Film
Seitz, Michael H.
FILM Michael H. Seitz Small Pleasures Executives at the major motion picture studios think of the period between New Year's and Easter as the doldrums. Movies they regard as potential...
...With only a couple of minor exceptions, the film keeps to theatrical sets...
...Circle of Deceit takes much of its power and fascination from the terrifying authenticity of its physical context...
...They knew all along what sort of a film he was making, he says...
...Late last year, at any rate, control of the film passed into the hands of Warner Brothers Classics, the division of the company which deals in old movies and those requiring special treatment in a limited release...
...I doubt that it would have been possible, even on an unlimited budget, to capture such compelling images of a resplendent modern city devastated by war...
...While this dip in the business cycle brings nothing but ulcers to the moguls of Hollywood, it often brings forth some of the most interesting work—low-budget productions and foreign films, which cannot compete for attention against star-laden mega-movies backed by million-dollar advertising budgets...
...Movies they regard as potential blockbusters are marketed for the winter holidays, when spending and movie-going are at high pitch...
...It also gives voice to the ambivalent attitude of many Chicanos called upon to fight for American interests in World War II...
...And while the dramatic events of the film have been staged for the camera, much of the work, like Battle of Algiers, has the look and feeling of a documentary...
...The Lagoon was a reservoir frequented by the young as a swimming hole and trysting spot...
...Over the Edge was given its first commercial run at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in New York, an alternative screening room which normally shows difficult foreign films and the work of avant garde independents...
...Valdez has done an unusually imaginative job of adapting his original stage production for the screen—wisely resisting the temptation to open up the work and shoot on location...
...But while Battle of Algiers is a work of historical interpretation, Circle is largely impressionistic...
...The enraged juveniles go on a rampage, trashing the school and setting fire to a parking lot full of their parents' cars...
...We'll talk it over when I get back," he says in parting, thus apparently confirming his wife's charge that he's always going off and avoiding real engagement...
...Even before his departure from Hamburg we are made to understand that Laschen is going through a crisis in his marriage...
...It was photographed on the stage of Hollywood's Aquarius Theater, where, as a musical, Zoot Suit was first performed...
...A Christian Falangist leader justifies the slaughter of Moslem women and children with the assertion that "we're defending Western civilization...
...Your war's on the homefront...
...Beirut is an insane inferno of indiscriminate killing...
...Laschen is increasingly sickened by this bloody roundelay in which all the players have a reason for what they do, and he begins to question his role as a reporter-panderer of ghastliness...
...But when Kaplan finished the film, both Orion and Warners claimed to be shocked by its forceful depiction of white middle-class teenagers in rebellion—and it was shelved...
...The Orient no longer exists...
...Valdez has taken advantage of the multiplicity of perspectives offered by the cinema—he has removed the viewer from his fixed seat in the orchestra, for one thing—and has exploited the expressive possibilities of frame composition, high and low angle shots, close-ups, and dolly shots to make an unusual and most expressive film...
...It is indeed provocative, but largely because of the social and political perceptions it embodies...
...They certainly ought to have, for outlines of the film, published before its completion, characterized it accurately...
...a case-hardened reporter for a German photo-magazine, who went to Lebanon in August 1975...
...The film was made in 1978 by young hot-shot director Jonathan Kaplan (a graduate of the New York University film school who, like Francis Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich before him, served his apprenticeship turning out exploitation flicks for Roger Corman's New World Pictures...
...But it doesn't work...
...No effort is made to explain the roots of the Lebanese disaster, and Schloendorff does not throw his sympathies to one side or another...
...There is an odd emotional distance between him and his wife, and he seems reluctant to commit himself...
...And if such provocation did occur, the exhibitors might even take it into their heads to sue the studios...
...Circle of Deceit {Die Falschung), co-written and directed by Volker Schloen-dorff (The Tin Drum), is a disturbing and stunningly realized work which should draw thoughtful viewers in any season...
...It was only a dream of the West...
...The police used the incident as a pretext for cracking down on Mexican-American gangs...
...In the wake of The Warriors, released earlier that year, there had been an apparent rash of copycat violence and lawlessness on the part of suggestible teenage moviegoers—turnstile jumping in the subways, much slashing of theater seats, knifings, and possibly one murder...
...Because Zoot Suit was conceived in a stylized mode, and depends upon theatrical conventions for many of its effects, the film's stagi-ness is entirely appropriate...
...Lebanon tries his values, and his experience there becomes a turning point in his life...
...Actually it never did exist...
...Forget the war," Henry Reyna (the film's protagonist) is counseled by his "pachuco" alter ego...
...they rounded up some 600 Chicanos in a sweep...
...The Palestinian Arabs retaliate with the butchering of a Christian village...
...Universal, nonetheless, is currently releasing Zoot Suit, a hardhitting Chicano drama written and directed by Luis Valdez, the founder of the militant farmworkers theater—El Teatro Campe-sino...
...The facts are real," he confesses, "but what I do with them is entertainment...
...Rootless, bored, and alarmingly disaffected, they take to drugs, sex, and petty crime—all that their parents were trying to escape...
...Zoot Suit is loosely based on the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon murder case, and on the racially charged zoot suit riots which took place in Los Angeles a year later...
...While theater owners are not clamoring for it, it's at least available...
...Asurprising number of recently made films have been languishing in studio vaults, for one reason or another deemed not quite fit for release...
...And when the opportunity presents itself, he takes up with Ariane (Hanna Schygulla), the German widow of a well-to-do Arab...
...But the reporter keeps his distance even as the Falangist-Palestinian conflict rages about him...
...On August 2, 1942, a Chicano boy was found dead along its shore...
...Zoot Suit builds a fictionalized story within this factual framework...
...For a couple of years Over the Edge was one of these...
...In Spain it was still possible [to take sides]," Laschen remarks, "but not here...
...New Grenada" is a grouping of sleazy condos populated by lily-white business people and professionals who've fled the rigors of the inner city in search of personal security and a wholesome life for their children...
...Three small films which have surfaced during this seasonal lull deserve notice...
...It is set in a planned suburban community and based on an incident that took place in just such a development on the outskirts of San Francisco...
...I hope that it may yet do so, and give the kids in the suburbs something to think about besides Superman's failing powers and the whereabouts of the lost Ark...
...In 1975, Kaplan's White Line Fever, the story of an independent trucker fighting a takeover from a shipping syndicate, was acclaimed by many critics, and became one of Columbia Pictures' most successful films of the year...
...It is at its best, in fact, in the most theatrically stylized sequences (dance hall numbers, a rather fanciful prison scene), and least effective when the action is given a naturalistic set...
...He is momentarily taken aback when an aged street vendor at his side is brought down by a sniper, but he continues to file grimly picturesque reports for his sensation-hungry magazine...
...A defense committee was formed, and after eighteen months in San Quentin, the Sleepy Lagoon twelve had their convictions reversed on appeal...
...Laschen sees in Lebanon's convulsions a reflection of his own inner confusion and turmoil...
...Its economy is unsound, and the developer has failed to deliver on many of his promises...
...Kaplan came to be considered a "bankable" director...
...Valdez thus avoids the incongruous spectacles of a movie like West Side Story—attractive performers staging highly stylized song and dance routines against a backdrop of gritty realities (New York's Hell's Kitchen...
...Set in the midst of the Lebanese civil war, and shot on location in the rubble-heap of Beirut in 1980, it is based on a book by the late Nicolas Born, which in turn was inspired by journalist Herrmann Kai's Stem magazine reports on the conflict...
...But Zoot Suit is by no means mere "filmed theater...
...This middle-class island is, alas, a ghetto of cultural sterility...
...Weapons of all sorts are for sale on the street corners, and children play in dump sites around the scorched bodies of the dead...
...Then, come the horse latitudes of January, February, March, box office receipts invariably decline...
...And despite a lack of inculpating evidence, twenty-two of them went on trial...
...After a fifteen-year-old is stupidly shot and killed by the local policeman, a curfew is imposed and the makeshift recreation center shut down...
...Kaplan maintains that the studios' alleged shock on viewing his completed film is so much barefaced disingenuousness...
...With Beirut," one character in the film remarks, "an old dream disappears—that of the Orient...
...No provision has been made for the children...
...But Kaplan's film is not high cinema—it was designed to play in drive-ins and the multiplex theaters in shopping malls...
...Motion picture exhibitors, the studios contended, would not accept another film which might provoke young viewers...
...The perspective is that of a Westerner wearing cultural blinders, for whom the realities of life in the Middle East are largely incomprehensible...
...It's a rare thing these days for a major studio to produce a film geared to any but the most elemental tastes and interests of the American mass audience—and it is even rarer for such a work to come from Universal, the studio principally known for its horror films (Halloween II, Funhouse) and mindless, overbudgeted spectaculars (Flash Gordon, 1941...
...At the conclusion of proceedings marked by blatant racial prejudice, twelve of the defendants were convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment...
...Over the Edge was the first film produced by Orion (a production outfit formed by disgruntled United Artists executives), and was to be distributed, like subsequent Orion films, through Warner Brothers...
...The 1942 mass arrests and riots the following year (precipitated by the attacks of sailors on Chicano zoot suiters) lend force to the suggestion...
...The story focuses on the experiences of George Laschen (Bruno Ganz...
...Over the Edge is a nifty popular movie, one of the more daring commercial films of recent years...
...mortal caprice is the norm...
Vol. 46 • March 1982 • No. 3
