The Screen
Weslerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
doubt) is the play's metaphor for an atmosphere in which no one is sure of anyone else (did Marcus set up Sigmund for arrest?) or even of his own actions (does Adrian, in coming to the country,...
...Miller, I assume, intends The Archbishop's Ceiling as the dramatic equivalent of Sigmund's novel, as a work with both ideational and human validity...
...Such lessons autodidacts teach...
...Instead of trying to apply the standards of the present to the past, as Attenborough has, Lucas applies the standards of the past to the future...
...The war here is an inter-gallactic one occurring in approximately the same millennium when Tom Corbett became a space cadet...
...as a prize safe author, he has developed a superficial relationship with the country for which he once suffered and his need for Maya--which he expresses in sexual terms--provides his strongest motivation...
...Attenborough's film is about as long, as expensive and as pointless as World War II itself was...
...Given the context, even the grand gesture of Sigmund and the others may be the result of manipulation, a possibility that the play's last line, Marcus's remark about "a game," seems to confirm...
...The other film, the comedy, is George Lucas's Star Wars, which contains only one star, Alec Guinness, and he's in a rather minor role at that...
...Thus he makes a work of flawless escapism: it escapes the angst of the present altogether...
...The historical panorama that it grafts onto the future really comes from a lot of Hollywood movies about the past rather than the past itself...
...The results, mounted on such a spectacular scale, and with such tediousness, are more likely to make us feel outrage at movies than at wars...
...Having set his film in the furthest imaginable future, Lucas has drawn his plot from the furthest historical past, or at least a reasonable Hollywood facsimile thereof...
...Like the Arnhem campaign, A Bridge Too Far was so misconceived that it was doomed before it got started...
...Well, maybe not the whole war, but at least that campaign to take the Arnhem bridge with which the movie deals...
...The heroine is a Princess, no less, and the villain is an appropriate nemesis for such royalty, the blackmasked Lord Vader...
...The film's difficulties are philosophical rather than artistic...
...His film is propelled by a kind of Relativity Theory...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN The summer season has opened with a couple of war movies that give new significance to that old filmmaker's saw about comedy being done in long shots and tragedy in close-up...
...Adrian, as outsider (only he of the three men has not had an affair with Maya, and even Martin was once her husband), has written a novel so false that he has destroyed the manuscript...
...Will the universe be saved...
...Will they be able to use "the Force" to penetrate Death Star's defenses before it incinerates the Rebel planet...
...This tree is mine...
...Lucas's Star Wars, on the other hand, takes the long view of history, and finds no moral in it whatsoever...
...It would be tempting to see her as freedom entrapped or something like that, but I assume that she embodies homeland in its most complex sense, a loved and dangerous place whose presence---if only for the familiarity of language--is essential to the creative artist...
...GERALD V~/EALES WA]R IN SW~.I.I...
...An historical relativism really is the secret to Lucas's success...
...if you count the extras in, the total must get up near a million--Attenborough's film recreates in relentless detail one of the most ambitious and disastrous Allied campaigns, the attempt to take by paratrooper assault the bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem, Holland...
...Come home, Arthur Miller, and rediscover the American Maya...
...He zooms through time from the remote future to the remote past as easily as Star Wars" rocket ships zoom through "hyper-space" from one end of the universe to the other at the speed of light...
...That simple declaration is By one who only thinks of his...
...What a Lovely War, and, second, he has chosen to make this film about one of the greatest military fiascoes ever...
...Sigmund's novel is apparently his finest work, one that takes him beyond the satire by which he made his name, a doublevoiced fiction in which the heroine is at once symbolic and touchingly human...
...I wonder what it is to be A solid object like a tree That seems to stay the same but grows?'" A man who asks that question, knows...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0000 5AMES SULLIVAN MEN ON TREES "The husbandman will prune a tree To concentrate its energy On making fruit that he can reach...
...If Attenborough lived too much in the recent past of the war itself while he was making his movie, he also lives too much in the present the rest of the time...
...Will we all be given decoder rings as we leave the theater...
...One hero comes straight out of a Ford western, and the other out of a Bogart ~Im heir (in fact, as he prepares to smuggle the Rebels away from a desert space port, the way Bogart smuggled the Free French off Martinique in To Have and Have Not, he even shoots an interloper right through a table top, the way Bogart shot Dan Seymour...
...his is the deepest commitment to Maya, but significantly the book is not yet finished...
...The suggestion is that the final horror of the situation is not that freedom is openly destroyed, but that it is so hedged by uncertainty that straightforward action becomes impossible and one's identity is called into doubt...
...That one is yours...
...in this situation, he can only look on with fascination and longing...
...It is, as usual with Miller, a play heavy with ideas, one that seduces the viewer into the kind of discussion that these paragraphs contain...
...This kind of thing you read In books by men who stay indoors...
...The tragedy is Richard Attenborough's A Bridge Too Far, which is a reprise of World War II...
...With Maya, however, Archbishop's Ceil...
...Attenborough's close-up gets so close to his subject that his film begins to seem what war itself must often seem first-handma mere processing of men and mat6riel, an administrative problem rather than a moral one...
...The characters are complex in conception, richly endowed with biography, dangerously articulate, but they are trapped in the play as well as in the imaginary country...
...The idea behind A Bridge Too Far 8 July 1977:432 is to make war hell by recreating its miscalculation and slaughter as fully, accurately and graphically as possible...
...The result of Lucas's efforts is to raise such questions as were never dreamt of in Richard Attenborough's philosophy: will the two heroes be able to rescue the Princess from the Death Star...
...They exist in its assumptions, not just its conclusions...
...This is to be gathered from the fact that, first, Attenborough has already made his anti-war sentiments clear in an earlier film, Oh...
...She seems not simply a character but a symbol--not for the author as much as for the three novelists in the play, each of whom has written a book about her...
...This is the second year in a row that the movie industry has managed to come up with a perfect summer-time film...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...The author of The Archbishop's Ceiling is the internationally celebrated Arthur Miller, "the voice of conscience" to borrow the title of Harold Clurman's article in the program, but I will settle for the playwright of earlier days...
...or even of his own actions (does Adrian, in coming to the country, inadvertently do what the government wants...
...One of the film's heroes is the adopted son of pioneers who are massacred in an Indian-style raid on their homestead on an out-of-the-way planet...
...Marcus's novel is apparently stylishly facile and has just become a tremendous success, in and out of the country...
...It's not so much the camera range that demonstrates this truism in these two film.~ as the historical perspective from which they are made...
...With the figure of Martin confronting us from the stage, we have to be sure whom we are serving...
...Just for a moment, John Cullum (as Sigmund) becomes a wicked little boy, preening himself on the praise his book has received from the men who confiseated it, and with that gesture, the actor reminds us that none of these characters has the dimensionality of Joe Keller, Willy Loman, Gregory Solomon...
...But Lucas, like the hot-shot astronauts in his film, is more of a free agent...
...With a cast of thousands--and those are just the stars...
...While Lucas's characters live a millennium or two from now, much of their story seems to occur anywhere from a generation to a millennium ago...
...uses for Miller, a edge in~ represenMiller may be on new ground...
...The Empire has launched a satellite, Death Star, with the capacity to destroy entire planets, and only a few errant members of the Rebellion can save the universe from this ultimate weapon...
...Attenborough himself obviously became so involved in restaging the campaign that he couldn't make value judgments about it any more effectively than the participants could at the time...
...A tree will grow because it will, Despite bad soil and winter chill, And nobody can tell which seed Will grow...
...On the human level, it is less successful...
...My neat explication of the character may not hold since, after all, maya means the power to create illusions, a definition with political and literary implications within the play but one that might also put critics on their guard...
...Even "the Force," an ~lan vital usable only by the righteous, is made manifest in an ancient form, a hand-held laser beam wielded as if it were Excalibur...
...But if there is any period genre Lucas's film seems to prefer, it is the Medieval...
...Last year it was Swashbuckler, this year it's Star Wars...
...So far I have been discussing The /ng in the conventional terms one playwright of ideas whose characters tative figures...
...With the same certainty that one can presume the purpose of the Arnhem campaign was to cross the Rhine and end the war, the purpose of the movie is to say an unkind word about wars in general...
...Commonweal: 433...
...The other hero is an adventurer and soldier of fortune, a gun for hire...
...The idea is, in other words, to create a tragedy with a close-up...
...And there's little else to say, really...
...The only blame he could imagine is that which the commander in the field probably assigns, the one based on resentment of those other commanders who don't actually take the field themselves but only plan campaigns from the safety of headquarters...
...Just as his movie becomes the captive of World War II, his original motive for making it was probably too much the captive of our own revulsion at war, brought on by Vietnam, to tell us anything we don't already know...
...Perhaps what frees Star Wars from the ponderousness of A Bridge Too Far is the fact that it deals not with history, but only with pop images of history...
...There's no possibility of considering the technique or style of Attenborough's workmif indeed it has any---because its failure inheres in the very idea behind it...
...Besides being punctuated with adventures from Robin Hood and Ivanhoe, the film is pervaded in general by an atmosphere of knights in shining armor and a damsel in distress...
Vol. 104 • July 1977 • No. 14
