"Primal experiences stay with you": A conversation with Peter Weir on The Way Back

The Way Back, Peter Weir’s adaptation of Slawomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk, concerns a group of prisoners who escaped the gulag in 1941 and traveled by foot from Siberia to India. The difference in the titles of the film and book already imply something of Weir’s authorial stamp: Weir’s story is imbued with a sense of destination absent in Rawicz’s narrative. Yet the journey itself remains central to The Way Back, its lasting impressions deriving primarily from images of unfathomably exhausted bodies staggering across seemingly endless terrain like semi-mummified pilgrims, of the small victories of finding food and shelter, and of the blisters and chapped skin that transform the topography of Ed Harris’ wisened face.


These days we might associate Weir primarily with his extraordinary streak of Oscar-winners like Witness (1985), Dead Poet’s Society (89) and The Truman Show (98), but consider how unlikely a candidate for Hollywood A-lists Weir seemed in his early years, working in his native Australia—a country that had almost no film industry to speak of when Weir started out—helming something as rigorously atmospheric and unresolved as Picnic at Hanging Rock (75) or the equally mysterious, apocalyptic and hallucinatory legal drama The Last Wave (77). Weir’s a rare talent who ushers a personal touch into films of the greatest possible scale. He’s also remarkably humble, charming, and articulate. I spoke with Weir during his visit to Toronto last week.

Peter Weir

JB: What drew you to adapt The Long Walk?

Peter Weir: I think it was what it usually is, which is an emotional connection to a script or book and a feeling of discovery that I can’t get off my mind for days after having put it down. When that happens I’ve already started to make it, in my mind, imagining how a scene might be realized. With The Long Walk I kept asking myself certain questions. Could I have done it? Would I have had the strength? What was it in those people that kept them going? But after having read the book I thought it needed something else. What I added to it, amongst other things, was the idea that it was Janusz’s wife he wanted to get back to after she’d betrayed him. I didn’t want it to just be like an Olympic event or something. [Laughs]

JB: I wondered if the hallucinations were yours.

PW: Yeah. Those too.


JB: Was there a particular element of the story that compelled you?

PW: Yes. It was to be without water. I remember going without water for just a day at home, wondering about that feeling. Kind of a silly way to do research. [Laughs] But it’s easier to imagine starving, because we know from hunger strikes that a body has the capacity to go a month or more without food. But not water. You’ve got to have that within 48 hours or so.


JB: Did you read the book presuming it to be entirely factual?

PW: Oh, yes. It was an afterthought when I asked the producers, “This is true, isn’t it?” And they confessed that there was always some controversy about whether or not Rawicz was on the walk. So I told them I can’t do it—if there’s doubts then that sort of destroys it. But then I suggested that if we can prove that the walk happened, with or without Rawicz, then I’ll do the movie, but I’ll fictionalize it. So that’s the way it went. I found evidence and then went ahead and changed the characters, changed the title, and freed myself from this man’s book.


JB: It raises interesting questions about which kinds of stories we accept as fiction and which we need to regard as fact in order to surrender to them. I guess for you this was the latter sort. You needed to know it was true.

PW: Yes. Once I was able to take some distance form the book, to use the “inspired by” credit, I then became obsessed with getting everything within the story as truthful as possible. The characters I was redrawing, the incidents they went through, the behavior, the life in the camp, I wanted all of this sourced back to true accounts or interviews with survivors of the gulag. I became surrounded by advisors so that every detail, from the clothing to the conditions of the walk itself, was accurate. Cyril Delafosse-Guiramand, my technical advisor, had actually done the walk, so he was with me for the whole production period. Being attacked by Siberian mosquitoes, for example, came from an experience he’d had.

Picnic at Hanging Rock

JB: Did you have similar concerns about verisimilitude with Picnic at Hanging Rock? Was it important for you to assure the audience that all this might have really happened?

PW: I think particularly with that film. The author opened her book with the same quote I’d used in the film. “These events happened long ago…” and so on, something that at the very least encircled the truth. I felt it was important to reiterate because for the film’s lack of resolution to work I think you had to feel it was true. Otherwise it might just seem like a bad film, like somebody forgot to write the ending.


JB: How important was it for you to give us some sense of just how arduous an experience the events in The Way Back would have been? How do you find a balance between conveying such unimaginable hardship and crafting a thoughtful, adult entertainment?

PW: That’s very much the question that confronted the editor, Lee Smith, and myself. I had a lot more anecdotal material as they went on, but it made the film too grueling or diffused the tension. So the questions became when to move, and at what rate? You have to believe they experienced these things but it reached a point where it was just too punishing. But I don’t think that’s what audiences will find involving. I think it’s that we stripped the film of most Hollywood conventions. There’s no wicked, sadistic commandant who’s obsessed with capturing them, therefore there’s no chase. Nature is the prison. There’s very few cliffhanger incidents, people clinging to a rope after having fallen down a crevasse or something. The music is also held back. These craft choices increase the film’s emotional strength. You feel you’re beginning to know the characters, so when you lose one it has a greater impact.


JB: So many of your films that deal with survival and self-reliance. What is it about these themes that keep luring you back?

PW: I think it was Robert Hughes, the Australian art critic, who talked about the gun-powdered trial that leads back to childhood. Primal experiences stay with you. In my case I was reading adventure books and biographies of individuals who’d been in prisons and POW camps. The Wooden Horse, Stalag 17, Reach For the Sky, and so on. Then at 20 I went to Europe by sea, which was the cheapest way back then. It changed my life. I got a sense of the vastness of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. I realized how far I lived from Europe, from my roots. Then I was hitchhiking through Europe, as you could do in 1965. I think those experiences have probably tilted me more than I would have thought toward the subjects I’ve put on film.

Weir at work

JB: I suppose it might also come from growing up in a country that had a limited art culture but no shortage of nature to explore.

PW: Absolutely. That and a very short history. A country blessed to have had no civil wars or revolutions, nor to have been invaded or bombed. Our soldiers went and fought in every war that was going, and displayed great courage, but the civilian population only ever experienced famine, drought and floods, as we are right now in Brisbane. Those things can all be very tough, but it’s nothing like what civilian populations went through in Europe during the Second World War. You can still sit as I did with people who have survived those tragic and tumultuous experiences of the 2oth century. That’s a function of these films too, to keep their stories alive.

The Next Three Days: Breaking out is hard to do

Following a bafflingly superfluous teaser prelude, the first scene proper features two handsome couples of apparent privilege seated round a table in a nice Pittsburgh restaurant, getting into a heated—which is to say overcooked—debate about gender roles in the workplace. So, ostensibly serious theme now slapped down on the table, we already know we’re in a Paul Haggis movie, even if the theme’s not entirely obvious relevance to our story seems a surprisingly loose opener for the Crash (2004) writer/director’s typically hyperactive dramaturgy. What this scene tells us is that Lara Brennan’s a woman worth going the limit for, one both smart and amorous—her public cat fight gets her so aroused she leaps upon her husband as soon as they get to their car. Of course, her husband is Russell Crowe.

The following morning Lara finds blood on her coat. Four seconds later cops burst in and arrest her for a murder we just sort of presume she didn’t commit. Before you know it, Lara’s behind bars and all out of appeals, sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of avoiding a very bad dye job. Now desperately spouseless and stuck with a morose six year old to raise alone, John Brennan’s only recourse is bust Lara out. He teaches literature at a community college, so there’s a scene where he lectures on Don Quixote, in case we didn’t catch on to the fact that he’s about a hatch a plan that’s positively quixotic!

The title of The Next Three Days reads like a fleet thriller, but it actually needs to cover about three years worth of story before those three days arise. That’s a lot to burn through, and the perhaps inevitable result is that each of its central characters, Lara and the little boy most especially, never emerge as anything more than ciphers, mere props in a complicated plot. This isn’t such a bad thing if the focus were to stay firmly on the action, but Haggis, working from a 2008 French movie called Pour elle, has to have it both ways, so we get scenes like the one where we first see John visit Lara in prison. I’m guessing that Haggis wanted to use the scene to strengthen our sense of the couple’s intimacy and John’s fathomless devotion—there’s not much of a movie here without it—yet their every exchange is almost comical in its slavishness to exposition. What we get is somberness without the satisfaction of emotional depth. What we get is a waste of Brian Dennehy in umpteen scenes where he does nothing but gaze portentously. The other thing we get is a thriller that’s 133 minutes long.

There’s a nice cameo from Liam Neeson and some clever twists. Things are most interesting when John’s forced to descend into Pittsburgh’s underworld to collect the necessary illegal items on his conscientious prison-break check list. He has dangerous run-ins with RZA, a deaf pessimist, and some really nasty dudes in a meth lab whose lives we’re to regard as expendable if their termination should facilitate Lara’s liberation. You sometimes wonder if there couldn’t be something in John’s totally insane adventure that might be fun, but that would be in the Tony Scott version, and we already got a new one from him last weekend.

Stone: do you hear what he hears?

When Jack Mabry (Robert De Niro) calls upon his pastor for spiritual advice he’s told that god speaks to us in mysterious ways, though the pastor may not have imagined the Lord being channeled through a cornrow-sporting, pornographically minded, trash-talking convicted arsonist when he offered up that old chestnut. Mabry’s a parole officer on the verge of retirement, his last case to close being the aforementioned Gerald “Stone” Creeson (Edward Norton), who for all his abrasive locker room jive seems to have a good heart and an earnest desire to get out of jail and get his shit together. Stone comes across some New Agey pamphlet in the prison library that promises spiritual awakening to those who listen for the right sound, those ready to become god’s tuning fork. Stone’s awakening comes one day during lunch while staring at a nature scene mural on the mess hall wall.

Stone was written by Angus MacLachlan, who previously wrote the script for Junebug, based on his own play. Directed by Phil Morrison, Junebug was buoyed on a warm embracing of eccentricity and subtle playfulness with form. Stone, directed by John Curran, is far more somber and downplays its characters’ quirks, though it’s very easy to imagine its premise yielding a comedy, particularly once we factor Stone’s wife Lucetta (Milla Jovovich) into the mix, a talented seductress who's big into the healing power of magnets and aims to boost her husband’s chances of early release by getting cozy with Mabry. As wildly different in tone as Junebug and Stone are, their similarities constitute much of what’s most fascinating in both films: an interest in the line that divides religious practice from spiritual thirst, and in the fundamental role outsiders play in shaping a given community. I settled in for Stone mildly intrigued but expecting little. I was surprised by how deftly that sense of intrigue blossomed and held on right to the end.

Curran’s previous directorial credits include The Painted Veil and We Don’t Live Here Anymore, so it’s no wonder that he seems to take a special interest in flushing out the themes of marital disharmony in MacLachlan’s text. Stone spends much of his first encounter with Mabry boasting about how his wife’s a dime and quite possibly a nymphomaniac, while at the dame time insisting that she’s an alien—that’s the word he uses, “alien,” as in someone from another planet. (Was this picture made before or after The Fourth Kind?) Stone wants to know about Mabry’s marriage, how it works, how sexual interest is sustained over the decades, but Mabry proves to be the real stone in this relationship, refusing to disclose any personal details. The truth is that Mabry’s marriage to Madylyn (Frances Conroy), a tippling Bible thumper, appears deeply unhappy, probably sexless, and has probably been that way from the start, as the film’s disturbing prologue set in the early days of their domestic life clearly implies. This prologue is in fact utterly unnecessary—there’s no reason at all for us to know the specifics of Mabry’s dark side, and this dramatization, awkwardly using younger actors to play De Niro and Conroy, feels like something demanded by outside forces with little faith in an audience’s ability to read between the lines.

Curran doesn’t have the charm or penchant for aesthetic detours that Morrison displayed, but I wonder if his approach isn’t actually more closely aligned to MacLachlan’s intentions. In any case, I don’t think anything he does here really hurts the story’s integrity, and the device of manifesting Stone’s obsession with listening for that magic sound through an aural landscape of Christian radio broadcasts, insect buzzing, and an immersive piece of glassy ambient music from Jon Brion is accumulatively effective. As well, Curran should perhaps take some credit for bringing out the best in his leads. There’s an engrossing chemistry between De Niro and Norton, and a near palpable heat coming off of Jovovich, who imbues what could have been a one-dimensional supporting role with considerable complexity.

I'm not claiming the film is entirely successful on every front, but I worry that some viewers—most certainly some critics—might be put off by Stone simply because it’s hard to tell what this film’s trying to be. I’ve seen it described as a thriller, which feels way off the mark, and I’ve read Manohla Dargis’ New York Times review, which tries to finger at as failed neo-noir, which seems even more off the rails. Stone doesn’t adhere to genre, not does it defy genre in any flamboyant way. I don’t know what to call it, but I think its ambitions are noble and the results substantial… if you only listen closely enough.

Working Knowledge: Král catalogues the quotidian

Petr Král, with Jana Bokova

It was something I’d been meaning to pick up for months, yet Petr Král’s Working Knowledge (Pushkin Press, $16.95) ultimately found me precisely when I most needed it, which was about ten days ago, just as I was settling into this large, half-empty, half-lived-in house in rural Saskatchewan, the semi-abandoned home of a friend, where some arguably misguided notion had prompted me to pass some weeks in solitude. The book was the last thing I bought before leaving Saskatoon, my last chance to soak up city life, and heading farther east. It’s been among the wettest Junes in provincial history, the house cold and damp, the surrounding fields too marshy for strolling, so I’ve spent many of these hours seated at this big wooden table, trying not to let my brain go completely soggy. I needed to try and remain alert to the world, to not retreat completely and morbidly inward, and Král’s eloquent, charming little book, his “strange and beautiful existential encyclopedia of the everyday,” as Milan Kundera describes it in his brief introduction, served to help me keep my focus.

Ranging in length from a few pages to a single sentence, Working Knowledge catalogues dozens of meditations on things known and most commonly taken for granted. Though I can hardly verify this, the translation sometimes strikes me as poor. Thankfully, Král’s is the sort of poetic yet mostly spare writing that can weather an awkward rendering or two. The book opens with ‘Coffee,’ immediately awakening our senses with its “residue of night,” before slipping into ‘The Shirt,’ considering ‘Dawn,’ that “washed-out, ashen period in which all things are reborn into doubt,” assessing the distinct values inherent in two kinds of breakfast, exploring the miniature offerings of self-recognition that lay waiting in every act of shaving, and reminding us to cherish the glaze of sleepy morning stasis: “…we are never closer to a state of grace than on those mornings when we lie in bed, half-awake, allowing ribbons of thought and itinerant dreams to drift idly through our minds. We are as yet no more than pure potential… sending out feelers and drawing them back again, between the shadows and the flares of light which occasionally reach us from between the closed curtains…”

Not all of these writings are so serene. One piece considers the unease raised by retrieving your luggage from the airport’s conveyor belt and wondering where it’s been or who’s been inside of it. Another is a strident defense of the word “cunt.” There are a number of rousing declarations threading through Working Knowledge, which sometimes read as so out of left field as to constitute enigmatic one-liners. “Only visiting mothers truly makes it possible to get to know a foreign city,” he writes at the top of ‘Mothers and Daughters.’ Yet as the book continues Král engages with his topics less as platforms for such pronouncements than as opportunities to ask the reader questions, as in his pages on laughter, where he wonders when did we first truly laugh, or whether true laughter is instinctive or learned. The prose seems cleanest when considering concrete items with a minimal number of words, yet I think the most wonderful passages are the longer ones which, while en route to some other assertion, pause to offer some tantalizing fragment of some other, larger story. These micro-narratives include references to ex-cons from Guyana who build their houses facing the prison as a reminder not to go back, to a mountaineering conductor who takes a catastrophic fall, to Lenin asking Trotsky for a cigarette even though he didn’t smoke, or to Luis Buñuel, who was hard of hearing, spending his final days rising at dawn to listen to the wind in the trees off his Mexico City terrace.

Like Kundera, Král, a poet, essayist and one-time surrealist, is a Czech living in France since fleeing his homeland back in 1968. It’s tempting to attribute his sensitivity to small things to the exile’s condition and its implied nostalgia—after all, there is in Working Knowledge a tribute to Czech Christmas fish soup that’s as brimming with affection as anything else in this book—but I’m fairly confident that Král would have written about such things anywhere and under any circumstance. Though often writing as though of universally shared experience, his perspective is unapologetically specific—male, white, heterosexual, European, art loving, and at times a little old-fashioned in his adoration of women and notions of gender roles—yet it’s this specificity that elevates Working Knowledge to something inspired, bold and funny, and necessarily particular, rather than aphoristic. I’m certain that this book is best read slowly, or even randomly, at one’s whim, but my present conditions compelled me to gobble it up over only a couple of sittings. It’s the sort of thing I read first for pleasure, secondly for work, and, perhaps thirdly, out of a lingering suspicion—or desire—that to live with a little more alertness to quotidian experience might make us better human beings, or at the very least slightly more pierced by the rush of living as it passes us by.

A Prophet: visions of sheer survival

This one could also have been called An Education, and if it were its title would have resonated with somewhat more bracing immediacy than its respectable yet less relevant fellow Oscar contender. A Prophet is a prison movie, and as such is inherently concerned with the acquisition of knowledge, codes, and hierarchies. 19-year-old Malik (Tahar Rahim) gets six years for assaulting an officer. An Arab in France with no family or resources, he begins his sentence with little more than the raggedy clothes on his back, a capacity for brawling, and a lot of fear, anger, and confusion. He fits in neither with the religiously observant Muslims nor the Arab-hating Corsicans, but it's the Corsicans who find use for him. He’ll quickly learn through a series of fumbling trails-by-fire to seduce, murder, take shit from his oppressors, and nurture secret plans for his own advancement. Just as importantly, he also learns to read, encouraged by the first man he kills, a fellow Arab named Rayib, who comes to haunt Malik’s waking dreams.

So part of this ambitious crime drama’s icy thrills come from our privileged ability to watch and listen while Malik is administers tough lessons. We aren’t necessarily encouraged to sympathize with Malik, and we certainly aren’t encouraged to pity him or shrug off his actions. Rahim gives a marvelous performance, a punk kid with a wispy moustache, alternately terrified and cocksure, stupidly reckless and suddenly wised-up, but he’s not what we typically call a magnetic presence, neither ingratiating nor glamorous nor obviously charismatic. What makes Rahim’s Malik so riveting is the honesty of the actor’s work and the complexity of character’s plight, which is thorny enough on a political, racial or religious level, yet finally grips us on a more basic, human one. The movie’s title is in fact the right one, mysterious in the best way, alluding perhaps to some trace of second-sight that might keep Malik alive, as well as to some vague sense that somewhere some unseen hand has already decided our fate for us.

A Prophet was directed by Jacques Audiard, whose previous work includes The Beat My Heart Skipped, an imaginative remake of James Toback’s cult film Fingers, and Read My Lips, a superb neo-Hitchcockian thriller. He wrote the screenplay with Thomas Bidegain, based on an original script by Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit, and the result feels busy yet seamless. The movie pounces sometimes like a vicious feline, staying close to its troubled protagonist, at others it comes to a halt to allow us to absorb the gravity of its violence, which is in some strange way a portrait of a new Europe.

Buxom, blonde, and dangerous to know: Cleo Moore and Bad Girls of Film Noir, Vol. 2 on DVD

Cleo Moore was born on Halloween, 1928 in Baton Rouge. At 15 she was briefly married to Huey Long’s youngest son, and had very likely already assumed the sort of undulating corporeal proportions that can make a guy break down and weep. She would eventually set records for the longest filmed kiss on live television, run for governor of Louisiana, and enter the world of real estate before dying of a heart attack at the age of 44. But in the 1950s she was a star of sorts, the muse of eccentric Czech-born auteur Hugo Haas, slated at one point to star in a bio-pic of Jean Harlow, though I knew her only for her memorable cameo in Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1952). If we shave off just one of its four titles, the recently released Bad Girls of Film Noir, Vol. 2 could just as easily be titled The Cleo Moore Signature Collection. The two-disc set serves as an introduction to a minor but nonetheless interesting career, one that speaks volumes about the role of women in postwar America.

The girls in these titles tend to not be all that bad, and the films certainly not all that noir. Too transparent for manipulation, Moore didn’t play the femme fatale. At the start of Haas’ One Girl’s Confession (53), Moore’s waitress steals $25,000 from her scumbag employer, hides it, and thereafter turns herself in. She becomes a model prisoner, and upon early release goes back to where she came from and, too deeply paranoid about people spying on her to recover her stash, takes another gig slinging drinks for a swarthy, lecherous gambler, played with terrific zest by Haas himself, who becomes chastely enamored with Moore, even after she nearly kills him. This strange tale of feminine self-reliance and the perils of coveting dirty money is highlighted by pleasingly bizarre plot twists and Haas’ distinctive use of close-ups. It’s a bit disappointing when Moore winds up content to be romanced by a horny fisherman, but in her private thoughts, conveyed through dreamy voice-over, she confesses that she’s genuinely drawn to him. He has clean fingernails, she thinks. “From all that salt water, I guess.”

“Caged men are separated only by a thick wall—from caged women. The system is wrong…” So goes the over-heated opening narration of Women’s Prison (55), directed by Lewis Seiler from a script by Jack DeWitt and Crane Wilbur, and the mother of all babes-behind-bars movies. It’s an ensemble piece, and Moore has a smaller role here, co-starring with none other than Ida Lupino, who plays the stylish and sadistic supervisor of the female half of the penitentiary where all the action takes place, as well as Jan Sterling, who starred with Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole (51), and Audrey Totter, veteran of several key noirs, such as Lady in the Lake (47), The Set-Up (49) and Tension (49). Despite Lupino’s prestige, Women’s Prison is about as trashy as you’d expect, given the period and the studio gloss, with hysterical inmates, saucy wisecracks, and a tawdry secret rendezvous, though there's little to suggest the subgenre’s token lesbianism. It’s perhaps a little fantastic that virtually all the women seem to do their time together in perfect harmony, exuding solidarity, but the pay-off comes when they organize to take over the joint with only a couple of knives and some ingenuity, and can only be suppressed by rifles, gas and the promise of revenge on Lupino.

Over-Exposed (56) begins when Moore’s snared in a police raid of a bar frequented by prostitutes and is ordered to leave town. She doesn’t, and instead is taken under the wing of a kindly old tippling photographer with a cat who runs in slow-motion. She learns the trade and adopts a new identity, trading in Lily Krenshka for Lila Crane—a name which would assume very different connotations only a few years later when given to Janet Leigh’s sister in Psycho (60). She moves to New York, rises in the ranks of society and becomes a famous portraitist, at one point a guest on this bizarre television program where the host phones her celebrity guests at their homes instead of bringing them on the show. Her ambition is soured by greed and a growing distrust of everyone around her. The mafia connections responsible for her social position prove to be her undoing, but as hubristic as Moore’s heroine may be its immensely frustrating when the movie ends with her succumbing to the drab, condescending, paternal affections of journalist/conscience Richard Crenna, who would one day become Rambo’s father figure, and the film’s latent feminism nose-dives with the realization that no woman in her right mind would choose a career over becoming an obedient spouse. Over-Exposed would be Moore’s second-last credit, and even if she never quite embodied the truly independent bombshell in the movies, she seems to have made considerable strides over the remainder of her too-short life.

The sole non-Moore title in Bad Girls, Vol. 2, which also lacks a female protagonist, is Night Editor (46), part of an unrealized franchise of wee-hour tales told by a big city newsman. A married cop witnesses a banker beat a woman’s brains in with a stick while trysting in some tall grass with the glamorous, wealthy, and equally married Janis Carter, excellent as the poisonous other woman. Some great location work and weird details, such as the old ethnic cop who habitually downs four glasses of buttermilk in a row, bring some flavour to an otherwise moralistic but entertaining thriller.

Reflections in a hollow eye: Four by Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock was prolific enough that though he’s the most famous director in history the breadth of his filmography remains unseen to all but the most ardent admirers. One of the pleasures of Hitchcock comes from tracing the obsessions, variations and attempts at reinvention found throughout the corpus. In the latest of their economically priced packages, Turner Classic Movies has smartly curated a quartet of films under the no-nonsense title of TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: Hitchcock Thrillers. Only one of these rests firmly in the essential canon, but the others are consistently fascinating, complex, often deliciously queer, and above all revealing glimpses into the filmmaker’s psyche. Two of these find Hitchcock deliberately working against established strengths, embracing unfamiliar styles while simultaneously imbuing the films with an unusual abundance of personal content. Not to mention casting actors in roles that ignite a compelling frisson between their star images and private lives.

Joan Fontaine meets Cary Grant on a train. He gropes her in the darkness of a tunnel, inserting himself in her cabin once she fits the bill for his bump to first-class. This is a kind of romance, but Suspicion (1941) is choked with psychological trauma. Grant’s an opportunist, a no-good bon vivant, his ruthlessness disguised by boyish charm, his words of love accompanied by no strenuous efforts at sincerity. Like Gloria Grahame in In a Lonely Place (50) Fontaine spends the film’s duration wondering what violence her beloved is capable of, but in Suspicion the ambiguity never ends—even the final scene feels less like resolution than yet another of Grant’s quick-saves. Though the story was cobbled on compromise—the source novel ends very differently—the result is something marvelous, a pitch-black metaphor for everlasting romantic love. It is everlasting because it can never grow stale from comfort.

Another train, another chance meeting. What strikes me most when I revisit Strangers on a Train, many years after my first awed teenage viewings, is just how utterly homoerotic—perhaps homophobic—the picture truly is. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s novel, this story of men who meet by accident and agree, however tacitly, to swap murders, is most rewarding when read as one of male-to-male seduction, a sort of gay Fatal Attraction (87), where Robert Taylor’s mama’s boy pseudo-aesthete genuinely does seem to act on the hero’s behalf, strangling the hero’s conniving wife, her glasses tumbling into the grass, bearing witness to their owner’s death as he silently lays her down and puts her to sleep. That hunky Farley Granger seems not entirely convincing as the tennis-playing hero trying to marry a senator’s daughter serves the film splendidly. Hitchcock, who’d already deftly exploited Granger’s homosexuality in Rope (48), clearly doesn’t believe his hero’s innocence and neither do we, tainting the ostensible resolution with palpable unease, greatly improving what might have felt like a triumph of closeted blandness over perverse insight.

I hadn’t seen I Confess (53) and always assumed it was a flawed curiosity. I didn’t expect it to be so boldly laced with uncertainty and so gorgeously photographed. Nor was I prepared for Montgomery Clift as the Québécois priest accused of murder. Clift’s performance is itself the most elegantly ambiguity-laden thing in the film, tormented, and conspicuously cagey. I Confess is a film of architecture and faces, mainly, of looming steeples and nerve-wracked gazes. The establishing shots seize the Quebec City exteriors in high contrast, tilted images that upset purely on a design level. Again, Hitchcock’s hero has privileged knowledge of a murder, the killer, somewhat nonsensically, taking him into his confidence, playing out some experiment in loyalty between male outsiders. The killer’s hilariously endowed not only with Hitchcock’s fear of authority but also given a wife with the same name as Hitchcock’s: Alma (Spanish for soul). Again, Hitchcock uses his star’s sexual ambivalence brilliantly. Did the beautiful, troubled Clift abandon romance and enter the priesthood because he’s secretly gay? By the end, Clift’s married ex-girlfriend spills her guts, Alma spills her guts, the killer spills his guts. Everything we need to know about the murder’s been explained. But we never learn what’s really up with Monty. The film’s hero is by far its greatest mystery.

An even more serious, less glamorous film, The Wrong Man (56) finds Hitchcock suspended somewhere between the poles of noir and neorealism. There’s an oft-told anecdote about how Hitchcock’s father had his five-year-old son imprisoned on a lark, and Hitchcock saw his anxieties about police reflected in the strange but true story of Manny Balestrero, a Queens bassist fingered for robberies he didn’t commit. In the wake of McCarthyism Hitchcock conjured his most Kafkaesque vision of America, where the assignation of guilt has the potential to impose guilt upon you. This nightmare scenario unfolds through a hybrid of dream-like artifice—a long, weird dissolve suggests that Manny’s prayers to Jesus are instantly answered by his double, walking a lonely street somewhere—and in some of the most realistic settings in Hitchcock. The subway rumbles past the windows of apartments and offices, through the shops where the cops escort Balestrero and, in a bizarrely malevolent procedure, force him to revisit the scenes of his ostensible crimes. Henry Fonda is perfectly cast as Manny, the jazz musician who neither drinks not does drugs and is always on time. He was the everyman who could be any man. It’s a shame he’d never work with Hitchcock again.

When movie stars should send screenwriters to jail: Law Abiding Citizen

Just before Clarence Darby (Christian Stolte) jabs a blade into his guts, just before Darby proceeds to rape and kill his wife and do about the same to his little girl, Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) hears this fat, sweaty, slovenly, drug-addled, disgusting pervert-ogre whisper in his ear, “You can’t fight fate.” Even by the standards of the overcharged Hollywood thriller this is ultra-portentous. Clyde takes it to heart. He stews over it for ten years, during which time Darby’s accomplice awaits execution while Darby himself does three years and goes free as thanks from the DA for ratting his buddy out. For ten years Clyde gets stoked on the ineffectuality of American justice and concocts a whopper of a plan to set things straight.

The central conceit of Law Abiding Citizen, that grief and frustration turns a contented family man and otherwise non-psychopathic maniac into Hannibal Lecter on steroids, could only have ever worked as utter camp. As an ostensibly serious, ostensibly engaging, ostensibly dark and brooding thriller about thorny issues of crime, punishment and bureaucracy, it’s a mind-numbingly absurd travesty of a movie. Clyde kidnaps Darby and slowly, messily tortures him to death, making imaginative use of power tools a poison isolated from the liver of a Caribbean puffer fish. Of course! It’s only his opening act. He gets thrown into maximum security and his rampage only escalates. Somehow he keeps exacting his flamboyant, baroque feats of violent revenge from captivity, gradually killing off anyone with even the most tangential connection to his case. Except for Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), the attorney who made the deal with Darby. Nick gets to watch as the whole house of cards collapses, wondering when he or his wife and daughter will get iced. Clyde and Nick play cat and mouse.

You don’t need a degree in law, psychology or engineering to balk at the mountain of risible improbability Law Abiding Citizen hinges on. Genius serial killers are among the most tiresome tropes, but Clyde Shelton and his reign of terror go far beyond the usual level of artifice and dumbness. Yet even if the basic story, which comes courtesy of Street Kings and Ultraviolet scribe Kurt Wimmer, weren’t so stupid, the details too feel all wrong, from our glimpses of Nick’s cardboard family life to the inner chambers of play-cynical Philadelphia lawmakers. The film’s only reason for existing is to try and keep you from guessing what moronic plot twist it’ll unleash next, until you finally realize that this thriller is really a horror movie, torture porn of sorts. It wants to be tough, I guess, but it’s really just crude, very, very silly, and more than a little sick.

Butler is on some kind of a roll. Here’s a sampling: Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, RocknRolla, The Ugly Truth. Dude’s been in some of the worst shit I’ve had to sit through over the last few years. I’m inclined to indulge a guy trying to move up in the system a little, but to what end? Does his producer’s credit mean to imply that Law Abiding Citizen is his fucking dream project? Does he secretly fantasize being confined to a prison from which he can slaughter his own career by remote control?

One last stray observation. There's an important early sequence where Darby's condemned accomplice gets executed by the state. As the sequence builds to its climax we keep cutting back and forth between the execution and a musical recital where Jamie Foxx's daughter plays the cello. Followers of this blog wonder with me: were the makers of Law Abiding Citizen studying The Walking Dead, or what?

What the Dead Know

Imagine you’re unjustly locked up for second-degree murder. You were just protecting your wife. You don’t know your own strength. It was a freak thing. You’re a musician, an aesthete, soft-spoken, demure by nature, a gentle soul with a shuffling walk and the slight lunge of those ready to topple into the grave. You get out of the pen, you’re womanless, hard-up, turned away from some big shot you were promised would give you a little work. You walk the streets in a beat-up hat and too-short baggy trousers when you meet this guy, friendly as can be. He recognizes you from the papers, remembers your case, knows you got a raw deal. He buys you a coffee, says he’s a PI, offers some work, kid stuff, just watch a house for a while, track the gentleman’s movements. The catch is the gentleman in question is the very judge that sent you up. Seems a little queer, but you can’t be picky. You’re too trusting, or fatalistic, to know when you’re being set up.


That’s the lowdown for John Ellman, the hero of The Walking Dead (1936), and if I’m trying to put you in his raggedy shoes it’s only because he’s embodied by Boris Karloff with such texture and compassion that you can’t help but sympathize—even if you never get the full story about that earlier killing. Ellman takes the fall for a mafia hit and gets the chair—a novelty of the period and much in the press. But somewhere a pair of young lovers who witnessed the crime lose sleep over the fact that they never came to Ellman’s defense. They finally confess, but it’s too late. The news gets to the prison just as Ellman gets the juice. But wait, the lovers are scientists, working for a visionary experimenting with reviving the dead. So Ellman corpse is sent directly to the lab, hooked up to electrodes, and Karloff’s given a major dose of déjà vu, five years after Frankenstein (31). He’s alive, again, remote, as though swallowed by completely by the melancholy that hounded him in his previous life. He doesn’t talk much, so the question lingers: what does he remember of death?

Directed by Michael Curtiz, still far from Casablanca (42) but in excellent form in a flurry of prestige Bs, The Walking Dead is a haunting picture. It’s riddled with artifice and coincidence as our Lazarus begins to quietly enact his wrath, yet it’s endowed with spectral beauty and a deep emotional current thanks mainly to Karloff, as well as an inspired feeling for musical accompaniment—Ellman’s final request is to have a cello player score his death march—and a spare lighting and production design that looks back to German Expressionism and forward to noir. The story also looks forward to The Dead Zone (83), David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about the loneliness that grips those back from the void and carrying secret knowledge.

The Walking Dead is by far the best thing in Warner’s Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics box, though Zombies on Broadway (45) is also very worthwhile. A horror-comedy that’s mostly comedy, it finds Wally Brown and Alan Carney’s New York talent agents coerced by a showbiz mobster into going down to a Caribbean isle to fetch a genuine zombie. Lured by a leggy American showgirl, they eventually find Bela Lugosi secretly cooking up a zombie formula. He fools them into digging their own graves and spending the night in his castle and, you know, hilarity ensues. It’s actually a fairly entertaining bit of hysterical hokum if you can stomach the crude racial gags, but more importantly for classic horror fans it represents a very weird effort to capitalize on a previous hit. Just like Lugosi’s zombies, my eyes popped out of my head when I recognized not only Sir Lancelot, once again playing a calypso singer serenading newcomers with sweetly forbidding ballads, but also Darby Jones, once again playing a shirtless giant zombie. Both were pivotal to the unforgettable spell of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (42), the second film to emerge from producer Val Lewton’s legendary low-budget horror unit at RKO. Their reprisals here are far less distinguished, though at least Jones gets his comeuppance this time around.

Frankenstein 1970 (58) features Karloff as the original mad scientist’s great-great grumpy grandson. In need of funds to buy an atomic reactor so he can make more monsters, he allows a Hollywood film crew to use his castle. The industry satire is all stale cliché, the story is limpid and limited, the monster’s head in wrapped up in so many bandages he looks like Gumby post-surgery. It’s genuinely curious that director Howard Koch chooses to cover most of the scenes in long, unbroken takes and wide shots, though they only make things drag even more. Though it’s got Lugosi, Karloff and Peter Lorre on board, You’ll Find Out (40) seems mainly a showcase for radio personality Kay Kyser and his College of Musical Knowledge. It’s not much of a horror movie, though it did seem really horrible. I had to shut off the TV and run screaming.

Island in the stream: The Invention of Morel

Adolfo Bioy Casares, 1968

In his prologue for the original 1940 edition of The Invention of Morel, Jorge Luis Borges makes an impassioned and, unsurprisingly, hugely articulate defense of fantastic literature. He laments its denigration, citing Robert Louis Stevenson’s reports on the British reading public’s scorn for the fantastic back in 1880 before continuing to note the disapproval it drew through the ensuing decades. I wonder what would Borges think of today’s climate, where the fantastic has gained considerable acceptance both among the general public and the literati, yet is so often employed either ironically, as an ingratiating nostalgic device, or in works of juvenile fiction that cross over into an adult reading public for reasons that may have much to do with a longing for the sort of strong narrative many fear has been forsaken by the authors of what we bizarrely choose to call literary fiction. (As opposed to non-literary fiction?) Of course, even now, in the year of the death of J.G. Ballard, the adult-geared, diverting yet thematically rich fantastic abides—most excitingly in the work of Spanish novelist Albert Sanchez Piñol, whose first two novels I'll be writing about later.

But among the attributes that remain so extraordinary about The Invention of Morel is this short novel’s simultaneous homage to its forebears and its tremendous prescience. It looks backward, most openly to Clemente Palma’s XYZ and to H.G. Wells and The Island of Dr Moreau, and forward, most especially to the ontologically vertiginous novels and stories of Philip K. Dick, with which it shares a special gift for scenarios so resonant as to inspire a kind of terror that never really leaves you, and most recently to the game Myst and the television show Lost. It’s author, Adolfo Bioy Casares, was only 26 at the time of its publication, yet his prose reveals a precocious blend of ambition and humility (“I don’t strive to make a big hit,” he wrote of the novel’s genesis, “just to avoid errors”), the result being vivid clarity in constant tension with near-baffling mystery.

Avoiding a prison sentence, a man flees to an apparently uninhabited island. A small group constructed a museum, a chapel, and a pool there in 1924 and then vanished—the island is said to host a grotesque, fatal disease. The fugitive is, we’ll learn, Venezuelan, though he seems to have traveled widely. We never learn the precise nature of his crimes. He is writing two books: Apology for Survivors and Tribute to Malthus. He’s also developing theories about immortality. He’s smart, smart enough to actually interpret the strange events he’ll soon encounter, but of the fact that he’s evading one kind of prison for another he seems not entirely cognizant. Much to his initial alarm, he’ll be joined by a group of tourists, including a woman, possibly Quebecoise, with whom he falls hopelessly in love. Yet rather than threaten his liberty, they seem not to notice him at all. What’s more, they seem to be repeating the same actions over and over. The repetition, combined with the apparently unbreachable distance that separates him from the woman he’ll learn to call Faustine, only intensifies the fugitive’s longing. (Bioy Casares was apparently drawing upon his own fascination-from-afar with the actress Louise Brooks.) As Ocatvio Paz would later characterize it, the novel conveys how in our longing for what we cannot touch “we bow to the tyranny of a phantom… not only do we traverse a realm of shadows, we ourselves are shadows.”

Bioy Casares with Borges

Bioy Casares with Silvina Ocampo

Even if he had never written a word, Bioy Casares would have a hallowed place in the literary pantheon of Latin America, and his home country of Argentina especially, by mere association: he befriended Borges in 1931, and the pair would go on to collaborate on a number of ventures, beginning with a pamphlet on the virtues of yogurt; and in 1940 he married Silvina Ocampo, another magnificent author of peculiar and bewitching imaginative powers. (Their complimentary yet distinctive styles and subjects, as well as the unusual conditions of their romantic relationship, align them to another sublime pairing of 20th century talents, that of US authors Paul and Jane Bowles.) My fear that Bioy Casares may be forgotten by much of the non-Latin world seems confirmed by the fact that for all of the wonderful supplementary essays, testimonies and documentaries on the Criterion Collection’s new deluxe two-disc edition of Last Year at Marienbad, mention of the pivotal influence of The Invention of Morel on that film is nowhere to be found. It’s a shame, since knowledge of one only enhances the reading of the other.

As with Marienbad, the “rotating eternity” that streams through the fugitive’s experience on the island, the sense of moments that always build toward a point that can never come to fruition, create a fusion of elements that penetrate the emotions as deeply as they do the intellect. That says something. And we’re so much closer to actually living the fantasy of The Invention of Morel; to the merging of the fugitive’s dreams of immortality with that of the scientist who visits his island—and who the fugitive fears may be be wooing his beloved Faustine; to the synthetic duplication of experience that in allowing us to, in some sense, live forever, is also draining us of life. But don’t let me spell all of this out for you—Bioy Casares does such a perfect, surprisingly lucid job of guiding us through this labyrinth. Go back to him. There’s a wonderful edition of the book still in print from New York Review Books Classics ($12.95 US/$16,95 Can.), translated by Ruth L.C. Simms and complete with Borges’ prologue, a very informative introduction from Suzanne Jill Levine, and the original illustrations by Borges’ sister, Norah Borges de Torre.