Adam Sandler in Pictures of Famous Actors and Actresses

Admam Sandler

Adam Sandler

 

Adam Sandler

 Famous Actor Adam Sandler

Eyes Without a Face (1960)

***^½
Country: France
Director: Georges Franju

When I was in high school, one of the most notorious parts of the driver education course was a slide show of gruesome car crashes, a fright tactic intended to discourage teenagers from dangerous driving. So graphic were these slides that before beginning, the teacher gravely told the class that anyone too disturbed by them could leave the room at any time. One of the slides was of a boy who had been run over by a car and whose face had been sliced off by the car's sharp bumper. The slide showed the boy's face, looking as if it had been surgically removed, lying next to the upper part of his body. The most unsettling thing about the slide, though, was not the face, but that the boy's head minus the face had been completely whited out. This could mean only one thing—that in this presentation designed to horrify, what remained after the face had been sliced away was just too grisly to show. The juxtaposition of that mask-like face and the blank head next to it is a chilling image I'll never forget.

That high school classroom stunt is what came to mind as I watched George Franju's horror classic Eyes Without a Face, the story of a young woman, Christiane Génissier (Edith Scob), whose face has been horribly damaged in a car accident that happened while her father (Pierre Brasseur) was driving. The father is Docteur Génissier, an experimental transplant surgeon, in reality a modern mad scientist who kidnaps young women and attempts to transplant their faces onto his daughter's to restore her beauty. In the meantime, Christiane is kept secreted in the attic of a rambling mansion adjoining her father's private clinic in the suburbs of Paris and forced to wear an expressionless, corpselike mask modeled on her own features. Unfortunately, her body keeps rejecting the transplants, so aided by his devoted assistant Louise (Alida Valli), whose looks he has restored with what appears to be the removal of a disfiguring goiter, Dr. Génissier must keep kidnapping more victims. Eventually Christiane's fiancé Jacques, also a doctor at the clinic, becomes suspicious about what is happening and goes to the police, who persuade a young shoplifter to help them entrap the doctor by becoming his next victim.

This is understandably a film whose eeriness—the way it blurs the distinction between dream and nightmare, the way it finds beauty in the grotesque—created an intense and unsettling impression while I was watching it. What is not so easy to understand is why that impression not only stuck with me afterward, but continued if anything to grow, evoking strongly eidetic memories every time I thought of the movie—what Robert Taylor writing on Eyes Without a Face recently at Wonders in the Dark referred to as its "haunting" quality. Part of the reason is almost certainly what I would call the film's atavistic nature. Elements of the film seem so familiar that even while watching it, I had a sense of déjà vu—and I mean this in a good way.

The very first sequence, of Louise driving the body of the first victim to the Seine to dump it, lets us know this is going to be a movie that acknowledges its origins. The body, slumped in the back seat of Louise's car with a man's hat on its head and wearing a trench coat with the collar pulled up so that it completely obscures the missing face, immediately brings to mind The Invisible Man. Throughout the film, references to many other works in the horror genre are invoked. The mask seems a reference to The Phantom of the Opera; the mad scientist, faithful assistant, and laboratory to Frankenstein; Louise in her car trawling for victims to Boris Karloff in The Body Snatcher, or to any of the other characters based on Burke and Hare; Christiane gliding around the spooky house in her white, shroud-like peignoirs to everything from Dracula and The Bride of Frankenstein to I Walked with a Zombie. I'm sure dedicated aficionados of the genre could spot far more than I did. There are even allusions to films not strictly in the genre. A portrait of Christiane dressed in white and holding a white dove on the back of her hand over the fireplace put me in mind of Laura. (Remember that the reason the body in Laura was misidentified was that its face had been blown off with a shotgun. Moreover, a crucial misidentification of one of Dr. Génissier's faceless victims happens early in this movie too.) Anyone who has seen Broken Blossoms will surely be reminded of that film in the dinner scene, which I'll get to in a bit.

Another reason the film sticks in one's mind so tenaciously is that even though it contains many visual elements that might have lodged in the memory of anyone who has watched a lot of movies, it presents these images in unexpected and sometimes jarring ways. In that opening sequence, the music by Maurice Jarre—nothing like his romantic scores for movies like Doctor Zhivago, but instead a dead ringer for the jaunty, carnivalesque scores Nino Rota wrote for Fellini—forms a weirdly anomalous counterpoint to what we're seeing on the screen: an anxiety-wracked woman driving through a foggy night with a dead body in the back seat of her car and clearly terrified she is going to be discovered before she can get rid of it. Later, in a sequence that might at first seem out of place in this movie, Dr. Génissier examines a little boy who is losing his eyesight. He reassures the boy's mother that he can cure the boy, but the glances exchanged between him and his assistant made me think that the case was hopeless and his assurances a benign falsehood. This sequence, which shows him in a sympathetic light, is immediately followed by one in which he visits a laboratory where that young shoplifter is undergoing tests with wires attached to her head that make her look like the victim of some kind of bizarre torture, rather like those photos of Abu Ghraib. Outwardly, he shows the same solicitude to her as he had to the little boy, yet we already know he is planning to abduct and mutilate her.

This is not the only scene that shows what a paradox Dr. Génissier is, and that emphasis on showing the main people in the film as psychologically well-defined characters rather than the flat stereotypes of the typical horror film is another thing that distinguishes Eyes Without a Face. A pioneering researcher working in a field with the potential to be of immense benefit to humanity, Dr. Génissier no doubt performs many good works at his clinic. Yet he has a dark side brought out by Christiane. Just what is his motivation in devoting himself to restoring his daughter's beauty to the extent that it becomes an obsession compelling him to commit the most horrible crimes? Is it guilt because he feels responsible for the accident? Is the situation one that piques his medical curiosity and gives him an opportunity to advance his life's work, with his own daughter the ultimate test subject? Is he driven by vanity, the godlike need to control? Whatever his motivation, love barely seems to enter into it. Look at the unfeeling way he manipulates the adoring Louise to help him commit his atrocities. Even though he shows devotion to his daughter, he never displays any real affection for her.

When Christiane tells Louise early in the film that her father is driven by the reckless need to control, that this is precisely what caused the car accident, she probably is close to the truth about him. This is especially evident in the dinner scene with Louise, Dr. Génissier, and Christiane that takes place shortly after a transplant appears to have succeeded and Christiane has indeed regained her beauty. Louise tells her that she is even more beautiful than before, that there is something angelic about her, to which Christiane replies that when she looks in the mirror she sees a face which resembles her own, but it's like looking at a different person who seems far away. In response, the controlling Dr. Génissier lays out his elaborate plans for her future then coldly tells his daughter not to be so negative and instructs her to smile. Christiane, compliant but clearly experiencing emotional stress, immediately does so. At this point I couldn't help thinking of the brutal Donald Crisp and the gentle Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms, and I wondered if the same dynamic of control and victimization might be at play here, only with the sadism concealed under a veneer of civility and concern.

Christiane is just as much an enigma as her father. It's impossible to say with certainty what she was like before the accident, although her relationship with Jacques indicates she probably led a normal life. But now she seems in many ways as blank as the mask that conceals her face, and as incapable of registering emotion. Restricted by the mask and her long, shapeless gowns, Edith Scob must concentrate her performance in her body—in her posture and the way she moves. With her rail-thin physique and elongated, birdlike neck and hands, she does a tremendous job of creating an almost spectral presence, silently drifting through the house like a ghost. She also conveys through her characterization the marked impression that Christiane has in a sense grown into her mask. That remark at the dinner table about what she sees in the mirror suggests that she feels she has lost her identity, that she has come to regard that inexpressive mask as more reflective of her present self than is her true face.

When it comes, the movie's conclusion is the result of the passive Christiane's reclaiming her free will when she spontaneously empathizes with that young shoplifter, her father's intended next victim. Regaining her sense of self-identity, she becomes an avenging angel who wreaks retribution on her father before he can do any further harm. Afterward, Christiane is at last free, but all alone except for the one white dove she carries. The last scene completes the movie's blurring of dream and nightmare as Christiane is swallowed up by the darkness and fog like a vanishing wraith.

Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973): 2005 Version

***^½
Country: US
Director: Sam Peckinpah

After many acrimonious disputes between the notoriously difficult Sam Peckinpah and his producers both during and after production, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid was taken out of the director's hands by MGM, edited without his participation, and finally released in 1973. Savaged by critics as a botched failure and disowned by Peckinpah, it was, predictably, a flop at the box office. A preview version edited by Peckinpah, about 20 minutes longer than MGM's theatrical version, was released on home video in 1988 (Peckinpah died in 1984), followed in 2005 by a "Special Edition" prepared by film editor Paul Seydor. This last was the version I watched, although I did refer to Peckinpah's 1988 cut for comparison. (More about this later.)

The crux of the film is the relationship between the two title characters. The two begin as friendly acquaintances meeting up again at Ft. Sumner in the New Mexico territory in the 1880s. But in the interval their relationship has changed, for the amiable Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson), with his history of robbery and gunfighting, now finds himself on the opposite side of the law from his old friend Pat Garrett (James Coburn), who has been elected sheriff of Lincoln County by the cattle baron John Chisum (Barry Sullivan) and other powerful economic interests. The two are now adversaries, and Garrett arrests Billy for a robbery committed a year before. After Billy escapes from Garrett's jail, the sheriff is summoned to Santa Fe and instructed by the territorial governor (Jason Robards), at the behest of a couple of political wheeler-dealers, to recapture Billy. A full pursuit is now on, and the rest of the film is the episodic account of how Garrett goes about hunting down his onetime friend.

If Garrett feels conflict between his personal feelings and his professional duty, he doesn't show it, and the conflict in the film remains externalized, the opposition of the hunter and the hunted. Garrett, who is older than Billy, seems weary of his former way of life and yearns for the stability of a more settled existence. Beyond that, he is motivated not by any personal animosity towards Billy or any adherence to a moral code, but strictly by the fact that he has been hired to do a job and intends to see it through. His tenacity is that of the professional who puts aside personal feelings to get the job done, not unlike the narrow dedication to purpose of the hard-boiled detective of film noir.

Billy, however, seems to take the situation differently. He doesn't see himself as a dangerous outlaw, but as someone who does what he needs to in order to survive comfortably in a harsh environment that offers little opportunity to a man of his willfulness and independence and lack of means. He's not the romanticized noble outlaw of Western fiction, but neither is he particularly a menace to the safety of ordinary men and women. He is actually a bit of an overgrown boy trying to avoid the boredom and staleness of conventional middle-class life and have a good time without putting too much effort into it, an attitude Garrett seems to have outgrown as he approaches middle age. If for Garrett the chase is a serious matter of duty, for Billy it seems more like a game, and the deadly consequences of losing that game don't really bother him much. At one point Garrett explains that this is precisely why he believes Billy won't manage to escape: "There's too much play in him."

Peckinpah places the personal conflict between Garrett and Billy in the context of a larger historical and political-economic conflict—the populist one between the rich and powerful and the poor and powerless. The territorial governor and his cronies represent the interests of those who desire to control land, resources, and human lives, openly acknowledging that they press for Billy's capture because they view his actions as a threat to political stability and commercial investment in the territory. Peckinpah shows these establishment figures as the corrupt, arrogant forces of control and conformity, while Billy represents the relative purity of personal freedom and individuality. Caught between these two opposing sides is Pat Garrett, allowing himself to be used as a cat's paw while repressing any natural sympathy he might once have felt for Billy and his way of life. It's clear which side Peckinpah stands on in this clash of values and equally clear that he allows this side little chance of prevailing against the juggernaut of power and influence and of changing times.

The film has much going for it in addition to its potent themes and focused examination of characters in conflict. Photographed by John Coquillon, this is a beautiful movie. The iconic landscapes of the American West have always been inseparable from the Western film genre, and here the clear, warm colors, limpid quality of light and air, and uncluttered widescreen compositions have the feeling of openness and space one associates with the Old West. The music score by Bob Dylan, largely spare arrangements based on simple guitar-and-harmonica harmonies typical of vintage Dylan, adds a lot to the film without sounding overbearing or dated like so many film scores of the time and includes his great song "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." Then there is that wonderful cast. James Coburn has never been better. Kristofferson is cheerful and likable although perhaps a bit too mature and on the bland side to be ideal for the role. I couldn't help wondering if a younger, more dynamic actor like the young Jeff Bridges might have brought a greater sense of impulsiveness to the part. (This might also have suggested more of a father-son transference between Garrett and Billy, who was actually in his early twenties.) The supporting cast is like a gallery of familiar character faces: R. G. Armstrong, Chill Wills, Jack Elam, Gene Evans, Harry Dean Stanton, an apparently bewigged Richard Jaeckel, Katy Jurado, and for me best of all, Slim Pickens. And Bob Dylan gets his first fictional film role. It's a pretty limited one, requiring him mostly to pose for reaction shots in close-up, but with his benign expressions and almost angelic features, he is quite effective.

Peckinpah's cut has adamant supporters who insist it is superior to Seydor's slightly shorter 2005 version. Coming to the film fresh, I didn't have any particular allegiance to either. Inclined to watch a movie more for its major points than for its minor details, I perceived few differences between the two versions—a few seconds, a line or two here and there, a brief scene shifted to a different place, but nothing that for me derailed the thrust of the film's themes or characterizations or altered the overall mood. To my mind, though, Seydor's Special Edition has two major differences that clearly improve the film.

For one thing, the opening and closing of Seydor's version are better. The opening of both versions consists of sepia-tinted scenes of Pat Garrett nearly thirty years after the main action of the movie, now retired and a rancher, being ambushed and killed, intercut with color scenes of Garrett and Billy's reunion at Ft. Sumner much earlier. But in Peckinpah's cut, this opening proceeds in fits and starts, awkwardly interrupted by freeze frames and shifts of the color shots to sepia to accommodate the credits that, unless a film opened with a "teaser" sequence, were obligatory at the beginning of a movie at the time this one was made. Seydor's version opens with no interruptions for credits, the longer sepia shots intercut with shorter color shots that gradually take over as the past bleeds into the present, sustaining a level of dramatic continuity the 1988 version doesn't have. And rather than returning at the end to this intercutting of the sepia present and color past as the 1988 version does, Seydor's cut simply has Garrett riding away towards the future we already know awaits him, for me a more concise and melancholy finale than that of the 1988 version.

More importantly, Seydor's version has a crucial sequence, entirely missing from the Peckinpah edit, in which Garrett goes home for dinner before setting off on his initial pursuit of Billy. The sequence, beautifully shot and edited, ends with Garrett's Latina wife tearing into him for what he is about to do, telling him, "You are dead inside. I wish you'd never put on that badge." The brief sequence not only further defines Garrett's character, but also broadens the scope of the film with its domestic details and its glimpse of a strong-willed female character in what is an otherwise male-dominated movie. The 1988 version does have one sequence, though, that I wish had been left in the later version. This involves Garrett's chief deputy Poe (John Beck) brutally extracting the fact that Billy is at Ft. Sumner from a group of old cowboys that includes Dub Taylor and Elisha Cook, Jr. What a wonderful addition they make to those other familiar character actors, and the scene does explain how Garrett learns where to find Billy for the final showdown.

The 1970s were not a notable decade for the Western film. Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid—with its deft balance of kinetic action sequences and quieter, more reflective episodes—is one of only a handful of really good ones from that decade that I've seen. If it doesn't quite attain the stature of Peckinpah's earlier Westerns Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch, it still comes close, resembling those masterful films in several important ways: its highly watchable pictorial values, its continued exposition of Peckinpah's recurrent theme of loyalty and betrayal in which onetime friends become adversaries, and especially its lamentation of the changes in the West as older ideals give way to harsher political-economic realities and to a more rigid social structure that leaves little room for individualism.

Diane Keaton in Famous Actors and Actresses

Diane Keaton

Diane Keaton

Annie Hall

 

Famous Actress Diane Keaton

Le Boucher (1970)

****
Country: France-Italy
Director: Claude Chabrol

In his book "Have You Seen . . . ?" David Thomson calls Le Boucher "a picture to be seen repeatedly over the years." In my experience, such movies tend to fall into two groups. In one group are the most complex films—Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Persona, 8½, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie—the convoluted products of a great filmmaker's overcrowded imagination that invite you to savor their technical and narrative intricacies again and again, but even after many viewings still remain resistant to ever being fully known. In the other group are the simplest films—Bringing Up Baby, The Naked Spur, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Pather Panchali—movies made not without style, but with an absolute economy of style that reduces film storytelling to its essentials. If Thomson is right about Le Boucher, then it is definitely of the latter type.

The film begins at a wedding in the Périgord, in south central France, where Hélène (Stéphane Audran), the principal of the village elementary school, and Popaul (Jean Yanne), the local butcher, find themselves seated next to each other at a banquet table. It's obvious from the beginning that a special rapport exists between them, and the two strike up an immediate friendship that soon develops into an easy camaraderie that stops just short of romance. Both are in a sense outsiders, and both have experience of the greater world beyond the rather insular village.

Popaul, a native of the village, has spent the last fifteen years in the Army in both Southeast Asia and Algeria, returning only recently to take over the local butcher shop. Hélène, who comes from Paris, is clearly much more sophisticated and better educated than other women in the village. Her chic hair style and clothes set her apart here, where a woman who smokes in the street, which she does, is considered daring and unconventional. When Popaul walks Hélène home—she lives in an apartment over the school—it's obvious these two will be seeing more of each other. Popaul seems a bit more eager to pursue the friendship than Hélène, boldly showing up in her classroom to bring her a special leg of lamb, offering to paint her apartment. But she doesn't resist the charming and persistent butcher, inviting him to dine with her when she cooks the lamb and later to go mushrooming with her and two of her students.

Life in the dozy village is soon shattered when two women are murdered, stabbed to death apparently at random and without motive, and it becomes apparent that there is a serial killer in the region. Hélène's comfortable, predictable life is also shattered when she becomes involved in the crimes. After taking her students on a field trip to the nearby caves to see the prehistoric cave paintings, she discovers a third victim. This happens after one of the students, a young girl sitting under an overhanging rock, notices something dripping on the piece of bread she is eating and it turns out to be not what it seems at first—raspberry or strawberry jam—but blood, an image that graphically conveys a chilling juxtaposition of the ordinary and the horrifying. That this is the first and only time in the film Chabrol uses such visual shock tactics makes the scene all the more jolting.

Chabrol doesn't equivocate about casting suspicion on Popaul. A loner without any friends aside from Hélène, he seems to dwell on the grisly details of the war atrocities he has witnessed in the Army. When Hélène finds the cigarette lighter she bought Popaul as a present lying near the body, her alarm grows, but rather than tell the police, she takes it home and hides it. Soon after this, Popaul shows up outside Hélène's window late one evening with a jar of brandied cherries he has brought her from Périgueux and asks to come up to her apartment. The five-minute long sequence that follows is a marvel of directorial virtuosity—masterful in the union of image and sound, the succession of apparently functional but subtly artistic shots, and especially the play of expressions on the faces of the solicitous Popaul and the anxiety-ridden Hélène as they eat cherries and carry on a desultory conversation that eventually works its way to Hélène's distress over finding the body. The scene finally resolves itself with Popaul taking from his pocket the lighter Hélène thought she had found near the body and Hélène in her relief asking him to stay the night. The entire sequence is a model of meticulous attention to detail used to create mounting tension that culminates in abrupt release.

In fact, Chabrol's direction of the entire movie could be characterized by his meticulous and unfailingly apt selection of detail. Hélène's apartment over the school, a picture of stylish domesticity with its tasteful, cozy furniture and eclectic array of art prints covering the walls; the unpretentious but faintly bohemian Citroën Deux Chevaux she drives; the tidy, picturesque rustic village with its pollarded trees and place with a central fountain; the surrounding landscape with its idyllic woods, eerie caves filled with stalactites and Cro-Magnon wall paintings, and misty river and fields—Chabrol orchestrates all these surface details to create an atmosphere so specific and real that it is almost palpable. Moreover, he works the same kind of artful magic with his deceptively simple direction, which uses all these things not as visual ends in themselves but as visual aids to propel the narrative through its trajectory. Throughout the entire film there is a fascinating tension between the sensational subject and Chabrol's almost contemplative directing style, entirely free of unnecessary embellishment without ever seeming austere or clinical.

Along with Chabrol, the film belongs to Stéphane Audran, who was at the time married to Chabrol, and Jean Yanne. It's difficult to imagine two actors who could have so convincingly inhabited the characters of Hélène, living in the village almost in self-exile, and the enigmatic and needy Popaul. Like the film itself, these are characters who at first appear simple enough. But as Chabrol adds more layers, revealing details about their backgrounds and showing the ways they interact with other people and especially each other, we begin to see them as quite intricate and individualized human beings. As their friendship develops, it brings out things each has consciously repressed, in the end resulting in an emotional catharsis as draining for the viewer as for the characters in the film. In both subject and style, Le Boucher is something of a paradox—a film that is stark without being bleak, stoical without being grim.

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The death of Claude Chabrol at the age of eighty was announced on September 12. Because this is the first film of his I've seen, I hesitated to give it a full **** rating. But the more I reflected on its virtues—its concision, restraint, absolute surety of technique, strong sense of character and place, and tolerant view of human fallibility—the more I felt it deserved my highest rating. I've added more of Chabrol's movies to my Netflix queue and will be watching them in the coming weeks and months.