Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
time, but the fundamental issue will remain-how should and office itself) visible, more rational, and more open to public can police power be made more...
...Like Ivory, Rohmer was dealing the sunshine beyond without having encountered anyone to with a novel of manners that is historically distant...
...opinion...
...word on a movie adaptation of James...
...The latter is the closer to The Europeans she comes at last to the front door, she opens it and steps into as a problem in adaptation...
...Also, although bar associations have not been hitherto known for vigorous action against errant members of the legal profession, their records in recent years have also been improving...
...When Marquise von O...
...We don't one, where Eugenia (Lee Remick) takes leave of Acton's feel beyond the film's identification with James the presence mother, and the scene after, where she encounters Acton of Ivory and Jhabvala in it...
...As James's fiction gradually turns into a dead I realize that in saying this, I fly in the face of received language, like Latin, the only life left to it may be in movies...
...In a system which delicately (or, at times, indelioccupational criminality than "businessmen" and "quasi- cately) blends the power of "laws" with the power of "men," professionals" such as the police...
...Whether her announcement of between them the rich Jamesian relations they have in the return to Europe is intended to shake him out of his indecisive- novel...
...Anyone who teaches but indifferent...
...new officers, community control, independent agencies to There would be important side effects as well...
...New thinking would be brought to practice in most (though not all) places...
...A wealthy characters stand far apart in big, sparsely furnished New Engfriend of theirs, Robert Acton, has shown a keen interest in land parlors, and we are free to invent in the dead air spaces her, but is now hesitating...
...greater accountability will be compatible with our understandThere is considerable sociological evidence that people who ing of the role of law enforcement in modern democratic consider themselves to be "professionals" will engage in less society...
...In those moments when Edel not to say literal, manner...
...Literal adaptations of this kind through a high window on the landing of the stair, and she work only on those rare occasions when a filmmaker discovers notes the placement of some flower pots on the bench there...
...Thus, the law enforcement function, now divided decisions about the degree of enforcement (conditioned in part between police and prosecutor, would be united, and the by the prosecutor's knowledge of what judges and juries will prosecutor would be subject to oversight by the professional do) would replace the ad-hoc or vague and confused determibar...
...poured on in the milk at the breakfast table to restore what has Acton says her maid will meet Eugenia in the hall outside and been lost...
...At least it's more America's leading James scholai...
...It seems so clear and liquid a communica23 November 1979: 663...
...Since prosecutors are usually elected (except in three NO INTERFERENCE states), they are doubtlessly subject to political pressures...
...Cc.'nme c est bien," . she says to herself...
...show her down to the front door...
...An indifferent system, including the workings of police departments...
...A good movie partments to fight crime...
...The first of two parts...
...One imagination submits to the other as it thereby to interrupt her solitary progress...
...Though it is apparent that the hero is strongly police departments without crippling the ability of those de- moved by the old couple, we are uncertain why...
...in our political and social kinds of movies-good, bad, and indifferent-on the system no proposal can be, if it is to utilize existing agencies...
...by local bar associations would compel prosecutors to devise More than greater efficiency will result...
...The police argument that "outsiders" cannot under- reduced...
...both are subject to the same "climate of opinion...
...The adaptation never embellishes, but only strips America...
...See its own...
...The movie doesn't bother with scenes of this sort at all...
...Prosecutors are also professionals has scenes of this sort in it...
...I N MY LAST COLUMN I was trying to distinguish among three No, this proposal is not perfect...
...A MOST RESPECTFUL ADAPTATION Their capacity to resist those pressures seems to be increasing...
...Among the many high opinions bestowed upon the Perhaps Edel consoles himself with the thought that a movie Ivory film, the most eminent is that of Leon Edel, who is such as Ivory has made is better than nothing...
...She has come here to visit her cousins the away...
...Better use of scarce law-enforcement resources stand the "street problems" faced by the department would be would occur when planning can be consolidated under one vitiated...
...realizes this...
...It follows as naturally from moments in life when nothing seems to occur, but in fact Claire's Knee, La Collectionneuse, My Night at Maud's and everything changes...
...But the intervening scene, one awakes from his Jamesian revery and has to admit to himself crucial to the novel which should have been the best of the how thin Ivory's movie is, the uneasiness he feels is probably movie, has been left out altogether...
...The hero explains to highly value civil liberties-have within their ranks numerous his wife what the previous scene meant, and snuffs out the members who are also "experts" about the criminal justice mystery which made the scene enjoyable...
...And this scene is also the most beautifully Rohmer's other "moral tales" as it does from Kleist's work...
...would be bodies...
...As in a novelist a truly kindred spirit...
...It cinematic, the most adaptable and richly visual, in the novel...
...Police misconduct would be prosecutorial mis- Since all laws can never be fully enforced all the time, policy conduct...
...There is nothing in what has been said that would bar media...
...This is what de ethics...
...The law enuse local bar association grievance committees to oversee both forcement function would be less fragmented than it is now...
...basis of a certain type of scene...
...The doing so will somehow mend her flagging fortunes...
...They are operations of vital agencies such as the police (and the D.A.'s found in good novels as well...
...Discriminapolicies and practices which would make law enforcement tion in law enforcement-which laws get enforced against open and subject to review by knowledgeable, even expert whom (and, again, why these particular targets...
...Eugenia waits impa- grateful-for a respectful adaptation...
...This is what happened when parlor as she passes along the hall, surveying with some care Robert Bresson adapted George Bernanos's The Diary of a this house of which she might have been mistress, taking the Country Priest, or when Eric Rohmer adapted Kleist's The measure of it...
...In New York City, despite the recurrence of police scandals, the level of pro- Screen secutorial performance has been higher (the Manhattan D. A.'s I office under Frank Hogan and his successors often prosecuted crooked and brutal cops...
...and as she is about to leave the boudoir, Mrs...
...We respond as if there tiently for a few moments, then decides to show herself out...
...She notices how the light comes in achievements of older arts...
...time, but the fundamental issue will remain-how should and office itself) visible, more rational, and more open to public can police power be made more accountable...
...operations...
...In many cities where the while attempting to remain true to ideals of justice and fairness police engage in lawless practices, prosecutors do not, though for all, this result would not only be foreseeable but welcome...
...Rather, the answer, problems such as the creation of standards for use of deadly incomplete though it may be, is to transfer the police function force against offenders (or presumed offenders)-an issue of from the mayor's office to that of the local prosecutor and to growing importance in many American cities...
...A bad one also has the scene, but who owe at least some allegiance to professional canons of then hurries to eliminate its ambiguity...
...remains a great film even without an awareness of Kleist...
...In a way this mute scene where nothing happens is the If we knew nothing of Kleist, we might acceptThe Marquise climax of James's novel...
...The threat of disbarment proceedings or even censure agency...
...recalling the novel...
...fallacy in supposing that someone like Edel must have the last COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...As were no higher virtue than piety, no greater demand movies she descends the stairs, she takes her time and observes the can make upon themselves than to be deferential toward the arrangements of the house...
...Such oversight would induce prosecutors to institute nations of police supervisors and street officers...
...Police operainvestigate misconduct charges, stronger internal investiga- tions would become truly professional, rather than exercises in tion units-have proven to be inadequate, either in theory or in public relations gimmickry...
...She goes to visit Acton's invalid mother to vitamins must be sprayed on with hoses at the factory and take her farewell...
...But his is by whom she might have betrayed how she felt at this moment in far the greater film because it is as much a part of his own work her life...
...We come away from the film with himself (Robin Ellis) in the garden, are both done in a faithful, little sense of who they are...
...In Henry James's The EuroCommonweal: 662 peans, there is a perfect scene of this type at the point when the tion of James's story that as a movie it is practically nonheroine, the Baroness Eugenia, has decided to end her visit in existent...
...mobilization of these already extant resources would make the Nor is it only in movies that scenes like this occur...
...I suspect that what Edel loves the movie for is its weakness...
...But I think there is a great dignified than a Classic Comic...
...scrutiny...
...She peers into each would to a visionary experience...
...All his novels are about these elusive as solely the invention of Rohmer...
...The Yet in James Ivory's new film of The Europeans, the scene is same could be said of Bresson'sDiary, whereas Ivory's Euronot included...
...Other People's Money where the hero, waiting on a train platform, watches an old woman remove some dust from her T HE IMPORTANT factor is that prosecutors possess the exper- husband's eye...
...It is a movie that can excite a very intense remembrance of James because it has no style of GIVE COMMONWEAL for Christmas...
...coverage and monitoring of the performances of both I T SEEMS to me that recent proposals -improved training of prosecutors and bar associations...
...This is often a silent scene, But, it is demonstrably better than (a) the present system and like the one I was discussing from Christian de Chalonge's (b) other "reform" ideas...
...Where a filmmaker's view she goes out the main hall below, she treads lightly, reluctant of life coincides closely enough with a writer's, the result can now to alert anyone in the household to her presence, and be like a revelation...
...This seems to be true in Philadelphia and Houston...
...Ivory's Europeans is, in quelled by his realization that fewer and fewer people are other words, the type of movie that is neither good, nor bad, literate enough to'read James at all...
...It gives us much less than the novel does, and in this way Wentworths at their home outside Boston, in the hopes that it leaves us lots of room to reimagine the novel in it...
...We are so used to having Hollywood make great literature This is where the scene occurs, for when Eugenia arrives in into travesties that we are profoundly grateful-too the hall, the Fmaid is nowhere in sight...
...We would find that innovative means to protect our liberties...
...There is nothing in it that might interfere with our form on page 657...
...The pleasing thing about this scene is its tise to understand and control the policies and practices of ambiguity...
...In the adaptation done by novelist and long-time peans becomes a rather insipid costume drama as soon as we Ivory collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the scene before this stop thinking of it as having been inspired by James...
...Bar Associations-often dominated by "elitists" who Chalonge's film does in the next scene...
...The movie is like one of those breakfast cereals where ness, or results from her genuinely being too offended by it to all the nutrition is removed from the grain in the processing, so stay, is hard to tell...
...as of Kleist's...
Vol. 106 • November 1979 • No. 21
