The Fallen Idol
Saturday, February 11, 2006
"Carol Reed's" The Fallen Idol
Something I thought would turn out to be politely English turned out to be a big success and kept me at attention throughout--Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol, now playing at the Film Forum. I've never been quite sure about Reed. The Third Man left me confused as to whether I was being well-used as a spectator or just twiddling my thumbs waiting for the good parts, for the zither to strum or for Orson Welles to begin speaking the choicer lines of Graham Greene's dialogue. Then again, you can be unsure of any movie in the same way, The Fallen Idol included. Take away Ralph Richardson's sneaky/honest performance, the gobs of sticky love coming off the kid, and the freaky, domesticated Elsa Lanchester-ness of Sonia Dresdel and I'm not sure what you'd have. A complicated set, well-employed, and a few interesting night scenes (repeated a year later in The Third Man). Doubt slips in. Maybe the movie does begin to sag a bit in spite of its pleasures, etc., etc.,-- and you can pick through all of this for a while, weighing performances and script as against the direction, before you realize, wait a second, Reed didn't do so badly. This was a fine picture. When did I get so sensitive?
I think a lot of people who think of the auteur theory as a discredited and hopeful notion still think in terms of Howard Hawk's films or Hitchcock's oeuvre (even in my own notebooks I tend to identify films by director first, and then by year). I think shorthand is necessary, not just for the purpose of reviewing a commercial product but for making inroads towards other disciplines and striking against the nihilism of arrogant nerds. Yet is it possible to get around some of its bad habits? Do we have a legitimate shorthand for talking about movies that doesn't in some way incorporate a big daddy auteur figure? I mean, do we always have to transform an aesthetic experience into bare-bones power and heap it before the strongest guy in the room, or the gassiest theory?
I'd like to think not. Still, my socialization (such as it is) recoils at the notion of just giving up and finally saying that after all it was just a good film. Certainly I won't get paid or honored for it. It's too much like praising an inanimate object, or praising art itself--in short, being a baldheaded modernist about it--when presentable criticism tends to point to something extra-artistic; that the film performs or demonstrates some social good (blacks=OK), or some repressed notion (Cat People=lesbians), or, as in the auteur theory, some great conductor (Orson Welles=genius; Gregg Toland=handyman).
This was Pauline Kael's great strength, knowing that criticism of art does not teach; it simply flatters certain types of ignorance. To say of any fine movie that many people worked to make it great is close to the truth but unstylish. It's undiscriminating. Yet Kael was able to say this and more, because instead of privileging the director or any fashionable theory she instead filled the role herself. She was the hero of her reviews. I think she was often wrong about the movies she reviewed, using as her compass a vague concept of good movies as being "human"; her definition of "human" being pretty much exclusive of anyone who can't appreciate Bonnie and Clyde and who doesn't regularly read The New Yorker. Her arrogance was extreme. Yet she took essential stabs at the auteur theory, and her longer essays brought a lot of portentous hero-worshiping into the light. If she was also the best film writer ever (and she may have been), it wasn't in spite of the fact that she didn't treat the films she was reviewing fairly, but because of it.
Anyway, that's all forgotten. In any newspaper, glossy magazine, or academic journal, Movie A is always about Issue B, and the whole thing becomes a fog. Then some quality personage cuts through the fog and reminds us that Martin Scorsese is One of the Greats, and then that's what the movies are about. The paychecks are cut, and so on.
So what can you say about Carol Reed? He was an adequate director. Somehow, he made great films. He's boring like democracy, or any other involved process. He must be treated fairly, and with acknowledgment of the system that supported him, to come across well. No writer who strives for coherency would want to take up that challenge.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:09 PM, ,
Ray Milland
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Two Short Observations Starring Ray Milland
From X--The Man With X-Ray Eyes, (1964)
"What do you see?"
"The city...as if it were unborn...rising into the sky
with fingers of metal...limbs without flesh...girders without stone...signs hanging without support...wires dipping and swaying without poles...a city unborn...flesh dissolved in an acid of light...a city of the dead..."
His eyes black and discolored, bulging like eightballs out of his head.
-----
And proof positive of the Auteur theory. The dialogue from Panic in Year Zero (1962), a post apocalyptic romp with lots of great radio dial imagery (even the Southern California landscape looks like a long radio dial as the mushroom cloud billows from behind it) directed by and starring Ray Milland.
"Rick, get in the trailer. Grab the gun. Shoot when I say so. Get behind that rock. Stay in the cave."
That's about it, as pure an emblem of direction spilling out in front of the camera hasn't been seen since Renoir directed himself in The Rules of the Game. Frankie Avalon running around with a shotgun, looking harried and confused.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:31 PM, ,
