THE INNOCENTS (Jack Clayton, 1961, UK)

 

Miss Giddens traverses the nebulous boundary between imagination and logic: Madness is the soft whisper at the edge of reason.

As the film begins, a child’s lilting and playful tune haunts an ominous black screen. Gradually, hands clasped in prayer are revealed to be Miss Giddens’ as she utters a tearful plea: “I only want to help the children, not destroy them”. It’s this dichotomy between light and darkness, good deeds and destruction, which prepares the audience for the trauma to follow. A psychologically fragile governess is given absolute control over two precocious children by their estranged Uncle; a man who can spare little time for their well-being and comfort. The children are orphans though their parent’s death is never explained: it’s another dead-end in this multicursal maze. Miss Giddens also learns that the previous governess died and that she must never mention her to the children, especially the impressionable Flora. She accepts the post and travels to Bly House, the uncle’s beautiful country estate that is the children’s sanctuary.

Almost immediately, a serene and mysterious echo wafts upon the mid-afternoon breeze beckoning Flora. The little girl is first seen as a murky reflection in the lake, a masterful display of foreshadowing the connection to Miss Jessel, before the camera pans to Flora’s cherubic smile. Her brother Miles is away at school but there seems to be some telepathic connection between them: she knows he is coming home. Miles does come home the next day because he was expelled from school and his deceitfully charming personality is exposed, his infectious temperament invigorated. The children act as tiny adults with kind manners and an intellectual capacity that belies their years. But they exude a nefariously manipulative and disingenuous aroma.

As Miss Giddens learns more about the suicide of Miss Jessel, the previous governess, and the death of Miss Jessel’s lover Quint, she begins to have strange experiences: a nefarious visage in the darkness, a towering man, a woman passing in a lonely corridor, the ghostly lady of the lake, and disembodied voices calling the children’s names. There is purpose behind every sound and shadow: a window slamming closed, a child’s game of hide and seek, or a bug crawling from the mouth of a statue all have ominous undertones. Though never overtly alleged, Miles is mysteriously implicated in Quint’s death. Herein lies the crux of the drama: is Miss Giddens irrational or is there some supernatural element that is harming the children? She believes that the spirits of Miss Jessel and Quint have possessed the children, and she must exercise them, cut out this malignance. Indeed, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

The cinematography is exceptional with Freddie Francis’ deep focus photography that brings every background detail to life, expanding the illusory world of Bly House far beyond two dimensions: it adds an otherworldly quality to the film. Truman Capote fleshed out the narrative and defined the repressed sexuality, in both Miles and the governess, which leads to a rather uncomfortable and askew moment. THE INNOCENTS does not judge the characters and lead us to any absolute understanding: the verdict is in the hands of the audience to decide guilt…or innocence.

Final Grade: (A)

THE BIRDS (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963, USA)

 

Based upon the Daphne du Maurier novella, Hitchcock juxtaposes a playfully frantic love story and an apocalyptic fury of feathers and claws, which takes flight as a tense frisson of unbearable suspense and tragedy. Melanie Daniels is a flighty socialite and Mitch Brenner a down-to-earth Public Defender: two disparate people who discover love at the end of the world. 

The film begins with Melanie, dressed in her green suite and expensive furs, crossing the street and looking skyward where a flock of birds ominously gather. An eerie hollow screech and sharp beating of wings dominate the soundtrack: Hitchcock doesn’t score the film and only briefly uses foreground music. As Melanie pursues Mitch to Bodega Bay with a pair of lovebirds, the atmosphere begins to subtly change. When the first gull attacks her nearly 50 minutes into the film, the tension begins to quickly mount. Melanie sheds her furs, and Mitch soon discovers the true person beneath. Then the avian assault begins.

Hitchcock deftly builds each scene: Melanie at the schoolhouse, as a murder of crows secretly gathers behind her; a tiny finch flitting out of the fireplace moments before the torrent; Mitch’s mother’s quest for her neighbor which reveals broken china…and much more. The running and terrified children, the burning town, Melanie ensnared in a phone booth, and the townsfolk who silently huddle with vacant birdlike stares are sequences that are shockingly unforgettable. The human race has become imprisoned in a cage while the birds now hold dominion. His editing is masterful: from reaction shot to exposing bits of information, cut by cut until the bloody reveal quickens the pulse. The plot only falters with exposition as an ornithologist just happens into the dinner to discuss the impossibility of the attacks, a bible quoting drunk, and the quick accusation against Melanie barely clips the narrative’s tail feathers. 

In the final act they take refuge in Mitch’s farmhouse and suffer the frenzied onslaught, bloodied and emotionally spent, while Melanie is reduced to a walking dead, raped by the piercing beaks and raking claws. The two caged lovebirds still nestle together, untouched by madness, a fleeting but hopeful metaphor for Melanie and Mitch…and the whole human race. But the ending is a bleak mise-en-scene as their car sputters through a parting sea of raptors, the world once again belonging to the dinosaurs. 

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a chirp. 

Final Grade: (A)

M (Fritz Lang, 1931, Germany)

 

Fritz Lang’s 1931 morality tale about impartial democratic justice versus vigilante restitution remains frighteningly prescient in our modern world. A child rapist and murderer is on the loose, terrorizing Berlin, every parent’s worst nightmare incarnate in flesh and bone…and the blood of innocent victims. The narrative is structured as a police procedural rather than a criminal psychological dissection, focusing on the investigation and the burgeoning frustration of law enforcement. 

Lang’s expressionist style suggests the crimes rather than showing the grotesqueries. As a little girl plays with a ball, an innocuous whistling stranger befriends her and buys her a balloon thus gaining her limited trust. We know what happens because Lang shows us the ball rolling slowly through the grass, coming to a dead stop. We then see an image of the balloon floating helplessly into the overhead wires. Lang’s cinematic genius is obvious in another scene as the killer looks through a shop window spying the reflection of a lonely little girl: all sound stops, his eyes widen, his feature contort into madness. And we fear for the little child. He also moves his camera in one continuous shot around a deli, stopping to observe minor details, and up and through a glass partition: surely this influenced a young Hitchcock! As the death toll mounts, the police aren’t any closer to solving the crimes and they begin to arrest the usual suspects looking for clues. 

The criminal underworld begins their own search because the constant raids are bad for business. They enlist the help of the poor and destitute and it’s the blind beggar who recognizes the killer’s signature tune that leads to his capture. The criminals pass their own judgment upon this killer; this is truly a trial by peers! But without the Rule of Law then society will plunge into anarchy: self-rule works well as a philosophy but it’s the powerful that abuse the weak in reality. Even a child molester has the right to Due Process. And yes, he’s guilty regardless of his own assessment: his premeditation is legal proof of intent, and his writing to the newspaper and covering up his actions shows he understood the concept of right and wrong at the time he committed the crime. Now it’s the government’s duty to pass judgment upon his acts, to punish this murderer with all jurisprudence. 

Final Grade: (A+)

71 FRAGMENTS OF A CHRONOLOGY OF CHANCE (Michael Haneke, 1994, Austria)

Michael Haneke’s unflinchingly icy stare penetrates briefly into the lives of disparate families and their fatal encounter during a violent convergence of circumstances. He purposely creates an atmosphere of detachment, an unemotional connection to these characters though we become voyeur into their ordinary activities: they become nothing more than statistics, victims briefly mentioned on the nightly news.

Haneke structures the film into 71 brief segments that last a few seconds to a few minutes and transitioned by an abrupt and jarring cut to a black screen. His mise-en-scene editing demands continuous shots with minimal editing and static camera placement. He communicates through sound and objects; background TV broadcasts, banal dialogue, mundane items like a pair of shoes or socks, and the people themselves become objects, their sometimes erratic and spontaneous behavior scrutinized. A child’s game of pick-up-sticks becomes the narrative metaphor: a balance of skill and chance that becomes the vinculum of violence which ends the lives of three totally innocent bystanders.

Our transient journey through the lives of three families: a Security Guard, a husband and wife who adopt an immigrant child, and a bank teller and her elderly father, is contradictory. Haneke creates a sense of intimacy but never lets us get too close, he creates real people with uninteresting lives not much different than ours. He shatters the filmic convention of beautiful actors pretending to be ordinary…he immerses us into the commonplace, the stark existence of our own lives. But we the viewer are human, and we do generate interest and empathy for the character’s plight, we do make the human connection. Even the killer surprises us, it is not whom we expect, and the violence is not premeditated…it is just a senseless act.

Haneke does not show us the viscera, the bloodletting, or the victims; his focus is upon the act itself. After the gun’s rapport fades, we see an extreme close up of an unidentified body and a slowly forming pool of blood. The theme of glaciation that Haneke achieves is frightening: the film plays like an extended news story where the value of human life is only momentary before the next sound byte catches our attention. The only brutal and bloody images we are shown are directly from newscasts that are not related to the story: the ubiquitous television is the purveyor of society’s desensitization. It is there for all to enjoy. 

Final Grade: (B)

DEAD OF NIGHT (Bob Clark, 1972, USA)

 

A mother’s suffocating love permeates the humid jungle air, crossing a distance measured in prayers, breathing a tepid half-life into her son’s rigid corpse. Director Bob Clark films a subtly malignant masterpiece of existential dread and spiritual abandonment; he creates a seemingly passive family melodrama that becomes corrupted by war and disillusionment…and a dead son who shoots-up blood like a vampire junkie. 

This subversive film undermines Patriarchal convention as the father and son becomes helpless; both men dominated by a mother and her unyielding selfishness, unable to be set free from this emotional bondage, victims of love’s cruel tempest. After the opening salvo, Clark films in tight shots, often isolating the father while framing the mother and daughter together, a visual cue that will explain the fractured nuclear unit which proceeds to implode. It also projects a gruesome anti-war message; filmed during the Vietnam War, it is a biting metaphor concerning the dehumanization of young soldiers, trained to be mindless automatons, mechanized killing machines whose homecoming is kept secret, hidden in the dark shadows, drug-addled zombies whose only peace is the grave’s soft embrace. 

The score is a bombardment of frantic strings and eerie whispers that keeps the narrative unnerving; a perfect juxtaposition to Andy’s monotone and flaccid condition that resurrects moments of ghastly suspense. The film also exposes the drug culture, a young man addicted to the needle and the damage done, injecting an arterial high to obfuscate his inhuman condition. Though Andy is presented as a creature that stalks the midnight boundaries, he is ultimately victim and deserving of our sympathy. As he wishes for death, it’s his mother who can’t let go, she who makes his existence an everlasting nightmare, even as his rotting hands desperately claw the soft earth, digging his own grave. 

Final Grade: (B+)

BENNY'S VIDEO (Michael Haneke, 1992, Austria)

 

Benny sees the world darkly through the clouded lens of adolescence and technology: equally one-part removed and one-part cruel participant in his narcissistic narrative. His bedroom is a cave, black curtains shroud the windows, but a camera shoots live footage of the street outside: somehow, peering at the video monitor is more real to Benny than just looking through the shades. It’s as if the camera has distanced him, on every humane level, from becoming a human being, his empathy lost amid the white noise and static. 

Benny films a pig being slaughtered, a rather mundane event on any pig farm, and becomes entranced with the image. He watches the footage repeatedly, sometimes in slow motion, looking for the moment of death when the metal bolt destroys the animal’s consciousness: when it ceases to live and becomes inert. He’s looking at death but not feeling death. Director Michael Haneke is not concerned with the footage itself: thousands of animals are killed this way for food every day. What he is concerned with is Benny’s obsessive reaction to the video. 

When Benny meets a teenage girl at a video store, he brings her back to his parent’s apartment (they’re away for the weekend) and through small talk eventually shows her the video. Her apathy is apparent too; her response concerns the weather. Benny then shows her the killing instrument and shoots her three times, her screams and violent thrashing echoing the pig's quivering death. He cleans up the mess and pours himself a glass of milk: Haneke shows us a terrific shot of him casually cleaning up the spilled milk in the exact same manner he wiped up the thick congealing blood. Benny then goes about the remainder of the weekend partying, hanging out as if nothing important happened. When his parents are shown the video, they are devastated for Benny, realizing his future will be forever tarnished. Soon, they each become an accomplice after-the-fact because Benny’s bright future is more important than the fate of some runaway (Read: lower-class) girl. Benny and his mother take a short vacation so the father can dispose of the evidence. 

In this early Haneke film, the auteur is imploding the very ideal of the nuclear family unit where patriarchal power corrupts absolutely. Humanity is viewed at a distance through a cold lens, where actions are never explained or understood through typical narrative tropes. The film fails to judge Benny, it does not portray this young man as a monster which denies the audience a clear emotional response towards him. The act itself can be judged on its own terms: a violently senseless murder of an innocent girl. The conflict between hating the act and not the perpetrator creates an emotional maelstrom, a vortex of reactions from the viewer. The first reaction may be dissociation, for the audience to turn away and turn off, to feel angry at being subjected to this mean-spirited vision. But Haneke is presenting not just a film to an audience but a case to the jury, requiring our full attention to detail and authority because we (the viewer) ultimately pass judgement without ever understanding Benny's motive. 

Benny shows no affect, no emotion, and only seems to have an identity when he looks through his video recorder. This affluent family has finally come together as a unit, working towards a common goal…but Benny even subverts this scheme. Can Benny be rehabilitated? That question denotes some beneficent foundation, a base of human morality, whether learned socially or through his family, which has become corrupt. But that’s not really the important issue: Has Benny ever been "habilitated" in the first place? 

Final Grade: (B+)

RACE WITH THE DEVIL (Jack Starrett, 1975, USA)

 

Best friends embark upon an easy ride that turns out to be their funeral procession. Jack Starret’s classic B-film gem sports one of the best tag lines ever: If you're going to race with the devil, you've got to be as fast as Hell! Peter Fonda and Warren Oates take their wives (and dog) on the best damn vacation ever, a cross-country journey from Texas to Colorado in their new $36,000, 32ft Villa Grande RV: that’s over $200,000 in today’s money! Somewhere in Texas, they pull of the road for the night and set camp in an isolated clearing. After racing their motorcycles and drinking beer, they settle down to relax and witness a satanic orgy…that ends in a bloody sacrifice. And the chase begins. The remaining 50+ minutes is a mixture of suspense and outright terror as the Deliverance-like cultists seem to be everywhere: from the local sheriff to the tourists at a campground! 

From the dark, watercolor splash of the opening credits to the final ring of fire, the ubiquitous sense of unease is truly unnerving: every smile, glance, or greeting seems to have ominous undertones. The score by Leonard Rosenman is brilliant, light and airy one moment before descending into subtle, paranoid creaking minor keys. His music perfectly underscores the action without becoming overbearing. Rosenman would score Kubrick’s BARRY LYNDON the same year and win the Academy Award, then win again the following year for Hal Ashby’s wonderful BOUND FOR GLORY! How’s that for a resume! DP Robert Jessup’s photography captures the action in violent and brutal intensity with close-up camerawork in the narrow confines of the RV. His action sequences are predatory, like obligate ram ventilators that must always move forward for sustenance. The twisted metal, careening cars, explosions and road-rage mayhem looks dangerous, and though we can see rollbars in a few of the stunt cars, this verisimilitude of smashing real vehicles on real highways ramps-up the tension. A film like this makes obvious the restrictions of modern-day CGI! Though this is a chase movie, the screenplay really focuses on the sense of dread and abandonment, as our protagonists become strangers in a strange land. When the action sequences happen, you have a personal connection and can feel the fear dripping from their pores. My only serious complaint is that Loretta Swit and Lara Parker are mostly relegated to the roles of stereotypical screaming women, though the film allows them some active participation. Otherwise, a great 70’s B-movie that outruns many contemporary action flicks!

Final Grade: (A) 

VAMPYR (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1932, Germany)

 

Carl Theodor Dreyer guides us through a nightmare world of shadows and vile darkness, of a malformed reality that coexists with our own. This frightening landscape is revealed to Allan Gray, a lonely traveler who stumbles upon a town haunted by a vampire and spends the night at a local Inn. This strange and palpable atmosphere settles upon him like a thick obscuring fog, the weight of fear heavy upon his chest. The Innkeeper makes an unexpected nighttime visit and gives him a package: it is not to be opened until his (the Innkeeper’s) death. Gray, his visage as ashen as his name, is overcome with curiosity and begins a nighttime sojourn in search of answers to this surreal riddle. He experiences dim and dangerous shadows as they cavort and conspire without their host bodies. He spies the old Innkeeper, shot dead by these sadistic shades, and discovers his two beautiful daughters…one of whom falls victim to the despicable darkness: the legendary Vampire. 

Dreyer is able to capture the sublime psychosis of fear on celluloid. He communicates visually through chiaroscuro lighting effects, grand shadowy illusions, and disturbing images. A man with a scythe, not uncommon in a rural setting, materializes as a Charon-like silhouette, ferrying the damned souls to Hades. A one-legged man becomes a monstrosity whose shadow is loosed upon the town like the Plague. A doctor’s office, a place of healing balms and the antiseptic aroma of hope, becomes a gruesome charnel house reeking of poison. It is obvious that Dreyer filmed in real locations because his tight framing often reveals ceilings, battered walls, and well-walked floors: this lends a solid reality to the film. He navigates the labyrinthine corridors of the Inn and Manor House with slow forward and backward tracking shots that remain in perfect focus. A scare or shock, so trendy in modern horror films, is a quick fast-food jolt, a simple excess of vapid calories that is soon consumed and forgotten. VAMPYR will chill your marrow and leave an uneasy feeling of deep malaise…but it won’t shock you. At least, not in the way you expect. 

Fina Grade: (A+)