The Wind and the Lion

The Wind and the Lion (1975) is a magnificent spectacle—a specifically American prequel to Lawrence of Arabia. It’s a celebration of robustness, with Theodore Roosevelt (Brian Keith) posited as the counterpart of a sagacious, honorable Arab (Sean Connery), who defies the European-bought sultan of Morocco and kidnaps a tough-cookie American widow (Candace Bergen). Bergen seems phony during an execution scene, but, otherwise, the performances are spot-on. John Huston, as an aide to Roosevelt, seems as if he were wrested straight from the period.

All that I really wish to take exception to here is the film’s American exceptionalism: Were our motives really that much nobler than the French and Germans, established powers whose only concern, apparently, was money? I love me some T.R., who certainly was a complex and honorable man, but I can’t accept that, just because we were (and are) a comparatively young country, our intentions and aspirations to power were somehow purer. The President invokes God at the end—an intended parallel, certainly, to Connery’s character’s belief that he’s merely a vessel of the will of Allah—but there’s a level of stickiness that John Milius, a political conservative, probably didn’t want to mop clean. And yet, there’s an undeniable allure in robust politicians—something that seems so emetic post-Bush, and yet something that movie gets at in an honest, powerful way. It’s difficult to watch movies set during the so-called Springtime for Europe (and big-stick America) because it inspires such contradictory drives: those of the beauty in strength and adulation of courage, the assuredness of divine right, and the disgusting repercussions of unchecked power, of the inhumanity that naturally sprouts out of arrogance. As Adam Gopnik pointed out, viz Paul Gauguin, courage is the most ambiguous of virtues. The Wind and the Lion, despite the concomitant ambiguity, makes you feel the power of power in your very core.

A Woman Under the Influence

A Woman Under the Influence—of what? Gena Rowlands mentions morphine once, but isn’t it in jest? I assume she’s meant to be under the influence of normal, lower-middle-class life, circa 1974, but she’s really just inflicted with diva disease. John Cassavetes’s filmmaking style was direction-without-direction, by which I think he meant to attain a deeper truth than that depicted in more conventional movies. But this film, regarded as a classic, is one of the most uncomfortable movies I’ve ever sat through. Rowlands doesn’t seem like she’s crazy, she seems like she’s acting crazy—she’s so bye-bye-birdy you want to laugh, but the serious undercurrents make you feel too queasy to do so. Mental illness doesn’t always have an apparent cause, but her campy overacting does—Cassavetes’s lax technique releases the drama queen within her like a lion into a shopping mall, and she chews the scenery like raw hunks of meat. She glowers and scrunches her face like Amy Sedaris in Strangers with Candy. As her husband, Peter Falk isn’t much better. When he blows his short fuse he’s a wild stereotype of loudmouth-goombah fury. He seems no saner than she does, and I can’t tell if that’s the point. When he tries to calm her down and have her be herself, he’s as effective as that succession of slappers who coax the frightened woman in Airplane!

There are some scenes that do feel right—quieter, looser scenes like Rowlands’s homecoming (at least in its first few minutes), and the film’s last few minutes, which aren’t all so quiet, but yet stand out as beautifully composed realism, even in terms of Rowlands and Falk’s acting. It’s as if they’ve used up their juice and were so exhausted from acting crazy that they called it quits; the movie’s over and they can be real people again, and we can sense their feeling of release. (The only real false note is in the chiruppy cooing of their forgiving children.) There’s at least one sustainedly good performance: Cassavetes’s Greek mother Katherine is wonderful as Falk’s Italian mother Margaret (although how many first- or second-generation Italian women are named Margaret?). She speaks like a variation of Ruth Gordon’s batty oldster in Rosemary’s Baby, but you can sense the stability in her nippiness that Rowlands’s nuttiness lacks.

The movie earns brownie points from me for its intentions, for which it’s probably also earned its reputation as a verité masterpiece. But good intentions and healthy experimentation can sometimes result in bad ideas and blah moviemaking. I doubt the actors were intending to play the farce that they do. But, when making movies with such serious intentions, actors’ instincts can veer toward the grandiose; and if the director thinks he’s just an observer capturing real life unfold, and doesn’t tell the cast to tone down when it should, then he’s letting stage-trained thespians turn his ultra-realism into a theater of the absurd.

The Innocents

"The Innocents" (1961) probably holds up better than most old horror movies. The frightening elements are psychosexual, but in a subtle, layered way--and it's subtle not just because the movie is old. If the undertones were any stronger--even if the film were made today--it would've become instant camp. (This isn't to say that a campy version wouldn't be entertaining.)

"The Innocents" is based on Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" (1898), which I started reading awhile back, but I was so bored with the prologue that I gave up--a mistake, perhaps, that I should rectify. (The change in name does more than make the title sleeker.) Deborah Kerr plays the young-and-pretty preacher's daughter, Miss Giddens, who goes off to an English manor and becomes the governess for a pair of orphans whose uncle willfully neglects them. She begins to see visions of the children's deceased former governess and the estate's deceased valet who, according to the good-hearted maid (Megs Jenkins), were lewd, flawed people. The former governess was obsessively, masochistically in love with the n'er-do-well valet, a cruel, abusive man who had a Rasputin-like appeal and influence. The maid is ashamed to tell Miss Giddens of their proclivity to make love when and wherever they wanted--even if the innocent children were watching. In a scene that the director, Jack Clayton, cleverly withholds from us, Miss Giddens somehow learns from her predecessor that the old governess and valet can only be together (sexually) if they possess the children; the lecherous elders were, of course, the isolated kids' idols, and Flora and Miles seem to have taken on some of the lovers' characteristics (Miles, for instance, flirts with Miss Giddens and kisses her lips good night). Giddens, who exhibits no sexual urges of her own, wishes to protect the children and believes that if the truth can be wrung out of them they'll be saved. The children claim to not see the ghosts when Miss Giddens does, and the maid is content to not wake the children from this bad dream; she doesn't see the specters either, and is skeptical of Miss Giddens, but minds the governess's authority. It's never resolved whether ghosts are present and Giddens's truth-bating does not go as planned.

The Victorian writing and setting, and the early-’60s production enrich and confound the sexual analogies. The children are referred to as "the innocents," but, if Miss Giddens is correct, they've been unwittingly corrupted. But is our virtuous, virginal heroine correct? Is the maid right in trying not to disturb the children’s' idyll, and what would it mean if she did? Since we're not clear on whether their excessively childlike behavior is really "innocent" or, in actuality, corrupted, we're not sure whether Miss Giddens' virtue is devoted to postponing their sexual awakening or whether or not that is a good or bad thing. If Giddens is right, then their sexuality is improper (both by Victorian and modern standards): possessed, the kids are made to be incestuous. However, they show no tangible signs of being truly harmed, and, as with many horror movies, we're forced to doubt the supernatural as much as we are made to believe in it. Although the movie never truly "frightened" me, I think its leaving me with these questions was enough to make it a chilling, intellectual and satisfactory experience.

The direction is simple and fluid and even Clayton's montages hardly seem dated (although sometimes the tendentious score does). Freddie Francis's vivid grayscale photography doesn't hurt (although the framing itself is hurt when not presented in its proper aspect ratio) and neither does the traditionally Victorian production design. Also, I'm sure that the film owes a lot to Truman Capote, who co-wrote the movie with John Mortimer and William Archibald in the midst of writing "In Cold Blood"--his spaciousness and journalistic formality in that book fit snugly here.

"The Innocents" in mood and manner has left its mark on more recent psychological-horror movies like "The Shining" and "The Others." If those movies appeal to you, then don't let this one's age be an impediment to your seeing it.