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Sunday, December 6, 2009
Monday, November 30, 2009
The Theater of Life: Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach
"Theatricality always fascinated Renoir."
The theater has intrigued many of the great filmmakers, inspiring them to examine the blurring of the distinctions between acting and life. Impersonation, disguise, deception, and hiding behind a false personality—all of these examples of the irruption of theatricality into real life and staples of many genres in literature and film—are devices found, for instance, in a number of Alfred Hitchcock's thrillers (The Lady Vanishes, Spellbound, Notorious, Vertigo, Psycho to name some of the most obvious). Ingmar Bergman was intensely interested in the interplay between personality and performance and probed the subject time and again, from his first masterpiece, Sawdust and Tinsel, to Persona to his last theatrical feature, Fanny and Alexander. Aside from Persona, few movies I've seen have been so thoroughly steeped in the parallels between the theater and reality and in the concept of life as performance as Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach (1952).
In the movie, the great Anna Magnani plays Camilla, the lead actress in a troupe of Italian commedia dell'arte players who travel to Peru in the 1700s. When they arrive, they find the whole trip has been a fiasco. There is no theater for them to perform in, the local innkeeper who has engaged them practically places them in servitude to pay off the cost of their passage, the local nobles shun them as too common, and the natives who attend their performances are unskilled in the respectful behavior of theatergoers. Camilla, who has spent the five-month sea voyage sleeping in a magnificent golden carriage being shipped to the colonial viceroy and seized upon it as the symbol of the golden opportunities waiting in the New World, is bitterly disappointed at the bleak reality she finds there.
When the viceroy, Ferdinand (Duncan Lamont), becomes besotted with her, the fortunes of the troupe begin to change. For the rest of the movie, she not only becomes involved in romantic intrigue, but also becomes the center of political intrigue when Ferdinand gives her the coach she covets as a present. This causes a revolt by the nobles, who proceed to depose Ferdinand and sue the bishop, who is the ultimate authority in all such decisions, to support their wishes and order the viceroy's execution.
The movie is part romantic farce, part social farce, and part political farce. These strains intersect in a very funny sequence in which Ferdinand races from room to room as the council of nobles meets in one room in an attempt to force him to sign a decree taking the golden coach back from Camilla and giving it to them, while the furious Camilla waits for him in another room obstinately refusing to relinquish the coach, and her competitor for his affections, Ferdinand's haughty former mistress, a widowed noblewoman, waits in yet another room trying to persuade him to give up the common Camilla and return to her. The sequence is staged, acted, and filmed in a style straight out of French farce.
The viceroy is attracted to Camilla not only by her earthy dynamism and anarchic spontaneity—a sharp contrast to the affected languor of the local noblewomen, with their mannered behavior and highly artificial appearance—but also by the fact that it is only with her that he can abandon his role as a political figurehead and be himself. This is expressed in their first meeting, at a formal dance for the nobility at the viceroy's palace, when he ushers Camilla to a secluded balcony and removes his wig, complaining that it's far too hot to wear something so absurdly uncomfortable. With everyone else he is formal and calculating, forever in the midst of a political or romantic power game in which he must be constantly on his guard to press his advantage and protect his position. But with Camilla he relaxes, and in the entire movie, it is only when he is with her that he ever laughs.
The central irony of the movie is that the nobility are in a way professional performers just like the actors, their lives governed by prescribed conventions of behavior every bit as formulaic as the set plots of commedia dell'arte that Camilla and her troupe perform nightly. The difference is that the actors have a real life when they are not onstage, and the nobles don't. For the professional performers, there is a clear distinction between acting and being. For them these are discrete states: they are either "on" or "off."
In the lives of the nobility, by contrast, this distinction does not, indeed cannot, exist. They are always "on," always performing, and they don't even seem aware of it. Everything about them—their arch posing, elaborate wigs and attire, pompous manners and diction, and stately dances—exists to sustain the grandiose illusion of entitlement that keeps them in power and wealth. The actors know the difference between acting and life and drop their stage roles when they are not working, but the nobles can never afford to drop their masks, for it is through the manipulation of appearances that they maintain their control over society.
For the viceroy and the other nobles, the golden coach itself is a symbol of privilege. Ferdinand freely acknowledges that this was the purpose of ordering the coach, as a symbol to impress upon the natives (and even though he doesn't say so, clearly upon the other nobles) his social and political status, to remind them as they see him riding in it of the hierarchical power structure of colonial Spain and of his own supreme position in the colony. This is why the nobles become so incensed when Ferdinand gives the coach to Camilla, because he treats it as a personal possession, not as a symbol of power and wealth. And they tell him openly the reason they insist on having it for themselves is the impression it will make on the natives when they see their social superiors riding in it—yet another example of illusion and performance merging with reality.
Romantic complications ensue when Camilla, already being pursued by Felipe, the leading man in her troupe, becomes involved not only with the viceroy, but also with the local celebrity, a toreador named Ramón. While attending a bullfight (itself another kind of highly ritualized performance), she becomes so caught up in the drama of the situation that she impulsively throws the golden necklace the viceroy has given her to the victorious toreador, who interprets it as a token of her affection. In another farcical and highly theatrical scene, in the background Felipe and Ramón fight a duel over Camilla with swords while in the foreground the viceroy, who has refused to give in to the demands of the nobles over the coach and resigned himself to the loss of his power and his life, says goodbye to Camilla on the night before the bishop arrives to sign his death warrant.
But in the end the viceroy is not deposed or executed. The resourceful Camilla outwits all of her noble adversaries by grasping, as they do not, the power of theater over life. How, you may be asking, does she put this knowledge to practical purpose? By recognizing that there is one powerful person with more invested in the maintenance of position through symbolism, ritual, and performance than the nobles themselves: the bishop, the man who has the final say in all that happens in the colony. For what could possibly be more theatrical than the pageantry of the Roman Catholic church? Costumes, props, music, stylized movement, elevated language—the church incorporates in its rites the same elements as the theater. By making a gift of the golden coach to the bishop, Camilla not only saves Ferdinand's life, but proves herself the most masterful dramatic strategist—and plotter—of the lot by correctly gauging the irresistible appeal of the coach's grandeur to the bishop's vanity. In thanking Camilla for her gift, the bishop actually says with a straight face that now when he is driven to give the last rites to a dying peasant, he will arrive in a vehicle befitting his position as spiritual head of the colony!
The Golden Coach benefits greatly from its Technicolor cinematography by the director's nephew, Claude Renoir, who worked with Jean Renoir on several of his movies. Filmed at Cinecittà in Rome, the movie has a gleaming, silvery glow that mirrors the sunblanched desert tones of the sky, sand, stone, and stucco of its setting. The film also benefits from the music of Vivaldi, which is contemporary with its setting and which Renoir says he used as an inspiration while planning the movie. But above all it benefits from the presence of the magnificent Anna Magnani. When unrestrained, Magnani can sometimes be just a bit too much larger-than-life. But here she has just the right amount of exuberance, willfulness, and voluptuousness. It's easy to see why the viceroy becomes so enamored of her, for her appeal shines through not so much in physical beauty as in her sensuousness, her liveliness, and her robust enjoyment of life—all qualities lacking in the effete noblewomen the viceroy normally socializes with and romances.
But most of all, Magnani's beauty is expressed through her huge, soulful, bovine eyes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the final scene of the movie. Like Olivier's Henry V, The Golden Coach opens and closes in a theater, and the entire movie is framed as a stage performance. In the last scene, the curtain descends, and the camera draws back to show the proscenium. Don Antonio, the manager of the troupe, stands to the left and delivers an epilogue on the superiority of the theater to "so-called real life." As the camera moves in for a medium close shot of Magnani, standing dead in the center of the stage in front of the curtain, she mutters distractedly, "Felipe, the bishop, Ramón, the viceroy . . . disappeared, gone."
"Do you miss them?" Don Felipe asks her.
"A little," she answers wistfully, raising those dark, melancholy eyes and looking directly into the camera, which lingers on her face in a haunting final shot that in its power and beauty rivals the last shot of Garbo in Queen Christina.
—David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (2004)
The theater has intrigued many of the great filmmakers, inspiring them to examine the blurring of the distinctions between acting and life. Impersonation, disguise, deception, and hiding behind a false personality—all of these examples of the irruption of theatricality into real life and staples of many genres in literature and film—are devices found, for instance, in a number of Alfred Hitchcock's thrillers (The Lady Vanishes, Spellbound, Notorious, Vertigo, Psycho to name some of the most obvious). Ingmar Bergman was intensely interested in the interplay between personality and performance and probed the subject time and again, from his first masterpiece, Sawdust and Tinsel, to Persona to his last theatrical feature, Fanny and Alexander. Aside from Persona, few movies I've seen have been so thoroughly steeped in the parallels between the theater and reality and in the concept of life as performance as Jean Renoir's The Golden Coach (1952).
In the movie, the great Anna Magnani plays Camilla, the lead actress in a troupe of Italian commedia dell'arte players who travel to Peru in the 1700s. When they arrive, they find the whole trip has been a fiasco. There is no theater for them to perform in, the local innkeeper who has engaged them practically places them in servitude to pay off the cost of their passage, the local nobles shun them as too common, and the natives who attend their performances are unskilled in the respectful behavior of theatergoers. Camilla, who has spent the five-month sea voyage sleeping in a magnificent golden carriage being shipped to the colonial viceroy and seized upon it as the symbol of the golden opportunities waiting in the New World, is bitterly disappointed at the bleak reality she finds there.When the viceroy, Ferdinand (Duncan Lamont), becomes besotted with her, the fortunes of the troupe begin to change. For the rest of the movie, she not only becomes involved in romantic intrigue, but also becomes the center of political intrigue when Ferdinand gives her the coach she covets as a present. This causes a revolt by the nobles, who proceed to depose Ferdinand and sue the bishop, who is the ultimate authority in all such decisions, to support their wishes and order the viceroy's execution.
The movie is part romantic farce, part social farce, and part political farce. These strains intersect in a very funny sequence in which Ferdinand races from room to room as the council of nobles meets in one room in an attempt to force him to sign a decree taking the golden coach back from Camilla and giving it to them, while the furious Camilla waits for him in another room obstinately refusing to relinquish the coach, and her competitor for his affections, Ferdinand's haughty former mistress, a widowed noblewoman, waits in yet another room trying to persuade him to give up the common Camilla and return to her. The sequence is staged, acted, and filmed in a style straight out of French farce.
The viceroy is attracted to Camilla not only by her earthy dynamism and anarchic spontaneity—a sharp contrast to the affected languor of the local noblewomen, with their mannered behavior and highly artificial appearance—but also by the fact that it is only with her that he can abandon his role as a political figurehead and be himself. This is expressed in their first meeting, at a formal dance for the nobility at the viceroy's palace, when he ushers Camilla to a secluded balcony and removes his wig, complaining that it's far too hot to wear something so absurdly uncomfortable. With everyone else he is formal and calculating, forever in the midst of a political or romantic power game in which he must be constantly on his guard to press his advantage and protect his position. But with Camilla he relaxes, and in the entire movie, it is only when he is with her that he ever laughs.
The central irony of the movie is that the nobility are in a way professional performers just like the actors, their lives governed by prescribed conventions of behavior every bit as formulaic as the set plots of commedia dell'arte that Camilla and her troupe perform nightly. The difference is that the actors have a real life when they are not onstage, and the nobles don't. For the professional performers, there is a clear distinction between acting and being. For them these are discrete states: they are either "on" or "off."
In the lives of the nobility, by contrast, this distinction does not, indeed cannot, exist. They are always "on," always performing, and they don't even seem aware of it. Everything about them—their arch posing, elaborate wigs and attire, pompous manners and diction, and stately dances—exists to sustain the grandiose illusion of entitlement that keeps them in power and wealth. The actors know the difference between acting and life and drop their stage roles when they are not working, but the nobles can never afford to drop their masks, for it is through the manipulation of appearances that they maintain their control over society.
For the viceroy and the other nobles, the golden coach itself is a symbol of privilege. Ferdinand freely acknowledges that this was the purpose of ordering the coach, as a symbol to impress upon the natives (and even though he doesn't say so, clearly upon the other nobles) his social and political status, to remind them as they see him riding in it of the hierarchical power structure of colonial Spain and of his own supreme position in the colony. This is why the nobles become so incensed when Ferdinand gives the coach to Camilla, because he treats it as a personal possession, not as a symbol of power and wealth. And they tell him openly the reason they insist on having it for themselves is the impression it will make on the natives when they see their social superiors riding in it—yet another example of illusion and performance merging with reality.
Romantic complications ensue when Camilla, already being pursued by Felipe, the leading man in her troupe, becomes involved not only with the viceroy, but also with the local celebrity, a toreador named Ramón. While attending a bullfight (itself another kind of highly ritualized performance), she becomes so caught up in the drama of the situation that she impulsively throws the golden necklace the viceroy has given her to the victorious toreador, who interprets it as a token of her affection. In another farcical and highly theatrical scene, in the background Felipe and Ramón fight a duel over Camilla with swords while in the foreground the viceroy, who has refused to give in to the demands of the nobles over the coach and resigned himself to the loss of his power and his life, says goodbye to Camilla on the night before the bishop arrives to sign his death warrant.
But in the end the viceroy is not deposed or executed. The resourceful Camilla outwits all of her noble adversaries by grasping, as they do not, the power of theater over life. How, you may be asking, does she put this knowledge to practical purpose? By recognizing that there is one powerful person with more invested in the maintenance of position through symbolism, ritual, and performance than the nobles themselves: the bishop, the man who has the final say in all that happens in the colony. For what could possibly be more theatrical than the pageantry of the Roman Catholic church? Costumes, props, music, stylized movement, elevated language—the church incorporates in its rites the same elements as the theater. By making a gift of the golden coach to the bishop, Camilla not only saves Ferdinand's life, but proves herself the most masterful dramatic strategist—and plotter—of the lot by correctly gauging the irresistible appeal of the coach's grandeur to the bishop's vanity. In thanking Camilla for her gift, the bishop actually says with a straight face that now when he is driven to give the last rites to a dying peasant, he will arrive in a vehicle befitting his position as spiritual head of the colony!
The Golden Coach benefits greatly from its Technicolor cinematography by the director's nephew, Claude Renoir, who worked with Jean Renoir on several of his movies. Filmed at Cinecittà in Rome, the movie has a gleaming, silvery glow that mirrors the sunblanched desert tones of the sky, sand, stone, and stucco of its setting. The film also benefits from the music of Vivaldi, which is contemporary with its setting and which Renoir says he used as an inspiration while planning the movie. But above all it benefits from the presence of the magnificent Anna Magnani. When unrestrained, Magnani can sometimes be just a bit too much larger-than-life. But here she has just the right amount of exuberance, willfulness, and voluptuousness. It's easy to see why the viceroy becomes so enamored of her, for her appeal shines through not so much in physical beauty as in her sensuousness, her liveliness, and her robust enjoyment of life—all qualities lacking in the effete noblewomen the viceroy normally socializes with and romances.
But most of all, Magnani's beauty is expressed through her huge, soulful, bovine eyes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the final scene of the movie. Like Olivier's Henry V, The Golden Coach opens and closes in a theater, and the entire movie is framed as a stage performance. In the last scene, the curtain descends, and the camera draws back to show the proscenium. Don Antonio, the manager of the troupe, stands to the left and delivers an epilogue on the superiority of the theater to "so-called real life." As the camera moves in for a medium close shot of Magnani, standing dead in the center of the stage in front of the curtain, she mutters distractedly, "Felipe, the bishop, Ramón, the viceroy . . . disappeared, gone."
"Do you miss them?" Don Felipe asks her.
"A little," she answers wistfully, raising those dark, melancholy eyes and looking directly into the camera, which lingers on her face in a haunting final shot that in its power and beauty rivals the last shot of Garbo in Queen Christina.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Brief Reviews: Two by Samuel Fuller
SHOCK CORRIDOR (1963) **½
"The picture that breaks the shock barrier!" proclaims the trailer to this movie directed by Samuel Fuller. The real shock here is that the man who directed Pickup on South Street and The Big Red One could have made such a preposterous movie as this one, evidently in perfect seriousness. In the film Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck), an investigative newspaper reporter of overpowering ambition, is convinced he will win a Pulitzer Prize by impersonating a madman, having himself admitted to a mental hospital, and solving the murder of a patient that took place there a year before. He plans to do this by pretending to have an incestuous sexual obsession with his sister, who is actually his girl friend, Cathy (Constance Towers).
This plot allows Fuller to portray mental illness in the most outrageous ways, his concept of mental illness consisting of a pastiche of a little bit of knowledge and a large helping of myth, imagination, and misinformation. The patients at the hospital show the most clichéd symptoms of psychosis, shuffling around like zombies, lounging about in catatonic stupors, or indulging in compulsive repetitive behaviors. In their "mad" scenes, the entire cast tends to overact without restraint. Fuller also throws in gratuitously lurid details (Cathy is a stripper in a sleazy nightclub) and dialogue: "My love for you goes up and down like a thermometer," Johnny says to an imaginary Cathy his first night in the hospital. "I used to work in the female wing, but the nympho ward got too dangerous for me," a friendly orderly confides to Johnny. In fact, the highlight of the movie is the scene in which Johnny gets trapped in the "nympho ward," where a pack of wild-eyed females surround him, throw him to the floor, and maul him.
Eventually Johnny gets around to interviewing the three witnesses to the murder, lunatics who fortunately snap into lucidity just long enough to reveal important evidence about the crime. These characters allow Fuller, who also wrote the screenplay, to inject into the plot heavy-handed commentary on some of the big political issues of the time—political defectors, segregation, and the Cold War. They also allow him to depict some of the more dramatic psychotic disorders—delusions of grandeur, dissociative identity (multiple personality) disorder, and regression to an infantile state. By the end of the movie, Johnny has solved the murder but been so traumatized by his experiences in the hospital that he develops a bad case of "catatonic schizophrenia."
Is there a reason to watch this movie? Well, yes, especially for fans of Fuller. Despite its sensationalistic excesses (and frequent unintentional hilarity), it is so flamboyantly directed, so imaginative in its visualizations (especially considering that it was shot in ten days on one set), and so unexpectedly and consistently over-the-top that it never fails to entertain.
THE STEEL HELMET (1951) ***½
In an excerpt from an interview I saw recently on Turner Classic Movies, Samuel Fuller spoke of the transition from being a journalist and novelist to becoming a movie director. He said he realized that as a film director he didn't need to use words to tell the story, that he could do this with the camera and the images. If Shock Corridor—with its long-winded speechifying and constant voice-over internal monologue narration by the main character—belies this observation, The Steel Helmet, in contrast, clearly illustrates it.
The movie takes place during the Korean War and was filmed during the early days of that conflict. Sgt. Zack (Gene Evans, excellent in the first of six films he made with Fuller), the lone survivor of a massacre by North Korean troops, tries to find his way back to his unit, along the way picking up a young Korean orphan and joining another group of soldiers who have become separated from their unit. After groping their way through a dense fog, the group eventually stumble on a deserted, pagoda-like Buddhist temple and hole up there, unaware that a North Korean sniper is hiding on the upper level of the building.
Visually, Fuller makes the most of the sequence in the fog and especially the temple, where much of the movie takes place. His camera glides around the interior of the temple and moves fluidly from level to level. Interspersed as a sort of unifying image are recurrent cuts to the giant statue of the Buddha dominating the interior of the temple, with its serene facial expression that forms such a contrast to the tension between the soldiers and to the danger they face from both the sniper inside the temple and the enemy troops closing in from outside.
But perhaps the most fascinating thing about the movie is how much it seems a trial version of Fuller's nearly three-hour long WW II epic The Big Red One (1980), with many elements from The Steel Helmet worked into that later masterwork and more fully developed. The Steel Helmet opens with a shot of Sgt. Zack lying in a field of dead soldiers with a bullet hole in his helmet, prefiguring the scene on the beach during the Normandy invasion in The Big Red One when The Sergeant (Lee Marvin) shoots a bullet through the helmet of a fallen soldier as a warning of what will happen to any soldiers who might pretend to be hit. The gruff Sgt. Zack, with his half-smoked cigar permanently stuck in his mouth, resembles both Fuller himself and Fuller's alter ego in The Big Red One, Pvt. Zab (Robert Carradine). The Korean orphan brings to mind the dying boy Marvin rescues from the concentration camp. At one point in The Steel Helmet Sgt. Zack tells of an enlisted man he served with in WW II who kept a detailed diary of his experiences, just like Pvt. Zab in The Big Red One. And he also reminisces about his sergeant in that war and quotes him as saying on the beach at Normandy on D-Day, "There are two kinds of men here: those who are dead and those who are about to die." This is, in fact, the most familiar line of dialogue from the later film, repeated verbatim by Marvin as he directs his soldiers when they land on the beach at Normandy. (Interestingly, Robert Mitchum has a very similar line in the 1962 D-Day epic The Longest Day: "Only two kinds of people are gonna stay on this beach: those that are already dead and those that are gonna die.")
Aside from some dated Cold War rhetoric, it's not necessary to gloss over any deficiencies in The Steel Helmet—filmed in ten days mostly in L.A.'s Griffith Park and in the studio with stock footage interpolated, on a budget reported to be only $100,000—to appreciate the feeling and the visual imagination Fuller put into the movie. And the resemblances to The Big Red One show how meaningful and how formative Fuller's own war experiences were to him and to the view of life he expressed in his films.
"The picture that breaks the shock barrier!" proclaims the trailer to this movie directed by Samuel Fuller. The real shock here is that the man who directed Pickup on South Street and The Big Red One could have made such a preposterous movie as this one, evidently in perfect seriousness. In the film Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck), an investigative newspaper reporter of overpowering ambition, is convinced he will win a Pulitzer Prize by impersonating a madman, having himself admitted to a mental hospital, and solving the murder of a patient that took place there a year before. He plans to do this by pretending to have an incestuous sexual obsession with his sister, who is actually his girl friend, Cathy (Constance Towers).
This plot allows Fuller to portray mental illness in the most outrageous ways, his concept of mental illness consisting of a pastiche of a little bit of knowledge and a large helping of myth, imagination, and misinformation. The patients at the hospital show the most clichéd symptoms of psychosis, shuffling around like zombies, lounging about in catatonic stupors, or indulging in compulsive repetitive behaviors. In their "mad" scenes, the entire cast tends to overact without restraint. Fuller also throws in gratuitously lurid details (Cathy is a stripper in a sleazy nightclub) and dialogue: "My love for you goes up and down like a thermometer," Johnny says to an imaginary Cathy his first night in the hospital. "I used to work in the female wing, but the nympho ward got too dangerous for me," a friendly orderly confides to Johnny. In fact, the highlight of the movie is the scene in which Johnny gets trapped in the "nympho ward," where a pack of wild-eyed females surround him, throw him to the floor, and maul him.
Eventually Johnny gets around to interviewing the three witnesses to the murder, lunatics who fortunately snap into lucidity just long enough to reveal important evidence about the crime. These characters allow Fuller, who also wrote the screenplay, to inject into the plot heavy-handed commentary on some of the big political issues of the time—political defectors, segregation, and the Cold War. They also allow him to depict some of the more dramatic psychotic disorders—delusions of grandeur, dissociative identity (multiple personality) disorder, and regression to an infantile state. By the end of the movie, Johnny has solved the murder but been so traumatized by his experiences in the hospital that he develops a bad case of "catatonic schizophrenia."Is there a reason to watch this movie? Well, yes, especially for fans of Fuller. Despite its sensationalistic excesses (and frequent unintentional hilarity), it is so flamboyantly directed, so imaginative in its visualizations (especially considering that it was shot in ten days on one set), and so unexpectedly and consistently over-the-top that it never fails to entertain.
THE STEEL HELMET (1951) ***½
In an excerpt from an interview I saw recently on Turner Classic Movies, Samuel Fuller spoke of the transition from being a journalist and novelist to becoming a movie director. He said he realized that as a film director he didn't need to use words to tell the story, that he could do this with the camera and the images. If Shock Corridor—with its long-winded speechifying and constant voice-over internal monologue narration by the main character—belies this observation, The Steel Helmet, in contrast, clearly illustrates it.
The movie takes place during the Korean War and was filmed during the early days of that conflict. Sgt. Zack (Gene Evans, excellent in the first of six films he made with Fuller), the lone survivor of a massacre by North Korean troops, tries to find his way back to his unit, along the way picking up a young Korean orphan and joining another group of soldiers who have become separated from their unit. After groping their way through a dense fog, the group eventually stumble on a deserted, pagoda-like Buddhist temple and hole up there, unaware that a North Korean sniper is hiding on the upper level of the building.
Visually, Fuller makes the most of the sequence in the fog and especially the temple, where much of the movie takes place. His camera glides around the interior of the temple and moves fluidly from level to level. Interspersed as a sort of unifying image are recurrent cuts to the giant statue of the Buddha dominating the interior of the temple, with its serene facial expression that forms such a contrast to the tension between the soldiers and to the danger they face from both the sniper inside the temple and the enemy troops closing in from outside.But perhaps the most fascinating thing about the movie is how much it seems a trial version of Fuller's nearly three-hour long WW II epic The Big Red One (1980), with many elements from The Steel Helmet worked into that later masterwork and more fully developed. The Steel Helmet opens with a shot of Sgt. Zack lying in a field of dead soldiers with a bullet hole in his helmet, prefiguring the scene on the beach during the Normandy invasion in The Big Red One when The Sergeant (Lee Marvin) shoots a bullet through the helmet of a fallen soldier as a warning of what will happen to any soldiers who might pretend to be hit. The gruff Sgt. Zack, with his half-smoked cigar permanently stuck in his mouth, resembles both Fuller himself and Fuller's alter ego in The Big Red One, Pvt. Zab (Robert Carradine). The Korean orphan brings to mind the dying boy Marvin rescues from the concentration camp. At one point in The Steel Helmet Sgt. Zack tells of an enlisted man he served with in WW II who kept a detailed diary of his experiences, just like Pvt. Zab in The Big Red One. And he also reminisces about his sergeant in that war and quotes him as saying on the beach at Normandy on D-Day, "There are two kinds of men here: those who are dead and those who are about to die." This is, in fact, the most familiar line of dialogue from the later film, repeated verbatim by Marvin as he directs his soldiers when they land on the beach at Normandy. (Interestingly, Robert Mitchum has a very similar line in the 1962 D-Day epic The Longest Day: "Only two kinds of people are gonna stay on this beach: those that are already dead and those that are gonna die.")
Aside from some dated Cold War rhetoric, it's not necessary to gloss over any deficiencies in The Steel Helmet—filmed in ten days mostly in L.A.'s Griffith Park and in the studio with stock footage interpolated, on a budget reported to be only $100,000—to appreciate the feeling and the visual imagination Fuller put into the movie. And the resemblances to The Big Red One show how meaningful and how formative Fuller's own war experiences were to him and to the view of life he expressed in his films.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Elisha Cuthbert in Famous Actors and Actresses
Elisha Cuthbert
Elisha Cuthbert
Elisha Cuthbert
Famous Actresses Elisha Cuthbert
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