The Talkies / Who'll Stop the Rain and Days of Heaven
Yagoda, Ben
"The Talkies / Who'll Stop the Rain and Days of Heaven" Who'll Stop the Rain and Days of Heaven Writing in the current issue of Horizon magazine, critic John Simon complains that American movies—unlike European ones—are...
...Until he does, his via negativa will prove a one-way street...
...Watching it, we yearn to empathize, to identify...
...it's not that I'm an aficionado of Beck's...
...One magical scene, where a train carrying President Wilson rides through the farm at night, opens up to us and the characters a world of possibilities beyond Texas...
...Ben Yagoda is a free-lance writer living in New York...
...On December 4, 1783, in the Long Room, General Washington gave a moving farewell to his men before embarking for Annapolis to resign his commission...
...He enlists Ray Hicks (Nick Nolte), an old Marine buddy, to take the stuff to his wife, Marge (Tuesday Weld), in Berkeley...
...What is more, there is no reason for us to feel anything when he is shot...
...It shares with Dog Soldiers a metaphorical structure that takes Vietnam and heroin, in various ways, as symbols for America in the seventies...
...Thus in Dog Soldiers—and in Rain, which was co-scripted by Stone and Judith Rascoe—the sadistic cops (brilliantly portrayed by Anthony Zerbe, Richard Masur, and Ray Sharkey) are part of a chain of influence that stops we know not where...
...May 14, 1774, a group of angry merchants assembled in the tavern's upstairs Long Room to discuss the closing of the Port of Boston...
...Considering this Texas world apart as an emblem for the country itself, one can easily see why no American filmmaker is up to Simon's standards...
...there are virtually no narrative dead spots...
...And at a few moments (most of them wordless close-ups), the characters manage to break through their icy masks and come alive...
...There, amidst a great clinking of glasses full of Madeira and port, they appointed the Committee of Fifty that drafted the proposal to unite the Colonies and led to the formation of the First Continental Congress...
...Malick is so determined not to succumb to melodrama that he eliminates any possible drama from the film...
...Don't get me wrong...
...and here that, just three years ago, Puerto Rican nationalists planted a bomb that took the lives of four people and injured 44 others...
...John Converse (Michael Moriarty), an American correspondent whose moral sense has been numbed by the horrors of the war, agrees to participate in a heroin-smuggling plan...
...This works well enough when it is only suggested, but it cannot bear much weight...
...It was in Fraunces Tavern, in fact, that the history of the United States began...
...It's just that Beck's enjoys some mysterious, Perrier-like status with Fraunces' current proprietor, Mr...
...It was here, too, that glasses were raised signalling the end of the War of the Revolution...
...Bill, Abby, and the Owner (and the farm workers, who form the only other society in the film) are severed from the past and from each other in precisely this way...
...and everyone—including Converse—gets together for an apocalyptic shootout at a New Mexico mountain hideaway...
...that a shell from a British ship once camecrashing through the roof...
...and the two main action sequences—the Berkeley confrontation and the climax—are flawlessly put together...
...Days of Heaven, written and directed by Terrence Malick, shows what can happen when an American tries to make a film in the European, artistically "honest," mode...
...He develops this argument at some length, and he has a point...
...Stone implies, moreover, that it is less a clearly thought-out act than merely something to do...
...In place of human concerns, Malick and cinematographers Nestor Almendros and Haskell Wexler have concentrated on the changing natural world...
...The central trio cannot help remaining enigmas, given Malick's reticence...
...Rain is essentially a melodrama, a form Reisz recently defined as "drama in which people express themselves in action rather than words...
...We aren't told why the lovers Bill and Abby (Richard Gere and Brooke Adams) pose as brother and sister as they journey to work in the Texas wheatfields in 1916...
...There are other reasons for seeing Days of Heaven...
...and second, that there are deep-seated cultural reasons for the predicament of American movies, and it is nearly impossible for even the most sensitive of auteurs to overcome them...
...Indeed, it affords a credible conception of a footloose 24 The American Spectator November 1978 America...
...The buyers, who turn out to be crooked narcs, try to rip off the heroin...
...The irony distilled from innocence (c.f., Huck Finn) suits Malick's detachment, and Linda's point of view—remarkably morbid and metaphysical—is genuinely interesting and affecting...
...Although occasionally a bit precious, the device generally works well...
...It's a suicide mission that he could have avoided by simply giving up the dope, but as he tells Marge, "All my life I've been f---ed around by morons," and he won't have any more of it...
...and here that the State Department (then known unpretentiously as the Department of Foreign Affairs) met under Jefferson...
...There is, at the same time, a fascinating secondary motif consisting simply of the many machines that work their way into the story...
...his Hicks commands our complete attention...
...The lines of motivation, complicity, and reaction are clearly drawn...
...This cool strategy succeeds in avoiding the traditional Hollywood pitfalls—the eight kinds of sentimentality and obtuseness abhorred by Simon...
...A devotee of Nietzsche, Zen, and tai chi, Hicks has been waiting years for this chance to resist the forces of power —his Land Rover, hideouts, contacts, and ammunition are all ready...
...Both Dog Soldiers and Stone's other novel, A Hall of Mirrors, are informed by a conception of society in which everyone with power—whether a "good" or a "bad" guy —is in collusion, and the unconnected soul hasn't a prayer...
...Unfortunately, a cinematic representation of this condition does not necessarily make for a satisfying film, and Days of Heaven is less than satisfying...
...The shared meanings and social traditions that make his beloved European subtlety and irony possible just aren't there: In America, there are no assumptions—it's always necessary to start anew...
...Compared to their European counterparts, the products of Hollywood often seem unbearably crude, devoted less to truth and art than to the platitude and the cheap thrill...
...Days of Heaven shuns the logic of Hollywood...
...It is here, too, that I consumed my first "Washington Cocktail" —a tangy Jamaican fruit drink spiked with dark rum, gin, and Cointreau that works quite well despite its highly suspect rum-gin mix—in addition to untold quantities of Beck's beer, the latter allaying my fears that the Puerto Ricans might return while providing valuable insight concerning the military strategy of the Hessians following General Washington's famed crossing of the Delaware in 1776...
...The logic of Hollywood, though, demands consistent characters and reasons for behavior, with the inevitable result being oversimplification...
...I most devoutly wish that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable....I cannot come to each of you, but shall feel obliged if each of you will come and take me by the hand...
...Robert Norden, and it's all you're likely to wheedle out of the tavern's bartenders, who think the word "beer" is synonymous with "Beck's" (it is not...
...General George Washington A Farewell to His Troops December 4, 1783 Fraunces Tavern It is fitting that it began here and ended here, for all great saloons are revolutionary places—within them the mind is easily induced to fermentation upon whatever imperious cause is at hand, be it George III or Jimmy Carter...
...Malick shows what Tocqueville must have meant when he described a land where "the woof of time is every instant broken and the track of generations effaced...
...Hicks and Marge take it and flee, with the authorities in pursuit...
...It's a perfect manifestation of the limitations of American-style movies...
...This film is as taut and exciting as anything in that tradition...
...In Deg Soldiers, Converse's move is treated ironically...
...often to magnificent effect...
...And Nolte's performance will endure...
...By showing Vietnam gore in horrific slow motion, Reisz uncritically accepts Converse's questionable point of view...
...But the film is after more than thrills...
...if they can't speak, it's because they haven't been given a language...
...Two current native products are cases in point...
...For the most part, though, Days of Heaven is hollow...
...THE TALKIES by Ben Yagoda Who'll Stop the Rain and Days of Heaven Writing in the current issue of Horizon magazine, critic John Simon complains that American movies—unlike European ones—are almost uniformly "naive, nostalgic, simplistic, escapist, trendy, stereotyped, infantile, unreal...
...As in Malick's only previous film, Badlands (1973), motivation and background may be inferred by us, but they are not spelled out —least of all by the characters themselves, who are almost aggressively inarticulate...
...Americans have put out better melodramas than anyone, as the Cahiers du Cinema crowd recognized by choosing as its heroes directors like Howard Hawks, Samuel Fuller, and Nicholas Ray...
...On Douglas Bartholomew is a free-lance journalist in Princeton, New Jersey...
...why the Owner of the farm (Sam Shepard, the playwright) lives all alone in a ragtag Victorian house that sticks up out of the flat landscape...
...In the "climactic" scene, for example, where Bill is chased by the police (he has killed the Owner), he has absolutely no hope of making it...
...Such a saloon is Fraunces Tavern, the oldest building in Manhattan and the most historic pub in the United States today...
...When the film gets too ambitious, however, it is less successful...
...Hicks, alternately witty, mindlessly violent, and sentimental ("They've got my buddy," he says at the end), is a perfect creature of the screen: He cravesand is defined by action...
...Since Malick's hands-off approach extends to the narrative, we need the voice-over narration of Linda (Linda Manz), Bill's 12-year-old sister, to know what's going on...
...In Who'll Stop the Rain, the focus is on Hicks, who, in the hands of Nolte and Reisz, becomes a classic American adventure hero...
...I have no more morals to draw from all this cheap death," he writes Marge, "so I've taken action...
...all weget are long pauses, vague Biblical overtones, and achingly beautiful long shots of the Texas plains...
...No matter, for at Fraunces, where the The American Spectator November 1978 25...
...In particular, the opening, in which Converse makes his decision, is a bust...
...And it was here that the New York Chamber of Commerce and the New York Yacht Club were founded (in 1768 and 1844...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES by Douglas Bartholomew Fraunces' Tavern and the Spirits of '76 With a heart full of love and gratitude, I now take leave of you...
...We see what Malick means, and may applaud him for forswearing the sins of the American cinema, but he has not come up with enough to take their place...
...But while Hicks is making the delivery, trouble hits...
...But Simon ignores, I think, two important considerations: first, that the American way of filmmaking has some peculiar virtues, which are simply not available to Europeans...
...In Who'll Stop the Rain, director Karel Reisz plays to the strengths of the American cinema, with generally effective results...
...The vision may be paranoid and conspiratorial, but it is an excellent literary fulcrum: Individual characters must either accept the state of affairs (and survive) or fight it (and die...
...the two-kilo sack of skag is the perfect Hitchcockian McGuffin...
...that Presidents Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, Harding, Hoover, Eisenhower, and Nixon ate and imbibed...
...Based on Robert Stone's novel Dog Soldiers and set in the early seventies, Rain begins in Vietnam...
...or why Abby agrees to Bill's plan that she accept the marriage proposal of the Owner, who, they believe, has only a few months to live...
Vol. 11 • November 1978 • No. 11
