Brief Reviews

THE MIRACLE WOMAN (1931) ***½
This is a most impressive early sound picture, more compelling and well-crafted than most of the movies of its time I've seen. Barbara Stanwyck plays Florence Fallon, a young woman who with the help of a sleazy showman, Bob Hornsby (Sam Hardy), becomes a celebrity evangelist/miracle healer in the style of Aimee Semple McPherson. The daughter of a minister who dies after the congregation he had served for many years replaces him with a younger man, she is motivated by bitterness and revenge, and by disillusionment with what she sees as the hypocrisy of those who profess to be true believers. When Hornsby sees her deliver a fiery denunciation of her father's parishioners from the pulpit, he realizes what a potential goldmine she is with her histrionic evangelism and her ability to make religious platitudes seem sincere. "George M. Cohan said, 'Leave 'em laughing,'" he tells her. "I want [you] to leave 'em crying."

Her revival meetings are theatrical, stage-managed affairs—almost religious spectacles—complete with shills planted in the audience to fake miracle healings and help Florence fleece the gullible for contributions. Problems begin when Florence meets and falls in love with a blind war hero, John Carson (David Manners), whom she saves from suicide, and begins to question her ruthless exploitation of her followers' trust. The possessive Hornsby, a sort of malevolent Pygmalion, senses he is losing control of Florence and coerces her into continuing their scam by threatening to implicate her in crimes he himself has committed, including bribery, fraud, embezzlement, and even murder.

Stanwyck is sensational in the title role, relentlessly intense as she maneuvers through a whole gamut of emotions. She is by turns a hardened cynic out to manipulate the credulous with her showmanship and phony piety, a frustrated victim being controlled by the menacing Hornsby, and a disillusioned and vulnerable woman susceptible to redemption by the goodness of her blind lover. But whatever emotions she expresses, she always remains believable and basically sympathetic.

Capra's direction is assured, and he keeps things moving briskly. The emotional intensity of the plot surges and relaxes, but Capra's sure-handed staging never for a moment lets the movie's interest level flag. Highlights include the lavishly detailed, circus-like revival meeting scenes, including one in which Stanwyck delivers a rousing sermon on the strength of faith while inside a cage of lions; a tender and humorous birthday party scene with Florence and John; a dramatic night scene on the beach between Florence, John, and Hornsby in which she defiantly confesses her charlatanism to John; and a spectacular fire that destroys Florence's Temple of Happiness in the movie's climax.

Florence and John in the lions' cage

Capra's expert staging of these sequences is aided tremendously by the inventive photographic effects of cinematographer Joseph Walker, including impressively mobile tracking shots, startling whip-pans, and imaginative camera placement—for example, looking into John's room from inside its fireplace, with roaring flames in the foreground between the viewer and John and Florence. Many shots of the revival scenes are composed showing Stanwyck from the rear with upraised arms, the silhouette of her body visible through the backlit diaphanous white gown she wears. This is one of the most watchable movies of its era I've seen—one of Capra's best early directorial efforts and one of Stanwyck's best and most sizzling early performances.

THE ENIGMA OF KASPAR HAUSER (1974) ****
Directed by Werner Herzog, this movie is a part-factual, part-speculative work based on a true story. In 1828 a young man is found early one morning standing in a deserted street in Nuremberg, Germany, holding in one hand a note saying his name is Kaspar Hauser and in the other hand a prayer book. Able to speak only one nonsensical sentence, he seems disoriented and confused. He appears to be neither violent nor mentally defective, only unacquainted with normal human life.

Kaspar appears on a street in Nuremberg

Exhibited as a freak in a circus, he is observed by a professor who adopts him and undertakes to teach him the ways of civilized humans and the German language. Kaspar quickly learns to communicate, and the story he tells is a bizarre one. He claims to have been kept chained in a dark cellar for nearly his entire life and never to have encountered another human being (food was left for him while he was sleeping) or to have seen anything outside the cellar where he was imprisoned. Under the professor's tutelage, Kaspar becomes something of a celebrity. There is much speculation—most of it absurdly fanciful, for example, that he is the castoff heir of the royal House of Baden—about his true origins before he is mysteriously murdered a few years later.

Filming largely in the Bavarian village of Dinkelsbühl, which looks essentially unchanged since the early 19th century, Herzog authentically recreates the life of the time. In the midst of this historical realism, he interpolates brief dreamlike scenes filmed in an anomalously distorted style. The overall effect of this historical authenticity punctuated with unexpected departures into surrealism is to suggest how utterly strange life in his new environment is for Kaspar. No matter how much he learns about the ways of human beings, his conception of life always keeps its edge of strangeness, threatening to slide at any moment into weirdness, if only briefly. Like a mystic, he is subject to occasional visions and imaginary events that seem to the viewer baffling and mysterious, but to Kaspar as genuine as his real experiences.

Kaspar is played by a 41-year old street singer named Bruno S., who didn't want his full name used in order to preserve his privacy. It's hard to imagine that anyone else, especially a professional actor, could have given such a naked, real performance, so spontaneous, instinctive, and entirely lacking in artifice does he seem. And it's hard to imagine that the movie would be half so effective with anyone else in the title role. One of the oddest supporting characters in the film is a scribe who is present almost from the beginning of the movie until its very end, obsessively documenting every experience Kaspar has, from his discovery in the town right up to the results of his autopsy. Yet these factual details provide no real insight into the man. The insight is provided by Herzog and Bruno S., whom it's clear played off each other and inspired each other like two complementary halves of a whole, Herzog providing the intellect and vision and Bruno the heart and emotions.

The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is unlike any other movie I've seen: It incorporates dreamlike elements that in a strictly logical and narrative sense don't seem to belong in an otherwise realistic movie, yet that on some extra-logical level do enhance the narrative without compromising its coherence, suggesting through the story of Kaspar Hauser that the nature and meaning of human existence can be explained only so far before hitting the impenetrable wall of the inexplicable.

DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978) ****
Terrence Malick is one of the great contemporary American directors, a filmmaker with a style as distinctive as that of David Lynch, yet he has directed only four movies. When you see how meticulously conceived, written, photographed, and edited his movies are, this deliberately unhasty approach to filmmaking becomes entirely understandable. His first movie, Badlands (1973), seemed to follow a clear plan determined in advance, with little improvisation. But beginning with Malick's second movie, Days of Heaven, his work seems to be the result of a combination of advance planning and spontaneous inspiration taking place at the editing stage.

I have heard that Malick is an exceptionally well-read man, and in Days of Heaven I detect two clear literary influences. The plot of the movie resembles Henry James's novel The Wings of the Dove. In the early 1900s two lovers, Bill (Richard Gere) and Abby (Brooke Adams), pretend to be brother and sister. When Bill is fired from his job in a steel mill in Chicago after a dispute with the foreman, he and Abby, along with his young sister Linda (Linda Manz), travel south seeking work as itinerant farm workers. They end up in the Texas panhandle, where the wheat harvest is just beginning. The wealthy owner of the farm where they find work (Sam Shepard) quickly becomes obsessed with Abby, and when Bill overhears the farmer's doctor telling him he has only a few months to live, he persuades Abby to allow herself to be romanced by the farmer and to marry him, with the expectation that he will soon die and she will inherit the farm. Two forces thwart this scheme, though. The farm foreman (Robert Wilke) is immediately suspicious of Bill and Abby. And the farmer's love for Abby cures him of whatever disease the doctor thought he had.

The other literary influence I detect is apparent in the visual element of the movie and makes an even stronger impression than the narrative. This element resembles the vividly atmospheric rural locales of certain novels of Thomas Hardy and the themes in those novels of the conflict between man and nature as humans attempt to tame and dominate nature in an early Industrial Age agrarian setting. The people in the movie are dwarfed and made insignificant by the vast, flat landscapes of the plains and the golden fields of wheat, the imperatives of following the rhythms of the crops, and the challenges to human endeavor posed by the physical world. Some of the strongest images in the movie are of the wheat being grown, being harvested, being processed. Scenes of frenzied harvesting, a sudden invasion of locusts, and the nighttime burning of the fields are especially dramatic and hypnotic. Such images contrast strongly with those of artifacts of early 20th-century industrialism—steel mills, steam-driven trains, the first automobiles, primitive farm machinery, even the World War I-era airplanes of a flying circus.

The invasion of the locusts

Visual and thematic preoccupations present in all of Malick's movies appear here: scenes of the limitless sky overhead shot through overhanging trees, of ever-flowing rivers, of animal and insect life coexisting with human beings shown in almost documentary fashion, of people attempting to survive in immense landscapes that barely accommodate their presence. All this is imbued with a deterministic sense—not unlike that of Hardy—of the lack of control of individuals over their destinies, which seem governed instead by hostile human enemies, their own self-destructive impulses, and a benignly indifferent natural world.

The movie is filled with arrestingly beautiful images, and a great deal of credit for this must go to Nestor Almendros, the Spanish-born cinematographer best known for his work with François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer, who won an Oscar for his work here. (Additional photography was done by another Oscar winner, Haskell Wexler, who has said he tried to duplicate the work of Almendros rather than impose his own style on the parts he shot.) Almendros largely eschewed artificial lighting, particularly in the many outdoor scenes, in favor of natural sources of light. Those outdoor scenes were shot mostly late in the long summer days on location in Saskatchewan, and the result is nothing short of stunning, with one riveting image following another. The voice-over narration typical of Malick, the performances, and the plot are lean, while the visual element is of a contrasting richness seldom found on the screen. Days of Heaven is in all ways the expression of a fully developed and uniquely personal cinematic style associated only with the greatest film directors.

The Cinematic New World of Terrence Malick

The career of the screenwriter and director Terrence Malick is a curious one. Since directing his first movie, Badlands, in 1973, he has directed only three other movies—Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005). Malick is a reclusive man who doesn't give interviews, allow photos of himself to be taken, or promote his work. Yet he is a consistent favorite of movie critics, film scholars, and organizers of film festivals. Each of his movies is in a completely different genre. Badlands is a crime-spree movie based on the case of Charles Starkweather and his 14 year-old girl friend Caril Ann Fugate, who went on a similar crime spree in 1958. Days of Heaven is a love-and-betrayal story set in early-20th century rural Texas that bears clear resemblances to Henry James's The Wings of the Dove. The Thin Red Line is a World War II combat movie set during the battle of Guadalcanal in the Pacific.

The script of Malick's fourth movie, The New World, which is about the well-known story of Pocahontas and Capt. John Smith, was completed in the late 1970s. Yet it was nearly twenty years before the movie was filmed and released, in 2005. At the time I had seen only Days of Heaven, and I was most impressed by its look (it was photographed by the great Nestor Almendros) and its distinctive style. Reviews of The New World piqued my curiosity, especially the one by Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle—one of the best-written movie reviews I've ever read—who chose it as the best movie of 2005. But not being a particular fan of movies about American history, I was not enthusiastic about the movie's subject. I recently got a chance to watch The New World, and I'm only sorry that I waited so long.

From its opening images, The New World is a visual marvel. It begins with the arrival of the English colonists in Virginia as seen by the Native Americans on the shore. Malick captures the arrival in images that emphasize its strangeness to the natives. The boats appearing suddenly in the clear, unbroken blue of the sea might as well be alien spaceships in a science fiction movie arriving unannounced from a clear blue sky, so bizarre does the event, as shown from the point of view of the natives, seem. When the colonists disembark, their unvarying dress, with its black fabric and tall hats, might be the military uniforms of alien beings from a distant galaxy. And the metal armor and Cavalier hats of the soldiers resemble the carapaces of insect- or robot-like creatures from outer space. The natives, who moments before had been frolicking in the tall grass, creep up gingerly to these people and touch them and knock on their armor before accepting that they are indeed human beings.

The Native Americans in The New World are depicted with what appears to be painstaking authenticity. Their dress, their dwellings, their customs, their social system—all the accouterments of their culture are presented with almost documentary precision. The uncorrupted nature of their "noble savage" existence may be somewhat exaggerated, but the detail with which the Native Americans are drawn always makes them seem living people and not just idealized constructs.

Relations between the two groups are at first friendly. With the help of the natives, the British establish a rudimentary community before their leader (Christopher Plummer) sails back to England for more supplies, leaving Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell) in charge. When the expedition fails to return before autumn and their supplies are nearly exhausted, Smith sails upriver to the winter home of the natives to seek help from them. What follows is an extended idyll with the love affair between Smith and the chief's favorite daughter, Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher), at its center.

When Smith does return to the fort, he finds that order has broken down, that in his absence he has been deposed as leader of the colonists and replaced with a kind of oppressive totalitarianism. Relations between the Native Americans and the settlers have also deteriorated. The natives have at last comprehended the expansionist aims of the English, and the English, who once referred to the Native Americans as "the naturals," now disparagingly call them "the savages." Each side now considers the other the enemy, and the colonists' dwellings have become a stockade fortified against attack.

Pocahontas, exiled by her father for what he sees as her betrayal of her people, takes refuge at the fort, where she is sheltered but treated coldly by the colonists. When the ships from England finally return, Smith has been recalled by the king to lead another sea expedition, this time in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. Before he departs, he leaves instructions that Pocahontas be told that he has been lost at sea and is dead. The devastated girl is befriended by another colonist, John Rolfe (Christian Bale), whom she eventually marries although she still pines for Smith. Adopting the dress and manners of an Englishwoman, she returns with Rolfe and their child to England, where she is regarded as an exotic celebrity, living on his family estate. She does finally encounter John Smith and learn the truth, and she at last is able to let go of her passionate emotional attachment to him.

What is most exceptional about The New World is less the story it tells, although it is a remarkable one, than the way Malick tells that story. Eschewing conventional methods of film narrative, Malick tells his story largely through a succession of almost silent images combined with voice-over narration by the three principal characters—Smith, Rolfe, and especially Pocahontas. There is very little real dialogue, particularly in the first part of the movie, and few scenes are fully dramatized in the conventional manner. Most shots are quite brief, lasting only 3-10 seconds, and most camera set-ups are static. When longer takes do occur, or when the camera does move, the effect is all the more striking. A good example is the long unbroken take that happens when Smith returns to the fort and walks inside. The shot lasts for a couple of minutes as the camera roams all around the interior of the fort, following Smith's gaze, to show how desperate conditions are and how suspicious and hostile the inhabitants have become.

Each individual shot is almost like a beautifully composed and rendered painting. As one shot follows another, there is often little obvious spatial connection, yet there is always a subtle continuity and progression in the sequence of images as they propel the narrative onward, continuously moving it in a forward direction. The brevity of each shot and the fact that the same camera set-up is rarely, if ever, repeated indicate that each shot, and its precise placement in the orderly series of images that make up the movie, must have been either meticulously planned in advance or meticulously devised at the editing stage. Either way, the complexity of this method of constructing a movie that runs 2 hours 15 minutes in its shortest version is mind-boggling.

Frequent images and sounds of the natural world act as a unifying element. We constantly see images of water—rivers, swamps and marshes, the sea—of the sky, of plants and trees. The first sound we hear, over the credits, is the song of a wild thrush. (Later, a Native American is shown with two Carolina parakeets, now extinct, perched on his arm.) When Smith begins to teach Pocahontas English, the first words she learns are the names of the things in the natural world—water, tree, earth, sky. These scenes of the natural world contrast markedly with the scenes that take place in England during the last section of the movie. Malick makes 17th-century England, with its oppressive gray skies, seem austerely monochromatic—a cold, damp, and forbidding place. The drab brick buildings and cobbled streets seem hard and colorless compared to the landscapes of Virginia. And the gardens of Rolfe's estate—with their rigidly formal, highly manicured, geometric design typical of the French-style gardens of the time—seem equally unnatural, uninviting, inhuman, and drained of color.

The mesmeric effect of Malick's highly visual way of telling the story is nearly impossible to articulate. I've experienced something like it before with certain films of Eisenstein, Antonioni, and Orson Welles, an effect so subliminal that it is akin almost to cinematic hypnosis. This description might make the movie sound like a sterile formal experiment in the methodology of film narrative and what Andrew Sarris calls "academic montage." But that would be far from the truth, for this is a movie with a strong human element and an emotionally compelling story at its heart.

The main character of the movie and its most fully defined one is Pocahontas, and the heart of the movie is her story. It is first of all a love story, between Pocahontas and John Smith, and that part of the film is both tenderly moving and intensely emotional. It is the story of Pocahontas finding and losing love, of her losing innocence as she gains experience, of her cultural displacement as she moves through three distinct cultures (Native American, early Colonial American, and 17th-century English), of her journey from girlhood to womanhood and finally death when she was only in her early twenties. Kilcher's Pocahontas is a gentle, sensitive, and intelligent woman who moves through the incredible phases of her life with quiet strength and dignity. It's hard to believe that Q'orianka Kilcher was only fifteen years old when she made this movie, so insightful is her performance, and so utterly authentic her portrayal of the evolution and transformation of Pocahontas.

The New World is an amazing movie because it works on so many levels. It is simultaneously a visual and a narrative work of art, taking the viewer on a journey through history, culture, and the life of one individual woman. It uses cinematic means that are almost beyond analysis or even description to bring to life a story that seems at once particular and universal. It expresses the uniquely personal vision of a film artist who is himself an explorer, a creative adventurer guiding viewers through his own cinematic new world.