Iceman
Iceman describes a modulation from Christian Nyby’s The
Thing, which had just been remade by John Carpenter, toward Ken Russell’s Altered
States.
A Stone Age man
is defrosted from the snows and housed in an artificial environment there in the
Arctic, rather like a zoo exhibit. He escapes into the lab, mucks about and
emerges into frozen daylight. He takes a helicopter for a divinity (Through
a Glass Darkly, or a much earlier Hollywood film), clings to one of its
skids, and falls happily from a great height in ecstatic space as lab men watch
below.
His exit from the
sealed cage of rocks and plants and skylight leads to the startling discovery,
startlingly filmed, of the modern world. He reaches out to touch a stoppered
glass bottle, it falls and breaks, a noxious acid. He sees zoological
specimens, including a bear, kept in plain cages. He carries a sharp stick and
impales a lab man with it out of panic.
Schepisi’s
direction of this sequence is illustrative, using a handheld camera to observe the
proto-human in the maze of the lab, then turning 360° to give his field of
vision, discovering him in a new position with a sense of dislocation, repeated
throughout.
What is most
surprising, apart from the general regard for humanity’s beginnings (this is
plainly Red Skelton’s caveman in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying
Machines), is Schepisi’s complete command of the discourse by way of
bright, even-toned and all-encompassing cinematography. Amid the stylistic
pirouettes of the lab sequence, he builds or dissects an ideal man of the
twentieth century, rather as Schaffner does toward the end of Planet of the
Apes.
Generally, it’s a
work of picture-making, with a particularly good instrument for it, and
something like The Story of Mankind to tell.
Plenty
Enough is as good
as a feast, or why foreign troops have not occupied France since V-E Day.
A lowly British
courier with the SOE may have her complaints in the years after, but by heaven
that is sure.
“David Hare has
been laying into the British for so long,” says Time Out Film Guide, “one
begins to wonder what they ever did to him.”
Film4 deprecates the thing as “stodgy, torpid,” Variety
“cold and ultimately unaffecting.”
Her last words
are precisely those of Admiral Nelson.
As noted here and
there, beautifully filmed.
The Catholic News
Service Media Review Office sums up, “cold, tedious, unfocused and intellectually
muddled”.
Roxanne
What looked at
the time like directorial fuzziness was more a reflection of an Australian
director in the Pacific Northwest with a script adapted from a late
nineteenth-century French play.
Schepisi’s plush mise en scène makes a lot of the gagwork
a good study, and gives scenes like the “nose riposte” a measure of Rostand’s
grandeur.
A
Cry in the Dark
An Australian
test case serves Schepisi as a kind of laboratory in which he isolates yellow
dog journalism as a revival of the Roman holiday. His somewhat remote model is The
Wrong Man, and he tosses in a quote from The Godfather (John
Marley and the horse’s head) as part of the surrealistic transformation of a
dingo attack into a lynch mob.
This is all
handled very realistically, with a very dry acuity, compensated without
underlining by the Australian cinematography. Schepisi controls the mickey of
the tale at the outset with a very well-filmed statement of the incident, in
which a teetotaling Seventh-Day Adventist minister who likes to feed the dingos
finds one of them has filched his infant daughter. Schepisi diffuses the mickey
of the subsequent investigation, gossip and trials with myriad setups often
less than a hundred frames in length, showing different aspects of the
proceedings. The modulation of a tragic occurrence into a Media Circus takes
two shots involving the technical arrangements at a television station, filmed
with simple authority, and lasting less than a minute.
A relationship
can be seen with certain elements of L’Argent and Zulu. The
lesson is Don’t Feed The Dingos, or as the main character says, “People can
turn on you like a pack of hungry animals, can’t they?”
The
Russia House
Conditions of
publication revert upon the publisher, necessarily, and so create the equable
system of patronage whereby widows and orphans are cared for after an author’s
death and everybody knows what’s what.
The special
circumstances pertain to the Soviet Union vs. the West, but that is all as it
may be.
“Filmed on
location in Leningrad, Moscow, London, Lisbon and Vancouver”, with reference to
Terence Young’s From Russia with Love.
Mr.
Baseball
Schepisi’s fine
analytical rendering of The Bridge on the River Kwai.
You may take the
East meets West poesy of this film at face value, and there’s a lot of value
here. The Japanese angle is very well played, and most particularly by Ken
Takakura as a baseball manager. He really gets to parade in this part, which
carries far more of the essential action than certain script points mentioned
in reviews like the one wisely left unsigned in the Washington Post.
Tom Selleck’s
performance as the New York Yankee who’s traded overseas accomplishes all the
various gags and sleight of hand required in fine style.
Fine style is
what you get when you put a 35mm camera in Schepisi’s hands and send him out to
satisfy his thirst for novelty. Besuboru!
Six
Degrees of Separation
According to
Shaw, Sir Henry Irving used to do this to Shakespeare. Shaw himself has Rita
Kempley’s failing, that of judging a work by its performance. The BBC thought
Will Smith’s worthy of praise.
“John Guare,”
says Schepisi in an interview, “the guy who wrote Six Degrees of Separation,
kept saying, ‘The dialogue is the wallpaper.’ And he’s right—great wallpaper,
sure, but what’s happening around that dialogue? Who’s doing what? What are the
other people thinking? What they’re thinking lets you know that, wait a
minute—what this guy’s saying is not exactly what he means or feels, or
something. That’s the fun of it.”
The passages from
Shaw are amusing and instructive. “In a true republic of art Sir Henry Irving
would ere this have expiated his acting versions on the scaffold... This
curious want of connoisseurship in literature would disable Sir Henry Irving
seriously if he were an interpretative actor. But it is, happily, the fault of
a great quality—the creative quality. A prodigious deal of nonsense has been
written about Sir Henry Irving’s conception of this, that, and the other
Shakespearean character. The truth is that he has never in his life conceived
or interpreted the characters of any author except himself. He is really as
incapable of acting another man’s play as Wagner was of setting another man’s
libretto; and he should, like Wagner, have written his plays for himself. But
as he did not find himself out until it was too late for him to learn that
supplementary trade, he was compelled to use other men’s plays as the framework
for his own creations. His first great success in this sort of adaptation was
with the Merchant of Venice. There was no question then of a bad Shylock or a
good Shylock: he was simply not Shylock at all; and when his own creation came
into conflict with Shakespear’s, as it did quite openly in the Trial scene, he
simply played in flat contradiction of the lines, and positively acted
Shakespear off the stage. This was an original policy, and an intensely
interesting one from the critical point of view; but it was obvious that its
difficulty must increase with the vividness and force of the dramatist’s
creation. Shakespear at his highest pitch cannot be set aside by any mortal
actor, however gifted; and when Sir Henry Irving tried to interpolate a most
singular and fantastic notion of an old man between the lines of a fearfully
mutilated acting version of King Lear, he was smashed. On the other hand, in
plays by persons of no importance, where the dramatist’s part of the business
is the merest trash, his creative activity is unhampered and uncontradicted;
and the author’s futility is the opportunity for the actor’s masterpiece.
“Punch, whether
as Jingle, Macaire, Mephistopheles, or Richard, has always been a favorite part
with Sir Henry Irving. The craftily mischievous, the sardonically impudent,
tickle him immensely, besides providing him with a welcome relief from the
gravity of his serious impersonations. As Richard he drops Punch after the
coronation scene, which, in deference to stage tradition, he makes a
turning-point at which the virtuoso in mischief, having achieved his ambition,
becomes a savage at bay. I do not see why this should be. In the tent scene,
Richard says:
|
There is no
creature loves me; |
“Macbeth repeats
this patch of pathos, and immediately proceeds to pity himself unstintedly over
it; but Richard no sooner catches the sentimental cadence of his own voice than
the mocker in him is awakened at once, and he adds, quite in Punch’s vein,
|
Nay,
wherefore should they? since that I myself |
“Sir Henry Irving
omits these lines, because he plays, as he always does, for a pathetically
sublime ending. But we have seen the sublime ending before pretty often; and
this time it robs us of such strokes as Richard’s aristocratically cynical
private encouragement to his entourage of peers:
|
Our strong
arms be our conscience, swords our law. |
“followed by his
amusingly blackguardly public address to the rank and file, quite in the vein
of the famous and more successful appeal to the British troops in the
Peninsula. ‘Will you that are Englishmen fed on beef let yourselves be licked
by a lot of ——— Spaniards fed on oranges?’ Despair, one feels, could bring to
Punch-Richard nothing but the exultation of one who loved destruction better
than even victory; and the exclamation
|
A thousand
hearts are great within my bosom |
“is not the
expression of a hero’s courage, but the evil ecstasy of the destroyer as he
finds himself, after a weak, piping time of peace, back at last in his native
element.”
Schepisi shows
what a genius can do with a complete misreading of the play. John Guare kissed
the check, I would have imagined, but no, he chose Schepisi.
It
Runs in the Family
Long Day’s
Journey into Night is about the
cult of Shakespeare, and The Iceman Cometh presents the consequences for
American drama. Lugubrious productions of O’Neill have damaged his reputation
and foisted a lot of family melodrama on the public, but still given us Time
to Say Goodbye?, a television film about Alzheimer’s disease set forth in
terms of King Lear.
The cruelties of
most such productions are mainly inflicted on the actors. Sophie’s Choice
has another cruelty, one answered by Karl Kraus: “I choose if there be doubt /
of two ways just the pair.”
It Runs in the
Family sides with Kraus, and also
takes the view of Ordinary People in a masterful scene with the
grandfather (Kirk Douglas) taking the father (Michael Douglas) to a park where
the former first laid eyes on the late grandmother (Diana Douglas). There is a
brief heartrending speech about the loss, and then the two men enact a scene of
unexpressed love made manifest that roundly contradicts the meaning of the
place. That is to say, Schepisi’s film acknowledges Redford’s as a point of
departure.
The prismatic
story concerns a step out of bounds distributed among the two sons and the
father. The younger boy kisses a Goth girl at the school dance, the college
student flunks his senior year and is arrested for growing and selling
marijuana, the father has coitus interruptus with a fellow volunteer at
a soup kitchen and also goes against his law firm in a pro bono case.
There is enough material to extend these reflections throughout the screenplay,
and the structure is coyly framed to have elements in juxtaposition. The
younger son follows his grandfather’s advice and efficiently defends the girl
from a gang of skateboarders while the older boy’s apartment is being raided
and the grandfather is giving his late brother a Viking funeral on the lake,
helped by the father. The two boys share a room after bail is posted, and
compare notes.
This is all very
funny, looked at in this way, and that is the whole point, to make humorous
sense out of a mishmash or snafu. The game is played by all the rules, even the
costive pianist straining for emotional effect is on the soundtrack, but the
actors are not tortured by the screenplay, on the contrary. Bernadette Peters
deals up the Jewish wife to perfection, Michael Douglas has a good time with
the father, the juveniles do very well, Diana Douglas is a real pro, and Kirk
Douglas is mighty.
Schepisi does not
exceed the boundaries of the form, because that is the game being played. What
he does is to express the truth of the representation in beautiful
cinematography that has nothing of the gratuitous about it, and he works his
scenes (notably the Seder around the dining room table) exactly as required
individually, always relaxing into a camera view when the work is done.
This is a
stylistic constraint, in a way, as you can see at the dance where the camera
might have left the shot/reverse shot of boy and Goth to follow that girl in
the background stepping innocently from heel to heel and swinging her hips, and
filmed Milos Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball instead. Consciously the
artifice is maintained even against a New York street at night for the fight
scene, the point being revealed in the last scene. Father in the doghouse and
grandfather spending the night after the jail scene are on two sofas set at an
angle, ready to sleep. As they converse, city traffic streams by in the
distance, seen through a window in the background.