True Love and False Sentiment
WEIL, HENRY
On Screen TRUE LOVE AND FALSE SENTIMENT BY HENRY WEIL T he first critical successes of the 1973 New York Film Festival opened commercially roughly one week after their Lincoln Center showings....
...and Boxcar Bertha...
...in short, everything Orson Welles had in mind when he called a film studio the greatest toy a boy ever had...
...Truffaut's verve and wit, moreover, establish him as one of the screen's leading entertainers...
...Charlie, we come to recognize, is an apprentice to the Mafia...
...Truffaut is equally enamored of the people he works with, although I can think of no other film that portrays actors so realistically...
...Charlie is attractive, compassionate, generous...
...Similarly, when Charlie and his friends go off to a poolroom, violence erupts without motivation...
...The marriage, to be sure, is not Truffaut's...
...In some, it is the central theme (Jules and Jim, Stolen Kisses...
...One scene is shot in a street named for Jean Vigo, and a package is opened revealing books on Bergman, Godard, Hawks, Bunuel, and Hitchcock...
...For example, though we see that Tony keeps a pair of tame lions caged in the back room of his bar, we do not learn why he wants them or what he does with them...
...His ear accurately reflects the nuances of Little-Italy English...
...Day for Night ranks with his greatest achievements...
...Johnny Boy is stupid, homely, arrogant...
...Day for Night is a film that embraces life itself, and when Truffaut hugs life and teases it and rejoices in it, he makes every one of us glad to be alive...
...in others, it remains an essential ingredient (The Wild Child, Shoot the Piano Player...
...In his other films marriages have always survived with dishonesty and pain...
...As one might expect, the incidental plot that buzzes around the filming of Meet Pamela concerns the love affairs of the actors...
...Constrictive and claustrophobic, the district is a breeding ground for victims like the film's main character, Charlie (Harvey Keitel...
...But ultimately, it is neither "a film in the process of becoming a film" (as Godard created in La Chinoise), nor a movie about directorial angst (as Fellini produced in 8V2...
...We see a dedication to Lillian and Dorothy Gish...
...All of Truf-faut's movies deal to a greater or lesser extent with love...
...Of course, all of the idolatries could just as easily have come from any amateur film-student...
...Just as Bang the Drum Slowly never adequately explained Michael Moriarty's affection for Robert de Niro (again...
...In the last analysis...
...Unfortunately, his ability to describe an ambiance far exceeds his ability to tell a story...
...The casting of Jean-Pierre Aumont is an open paean to Hollywood in its star-studded heyday...
...Day for Night clearly intends to celebrate film at its very source...
...He shows cars parked end to end down both sides of the streets, hemming in the inhabitants no less oppressively than the peeling enamel paint on their walls and the three-dimensional pictures of Christ in their luncheonettes...
...Truffaut, appearing as the director of Meet Pamela, throws up his hands at them...
...Scorsese is dazzlingly precise in catching the details of Little Italy's life, but his extravagances of violence and insufficiencies of motivation suggest that his view of that life is romanticized—with the result that Mean Streets, finally, is unconvincing...
...What is uniquely Truffaut, indeed what explains so much of his success, is that his affection is less for the iconography of filmmaking than for the labor itself...
...Nonetheless, Charlie destroys his future for his friend...
...Giovanni's greatest objection is to Johnny Boy, an undeniable loser, but the man to whom Charlie feels his fiercest loyalty...
...The movie ends with Charlie's ostracism virtually assured...
...fireplaces that conceal gas jets for adjusting the fire to cinematic heights...
...The plot details the making of a commercial movie, Meet Pamela, and in the course of its shooting Truffaut excitedly exposes the tricks of his trade: candles with built-in lights to illuminate actors' faces more intensely than flames...
...The movie declares its purpose from the start...
...and Tony (David Proval), the owner of the bar where they all hang out, and the least defined character of the lot...
...We watch an optical soundtrack accompanying the credits...
...Except for the passing homages to various directors, Day for Night records the adrenalin-bubbling excitement of moviemaking with sure-ness and precision...
...As part of his tribute to his art, Truffaut somewhat awkwardly assembles various references to other filmmakers...
...But what we have the most difficulty accepting is the depth of Charlie's affection for Johnny Boy...
...fraudulent rainstorms, slaps and car accidents...
...The latest film by Francois Truffaut, Day for Night, gives us the director at his stylistic best and most thematically committed...
...In Mean Streets, author-director Martin Scorsese has captured life in Little Italy, an immigrant neighborhood on Manhattan's Lower East Side...
...Thus he wears a hearing aid in Day or Night, an oblique homage to Luis Bunuel, who is deaf...
...The film also points up how actors exhibit forced affection for one another, their occasional irrational refusal to cooperate with the simplest direction, and their reiterated resolutions to leave show business—which, of course, they never do...
...Mean Streets offers no explanation for the central relationship it depicts...
...A company photographer is pointedly never able to gather Meet Pamela's cast for a one-big-happy-family photograph, yet we get a strong feeling of the sense of community among movie actors...
...These associates do not reflect favorably upon Charlie, and Uncle Giovanni is worried lest his nephew's reputation be tarnished with the Persons Who Count—the upper-echelon Mafiosi...
...Nor again is it a film that mindlessly declares the magic of movies as superior to the world of reality, for Truffaut repeatedly shows us airplanes in the sky behind flimsy movie sets to underscore the constant presence of an ongoing and vital world apart...
...His compassionate sense of our collective buffoonery, his insight into the eccentricity of our emotions and his instinctive facility for detailing his observations make him, in my opinion, the cinema's foremost humanist...
...Still, in the end, he finds actors highly admirable, and we meet as well those who not only cruelly discipline themselves in the midst of horrendous personal catastrophe, but possess genuine concern for their coworkers...
...When asked, for instance, to describe the picture they are making, each of the performers declares his role to be the central one...
...he has potential, even if it is as a gangster...
...We hear Truffaut calling out the instructions in the background...
...His eye unerringly discovers the clothes his characters define themselves with...
...It gave the new Truffaut an extra puff of prestige (which it didn't need), helped to snare a distributor for the new Scorsese (which might never have found one otherwise), and reinforced the negative judgments of distributors who had turned down the rest of the entries (except perhaps for Badlands, another critical success that will doubtless be popping up at neighborhood theaters soon...
...his first love is represented in the character who would rather go to the movies than eat...
...Truffaut revels not in contemplation but in the toil of creation...
...Truffaut even hints at a startling discovery: a successful marriage...
...He is an ardent lover, and his best films have a pace, passion and perception that place him among the finest directors in the short history of the cinema...
...Giovanni, in turn, seems to do little except manage a shabby, two-room luncheonette, but he dresses expensively and speaks darkly about not putting pressure on an aging and kindly restaurateur who apparently owes him money...
...One cannot say, for Charlie himself has never been clear about his real desires...
...The nightmare is of Truffaut as a child, stealing stills from Orson Welles' Citizen Kane...
...We are left feeling that Scorsese has given us a fight merely to prove that his streets really are mean...
...Is this outcome meant to be tragic...
...This is not entirely surprising since, all along, Scorsese has failed to provide adequate exposition...
...Day for Night chronicles with brio the seeming minutiae of directing: determining a wig's color, shooting and reshooting a scene until it is right, deciding on the exact frame at which to make a cut, wasting hundreds of feet of celluloid waiting for a recalcitrant cat to lap milk from a saucer...
...Whatever its declared purpose, the Festival, as usual, was little more than a commercial trial balloon...
...In fact, the movie lacks a definitive resolution...
...Scorsese grew up in Little Italy, and now, on the screen, he luxuriates in the clutter of its frayed buildings and dented garbage cans...
...Still, there is much to it that is impressive, and it stands as a solid improvement over Scorsese's other films, Who's That Knocking at My Door...
...But Day for Night is the only Truffaut film that can be called an open and unabashed love-letter...
...Michael (Richard Romanus), a petty gangster given to sprayed hair and velvet collars...
...He employs Fellini's methods of postdubbing, and zooms in on himself having a nightmare, in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo...
...A young, handsome paisano, Charlie appears to do little except run infrequent errands for his Uncle Giovanni (Cesare Danova...
...But he is not yet on the team, and he spends most of his time with his friends: Johnny Boy (Robert de Niro), a bumbling punk who assumes he can get away forever with facile arrogance and flagrant welching...
...More than anything else in the world, Truffaut tells us, he adores the movies...
Vol. 56 • November 1973 • No. 22
