Surface Sparkle and Inner Fire
SIMON, JOHN
ON SCREEN By John Simon Surface Sparkle and Inner Fire Seven Days in May is a useful movie, serving an entirely salutary purpose. It sets a standard for films that will not, or cannot, be...
...It is to be enjoyed without feelings of guilt, there should be more movies like it, and it has nothing first-class about it...
...But from the latter (say, as portrayed by Kevin McCarthy in Strategic Air Command) to the general who, though intelligent, intrepid, a master-strategist and sexy to boot, is also a brutal, neo-fascist traitor—and one who can carry most of our armed forces with him —we would seem to have come a long way...
...But as a film, it has the obvious virtue of questioning the infallibility of our Army, which is a worthy endeavor, although since the Army-McCarthy hearings a breach has become manifest in the complacency with which Hollywood had viewed the Service...
...Seldom has an author so sardonically turned his fictional alter ego into a dartboard to riddle with the most fiendishly well-aimed epigrams...
...Pierre Dr'eu La Rochelle was one of those short-changed souls who came of age exactly as World War I broke out...
...George Macready's, and Martin Balsam's sturdy supports to a President in need...
...Not that such devices are fundamentally wrong...
...Its head is none other than the hero's venerated chief: a brilliant general, but, as it turns out, a fanatic...
...The film is as uncomfortably apt in the '60s as the novel was in the '30s...
...Its bark, though very good indeed, is still worse than its bite...
...True, it uses a hand camera...
...perhaps "trashy intelligence" would be the name for it...
...and, best of all, has a nice rhythm to it with just the right amount of gradual acceleration...
...And all this is couched in splendidly literate dialogue of utmoit simplicity, untarnished even by lax subtitles...
...Seven Days in May is like Rigoletto with Tucker, Merrill, and Peters...
...The man is quite obviously going to kill himself...
...Marking time and marked by it, scurrying inside a huge immobility, they are slowly rushing to embrace a palpable nothingness...
...But there is a graver ill of which he is not cured: himself...
...Edmond O'Brien's...
...Had it been directed by Stanley Kubrick (vide Dr...
...But then, in the end, it is all a mite too quick, easy, bloodless: a bit smug, with everyone saying the right, only slightly hackneyed, words, and we feel that we have perhaps been had, after all...
...Granted that she is meant to enact a woman left too long on the bough, the fine line between overripeness and marcescence proves too fine for her...
...Drieu veered from Communism to Fascism, wrote poetry, stories, and autobiographical novels with such emblematic titles as The Man Covered with Women and Peculiar Journey, became a collaborationist, and, totally disillusioned as well as aware of what awaited him, killed himself in 1945 at the age of 52...
...finally they just stand there, stupefied, emptied out, mouthing some gilt-edged platitude...
...Kirk Douglas' Colonel, nicely suggesting the skin under the uniform...
...Accordingly, the cliché Blustering General has lost ground to the cliché Nasty General: captious, bureaucratic, and meanly trig...
...but with flawless tact and a dignified sense of lacrimae rerum...
...I am not even thinking primarily of the extraordinary photography, wh'ch is an object lesson in exactly how far one can push the artful without becoming arty...
...Had it been directed by Otto Preminger (vide The Cardinal), it would have emerged pre-rehearsed, grandly violent but tidy: touristfolder photography—if there were tourist folders inviting us to come to exotic Vietnam and see the glorious fighting...
...He is a beggar whom no amount of alms they can give will succor and who even insults them into the bargain...
...And we see it equally precisely, disturbingly, and unglamorously in those who are running around Paris—homosexuals, dope fiends, promiscuous women...
...But we see it most piercingly in Alain, who is so bright and appealing and yet such a cynical and irascible drain on himself and anyone who would help him...
...Now Louis Malle has turned Le Feu follet into a devastatingly accurate, wryly beautiful film, released here as The Fire Within...
...He has a rich and beautiful American wife in New York who keeps him, but keeps him at ocean's length...
...Once, however, is good fun...
...The ambivalence of sickness and health, though, is never expressed sneeringly or snarlingly...
...The screenplay, also by Malle, is excellent in several ways...
...Nothing can keep it from remaining one of the year's best films...
...It is the story of the last two days in the life of Alain, a delightful youngish man about to be released from a genteel private institution at Versailles as cured of alcoholism...
...they are merely out of place in such a nastily vulgar context...
...This is the story of a military junta which is about to take over our government...
...Consider the scene at the beginning where a minor riot breaks out in front of the White House...
...They end up loathing him, and themselves for loathing a sick man...
...As it ends, he is in bed with a bullet in his heart...
...The Fire Within, even while honestly asserting the sickness of the sick (asking no pity for them—showing them both bad and good), insinuates with acidulous finesse its doubts: How healthy are the healthy...
...I am told by a friend who went to see Seven Days in May a second time that the dialogue proves absolutely mouldy on re-use...
...Besides Frankenheimer's smartly profane direction—with occasional flashes of something better—there are also very good performances: Fredric March's President, ashen but still capable of smouldering...
...And so we would have—if his psyche were adequately examined, if his language could rise above a judicious mixture of wisecracks and platitudes, if his actions were able to give him full three-dimensionality...
...I am thinking, above all, of the way Malle has paced his film with a kind of double tempo: a lot of tiny, repetitious, senseless fastnesses which add up to a great, viscous, oppressive sense of barely moving...
...With the help of Maurice Ronet, a magnificently various Alain, and a splited supporting cast the film comes to aching, furious life...
...Strangelove), it would have had a spontaneous, unnerving, newsreel quality, unspectacular but cruelly effective...
...His adjusted friends want to help him: They want to convince him that life is good, but he only undermines their own faith in it...
...It sets a standard for films that will not, or cannot, be works of art or appeal predominantly to intellectuals, but that staunchly refuse to compromise their high standards of—not excellence—competence...
...Only Ava Gardner has a problem...
...like a good scientist seeking proof of his hypothesis—that life is not worth living...
...What keeps The Fire Within from being a great film is the constricting effect of emotional grisaille relieved only by some flashes of black comedy...
...In between, he revisits some of his old Paris friends (he has been in New York for years, then in the institution for month...
...Bit there is more...
...We are held by the story all the way, and on a level above that of merely yielding to make-believe...
...This is not exactly what James Agee used to call "intelligent trash," but something rather better...
...As clearly as perhaps never before in a movie we are shown what it is like to be confronted with someone who feels that life only humiliates us, and that he could never really hold anyone, anything...
...Instead, Burt Lancaster makes him into just what he was meant to be: a figure in its two-dimensionality genuinely menacing, but not terrifyingly real...
...Nonetheless, there are also slick camera angles, tricky panning shots, and rather sly cutting...
...So with the whole plot...
...Or of the ingenuous way in which the camera comments on the bizarre objects and perverse little rituals with which Alain tries to bejewel the drabness of his existence...
...Le Feu follet (Will-o'-the-wisp) was a novel Drieu wrote as he pushed 40, and hell hath no fury such as a brilliant, charming drifter will unleash against himself when middle age surprises him in flagrante with the sense of his own gratuity...
...Of the novel on which this is based, I know only that it was a tenacious best-seller and a favorite of Dore Schary—which, I'm afraid, is enough...
...He became, along with Montherlant, one of the writers who most clearly spoke for those who returned to postwar Paris morally uprooted and ideologically adrift...
...it is not weird and exotic, as amateurish films like David and Lisa would have it, only painfully ordinary and vaguely sordid...
...like a good, early Bernard Buffet...
...Amercans will know this figure best from Cole te's Chéri novels, but one mu:t imagine a Chéri with exceptional literary talent and not only financial and amatory hungers, but also vast and fickle political appetites...
...like an adequate red wine...
...First, in its unprecedentedly incisive portrayal of neurosis and psychosis...
...It is not a case of intelligence going to work on making tripe look piquant, but of canny observation deciding to play it not entirely safe —yet safe enough...
...And just how much is health worth...
...Other virtues of the film are similarly ambiguous...
...so it would seem advisable to see the picture only once...
...has movement that, though carefully calculated, seems random and disorganized...
...Those sequestered at Versailles are pictured with uncanny exactitude: neurosis is just a little too much or a trifle too little of something...
...Mostly, however, it is what is purely filmic that is so enchanting here...
...As the picture begins, he is in bed with one of his wife's best friends...
...It is, however, directed by John Frankenheimer and partakes of both modes...
...An upstanding, sharp young colonel stumbles on the truth in the nick of time, tips off the aging and tired but able and right-thinking President and a band of his trusty aides, and together they foil the devilishly clever, Right-wing conspiracy...
...Or of the superb soundtrack, on which a wistful but proud bit of Debussy piano music alternates with the clumsy, pointless noises of life...
...The panther in his cage, eddies in a stagnant pool, boxed pendulums —that is what Alain and his friends are...
Vol. 47 • March 1964 • No. 6
