Murder by Politics, Death by Dancing

...In Lear there is a sense of a cruel and unjust universe running through the whole play, and, secondly, the "good" characters are riddled with weakness, impatience, irascibility, gullibility, authoritarianism and other flaws, whereas the "bad" ones often have on their side a certain dash and charm, and a shrewdness verging on sheer common sense...

...And the garish, pathetic, hysterical backstage activity—or merely leaden inactivity—during the brief rest periods of which many dare not avail themselves lest they never rise again to shuffle on...

...It's recess time...

...The images remain just a little grainythe true texture of history on film...

...Characters are barely sketched in...

...What weighs on this film is the passage of time: McCoy wrote his novel without the knowledge that he was creating a symbolic microcosm embodying universal hopelessness...

...But the same principles must apply...

...It is not so good as its romantic provenance, but it is good enough...

...There are surely qualitative differences even in propaganda, and this is superior propaganda as well as serious, excellent entertainment...

...It is hard to conceive that a surer way of doing him in could not have been devised, and that efficiency in murder would so defer to cinematic suspense...

...It may be that the part does not permit much more, but seeing Miss Papas pull the same trick over and over again (most recently in the totally negligible A Dream oi Kings), I wonder whether she is the actress we all took her for or just another gritty face...

...But there it is again, absolute sanctity so unswerving that when the judge—privately convinced there was a murder yet still insisting that, until conclusive evidence is produced, everyone refer to the death as an "incident"—himself, near the end, inadvertently slips into the word "assassination," that one word hits both the court stenographer and us in the audience like a sudden judgment of God...

...No less important in removing the film from the range of art is the atmosphere of drama verging on melodrama and sometimes even farce that prevails in it...

...But, you may remonstrate, does not the tragedy in King Lear set in just when everything seems to be finally working out for the best...

...Z, made from a novel by Vassili Vassilikos, is a fictionalization of the 1963 political assassination of Professor Gregorios Lambrakis, a deputy of the Left-oriented Greek eda party, in Salonika, where the University of Athens professor of medicine had just delivered a speech against the installation of an American Polaris missile base...

...Both these men, though they do great good, do it out of mixed, partly selfish motives...

...He manages to make imperturbable dedication look human and also a little sad, and can, even from behind dark glasses, flash looks of luminous penetrancy...

...Edmund Wilson, while conceding that it was "a subject with possibilities" and "worth reading," also noted the lack of characterization and motivation in the novel...

...A young Investigating Magistrate, appointed by the government, turns out to be so much in love with the truth that, despite blandishments and threats from very high sources (perhaps the king himself), he inexorably brings the guilty to trial and condemnation...

...both in the book and in the film there is something incredible about this ending...

...In the movie, Gloria is so dynamic, resourceful and clever that we cannot see her as the loser Rocky, the marathon's shady entrepreneur, recognizes in her...

...I am not proposing Lear as the measure of all dramatic, let alone cinematic, art...

...In what could have been the standard Gregory-Peckish part of the Investigating Magistrate, Jean-Louis Trintignant works quiet wonders...

...It is not that these things may not be true, but the eye of art would select more carefully, or the touch of art would fuse and integrate more suasively...

...As a result, the Karamanlis government (it is not so identified—nothing in the film is) falls and, for a while, the Papandreou government takes over...

...Thus the film makes the marathon's management corrupt in several additional and unconvincing ways, but even this is less of a problem than the sometimes topheavy dialogue, as in the case of that line McCoy relished enough to make it the title of his book...

...by that standard, few works indeed would make the grade...

...Within this lesser context, one can even enjoy such questionable devices as the chase of the half-Jewish deputy by a car occupied by a single person bent on running him down...

...But, with CIA support, the Rightist colonels, plus royalistes que le roi, stage their coup, the culprits are freed and reinstated, and the supporters of Lambrakis are jailed, exiled, or assassinated...

...The French existentialists were not hovering over his shoulders as they are over those of the filmmakers...

...Let it be a message film, oversimplified and propagandistic...

...Here the fault lies partly in the movie Gloria's greater attractiveness and less pronounced death-wish than her fictional prototype's, and partly in Michael Sarrazin's not being a good enough actor to convey how one may be swept into this deathly compact at the cost of one's own life...

...So do go to see Z right away, and do not go to Greece this summer...

...as the murder victim, Yves Montand endows his relatively brief role with manliness and dignity...

...The sad thing about these blemishes is that the director, Sydney Pollack, is fully aware of their faultiness, and first made the film without these fatal embellishments...

...It is taut, humane, intelligently constructed, sharply executed, and it is against those colonels who have plunged Greece into barbarism...

...Similarly, the farcical touches surrounding the arraignment of the high functionaries of the gendarmerie, though very satisfying in a two-dimensional context, would be unpardonable in the framework of a genuine piece of art...

...Good enough, too, is Z itself, under the skilled direction of Costa-Gavras...

...the cowardly yet superficially punctilious Public Prosecutor of Francois Perier...

...Both are based on fairly respectable novels, both tell stories symbolic of something bigger (universal or metaphysical) than the actual events touched upon, both involve large casts acting together in exemplary harmony, both have been directed and photographed with great skill, and both fall short of being works of art...

...I am not even persuaded that the strong-willed Gloria would need the bland Robert to act as her executioner...

...Equally impressive and equally flawed is They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, made from Horace McCoy's underground "classic" of 1935...

...Nevertheless, the chief weaknesses of the film are like two or three bad sections of a tangerine, and can easily be spotted and mentally removed...

...except for that colorful carpenter, they exist only as plot furtherers and ideological mouthpieces...

...What was pronounced an accidental death from being knocked over by a passing vehicle, eventually proved to be a carefully planned assassination organized by the extreme Rightist party with the approval and collaboration of the chief of Salonika's gendarmerie and other high officials...

...the winning, decent, reasonable and brave eda Deputies of Bernard Fresson and Jean Bouise...

...The last part of the sad tale appears in the film only as a brief, bitterly ironic epilogue: The body of Z concerns itself with what looks and feels like the arduous triumph of justice, and is meant to instill in us elation and hopefulness...

...The choice of Algeria for location-work is less than fortunate—not because it is considerably closer to the tropics than Salonika, but because this film, which steadily implies that it could be happening anywhere and not only in Greece, should eschew the lush atmosphere and swarthy extras that seem to restrict it to some exotic backwater...

...Yet, for me, these faults fade beside the solid achievements of the film...

...some flash-forwards of Robert Syverton's trial for the shooting of his dancing partner Gloria—scenes shot in spooky ocean green and easily mistakable for flashbacks...

...and a carpenter who proves a key friendly witness, played with incomparable juiciness by Georges Geret, a character actor on the grand scale of such earlier French masters as Harry Baur, Raimu and Marcel Dalio...

...There is, first of all, the dazzlingly authentic atmosphere: the mendaciously optimistic music nudging on a dance that looks progressively less like dancing and more like chronic somnambulism, as if some sinister narcosis from another planet were infecting our world...

...and the loyal wife of yet another deputy, played with fine, understated tension by Clotilde Joano...

...this might easily have compensated for the insufficiency of characterization which the film in part inherits from the book...

...Besides those already mentioned, I must single out the blustering General of Pierre Dux, sometime leading man of the Comedie Francaise...

...The other figures have to be taken at face value, which in all but Robert's case is not a serious loss...

...and there is brilliant use of large expanses of white against which a little black or red or both can work miracles of coloristic poignancy...

...And there is the Investigating Magistrate, who, though a government man, proves an absolute saint of justice...

...Although the Greek-born French director, Costa-Gavras, and his co-scenarist, the Spanish-born French novelist, Jorge Semprun, have followed their historical novel reasonably closely, they have created a plot that is artistically untenable: The main drift of the film clashes with the epilogue to produce a self-contradictory, self-defeating impact, as of a Tinguely machine that destroys itself...

...True, with two significant differences...

...In Z, the bad guys are quite intolerable without exception, and the good guys are as right as Left can be...

...There is much to be said also for the homosexual assassin of Marcel Bozzufi...

...The only two characters in Z who are not black or white are a muck-raking press photographer, delightfully played by one of the screen's most prodigiously versatile young actors, Jacques Perrin...

...We are always in the presence, first and foremost, of a plot, and a plot that progresses along melioristic lines from profound gloom to radiant dawn...

...Then, however, comes the epilogue, in which with a casualness that deliberately verges on the sardonic, we learn of the complete reversal of the just ending, the systematic destruction of truth and goodness, and a reversion to conditions even worse than the initial ones...

...And though Pollack and his screenwriter, Robert E. Thompson, have labored to stick in grim little details to justify this suicide, to me the dosage does not seem lethal enough...

...But, in a sense, it was just this spare, straightforward, journalistic account of a monstrous Depression phenomenon, the dance marathon, that made the short book so unsettling: wholesale human degradation as the most matter-of-fact thing in the world...

...The reel McCoy is, unfortunately, not quite the real McCoy, which itself fell short of a true work of art...

...Yet through this jiggling morass there runs a thread of life, of gallows humor, of sheer defiant tenacity, toward a paltry but touching heroism...

...The magistrate, then, is one who was accidentally born into the ranks of "Them," and who, had history evolved otherwise, would duly have found his way to "Us...

...Raoul Coutard is a magnificent cinematographer, and his work with light and shadow, sunburst and brooding nightscape, treacherously lovely exteriors and morose interiors is always exciting without falling into mere prettiness...

...I think of an actor like Gerard Philipe in this part, of the Mishkin-like quality he would have brought to it...

...and a bit of montage whereby the dying Gloria is seen collapsing no longer on a shabby pier but, in slow motion, in that meadow where the proud steed was killed...

...Rather more disturbing is the fact that in the film, as already implied, the marathon tries too hard to be emblematic of the world without quite being able to carry off the allegory...

...Well, there is a half-Jewish lawyer-deputy (sizzlingly played by that superior jack-in-the-box, Charles Denner) who is probably too violent—but with what fearful provocation...

...Only Irene Papas, as the victim's wife, is content to walk through her part with a face frozen into an easy tragic mask...

...Yet propaganda it is—even though it happens to be on the side of what I firmly believe to be right...

...But both of them are, in a sense, peripheral characters...

...But, alas, the guffaws are not entirely the fault of cloddish spectators...

...The original version of the film, without any of these elements, was screened for audiences in Palo Alto and San Francisco and elicited so much laughter in the wrong places notably when Gloria produces a gun from her pocketbook in the last scenethat the additional material was put in to foretell disaster and forestall guffaws...

...But at the next bell, on with the marathon...

...Now to some extent this is the inevitable consequence of trying to tell an elaborate story in all its detailed ramifications with compact efficiency...

...On the other hand, the dialogue, presumably by Semprun, is generally polished, witty, biting or flavorous enough to make the onesidedness go down easily...

...To be sure, the movie does supply Gloria with a reasonably adequate background, as it also provides Rocky, a character largely created by the filmmakers, with a plausible past and interestingly complex personality springing from it...

...The music by Mikis Theodorakis, one of the folk heroes of the Greek Resistance and now ironically deported to Arcadia, had to be smuggled out of the composer's house arrest...

...The performances, all but one, are remarkable...

...It makes a good title, but it is a poor line...

...The sleazy dance emporium is recreated in all its tawdriness, the costumes are painfully accurate, the false gaiety enough to make a tin angel weep...

...Costa-Gavras and Semprun have, to be sure, tried to add a little extra dimension to the film by introducing rapid-fire mini-flashbacks, mostly meant to show that all was not quite well in the murdered Deputy's marriage...

...And there is the hideous parasitic life that swirls around these staggering corpses: the management, the employes, the audiences...

...while they affect the course of events, they are politically unaffiliated, outside the ideological line-ups that confront each other on the film's prime battlefield...

...But that means the genre itself largely defies art, or, at least, screen art...

...And ponder our country's role in the ghastly events depicted here...

...Also, one of the two murderers is represented as a somewhat comically sinister pederast, but these are rather conventional "humanizing" touches, and remain unexplored...

...This is, of course, an oversimplification at best, but let us, for the moment, go along with it...

...They include a slow-motion prologue, or prelude, reminiscent of Sidney Lumet at his Pawnbrokerish worst, in which a boy witnesses the shooting of a glorious white stallion for no very convincing reason...

...With whatever difficulties, at the cost of martyrs' blood and every kind of suffering, the body politic goes from the sickness of war-mongering, elitism, religious fanaticism, racism, and despotism to the health of Leftism, pacifism, democracy, freedom and justice for all...