July 3, 1973 [Play Time]

Four days after seeing it, and Jacques Tati’s Play Time still echoes in my head, his M. Hulot a low reverberation of sweet melancholy and last glimpses, a middle distance sound that doesn’t want to fade away.

Hulot, an essentially silent character in a world of increasingly complex and subtle sounds, a tall and almost blocky figure with a hat and long raincoat and umbrella and pipe, has been wandering around Paris for twenty years or so; but he is fading at last, the note diminishing during a single long Parisian night--a "play time" that begins in a lengthy first act of blue steel and geometric severity, leads toward a chaotic symphony for jazz nightclub and tourism, and ends with perfect calliope diminuendo (if such a thing is possible)--while Paris, cold and impassive throughout the day, becomes raucous in the nightclub--which falls apart in joy, chair by chair, garment by garment, wall by wall; and with the dawn, the city transforms itself into a rush-hour carousel, a country fair that fades as the tourist bus leaves the city.

At this last moment, Hulot finds one more opportunity to gently offer a gift (a scarf for a young woman, a tourist he had befriended during the long night of free jazz and dismantled architecture), and the curve of a spray of small flowers he had put in the gift box mimics the branching ultramodern streetlights marching outside the bus's windows. The end falls into a last fond dream: that Paris (that is, the modern--heck, the American--world) just might have hidden in its monolithic polish and metallic hiss a memory of the plaintive-but-happy notes of a café accordion, accompanied by a fine but thin--and somewhat tipsy--voice singing, after everything closes down.

So maybe the song refuses to fade away, after all. Hulot gets to stay behind--perhaps lost in a France that looks almost nothing like the strolling ease of Mr. Hulot's Holiday, but still able to recede, maybe to some last corner of his Paris-that-was, all winding streets and stray cats and children, his owlish half-smile tentative but secure.

Me, I travel with the bus, with the other Americans, back toward the airport where the movie began, having never seen Paris' old-time charms except in plate-glass reflections, more a memory of a memory. It is a long goodbye, but I can still see Hulot waving, smaller as I move away, but not disappearing.

May 14, 1973 [Paper Moon]

Peter Bogdanovich loves the movies in a way that exposes both him and the movies to all kinds of heartache. Whether in Targets or The Last Picture Show, the pair of them--Bogdanovich and the movies--unashamedly argue and make up in public, always close to understanding one another as much as they understand themselves. Add to that Ryan and Tatum O’Neal, a couple of genuine movie actors, and Paper Moon becomes a movie in which everyone knows they’re making a movie--but it is a secret love, one they won’t tell us about--they’ll show us, though.

The O’Neals move through the black and white Depression just like actors in a Depression-era film, their voices taking on the same cadences, the same slightly self-conscious tilt of actors playing “low”--and this is what I love best about Paper Moon, its desire to be a movie, to roll out those barren Plains like Steinbeck daydreams, like a Warner Bros. reminiscence of the 1930s. Addie’s stubborn affection for Franklin D. and Mose’s silly mustache conspire like Wild Boys of the Road to put on a show--a series of shows, really, little con games we love to watch, like card tricks--and we are willing to be fooled, it’s so much fun, this loving pretense of theirs. Of course “it’s only a paper moon,” as phony as Mose’s snap-on gold tooth; that’s the feature, kiddo.

December 22, 1972 [Cries and Whispers]

Cries and Whispers made Camus' Sisyphus slip into my head--and almost random sentences from his heroic surrender wandered around as I watched the movie; but this one will do: "His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth."

Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers is polished with a master's hand, the grain of it glowing, the passion of every curve of the thing rising above its surface like dust-motes stirred. As Agnes dies of cancer, she seems able to assert--as does Camus' other hero, Oedipus--"my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Agnes and her sisters suffer in the present, which gives new life to the suffering of the past, invites it to send Agnes to not simply death but a heroic oblivion, one that does feel Greek--that is, if those troubled Hellenic women wrestled with their fates in Sweden, the cold Lutheran admonitions first wrapped around them like furs, then cast off, Agnes' magic end like a fit pitched in faith--the certainty of a few minutes of perfection.

August 3, 1972 [Deliverance]

It’s hot out--the air thick and uncooperative, denying easy breathing, movement, thought. The cicadas make a racket like busted little dynamos, threatening to unmoor themselves and throw sparks in the dry trees. Is the South like this in August, or worse? Is it like this going down the river in Deliverance?

In James Dickey’s poem, “For the Last Wolverine,” the promise is made: “I take you as you are / And make of you what I will, / Skunk-bear, carcajou, bloodthirsty / Non-survivor.” It’s a prayer and a eulogy, a fierce celebration and red-faced admission. In the movie Deliverance, Burt Reynolds’ Lewis bares his arms and sets his jaw and digs in, as the weekend keeps its promises and they all tumble into a new reservoir, the last of themselves, “small, filthy, unwinged” and “crouching / Alone” in their own guilty dreams, where they’ve made themselves extinct, and have to keep on living with it.

June 28, 1972 [Frenzy]

Frenzy is a good title for this Hitchcock movie: funny and horrifying, with cool observance of bestial acts and pity tempered by appetite, the wrong man a jerk and the murderer keeping it together--and the victims flopped around like broken mannequins, their sightless eyes looking away, their stiffening fingers cracked--and we want it, and Hitchcock lets us have it, more ferociously than Psycho--and almost as funny as The Trouble with Harry.

Now that he has an “R” rating to live in, Hitchcock’s house may become more haunted than I can take. When his necktie murderer closes in on one young woman, the camera backs away, politely leaves him to it. I know I’m supposed to be chilled as the camera moves into the street, where everyone bustles by--but what’s worse is that Hitchcock is so gracious about it, like a butler withdrawing from his master’s study, knowing his place, whether he approves or not.

March 15, 1972 [Tokyo Story]

Tokyo Story was made twenty years ago, and has drifted in and out of every conversation I’ve had about Japanese cinema, a solemn secret that one lets drop every once in a while, quietly but with some hope that it will be told.

Such a ghost-existence is fitting: The movie is still and direct—even the actors looking not at each other but into the camera, close, their polite smiles aching—and dedicated to the truth--even when that truth is our decision not to face it, to smile instead, to wait until we’re alone to weep--but in Tokyo Story someone dies, and one is allowed to cry openly--or not, maybe, like the men, just a little sighing grunt of acquiescence to the realization that “life is disappointing,” as the young girl says, fearing that she, too, will lose her tender heart, and turn from death to dinner and home and work the next day.

But the older woman--not older by much, just enough to lose her husband in the war and live seven years or so alone--knows that one must turn away, and go home, and work. It’s all she wants, to share one place with one other, and her sadness drifts like mourning incense through the film--she’s the first one to feel the death of a spouse, and joins her parents-in-law in trying to accept the disappointment.

This movie has given me a picture of the Japanese mind that may be partial, but it fills me, a rare moment of true poignancy--even though “poignant” is a word used too easily, a silly thing--but again: filling me in this movie, the nice smile and thank-you’s both a mask and a solid rock, something to hide behind and stand on.

February 14, 1972 [Cabaret]

It’s been a difficult week at the movies:

Despite Michael York’s buttery voice and Great Profile, Cabaret was not the best Valentine I could’ve given my wife. Joel Grey as the Master of Ceremonies haunts that picture like Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs--except in Cabaret he really means it, his compact painted skull-grin ever-growing, having a devilishly good time spreading out the end of the world like a glutton’s banquet, shiny with grease, and ripe.

York’s boyish Englishman stammers around Berlin just long enough to realize they’ll one day come knocking, and he goes home before the jackboot’s heel finds his neck--not yet, at least--but it’s too late for most of them, even the American, Sally, played by Liza Minnelli with a look somewhere between Louise Brooks and Lil Dagover, and with so much forced decadence (it’s expected of her) and desperate optimism (she expects it of herself) that she, too, knows too little, too late.

The movie is of course an impression of the first whiff of World War II--but its politics are so personal, to misquote the feminists, that to nose it out we need Sally and her hesitant beau--and the Jewish Duchess and gigolo, and the rich German who wants to charm every gender--and peering around the corner is the outsider, the homosexual, the Jew, the transvestite, the sensitive ones, in this picture all the same--or at least all in equal danger. Bob Fosse accepts the material: fascism as "simple" prejudice, the xenophobe's fist curling on the blade, and he carves the picture like a cow on the killing floor, sudden slices and splashes of color, a metallic look and clattering echo--laughter, maybe, but too hysterical for mirth.

The musical has been re-invented--even the photo-realism squalor of Oliver! can’t match Cabaret’s expressionist knife-edges--and bursting into song in the movies will never be the same; it's as though Alex in A Clockwork Orange, singin’ in the rain, has turned moralist and scolds as thoroughly as he once brutalized both the innocent and guilty.

February 10, 1972 [A Clockwork Orange]

Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange made me sit too close--my peripheral vision gone; and I grew dizzy from all that Nadsat, bolshy and gloopy and oozhassny, a pain in the gulliver. And worse: the intimacy of first-person, Alex so chummy, as charming as Hitler at tea, beaming at us with all the good will he can muster without tearing us to pieces. And worst of all: the moral weight, the grinding insistence that Alex as-is is better than Alex as-we’d-like--better for Alex, of course, but also for us. More or less: Alex, after all, has to live inside himself--while we have to live with him, and his busy hands.

The book is so exhausting--and I was so taken with it, and so debilitated, that I was almost afraid to see what the hard man, Stanley Kubrick, would do with such an enthusiastically savage thing. At home, I could always drop the book and see what the happy little birds outside were doing, or watch the night fall picture-perfectly, or listen to the cars out there move on the road, without mishap. But I always stay until the end of a movie.

Kubrick understands what nasty fun the book is, with a kid’s smug grin, daring us--and he loads us up with Beethoven and synthesizers, glaring whites and reds--like 2001 on bad drugs--and harsh shadows, all of it somehow built on the cheap--a future I do not look forward to--but maybe the only one we’re getting. And the only pity we are allowed to have is for Alex--until he stares down at his victims, and we viddy well just what he’s up to. Then it’s all disgust--my sister walked out, angry with me for insisting that she see it. And I didn’t follow her, but left her in the lobby and myself in the theater, “cured, all right,” with the Ninth Symphony among the casualties, music for the end of the world, as it collapses under the moral conundrums--carted along like scrap iron--of freedom and dignity.

December 28, 1971 [Dirty Harry]

Clint Eastwood is best when he's still, his face like an old-before-his-time bird of prey--but not just old: smart, seeing the terrain clearly, measuring, moving without hesitation. At the same time, he's out of place, the only person in the room without a friend, reminding me of John Wayne--lanky, though, almost scrawny--but without Gary Cooper's soft edge--especially as Dirty Harry Callahan, breathing his lines from a well, his face screwed up with the stink of things.

Don Siegel directs Dirty Harry, and he understands Eastwood, the two of them so sparse and matter-of-fact that Dirty Harry made me think of Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, both movies no-frills fantasies, paranoia for once the only way to go--reaching a point of peril that only a cutting shovel or "the most powerful handgun in the world" can resolve--both built to separate villains' heads from their bodies. And both movies also trade in uncertainty, white hats switched for black, and back and forth, until you're forced to choose the devil you know, Harry and his Magnum, the last man not yet an alien and still eager to save the world.

December 20, 1971 [Le boucher/The Butcher]

Le boucher is a melancholy thriller, enervated by its attempts to find something more than loneliness. The pretty young headmistress and the affably cynical butcher come together at a wedding--the bride soon to be murdered, the butcher slowly emerging as the prime suspect.

But a phrase like “prime suspect” is inappropriate in this movie, as though there were clues and motives we can use to solve the case. Nothing comes of it--except the inevitable drop of telltale blood, the trickle, the end.

And the pace is leisurely, to say the least, but this too is important, an admission of guilt--or at least a kind of helpless gesture, the hands palms-up, showing us the emptiness. But then something happens: a shift toward sympathy that made me think of my sudden sadness at the climax of M, Peter Lorre so small and haunted that all I feared were the ghosts that surrounded him; he was only an old wreck of a house, ruined a long time before the movie began. The mad butcher is also filled with ghosts, his expertise at slicing meat too much of a temptation as he tries to set down his knife, confusing his loves--for life, for death--while the headmistress holds him like a mother who's arrived too late.

October 25, 1971 [The Last Picture Show]

I saw The Last Picture Show, and on the way out of the theater I heard someone make a crack: “Peyton Place with tumbleweeds.” But in the end all those couplings don’t matter; it’s not a picture that wants me to think about sex--or not just sex, but the yearning, the loss, the desire to drive to it and have it be there, waiting: the thing desired, the moment that softens the lines in your face--suddenly aware you’ve been straining, trying not to fall down, and so your face is tight with the fear that the next moment will tip you over.

When Sonny gets in his car and drives, his foot pressing down on the accelerator, his mop of hair scattered with the wind, I wanted the movie to end, to see him just go. But he has to return to Ruth; everything else is dead; the price he pays for growing up is to be free of everything he loves. And she shouts at him, and tells him the bitter truth, and he takes it--like something out of a real tragedy, the beaten hero hoping one person remains to hold his hand, to murmur something to help him be still.

And as the picture ended, and the wind moved us slowly to the empty movie theater, I knew I’d be walking out of that movie myself, followed by all of them--all gone, but all here. In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman assures us, “I consider’d long and seriously of you before you were born.” Sonny and Ruth (Cloris Leachman; fifteen years ago in Kiss Me Deadly she told Ralph Meeker, "Remember me") and lost Duane and foolish Jacy--and maybe most of all Sam the Lion, Ben Johnson rising up from a cowboy picture that looked West but never got there--they consider us, too, and make me want to do the same.