Blood Orange, Violence in the Movies

...he is eliminated...

...In Dr...

...Meanwhile, let us unravel some more confusions...

...The family, small f, supplies warmth and comfort and, yes, love...

...But it is also, and here I shall have to recur to my original point, something of an event...

...Bleak landscape can work nicely to objectify this kind of nihilism: when Hoffman gazes out at the unfertile expanse of ground beyond his front yard—sparse brown grass, rubble, a few unconsoling trees—we know it is the best moment in the film...

...The pervert, at least, is as human as his perversion, but the cops have turned into a Big Brother who is good precisely because he is terrifying...

...Ordinary sympathy, in other words, has departed altogether, and so has irony...

...Corporate evil, which used to be the enemy of independent cop and robber alike, has been transformed into an angel of light...

...The plot itself fits nicely with Kubrick's intentions...

...What we have been getting in place of the fiction, lightly disguised in The Wild Bunch and now, in Straw Dogs, emerging in all its repellent bareness, is a degenerate fiction...

...Don Vito Corleone, played remarkably by Brando in his most solid role since Terry Malloy, is being petitioned to murder a few young men who have raped a young Italian woman...

...The game has always worked both ways with Kubrick...

...If one likes the film, he and his admirers suggest, that must be because it communicates a right vision of human nature through high art...

...And that film offers an ideal of heroism in which we want to believe, as does Peckinpah's Ride the High Country...

...He is brought into the family circle again by the attempted murder of his father, decides to do a murder himself, and thereafter becomes all but nominal head of the family...

...the shock of hitting cement has apparently sufficed to restore him to his old self...

...in 2001, where computers are meant to be taken very seriously indeed, he couldn't help making the whole business rather winningly foolish...

...On the one hand he is a good and pious liberal: Paths of Glory is solidly built on his faith, as is Dr...

...No garish light plays over the faces of these gangsters: to contemplate a tactical murder is not to blackmail someone on penalty of "rubbing him out," in the melodramatic flourish of the old days, but to "make him an offer he cannot refuse...

...Murderous violence has, in A Clockwork Orange, become the test case for all human instincts, so that Kubrick means something rather unusual when he speaks of solving the crime problem...

...Among directors, Clouzot strikes me as a fascist who made works of art: but somehow the two remain separate with him...

...it is Family life experienced simply as a part of family life...

...Strangelove, beneath all its veneer of iconoclasm...

...Ah, but that would not be justice, Don Corleone replies, because your daughter is still alive...

...My complaint against Straw Dogs is that it is a bad film...

...Certainly it is his most confused...

...How odd, in a tract about liberating the human spirit, that every image should feel predigested...

...The film is done in an urban futuristic setting, and he is the hero...

...The Godfather, which seems to me one of the best American films ever made, puts paid to corporate violence with the emphasis on both words...

...Of course, Peckinpah like Kubrick has a didactic purpose...

...This comes out not in the overt message but in the style...

...its great lesson is not misanthropy but humility, and its effect is to chasten...

...From now on, perhaps, "Mission: Impossible" really will not be possible...

...Alex, a streamlined Hell's Angel with plenty of experience in chainfighting, takes particular pleasure in rape ("the old in-out in-out") and the music of Beethoven ("Ludwig Van...

...we want to ask him, as we might care to ask the director: what is it you have done...

...Wages of Fear may be the supreme adventure movie, but the director's inhumanity stays always in the background—at worst, irritatingly in the background...

...It is, to be sure, one sign of critical maturity to be able to say: I do not like this work but I must allow it is art...

...Al Pacino as Don Corleone's intelligent son, Michael, at first regards his family from a distance, estranged from it by a university education and war experience, adopting as far as he can the Ivy League man's opinion of bloody murder...

...The dialogue, and I don't see how anyone can have missed this, has been stiffened absolutely beyond belief, as if the director stood trembling with anticipation of his climactic scene, where words will not matter...

...Later in the movie, Don Corleone will ask the undertaker to clean up his son's corpse, which is riddled with bullets, to make it fit for a mother's eyes to see...

...he says...

...Because the story lacks a hero, it lacks also—I hesitate to say moral involvement, but no other words seem right...

...he is preaching a different sermon, and the physical resemblance between the two actors serves to heighten the contrast...

...Hence the phrase offered by a cautious admirer but an admirer all the same, "a fascist work of art...

...This was the situation more than 30 years ago that gave us everything from Scarface down to Angels with Dirty Faces and The Maltese Falcon...

...He becomes what he contemplates...

...The film leaves no doubt that the object of its attack is, indeed, corporate evil—a welfare state that has reached advanced decadence—while what it seeks to propagate, the moral of the story, is the need for a free instinctual life among men...

...But nothing is made of it...

...We do not see it covered over, made acceptable, by our driving off in a limousine...

...However, the simple-mindedness of the film seems to me inseparable from what has gone sour in it at a far deeper level...

...Recently, however, on television and in the movies, there has been a shifting of the current...

...but he earns his freedom before too long by submitting to the Lodovico treatment, which looks something like a polite lobotomy...

...For it changes once and for all the image of corporate violence in America, in the same way—if with small things we may compare great—that Madame Bovary forever altered the image of the bourgeoisie in France...

...The fiction, I think, in Peckinpah's case, was a rather narrow conception of heroism borrowed from Hemingway...

...He did not descend to the manner of a nightclub routine for a laugh, just as, in The Godfather, he does not descend to melodrama for a shudder...

...shows through when Hitler appears in the films that are to deprive Alex of his rightful human inheritance, his instinct for blood...

...Like Kubrick, he is fond of citing a hack screenwriter and anthropologist named Robert Ardrey, who may fairly be described as a two-penny Hobbes...

...But when Hoff -man exclaims over his feat of killing off the better part of the supporting cast "I did it...

...As early as that, however, technological good guys were impossible without the element of individual pluck and wit...

...If on the other hand one cannot abide the film, that must be because one is not sufficiently tough minded, not sufficiently even-handed, about the pathological violence it so surely (indeed moralistically) commends, and one is thereby disqualified from judging the thing dispassion ately on artistic grounds...

...Mission: Impossible" takes the next and final logical step: quite commonly, the agents of that program choose not to kill their enemies outright, preferring to drive off in limousines after having tricked the hunted man into the snares of another criminal...

...Well then: a weak American academic is setting up residence in Britain (gentle insinuations of a flight from student turmoil: his wife bothers him vaguely about "commitment...

...Peckinpah believes that we are aggressive beings after all, and that in this film he has finally got down to the root of the matter...

...For anyone who cares about movies in this country, it is above all an encouraging film to watch...

...Instinctual repression—dressed, naturally, in a police uniform—is death...

...And why have you waited till this moment to seek the kinship of the Family...

...James Cagney and Malcolm McDowell both do the type of the hometown boy gone wrong: their environment has become intolerable, they turn to a life of crime, and we follow their exploits...

...The "X" rating of A Clockwork Orange had more to do, as these things will, with pubic hair than with blood...

...And that, I suggest, is not the way we respond to art...

...he indulges in an altogether pleasant sexual fantasy, and that finishes the story...

...The signs of what was coming go a long way back...

...The director of The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola, has not been able to present his slice of life without a certain sacrifice...

...What, in any case, can be meant by "a fascist work of art...

...no one else is allowed to act the least bit human...

...Having lost his belief in human decency, Peckinpah can no longer give us living characters—only lurid glimpses of the eternal principle of viciousness, with slight variations from one person to the next...

...They work by their own peculiar skills, and organizations are alien to them because they are individuals...

...If, then, 2001 is its own best parody, Dr...

...He is a great misanthrope, and this is his magnum opus of hate...

...The evidence remains the same —what was evil and is now good has been steadily cold-blooded—but we are asked to draw a different conclusion...

...it was just too much...

...in White Heat, for example, a 1949 Cagney vehicle with Edmund O'Brien as the cop, the endearingly psychotic criminal is pursued and finally caught by radar, and thousands of blue Los Angeles policemen watch like furies as he commits suicide...

...The law enforcement agents are mannequins with not even a flicker of human warmth, and they quarry the criminal—a homicidal pervert played by Ross Martin—by pretty nearly landing a helicopter on him in Candlestick Park...

...When a man gets strangled in The Godfather, we strangle with him...

...All this changed beyond recognition by the time of a film like Experiment in Terror, made in the early 1960s and heavily influenced by television...

...the local rowdies rape his wife, and then try to break into the house to capture a mentally retarded criminal, whom the academic is protecting until justice can be brought...

...Even a glance at his first film, You're a Big Boy Now, will show where he parts company with another young director like Mike Nichols...

...Cagney is not killed...

...and yet that conception plainly had a certain power and nobility, as anyone who saw Ride the High Country will recall...

...I say this without reference to the controversy that grew up around the film and for a time seemed about to bury us all...

...His gradual absorption of Brando's physical mannerisms, quirks of speech, executive logic, turns into an entire show in itself...

...That discovery may be the most original thing in A Clockwork Orange: in the Korova MilkMOVIES bar episodes, for instance, with their molded enamel interiors, chill decor...

...I don't like violence," says a character...

...Cagney ends badly and McDowell ends well—and why...

...Sam Peckinpah, the director of Straw Dogs, being a more rigorous artist, assumes that one needn't stay on that bandwagon at all—which is certainly a more interesting line to take...

...Kubrick is also something of an idolator of technology, that most pervasive manifestation of corporate evil: this fact lies behind the characteristic imagery of 2001 and was, I think, an aspect of Dr...

...We can find traces of a deeper resonance: Alex winning entrance to his victims' houses by complaining, "My friend is lying in the street, Ma'am, he's bleeding...

...Coppola has put the rigor back into death...

...THE FIRST LINE in The Godfather is "I believe in America...

...The violence in this film, rated "R," is atrocious...

...Probably the answer is that a good many people sensed the complicity to which I have alluded: complicity in every kind of violence, even the technological...

...There is no such relief in Straw Dogs...

...Because Kubrick is throwing a sop to his audience...

...Remember the monolith...

...This is corporate violence with a vengeance, so to speak...

...To this state of affairs Stanley Kubrick bears an intriguing relation...

...The poor boy jumps out the window, but recovers...

...Why, then, was the debate over that movie conducted so fiercely...

...We have to use this label loosely with respect to Peckinpah, of course—anyhow the label is not of my own devising—but never mind that for the moment...

...and though the comparison may be lowering, I would much rather see Public Enemy again than A Clockwork Orange...

...Coppola, one hopes, will now get the recognition he has long deserved...

...He is a small-time undertaker and he believes in America, and America, for him, has begun to mean the Mafia...

...I'm a businessman...

...However, a story in the naturalistic vein about a subject like the Mafia looks forward to that weakness, and affords other satisfactions be sides...

...The academic, up to now a pretty tame fellow, finds that he must kill all the rowdies to pro tect his home, and that is just what he does, and in the most exotic ways, too...

...and in the Cat Lady sequence, where green leotards become a pop invitation to murder...

...The only moments of relief come when McDowell steps out of his role, hopping or skipping or overacting, and making us laugh a little, thank God...

...A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, Straw Dogs, and The Godfather can all be seen as reactions against the notion of corporate good, really a vicious notion, which lately has become fixed in our popular culture: the attempt to win sympathy, that is, for the insulated group in its war against the isolated individual...

...We are being asked, it seems to me, not whether or not we assent to Peck inpah's view of human nature, but whether or not we can value his work in its particularities of expression...

...But alas, Kubrick gazes too long into the eyes of the dragon...

...It was not respectable in Hemingway and it is not respectable here...

...Why do misanthropes want to convert everybody...

...It has, for example, the satisfaction of inevitability...

...Public Enemy thought of preaching to its audience, too, but it was never this slow and solemn...

...The hoodlums have got no respect, her father says...

...Their folly consists in mistaking virtu for virtue, when their heroes are in fact redundantly vicious...

...For A Clockwork Orange is—like the propaganda movies that were a part of the Lodovico treatment, and despite its ostensible message —a terribly oppressive film to have to see...

...And his film moves quite naturally in the ambiance of Big Brother, so that its steady portrayal of Alex's enemies seems more like a complicity...

...His story makes simple enough retelling, hate being among the simplest of emotions...

...Justice, the man goes on, demands that the rapists be killed...

...The confusion is owing to divided feelings in Kubrick himself, a friend of individualism who seems nevertheless to be an ally of Big Brother...

...526 The didactic scheme of A Clockwork Orange could scarcely be sillier: I do not think my summary has done it any injustice...

...But I shall return to this...

...Works that are systematically antihuman cannot be called art, because a necessary point in any definition of art is that it humanizes...

...Such are the circumstances relevant to his new and ambitious contribution to the gangster film genre, A Clockwork Orange, which is his worst work to date...

...Strangelove he couldn't satirize the obsession with gadgetry without first taking it seriously, explaining the gadgets...

...Why have you waited till now, when you seek us only for protection...

...Strangelove that many of us were apt to ignore at the time...

...And the message of it all is: he killed a lot of men, and he saw that he was good...

...Alex has a charming smile, and reminds one a little of Holden Caulfield, and when he gets carted off to jail it is a great tragedy...

...The Family...

...During the most violent parts of Straw Dogs, when I saw it, the audience was driven to protect itself 528 with laughter...

...And there is, consequently, no sense of humor in the entire film, though there is a great deal of portentous frivolity (doorbells ringing the first notes of the Fifth Symphony, and the like) . Kubrick has made his visual style surrealistic on a grand scale, using the kind of sets that give every parking lot the appearance of a crater on the moon...

...The treatment has made him hate sex and Beethoven, and when he stumbles into the house of a famous writer—who turns out to have been married to his last rape victim—this old hypocrite, who leads the left-wing opposition to the Lodovico treatment, actually makes an attempt (if I may borrow the language of the movie) to ninthsymphony Alex to death...

...Strangelove may contain less of satire than we had imagined...

...his wife is a bit of a kitten, a flirt (question never to be resolved: how did they get together...

...But no matter: in a didactic way—as in any other— the film simply does not convince...

...And we may, some day, ask you to return the favor...

...But the plot is utterly subverted, or at any rate muddied, by a frigid stylization that deadens every action in the film...

...I MOVIES did it...

...Yet the director has tricked his audience into a curious quandary...

...O'Brien provided just the right touch of native intelligence when he got isolated from the police network but still rebuilt his own radar set, illustrating the point that if we were to respect organizational cops at all they had to break with the organization at some stage and go it on their own...

...The first two of these movies follow out their reaction to the point of folly, and substitute for corporate violence an old-fashioned respect for private virtu, personal violence...

...It is an unfortunate movie and, unfortunately for Kubrick's reputation among intellectuals, a feeble-minded one...

...Presumably, though this is to move past the end of the film, sex with the kitten will now be better than ever...

...Surely, Hitler represents precisely the impersonal violence that had better not be assimilated to Alex's revolt...

...But what happens when that insistent moralism gets loaded into the conventions of a gangster film...

...Also, and I think this accounts for the film's attraction for otherwise intelligent people, he has understood the possibilities of pop art as a form of violence...

...Again, the confusion—or is it bad faith...

...Here, we notice, is the characteristic separation of powers in American life...

...I'm cured...

...The unstated principle seemed to be: cops and robbers have more in common with each other than either can ever have with the organization man...

...Peckinpah is a director of Westerns—the best of them is Ride the High Country, though better than any of his films was a television adaptation of Noon Wine—and Straw Dogs is, so far as I can tell, a plague that he has sent down personally on the human race...

...John Dillinger and Sam Spade would feel equally out of place in this world...

...In short, a myth of violence...

...You may not like my idea of virtue, but that's just too bad—pow...

...he has made room again, I think, for the free-lance detective and the free-lance hero...

...However, I submit that to make this response to Straw Dogs would be wrong, and propose the following explanation instead...

...The writing and acting have a fullness, here, that one rarely finds in ambitious American films: Coppola has imported the great European middle style of Renoir and Ophuls—deep focus, fluid movement, minimal editing—and he has done it right...

...Their good and evil, and their energy, belonged to themselves alone—and the age has set new demands...

...Gulliver's Travels is not apposite as a counterexample...

...Those who objected to the depiction of vio lence in Kubrick's film were importantly wrong, because the gross physical violence in A Clockwork Orange, quite apart from its ideo logical content, was of a much lower order of magnitude than anything in a film like The MOVIES French Connection...

...Tamburlaine, a hot-blooded type, could never have worked for the intelligence squad of "Mission: Impossible," but then neither could Bogart or Cagney or Edward G. Robinson...

...Rather, he likes the idea of violence, put to Beethoven music and processed and sterilized...

...Dustin Hoffman as the academic manages to look surprisingly like a turtle, but characterization here never reaches far beyond caricature: this is a Western director's picture of an intellectual, the Hemingway picture...

...Well, for one thing, it spoils all the fun, makes it a terribly dull movie to watch...

...The shades of the room are drawn and the only color we see is a faded brown...

...A bear trap over the head takes care of one...

...Crime is life...

...The Family, large f, supplies cool business sense—takes care of finances...

...There is nothing quite like it in the American cinema...

...Blood Orange, or Violence in the Movies Hollywood movies used to make the gangster "understandable" by allowing him a human weakness, and the same trick of complication was played on cops...

...Remember CRM-114...

...Let us take the comparison one step further and see where it leads...

...Is this such a very hard movie to render judgment on...

...Frank Kermode speaks somewhere of political myths as "degenerate fictions," and refers to fascism as one such myth...

...q MOVIES 529...

...he has dissected the Family and made its warmth insidious...

...In Coppola's film, for all the straight Salingerisms, we know right away that the director has thrown himself into life—take him where it will...

...To stay on the "humane" bandwagon, Kubrick ends by apologizing for Alex's worst moments with the sentiments of all-purpose mitigation, "he was a born loser...

...This is literally true in the slowed-down fight sequences that have been set against Beethoven plus other-worldly electronic flourishes...

...It is not that Kubrick likes violence...

...Blood is a big expense...

...But never mind, we will find these hoodlums...