, shouting hysterically at top-decibel-level about how she will be there for her father. Keep it down, sister, the creditors may be listening.
Next, we see the two on the boat back to England. Sylvia has become Sylvester. The fog swirls thick around the boat, making everything seem ominous. The father is a not cut out to be a crook, he’s far too emotional: he gives himself away constantly by his panic, anxiety, and flustery-blustery responses to simple questions. Sylvia, meanwhile, retches over the side of the boat, and barges into the Ladies’ Room at one point, causing screams of alarm. Meanwhile, they are being watched, by a mysterious figure (Grant). He hovers on the outskirts of their panicky duo, and Sylvia is suspicious of him.
Her father, however, is a moron and befriends the stranger, even letting him in on a little secret: he has wrapped his torso with expensive lace to smuggle into England. Tee-hee, ha-ha, isn’t a delightful joke?? The father rocks back and forward howling with laughter at his own ingenuity, as Grant smokes his cigarette in a pensive cunning (gorgeous) way. The father’s indiscretion leads to an act of treachery on the part of this mysterious Cockney fellow, father and daughter/son are thrown into jail upon arriving in England. After their release, they hook up with the man who betrayed them (because, of course, that is the logical choice), and begin a career of petty crime, hoodwinking people in the park to give donations by pretending to be stranded French orphans. It all makes sense.
Maudie (Dennie Moore), a giggly maid with a screech-owl laugh, joins up with their threesome, and, in a moment of bravura and inspiration, they decide to form a traveling theatrical troupe and tour the provinces. It’s so random. What a high-maintenance lifestyle change for a bunch of crooks! It requires so much capital, so much planning. But that is what they do.
The next time we see the four of them, they sit outside their whimsical painted circus caravan at night, eating under the stars. The plot has thickened: Mr. Scarlett has fallen deeply in love with Maudie, and she appears to be going along with it, giggling and teasing him. Monkley barks cynically, “‘Ow’s married loife treatin’ ya?” Meanwhile, Maudie has also fallen in love with Sylvester, not knowing, of course, that it is a girl in drag. She trails along behind Hepburn, mooning away in love at the young boy washing dishes, and, in one overt scene, draws a mustache on Hepburn’s face and then attacks her, kissing her passionately.
Midsummer Night’s Dream may not be the best analogy here, although Shakespeare is clearly an influence on Sylvia Scarlett. As You Like It would be better: Rosalind dresses up as a boy to escape court life, and also because it is dangerous out there for a girl without a chaperone. Of course, once she puts on boy’s clothes, she starts to get into it, the power, the freedom. But her disguise is so convincing that women fall in love with her, causing much mayhem, and she is forced to become best buds/love counselor to the man she loves, who thinks he is confessing his feelings to a good guy friend, rather than a GIRL. Everyone always goes back to their proper gender at the end of Shakespeare’s comedies, but it is that gender confusion that sets everybody free in the first place.
To complicate matters sexily, Grant as Monkley of course assumes that he will be bunking with Sylvester, and unselfconsciously undresses in front of a shocked Hepburn. He says to her, “It’s cold tonoight. You’ll be a roight proper hot water bottle.”
Girls make out with other girls, boys use one another as hot water bottles, girls put on mustaches, boys flirt with each other (as Aherne flirts with Hepburn, dressed as a boy), and there are strange sexual undercurrents in every interaction. It’s pretty radical stuff for the time, and it’s not even subtext in Sylvia Scarlett: it’s the Text itself. Of course, things start to go south when actual, you know, feelings are involved. Sylvia falls for Michael (Brian Aherne), a sort of country lord (I guess) who invites the troupe over one night for a party, and although it is revealed that Michael hangs out with a pretty nasty group of bohemian people with cruel hearts, Sylvia goes ga-ga for this laughing jolly man. Later, when Hepburn shows up in a dress, revealing her womanliness, he roars with laughter saying, “I was WONDERING why I was talking to you in the way that I was!!”
Hm. Maybe you need to look at that, Mr. Michael with the Curly Flop of Hair and the Curly Pipe and Your Artist’s Easel and Nasty German Ladyfriend.
Hepburn rules the roost here, and is in nearly every scene. She had already won one Best Actress Oscar at this point, and been nominated for another. Sylvia Scarlett was the beginning of her slide in popularity, which would end with her going back to New York, purchasing the rights to Philadelphia Story, appearing on Broadway triumphantly in the role, and engineering a massive comeback in 1940. Putting the lovely Hepburn in drag for the majority of Sylvia Scarlett was a disastrous choice, at the time, and the film was not a success. The only person who got anything good out of it was Cary Grant, as mentioned before.
But removed from the box office concerns and trends of its current time, Sylvia Scarlett is a weird and uneven piece of work, defiant and unique, chaotic and ridiculous. It’s a lot of fun, and its spirit is unfettered. Mr. Sylvester, randomly, goes mad. It seems to come over him in a 24-hour period. He drinks to excess one night, falls off a barrel, makes a huge scene, and really never recovers his mental equilibrium again. “We must away from this place, my dear …” he pleads with his daughter by the caravan, “… my head is filled with dark imaginings.” WTF is going on with this guy? He is in love with Maudie, and yet it gives him no joy. He is consumed by jealousy, and Maudie plays him for a fool, as would be expected. Jimmy Monkley throws everyone under the bus, repeatedly, and yet we kind of love him, because he’s Cary Grant. Cukor understood atmosphere better than most, and there are scenes, particularly the nighttime scenes, where we see the “Pierrots” perform at a makeshift stage in the middle of the countryside, that reverberate with theatrical magic. It’s so … odd-looking, it seems to emanate from another time, a Time out of Time. Sylvia Scarlett does not take place in a recognizable world or era. There are motor-cars at one point, but the energy of the film is pre-modern, where magic can operate freely, where the ties that bind us socially are irrelevant, where a caravan can park in a field by the sea, and nobody thinks anything of it.
Hepburn acts up a storm. She has a drunk scene that is particularly awful, and yet considering the script (which is overblown to say the least), you can understand why she went the way she did. Brian Aherne can’t stop laughing throughout the entire picture, and it’s ridiculous, and you hate him for it, for his arrogance, but he’s also extremely fun: he doesn’t take anything too seriously. You better not if you’re going to live in a Sylvia Scarlett world. Cary Grant sneers and mugs and man-handles Hepburn, but his natural animal charm is so palpable that we ache to touch him, to hang out with him, to be in his presence. It’s a marvel, this performance.
Besides, seeing Cary Grant in a puffy Pierrot costume with bells down the front playing the piano and singing at the top of his lungs is one of the greatest movie joys I have ever known.
Sylvia Scarlett failed to find an audience in 1935. The Hepburn-Grant pairing here is now overshadowed by their far more successful outings together in Bringing Up Baby, Holiday (my favorite), and Philadelphia Story. But they’re great here together, too: the camera aches with the tension between them in their final scene together, there’s a tension in the space between them, a space that yearns to be filled. In the world of Sylvia Scarlett, Jimmy and Sylvia couldn’t make a go of it, although that is what we want for them, merely because they are so dynamite together onscreen. Jimmy, in his final moment, lets her go without (for once) ruining it for her. With all of the madcap romping about Love in Sylvia Scarlett, his selflessness in that moment is profound, and is representative of what the best of love really means and looks like. Cukor obviously knew what he had here, and knew that Grant was having a breakthrough in his acting. It’s not an accident that the film ends with Grant leaning back in his seat on the train, bursting out into a wild whoop of laughter that still, after seeing it so many times, is thrilling to behold.
He’s a movie star already. The world just needed to catch up. It wouldn’t take long.
‘Shooting an Elephant’, from 1936, is one of George Orwell’s most famous essays. It remains one of the best descriptions of how Empire operates, at its ugliest, and Orwell does this by staying wholly personal. It’s still hard to believe how well the essay works, as a political statement, as an indictment of the role of Empire, its cruelty and savagery. It’s not long. ‘Shooting an Elephant’ is the story of Orwell’s days as a police officer, stationed in Burma. One day, he hears that an elephant has gotten loose and has rampaged through the town, killing a man. He doesn’t know what to do. He has no training in such matters, but there is panic and fear, so he grabs his rifle and sets out to find the elephant. Orwell writes that he had no intention of shooting the elephant. Elephants are normally peaceful creatures, and when they go apeshit, it usually passes quickly. He was sure that once the elephant was returned to its owner, all would be fine, and everything would blow over. But the expectation of the crowd is such that they want to see an elephant die. They need that catharsis. So Orwell, young at the time, and fearful of looking foolish or inadequate, shoots the elephant. It is a terrible scene. Orwell assures us he is not squeamish about killing animals, but he felt that what he did to that elephant (who was, by that point, calmly eating a bush) was murder. In one of the most horrible lines in this horrible tragic piece, Orwell says, “I heard later that it took him half an hour to die.”
What all this has to do with Empire I leave to Orwell’s genius. He opens the essay, which operates as a memoir-type piece but, in point of fact, is a political statement, with a description of the anti-European feeling in Burma among the natives. Europeans were spit at. There was hostility in the air, and the English were losing control of the situation. Orwell absorbed that anxiety into his duties as a police officer, and it all sounds very schoolboy-ish, doing what you can to avoid being teased and bullied by your classmates. The British Empire was, famously, better than most (they built roads, schools, railways, and preserved the art of the region), but the hostility was toxic. Orwell felt the hostility of the Burmese, and, in turn, he hated them back.
And THIS, THIS, is Empire.
Orwell writes:
I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evil-spirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty.
What is so brilliant about this essay is that Orwell stays with his own experience, his feeling of uncertainty (“should I kill the elephant? I don’t think I should, but …”), and his sense that the natives who had made fun of him and jeered at him and spit at him during his tenure there, were racing after him, expecting a show. There was no way on earth, under that peer pressure, could young Orwell say, “Okay, the crisis is over – no need to shoot the elephant now – time to go home.”
He has to shoot the elephant multiple times before it even goes down, and even then, it won’t die. Orwell is forced to shoot directly into the elephant’s heart, and still, it lies there, gasping. The crowd jeers around it. Orwell ends the essay with:
I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.
The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the elephant – I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary – and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the slightest notice of the crowd’s approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth.
I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant – it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery – and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of “must” was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home.
But at that moment I glanced round at the crowd that had followed me. It was an immense crowd, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes-faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives,” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing – no, that was impossible. The crowd would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at.
Agnieszka (Krystyna Janda), a young woman in 1970s Krakow, wants to make her thesis film on a famous bricklayer and Communist hero named Birkut, whose rise and fall occurred in 1950s Poland. Birkut was celebrated in song and poetry, with statues erected for him. He traveled around the country, demonstrating his bricklaying technique. He has been long forgotten, and it is a strange thing: to be so forgotten in just 20 years time. Agnieszka argues with her advisor in the opening scene that she wants to make the film to “learn my father’s history”. Communism has a sketchy attitude towards its own past. History is to be managed from on high, one day you’re a hero, the next day your statue is taken down, and nobody is allowed to speak your name ever again. What happened to Birkut? Agnieszka is a driven young woman, passionate about her topic, and will not be dissuaded from moving forward.
Man of Marble, directed by Andrzej Wajda, came out in 1977, just three years before the eruption of the Solidarity movement in Gdansk. There is a sequel, Man of Iron, about Solidarity. Wazda is a political filmmaker, interested in the history of his country, the lies it tells itself, and the collective search for truth. (It’s well worth it to seek out his fascinating 1962 film Siberian Lady Macbeth.) Born in the 1920s, Wazda is still alive, and still making films that ask questions about Poland’s past, questions that in many cases people do not want to look at. Katyn (2007), about the massacre of thousands and thousands of Polish soldiers by the Soviets in 1940, was nominated for an Oscar, and according to IMDB Wazda is currently in post-production for a film called Wałęsa. Wazda has been making films since the 1950s, in the chilly first years of Soviet control. Wazda has seen a lot.
Birkut, the famous bricklayer, has been so erased from Poland’s official history that Agnieszka finds making her film tough-going. What happened to him? Is he still alive? There must be people around who still knew him. She seeks them all out, trailing her tiny film crew behind her. They visit the museum in Warsaw, where she has heard that his famous statue lies in storage. “Why do you want to see those? The director doesn’t like anyone to go in there …” says the staff member. Behind a locked gate are all of the statues, piled up amongst one another. The statue of Birkut, a homoerotic nude statue, fetishizing his physical beauty and tousled hair, lies on its back. Agnieszka straddles it, pointing her camera at the torso, the head, all while the staff member is kept distracted.
The fact that nobody wants to talk about Birkut, or even admit his existence, is just fuel to Agnieszka’s fire. There’s a story there. And she is going to tell it.
Man of Marble has a Citizen Kane-like structure, even down to the use of newsreel footage to put together the historical record, and an encounter with his now-drunken waste of a wife. Birkut, like Kane, is a mysterious figure, hidden behind myths and legends, a public hero with a tarnished reputation. Newsreels show us who we was in the public eye in the 1950s. Agnieszka sits in the television station and watches two old newsreels, celebrating the rise of Birkut. One is called “A City is Born”, about the building of the city of Nowa Huta, and the famous steel mill there, and the other is called “Building Our Happiness”, about Birkut’s glorious successes. Much of this footage has either never been shown or hasn’t been seen in years. (One of the documentaries lists “Andrzej Wajda” as a crew member, a wink to the audience.) We see the films in their entire: we see Birkut (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) as a hopeful gorgeous young man, one of the thousands who left the farmlands to come and join the building crews in Nowa Huta.
Rousing political music plays and a narrator tells us of the hope of a generation, symbolized in this one figure, Birkut. All of the footage shows Birkut laughing and joyful, even during the one famous day when he and his crew laid 30,000 bricks in one shift, a record: it made Birkut famous. He travels around Poland, greeted at the train station by bands, and throngs of people handing him bouquets. It is because of people like Birkut that Poland will become industrial (because you know how the Commies loved their factories! If they could have paved the entire world, they would have).
The newsreels were directed by a now-world-famous director named Jerzy Burski (Tadeusz Lomnicki). His films have helped “put Polish cinema on the map”, and he wins awards at festivals, etc. He’s come a long way from making propaganda films for the Politburo. Agnieszka tracks him down, and interviews him about Birkut. Burski calls Birkut “my greatest stunt”. The story of Birkut emerges in flashbacks, and, like Kane, we move backwards and forwards in time. The film itself becomes a piece of investigative journalism: we see the piece of the story told by one narrator (who may or not be unreliable), and then we learn a deeper part of the tale, or a more nuanced telling of it, when we hear someone else’s version. It’s a great technique, and makes Man of Marble compulsively interesting. We must find out what happened.
It emerges that the “30,000 bricks in one shift” was engineered by Burski as a publicity stunt, agreed to by the Communist Party, as propaganda for the working class and the feat of building Nowa Huta. We have seen the newsreel footage, now we get the backstage story in flashback. We see Birkut being groomed, like a movie star: he’s given a shave and a haircut, he’s fed like a prize steer. He and his bricklaying team start over to the pile of bricks, and they are made to do it again, Burski calling out a direction, “Walk more like workers!” It’s a deeply cynical scene. Birkut seems unaware of the level to which he is being used. The crowds watching the bricklaying stunt are exhausted by heat and deprivation (although in the newsreel we only saw them cheering and clapping), and the band, hired to play during the shift, are drunk and collapsed on the hillside and have to be exhorted to “keep playing”. Burski, looking back on it, is proud of how well the stunt went over. It helped make his name as a director.
There are multiple levels of artificiality in Man of Marble, which is a quest for truth, but also an examination of the power of film-making (for good or evil). First of all, we are watching Man of Marble, a film. That’s the top layer of artificiality. Then, we watch a newsreel within this film, the second layer. Then, beneath that, we watch the “making of” that newsreel, a third layer, and beneath all of that is the final layer of artifice: The “making of” flashback shows that the entire event being filmed was phony, a set-up from start to finish. So what is real? What are we to believe?
Agnieszka tracks down Birkut’s associates, one being a man named Michalak (Piotr Cieslak), who had been Birkut’s Communist Party minder during the time of Birkut’s rise. Michalak now runs a strip joint in Krakow, and is sleazy and corrupt, a far cry from the cleancut man we see in the flashbacks. He doesn’t want to talk to Agnieszka. In such a political culture, everyone has sins on their conscience. Communism required full participation of all citizens. But she gets him to tell his part of the story. Birkut, a celebrity, travels around Poland, trailed by Michalak. At one work-site, a tragic and suspicious event occurs: Birkut, head of his work crew, is handed a red-hot brick, and he is not wearing gloves. His hands are burned, his bricklaying career is over. Was it sabotage? Birkut is devastated, saying to his comrade Witek (Michal Tarkowski) afterwards, “Why would a worker do that to another worker?” Witek replies, “We’re cranking up the quotas. Not everybody likes that.” These comments get both of them in trouble.
In a creepy scene, Birkut and Witek are summoned to Communist headquarters in Krakow, and Witek vanishes from an office where there is only one means of egress. What the hell happened? Did Witek de-materialize? Was he thrown out a window? Birtuk demands an explanation. Where did he go? Birtuk, who still doesn’t quite understand the reality of Communism, who doesn’t understand what State-Control really means, begins a quest to find out what happened to his friend, an investigation that mirrors Agnieszka’s current-day quest. Birtuk, an insider, finds himself increasingly isolated. A giant poster of his head is removed from the main square. Birtuk’s out. He will never be mentioned publicly again.
Birkut goes mad. He drinks to excess. He hires a band of gypsies to follow him around, and shouts at them to “play the bricklayer’s waltz”. Furious and helpless, he throws a brick through the windows of Communist Party headquarters. His friends denounce him. He is sent to prison for three years and when he comes out, things have changed. He tries to reconcile with his wife, even after he learns that she publicly denounced him.
Man of Marble has a gritty energetic atmosphere, reminiscent of the paranoid political thrillers so popular in the 1970s, and a very unfortunate soundtrack, cheesy pop-rock accompaniment, supposed to anchor us in the modern world, but (ironically) dating it terribly. The acting is good, with Radziwilowicz as Birkut giving us a heartbreaking portrait of a man crushed by the State, the State he loved and trusted and believed in. Krystyna Janda, however, doesn’t encounter a simple moment that can’t be over-complicated by random behavior: she can’t stop herself from adding gestures, head-snaps, dramatic poses. She doesn’t just smoke. She acts the shit out of smoking. She can’t just sit in a chair. She has to twist herself up and around, looking around her on hyper-speed (“see me sitting?? See me listening?”). She can’t just walk into a room. She has to swoop in, hand on forehead, hip cocked to the side, so that we can “see” her sense of urgency. Her acting was distracting, to say the least, and it’s unfortunate, because she’s the lead, she’s our guide. I remember on the first day of rehearsal for a play I was cast in, the director said to us, “You don’t need to prove to me that I was right in casting you. You’re in. Relax.” In every moment, Janda is trying to prove herself, and it’s not necessary. You’re already cast. Relax.
But the story is the thing here. Wazda has made finer films, to be sure, but Man of Marble is a fascinating document of a country trying to put together the pieces of its own wiped-out recent past.
Considering the issues portrayed in Man of Marble, and considering its cynicism and honesty, it’s hard to believe that it was made at all. Prophetically, the penultimate scene in Man of Marble takes place outside the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk, where Solidarity started, helmed by Lech Wałęsa. There are the gates, the gates that would be world-famous not even a decade later.
The winds of change roar through Man of Marble. It is “the moment before”.
“I woshipped Kipling at 13, loathed him at 17, enjoyed him at 20, despised him at 25, and now again rather admire him.”
– George Orwell, 1936
I think a lot of people go through such a journey with Kipling. He is representative of very ugly realities, which cannot be denied. But his stories are also so fun. I still have fun reading Kipling. The fact that he was a shill for empire (in its dying days) makes him more interesting and worthy of study. You want to understand empire? Well, Kipling understood empire. To dismiss Kipling as “incorrect” in his attitudes is to cut yourself off from the front-row-seat perspective he provides. You learn a lot about life and politics from reading Kipling. He also wrote one of the greatest anti-war rhymes ever written:
“If any question why we died
Tell them, because our fathers lied.”
Orwell has a lot to say about Kipling, much of it critical. You can’t wish away Kipling’s racism, his imperialism. You can’t just dismiss it with “Well, you have to understand the context” or “The context back then was different.” Nope. Kipling doesn’t get a “pass.” But to dismiss him as unworthy of study is also foolish. The past is the past. It can’t be eradicated but ignoring it is to basically invite the same catastrophes to happen again. Orwell’s criticisms of Kipling are invaluable. He does not mince words when it comes to the “sham” of the middle-class Left. This tone of his is one of the reasons why the Left has always had an uneasy feeling that he was actually of the Reactionary Right. Yeah, because an avowed Socialist is always a right-winger. Look out for orthodoxy: it can make people idiots.
Much of Kipling’s phraseology is taken from the Bible, and no doubt in the second stanza he had in mind the text from Psalm CXXVII: ‘Except the lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’ It is not a text that makes much impression on the post-Hitler mind. No one, in our time, believes in any sanction greater than military power; no one believes that it is possible to overcome force except by greater force. There is no ‘Law’, there is only power. I am not saying that that is a true belief, merely that it is the belief which all modern men do actually hold. Those who pretend otherwise are either intellectual cowards, or power-worshippers under a thin disguise, or have simply not caught up with the age they are living in. Kipling’s outlook is prefascist. He still believes that pride comes before a fall and that the gods punish hubris. He does not foresee the tank, the bombing plane, the radio and the secret police, or their psychological results.
But in saying this, does not one unsay what I said above about Kipling’s jingoism and brutality? No, one is merely saying that the nineteenth-century imperialist outlook and the modern gangster outlook are two different things. Kipling belongs very definitely to the period 1885-1902. The Great War and its aftermath embittered him, but he shows little sign of having learned anything from any event later than the Boer War. He was the prophet of British Imperialism in its expansionist phase (even more than his poems, his solitary novel, The Light that Failed, gives you the atmosphere of that time) and also the unofficial historian of the British Army, the old mercenary army which began to change its shape in 1914. All his confidence, his bouncing vulgar vitality, sprang out of limitations which no Fascist or near-Fascist shares.
Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was political disappointment rather than literary vanity that account for this. Somehow history had not gone according to plan. After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before, and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this. The virtue had gone out of the classes he idealized, the young were hedonistic or disaffected, the desire to paint the map red had evaporated. He could not understand what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern. Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed ‘natives’, and then you establish ‘the Law’, which includes roads, railways and a court-house. He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it. It was the same motive, for example, that caused the Malayan jungles to be cleared for rubber estates, and which now causes those estates to be handed over intact to the Japanese. The modern totalitarians know what they are doing, and the nineteenth-century English did not know what they were doing. Both attitudes have their advantages, but Kipling was never able to move forward from one into the other. His outlook, allowing for the fact that after all he was an artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat who despises the ‘box-wallah’ and often lives a lifetime without realizing that the ‘box-wallah’ calls the tune.
But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which ‘enlightened’ people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling’s understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase, ‘making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep’. It is true that Kipling does not understand the economic aspect of the relationship between the highbrow and the blimp. He does not see that the map is painted red chiefly in order that the coolie may be exploited. Instead of the coolie he sees the Indian Civil Servant; but even on that plane his grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.
A little blind boy named Mohammad sits on a bench outside his school in Tehran. It is the beginning of summer vacation and parents from all over Iran have come to collect their children. We have seen the rapturous embraces, mothers and fathers scooping up their children, kissing them. Mohammad’s father is late. He has to take a bus in from very far away. So Mohammad sits alone and waits. The air is filled with sound. He is alive to every nuance. He hears a bird chirping, and he goes to investigate. He walks without a cane, his hands out in front of him, feeling his way with his feet, and with his ears. He gets down on his hands and knees, and slowly, gently, starts feeling through the fallen leaves. A cat approaches, meows, and Mohammad, alert, throws a rock in the general direction of the cat, scaring it off. Mohammad’s sensitive fingers comes across what he knew would find in the leaves: a fallen baby bird, chirping pitifully. Gently yet surely, he picks up the baby bird and puts it in his pocket. Mohammad is not done. He feels his way forward to the nearest tree, and begins to climb. It is not easy-going and I feared for the bird in his pocket. Mohammad’s feet struggle for a grip on the smooth trunk, and he reaches up and out with his hands, for the branches he cannot see. There is a chirping bird somewhere up there, a bird who knows that something disastrous has occurred. Mohammad reaches out, tentatively, feeling through the leaves, following the sound. Finally, his fingers bump up against the nest, with a chirping panicked mother-bird inside. A smile bursts out on Mohammad’s face, and he carefully takes the baby bird out of the pocket and places it back inside the nest.
This extraordinary sequence takes place in the first 10 minutes of The Color of Paradise, directed by Majid Majidi, and is a cliffhanger of action and emotion. It plays with no music, just the sounds of the natural world, the leaves, the wind, the birds, the meow, and it works on such a profound and emotional level (I had no idea how it would turn out: would the baby bird be crushed? would Mohammad fall from the tree? would he be able to find the nest?) that I was moved to tears. I cannot remember another time when I was moved to tears so early in a film, invested so entirely in the emotional journey of the character, without knowing a thing about him. So much information is conveyed in the first 10 minutes, and it is done so with a minimum of melodrama or exposition, and it carries us through the rest of the film. While we have no reason to believe at that time that Mohammad’s father being late is anything other than a momentary disappointment, there is an undercurrent in a conversation Mohammad has with his kindly teacher that is eloquent of deeper issues. So Mohammad sits alone, and for a moment he seemed to me to be a forlorn figure. He looked so small and fragile, and that’s not even taking into account his blindness. The bird-rescue moment removed any hint of pity for this highly capable and brave little boy, who knew what to do in such a situation, and could easily distinguish between normal bird-chirps and “help me” bird-chirps. He was fine. He was better than fine: he was an amazing little kid.
All of this with no dialogue. And so, for the rest of the film, where we see him being mistreated by his father, who is so ashamed by his son’s blindness he can’t deal with him at all, we are devastated.
Majid Majidi is one of my favorite current Iranian film-makers. A highly memorable movie-going experience was seeing a matinee of Majidi’s Oscar-nominated Children of Heaven at The Angelika with my friend Kate.
Children of Heaven is a movie about kids (as so many films from Iran are), and so the audience was packed with adults who had brought their children. The fact that the film has subtitles did not deter these parents at all, and good for them. Children of Heaven played like gangbusters for that audience, with little kids shouting in excitement during the race at the end and little kids bursting into laughter watching the little girl run along with giant sneakers emerging from beneath her veil. Kate and I were thrilled by the film, and thrilled by watching it with a bunch of school-age children who not only “got it”, but loved it, loudly! Majidi’s Children of Heaven has a lot of things to say about the class divide in Tehran. But it’s also about a smart little brother and sister who find themselves in a bind, and come up with an ingenious (and sometimes ridiculous) plan to keep their parents from finding out. Kate said to me when we left the theatre, “I suddenly felt sad in that last scene” (where the little boy puts his feet in the small fountain and stares down at the red fish swimming around). I asked her why she felt sad, because I had felt sad too. And she said, “Because does anyone realize how incredible this little boy is? How smart he is? I want someone to TELL him how great he is!”
Majidi is a master of filming childhood. (He also wrote the scripts for both Children of Heaven and The Color of Paradise: these are highly personal films, a vision of how he sees the world.) Majidi understands the seriousness of childhood, its isolations and fears. He also understands innocence, and how it operates. He cherishes that innocence, with little sentimentality. The brother and sister in The Children of Heaven are not idealized. They bicker, they hiss in annoyed whispers at each other, she refuses to go along with the plan at first, throwing him an eloquent look that says, “You want me to do WHAT? NO. WAY.” They feel like real little kids. And the children in The Color of Paradise are not idealized either. They behave like recognizable little kids, with tantrums, and giggling fits, and the sweet nonchalance of little citizens who do not yet realize that the world will be unfair.
Mohammad (Mohsen Ramezani) comes from the fertile mountainous area north of Tehran. His grandmother (Salameh Feyzi) has a farm up there, where she grows alfalfa and other things, living with her son, Mohammad’s father (Hossein Mahjoub), and Mohammad’s two adorable sisters. Mohammad’s mother is dead. He has been placed in the Tehran Institute for the Blind, and he boards there during the school year, but during the summer he has to go home. In the opening sequence of the film, we see the little blind boys in class, creating pages of Braille with a plastic device, the teacher dictating to them as she strolls the aisles. We see the boys in their dormitory: one kid is playing a Casio, a teacher hands out cookies, Mohammad looks through the gifts he has chosen to bring home to his family. It is a good atmosphere, one of learning and possibility.
When Mohammad’s father finally arrives to pick him up, he looks upon his son with shame and resentment. He meets with the teacher and the headmaster and sees if he could just leave Mohammad there for the summer. They both say, “Uhm, no. We aren’t that kind of school.” Mohammad and his dad ride on a bus up north and trek across fields and hills to get back to the village. His father sits in a morose pained silence. He doesn’t ask how school went, he is not interested in Mohammad’s thoughts on the school year. Mohammad is a burden to this man.
While Mohammad’s father withholds love from his son, Mohammad’s sisters and grandmother welcome him back with open arms. They stand quietly, while Mohammad feels across their faces (and, in one moment that killed me, after feeling his younger sister’s face, he says in awe, “You have grown up so much.”), and coo excitedly over the gifts he has brought. Granny is an elderly white-haired woman, stooped from working in the fields, but tears of happiness comes to her eyes when she looks upon Mohammad again. This is a good family. Too bad Mohammad’s father is too consumed with self-pity to join in the celebration.
In a later scene, Granny comes across a flooded path after a rainfall and notices a poor fish, flopping stranded in water that is too shallow. She stoops down, scoops up the fish, and moves it to a deeper area. We think back on Mohammad saving the stranded bird. We know now where that impulse to protect and do the right thing comes from. Mohammad gets upset at one point, when his sisters go off to the village school and he is not allowed to follow. He cries on the porch, and Granny comforts him, saying, “Please don’t cry. When you cry, I feel like crying.” Salameh Feyzi has no other acting credits to her name. It doesn’t matter. She brings with her the authority of an entire lifetime lived, etched into her face, her rough hands. It is a very intelligent and complex performance.
In a powerful moment, late in the film, Granny sits in the house, tears in her eyes. Her son ministers to her, and tries to defend his treatment of Mohammad. She looks at him, with pity, and says, “I’m not worried about him. I’m worried about you.” His expression is devastated. What a difficult loving thought. And what an indictment on his behavior with his own child.
Mohammad’s father has been courting a wealthy woman in the area. He rides his horse to her house, offering gifts to her family. He assures his future in-laws that his “daughters will serve” his new wife. Not a word is said of Mohammad, an ominous sign. There are hints that Mohammad’s father suffers from either PTSD or some kind of mental illness. While Mohammad sits in the forest, listening to all of the bird calls, smiling, wondering what the birds are talking about, Mohammad’s father is haunted by the caw-cawing of a bird that seems to blast from a loudspeaker. It sounds like the bird is laughing derisively.
Meanwhile, life goes on for Mohammad: he knows his father does not love him, but as long as he is supported and buoyed up (by either his nice teachers at the school in Tehran, or by his grandmother and siblings at home), life is very good. He talks with his grandmother about woodpeckers. He runs with his sisters through fields. He sits with his grandmother who is making dough, and he taps out Braille messages in the dough with his fingers. He listens to bird calls, and the rushing of the nearby river, and spells out the names of things in a whisper.
His sisters’ village school is still in session, and he begs to be allowed to tag along. No, is the answer. After Mohammad has a meltdown about it, Granny caves and walks him to the one-room schoolhouse. The teacher comes out to meet Mohammad, who carries with him his Braille book, and announces that he is up to speed on lessons, he knows his sums, he’s ready to join the class. One of my favorite scenes in the film (but there are so many) shows the class reading out loud from their story-book, and Mohammad, following along in the Braille version, corrects people’s verb tenses and word pronunciation. The teacher (and I recognized him immediately as the petty-tyrant gym teacher in Children of Heaven) stares down at Mohammad, and I thought he was annoyed at the interruptions, I thought he was about to scold Mohammad for his arrogance and presumption. But this simple rural man stops the class and asks Mohammad, “Are you reading?” Mohammad says Yes, and he begins to read out loud, his fingers scanning across the Braille figures. Fascinated, the teacher moves forward to get a closer look. This gives the rest of the class permission, and the little boys and girls creep forward to peek over Mohammad’s shoulder.
The teacher finally realizes he has lost control of the class, and barks, “Back to your seats! Now!” But he had been amazed, too. The film is full of funny human moments like that.
But events begin to fracture, the tension boiling over. As Mohammad’s father begins the plans for his upcoming wedding, he knows he must get rid of his son. He has heard of a blind carpenter in another village, who is self-sufficient, and has his own business. He wants to give Mohammad to this man, as an apprentice. Mohammad is not consulted. Granny is not consulted. While there is no shame in manual labor, there is no reason to believe that Mohammad couldn’t do anything he wanted to do in life. He can read, he is a good student, he is intelligent and curious. Being blind barely seems to impact him. In a heartwrenching scene, Mohammad’s father drags him off to the carpenter’s one day, Mohammad kicking and screaming. The carpenter lives in a shack in a forest, with a workshop filled with tools and wood. Mohammad is traumatized. The carpenter shows him around, shows him where he will be sleeping, takes him outside to show him the different kinds of wood. The carpenter says, “Men don’t cry.”
Mohsen Ramezani is about 10 years old. He has no other acting credits to his name, either. He is one of those beautifully unselfconscious and natural children who populate Iranian cinema. It does not feel like an acting performance. It feels like a real experience is unfolding before our eyes. His tears are not the tears of a precocious young actor, facile in manipulating his own emotions. His tears come from his guts, from a primal and personal place of pain. It’s unbelievable. Sitting there with the carpenter, Mohammad sobs:
Our teacher says that God loves the blind more because they can’t see. But I told him if it was so, He would not make us blind so that we can’t see Him. He answered “God is not visible. He is everywhere. You can feel Him. You see Him through your fingertips.” Now I reach out everywhere for God till the day my hands touch Him and tell Him everything, even all the secrets in my heart.
That is a tough monologue, full of sophisticated themes and images, things that obviously interest Majid Majidi. It wouldn’t surprise me if that monologue was the first thing Majidi wrote of the script: Here is what the film will be about. Ramezani plays it with such ease that I wept for him, I wept for him to see God through his fingers, I wept for the fact that his father was failing to recognize how beautiful and awesome his son was (again: I thought of my friend Kate’s words about the final scene in Children of Heaven), and I wanted to comfort him. His pain is raw.
The carpenter listens to Mohammad, and his only response is a quiet comment, “Your teacher is right.”
Majid Majidi is interested in the ways in which God operates in our lives. Obviously, the natural world is very important here: cold rushing water, woodpeckers, alfalfa plants, flower petals, are all God’s visible presence in our world. Mohammad seems to seek out that presence with more consciousness than others. He is precocious in that respect, while, at the same time, he is a normal little boy who wants to be loved, and fears abandonment. Mohammad Davudi was the cinematographer for The Color of Paradise, and in grand panoramic shots he catches the breathtaking beauty of the landscape, of the earth, really: steep hillsides covered in pine trees, fog obscuring the mountaintops, a field ablaze with purple, yellow, and red flowers. We see the world through Mohammad’s eyes. It is a tactile and visceral world. The “soundtrack” clamors with voices: birds of all kinds, the rustling of trees, the rushing roar of water and waves. The film is a sensuous pleasure to behold.
The camerawork is subtle and unobtrusive, and when the camera moves, it really means something. There are quite a few of what I found myself referring to as “God’s-eye-view” shots: the camera placed high above a character, and sometimes slowly panning down to ground level. There’s deep resonance in these camera moves: Mohammad sits alone on a wood pile, or in the woods waiting for his father to finish up with one of his manual labor jobs, and he sits alone in the frame, listening to the sounds. When the camera pans in on him, it feels as though it becomes that Invisible Presence he seeks out, the camera is the eye “seeing” him. Nobody is insignificant to God.
Hossein Mahjoub, as Mohammad’s father, often behaves in an unforgivable manner, but his performance is a great and accurate portrait of the poison of self-pity. Self-pity blinds this man, blinds him in a far more severe manner than his own actually-blind son. When things go wrong for him, he collapses. He does not have resilience. He does not have the ease with other people that he envies in his son. He knows that he has come up lacking, as a man, in his mother’s eyes. He is closed to the goodness of life. You know that even if he did marry this new woman, he’d probably find a way to mess it up, especially with the sin of how he abandoned his son on his conscience.
In this way, The Color of Paradise is a morality tale.
The final ten minutes were so harrowing, terrifying, and emotional that I feel like I barely breathed during that entire time. Something goes wrong, horribly, and while there is a possibility of emotional and spiritual redemption, it might come too late. Is the film a tragedy or a comedy? It has elements of both. Majidi feels no need to choose. Until the very last shot, I did not know which way it would go.
And, in retrospect, Majidi ends it the only way it could go. I needed to be mopped up off the floor as the credits began to roll.
Email from my friend Allison (it’s one of the best emails I have ever received):
So I was backstage at Letterman with a dog star of one of our shows who was making an appearance (Norman, the French herding dog who rides a bicycle, in case you’re wondering)… and as we are done with the segment and walking up the stairs from the greenroom to leave, I hear someone crooning from the landing above, “He ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog….” And I hear another male voice, say “No, No, Man! Start again…you’re off.” and I round the corner to behold…well, I’m not exactly sure what I was beholding, but whatever it was, I had to get a picture….so I said, “hey fellas, you mind I take a picture of y’all for a pal who loves Elvis.” They happily obliged:
, by George Orwell
, Orwell made his thoughts about language clear, and carried them to their furthest extreme. “Newspeak” in 1984 limited the number of words one could use for any particular thing, or idea/concept. Orwell’s criticism (in 1984 and here in “Politics and the English Language”) is that if you limit the words available (either by political fiat, or through your own incompetence with language), then you limit thought. It doesn’t go the other way around. When someone has a limited vocabulary, they have limited thinking power as well. Bad writers often are bad thinkers. You can see this on some of the political blogs, certainly, where the writer has a lot of feelings and opinions, but must rely on strung-together worn-out cliches, because 1. they do not have the writing skill to put their thoughts into words in any way that is fresh or their own or 2. there really isn’t a lot of thinking going on in the first place. With some of the more partisan blogs, you know what they will say before they say it. You even know the WORDS they will choose. Orwell suggests that this is not just a matter of poor writing, but poor thought, lack of any thinking whatsoever. Political writing is obviously the best example, because most of it is either preaching to the choir already in agreement with the sentiments expressed, or a battering ram against an easily-demonized opponent. But examples abound elsewhere, and it’s gotten worse since Orwell’s day, with post-modern lit-crit style suffocating academic writing (and writing about the arts, in general). 
