King Leopold’s Ghost is not a movie to be evaluated simply as a piece of cinema seeking to balance form and content. Of the form there is little to say, especially since the content is so overwhelmingly mesmerizing in its depiction of the depths to which some human beings will descend in the oppression, torture, mutilation and murder of others in the systematic pursuit of profits. Millions of people were murdered in Congo, and not because of some theocratic imperative, as in the mutual slaughter of Muslims and Hindus after India gained its independence from Britain. Nor was it simply another instance of European colonialism in Africa.
King Leopold II of Belgium (1835-1909) was in a class by himself as a colonial exploiter. He reigned as King of Belgium from 1865 to his death. He also reigned as King of the Congo Free State from 1876 to 1904, when he was forced to abdicate because the horrors of his supposedly “benevolent” rule could no longer be hidden or suppressed. But he didn’t abandon Congo empty-handed: He sold his holdings in the colony to the Belgium nation for what might be described as a princely sum, if not an outright swindle of the Belgian people. The monuments to Leopold’s greed can be seen today in many parts of Belgium and the French Riviera. Indeed, the thriving port city of Antwerp was built virtually on the backs of the wretched Congolese laborers engaged in the labor-intensive industries of mining, harvesting and hunting for gold, diamonds, rubber and ivory, among many other valuable commodities. In more recent times, Congo has become one of the chief sources of uranium for the world’s nuclear generators and arsenals. That is the ultimate horror of the film: that not much has changed since Leopold II began his artfully capitalist manipulations over a century ago. In the end, he is almost a comic figure in what has turned out to be an unending horror-movie nightmare of prodigious proportions.
Among the more fascinating footnotes to this saga of evildoing is the derogation, even destruction, of the legend of British journalist, explorer and self-glorifier Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904), best known in the popular mind for his expedition into Africa in search of David Livingstone, whom he greeted with the words “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” in 1871. I still remember Henry King’s 1939 Stanley and Livingstone, in which Spencer Tracy as Stanley asks the famous question of Cedric Hardwicke. It turns out that Stanley had a more shameful mission in Africa, serving as Leopold’s advance bullyboy to intimidate the natives and hunt elephants for their valuable ivory. In essence, the time-honored Stanley was an imperial thug for Leopold II, and the Congolese people felt the lash of his whip, both real and metaphorical.
A more edifying footnote involves the immortal Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), whose experiences as a steamboat captain in Congo provided him with the background material for The Heart of Darkness (1899). When Marlow, the narrator of Conrad’s tale, journeys up the river in search of the madman Kurtz, he finds him hallucinating to the refrain of “the horror, the horror”—Conrad’s elegant summation of what he himself had found in Leopold’s tormented realm. Ironically, Leopold himself never set foot in Congo, though his massive footprints in the region are still visible today in the poverty and suffering of the Congolese people, who have never benefited from the exploitation of the region’s vast resources.
The U.S. government and many of the largest American corporations have collaborated with the Belgian colonialists and their own military and corporate sponsors to keep the people of the region from shaping their own destinies. During the period of the Cold War, President Eisenhower and the C.I.A. conspired with the Belgian military to have nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba arrested and murdered by a military thug named Mobuto Sese Seko, who continued the looting of Congo in the name of the anti-Communist crusade—an ideological dodge that Leopold himself would certainly have appreciated if only he’d been around to see it. King Leopold’s Ghost can be recommended as an economical education in one of the lesser-known atrocities of the capitalist system, as well as an eye-opening account of history’s most ruthless amasser of wealth. The people down at Wall Street should erect a statue to the larcenous Leopold: Why should Belgium and the French Riviera have all his monuments? --Andrew Sarris, The Observer
The fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom occasions a New York screening of the rarely shown documentary King: A Filmed Record…Montgomery to Memphis (1970). Consisting primarily of newsreel footage, the movie chronicles Martin Luther King Jr.’s stewardship of the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination thirteen years later. This vital commemorative event takes on even greater urgency when viewed against the backdrop of quite recent, dispiriting legal decisions: the Supreme Court’s dismantling of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in June and George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the Trayvon Martin case last month. Just as important, King: A Filmed Record also counterbalances the unconscionably cartoonish dramatization of the civil rights era in Lee Daniels’s The Butler, now in theaters.
Produced by Ely Landau, King: A Filmed Record was originally shown as a one-time-only event on March 24, 1970, nearly two years after the reverend’s murder on April 4, 1968. (The three-hour-long documentary, according to the New York Times review, played at more than fifty theaters in the five boroughs of New York alone.) A brief prologue juxtaposes speakers of fiery rhetoric—“We’re going to put every cracker in America on his knees! We want black power”—with snippets of King’s speeches espousing nonviolence and interracial harmony. From there, the documentary proceeds linearly, inexorably, stirringly, devastatingly, detailing the cycle of action and reaction, of courage colliding with hate, that defined the years covered in the film: bus boycotts, Freedom Rides, and marches met with fire-hosings, clubbings, and bombings.
This history, from which we are only a generation or two removed, is presented without narration and with an economy of titles listing dates and names—whether those of King’s allies (Fred Shuttlesworth, Reverend C. T. Vivian) or foes (“Bull” Connor, Sheriff Jim Clark, who sports a button declaring NEVER on his lapel). Ten people in the film appear without any ID at all: a multiracial group of prominent actors (eight men, two women) who recite from unidentified texts. Often disjunctive, sometimes ridiculous, these interstitial segments, directed by Sidney Lumet and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, aren’t entirely without interest: I’ll never forget the slight twitching of Ruby Dee’s left hand during her reading, as if she, still charged with raw emotion, were revolting, ever so slightly, against a staid exercise.
Of course, there are few speeches from this country’s history as soaring, as transcendent as those delivered by King, whether in front of national monuments or from church pulpits; this invaluable film’s greatest asset is the presentation of several of these electrifying orations in their entirety. But just as unforgettable are those moments that capture “the moral leader of our nation,” to use A. Philip Randolph’s description, in unscripted delight: King, soon to address a church in Chicago regarding the open-housing movement there in 1966, beams as Mahalia Jackson sings “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho”; he laughs as an associate presents him with a series of gag gifts for his birthday. “Thank you very much. I’m just getting older is all,” he says to his well-wishers. This birthday—King’s thirty-ninth—would be his last. --Artforum
A vital archival document. No talking heads. All images sourced from news footage and home camcorders. Begins with the Watts protests and continues with Rodney King, but the film is structured as a ceaseless stream of pain and anguish, rage and fury. The filmmakers know that systemic racism, the failure of the justice department, and the brutalization of the Black community by the police state will continue, and it has. We have seen this again and again, and the film asks us to be emotional spectators, to recognize the patterns in coded racist rhetoric by officers, presidents, judges, and government officials, and to observe the minimal changes, the little differences that only further emphasize how hardly anything has changed in this fucked-up country. It's awful how with films illuminating the past, they also relate immediately with the present-day. Turning off Netflix and then opening and scrolling through Twitter is harrowing. There is no difference. This should not be the case. Abolish the police, recognize that black lives matter, and be vigilant in this time of anxiety and rebellion. --Silentdawn, Letterboxd
The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), the directorial debut of director Ivan Dixon, a rising star in the black American film world, has to date only been available from bootleggers or as an occasional short-run independent DVD release. It remains outside the canon of film history and is rarely screened in the US or elsewhere. This wasn’t always the case. On its release the film was the talk of Variety – here was a blaxploitation movie with a difference. That was until the FBI deemed it cause for concern and all but one of the existing prints were seized and destroyed.
The novel on which the film was based was written by Sam Greenlee. It found publication in the UK in 1969 via Allison and Busby only after having been rejected by 40 US publishers. Translated into six languages and receiving the Sunday Times Book of the Year award in 1969, the book’s hip, streetwise observation and wider political savvy made it a sensation. Early reviewers considered Greenlee’s novel a fictional accompaniment to Franz Fanon’s 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, a primer for struggles of the oppressed and a first-world companion to Gillo Pontecorvo’s film masterpiece The Battle of Algiers (1966).
After graduation, Sam Greenlee served in the army before working for the US Information Agency on government propaganda promoting American culture overseas. He was one of the first black foreign-service officers, holding assignments in Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia and Greece between 1957 and 1965.
Disillusioned with his role, Greenlee returned regularly to the US and couldn’t fail to notice the outbreaks of inner-city rioting, especially in his home town of Chicago. Deemed rebellions by Greenlee, the 1968 Chicago riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King demonstrated insurrection on an unprecedented scale, bringing in to quell them the full force of the army, as well as the police and the National Guard. Police were ordered by Mayor Richard Daley to shoot looters and rioters on sight. US filmmaker and actor Tim Reid, whose company later helped to release Spook, told the Los Angeles Times in 2004: “When you look back at the times… Martin Luther King was assassinated, Malcolm X, Bobby Kennedy. Black people were really angry and frustrated; we were tired of seeing our leaders killed. What do we do? Do we have a revolution?”
Greenlee left the US Information Agency but remained on the island of Mykonos and wrote The Spook Who Sat by the Door, often dubbed the first black-nationalist novel, in four weeks in 1968. Its original title, The Nigger Who Sat by the Door, was pre-empted by Dick Gregory’s newly published Nigger: An Autobiography. ‘Spook’ was substituted, the word deriving from a slang term for ‘spy’. It also plays on the notion that people of African descent were inherently superstitious and scared of ghosts. But most of all the ‘spook’ is the spectre of black revolution that has consistently haunted US white supremacists since the days of slavery.
The story itself narrates the quest of African-American CIA operative Dan Freeman, recruited as part of an affirmative-action programme. After a very competitive selection process he trains in high-level combat and espionage. However, following this arduous training, this model recruit is rewarded with a post in the reprographics (aka photocopying) department, ‘left by the door’ as a token of the CIA’s ‘racial equality’. Freeman leaves after five years and returns to Chicago, ostensibly to work for the city’s social services. But now he is primed and committed to revolution in the major US cities. The story is both a fanciful conceit and a razor-edged ‘what if?’ provocation in response to the urgency of the times.
For the movie screenplay, Greenlee teamed up with director and actor Ivan Dixon, acclaimed for his role in the pivotal film Nothing But a Man in 1964. Dixon was profoundly inspired by the novel but all his attempts to secure production funding from the major studios were unsuccessful. The search took Dixon and Greenlee across the globe and finally into Africa. Having spoken with interested Nigerian bankers, they were later disappointed to find these men had been ‘advised’ against doing business with black filmmakers from the US.
Returning home and desperate, they turned to individual donors within the local community. Greenlee lived on the South Side in Chicago, the main setting for the film. Not surprisingly, the city’s mayor Richard Daley refused to give them permission to shoot there. But help was at hand. Dubbed ‘chocolate city’, Gary, Indiana was home to a new administration under its first black mayor, Richard Hatcher. Hatcher opened the city doors to the Spook production team and gave them access to Gary’s police and fire departments, and even a helicopter for shots of the post-riot devastation. Though the film was set mostly in Chicago, little was shot on location apart from clandestine handheld and pick-up shots.
Halfway through shooting the film, Dixon and Greenlee ran out of money. Shown footage from the ‘riot’ scene cut together with shots of a sexy nightclub dancer and band, United Artists were easily persuaded to support what looked like a blaxploitation movie.
In addition the film was now to have an original score by electric-jazz musician Herbie Hancock. Greenlee believed that Hancock took on the project for its sheer scale, as well as for personal reasons (they grew up in the same neighbourhood and Hancock went to the same high school as his sister). Like Shaft (1971) and Superfly (1972), Hancock’s soundtrack was the perfect groove for this labour of love, its funky, highly charged ‘Fender Rhodes’ sound of the 70s building on Hancock’s deeper musical roots in US African-American music.
Prior to the 70s, Sidney Poitier was the big African-American film star. He won the Academy Award in 1964, the same year that Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize – and the same year that the Civil Rights Act was signed. However, by the late 1960s Poitier was out of favour with young people. They wanted an image to reflect their own predicament, someone less idealised and less passive.
In 1971 filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles independently funded his own movie, Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song, after rejection by the main studios. Its tale of revenge and injustice is delivered at a stunning pace and with a combination of jump-cuts and montage akin to the European New Wave. Its success led Variety to consider movies capturing the black American experience as being highly marketable for a significant percentage of the filmgoing population. Thus the blaxploitation genre was born. Sadly, the majority of these movies were precisely that, serving up an onscreen array of stereotypical gangsters, cops, drug dealers, prostitutes and pimps.
The Spook Who Sat by the Door had its premiere in 1973 and was an overnight smash. Initial takings impressed the movie trade press. But its troubles quickly resumed. Theatre managers were approached by FBI members who advised against holding further screenings. All the prints were seized, though director Ivan Dixon had the foresight to archive the negative under a different title, and it’s for this reason alone that the film survives today. Historians consider such disruption and intimidation to be characteristic of the FBI’s COINTELPRO strategy – a covert and illegal project to discredit any homegrown community-based political movement in the US.
The film was effectively erased from history and the careers of all its protagonists foundered. Ivan Dixon was never to direct another film and the film’s star, Lawrence Cook, never found a role of comparable weight. Greenlee, financially bereft, continued to write and encourage other aspiring artists, and does so to this day.
Critically speaking, the film was hailed by the public for its sassy dialogue, stylish cinematography and cool soundtrack, while some critics found Spook resonant with the times. Yet its provocative message was missed by a mainstream media ignorant of the war that was being fought in the projects and ghettoes of the US. Unlike the later Rambo movies, which really did encourage violence in support of Uncle Sam’s military mission, Spook is an agitprop call to action across the social divide. It resembles Battle of Algiers in its textbook authenticity of social revolution, and is a regular presence on required-viewing lists for both intelligence and revolutionary groups.
On one level it’s a heist movie and, after a considerable set up, an unstoppable rollercoaster ride. However, Spook is much more than thrills: this is a film about ideas and types. During his work for the CIA Freeman demonstrates every possible clichéd role played by the black man during his 400 years in the US, from enslavement through the many masks of servility and complicity to those of rebellion.
Often painfully funny, the film leaves a strong aftertaste. When new recruits are instructed to steal from the enemy instead of their black brothers and sisters in the ghetto, Freeman alludes both to the invisibility of the ‘blacks with the mop’ and to their plight. A smiling cleaner enters an executive office and removes the company president’s collection of briar pipes from under his nose. Freeman tells his new recruits: “Your oppressors hardly know you exist! That’s the real issue.”
In a later scene, the gang conceals its actions by posing as hopeless junkies – no cops would believe such characters could pull off a heist. (Interestingly, the politics of drug trafficking at the time show the Superfly hustler as simply a pawn within a wider heinous trade that hides behind a respectable face, an argument beautifully captured in the lyrical counter-narrative of Curtis Mayfield’s haunting soundtrack to that film.) Turn reality on its head and use it to your advantage, Freeman tells his recruits: slapstick humour as corrosive satire as urgent call to action.
The film has its flaws. Spook is predominantly presented as a boy’s own adventure, with the exception of the Dahomey Queen who supports Freeman’s struggle despite her background. Anyone familiar with the history of the Black Panther Party would know that 60 per cent of its members were women, among them Angela Davis and Chaka Khan.
Despite this, the major achievement of Spook is its depiction of a spectrum of social roles within the African-American community. It’s a vivid picture of the language of race politics whose complexity and inherent contradictions go to the heart of the African-American experience, encouraging the viewer to transcend class and consider their collective plight. Without this critique of individual complicity in oppression, The Spook Who Sat by the Door could be accused of being a rabble-rousing exercise in fuelling blind resentment, but as Freeman tells a fellow gang member, “This is not about hating white folks… this is about loving freedom enough to fight and die for it.” --BFI
Unique in African-American History, Black Liberation is not just a "movie on Malcolm X." It incarnates his authentic spirit and will, The leader was actively involved behind the camera, as an essential creative and political force. Malcolm X did not want an idolatrous movie, replete with lengthy footage of himself at a microphone. Instead, he was determined to make an uncompromising film that was truly of, by, and for the African-American people. A politically serious European director shared that vision. He freely offered formidable cinematic experience, as well as his own film equipment and production facilities. Both men knew that the project would retain its integrity only if its makers owned the means of film production. Armed with minimal, yet strictly independent resources, they drew their filmmaking collective directly from the African-American community.
Black Liberation stars — the African-American People. Therein lies the power of the leader's filmic testament. African-American faces and voices speak for themselves. The men, women and children of this film — and their children — possess an extraordinary heritage. Black Liberation touched thousands of lives, and served to organize and politically educate the communities where the shooting took place.
Ossie Davis participates in the narration of Black Liberation, as a gesture of political solidarity. You will also hear the voices of Malcolm X, of other leaders, and of the many men and women unknown, who speak their minds, their hearts, their souls. The voices and music of the African-American People complement the explosively metaphoric documentary and docu-dramatic imagery.
The film moves at a speed consistent with the editing style of our present day. Twenty years before MTV, Black Liberation mastered the contemporary language of quick, synthetic imagery. The African drums of Black Liberation propel a rush of visual metaphor. On second and third viewing, the images reveal further layers of meaning, hitherto unseen. The style is straight out and near-subliminal at once. Black Liberation grabs you bodily, and takes you to the limit.
Judged incendiary in its own time, this film was never openly distributed in the country of its origin. Prints have been circulated within the African-American community, but were never plentiful or accessible enough to meet the demand. In the Third World and Europe, Black Liberation won respect both as "The First Truly Underground Film Coming From the USA," and as an exceptionally fine example of the cinematic art. The list of international awards would be impressive for any film, but it is stunning for a feature made primarily as an uncompromising expression of political rage and hope. Black Liberation is a prime example of how form and content can truly be worthy of one another. An explicitly political film can be a fine work of art.
--Zoelund
“Filmed and edited by William Klein … in collaboration with Eldridge Cleaver and Robert Scheer” read the red-lettered credits at the beginning of this portrait of Black Panther activist Eldridge Cleaver. In the late sixties, Cleaver left the United States for Cuba, then Algeria, in order to avoid prosecution. Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther tells the story of his political activism in exile and becomes itself more incendiary by the minute. But it also stops from time to time to take stock, such as in the conversations between Cleaver and Scheer or in Cleaver’s encounters with representatives of Pan-African peace movements or South Vietnam. How does the American struggle fit into the struggle against worldwide imperialism and how does the Panther’s revolutionary language fit into Klein’s images? A film that creates affirmative images, but still asks how images produce images nonetheless. --Berlinale
Political philosopher and visionary, husband and father, dynamic orator and militant minister. In his lifetime, Malcolm X was many men. Born Malcolm Little, he later became "Detroit Red" and "New York Red" — a hustler, drug pusher, pimp, con man and the head of a Boston robbery ring. After spending time in prison, he emerged as Minister Malcolm — Malcolm X, the fiery, eloquent spokesman for the Nation of Islam. Finally, he became El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, an internationally recognized leader and advocate for oppressed peoples. He was both loved and despised, revered and feared — until an assassin's bullet cut him down at age 39.
American Experience marks the 40th anniversary of his death with "Malcolm X — Make It Plain." This in-depth film portrait goes straight to the heart, mind and message of one of the modern era's most complex figures. Actress Alfre Woodard narrates the special.
This film chronicles Malcolm X's remarkable journey from his birth on May 19, 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska, to his assassination at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City on February 21, 1965. His compelling story is told through the memories of people who had close personal and working relationships with him: prominent figures such as Maya Angelou, Ossie Davis and Alex Haley; Nation of Islam associates, including Wallace D. Muhammad, the son of Elijah Muhammad; and family members, including his wife, Betty Shabazz, and his oldest daughter, Attallah Shabazz. Included is extensive archival footage of Malcolm X, speaking in his own words at meetings and rallies, and in media interviews.
At a time when black civil rights leaders preached harmony and integration, Malcolm preached a militant gospel of self-defense and nationalism that terrified many whites and disturbed, yet also inspired, black Americans. After his travels to Africa and Mecca, he returned with a deeper understanding of Islam and a new willingness to accept white allies. "The white man and the black man have to be able to sit down at the same table," he said in his last year. "Then they can bring the issues that are under the rug out on top of the table and take an intelligent approach to getting the problem solved."
In 1965, under attack from the Nation of Islam and under surveillance by the FBI, Malcolm X was assassinated while delivering a speech. Who killed him and why remains a mystery to this day, 40 years after his assassination. --PBS
Its fans include Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen brothers, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock and Dave Chapelle. Its director is the not-so-famous father of an extremely famous - and, on occasion, extremely infamous - contemporary actor. It was nudged towards hip-hit status when Jane Fonda, appearing on Johnny Carson's Tonight show in 1969, proclaimed it a masterpiece. Its stars include an electrifying Antonio Fargas, six years before Car Wash and seven years before Huggy Bear; the ex-husband of suicidal freak-and-dwarf photographer Diane Arbus; two midgets, playing the US president and his fun-size first lady, whose only other credit is Werner Herzog's Even Dwarves Started Small. It climaxes with Fargas, dressed as an Arab potentate, setting fire to millions of dollars with a Molotov cocktail, and - oh yeah - it's the first movie in history to deploy that notoriously potent revolutionary code-word "jism".
Robert Downey's Putney Swope, a scathing, hugely energetic and scattershot satire about the black takeover of a lilywhite Madison Avenue ad agency, made a lot of Top 10 Lists back at the end of the 1960s and then disappeared, seemingly for good. Now it's back, on DVD in the USA and at a screening in London. The chance to reassess it shouldn't be missed by anyone who cherishes the lost movies of a tumultuous era in American history and American cinema. I first saw it two decades ago and it has lost precious little of its pitch-black satirical zing in the years since. Indeed, like a number of movies from that period, it seems not less but more relevant now than then. It dated badly for a while, then came full-circle back into renewed potency.
So it's disconcerting to catch up with Downey and hear his first words: "I don't love it very much. It's an old movie and, in its own moment, it got very lucky to get distributed at all." The distributor, Don Rugoff of Cinema Five, was almost turned away from the screening by Downey himself. "And then at the end of the screening he came up and said, 'I don't understand this movie, but I like it. Come see me.' And he opened it about a month later on 3rd Avenue and the poster for the movie was so strong" - it's a fist giving the finger, with a sexy model instead of the digit in question, reminiscent of the logo for M*A*S*H, and the tagline "Up Madison Avenue" - "that when he showed it to me I said, 'it's better than the movie!' And it found an audience, which was very unusual for my stuff." (This hitherto had mainly consisted of short absurdist movies with tasty titles like Balls Bluff, Chafed Elbows and Sweet Smell of Sex).
Downey is pushing 70 now, has a fine full head of white hair, and sounds like your Jewish uncle who just drove 16 hours to the family reunion and now wants an iced tea, a knish and a comfy place on the couch. Push him a little, though, and he regales you with a few anecdotes about what a crazy old dog he was back in the day.
"I was making movies that were getting a nice response in New York and playing in one theatre in Greenwich Village for a few months. And I was also working at an outfit that was experimenting with films on the side. One day a black guy who was working with me came up and said, 'Hey we do the same job but you get paid more than me.' I said, let's go see the boss, who was a great guy, and he said, and this is in the movie, 'See, if I give him a raise, I gotta give you a raise, too, and then we're right back where we started.' And that stayed in my brain forever. And working around people who made commercials gave me a lot of insight. I had a brother-in-law who worked at an ad agency who put me into a meeting and said I was from South America and couldn't speak English, so I could just sit there and pick up all this real stuff. So that's how it happened."
The movie's impact may have had to do with its long and splendidly demented opening sequence, in which a hairy, biker-looking feller descends on Manhattan from on high in a helicopter (the back of his Hell Angels-like colours-jacket reads "Mensa: Chapter X"), strides into the ad agency's boardroom and, having been introduced as an high-calibre expert in market research, announces that beer is a bullshit product that appeals most strongly to men with a deep-seated sense of their own sexual inadequacy. "In short, gentlemen, beer is peepee-dicky" - whatever that means - and then he walks out, leaving us trapped in the room with a rogues' gallery of corporate grotesques, nodding-donkey yes-men, rich white stereotypes and barely sentient boardroom idiots.
Moments later, Mario, the founder of the firm, enters grandly and dies pretty much immediately, falling face-down on the boardroom table. A senile old place-filler (Joe Engler) - weirdly reminiscent of quaking little Jimmy Conklin from Preston Sturges's movies - keeps asking, "How many syllables, Mario?" over and over again, even as the sharky board members conduct a vote that, by dint of corporate racism and internecine paranoia, installs the token black member among them, musical director Putney Swope (Arnold Johnson), as the company's new chairman and CEO.
After fending off jealous co-boardmembers who offer him various satanic quid-pro-quos ("If you give me the job, Putney, I'll get you into the Knights of Columbus!") Swope spends the remainder of the film ousting Big Whitey, installing a staff of no less venal, corrupt and money-hungry black hucksters and hustlers, and remaking the world of advertising by demanding millions from his gullible white-bread clients and making ads that underscore the crudity and dishonesty of the very concept of marketing itself.
Interspersed with the film's beautiful high-contrast black-and-white cinematography is a series of sort-focus Technicolor faux-commercials for products of quite stupefying crassness. After one toy manufacturer demands an ad for his latest kids' item, "a Junior-Miss flame-thrower that works on regular lighter-fuel", it's a short hike to commercials for "Ethereal Cereal" - the tagline is "No Sheee-it?" - or an explosion-prone neo-Nazi-backed car called "the Bormann Six".
Like I say: scattershot. Putney Swope is what happened when a New York Jewish absurdist comic sensibility like Downey's, far harsher and more cynical than the cuddly version being purveyed by at the time by mainstream contemporaries like Woody Allen and Mel Brooks (who in fact has a nanosecond-long cameo in Putney Swope), collides with a revolutionary African-American worldview.
The success of the movie is underlined by its appeal to the fans mentioned earlier: white boy Anderson, the Jewish Coens, and, far less predictably, three of the great black hopes of African-American standup comedy of the last two decades. I ask him if there were any Afro-Jewish tensions on the set. No, he says, not at all. But interestingly, elements of the backstabbing atmosphere in the script turned up on the set itself, particularly because of Johnson's inability to remember his lines. Downey has sometimes been accused, quite wrongly, of racism for replacing Johnson's voice with his own, but insists that it was a desperate measure forced upon him by a shortage of funds and the impossibility of recasting - something he was loath to do anyway because Johnson was a fine actor and perfect for the role. "Anyhow, I dubbed Arnold's lines later - that's my voice. So the other guys in the cast suddenly began to come up and say, "Get rid of him. I'll play the part,' and I began to see this dynamic taking place on the set that was in the movie, in a way."
Along with Jane Fonda, perhaps the movie's biggest help came from Vincent Canby of the New York Times, but more importantly from a reviewer at the New York Daily News, whose anti-encomium now adorns the US DVD reissue. She hated it. "Vicious and vile. The most offensive picture I've ever seen." "Yeah, that put it on the map in an even bigger way!" chuckles the director.
And the movie's effect on advertising in general? Zilch. "There was a guy at a college where I took the movie to show to students, and at the end he came up to me. He had on a bow-tie and he said, 'MISTER Downey,' both of which had me frightened already, and he said, 'I want to thank you for getting me into advertising!' And that's when I knew I knew absolutely nothing." --The Guardian
Robert Downey Sr. and Paul Thomas Anderson in discussion on Putney Swope:
The first time Michael Roemer set foot in the American south, something pinged in his brain. He had never been there before; he grew up in Germany and Britain, but that day in segregated Alabama in the early 1960s, "I recognised everything. It was immediate. I said, 'Oh, I know this. I know what this feels like.'"
In the last 10 days, I have seen three films by Roemer: two documentaries and Nothing But a Man, his first feature, shot in 1963. The documentaries – Dying, a short piece following three people in the last few months of their lives; and Cortile Cascino, a study of a slum in Palermo, Sicily – are 40 years old and hard to get hold of. Nothing But a Man is rereleased this week by the BFI, and if I could reach out and grab your collar I would: do whatever you can to see these films.
At 84, Roemer still teaches at the Yale School of Art, where we meet in a sunny conference room, interrupted now and then by colleagues coming in to use the microwave. He has a look of Samuel Beckett about him and a slight German accent. Roemer left Berlin aged 11 as part of the Kindertransport and spent his teenage years in Britain, before joining his mother in the US. His sensibility was probably formed by three things, he says: fascism, Brecht and boarding school in Britain. The result is a rare and scalding humanity. Cortile Cascino, which Roemer calls "a very visceral film", was judged by a director at the Cinémathèque in Paris to be "better than Fellini".
The question of why Roemer isn't better known comes down to a choice of subject matter – and the eye he turned on it – years before anyone else was making such films. Nothing But a Man, which has an almost entirely African-American cast, tells the story of a young black couple in Alabama struggling to keep a family together. It is at once a period piece and, thanks to the startlingly natural performances, as modern a film as you'll see.
The lead actors – Ivan Dixon as Duff, Julius Harris as his father Will, and Abbey Lincoln as Josie, his wife – had to film in New Jersey since filming with a black cast in the south was too incendiary in 1963. Roemer and Robert Young, his long-time collaborator, had spent two and a half months touring the southern states, looking for stories that picked out the terrible things going on there in the early 60s, and out of this wrought a film that Roemer hoped would say something about the way larger political movements can undermine people at the most basic levels.
"It was showing how the economic system, the social system, destroyed the most intimate relationships. I saw it happen. It happened to Jews. It happened to my grandfather. He came from a very assimilated family, and they were interrelated with the Prussian aristocracy. Nonetheless, my grandfather was destroyed by everything he had taken away from him. He was a wonderful man. He shrivelled up and lost his identity."
Likewise Nothing But a Man shows Duff, a railroad worker, being systematically stripped of every piece of selfhood. While he fights against the system, his father-in-law, a preacher, negotiates with "the white power structure", so that his son-in-law yells at him: "You been stoopin' for so long, you don't know how to stand up."
Roemer's own early years were a mix of privilege – his extended family owned one of the biggest shoe manufacturers in central Europe – and neglect. His parents divorced when he was an infant and he hardly knew them. "I was raised by a governess. I had no sense of what family life was like. So when I was without a family, it wasn't a big change. And I was free of the governess, which was marvellous. I was terrified of her."
She was, he says, "a sadist", but one with an awareness of her own motivation. "She had a story about why she was the way she was, and, oddly, she shared it with me – perhaps in the hope of my understanding her. It was about her childhood: she would watch her mother being beaten by her father. She would say, 'I was at the bottom of the stairs, and he was beating her upstairs and she was screaming and crying.' And this was the woman that beat a child." He smiles. "Everybody has a story and a justification for who they are and what they do.
So it was with some relief that Roemer was one day told to pack up and prepare to leave Germany. Looking back now, he marvels both at his acquiescence – "I was very obedient, because I'd been scared a lot. I did what I was told" – and the surrealism of what came next. The children arrived in Kent and were taken to a local hall, where they were put on stage and their names called out one by one. "And you'd go down the steps to someone you didn't know. It was bizarre."Roemer was lucky. The Bunce Court School, for which he was destined, had relocated to England from Germany after the Nazis seized power, and it now catered to large numbers of German Jewish refugees. The British pupils were largely the children of communists or artists. Unusually for the time, it was co-educational. There was almost no discipline. "We were outside a lot; if we got out of bed at night and started roaming around, nobody ever noticed. We never had a pregnant girl, which is amazing. We were totally unsupervised." It suited Roemer, as it did his new and enduring best friend, Frank Auerbach. "Frank and I both feel that it was the really big, formative experience. The encouragement to go your own way. The teachers were good parents to us. I loved it and didn't want to leave."After the war, however, at the age of 17, Roemer was summoned to Boston, where his mother had been living with her sister. While in England, he had obsessively read German literature. Now, in the US, he started to read the English classics. "I was always one country behind."
He was also at a loss as to what to do next. His aunt told him there was a rather good college across the river from where she lived and he should pull his socks up and apply. "And that's how I got to Harvard. I mean, it was insane."
It was at college that Roemer started getting interested in film. When Charlie Chaplin's Gold Rush came out, he spent a week watching it over and over at the cinema. When the Harvard Crimson advertised for students interested in film-making, he applied and was told to turn in a script by the end of the summer. No one else finished theirs and so, by default, Roemer's got made. "It was a terrible script – nobody liked it – but it got made!" He directed it, and somehow a film reviewer at Life magazine saw it and made it movie of the week. "Amazing! But if you look at anybody's life, it's pretty crazy. That your life doesn't end up on the rocks somewhere is just a miracle."
This has always been his outlook. Whereas Young, his producing partner, has what Roemer thinks of as the American birthright – "that sense of 'things are going to be all right'"– Roemer has the opposite. "Things are not going to be all right," he tends to think, and in the case of their 1962 documentary, Cortile Cascino, he was right. The TV network, after commissioning the film, refused to show it. The film-making was too stark, too shocking. They even destroyed the prints, but a producer at NBC smuggled out a copy – not something Roemer himself would ever have done, he says. "Even if it had been a Leonardo or a Rembrandt, I wouldn't have been able to do it: to go against the people who were paying me. I can't do that."
Nothing But a Man suffered from distribution problems, too. None of the big movie theatres wanted to show it. "In Philadelphia, I asked the exhibitor why it was playing in the suburbs, and how are black people supposed to get there to see it? And he said, 'We don't want them.' So, you see, the audience was not supposed to be the black audience. And that's where the real life of the film would be."
The film did nothing on release; but over the next 40 years it became a staple on video, shown in schools, churches and youth centres to largely black audiences. One day Malcolm X "ran into the man who played the father, on the street, three days before he died. And he said, 'You're Julius Harris. I saw Nothing But a Man, I really liked it.' Juli was very pleased."
If Roemer has a regret about the film, it is that his own story is too nakedly visible in it. The difficult relationship between Duff and his father is his own. (Roemer's father survived the war in Spain, but was a "very unhappy man," about whom his son knew almost nothing). "I see the graft too clearly. Ja, I do. People know that the heart of the film is in the right place. But a few people, mostly African-American, can see the graft, and I have to agree with them.
Roemer went on to make a few more films, but commercial success never troubled him. "I can't make a film to get to do something else. I just have to do it for itself, and if it costs me … " He worries now that he jeopardised his family's welfare to make the films he wanted to make but that no one, at the time, wanted to see. "It's a little crazy, you know? You put everything into this thing. It's this and nothing else. And whatever happens next, I can't think about."
But he was determined – not that the word "determined" makes much sense, he says, laughing. If his life has taught him anything, it is the limits to which the individual determines anything. --The Guardian
By all cultural accounts, 1968 was a hellish year for America. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy helped spark the “burn baby burn” sensibility ignited in the streets. It was also during this turbulent period that Paramount Pictures reluctantly agreed to finance Jules Dassin’s remake of the classic film The Informer into militant action film Up Tight.
Moving the action from the streets of Ireland to the ghettos of Ohio, Dassin’s bleak exploration into the world of sharp-dressed Black revolutionaries introduced the Blaxploitation aesthetics that later influenced a crop of Black action films including Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), Shaft (197), Super Fly (1972) and others. In addition, the film stars an ensemble of actors that would a few years later become major stars including: Ruby Dee (American Gangster), Raymond St. Jacques (Cotton Comes to Harlem), Max Julian (The Mack), Janet MacLachlan (Sounder), Juanita Moore (The Mack), Roscoe Lee Browne (Uptown Saturday Night), James McEachin (Buck and the Preacher) and Dick Anthony Williams. Best known for his role as the sharp-tongued pimp “Pretty Tony” in The Mack, this was the film debut for Chicago native Williams. Playing Corbin with the heated coolness of hot ice, his performance was brilliant.
Up Tight, whose original title was The Betrayal, focuses on a group of fictional revolutionaries called The Committee. In his otherwise positive 1969 review of Up Tight, critic Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun Times, “It’s remarkable that a major studio financed and released this film.”
However, according to EBONY, in a November 1968 story on the film, the studio did try to bow out on their commitment to bankroll the film. “Paramount did not want to release the film,” stated co-star then-84-year-old Ruby Dee, who also co-wrote the script, at a 2008 screening of the film at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the Afro-Punk Festival. After Dassin passionately argued the project’s relevance, a Paramount executive supposedly said, “I’m crazy, but we’ll do it.” Reportedly, the budget was little over two million dollars.
A New York City native, Dassin grew-up in Harlem and moved to Hollywood in 1940 beginning his career as an apprentice with Alfred Hitchcock. A few years later, proving he too was a visionary filmmaker, Dassin directed the film noir gems Brute Force (1947), The Naked City (1948) and Night and the City (1950). In 1951, Dassin’s successful Hollywood career came to a screeching halt when, after being labeled a Communist before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he relocating to France. He struggled for a few years after Hollywood studios informed European producers that no Dassin film would ever be distributed in the states.
Unafraid of the repercussions, producer Henri Bérard took a chance in 1955 and hired Dassin to adapt the noir novel Rififi. The film was successful and became the template for future heist flicks including The Anderson Tapes and Ocean’s 11. Yet, while Dassin won the 1955 Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival, it would still be another thirteen years before he was hired by an American company to shoot a movie in the states.
Up Tight opens with stark newsreel styled footage Dassin shot of Martin Luther King’s funeral procession in Atlanta disgusted and distraught bystanders wept. “As we were finishing the shoot, Dr. King was assassinated, so Jules took his cameras down to Memphis and Atlanta and incorporated some of that footage into the beginning of the film,” Dee explained. “We then rewrote and reshot some of the film to reflect what had just happened.”
Minutes into the movie, the camera pulls back to show a group of young men watching the sad spectacle of the funeral on a television set inside a rundown Cleveland, Ohio barbershop. “I brought the story to Cleveland because I think Cleveland is more representative of a big American city than any other,” Dassin told the Ohio Plain Dealer at the time. Shot in a section known as Hough, two years before the community was the scene of an infamous riot that took place over six nights, we see a community in shambles and on the verge of explosion. The tenements and tacky hotels, side streets and steel mills look as though they might blow away in the next storm. In the same way King’s death led to riots in streets major cities, it was used as motivation behind the crime in Up Tight that sets the pulp fiction aspect of the movie in motion with a failed heist of a gun armory the night of King’s funeral.
“The man from love got his head shot off,” spits Jeannie (Janet MacLachlan), one of the militants. “And all those people learned nothing.” Coldly, the organization’s co-leader B.G., portrayed superbly by Nehru jacket wearing Raymond St. Jacques, replied, “Death is a fast teacher. They’ll learn, it’s clearer now.” A few scenes later the entire Committee, led by soft-spoken Corbin (Dick Anthony Williams) meet-up inside their headquarters, an abandoned bowling alley. Film World magazine described the location as, “…something out of a Black Power nightmare.”
Two of the film’s stars, Julian Mayfield (Tank Williams) and Ruby Dee (Laurie), co-wrote the script with the director. Originally, Dassin sought Ruby’s husband actor/director Ossie Davis as a co-writer, but he was scheduled to be in Mexico shooting Sydney Pollack’s film Scalphunters starring Burt Lancaster. Having taken his wife to the meeting, Davis suggested Ruby would be just as good behind the typewriter and Dassin took his word.
“Ruby has a very strong, poetic talent,” Dassin told EBONY. “Her sense of images, her sense of sound is just marvelous. It was a very full collaboration.” Asked about the film’s title change from The Betrayal to Up Tight, Dee, who is also a Cleveland native, answered, “Jules was very pleased with when the new title was suggested. It was an uptight time. Being Black in America is an uptight situation. If you’re going to survive, you have to loosen-up.” Surprisingly, she had never seen the film prior to the 2008 screening in Brooklyn.
Dassin’s second script collaborator as well as the Up Tight’s star, was novelist, journalist and stage actor Julian Mayfield. The burly scribe had gotten the gig at the suggestion of co-star Frank Silva, whom he had met a few months before a writer’s conference at Fisk University. Mayfield had just returned to the country after being in exile in Ghana.
Although Up Tight was Mayfield’s first screenplay, his talent as a novelist on The Hit (1957) and The Long Night (1958) had been celebrated in Jet magazine years before the Dassin collaboration. “Julian Mayfield demonstrates with an almost disarming ease that he possesses narrative skill, a sense of dramatic unity and poetic feeling,” they wrote. Though partially forgotten since his death 1985, crime novelist and The Wire writer George Pelecanos reprinted Mayfield’s short story “The Last Days of Duncan Street” D.C. Noir 2: The Classics (Akashic Books) in 2008.
In their shared 1998 autobiography With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together, Dee wrote that director Dassin originally wanted James Earl Jones to play the intoxicated loser who betrays the Black militant organization, his woman, his best friend Johnny Wells and, in the end, himself.
Yet, while writing with Mayfield, the director realized he had the perfect “Tank” sitting next to him. “I don’t feel this will be a film we will be ashamed of,” Mayfield told a reporter in 1968. “Just seeing certain images will be so new, it will blow the minds of many people, Black and white, to see what is going on in this country.”
Working with cinematographer Boris Kaufman, who shot On the Waterfront (1953) and The Pawnbroker (1963), making Up Tight a visually nightmarish film that was arty, brutal and beautiful. Dassin created a claustrophobic cinematic landscape that New York magazine critic Judith Crist described as, “teeming and pulsing one minute, stark in its solitudes and isolations the next.”
“But, it was about the music too,” says Darius James, author of That’s Blaxploitation!: Roots of the Baadasssss ‘Tude. “Booker T. & the MG’s doing ‘Time is Tight’ was the best. This was a few years before the big soul soundtracks like Shaft or Super Fly, and people loved it.”
According to journalist Rob Bowman, author of the fascinating book Soulville USA: The Story of Stax Records (1997), the group was commissioned after the film was completed. In preparation to learning the art of scoring films, bandleader Booker T. spent a week with Quincy Jones.
“Quincy was complimentary when I came to California,” Booker T. told Bowman. “He felt we were equals. He really made me feel good about the music, asking me for advice, for tips about making stuff funky.” The score was recorded in Paris, where Dassin edited the film, away from the prying eyes of studio executives who had threatened, according to Ruby Dee, to pull the film.
The Up Tight soundtrack spawned Booker T. & the MG’s second biggest single “Time is Tight;” heard in fragments throughout, the complete song serves as the film’s coda. Booker T. wanted to name the song after the film, but didn’t want to confuse the audience with the 1966 Stevie Wonder song of the same name. The single went to #7 on the R&B charts and #6 on the pop charts. In Soulville, writer Bowman says, “‘Time is Tight’ just might be Booker T & the MGs finest moment.”
Cultural critic Greg Tate recalls seeing the film at a drive-in when he was a kid. “The scene where the hood rains bottles on the cops is still a visceral childhood memory,” Tate explained, still excited forty years later by an especially impressionistic moment in the movie.
While Up Tight remains one of the best gritty political crime features from that period, it was soon, according to Ruby Dee, withdrawn by the studio. Although it can occasionally be seen on late-night television, at repertoire houses or film festivals, Paramount has never released the film on video or DVD.
After the disheartening experience on Up Tight, director Jules Dassin, who died in Athens, Greece in 2008 at the age of 96, never made another movie in America.--Ebony
The Murder of Fred Hampton has never felt more relevant. It serves as a document of the late 1960s, but it is impossible not to draw comparisons between the film’s representation of the Black Panther Party, which started as a way to fight police brutality towards young Black men, and today’s Black Lives Matter movement, sparked by police shootings of African American youth.
A group of independent filmmakers in Chicago, fashioning themselves as The Film Group, set out to profile Chairman Fred Hampton, the charismatic, 21-year-old leader of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, and ended up documenting the last nine months of his life. During production, in the early morning of December 4, 1969, Hampton’s apartment and Party hangout was raided by officers assigned to State’s Attorney Edward V. Hanrahan. During the ensuing assault, Hampton and Mark Clark were killed and four others wounded. As the film goes on to argue, the raid was unlawful and Hampton’s death was, in effect, an assassination.
The Murder of Fred Hampton is not just exceptional for the investigation it presents. It shows a fuller portrait of a misunderstood political movement that was simplistically reduced, by its critics and the media, as one solely devoted to violent militancy. Instead of that narrative, we see the attempts of the Black Panthers to better their neighborhoods through socialist initiatives. Viewing this film today feels like a rediscovery of the legacy of the Black Panther Party and the movement to try to create a coalition of all races, not just African Americans. Hampton reframed the Party’s slogan of “Power to the People” to “All power to all people.” Words still valuable today. --Eastman Museum
On April 4, 1967, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took the pulpit at Riverside Church in Manhattan and made his strongest denunciation yet of the Vietnam War; a year later to the day he was assassinated in Memphis. King does not appear in David Loeb Weiss’s “No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger” but this searing 1968 documentary feature is informed by both events.
Restored by Anthology Film Archives and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, “No Vietnamese” is a historical document with contemporary relevance. This weekend it will be shown twice at Anthology in a terrific 16-millimeter print.
The film alternates between footage taken on April 15, 1967, at the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam march in New York, which King addressed, and interviews with three Vietnam veterans, filmed less than a month after King’s death. “I’m a man without a country,” one of the interviewees quotes a fellow G.I. as saying, having been radicalized by his war experience.
According to its organizers, the New York mobilization attracted 400,000 marchers. (The police and The New York Times estimated between 100,000 and 125,000.) Weiss and his crew followed the 1,500-strong Harlem contingent, led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairman, Stokely Carmichael, with whom King had to be persuaded to share a platform. Carmichael’s black power position is clear when his followers refuse to let a white Harlem resident join the march.
The filmmakers stand in for the white power structure, eliciting all manner of frank comments from marchers and onlookers: “Why should we fight for you? You got it all.” Intermittently, the three G.I.s give detailed testimony regarding the Army’s pervasive inequality. One who studied to be an air traffic controller at a Southern base was banned from his squad’s graduation party; once in Vietnam he was assigned to be a driver, but when he complained he was sent into the field. All three men — Dalton James, Preston Lay Jr. and Akmed Lorence — were radicalized, expressing alienation from the Army and identification with the Vietnamese.
The movie is alive with incidents. Several youthful observers of the march, followers of Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, disdainfully tell the filmmakers that, as Muslims, they don’t need to demonstrate (“We respect the government”) while, several blocks along, in front of a tavern, people enjoy a spring afternoon ragging on the war as the Supremes blast out of the jukebox. In Midtown, the irate white counter-demonstrators include members of the National Renaissance Party, bedecked with crypto-fascist imagery like swastikas and “Bomb Hanoi” pins, coolly explaining their nativist ideology.
The filmmakers give the G.I.s the final word. One, who suffers from a stutter, becomes increasingly eloquent as he grows more militant. It’s almost a metaphor. The movie ends with a long, seemingly extemporaneous speech which, as passionate as it is lucid, another vet analyzes the situation of American blacks with a mounting fury, challenging the camera: “How can you tell me it’s too much to ask to be a human being?”
Weiss, who died in his early ’90s in 2005, was born in Warsaw and immigrated to the United States as a child. He was, among other things, a founding member of the Socialist Workers Party and a proofreader for The New York Times; he rode the rails during the Depression and, well into his 50s, studied filmmaking at New York University, recruiting his crew among his fellow students. (Michael Wadleigh, who later directed “Woodstock,” is one of the cameramen.)
“No Vietnamese” was shown at the 1968 New York Film Festival as part of a sidebar devoted to “Film-makers on New Life-Styles.” It seems never to have had a commercial opening, at least in New York, but was shown widely at colleges and G.I. coffee houses. The movie’s title, itself a potent form of political enlightenment, was taken from the printed placards that the SNCC marchers carried — although the sentiment is so closely associated with Muhammad Ali, who refused induction into the Army on April 28, 1967, but never actually said it, that some assumed that Weiss’s movie was about Ali. It’s not but it also packs a wallop. --NYT
The slow motion of horses streaming through the early dawn, the light breaking slightly on the horizon, but it offers no succor from the inexorable march of the Templars. This is a horror film that inspires dirges of doom metal: the tombs creaking with malevolence, the chanting, ethereal demonic voices from beyond the grave, dark and baleful rituals threatening to commune with the Devil. There's a pulsing red neon light, but it can't save you from the slow grasp of evil. A sentinel army of mannequins echoing the blind dead themselves. The cold wind bites and embraces in equal measures just as the skeletal hands that reach across time to seal your doom. The tattoo of hooves as they gallop towards your obliteration. --Letterboxd
I had never fully gauged how much I associated the films of Ernst Lubitsch with the very notion of civilization until an evening in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11. The occasion was a dinner in Paris, at the home of a French poet and his Italian wife; and it was through her graceful stewarding of the conversation that it turned away from the events of the day—and the unavoidable mood of shock, grief, anxiety, and disorientation—toward, of all things, Lubitsch. She had recently seen a screening of Angel (1937), and as we began to discuss the film in detail, and as memories of other Lubitsch films came welling up, I began to feel a gratitude to Lubitsch that was profound and personal, as if the emotional qualities he had embodied in his art possessed, even in mere recollection, the sort of healing power more commonly associated with the tombs of saints.
He had made a world of elegant illusions, of luxuries and pleasures savored by being transformed into metaphorical wit (the “Lubitsch touch”)—a parallel place that, at any time, might well be the place where one would rather be—but there was nothing flimsy or casual about it. The illusion was acknowledged to be an illusion by the characters themselves, and that acknowledgment made it real. Nowhere did this realness become more apparent than in To Be or Not to Be (1942), where for once he dared to pit the inhabitants of his world, living on wishful reverie and theatrical sleight of hand, against forces of real destruction. Jack Benny against the Nazis? A farce set in occupied Warsaw? Jokes about concentration camps? The Gestapo itself foiled by an elegant web of implausibilities? The victory that he permitted his creatures was the victory of art over life, and it was possible only as long as he did not compromise his own art in the least. It is not surprising that a good many critics and viewers at the time found the movie tasteless and inappropriate. The ever-astute Bosley Crowther of the New York Times intoned: “Frankly, this corner is unable even remotely to comprehend the humor.”
If only the film had been a bit more sentimental, the jokes might have gotten by; comic relief was something understood and accepted, and indeed was to become the bane of many a wartime melodrama. But To Be or Not to Be did something rare, then or at any time, by interweaving farce and disaster in such a rigorously structured fashion as to elicit, in the very same scenes, genuine anxiety and a hilarity so acute that it has something like an ecstatic kick. For many, myself included, it is close to being the funniest film ever made, featuring Carole Lombard in her last and greatest performance (she would be killed in a plane crash before the movie opened) and Jack Benny in the only film role that did justice to his comic genius. But at every step, it keeps plainly in view—just offscreen, and detectable even in the comic buffoonishness of Sig Ruman’s Colonel Ehrhardt—the possibility of real terror, real soul-destroying cruelty, real suffering. The fear is real, and even though each emerging danger is deflected by the most ingenious comic solution, another danger soon enough takes its place.
The story line of To Be or Not to Be is attributed to Lubitsch’s old acquaintance Melchior Lengyel, one of those Hungarians whose dramaturgical contraptions the director found so indispensable as a point of departure for his own inventions. (Lengyel had previously appeared in the credits of Lubitsch’s Forbidden Paradise, Angel, and Ninotchka.) It is hard to say how much the story matters here, since everything depends on the manner of the telling. As scriptwriter, Lubitsch enlisted not a previous collaborator, such as Samson Raphaelson or Billy Wilder, but the playwright Edwin Justus Mayer, author of the critically admired, commercially disastrous play Children of Darkness (1930), a work too literary for a Broadway hit and too dark, with its story of condemned prisoners in eighteenth-century London, for the comedy it was meant to be. To Be or Not to Be differs sufficiently from any other Lubitsch film that it seems fair to grant Mayer a decisive role in shaping its pointed style.
Almost no line of dialogue is without a barbed secondary implication; jokes comment knowingly on the jokes that preceded them, adding elements of ironic awareness too discreetly and rapidly for a single viewing to suffice. “I thought you would say that,” says Benny’s Joseph Tura (impersonating the turncoat Professor Siletsky) to Gestapo commander Colonel Ehrhardt when the colonel comes up with precisely the same remark that Tura improvised when impersonating Colonel Ehrhardt in conversation with the real Professor Siletsky. Earlier, Lombard, as Tura’s wife, Maria, rattles off examples of how her husband is always trying to take credit for everything, concluding: “If we should ever have a baby, I’m not sure I’d be the mother.” Benny’s even funnier comeback—“I’m satisfied to be the father”—subverts Production Code niceties neatly but is often missed because audiences are still laughing at Lombard’s impeccably delivered speech.
Not to suggest that anyone but Lubitsch could dominate a Lubitsch production. As Robert Stack, who plays the love-struck young Polish aviator Lieutenant Sobinski, remarked: “He was a Renaissance man. He could do it all. He was an actor, a writer, a cameraman, an art director. He did not allocate responsibility.” In To Be or Not to Be, he seems to deliberately challenge the stylistic and emotional equilibrium of his earlier work, as if to see how much stress it can take. By way of preparing the audience for what is in store, he lays down from the start a pattern of deception and reversal. We see Hitler walking the streets of prewar Warsaw; a moment later, we are given Jack Benny in the role of a Gestapo officer—something so shockingly unexpected that Benny’s own father, unprepared, walked out of the theater in disgust.
These first impressions are rapidly dissipated as we are made aware of having been drawn into a play within a play. But the structural game playing continues in different modes, as theatrical illusion is enlisted in the struggle against the Nazis, whose own grandiose brand of theatricality has a heavy-handed humorlessness that will be successfully manipulated by Benny, Lombard, and the rest of their troupe of Polish actors. The genius of the film is that the actors do not work as a buoyant, Merry Men–style band of movie adventurers but as a squabbling assortment of egotists and grumblers who needle one another even in the midst of danger, ham actors (“What you are I wouldn’t eat,” Felix Bressart’s Greenberg tells Lionel Atwill’s Rawitch) who cannot resist padding their lines even when carrying out an undercover mission against the Gestapo. From first to last, this is a film about theater, weaving in countless notes on the perils and uneasy joys of improvisation and impersonation, and relishing with infinite affection the many shades of actorly vanity.
It is fascinating to contemplate To Be or Not to Be alongside that other great exposition of theatrical egomania, Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century (1934), especially given the presence of Carole Lombard in each, giving two utterly different performances. With Hawks, the atmosphere is one of real madness, a self-absorption so relentless on the part of both Lombard and John Barrymore that it achieves a mood of unforgiving savagery. Nothing could be further from that nightmare than the vanity of Lombard and Benny in To Be or Not to Be, in which each indulges as the sort of illusion that makes life bearable, and that each in turn tolerates in the other. They are more, not less, human by virtue of their egotism, since neither evinces any desire to hurt. As the devil says to Don Ameche at the end of Heaven Can Wait (1943), Lubitsch’s next film: “We don’t cater to your sort here.”
Such is the concision of the screenplay that to summarize the plot of To Be or Not to Be—to relate precisely how it becomes necessary for Carole Lombard to promise to spend the evening with the traitorous Professor Siletsky to prevent him from betraying the Polish resistance movement, and for Jack Benny to impersonate in turn Colonel Ehrhardt and Siletsky (the real Siletsky having just been assassinated on the stage of Benny’s theater), to explain how Tom Dugan’s Bronski, the Hitler impersonator of the opening scene, finally gets his longed-for chance to play the part he has rehearsed for—would take nearly as long as the film. Nothing is wasted here, although much is repeated. In fact, the rhythm is built through the repetition of elements, the same scenes replayed with different actors, the same lines spoken again in different contexts.
Long acquaintance with To Be or Not to Be only makes more fascinating the skill with which these variations are worked: the title soliloquy itself, the joke about Hitler becoming a piece of cheese, the Shylock speech, the false beards and mustaches, not to mention the countless comic inflections given to “Heil Hitler.” That phrase almost becomes the leitmotif of the film; not only does Lubitsch turn it into a comedy line, he turns it into an array of quite distinct comedy lines, having already kicked the film off with Bronski’s hilarious entrance as Hitler in the Tura company’s never-to-be-performed play Gestapo: “Heil myself.”
The bedroom farce that centers on Benny as “that great, great actor Joseph Tura,” Lombard as his wife, and Stack as her doting young admirer will not be resolved by the war that so jarringly interrupts it, merely deferred to a sequel we can only imagine, and for which the last shot sets us up. “It’s war!”: the Lubitsch comedy is disrupted, for once, by forces beyond its control. Left to follow its own course, it might have turned the film into a close variation on his previous picture, the only sporadically successful triangular comedy That Uncertain Feeling (1941). Under the circumstances, it goes underground, like the actors, but pops up at the most inopportune moments, as when Benny’s simmering jealousy nearly destroys the mission when, impersonating Colonel Ehrhardt, he takes advantage of the role to try to find out what Maria has been up to. The spark of inappropriate feeling gives him away to Professor Siletsky, and the mood suddenly darkens as Siletsky comes as close as the Production Code would allow to calling Tura’s wife a whore. The rules of discretion normally operative in Lubitsch comedy have been shattered by a character beyond civility and beyond humor.
Professor Siletsky is crucial to the film because he is the only character who is not funny. The other Nazis in the story can be fooled. Ruman’s magnificent Colonel Ehrhardt is a full-blown comical picture of evil—obsequious to superiors and tyrannical to underlings, lecherous and fatuously self-admiring, quick to bully and quicker to plead for mercy—and even his ending is played for comedy. Siletsky is a figure of real evil and has to be killed outright, with no jokes. Everything that surrounds him is in earnest, giving a particularly sharp edge to the scene in which Maria visits him in his hotel room to intercept his exposure of the Polish resistance network. As William Paul points out in a brilliant passage in his book Ernst Lubitsch’s American Comedy, the scene is full of echoes of Lubitsch’s 1932 Trouble in Paradise. There, Miriam Hopkins and Herbert Marshall were two con artists, each vainly trying to con the other and finally falling in love. In To Be or Not to Be, all the elegance of that earlier seduction scene is reduced to a crude bit of sexual bargaining, with Maria playing for time by keeping the professor at bay.
Siletsky’s tired imitation of a suave seduction does indeed suggest that he saw Trouble in Paradise at some point and picked up a few line readings from Marshall, but just underneath that is brutal impatience and barely veiled contempt. The Nazi as would-be bon vivant comes out with lines like “In the final analysis, all we’re trying to do is create a happy world . . . Why don’t you stay here for dinner? I can imagine nothing more charming, and before the evening is over, I’m sure you will say, ‘Heil Hitler.’” There is no suggestion, however, that Siletsky has any ideological concerns other than being on the winning side. Where many Hollywood films would emphasize Nazi fanaticism, Lubitsch zeroes in on a more disturbing image of pragmatic calculation. Siletsky is an intruder in Lubitsch’s comic world, the voice of someone who has come to announce that the party is over.
It is precisely in this scene that Lombard’s playing reaches a giddy peak of exhilaration. She proves Maria Tura is a great actress because she’s sexiest at just the moment where we know she’s totally faking it; surely Siletsky will be captivated, because we certainly are. She brings to an impossible part—a Polish patriot prepared to sell out her country for a serving of oysters and caviar, a famous actress who finds the attentions of an aging Gestapo collaborator irresistible—all the invention and exuberance she can muster, spinning fresh revelations of flirtatious charm on the edge of the abyss to gain a little more time, right up to that final, breathless “Bye!” she whispers to Siletsky as she glides out the door.
I had a chance to experience the film’s power again not long ago, under circumstances peculiarly fitting, at an informal screening of it with other fellows of the American Academy in Berlin. The academy is situated in the Wannsee quarter, in a villa across the lake from that other villa where, at the Wannsee Conference of 1942, the administrative details of the Holocaust were ratified by Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, and others. The academy villa, formerly the home of a Jewish industrialist, was seized by the Nazi regime and became the residence of Hitler’s finance minister, Walter Funk. No one else attending the screening had seen the film before, and it was exhilarating to feel both their astonishment that this film had been made at all and their hilarity as it unfolded. All of us experienced an extra frisson from seeing it in an ornate library once allocated to a functionary of the Third Reich.
Hitler is said to have had a particular animus against Lubitsch, as a Berlin Jew who triumphed in the German film industry and then went on to further triumphs in Hollywood. Lubitsch’s face is used in the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew (1940) as an archetype of corruption and depravity, employing footage of the director taken in Berlin on his last visit to his hometown, just six weeks before Hitler was sworn in as Reich chancellor. No filmmaker, indeed, is more immune to the appeal of martial and nationalistic grandiloquence. He is a heroic champion of the unheroic, a tailor’s son who sees in all variations of royal and aristocratic authority nothing more than an opportunity for humor, a defender of the small virtues of politeness and shared pleasure who managed, if not to wake from the nightmare of history, then at least to make a counterdream in its midst.
The vibrance of Lubitsch’s domain is in its freedom from contempt or triviality or easy escapism or indifferent sentimentalism—freedom, against all odds, from bitterness. We may well infer from his films a deep conviction that power, and fantasies of power, however disguised, are the poison of human existence, separated by a chasm from the venial and eminently forgivable flaws of ordinary lust and ordinary vanity. Lubitsch, of course, would never be so strident as to say so out loud. What he shows us is an illusion, but an illusion created from a refined consciousness of what the world is, with the aim of creating delight. In To Be or Not to Be, he achieved this even in the face of the darkest of shadows. In any situation, as Greenberg observes early on, “a laugh is not to be sneezed at.” --Criterion
