The Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
It is coincidental but interesting that in this atmosphere there is now a new interest in the life and works of the late comedian Lenny Bruce, a man whose jokes were so public and apparently so...
...Recordings of his performances are selling briskly...
...Lenny Bruce's medium was nightclubs, at first glance an unpromising forum for serious satire...
...It is as if Malle is constantly hedging against the possibility that his film might fail because of Lucien's vileness---as if Malle is so concerned Lucien will offend us by his very nature that he alters all the characters' natures to keep us in our seats...
...Books by and about him are in print, and a best-seller called Ladies and Gentlemen: Lenny Bruce...
...He fantasized, for example, about Cardinal Spellman's panic at being suddenly confronted with the return of Christ and Moses to earth, about the mysterious and kinky refusal of the Lone Ranger to accept a thank-you, about the Jewish guilt for the death of Jesus ("All right...
...It is not likely that Lenny would have paid much attention to the embarrassments of Wilbur Mills, but his fantasies about life within the White House or in Rockefeller's camp in recent months can be imagined, and they might have helped satisfy our craving for catharsis...
...I cruise with my eye or let my forefinger broadjump from one meridian to another...
...Eventually his disregard for the consequences even infects France's father...
...In his last years, his satire, when it was not a tantrum of abuse, was often a self-righteous lecture...
...The relationship that Lucien develops with France, her father and her grandmother is finally comprehensible only as the relationship of the concentrationcamp guard to his inmates...
...No matter how sympathetic we might feel toward France, her point of view is still a deranged one...
...He was, in the words of Brian Glanville, "a brave voice calling from the nursery...
...I'm gonna clear the air once and for all, and confess...
...There is a primitive honesty in this world, perhaps, but he was mistaken to believe that it represents the "truth," a basic heritage that we are all afraid to face...
...But at the moment that he walks her to the front of the rationing queue, or into the dining room at headquarters, there is a quite ordinary moonishness in his attitude towards her...
...He was, at his best, an exceptionally funny man, but most of his career was devoted to demolishing the hypocrisies inherent in the notion of "good taste...
...From an evil interloper in these people's lives, Lucien has become someone who unintentionally gives them joy...
...He was finally driven to shock just for the sake of shocking, in his desire to penetrate the deadening layers of maturity which he saw around him...
...Like most satirists, he viewed basic moral precepts as absolutes ("Ten Commandments don't say, 'Thou shalt not kill sometime,' ") and he rejected all of society's taboos as simply "lies...
...Probably too much has been and will be made of Lenny Bruce...
...In a fundamental way, he was a brother to that small band of performers who come up for air on the late-night TV shows and talk about how recently they left Vegas and how soon they will be going back...
...I know only names guessing at mountains, desiring grass where none has ever been...
...He collaborates helplessly with the Collaborationists...
...For all his passion for truth, his vision was one-dimensional and circumscribed by the word of strip-joints, jazz, narcotics and obsessive sex in which he lived...
...But in a way this selfishness of his comes across as a romantic, almost rebellious disregard for German anti-Semitism...
...Yet we cannot escape the feeling that the sallies of Johnny Carson, Russell Baker and the rest are not savage enough, childish enough--irresponsible enough - - t o meet our needs today...
...Yet even to condemn him this way is to ennoble him unnecessarily and make him seem more interesting than he is...
...OOOQQOQQQOOQOQ JACK LINDEMAN MAP READING I say there is more, a cloud with its foam oozing out of itself, a burden of air, while I accumulate seven oceans, gallop along a longitude with my fingernails scratching the topography of lands unvisited...
...We felt at every turn that Malle was meddling in his characters' lives in order to make their approaching sin acceptable to us...
...For the moment at least, his lack of concern for her seems compounded with real affection...
...is the center of a bitter journalistic battle...
...On the other hand, though, this judgment is perhaps too harsh...
...Malle has extraordinarily mixed feelings about Lucien, as his handling of Lucien's courtship with the tailor's daughter demonstrates...
...But even if this is so, it does not rescue Malle's film...
...We found a note in the basement...
...Commonweal: 215...
...In his relationship with this family, Lucien proves a young man who has needs and cravings, but no emotions--a wandering appetite, like a shark...
...It is coincidental but interesting that in this atmosphere there is now a new interest in the life and works of the late comedian Lenny Bruce, a man whose jokes were so public and apparently so dangerous that many people did not consider them funny or even permissible...
...As a teenager during the closing days of World War II in France, he falls in with the local Gestapo group and quickly shows himself a fitting associate for them...
...Like the guard and his prisoners, Lucien and France's family are ultimately united by their dependence on each other...
...His defenders who compare him now to Swift are overstating the case considerably: granting that "Lenny was his own act," in Nat Hentoff's phrase, and that he cannot be fairly recaptured in transcripts, imitations or even recordings, hi~ body of work, by any definition, was pathetically slim...
...Even her grandmother, who has been in a state of silent, stony-faced rage throughout the film, finally smiles at the summer night when Lucien escapes to the mountains with her and France at the end of the German occupation...
...We still seem to need some ultimate, distasteful insight, blasting through the bizarre yet maddeningly prosaic and maturely presented facts that we have been offered...
...That courtship begins with a scene where Lucien makes the girl, France (Aurore Clement), jump a rationing queue, and it reaches a culmination of sorts when he takes her to a party at Gestapo headquarters...
...His actions spring from mere narrow-mindedness, for his field of vision as he gazes at her is literally too narrow for him to see the consequences of his attentions, especially for her...
...But something here is not--if you'll excuse, please, the appropriate expression--kosher...
...The recent play about him is being revived outside of New York (currently in Boston...
...Nat Hentoff and others have blasted the author, Albert Goldman, in various papers and magazines for distorting the facts about the man, and so Lenny is once again a figure of controversy...
...A movie, with Dustin Hoffman, has just been released...
...He was arrested so often for obscenity that it is hard for many people to separate their understanding of what he accomplished from their outrage at his persecution...
...After years of cautious hiding he begins going out in public, at last paying a reckless visit to Lucien right at Gestapo headquarters and getting arrested...
...In both scenes it is just the girl he looks at and enjoys, not the way everyone else stares at them and wonders at his audacity...
...It said, 'We killed h i m . . , s i g n e d . . . Morty.' ") Most of all, he ripped into the barriers of taste that society has built around sex...
...What appears to be Malle's regard for Lucien may therefore be only France's regard for him, a regard born out of despair...
...The 29 November 1974:214 French Underground won't have him (that's why he joins the Gestapo), and to be honest, Dostoyevsky's Underground wouldn't have had him either...
...We did it...
...I did it, my family...
...In one sense, he was a child who could not accept the careful accommodations of adulthood, the arranged pretenses and self-protective structures of grown-up life...
...We are soon to see that Lucien is capable of real brutality with France...
...His death itself, from an overdose of narcotics in 1966, is widely considered to be a direct result of cruel police harassment...
...These swell like mammals wearing their young in a sack beneath their hearts...
...This is purple or blue & green on the water of things...
...Malle's failing here may not be that he is too sympathetic to Lucien, but too sympathetic to Lucien's victims...
...Indeed, Lucien (Pierre Blaise) is himself nothing more than a petty bureaucrat, one of society's official and anonymous gangsters...
...What these two scenes share is the blank but fixed way that Lucien stares at this hapless girl in them...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...When he discovers a Jewish tailor (Holger Lowenadler) in hiding with his daughter and mother, Lucien terrorizes the whole family with his attentions to the daughter, eventually bringing about the arrest of all...
...To the extent that Malle allows it to dominate his film, he too becomes a victim of Lucien...
...Malle's sympathies are entirely suspect here because it would not be the first time that, having chosen a controversial and volatile subject, he soft-soaped the movie he made about it...
...In Lacombe Lucien we feel the same way, particularly at moments like that when France's father conveniently eliminates himself so Lucien won't have to do so...
...Here shall be trees & there nothing but a bare sky with an occasional buzzard entering from the womb of the sun...
...This is precisely what he did in Murmur ol the Heart, where he was so anxious to make incest palatable as drama that he let his characters have little life and fate of their own...
...France has already allowed Lucien to make love to her despite her aversion to him, and now with her father out of the way she yields further...
...It is one of today's pieties that Lenny Bruce was ahead of his time...
...MICHAEL MURRAY MALLE DE MOVIE 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN As the title of Louis Malle's new film, Lacombe Lucien, indicates, the central character always gives his name backwards, the way a bureaucracy would...
...Although spiritually a member of this tribe, Lenny Bruce was never able to contain his improvisations within the boundaries of taste prescribed by the networks or even the nightclubs...
...France and her father come to behave as quirkily as Lucien does-they begin to reproduce Lucien's own disregard for them --because their isolation allows him to impose his values on them totally...
...He doesn't have such stature, even as a brute...
...Even given the shifting standards of permissiveness over the past ten years, however, the question-- today as then--is how far can one go with public jokes about private matters...
Vol. 101 • November 1974 • No. 8
