Manipulating the Moviegoer
ASAHINA, ROBERT
On Screen MANIPULATING THE MOVIEGOER BY ROBERT ASAHINA with the possible exception of music, no artistic medium can match film for sheer visceral excitement. Consider the suspense and terror (to...
...When a grenade explodes, we can almost taste the dirt it kicks up...
...What De Palma leaves behind is Hitchcock's cynical Catholicism...
...then, when it has reached its highest point, the screen appears to divide in two, with the bed on one side and the gallery on the other, much like a genuine split screen...
...Consider the suspense and terror (to take the tritest example) of watching a helpless maiden tied to a railroad track by a sneering villain as a speeding train approaches...
...We never pause to think about the crude pseudo-Freudian psychology or the improbable characterizations...
...De Palma's latest effort, Dressed to Kill, borrows liberally from his previous films: the "surprise" ending, a shock that turns out to be merely a nightmare, recalls Carrie...
...In Czechoslovakia, their impassive sergeant (Lee Marvin) befriends a young boy who has managed to survive the Holocaust, but who lives only long enough after the liberation to tug the tough guy's heartstrings...
...Audiences are not annoyed at such violence because it arouses feelings they are afraid to deal with...
...Even those critics and colleagues who admire Fuller call him a "primitive...
...Off the battlefield the Bleeding Heart takes over...
...His point of view, as both a writer and a director, is simply amoral...
...It proceeds to portray French Indochina as the last line of defense against the rampaging Red Chinese hordes, and then cuts to a little Vietnamese boy wandering through a bombed-out village with a dog hidden under his tattered shirt...
...Fuller effectively conveys the gruesome, transitory nature of an infantryman's life, lived not day-to-day or even hour-to-hour, but second-to-second...
...Each episode is a drama in itself, revolving not around grand strategy or long-term objectives, but around immediate goals such as knocking out the artillery on the next hill or blowing a hole through the barbed wire 25 yards away across a bullet-riddled stretch of beach...
...he is the Mickey Spillane of movie makers...
...But Fuller's handling of the action-notably in the scene where Widmark lifts the wallet of an FBI suspect being shadowed by two agents who look on helplessly-is so crisp and the film so tautly constructed that, even today...
...Rarely has claustrophobic fear been rendered on screen with such tactility...
...Take, for example, Pickup on South Street, starring Richard Widmark as a master pickpocket who inadvertently becomes mixed up in a spy case...
...The violence in his movies-with the important exception of Carrie-is committed for esthetic reasons alone...
...Split screens are used throughout the movie...
...and Home Movies...
...In each episode, though, the characters are ridiculously wooden...
...The flip side of Fuller the He-man is Fuller the Bleeding Heart, as is evident from the opening scenes of China Gate (1957...
...There is no attempt at a coherent dramatic structure...
...We get a sense of the awful arbitrariness of death when a bullet strikes a soldier a foot away from the character we have been watching closely on screen...
...In Sicily, the soldiers come to the aid of a boy who is pulling a cart with the body of his dead mother inside, looking for a coffin and a place to bury her...
...Similarly, Shock Corridor (1963)featuring Peter Breck as a courageous reporter who feigns madness to investigate the horrifying conditions in a mental hospital-plays directly to our deepest paranoid fears...
...The anonymity that gives the combat scenes a brutally random quality undermines the clearly sincere sentiments of the noncombat interludes...
...Other scenes are lifted from The Steel Helmet (1950...
...The much-touted ability of Alfred Hitchcock to elicit emotion, for example, was really a kind of audience-response engineering carried out with mechanical aids (editing, lighting and special effects, aimed at the eye and the ear...
...they are disgusted that they have let their emotions be toyed with so cheaply...
...As far as I can see, only because the director liked the construction of the shot...
...Probably the latter...
...the element of voyeurism derives from Hi Mom...
...Fuller is obviously working out his private obsessions, a process that some critics glorify as "personal film making...
...Who is getting pleasure out of such violence...
...That art is not engineering is a distinction worth remembering when confronting the work of Samuel Fuller and Brian De Palma, two movie mechanics whose undeniable technical skills have blinded many to their artistic limitations...
...Only Fuller would dare such an outrageous mixture of unabashed sentimentality, bloodthirsty action, low-level melodrama, and simple-minded politics...
...Although they take somewhat different routes to the solar plexus, both are true masters at manipulating the moviegoer...
...But it is the absence of any point to the sex or violence that makes Dressed to Kill truly offensive...
...Is this a device to indicate the killer's derangement, or just a cinematic indulgence...
...The moral and intellectual content of the movie is no more convincing than the emotional...
...The area has been so ravaged by war, the narration continues, that all the dogs and cats have long since been eaten-All but one, that is...
...To what end...
...The impression that De Palma is preoccupied with his own film making is borne out as well by the hammy estheticism of Dressed to Kill...
...What other art form can combine the visual, the aural and the dramatic, while seducing us with its verisimilitude...
...he dispatches his characters in spectacularly gory fashion with no justification other than sheer delight in the kinetic possibilities of killing on screen...
...In Carrie, for instance, the bloody climax is brought about by a teenager's need to avenge the indignities she suffered at the hands of her cruel classmates-A motivation most audiences immediately recognized in themselves...
...Free of the self-consciousness that has been the undoing of more sophisticated writers/directors, his reputation as a primitive is deserved...
...These action sequences are quintessential Fuller...
...If what you want is some vicarious experience of combat, The Big Red One delivers some truly stunning moments...
...This is a semi-autobiographical account of his first combat adventures with the First Infantry Division during World War II, and the ultimate grunt's-eye vision of war...
...Just as Terrence Malick shoots visually beautiful but meaningless pictures, so De Palma makes films that are meaning-lessly violent...
...Now he's on the rampage again in The Big Red One, his first film in 15 years...
...On the other hand, his thumb-in-the-eye directing is so well suited to his hairy-chested writing that his efforts take on a kind of idiot dignity...
...In Dressed to Kill the blood and gore seem to serve no purpose except to convey the filmmaker's contempt for his audience...
...time for condescension...
...Not only is this conclusion banal, it also contravenes the individual acts of dignity and heroism we have seen throughout...
...the continuing popularity of horror films testifies to that...
...Pauline Kael, one of De Palma's champions, recently suggested that we look down on his movies because of our "fear of movies": Audiences belittle De Palma's work to make it less menacing...
...You have no time to squirm at Fuller's cliches because the story is steam rolling right over you at breakneck speed...
...Another bothersome aspect of The Big Red One is the reworking of old material...
...In France, they help a woman give birth right after a bloody battle...
...Made in 1953, this is a Cold-War mystery whose self-righteous, red-white-and-blue dialogue would probably embarrass Ronald Reagan...
...One scene in a Belgian mental hospital liberated by the soldiers is straight out of Shock Corridor...
...The sobriquet happens to capture his weakness no less than his strength as a writer/director...
...It can only be De Palma himself, smirking at his own manipulativeness...
...Most of the time, incredibly, Fuller's daring succeeds...
...In one graphic sequence, the infantrymen, who have taken refuge in a cave, hear a distant and terrifying rumble, followed by an eerie mechanical squeak...
...But, in the nick of time, an American airlift arrives...
...But when it comes to self-plagiarism-or, for that matter, to the kind of stealing that goes under the name of hommage-fuller can't compete with Brian De Palma...
...an enemy tank then emerges from a blinding cloud of dust and seals off the mouth of the cave...
...When Fuller is at his best, the intelligence of the directing and the zest of the acting leave you breathless...
...The vividness of the combat is reinforced by the fact that much of it is shot in mid- to close-range...
...But simple motor excitation does not equal a genuine esthetic response, and wrenching an audience's gut is not the same thing as engaging its sensibility...
...Surviving is the only glory in war" is the movie's last line, and its message...
...If you are looking for an imaginative transformation of this raw material, Samuel Fuller is hardly the right man to turn to...
...His films have few nuances-emotional, moral or otherwise...
...A film may amuse, sadden or frighten us, without in any way being art...
...Adding a little nudity and sex, he makes off with more or less everything from Psycho, right down to the shower scene and the psychopathic killer who dresses in women's clothing...
...The movie begins with a paean to the French Foreign Legion and its valiant stand at Dienbienphu-recited by a narrator over newsreel combat footage...
...And there are usually good dramatic or psychological grounds for allowing themselves to feel fear...
...Actually, moviegoers generally like to be scared...
...But these are nothing compared to what De Palma steals from Hitchcock...
...Indeed, Fuller achieves a curious purity...
...Kael has advanced a number of fatuous notions in the past, but here she has outdone herself...
...it allows no...
...his plots and characters are generally devoid of realistic ambiguities...
...Suddenly a Fu Manchu-like villager in a straw hat spies the boy and his dog, flicks open a switchblade, and chases them through the rubble...
...Organized in brief segments, the movie approaches combat as an infantryman experiences it-one bloody battle at a time...
...If we needed more evidence of this, in the last scene the camera rotates and rises above a hospital bed, revealing an observer's gallery...
...The film's gruesome ending is purely gratuitous...
Vol. 63 • August 1980 • No. 15
