Born on this day...

He's the gift that has kept on giving to audiences and movie lovers for the last 81 years, since his first major appearance in 1936's The Petrified Forest.  Humphrey DeForest Bogart was born on Christmas Day, 1899.  Making himself into an actor by sheer hard work, Bogey would end up becoming the most iconic movie star of them all.  Starting off playing gangster parts, it was in Casablanca that he transformed into the unlikeliest romantic hero, the suave and cynical Rick who proved to be a rank sentimentalist after all, just as Louis accused him of being.  Bogey could fit into whatever role he was called to play, whether it was the hard-boiled detective, or the amiable drunk Charley Alnutt, or the paranoid Phillip Francis Queeg.  Bogey made us believe in them all.

"I've been around a long time.  Maybe the people like me."
—Humphrey Bogart

A special message for members of Annie's Secret Circle.

Ovaltine?  A crummy commercial?!

Sunavabitch...

Your senses are much too blunt!

What is terror, exactly?  This is an important question considering horror cinema since it is that very quality that a given thriller reaches for to scare and captivate its audience.  But in recent years, filmmakers seem to have lost the essential understanding of what it is that creates terror in the human mind.  Instead of really thinking the problem through, modern screenwriters on a horror picture will simply go for plain gore, as excessively bloody as the special effects budget will allow, and utterly fail to show an iota of imagination to try to come up with an ever more shocking spectacle than the last dozen gorefests masquerading as "horror" movies.

Such filmmakers are very much like the character of Alfredo in Roger Corman's 1964 horror/philosophical masterpiece, The Masque Of The Red Death.  In a film that turned upon generating its horror through a rising degree of tension to create unease, one of its most brilliant scenes highlights this very quality as Prospero contemptuously dismisses Alfredo's sensibilities as far too blunt to appreciate what terror is prior to giving a true explanation and demonstration of the source of fear in the human mind.  As the scene unfolds, the crowd of sycophants who have gathered at Prospero's castle are bidden to silence as he soliloquizes, with only the sound of a clock ticking away in the background:

"Silence!  Listen.  Is it to awaken and hear the passing of time?  Or is it the failing beat of your own heart?  Or the footsteps of someone who, just a moment before, was in your room?  But let us not dwell on terror.  The knowledge of terror is vouchsafed only to the precious few."

At that very moment, the clock strikes the hour, causing one of the women in the castle to flinch with fear at the sudden shock, to the amusement of Prospero who had created that fear simply with the sound of his own voice, gradually ratcheting up the tension level during his exposition.   The moment is perfect, since Price here lulls the audience, as Prospero lulled his, into a stupefied fascination much like the cobra hypnotizing a bird before it strikes.  This is perfectly in keeping with the character who, as has been outlined in this blog's previous examination of this singular movie, is a brainwasher, using a number of psychological techniques to disrupt and then recondition the minds of his victims. The movie, likewise, takes the psychological approach to creating horror in the minds of the audience.  And when one of the very few moments of gore in the entire picture does occur when Prospero's wife Juliana is ravaged and killed by his hunting falcon, it achieves maximum impact upon the viewer after having been lulled into complacency, much like both Juliana and Francesca, by the intellectual manipulations of Prospero as they watched.  Which is why this movie remains the classic it is.

Sadly, such subtle manipulation of the audience is beyond today's gorefest schlockmeisters, who believe that horror equals lots of blood and screaming.  To any of those directors, Prospero would have the perfect put-down: "What do you know of terror?  Your senses are much too blunt!"

I never saw this!

If there is any one scene that defines the greatness of a movie, and ranks as one of the finest in cinematic history, it has to be this singular moment from John Boorman's lush, mythic production of the legend of King Arthur — his 1981 masterpiece Excalibur.

This movie was a loose adaptation of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur according to the credits, but no doubt screenwriters John Boorman and Rospo Pallenberg also drew from sources such as Tennyson's Idylls Of The King and the Wagnerian opera Tristan und Isolde to fashion their own interpretation of the ages old legend.  In so doing, the movie is open to explore themes such as the true source of leadership and what courage actually is.

One of the most critical segments of the story comes when Arthur, fighting to defend his claim to the kingship of Britain, has led his army of knights to the castle of King Leodegrance of Camelard, one of the few warlords who swore alliance to the boy king.  Leodegrance is under siege by Uriens and his allies.  Uriens is unwilling to recognize Arthur's legitimacy, being a mere squire who has not yet even attained the rank of knighthood and of questionable parentage.  To a man like Uriens, Arthur is in no way, shape or form worthy to hold any claim to the throne of Britain.

Arthur certainly proves his mettle in combat.  He leads his men effectively in breaking through Uriens' siege lines and cuts his way through several knights, taking a sword wound in the fight.  He finally gains the upper hand on Uriens by leaping down on him from the castle battlements.  Having him in the moat and swordpoint, Arthur demands his submission.

"Swear faith to me, and you shall have mercy.  I need battle-lords such as you."

However, even at swordpoint, Uriens will not surrender, and neither will his men.  "A noble knight, swear faith to a squire?!"

Arthur's first impulse is to simply kill the rebel knight.  But he then looks around the battlefield and reconsiders the situation.  And he realizes that he needs something more than mere strength of arms to win this battle, and has an insight that was beyond his father, the brutal warlord Uther Pendragon.  "You're right, I'm not yet a knight.  You, Uriens, will knight me.  Then as knight to knight, I can offer you mercy," says Arthur, handing Excalibur — the very symbol of kingship — over to his enemy and kneels in the water to either receive the accolade of knighthood or the death blow.

The sudden turn of events shocks Uriens.  Arthur's recognition of the justice of his claim, and his willingness to place his own fate into the hands of an enemy, are things Uriens never expected of the "bastard" boy who would be king.  Uriens struggles with his conflicting impulses to simply kill Arthur and take the throne of Britain for himself, or to treat his enemy with mercy and justice.  The fate of the land suddenly rests in his hands alone.

Then Uriens makes his decision, the only one a noble knight such as himself could make:

"In the name of God, St. Michael and St. George, I give you the right to bear arms and mete out justice."  To which Arthur humbly replies, "A duty I shall solemnly obey, as knight and King."  Uriens then hands back Excalibur and kneels to his lord.

"Rise, King Arthur.  I am your humble knight.  And I swear allegiance to the courage in your veins.  So strong it is, that its source must be Uther Pendragon.  I doubt you no more."

In that instant, Arthur won over his enemies.  The true test of his courage and his right to claim Excalibur and the kingship was not in pulling the sword from the stone but in his willingness to be subject to the same law he would impose upon others.  Arthur's simple faith that Uriens, a just man, would do the right thing by both himself and the land won him a deeper victory than that which could be brought about by force alone.  That in and of itself is one of the most powerful messages of this movie and indeed of any movie.  The true source of power is not force but justice, and the true source of courage is not brutality but humility and the willingness to place oneself in danger for a greater object than one's own self.

I'm supposed to do a thriller at Universal, but they want Charlton Heston to play a Mexican.

Interesting bit of little-known cinematic trivia: Plan Nine From Outer Space (1959) and Touch Of Evil (1958) were in production at roughly the same time through the year 1957.  This coincidence is a subtle but signature element of Tim Burton's magnificent comedy biopic Ed Wood (1994), the story of the (in)famous no-budget schlock director with more heart and imagination than actual filmmaking talent.  This coincidence is played upon not only in the famous bar scene in which Ed supposedly meets his hero and role-model, the great Orson Welles, but in a number of stylistic touches in Burton's filming that suggest the connection.

Of course, Ed Wood takes a bit of liberty with Welles supposedly complaining about studio interference leading to the casting of Heston as the Mexican state police narcotics agent Miguel Vargas.  In actuality, it was Welles who had changed the character from an American district attorney, as scripted, to the Mexican.  And Heston agreed to star in the movie only if Welles was directing, when he had been originally hired merely to play the role of the corpulent and corrupt Capt. Ouinlan. On the flip-side, however, Welles did shoot Touch Of Evil mostly at night to avoid the kind of studio interference that plagued both men (lampshaded in Ed Wood by the mostly night-time filming of Bride Of The Monster).  And in the bar scene, Ed complains to a sympathetic Welles about producers recutting his films; a situation the master filmmaker often had to contend with and which became a particular issue over this one movie. So for the most part, the fantasy meeting of the two directors who were polar opposites of one another in terms of ability did carry a note of truth to it after all.

Clean up on the aisles.

Who knew I would end up having such a maddening time this year just trying to keep up with this blog?  A dead screen on my iMac forced me offline for nearly a month while I had to wait for the replacement screen and adapter kit to arrive.  Then just two months later, the iMac died, finally giving up the ghost after eleven years of reliable service.  Not bad for a single computer.  Now I have to pull the hard drive out of it to get to my files and apps.  It should be intact, at least I'm reasonably certain that the killer of my old computer had nothing to do with the drive itself.  Fortunately, I've scored a good used iMac running a better OS and with more memory and storage, so I and this blog will soon be back in regular business.

Obviously, this is a filler post.  But I can also use it to announce some upcoming blog topics: a review of the B-grade science fiction movie Creation Of The Humanoids (1962), which is actually a much better picture than a lot of people give it credit for, and a look at the flip side of Atomic Cinema — a government propaganda movie dramatizing the coordination of a nuclear war.

How was I to know if I got too close, I'd catch your dreams?

"When I was a little kid, maybe five years old, in the old country, my mother used to say to me, she'd warn me, she'd say, "Don't get too close to people, you'll catch their dreams".  Years later, I realized I misunderstood her.  "Germs", she said, not "dreams".  "You'll catch their germs"...  I want you to know something, Tucker.  I went into business with you for one reason: to make money.   That's all.  How was I to know... if I got too close, I'd catch your dreams..."
—Tucker, The Man And His Dream (1988)

"I remember my father telling me, "The eyes of God are on us always".  The eyes of God.  What a phrase to a young boy. What were God's eyes like?  Unimaginably penetrating, intense eyes, I assumed.  And I wonder if it was just a coincidence I made my speciality opthamology."
—Crimes And Misdemeanors (1989)

"They were mythic.   They had a poetry to them."

"Yes."

"And you know what else?  The women... The women preferred the traditional monsters."

"The women, huh?"

"The pure horror, it both repels and attracts them, because in their collective unconscious they have the agony of childbirth.  The blood.  The blood is horror."

"You know, I never though of that."

"Take my word for it.  If you want to make out with a young lady, take her to see Dracula."
—Ed Wood (1994)

And it was for that one that Mr. Landau won his Best Supporting Actor Oscar for an outstanding performance as Bela Lugosi.  A long-deserved honor coming during a late career resurgence.  Proof that it is never too late, shy of the grave, to make one's mark.

The unburied dead have been returning to life and seeking human victims.

"It was the filmmaking, the fantasy, the fact that it was a fantasy and it had a few frightening, sort of bizarre things in it. It was everything. It was really a movie for me, and it gave me an early appreciation for the power of visual media, the fact that you could experiment with it.  He was doing all his tricks in-camera, and they were sort of obvious.  That made me feel that, gee, maybe I could figure this medium out.  It was transparent, but it worked."

—George A. Romero, speaking of the British filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and their 1951 movie The Tales Of Hoffman, for Robert K. Elder's book The Film That Changed My Life (2011, Chicago Review Press)

Some days, you just can't get rid of a bomb!

Damn.  I really had not wanted to return to regular service with this blog having to post another obituary, but there it is.  Actor Adam West — originally born William West Anderson — died just this morning at the age of 88, after a brief but intense bout with leukemia.  West was much more a television rather than a movie actor.  His few films included an appearance with Paul Newman in 1959's The Young Philadelphians.  Between doing a wide range of television roles, he found time to star in the camp science fiction adventure Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) and the equally camp western comedy The Outlaws Is Coming (1965), which was the last ever movie role for The Three Stooges.  The next year after that, he landed the role that proved both a blessing and a curse as the star of the new ABC television series Batman, as the lead superhero Bruce Wayne/Batman.  For five years, he donned the cape and cowl and battled a Rogues' Gallery of supercriminals in a series known equally for its camp cheesiness as well as for its having become a legendary cult icon.  For years afterward, West could never escape being typecast as the super-earnest, unbelievably straight-laced Batman, and his career suffered for it.  One of the very few post-Batman film roles he managed to net was in the cheesy B-science fiction "thriller" Zombie Nightmare (1986), notable mostly for being the launchpad for the career of co-star Tia Carerre, and later as one of the "experiments" on the television series Mystery Science Theater 3000.

However, the blessing for Mr. West was that he was never forgotten by the millions of loyal fans of the series and millions who discovered him in the 70s and 80s in television rerun-land.  And he was able to enjoy something of a career renaissance in his later years, often taking roles parodying either his famous television series or his image from it, when he learned to laugh at himself.  He also found the adulation of his longtime fandom a great comfort, allowing him to see that he had made a lasting and very positive impact in the lives of a lot of people.

Anybody reading this page who was a child of the 60s or 70s grew up with Batman.  As much as Capt. Kirk, he was the hero for the ages for those young generations and as such will always be remembered with great fondness.  It's easy to laugh at the image of him from the Batman feature movie of 1966 when he spent several painful minutes running around carrying a bomb with a long slow-burning fuse steadily diminishing, unable to dispose of it for one reason or another, and exclaiming in exasperation "Some days, you just can't get rid of a bomb!"  Well, Mr. West was laughing right along with us, and smiling at that scene in fond remembrance, and basking in the glow of the still burning admiration of his many, many fans.

If you listen very carefully, you can hear the gods laughing.

Rome.  For centuries, the historical spectacle of the rise of Rome from its humble beginnings as a village on the River Tiber in Italy to become the model of a republic, then its transformation into an empire which ruled ancient Europe for centuries, to be followed by a slow disintegration, has fascinated scholars for over a thousand years, nearly as long as the empire existed.  It has been used as an example, a metaphor, and a warning, countless times by philosophers, historians, jurists and religious leaders over the generations.  Its legacy has reached out to our time and has retained such clarity that people today can envision that long dead symbol of greatness.  We see the grandeur that was once Rome, and we also see its degeneracy and ultimate fall.

Rome has been as popular a subject for big budget cinema as any theme exploited by Hollywood.  It's the greatest empire that's ever been done on film.  Rome has been at the center of religious spectacles such as Ben-Hur, The Robe, King Of Kings and The Greatest Story Ever Told.  It has featured in huge epics such as Cleopatra, in musicals such as A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, and has been the subject of satire in  Carry On Cleo and Monty Python And The Life Of Brian.  In a more serious vein, the example of Rome has also been used as a vehicle to tell the story of the fight for freedom and as political and social warning.  The signal example of the former was, of course, Spartacus (1960).  As for the latter, that story was conveyed in the 1964 epic, The Fall Of The Roman Empire.

Featuring a script touted to have been based upon the histories of Suetonius, Tacitus, Cassius Dio and Edward Gibbon's The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, the movie tells its story of the beginning of Rome's degeneration.  To help guide the production, the historian Will Durant was brought in as historical consultant. Durant, the author of the multi-volume The Story Of Civilization, drew material from Volume III of that series, Caesar And Christ, to provide screenwriters Ben Barzman and Basilio Franchina with scholarly backup for their story. What followed was, of course, not a completely accurate picture of Rome's steady fall in every historical detail but rather a sense of the dynamic behind that fall.

"Two of the greatest problems in history are how to account for the rise of Rome and how to account for her fall.  We may come nearer to understanding the truth if we remember that the fall of Rome, like her rise, had not one cause but many.  And it was not an event but a process spread over three-hundred years.  Some nations have not lasted as long as Rome fell."

With this prologue, the audience is then launched into the moment this movie deems the beginning of that long process.  The opening scene takes place on the Danube Frontier.  Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Alec Guiness), perhaps the wisest of all Roman emperors and the living model of a true philosopher-king, has been leading Rome's armies in a ten year war against the Germanic tribes of the northern lands.  Now in his late fifties, tired and aware that he is dying, the Emperor realizes that he has little time left to make a permanent change in the Empire in order to secure its future.  Calling a conclave of his generals, provincial governors and proconsuls, as well as his allied tribal chieftains and kings, Aurelius intends that Rome shall pursue peaceful co-existence with the nationalities comprising the empire and those out beyond the borders of the empire, to create new "human frontiers" upon which a thousand year true Pax Romana may be based.  It is a sweeping vision few in the Empire can comprehend, particularly his son and principal heir Commodus (Christopher Plummer), who believes the only reason the wars have lasted so long is because his father wasn't ruthless enough.  Hiding his disappointment in the son who has never matured even after being given an army command of his own, Aurelius turns to his most trusted general, Gaius Metillus Livius (Stephen Boyd), to become his heir and assume the Imperial throne after his death.  It is upon Livius that the old Emperor has pinned his hopes for the realization of his vision of a New Rome that would build a world of never-ending peace and prosperity.  Livius shares the Emperor's vision but doubts he is the man to carry it out.

Unfortunately, Marcus Aurelius has even less time than he imagines.  While the Emperor is trying to persuade Livius to become the next Caesar, several of his own officers who are cronies of Commodus realize the threat to their own positions should this New Rome ever materialize.  Seeing how their own futures will be curtailed if Commodus is bypassed as heir, they decide that Aurelius must die and connive to feed Caesar a poisoned apple. The plot succeeds. Caesar dies before he can name Livius his heir and successor, and the throne ends up in the hands of Commodus.

At the funeral of the late emperor, Livius hands the torch over to Commodus and proclaims him "Undoubted Caesar", confirming him as Emperor before the entire Roman Army.  Livius does this in order to ensure the peaceful transition of rulership and thereby neutralize any possibility of political chaos threatening the survival of the Empire.  A grateful Commodus awards Livius' loyalty by naming him a consul and his colleague, to rule Rome jointly.  With the support and strength of the respected commander of the Northern Army, the reign of Commodus should have gotten off to a proper start.  He enjoys a triumphal return to Rome as the population hail him their new Emperor and vanquisher of the Germans, and the Senate proclaims his ascension to the throne before the whole nation.

Sadly, Commodus immediately begins living down to his late father's low expectations.  A man obsessed with gladiators, games, and ruthless punishment toward all who defy his rule, he orders that the provinces shall send more wheat and gold to Rome even if they should be impoverished and reduced to famine as a result.  Any province or tribe that resists, Commodus casually remarks, shall be destroyed.  In every way, Commodus very quickly demonstrates that he is a man of very small vision and even smaller mind, who in no way should ever have become Emperor.  Unfortunately, a large faction of the Senate are in agreement with Commodus' vision regarding the provincials, who are regarded by them as little better than slaves existing only to feed the ever growing appetites of Rome.  They quickly attach themselves to Commodus to secure their own wealth and power.  In the process, the honor and true glory of Rome, and the grand vision of its founders, is forgotten.

While Rome has been sinking under the weight of Commodus' degeneracy, Livius has been doing his best to make the vision of Marcus Aurelius a reality.  Finally cornering the barbarian chieftain Ballomar (John Ireland), the wisdom and bravery of Livius' trusted aide, the Greek philosopher and teacher Timonides (James Mason), sways him and his people into accepting the peace offer Livius has made to them in Rome's name.  Returning to the capital, Livius and Timonides succeed in persuading the Senate, despite itself, to accept the peace plan and allow the barbarian peoples to settle in the abandoned farmlands and villages of the northern frontiers and to become Romans.  This enrages Commodus, who sees the peace as a personal defeat for himself.  He exiles Livius to the outmarches, never to return to Rome again.  But when Commodus' actions spark revolt in the East, he hastily recalls Livius to assume command of the remaining loyal armies which have not joined in rebellion.  Livius warns Commodus not to give him that kind of power, which he could easily use to lead a military coup, but Commodus dismisses the warning, convinced that the gods are with him.  Livius can see clearly that the Emperor is a megalomaniac, but his first duty is to save Rome from the revolt in the East, which threatens to open the door to a Persian invasion if the tribes make alliance with Rome's great rival.

But even as Livius is fighting to save Rome, Commodus is destroying it.  He sets his legions to exterminate the barbarian tribespeople Livius made peace with, burning out their villages and taking captive all those who were not massacred.  The noble Timonides is killed in one of the attacks, and Ballomar and his people are dragged off to Rome, to be sacrificed to its newest god, Commodus.  The very mad emperor proclaims new festivals and games to entertain the people, who quickly fall into revelry, blindly celebrating their own degradation and that of their nation.

Livius succeeds in quelling the revolt, aided by the Roman legions which had first mutinied but then switched sides when the Persians attacked Livius' army.  As Livius leads his troops back, a trail of devastation greets their sight. They pass through village after village destroyed by Commodus.  Livius now realizes that the only way to save Rome is to overthrow Commodus.  But he resolves to go into Rome himself to give Commodus one last chance to abdicate before he orders his army to march into the city and remove him by force.  Returning to Rome, Livius is horrified to discover that the Senate is begging permission of the Emperor to rename the city Commodus and the Roman Empire the Empire of Commodus.  Livius then makes his last appeal:

"Honorable Fathers of Rome, what have you done? What have you become? You are the Senate of the people of Rome!  The voice, the conscience of the Empire!  Stand up!  Rid yourselves of this man who has imperiled the life of the Empire!  The Northern Army is at the gates of Rome.  The army will support you."

Livius' words go unheard.  Even while he is being denounced as a traitor to Rome by the Senate, Commodus has sent aides to bribe Livius' troops with gold.  Not having been paid in months, the soldiers and officers start grabbing at the gold being tossed to them.   Livius' legions disintegrate.

Commodus, who has long fancied himself the greatest gladiator of all time, decides to challenge Livius to a duel to the death in the Forum, with the lives of the Germanic provinicals, chained up to be burned alive upon a vast sacrificial pyre, at stake.  If Livius wins, he wins their lives and the throne of Rome in the bargain.  Surrounded by legionnaires who form an enclosed shield wall for the combat, the fight begins.  But even as Livius and Commodus battle, one Roman senator who had been a loyal supporter of Commodus approaches Victorinus, Livius' former tribune, to bribe him into killing the winner and then proclaim him the new Emperor.  He quite literally bids for the throne, upping each offer by a half-million dinars.  Meanwhile, Livius finally kills Commodus.  But with his dying breath, the Emperor manages to order the tribespeople burned.  Torches land on the pyres, and before Livius can do much of anything, they are consumed in the flames.  Livius then confronts the treacherous officer and senator on the podium, who are ready to proclaim him emperor.  Disgusted, exhausted by the combat and demoralized by all his efforts coming to nothing, he contemptuously rejects the throne and leaves Rome to its fate.  The senator then continues bidding for the throne.  "Emperor of the greatest empire in history?  From Britain to Egypt?  Ruler of the world?" says an incredulous Victorinus as the senator ups his bid to three million.  At the very end of the movie, Rome has literally become a commodity to be bought and sold, with no one left to care about the nation at all.

Now, The Fall Of The Roman Empire, as said before, takes some liberties with the actual history.  Events are severely compressed and some significant details are altered.  Commodus actually reigned for eleven years before his assassination.  Commodus' successor, Pertinax, was assassinated by the Praetorian Guard in CE 193 after sitting only three months on the throne when his attempted reforms of that body were deemed by them a threat to their own power.   The immediate successor of Pertinax, Didius Julianus, was the man who literally bought the throne from the Praetorians for a bribe of 25,000 sesterces.   Julianus would himself survive only nine weeks on that throne before Septimus Severus deposed him in a military coup and had him executed for treason.  After his death, Septimus' tyrannical son Caracalla became Emperor, with his misrule helping to set Rome on the path toward the Crisis of the Third Century, as it is known in history.

Despite how the movie plays fast and loose with historical detail, however, it does indeed present to the audience a memorable picture of Rome's slide from grand empire to degenerate spectacle.  We see the loss of belief in the overarching vision of Rome.  We witness the demoralization of the people, the Senate, and the army.  Parallel to this, the audience watches the rise of intellectually and emotionally immature men heedless of the destruction they will cause while grasping for a false vision of glory based only upon force and the hoarding of wealth.  The resulting cinematic tapestry reveals a picture of how these forces all combined to drain Rome of its vitality and its moral power.  The movie shows how an increasingly debauched Rome became more violent and corrupt as excesses went unchecked, and how the very institutions which had been established to safeguard the political life of Rome instead were turned into instruments of its destruction.   The scenes depicting a Roman population celebrating the death of their once great nation are rather frightening to witness.  Because when a people no longer can be bothered to care about their own society, there is no longer any kind of society worth fighting for and nothing any one person can do will save it, as Livius finally came to realize for himself.  And for those who look to Rome as an object lesson, it is very tempting to see in current events some very uncomfortable parallels between Rome's downfall and our own situation in the present day.

"This then was the beginning of the fall of the Roman Empire.  A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."

Oh look, we have created enchantment.

Around this time last year, during another Carnival season, this blog slammed the movie Candyman: Farewell To The Flesh (1995) for its hopelessly cliched portrait of my hometown, which a lot of movies about New Orleans are often guilty of.  Indeed, New Orleans is often looked upon either as some sort of cartoon or perpetual playground in cinema, perhaps a reflection of how the city is judged by its misconceptions by the rest of America, and succeeding movie depictions of New Orleans almost invariably follow suit.

However, there is one movie which seemed to really capture a true feeling of this unique city in a particular slice of time and one which still reverberates to the present day, and that was the landmark production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).

Rather faithfully adapted from the original stage play by Williams himself in partnership with screenwriter Oscar Saul, the movie unfolds as background to the story of smoldering sexuality and growing madness a portrait of an everyday New Orleans populated by a mixture of ordinary people going about their lives the same as in any other city in America.  It's not Mardi Gras, everybody isn't drinking like a fish, there are more than just French people or Tobacco Road hicks amongst the population, and bayou country isn't just a five minute drive away from the Vieux Carre.  The New Orleans of Streetcar is a living, breathing place with its Kowalskis, Hulls, Mitchells, Gonzalezes, milling about the streets, the bars, the shops and the walk-ups and downstairs apartments of the Quarter, conducting their everyday business.  This is a real New Orleans with real people who work, shop, bowl, fight, love, and struggle to make sense of things just as people do everywhere.

The stage play takes place entirely in the Kowalski apartment, whereas the movie had to create an external New Orleans to fully establish setting.  The first shots were filmed on location as Blanche (Vivian Leigh) arrives at the old Louisville & Nashville station which once occupied the foot of Canal St. at the ferry landing many years ago.  These first scenes depict a long shot of the train pulling in past the Bienville St. Wharf to the station.  Blanche gets off the train to find herself across from the neutral ground where the streetcars turned.  It is there of course that she boards the Desire streetcar to then transfer to the Cemeteries car to take her to Elysian Fields and the residence of her dear sister and her rough-hewn husband.

The rest of the movie takes place on a soundstage, but the French Quarter created for the sets is quite realistic (though taking some degree of artistic license of course).  The street set looks quite authentic, right down to the flagstone, the wrought iron galleries and the masonry peeling away from the buildings to expose crumbling brick, and everywhere there exists the ambience of decay characteristic of a poor, run-down neighborhood.

The French Quarter today is a trendy tourist mecca, with the effects of commercialization and gentrification evident throughout the district.  Back when Tennessee Williams lived in New Orleans and at the time the movie was produced, the Quarter was very much the way it was depicted in the movie.  It was a poor decaying neighborhood, populated by largely forgotten minority people: blacks, Italians, Mexicans, a wide variety of ethnicities in fact. Rents were cheap and the houses and apartments were run-down tenements.  It was common to see the wash hanging from the galleries in those days, kids running in the streets dodging the cars, and ragged street vendors desperately selling their cheap wares. 

It's a New Orleans that doesn't quite exist anymore and hasn't for many years now.  However, it was every bit as real in the movie as it was in actuality back then thanks to the very careful craftwork of art directors Richard Day and Bertram Tuttle as well as set director George James Hopkins, who either must have actually visited New Orleans to be able to properly visualize the city as it existed then, or poured over whole collections of photos, or were guided by Tennessee Williams in recreating the Quarter for the movie.  As can be seen in this snapshot from the late 1940s when that rattletrap streetcar still ran down Dauphine and up Royal as part of its route, the recreation was quite authentic.

But while that New Orleans of a bygone era is no longer real, its ghost still lingers in the present day city despite the changes wrought over the years.  Many is the time I've walked those very streets while growing up in that special place at the bend of the Mississippi River, where history is felt at every turn if one is sensitive to it.  And in point of fact, the French Quarter was still something like the French Quarter of the movie when I was a lad, before the Moonwalk and Woldenberg Park, when Jax Brewery was still a working brewery and not a shopping center and you could smell the scent of the malt permeating the air.  The district was in transition even then, but the poor residents hadn't yet been pushed out by skyrocketing rents and T-shirt shops had yet to appear in the storefronts which had once been mom-and-pop enterprises.

Not everything has changed about the Quarter.  There is still evidence of decay even despite the commercialization which has transformed the original city.  Mainly, however, there very much remains that same easy pace of life as can be experienced in the course of a long rainy afternoon in which an hour stretches into an eternity.  New Orleans is still a place which rejects realism for magic, and like Blanche tends to misrepresent things and not tell truths but what ought to be the truth instead.  And in that aspect, A Streetcar Named Desire is about the most true movie about the Crescent City that was ever made.

It will be the end of our Takeda clan.

Often, I find myself relating current events of the day by way of analogy to the movies.  Being our modern world's mythology, movies have many lessons to teach through their stories, lessons well worth heeding.

In this vein, given the confluence of events on the day I write this, I am inevitably reminded of the climax of the Akira Kurosawa masterpiece Kagemusha: The Shadow Warrior (1980).  The story of the Japanese Takeda clan's effort during the height of the 16th century Daimyo Wars to conceal the death of the clan chieftain, Lord Shingen (Tatsuya Nakadai), for three years, the movie spins out the tale of a thief who was about to be crucified but because of his uncannily close resemblance to the late chieftain is instead recruited by Shingen's brother Nobukado (Tsutumo Yamazaki) to act as his double.  The training of the thief is so thorough that he effectively becomes Shingen, much to the humiliation and growing outrage of Shingen's son Katsuyori (Kenichi Hagiwara) who is continually marginalized by Nobukado and the clan generals.  A stupid accident reveals the thief as an imposter, finally forcing the clan to publicly acknowledge Shingen's death and hold the long-delayed funeral.  The event also catapults the resentful Katsuyori to the chieftainship of the clan.  As Nobukado and the elderly Masakage Yamagata (Shuji Otaki), the late Lord Shingen's uncle and senior general of the Takedas, both know too well, Katsuyori's ascension presages the clan's doom, since the young man completely lacks the temperament and wisdom necessary to rule effectively.



Now freed from the shadow of his late father, the imposter, and the generals, Katsuyori is determined to establish his own glory by leading the Takeda army into an immediate attack upon the combined armies of Nobunaga Oda (Daisuke Ryu) and Ieyasu Tokugawa (Masayuki Yui), Shingen's principal rivals for the Shogunate of Japan prior to his death.  Katsuyori's march defies Shingen's will that the Takeda clan remain in their domain to guard it and preserve their own power.  Marching along the coast, the army is confronted by the sight of a rainbow upon the sea.  Making one last attempt to reach Katsuyori, Masakage points to the rainbow as an omen that the Takeda clan should not meet Nobunaga and Ieyasu in battle.  Scornfully, Katsuyori declares that the Takeda clan has never been defeated and orders the army forward to Nagashino.  There, Nobunaga and Ieyasu are waiting with their army deployed on a ridge, behind a solid log barricade where hundreds of musketeers are lined up and awaiting their oncoming enemy.

Nobukado and Masakage know that the clan is about to be destroyed and there is nothing they can do to prevent it. They cross lances, make their final goodbyes to one another, and ride forth to join their men.  Heedless of the strong position on high ground taken up by their enemies, Katsuyori sends the divisions of his army across the open plain toward the enemy line, one by one.



Each division charges the barricade in order, and each division is shot down by the musketeers as they come forward. The carnage is horrendous.  Men and horses are slaughtered down to the last of their number without coming anywhere close to the foot of the ridge.  Within ten minutes, the mighty Takeda army is annihilated.  The remaining warriors retreat to the sea, where they are pursued and finished off by Nobunaga and Ieyasu.  With the completion of the final slaughter, the Takeda clan is no more and they disappear from Japanese history.  All because of the ego-driven flight of madness by one immature individual, catapulted by a twist of fate to a seat of leadership he did not deserve, and who ended up quickly leading his clan to total disaster.

But hopefully, this will remain just a plot from a movie.