Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando
Brando
Top Images Marlon Brando
Monday, August 30, 2010
The Fire Within (1963)
****
Country: France
Director: Louis Malle
Louis Malle's The Fire Within begins in medias res when we meet the main character, Alain Leroy (Maurice Ronet), in a hotel where he has spent the night with a former girl friend. As the film unfolds, more is gradually revealed about Alain. We learn that he is a recovering alcoholic, a patient at what appears to be a very swank private sanatorium in Versailles, just outside Paris. The fees are being paid by his rich wife, who lives in New York and from whom he is separated. When his doctor tells him the cure is complete and it is time to leave, Alain insists he wants to stay at the clinic, that without its regimen to restrain him, he believes he will immediately begin drinking again. Alain's cryptic comments to the doctor about the futility of his life and about death suggest he is suicidally depressed, something which seems quite plain to the viewer but which his doctor dismisses with upbeat platitudes. Later, alone in his room, he opens his brief case, takes out a pistol wrapped in a handkerchief, and contemplates it before putting it back, then walks to the mirror, on which he has written the date July 23, and looks at himself. There can be little doubt about his intentions.
The rest of the film follows Alain through his last day, as he goes to Paris and looks up old friends before returning to the clinic. From these encounters we discover more about him—that he is a writer who is no longer able to write, has been involved in the war in Algeria, has led a dissolute life among rich bohemians, that he invariably rejects suggestions of ways he might repair his life. We also learn that he is well-liked by his friends and that quite a few attractive women—and even some men—find him sexually appealing, while others find his spiritual torpor merely pathetic. Yet even as these details about his life accumulate and our picture of him becomes more complete, one thing is unchanging: our sense of the hopeless, unshakable despair he feels.
While discussions of The Fire Within tend to stress the role of alcoholism in the film, I would say that this is more than a movie about the evils of alcohol. In fact, Alain consistently refuses offers of alcohol and is never shown drunk. In the entire film he takes only one drink, when he furtively gulps down one small glass of cognac that has been left at the next table in a sidewalk cafe. The only effect of the liquor is to make him violently ill. Alain's problems go beyond his dependence on alcohol, which may actually be as much a symptom as a cause—all the way to a pervasive disenchantment with life that colors every moment of the movie. His despair is quite different from both the intellectualized and rather rarefied ennui being explored at the time by Antonioni in films like L'Avventura and L'Eclisse and the almost celebratory alcoholic self-destruction of Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. Malle depicts real mental pain here—not melodramatic agonizing, but the quiet resignation of a man whose life has been drained of all hope. The usual diversions that can pull a person out of such a depressive frame of mind or deaden the pain for a while—love, work, intoxicants—no longer have any effect on Alain.
The Fire Within is what might be called a dramatically level film, its lack of strong emotional highs and lows reflecting Alain's own emotional numbness. Rather than dramatic situations, the film presents a series of subdued encounters between Alain and people from his past. In these encounters, his every action makes it obvious that like many intended suicides, he is revisiting his old haunts to say goodbye. Yet only once—when he visits his friend Eva, an artist played with great sympathy in a cameo by Jeanne Moreau—did I feel any real connection between Alain and these people. For the rest, there seems to be an almost palpable sense of estrangement between them and Alain. At one point he figuratively demonstrates the isolation he feels by reaching out to touch the face of one of his friends but stopping with his fingertips just an inch or so away, explaining that he can reach out but can never actually touch another person. It is this terrible sense of psychic solitude that seems to be the genesis of his withdrawal from life.
From beginning to end, the mood of The Fire Within is one of melancholy. Director Louis Malle works in a muted, unemphatic style, avoiding obvious directorial intrusion as he objectively observes Alain's depression without overdramatizing or sentimentalizing Alain's situation. Interestingly, Malle began shooting in color but quickly switched to black and white, a prudent artistic decision that underscores the colorlessness of Alain's life. The sparing use of pensive piano music by Erik Satie also contributes a great deal to the picture's theme of Alain reflecting on his life before ending it.
But the greatest credit for
the the film's success must go to Maurice Ronet, whose deeply affecting performance is the movie's core. In a film of such intimate focus on his character that the camera would surely reveal the least trace of dishonesty in his performance, his Alain seems absolutely genuine. Ronet immediately establishes Alain's state of mind (and his state of mind is the movie), somehow externalizing and making visible what is essentially interior and invisible, and then sustains it scene by scene for the duration of the film, surely the most difficult thing for a film actor to do. Ronet completely disappears inside Alain, fusing so thoroughly with him that actor and character become one. Wholly internalized and without gimmickry or actorly mannerisms, this is film acting of the highest order.
Aside from a few flashes of dark humor at the clinic near the beginning, The Fire Within is an unrelievedly somber film. Yet Malle's low-key directing style and Ronet's unsentimental performance, entirely without self-pity, create enough emotional distance to make the movie bearable without making it seem cold or aloof. On the contrary, The Fire Within is a film that in its understated treatment of alcoholism and depression, subjects which could easily have become trite and overwrought, manages in its restraint to be all the more moving.
Country: France
Director: Louis Malle
Louis Malle's The Fire Within begins in medias res when we meet the main character, Alain Leroy (Maurice Ronet), in a hotel where he has spent the night with a former girl friend. As the film unfolds, more is gradually revealed about Alain. We learn that he is a recovering alcoholic, a patient at what appears to be a very swank private sanatorium in Versailles, just outside Paris. The fees are being paid by his rich wife, who lives in New York and from whom he is separated. When his doctor tells him the cure is complete and it is time to leave, Alain insists he wants to stay at the clinic, that without its regimen to restrain him, he believes he will immediately begin drinking again. Alain's cryptic comments to the doctor about the futility of his life and about death suggest he is suicidally depressed, something which seems quite plain to the viewer but which his doctor dismisses with upbeat platitudes. Later, alone in his room, he opens his brief case, takes out a pistol wrapped in a handkerchief, and contemplates it before putting it back, then walks to the mirror, on which he has written the date July 23, and looks at himself. There can be little doubt about his intentions.
The rest of the film follows Alain through his last day, as he goes to Paris and looks up old friends before returning to the clinic. From these encounters we discover more about him—that he is a writer who is no longer able to write, has been involved in the war in Algeria, has led a dissolute life among rich bohemians, that he invariably rejects suggestions of ways he might repair his life. We also learn that he is well-liked by his friends and that quite a few attractive women—and even some men—find him sexually appealing, while others find his spiritual torpor merely pathetic. Yet even as these details about his life accumulate and our picture of him becomes more complete, one thing is unchanging: our sense of the hopeless, unshakable despair he feels.While discussions of The Fire Within tend to stress the role of alcoholism in the film, I would say that this is more than a movie about the evils of alcohol. In fact, Alain consistently refuses offers of alcohol and is never shown drunk. In the entire film he takes only one drink, when he furtively gulps down one small glass of cognac that has been left at the next table in a sidewalk cafe. The only effect of the liquor is to make him violently ill. Alain's problems go beyond his dependence on alcohol, which may actually be as much a symptom as a cause—all the way to a pervasive disenchantment with life that colors every moment of the movie. His despair is quite different from both the intellectualized and rather rarefied ennui being explored at the time by Antonioni in films like L'Avventura and L'Eclisse and the almost celebratory alcoholic self-destruction of Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. Malle depicts real mental pain here—not melodramatic agonizing, but the quiet resignation of a man whose life has been drained of all hope. The usual diversions that can pull a person out of such a depressive frame of mind or deaden the pain for a while—love, work, intoxicants—no longer have any effect on Alain.
The Fire Within is what might be called a dramatically level film, its lack of strong emotional highs and lows reflecting Alain's own emotional numbness. Rather than dramatic situations, the film presents a series of subdued encounters between Alain and people from his past. In these encounters, his every action makes it obvious that like many intended suicides, he is revisiting his old haunts to say goodbye. Yet only once—when he visits his friend Eva, an artist played with great sympathy in a cameo by Jeanne Moreau—did I feel any real connection between Alain and these people. For the rest, there seems to be an almost palpable sense of estrangement between them and Alain. At one point he figuratively demonstrates the isolation he feels by reaching out to touch the face of one of his friends but stopping with his fingertips just an inch or so away, explaining that he can reach out but can never actually touch another person. It is this terrible sense of psychic solitude that seems to be the genesis of his withdrawal from life.
From beginning to end, the mood of The Fire Within is one of melancholy. Director Louis Malle works in a muted, unemphatic style, avoiding obvious directorial intrusion as he objectively observes Alain's depression without overdramatizing or sentimentalizing Alain's situation. Interestingly, Malle began shooting in color but quickly switched to black and white, a prudent artistic decision that underscores the colorlessness of Alain's life. The sparing use of pensive piano music by Erik Satie also contributes a great deal to the picture's theme of Alain reflecting on his life before ending it.
But the greatest credit for
the the film's success must go to Maurice Ronet, whose deeply affecting performance is the movie's core. In a film of such intimate focus on his character that the camera would surely reveal the least trace of dishonesty in his performance, his Alain seems absolutely genuine. Ronet immediately establishes Alain's state of mind (and his state of mind is the movie), somehow externalizing and making visible what is essentially interior and invisible, and then sustains it scene by scene for the duration of the film, surely the most difficult thing for a film actor to do. Ronet completely disappears inside Alain, fusing so thoroughly with him that actor and character become one. Wholly internalized and without gimmickry or actorly mannerisms, this is film acting of the highest order.Aside from a few flashes of dark humor at the clinic near the beginning, The Fire Within is an unrelievedly somber film. Yet Malle's low-key directing style and Ronet's unsentimental performance, entirely without self-pity, create enough emotional distance to make the movie bearable without making it seem cold or aloof. On the contrary, The Fire Within is a film that in its understated treatment of alcoholism and depression, subjects which could easily have become trite and overwrought, manages in its restraint to be all the more moving.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Jennifer Lopez Glamour US September Photos | Jennifer Lopez Picture
American actress and singer Jennifer Lopez on the cover page of the fashion magazine Glamour US for the month of September 2010. Jennifer Lopez is looking sexy in this photoshoot with kitty prints.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Men in War (1957)
***½
Country: US
Director: Anthony Mann
Anthony Mann's Men in War, which actually takes place during the Korean War, is aptly titled, for it's one of the finest movies about any war I've seen. The film opens on the morning after a battle between Communists and a small platoon of American troops—around twenty in number—led by Lt. Benson (Robert Ryan). Stranded, their supply truck destroyed, they must make their way back on foot to a nearby hill to rendezvous with the rest of their unit. Almost as soon as they start out, a Jeep comes careering out of the distance, and Lt. Benson commandeers it and its two occupants—the driver, Sgt. Montana (Aldo Ray), and his mute, shell-shocked passenger, his commanding officer whom he calls simply The Colonel (David Keith)—to carry the platoon's weapons and ammunition. The rest of the film details the journey, which lasts several hours, to their destination.
Propelled by a sense of great urgency, the plot is utterly simple, consisting largely of the perils the platoon must deal with in order to reach its goal. These include snipers, land mines, and artillery attacks. The landscape the platoon moves through, rocky and nearly devoid of vegetation, offers little cover, and the sense of being constantly in the open and exposed to attack creates a milieu of unrelenting danger. Mann expertly milks this rather basic story for its full potential, creating a film that even in its infrequent lulls in action still maintains an atmosphere of nail-biting tension.
With such a basic plot, Men in War relies on the interactions of its characters for depth. Mann avoids the common cliché of many war movies of portraying the platoon as an obvious cross-section of ethnic and personality types. As in real groups of this kind, most of the men don't seem that distinct from one another, although a couple—a patient, likable African American medic and the nearly catatonic, battle-fatigued young soldier he cares for—do stand out. Lt. Benson, however, is thoroughly fleshed out, and Robert Ryan, who worked with Mann in three films, fully inhabits the character in one of his most nuanced and sympathetic performances.
Ryan's Lt. Benson is a weary man but a purposeful one, his immediate purpose to complete his mission and report back to his unit with vital information about the situation. At one point he states that his objective is to get just one man back to headquarters. In the meantime, although he views those under his command as resources to be deployed to achieve his strategic goal, he seems not without concern for their welfare. It's just that he sees completion of the mission overriding any consideration of the safety or even survival of himself or his men. Benson is a man of great leadership ability, able to keep his soldiers united in their purpose and focused on the task at hand. A follower of rules and prescribed procedures, he is nonetheless a practical, level-headed person able to gain the cooperation of his men with his confident attitude and skills of persuasion—organized without being a martinet, authoritative without being authoritarian.
The only person this reasonable approach does not succeed with is Sgt. Montana, and it is the clash between the personalities and attitudes of these two that provides the conflict in the film. Montana is Benson's opposite in every way, a maverick dedicated to his own agenda—to get his psychologically wounded Colonel back to safety and medical treatment. When he remarks at one point that The Colonel is the only man who ever addressed him as "son," it becomes clear that a kind of transference between the two has occurred. That The Colonel has become in essence a surrogate father for Montana explains his fierce personal loyalty, which in turn explains his disdain for Benson's mission, his animosity towards Benson, and his defiance of Benson's authority at every turn.
Burly Aldo Ray is quite good at conveying the unsympathetic qualities of Sgt. Montana. Not only is Montana an insolent loner, but he is also an almost paranoiacally suspicious racist who refers to Koreans with derogatory racial epithets, the only person in the film who ever does this. In a key sequence, the platoon encounters several American soldiers in the distance calling out to them and racing towards them. Without warning, Montana opens fire and mows them down. When the astounded platoon reaches the bodies, they discover that the dead men are actually Koreans with uniforms and weapons taken from dead American soldiers. After Benson angrily points out that Montana fired before he could even see their faces and might easily have killed Americans, Montana replies,"I can smell 'em," and adds that his practice is to shoot first and find out who he has killed later. The appalled Benson responds by saying, "God help us if we need men like you to win this war."
David Thomson compares Men in War to Mann's Westerns in the way it "work[s] toward an ordeal by combat that defines honor." In a sense, that's indeed what happens at the end of the film when the group reaches the hill only to find it has been taken by the Communists. Desperate, Benson works out a risky plan to retake the hill, and at this point circumstances force the two adversaries to set aside their considerable differences and work together. In the end, only accommodation between Montana's extremism and Benson's moderation, between Montana's gung-ho machismo and personal hatred of the enemy and Benson's professional shrewdness and detached view of the enemy as just another obstacle to be overcome, allows the two to combine the forces of anarchy and order and move towards a common aim.
Men in War ends with a brief but powerful scene in which Benson and Montana together posthumously "award" to their fallen comrades Silver Stars Montana has been given by The Colonel, each man's behavior in the scene absolutely typical of his essential nature. As the two stand atop the hill they now control, Benson methodically reads off the names of the dead in alphabetical order from a notebook in which he records the details of combat, while Montana tosses the medals over the sandbag parapet of the hill, strewing them randomly over the bodies of the dead soldiers below. I would say that in this scene Men in War arrives at a conception of honor quite unlike the unambiguous moral choice normally found in Mann's Westerns. War, Mann seems to be saying, consists of equal parts method and chaos, of both selfless nobility and selfish ferocity, of great personal sacrifices made to achieve minor victories. In the face of this paradox, honor becomes such a relative term that it ceases to have any clear meaning.
You might also be interested in my post on Samuel Fuller's Korean War movie The Steel Helmet.
Country: US
Director: Anthony Mann
Anthony Mann's Men in War, which actually takes place during the Korean War, is aptly titled, for it's one of the finest movies about any war I've seen. The film opens on the morning after a battle between Communists and a small platoon of American troops—around twenty in number—led by Lt. Benson (Robert Ryan). Stranded, their supply truck destroyed, they must make their way back on foot to a nearby hill to rendezvous with the rest of their unit. Almost as soon as they start out, a Jeep comes careering out of the distance, and Lt. Benson commandeers it and its two occupants—the driver, Sgt. Montana (Aldo Ray), and his mute, shell-shocked passenger, his commanding officer whom he calls simply The Colonel (David Keith)—to carry the platoon's weapons and ammunition. The rest of the film details the journey, which lasts several hours, to their destination.
Propelled by a sense of great urgency, the plot is utterly simple, consisting largely of the perils the platoon must deal with in order to reach its goal. These include snipers, land mines, and artillery attacks. The landscape the platoon moves through, rocky and nearly devoid of vegetation, offers little cover, and the sense of being constantly in the open and exposed to attack creates a milieu of unrelenting danger. Mann expertly milks this rather basic story for its full potential, creating a film that even in its infrequent lulls in action still maintains an atmosphere of nail-biting tension.With such a basic plot, Men in War relies on the interactions of its characters for depth. Mann avoids the common cliché of many war movies of portraying the platoon as an obvious cross-section of ethnic and personality types. As in real groups of this kind, most of the men don't seem that distinct from one another, although a couple—a patient, likable African American medic and the nearly catatonic, battle-fatigued young soldier he cares for—do stand out. Lt. Benson, however, is thoroughly fleshed out, and Robert Ryan, who worked with Mann in three films, fully inhabits the character in one of his most nuanced and sympathetic performances.
Ryan's Lt. Benson is a weary man but a purposeful one, his immediate purpose to complete his mission and report back to his unit with vital information about the situation. At one point he states that his objective is to get just one man back to headquarters. In the meantime, although he views those under his command as resources to be deployed to achieve his strategic goal, he seems not without concern for their welfare. It's just that he sees completion of the mission overriding any consideration of the safety or even survival of himself or his men. Benson is a man of great leadership ability, able to keep his soldiers united in their purpose and focused on the task at hand. A follower of rules and prescribed procedures, he is nonetheless a practical, level-headed person able to gain the cooperation of his men with his confident attitude and skills of persuasion—organized without being a martinet, authoritative without being authoritarian.
The only person this reasonable approach does not succeed with is Sgt. Montana, and it is the clash between the personalities and attitudes of these two that provides the conflict in the film. Montana is Benson's opposite in every way, a maverick dedicated to his own agenda—to get his psychologically wounded Colonel back to safety and medical treatment. When he remarks at one point that The Colonel is the only man who ever addressed him as "son," it becomes clear that a kind of transference between the two has occurred. That The Colonel has become in essence a surrogate father for Montana explains his fierce personal loyalty, which in turn explains his disdain for Benson's mission, his animosity towards Benson, and his defiance of Benson's authority at every turn.
Burly Aldo Ray is quite good at conveying the unsympathetic qualities of Sgt. Montana. Not only is Montana an insolent loner, but he is also an almost paranoiacally suspicious racist who refers to Koreans with derogatory racial epithets, the only person in the film who ever does this. In a key sequence, the platoon encounters several American soldiers in the distance calling out to them and racing towards them. Without warning, Montana opens fire and mows them down. When the astounded platoon reaches the bodies, they discover that the dead men are actually Koreans with uniforms and weapons taken from dead American soldiers. After Benson angrily points out that Montana fired before he could even see their faces and might easily have killed Americans, Montana replies,"I can smell 'em," and adds that his practice is to shoot first and find out who he has killed later. The appalled Benson responds by saying, "God help us if we need men like you to win this war."David Thomson compares Men in War to Mann's Westerns in the way it "work[s] toward an ordeal by combat that defines honor." In a sense, that's indeed what happens at the end of the film when the group reaches the hill only to find it has been taken by the Communists. Desperate, Benson works out a risky plan to retake the hill, and at this point circumstances force the two adversaries to set aside their considerable differences and work together. In the end, only accommodation between Montana's extremism and Benson's moderation, between Montana's gung-ho machismo and personal hatred of the enemy and Benson's professional shrewdness and detached view of the enemy as just another obstacle to be overcome, allows the two to combine the forces of anarchy and order and move towards a common aim.
Men in War ends with a brief but powerful scene in which Benson and Montana together posthumously "award" to their fallen comrades Silver Stars Montana has been given by The Colonel, each man's behavior in the scene absolutely typical of his essential nature. As the two stand atop the hill they now control, Benson methodically reads off the names of the dead in alphabetical order from a notebook in which he records the details of combat, while Montana tosses the medals over the sandbag parapet of the hill, strewing them randomly over the bodies of the dead soldiers below. I would say that in this scene Men in War arrives at a conception of honor quite unlike the unambiguous moral choice normally found in Mann's Westerns. War, Mann seems to be saying, consists of equal parts method and chaos, of both selfless nobility and selfish ferocity, of great personal sacrifices made to achieve minor victories. In the face of this paradox, honor becomes such a relative term that it ceases to have any clear meaning.
You might also be interested in my post on Samuel Fuller's Korean War movie The Steel Helmet.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
