Bowen’s Cinematic

The political picture can be difficult, primarily because it appears to be one of the genres (films dealing with mental breakdown being another) that’s most encouraging of a certain suffocating self-righteousness. Life, humor, even sex mostly, are choked out of these pictures in a desire to be taken seriously as (I assume) works of criticism or essays of change (Oscar traps). Charlie Wilson’s War, the recent Mike Nichols release, is such a film. War began promisingly as a boozy, one thing after another chronicle of a guy in Congress that kinda-sorta grows a conscience by accident, only to squander its strengths and originality (a we scratch each other’s backs to keep the machine rolling by way of compromise by way of humor born of despair that fleetingly recalls a contemporary screwball comedy by way of Altman on a lesser day) in favor of the usual eat your vegetables civics beats. Charlie Wilson’s War had a more honest than usual ending, I’ll give it that, but I had checked out long before, finding the self-congratulation too stifling.

Happily, the problems many usually note of Otto Preminger’s movies (cold impersonality being a primary), run straight into the problems of the political picture in Advise & Consent, and cancel one other out in the process. The film concerns the approval of the President’s (Franchot Tone) nomination for Secretary of State, Robert Leffingwell (Henry Fonda), by the Senate. Advise & Consent, unmistakably a Preminger film, opens with the most essential, definitively first, cog in the plot-the announcement of the nomination in the paper (an example of the picture’s admitted naiveté, primarily springing from a just adequate screenplay), which the President has made to the Senate’s excitement, dismay and shock. The conventional candidates were ignored (of course) in favor of Leffingwell, whom the President feels is essential to maintaining his legacy. The Senate Majority Leader (Walter Pidgeon) immediately kicks into spin drive on the President’s behalf, contacting a variety of (again, of course) eccentric characters in the Capitol in an effort to put the President’s nomination through with as little question and conflict as possible (the underrated Aaron Sorkin-Rob Reiner film, The American President, is a comedic gloss on an intentionally similar premise).

The President and Senate Majority Leader’s primary hurdle is South Carolina Senator Seabright Cooley, played by Charles Laughton in one of his grand, willfully bizarre scenery chewing roles. Laughton’s walk, intimidating in its purposefully, ironically visible vulnerability (an old fat man’s come on), has more personality and wit than many actors’ full bodied orations. Laughton’s full bodied orations then, which have no bearing on any kind of speech existing on planet Earth, are feats of hyperbolic poetry (also catch Witness for the Prosecution, if you haven’t yet) that puncture that ridiculous seriousness that pervades in many political pictures (The Contender, being another, recent, laughable example). Laughton accomplishes something notable here: he takes, as he’s normally apt to, his character so far into the theatrical stratosphere that he comes to resemble something more true (at least in our movie fed imaginations) than most movie politicians. Laughton signifies the idea of inner government as ultimate performance art, a perpetual game of evening the stakes, of give and take, tit for tat. (It stuns me that Preminger didn’t give Laughton a scene of eating rare steak.)

Preminger uses most of the other performers just as adroitly, with Gene Tierney, returning to Preminger after all those years, registering in a bit as a socialite Pidgeon is seeing in secret; blessing the film, briefly, with the pathos of her real story-a still beautiful woman, struggling to hold herself together amidst a society of jackals. Burgess Meredith brings the picture to a temporary standstill as a man of mental doubt who comes to accuse Leffingwell of Communist leanings; his frailty and torment seemingly borrowed from another picture, which brings the picture at hand to frightening, vivid life (he gives us a sense of the cost of all this nonsense without resorting to the pedantic). Tone, as the President, feels miscast at the beginning (we wonder how he could be elected) but blossoms, as Advise & Consent continues, into a memorable, convincing, portrait of casual, insidious, slight of hand entitlement.

Advise & Consent’s tone, and manipulation of plot, particularly pertaining to the Henry Fonda character, are what strike me as most interesting and subversive though. The opening third primes us for the usual, morally rigid story that subjects our spiritually untouchable character to a series of insults and doubt before allowing him to conquer all and rise to the occasion in order to bless us all with his sense of right and indignation. The picture introduces Fonda to us in a scene with his little son, drinking milk of all American things, never a good sign. Fonda’s scenes primarily consist of him defending himself to the increasingly self-amused Laughton character, again no surprise. Then the film drops Fonda almost entirely, after revealing him to be a bit more fallible than we expect. Contracting Fonda’s guilt, jarringly (like a disease), is an up to this point secondary character, Sen. Brigham Anderson (Don Murray), who discovers Fonda’s indiscretion via a manipulation on the part of Laughton. At this point, Advise & Consent, written off by Pauline Kael as mindless melodrama, comes to unexpected, feverish, lurid life.

The film, once again characteristic of Preminger, consciously concerns ahead of its time subject matter; namely, homosexuality, and the never-ending compromise that is service in the big government. To write off Preminger’s treatment of homosexuality, and its subsequent influence on the Leffingwell case, as merely melodramatic and puritanical (both true) is to miss part of the point: the Puritanism, whether a limitation of Preminger’s or an intentional manipulation of the filmmaker, informs Advise & Consent in a way that undeniably increases its fascination and tension. The shift in focus of characters is interesting enough for a mainstream American film of the early 1960s, but the shift in tone strikes me as amazing.

Brigham Anderson, facing professional and personal collapse, loses his wits, which in turn transforms much of the last third of Advise & Consent into a near horror picture. Yes, a gay club is portrayed as a nest of forbidden evil, but this is also the culmination of Anderson’s panic and is complimented by an earlier scene with Anderson and his wife at their home, and their child’s almost alien voice and she asks to play with dad. Is Preminger overplaying his hand? Or exhibiting considerably more empathetic filmmaking than is traditionally acknowledged in his work? I think it’s both, and that’s an unsettling accomplishment, with the picture’s brilliant, open-ended anti-climax serving as the cherry on top: revealing the entire story to be just one of many daily controversies, with the next already ready at the wings.

Preminger’s curious, remote approach dries the subtext free dialogue of the script. The superb, full compositions lend the picture a subtly and implication of inner life that is absent on the page. Preminger’s aloof outlook (a criticism that’s overstated but undeniably present), when wedded to the right story, perfectly compliments the barely repressed hysteria and perversion of the subject matter. Angel Face is a wonderful example, and so is Advise & Consent, rightfully regarded as one of Preminger’s strongest films.

Elevator to the Gallows has a menacing central image that the rest of the picture struggles to equal. Julien (Maurice Ronet), a man of dubious reputation, murders his boss, flees, forgets something, and gets himself stuck in the damn titular elevator trying to go back for it. Julien waits and waits, trapped, a bug in a particularly precarious jar. This sight, of a killer cramped and crowded by his own guilt, at the mercy of a larger justice disguised as perverse bad luck, is unforgettable. Unfortunately, Louis Malle, in his directorial debut, isn’t satisfied with this simple, ingenious scenario. The story splinters into another scenario, and then yet another, these latter plot strands only distracting from the sensuality and power of the original story.

Elevator to the Gallows is an example of two otherwise perfectly suitable thriller ideas being forced into competition with one another and nearly canceling each other out in the process. As Julien finds himself imprisoned in the faulty elevator, a callow young couple decides on impulse to steal his car and, well, they haven’t quite gotten that far yet. They eventually end up inadvertently framing Julien for a murder he had nothing to do with. The police close in on Julien for this second murder, all as Florence (Jeanne Moreau), the wife of Julien’s former employer as well as (of course) Julien’s lover, searches the streets for Julien, thinking he’s discarded her and their plan, running out with another woman.

Elevator isn’t as frantic as all the above would lead you to believe, Malle allows the picture a deliberate, dreamy, existential pace that distracts us from the sheer busy-ness (and ludicrousness) of what we’re watching. And we should be careful with the term ludicrous, as to apply logic to a picture that’s clearly striving for (and obtaining) the poetic is to miss the point. The sensuality of the images and the one thing after another tumbling dominoes nature of the scenario aren’t totally of a piece though. We’ve seen many noirs or crime pictures in which events shatter in many different directions, but the best of those pictures (let’s recruit Rififi as Exhibit A, as it’s in front of me as I write this) achieve a true willy-nilly chaos. We feel swept up with the characters as their existences slip out from underneath them. Elevator to the Gallows is a slower, narrower picture, and the excess of events is an intrusion. The frequent cross-cutting to updates of the other wronged parties breaks the “all alone as the world folds in” spell. (Let’s recruit, as Exhibit B, a picture that nurtures this sort of wounded mood, carefully, without a bunch of extraneous hugger-mugger, Le Samourai).

I wouldn’t dare advise you skip the picture though. I go back to the haunting image of Julien in the elevator, awaiting judgment, a regret or common decency still beyond him (he would appear to think in more animal, instinctual terms) smoking cigarettes to pass the time. There’s also the image of the beautiful Moreau in close-up, whispering words of love and concern to her doomed partner in a pay-phone, moments before the murder is to go down. There’s the near Expressionism of the interrogation room sequences toward the end: the room bathed in darkness, only the speaking parties allowed the slightest of vision by a sliver of light above. Elevator to the Gallows has a hazy, soft, but somehow sharp at the same time cinematography that conjures hallucinatory, naughty, sexy thoughts as corrupted by a greater moral decay and outrage (pointed references to Algeria abound). This picture would make an ideal double bill with either Godard’s Le Petit soldat or Allen’s Match Point. (The former also explores Algeria in thriller terms; while the latter also addresses the notion of chance as ultimate judge, jury and executioner.)

In the end, I still very much value Elevator to the Gallows, allowing the good and great scenes to count for more than the scenes that tend to verge on the tedious. The film is obviously the work of a major filmmaker (though that’s easy to say fifty years after the fact) and I imagine Elevator is a picture that will grow in estimation as it fades in immediate viewing memory, possibly reshaping itself in the mind as the slimmer, less tangible picture it was always meant to be. That possibility is one of the many facets of the magic of the movies.

It’s impossible to see Arthur Penn’s The Left Handed Gun nowadays and not consider Bonnie and Clyde, the ironically, morally gray outlaw picture that Penn would direct nine years later. The films are startling in their similarities, particularly in their ahead of their time insistence that violence amount to something more than men merrily, mindlessly blowing one other away in the service of some self-justifying, hypocritical, appease the manly man coda. The Left Handed Gun isn’t nearly as violent as Bonnie and Clyde, there’s no way it could have been in the U.S. in 1958, but you may find it, in its own way, even more uncomfortable than Clyde. There’s a disconnection of style and artistic temperament in Gun that’s unexpected and frightening.

Younger viewers can slip Bonnie and Clyde into their DVD players and prepare themselves for one of the first of the new wave of violent, rebellious American pictures of the 1960s-1970s: Bonnie and Clyde undeniably belongs in that era. The Left Handed Gun, on the other hand, shot in stunning, stately, black and white, looks just like another breezy, authority reaffirming American western of the 1950s, perhaps directed by Howard Hawks in the second or third act of his career, and that expectation comes to bite you in the ass. The Left Handed Gun behaves according to the standards of the day, at first, complete with instantly dated opening song, but it gradually becomes something darker and more ambitious. Bonnie and Clyde, like Psycho or any other classic that’s at least partially legendary for its bloodshed and anarchic sensibilities, unavoidably braces you through cultural osmosis. The Left Handed Gun has the benefit of relative obscurity; it’s a vicious little animal that doesn’t announce itself with a BEWARE sign.

I tend to forget how dangerous Paul Newman can be in the right role, as his wonderful elder statesman performances have a habit of coming to my mind first. Newman’s charm, at times, particularly in his youth, could trump whatever the character may have actually been about (the traditional trap of the movie star) but he was also, and would continue to be, an astute, instinctual actor; a man very much aware of his presence and charisma. Occasionally, Newman would turn that heat right back on the audience (Hud, Cool Hand Luke) and do something risky and uncomfortable, or at least more risky and uncomfortable than you expect. Billy the Kid is cut from the same cloth: good looking, commanding, likeable, but also a flake; a live-wire who reaches for his gun at the slightest provocation with no consideration as to how the gunfight will affect his friends or himself the day, or even moments, after. Armistices, apologies, secret alliances, back door hand shakes, these are the dealings of corrupt higher-ups; Billy’s gun is, in his eyes, the great equalizer.

The Left Handed Gun may have an even fuller, more complicated understanding of its troubled hero than the (still greater) Bonnie and Clyde. Billy the Kid is glamorized, revered (largely by townspeople unaware of how casually he screws people caught in the cross-fire) but the picture never dilutes his self-absorption or near insanity. That refusal comes into focus in what is possibly the best scene in the picture: Billy and his de facto gang are at a party hosted by destined pursuer Pat Garrett (John Dehner), and a gentleman, resenting Billy’s fame as well as the subsequent, by the skin of his teeth pardon afforded by an armistice, tries to start something. Billy initially resists, and Newman handles his push and pull towards and away from violence and agitation with understatement, slowly boiling to an intense, unchecked fever. It’s a testament to Penn, Newman and John Dehner’s work that the almost murders of The Left Handed Gun are more disturbing than the actual murders of most pictures. This picture, at its best, has that same liquid violence to comedy to violent comedy to slapstick volatility that marks Bonnie and Clyde as an undeniable masterpiece.

The true bloodshed of The Left Handed Gun is also a triumph, memorable in its strangeness and near abstraction. Billy and his boys, as they must, ultimately disregard the armistice and plug one of the men they’ve vowed to punish for their former boss’s murder, and the shooting is ghastly and cold-blooded: the man’s terrified, twisted face framed in a triangle as he collapses to his death. Another murder, committed out of indifference to a promise Billy made to Garrett, is a bit more justified but even more perverse in its violation: the partygoers cry and stand shocked and aghast, the weight of what’s just transpired acknowledged with remarkable (even for today) honesty.

Penn, again foreshadowing Bonnie and Clyde, doesn’t let us off the hook with a lazy, convenient ending either: the right person dies and the right person lives, but the final act is denied any riding off into the sunset closure: the final killing is as much a suicide as anything else, a loss brought about from imperceptible damage, bitterness and twisted authority. The ending is even more of a lump in the throat than Clyde’s, that picture, reminiscent of Easy Rider, at least allows us a certain self-glamorizing, self-pitying, the little guy can’t ever win fantasy. The Left Handed Gun pitilessly reveals Billy the Kid to be every bit as self-motivated as the big man he opposes, he’s just not as adept at playing the game, which is, unfortunately, our country in a nutshell.