The Talkies/Of Auteurs and Collaborators
Podhoretz, John
OF AUTEURS AND COLLABORATORS by John Podhoretz In a splendid little movie called Eyewitness, a murder mystery is made untidy by its characters, who simply refuse to act like model suspects,...
...In addition, Yates and Tesich have cast the movie impeccably: Each actor is good (especially William Hurt as Darryl and James Woods as Aldo), each does exactly what is required of him, and none is allowed to chew on the scenery...
...The detectives do follow Aldo around doggedly, but to little purpose...
...This is hardly the dramatis per-sonae one expects of a murder mystery...
...he has developed a terrific crush on her from watching her perform on the evening news...
...The cinema was not, as Robert Warshow averred, "the bastard child of art," but was as great an art form as the older, more established arts...
...The results of such a collaboration cannot, by nature, be art, but can be successful entertainment, which is something almost as welcome...
...In fact, the only one at all concerned is the murderer himself, who gets the mistaken impression that Darryl really does know something, and must therefore be dispatched as well...
...He himself is no ordinary murderer...
...is there any industry which does not claim that it exists not to make money but to serve mankind...
...OF AUTEURS AND COLLABORATORS by John Podhoretz In a splendid little movie called Eyewitness, a murder mystery is made untidy by its characters, who simply refuse to act like model suspects, witnesses, investigators, and murderers...
...The victim was a Vietnamese, the director of a trading company who peddled information to every conceivable side during the Vietnam War and still maintains suspicious contacts within the Soviet Union...
...it is the director's personal vision we are really seeing on the screen...
...Darryl is concerned only with strengthening his tenuous relationship with the newswoman, and with protecting Aldo...
...The director makes his intentions clear in many ways: in the ways he stages the action, places the camera, emphasizes the "visuals" over the soundtrack, etc...
...First of all, there is no detective...
...A good movie has no one author...
...Toni, who wants a "scoop" on the case, cares less and less about it as she grows more interested in Darryl...
...he has not killed Nyguen Long for avaricious or passionate reasons, but in the name of a good cause...
...Peter Yates, the director, has had the taste and intelligence to serve the screenplay- he does not distract the audience with obtrusive visual business, and he places the actors cleanly within the frame, so that one can always see their lips moving (something auteur-ist directors often fail to do, mainly to disastrous effect...
...The auteur theory, developed in France in the early fifties and imported to this country by Andrew Sarris, film critic of the Village Voice,] argues that the director of a movie is its "author," in the same way that a novelist is the author of his novel...
...With the theory, for example, we can discover that Alfred Hitchcock, nominally "the master of suspense," was really the cinema's Conrad, and comparable to Conrad in stature...
...I really like you," he says when she tries to interview him on camera...
...besides which, they have to go on living, have to go to work and deal with family and friends...
...However, he does hint to a beautiful television newswoman, Toni Sokolow, that he might know more than he is telling, because he wants to see her again...
...A screenwriter contributes the words, the actors recite the screenwriter's words and go through the paces of the plot, but their contributions are, in fact, negligible...
...When a good director and a good screenwriter work together so well, it only proves that a movie cannot have one without the other: Fiery raise en scene will not substitute for strong writing, and-strong writing is not enough without a director who knows what to do with it...
...Directors have become the most powerful people in the movie industry, to the extent that Michael Cimino, the Oscar-winning director of The Deer Hunter, was allowed to spend almost $40 million on a film called Heaven 's Gate in which few people had any faith and with a screenplay everyone in Hollywood agreed was mediocre at best...
...Rather, we can find it in the tension between what the film seems to be saying and what the director is truly saying...
...All parties think him contemptible, and better off dead, even...
...Although to avoid suspicion he hides the fact that he was accidentally the first to come upon the body, he really knows nothing about it...
...Tesich has written a superb screenplay, neither too talky nor too laconic...
...But it is impossible to belittle the contribution of Steve Tesich to Eyewitness...
...Darryl, the protagonist, is a janitor in a New York City office building where a murder takes place...
...A movie like Eyewitness reminds us that moderation is a virtue to be pursued not only in life but in the making of entertainments as well...
...This was not simply another academic theory, however, for the auteunsts intended to legitimize the cinema by means of it...
...Cut," she replies, turning towards her cameraman...
...It has much the same quality as Breaking Away, the first Tesich-Yates film: It is not a statement, but a story, and its characters are not personifications of modern anxiety but are, almost recognizably, people...
...When he was a little boy Aldo must have wanted to grow up to be a suspect," one says wearily, but they can pin nothing on him...
...It is instead a collaborative effort...
...What is most interesting about Eyewitness, however, is not how good it is,-but how it serves as another convincing demonstration of the falseness of the all-pervasive auteur theory...
...For if its seemingly minor films-those suspense films of Hitchcock, the gangster movies of Howard Hawks, and the Westerns of John Ford-were art of a high order, then clearly the potential of the cinema was limitless...
...In this atmosphere, the role of the screenwriter has necessarily been much belittled...
...Its tone is consistent, its photography is not distractingly beautiful, and the music is used sparingly...
...In the most seemingly trivial of movies, therefore, we can find the most serious and meaningful statements, if we but use the auteur theory to plumb their depths...
...Darryl's friend from Vietnam and fellow janitor, Aldo, would appear to be the main suspect, but he invests most of his energy trying to convince Darryl to marry his sister, Linda, rather than trying to come up with a convincing alibi...
...This was only to be expected, of course...
...Second, no one really seems much interested in solving the case...
...More important, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, the directors of, respectively, Apocalypse Now and Star Wars, have sought to ensure the director's lasting control over the industry by each buying a movie studio...
...And in the twenty years since Sarris first began publishing auteur-ist criticism, the auteur theory has conquered Hollywood...
...The true meaning of a film thus cannot be found on its surface...
...Its plot is convoluted and interesting, and it has all those fully realized, slightly larger than life characters, complete with personal obsessions, difficulties, kindnesses, and loves...
...Something much more profound is going on...
...And the two police detectives assigned to the case have their minds on other matters: One has a son named Bernie who is a great disappointment, while the other has been so far unsuccessful in producing a child...
Vol. 14 • May 1981 • No. 5
