THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
FRESH BLOOD 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0000 THE SCREEN In its heyday, from The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity to The Big Sleep and The Asphalt Jungle, film noir was a genre exceptionally...
...As Jonathan arrives in Paris for a medical, a man ahead of him at the top of an escalator suddenly falls down...
...The yellow light of day and blue light of evening deepen into tangerine and purple...
...It is similarly an atmosphere in which ordinary places or things become menacing and sinister...
...The minute Jonathan commits his first murder, Wenders plunges us headlong into this world...
...The result of such calculated effects is to impart to Jonathan's story an oppressive feeling of inevitability...
...We come to feel, insanely, that Jonathan couldn't have not become a criminal...
...Learning by chance that Jonathan has leukemia, Ripley suggests to a crony that Jonathan might be willing to become a hit man in order to leave his family with a large sum after he is dead...
...Because they anticipate the scene of the murders, the pictures of trains ultimately function this way too, as do many other atmospheric details...
...This is especially true with the serial heroes like Chandler's private eye, who only manages to stay a cut above his clients and the gangsters they get mixed up with by keeping a very firm grip on himself...
...Of course, film noir has always maintained, with Heraclitus, that fate is character...
...Coincidences even begin to occur that flaunt the improbability of the plot, as when Ripley happens to walk by a window behind which, at just that moment, a gangster is receiving a call about the shooting Ripley helped arrange in Paris...
...To the point is that Ripley and Jonathan, like every character in film noir, live in a world too complex and tortuous to be fathomed, a world whose human darkness makes it impenetrable...
...instead, Mitford will undertake "merely to reconstruct my own experiences as a part of the [Red] Menace during those years and as an 28 October 1977:688...
...At its best film noir always gives us these irrational feelings that the characters are trapped in invisible ways...
...Since Jonathan shoots his first victim on an escalator in the Metro, that man who falls on the escalator Commonweal: 687 at the Paris airport becomes a foreboding image...
...and, one thinks on hearing this, how refreshing such a tone could prove, after all the sackcloth and ashes, muttered curses and terriblecries of the ravaged heart...
...We discover this, as he does, when he is elated after his first murder...
...No genre is harder to do original work in than film noir...
...In other words, the film has an atmosphere where images turn into actualities and, by implication, where a violence most of us know only from fiction or fantasy can become part of an ordinary man's life...
...No, we are to be spared such tiresome analysis...
...That hero is someone always in danger of becoming indistinguishable from the villains in his story...
...That this question can't be answered in any rational way makes the fact that Jonathan does believe him seem an inescapable turn of events...
...The two-fold consequence is that Jonathan first becomes Ripley's friend, and then ends up betraying him...
...Just as Howard Hawks relied on Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder on James M. Cain, so Wenders has been, by his own admission, greatly inspired by the Patricia Highsmith novel on which his film is based...
...Hawks once confessed that there was at least one murder in The Big Sleep which even he couldn't explain...
...In order to understand the relationships between characters, we have to begin with the victims rather than the heroes --with Jonathan rather than Ripley--and we have to concentrate not on what happens so much as on the atmosphere in which it happens...
...The further we are drawn into this expressionistic world, the more it takes hold of our imagination and compels our assent to it...
...Then these pictures bizarrely complete their transformation into reality, becoming the Paris Metro trains on which Jonathan stalks the first man he kills and the MunichHamburg Express from which he and Ripley throw the second...
...Acting out his suspicion that he has been "framed," for instance, Jonathan pokes his head through a gilt picture frame he himself has made, and then smashes his handiwork to pieces as if trying to break free of his own fate...
...To look hard and steadily, without illusion but also without self-pity, without tears or whimpering, recriminations or craven pleas for forgiveness of sins, that depressing prelude to squalid capitulation made familiar by the like of Howard Fast, Bella Dodd, Whittaker Chambers, Louis Budenz and so many others of the " 'I-was-duped' school of American ex-party members...
...In his hotel room, a knob on the television gives him a shock, and a crane outside the window swings around as if about to crash through...
...During an interview Wenders confirmed for me what his film, like others in the genre, suggests: that the continuity he tried to maintain is in the atmospheric details much more than the plot itself...
...The shooting has a retroactive effect on our memory of the man who falls, and of Jonathan's own flight down an escalator earlier on his way to his doctor in Hamburg...
...All revelation in film noir is circuitous...
...It makes us believe in a world gone mad, a world of lurid exaggeration and extreme artificiality...
...The fact that what happens to Jonathan is so arbitrary somehow makes his fate seem all the more irresistible...
...They take one step further the sort of hero common in the earlier versions of film noir...
...FRESH BLOOD 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0000 THE SCREEN In its heyday, from The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity to The Big Sleep and The Asphalt Jungle, film noir was a genre exceptionally dependent on its literary sources...
...These baroque touches make it seem as if Jonathan lived in a deterministic world--as if he were doomed from the start...
...Perhaps the logical conclusion to which such heroism was leading all along is the one found in Highsmith's work, where the only serial hero to emerge so far is a man who is essentially a gangster himself--a man in whom heroism and villainy finally do become indistinguishable because he is both things at once...
...Why should Jonathan believe what some Mafioso tells him about his health instead of his doctor...
...If Jonathan trusts the gangsters, it is at least partly because he wants to and, deep down, craves the violence to which trusting them will expose him...
...Highsmith's novels provide an appropriate new twist for this genre, too...
...The plot is really somewhat beside the point, however, as is so often the case in film noir...
...The influence of the films in this genre has been so pervasive that aH its possibilities seemed exhausted long ago...
...Unburdened by remorse, or even a small ache of regret, Mitford in effect announces, moreover, that she will treat her subject with affection and humor as well as pride...
...This is quite a feat on Wenders's part...
...A POLITICS OF THE NURSERY SAUL MALOFF A book such as Jessica Mitford's A Fine Old Conflict (Knopf, $10) might have been is lamentably overdue: at this remove to look hard through relatively clarified air at a Communist "past," extending in her instance from the days of the Spanish Civil War to 1958, two years after Khrushchev's confessions to the 20th Congress of the CPSU...
...In Wenders's film version, Ripley (Dennis Hopper) is a purveyor of art forgeries who gets a framemaker named Jonathan (Bruno Ganz) mixed up with his gangster friends...
...The best work of the last few yearsm Gumshoe, The Long Goodbye, The Late Showmsuggested that the only thing left for film noir to do was parody itself...
...The first of two parts) COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...A still ampler bounty is promised: since she left the Party in anything but a vertigo of rage and disillusionment, but on the whole cheerfully and fondly, saying "au revoir but not goodbye, for I went on seeing lots of the comrades, giving what support I could to their endeavors," she is not interested in "sort[ing] out the tangle of events in the Communist world of the postwar era," in assessing the "changes in Communist strategy and tactics (or the Party Line, as it is called for short), the rise and fall of Party leaders...
...This man is Tom Ripley, the central character in, among other novels, Ripley's Game on which The American Friend is based...
...With false medical reports, the crony plays on Jonathan's anxiety about himself and lures him into committing two murders...
...Getting us to accept a crazy premise, such as the corruptibility of a man like Jonathan, is what film noir is all about...
...The imagery, which has only had subliminal designs on us until now, begins to become outrageous...
...The atmosphere of The American Friend is one in which, for instance, a painting of a speeding train that Ripley gets from a forger happens to be very like the picture of a train on the lamp in Jonathan's son's room, except that while Jonathan gazes at this second picture we hear a real train apparently going by outside...
...That this is not the case, though, Wenders's film makes clear...
...So is The American Friend, a new lilm noir by German director Wim Wenders...
Vol. 104 • October 1977 • No. 22
