FLIMS BRIEFLY
Dworkin, Martin S.
Films Briefly By MARTIN S. DWORKIN Diabolique. In The Wages of Fear, Director Henri-Georges Clouzot developed an excruciating suspense to point up a sardonic view of man's desperate courage—even...
...If this film is any measure, those unions which are giving their sanction to movie melodramatlzatlon— here the United Auto Workers (the old A.F.L...
...The great films which have lately asserted the emergence in Japan of a superlative cinematic art—Rashomon, Ugetsu, Gate of Hell—all concerned the classic medieval epoch...
...had better stop...
...But to many people, the dialectical evangelism of the old Bolsheviks under Vishinsky's dispiteous prodding was less difficult to accept than the public confession of Cardinal Mindszenty in the great Hungarian showcase trial of 1949...
...But it looks as if labor's only hope, even with police help, lies in cheap melodramatics to turn gangsters' sons and daughters against their fathers...
...The Golden Demon...
...But the deepest disappointment with the response to the film must stem from the apparent inability of most who have judged it to distinguish between intelligent talk—so rare on the screen— and ideas...
...union, nor the huge U.A.W.-C.I.O...
...Is shown overpowering ancient values, breaking the engagement of a boy and girl—Jun Negami and Fujiko Vamamoto—who have been sweethearts since childhood...
...In this country, it has been generally acclaimed—for its acting, which is clearly excellent, if not for its ideas, which are not so clearly recognizable...
...The rejected Sand, seeing his hopes wrecked by money, leaves his studies—towards a modern professional career—to become a notorious moneylender...
...The commercial success of On the Waterfront seems to have touched off a boom of quickies about labor racket-busting from Columbia Pictures...
...The gaudy power of the new industrial wealth, represented by a banker's son...
...But it is because of this very conflict of old and new—at a time scarcely a half-century since Perry's visit and the introduction of Western modernity into a still medieval Japanese culture—that the story has had profound meanings for the Japanese...
...The opposition is that of two usuries, new and ancient, exemplifying the perni-ciousness of the blind pursuit of material wealth...
...a few others found them vague, improbable, and even mendacious, subtly commercializing the reality of the Mindszenty affair with a sophisticated fiction...
...It is not surprising that a work in a popular medium pitched at so high an intellectual level should occasion disagreement as to its meaning...
...Wilfred Lawson portrays an old jailer with an insight that is both sharp and tender...
...To explain the Cardinal's willing defacement of his own image, "a national monument," the film counterposes psychologies, not philosophies...
...Predictably, the film was rejected for showing by the Cannes committee, as likely to antagonize Communist representatives invited to the 1955 festival...
...The film will surely be a classic of the genre that entertains by shock...
...The Cardinal's lack of love for his mother, his disgust with his dubious birth and poor beginnings, and his compensatory ambition to rise as a churchman and national hero, are prideful...
...Paul Meurisse is perfectly cruel, acidly evil as the husband-victim...
...One of the most typical—and necessary—totalitarian rituals is the public trial at which "enemies of the state" confess their "guilt...
...Peter Glenville, directing his first film (he directed the play on the London stage), achieves excitement and suspense out of what is principally talk, aided by fine photography by Reginald Wyer, and perceptive editing by Frederick Wilson...
...as if only fiction could get at so bizarre a truth...
...The success of the Communists in achieving apparently uncoerced abjection has been an enigma, from the notorious Moscow trials of the 1930s—best comprehended, revealingly enough, in Koestler's novel, Darkness At Noon...
...modernity penetrates the ancient forms —and, paradoxically, it may be that the amalgam of contrasts will appear incongruous, or, perhaps, merely difficult for Westerners to comprehend...
...Inside Detroit...
...If in Wages Clouzot described the accidentally-erected, despair-illuminated boundaries of his existentialist world, in Diabolique he locates the nothingness beyond in a sheer drop into the audience's own terror...
...Alec Guinness and Jack Hawkins are magnificent as the antagonists—although the latter's final ascription of triumph to the Cardinal is unconvincing...
...The Prisoner, patently modeled on the Mindszenty case by writer Bridget Boland, attempts the most sophisticated penetration since Koestler's of the Communist process of obtaining open, ostensibly voluntary protocols of guilt...
...In the leading roles, Clouzot's wife Vera projects a clinging, distasteful weakness...
...The Prisoner...
...Charles Vanel is seedily exquisite as a detective, watching horror unfolding with impassive patience...
...A Catholic prelate, surely, ought never to have yielded under what at best and at last could only be secular pressures and blandishments...
...But the joke is sharper, as he toys with the audience's acceptance of the realistically horrible, measuring the lengths to which men will go to gain their shoddy little ends...
...For, The Prisoner is less about ideas than about characters...
...The honest unionists of Local 2201, led by Dennis O'Keefe, finally defeat the gangsters, whose chief is Pat O'Brien, and whose methods Include bombings, beatings, arranged accidents, and- variegated racketeering...
...There is a love story concerning Jeannette Sterke and Ronald Lewis that seems to attempt a parallel narration of seductions, but this is so fragmentary and unresolved as to be irrelevant...
...John Cameron Swayze intones an introduction and epilogue, to impart a documentary flavor that is tasteless and spurious...
...But would a theologian of his caliber ever believe that he would be serving God by confessing to untruths, in order to flagellate his pride...
...Less logical was the action of Irish censors in banning the film as pro-Communist—or, at least, as depicting the frail humanity of the clergy, regard of which some Catholics apparently assume necessarily signifies Communist tendencies...
...The latter, one or two critics maintained, are the most profound ever articulated on the screen...
...In The Wages of Fear, Director Henri-Georges Clouzot developed an excruciating suspense to point up a sardonic view of man's desperate courage—even in pursuing sordid, fortuitous purposes towards meaningless outcomes...
...The aggravation of suspense is deliberately punishing, playing upon the audience's misapplied sympathy for the murderers...
...In Diabolique, he again jests bitterly about intentions, delineating each ghastly detail of the bizarre cooperation of a man's wife and his mistress in an ingenious plan to murder him...
...Perhaps this remoteness in time may have rendered the profundity of themes, and the exotic complexity of styles, accessible of approach by Occidental audiences—on their own terms, if not those of the Japanese...
...Si-mone Signoret a mannish, unscrupulous strength...
...There is little clashing of theories in the battle of the Cardinal and the relentless Interrogator—except as we may find it later by analysis...
...In The Golden Demon, from a famous novel of the 1890s by Koyo Ozaki...
...For all its brilliance, the film can only adumbrate the enigma of the confessions, so long as the complexities of ideology are so thoroughly particularized into psychology...
...As might be expected, they are all wholly unattractive people, in Clouzot's latest punch in the eye...
Vol. 20 • February 1956 • No. 2
