Cinemonkey

Driving Out the Money C h a n g e r s (Danger Diabolique, film and monograph)

 

 

An interesting, foreshadowing moment occurs about an hour and 15 minutes into Danger: Diabolik, the Italian film from 1968 based on the popular comic book. The villain-hero Diabolik (John Phillip Law) has once again foiled his Javert-like nemesis, Inspector Ginko (Michel Piccoli) and as a consequence, the new “Minister of Finance” (the country where he is administrating isn’t exactly specified) has offered a million dollar reward for the capture of the thief. Almost immediately, there follows a montage of explosions as the plinths identifying various tax offices go up in smoke and fragments. This immediately puts the viewer in mind of Fight Club, which ends with a sweeping survey of the city as Club-members take down insurance buildings, banks, and other symbols of economic oppression that keep the male identity weak and docile. Danger: Diabolik anticipated this spirit of anti-corporate anarchy by about 30 years.

 

 

Granted, the virile Diabolik is acting in self-defense. The reward was about to hamper his criminal schemes. And his response works. The new Minister is fired, the country is presumably bankrupt, and the old, equally incompetent Minister (Terry-Thomas) is back in office.

 

 

As a comic strip character, the leather-cat-suited Diabolik was a throwback to Fantômas, the Parisian crime lord who terrorized the city in novels and then in silent serials directed by Louis Feuillade. As Leon Hunt clarifies in his new slim monograph about the film, Danger: Diabolik was at the forefront of various remakes and inspirations based on the spirit of Fantômas, including remakes of the original, several lines of adult Italian comic books borrowing both from Fantômas and Diabolik, other comic book inspired pop culture films such as Barbarella, and much more.

 

Professor Hunt’s new Danger: Diabolik (Cultographies) (Walllower Books-Columbia University Press, 128 pages, $15, ISBN-13: 978-0231182812) is the latest in a series of single title monographs that cover what the French call film maudit, or disreputable movies, and what here we call trash, grindhouse garbage, and in general films that another book in the series could offer as a general title, Bad Taste (Jim Barratt’s volume on the Peter Jackson horror comedy). Other films covered in the Cultographies series include They Live (D. Harlan Wilson), Quadrophenia (Stephen Glynn), Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (Dean J. DeFino), Frankenstein (Seattle’s Robert Horton), Blade Runner (Matt Hills), Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (Ian Cooper),The Evil Dead (Kate Egan), Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (Glyn Davis), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock), Donnie Darko (Geoff King), This Is Spinal Tap (Ethan de Seife) and more recently, books on The Shining (Kevin J. Donnelly), Stranger Than Paradise (Jamie Sexton), I Spit on Your Grave (David Maguire defending what many consider the indefensible), Serenity (Frederick Blichert), The Holy Mountain (Alessandra Santos), Ms. 45 (Alexandra Heller- Nicholas), and Argento’s Deep Red (Alexia Kannas). As you can see, there is variety to that legion of titles that the mainstream culture deems, or used to consign to, garbage. Instead, this list is enough to inspire most film students into hysterics of ecstasy. Collect them all!

 

 

Leon Hunt was a contributor to the last physical issue of the influential Movie, a UK publication that focused on close readings of mostly Hollywood films, and whose last issue was No. 36 (recently the publication has been revived as a digital magazine out of the University of Warwick). Mr. Hunt’s contribution to that last issue was a late career survey of Vincent Price’s horror films, and he had fascinating, insightful things to say about tensions between the screen icon and his material and its directors, certain values found consistently among the roles, and the issue of campiness as embedded in self-mocking meta-horror.

 

Mr. Hunt might have gone on to write for Movie further, if the magazine hadn’t fallen into hiatus. On the other hand, he brought an historicism to his essay which matched that of C. G. Crisp, who wrote a book on Truffaut for the Movie series of now-sought-after out-of-print books. The more famous Movie contributors, such as the late Robin Wood and V. F. Perkins, embodied the spirit of close “textual” detail, mostly attending to mise-en-scene and editing (without foregoing story or actorial contributions, of course). Hunt and Crisp may not have fallen into that "pure" category, although their writings are rife with scrutiny of shots, gestures, and point of view. Hunt went on to become Senior Lecturer in Film and TV Studies at Brunel University and write or edit British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation (1998), Kung Fu Cult Masters: From Bruce Lee to Crouching Tiger (2003), BFI TV Classics: The League of Gentlemen (2008), Cult British TV Comedy: From Reeves and Mortimer to Psychoville (2013), East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film (2008) and Screening the Undead: Vampires and Zombies in Film and Television. Crisp became Colin Crisp, who until his recent retirement was Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, and has published a series of excellent books on French cinema from the ‘30s through to the ‘60s, published mostly by Indiana University Press.

 

Danger: Diabolik, the book, is one of the best I’ve read so far in the series. Its 128 pages are packed with information, facts, figures, speculation, analysis, and cultural connections. Want to know why the name “Diabolik” has a “K” in it, and how the name is properly pronounced in Italian? Interested in subtle differences between international cuts of the film? Were you aware that there was a proposed earlier version of Diabolik, with Jean Sorel and at one point Catherine Deneuve? The text is a indeed like a “biography” of the film, tracing antecedents and then its influence. Professor Hunt summarizes the history of the comic book itself, created by two sisters already in publishing, Angela and Luciana Giussani, how the film works, the influence of James Bond on the movie, which ultimately was directed by Mario Bava in what was probably his biggest budget ever, and the aftermath, more specifically the cult that has grown around first the film, then Bava, perhaps even more important the cult around the film’s composer Ennio Morricone (in one of his most varied scores), and finally the comic book itself. Culture quotations include the inclusion of Danger: Diabolik in a Beastie Boys music video, the film’s place in the pantheon of parodies by Mystery Science Theater 3000, and in CQ, Roman Coppola’s homage to European pop cinema from the 1960s.

 

 

 

Among the fascinating facets of the film are the moral contours of its hero-thief, the rich relationship between the mysterious Diabolik and his partner Eva Kant (Marisa Mell), and the aesthetic tennis game between producer Dino De Laurentiis, who was thinking big, and Bava, who was used to making magic out of slim budgets. The film’s visual scale is amazing given its limitations, though viewers today may laugh at the rear projection chase scenes. Hunt notes that the movie comes in three large parts, equivalent to three issues of the comic book rather than a a fully plotted out Poliziotteschi, which was a certain kind of Italian crime film that emerged shortly after DD and the “demise” of the giallos. The three parts, in fact, explore the anarchism behind Diabolik’s greed. In the movie, he is less interested in wealth than in tweaking the stuffed shirts chasing him, and in bringing down the civic hierarchies. Diabolik likes to put on a disguise and attend press conferences about himself, which he then turns into mockeries of the officials. He bravely feigns death at one point, only to reassert his superiority over the lumbering professionals hovering over him. His blowing up of the tax institutions and subsequent theft of the replacement gold ingot is motivated by a desire to make it all stop. He wants to bring down society – but really for his own seeming profit.

 

 

The first part of DD concentrates on a cash transfer heist, which establishes Diabolik’s wit and methods. The second part concerns the theft of a priceless necklace, which focuses on Diabolik’s relationship with Eva, whom he adores and pampers, and who in turn worships him. They are equals, and she has equal operative cunning. The third part expands the systems of transportation that the film exploits, in this case trains and ships, as Diabolik fetches the huge gold bounty he has contrived to send to the bottom of a lake. In the film’s dreamy anarchy, Ginko is impotent to stop him, until the very last sequence, but a breaking of the fourth wall indicates that Diabolik isn’t down and out yet, and that the producers may have assumed that the Diabolik series might attain James Bond level iterations. Well, there wasn’t a second Barbarella, either.

 

 

As in the anarchic parody of Fight Club, Danger: Diabolik explores, consciously or not, shades of masculinity, ranging from the potent lovemaking of D, to the just not quite good enough braininess of Ginko, the humorless lethality of the villains that harass Diabolik and Eva in part two, and the cluelessness of officialdom in toto. This celebration of all that is opposed to fatuousness, fibbing, and cultural vacuity in the end shows an at least indirect influence of Mad magazine, that hilarious, mass-culture-undermining seed-bed of the radical left and social protest of the ’60s.

Originally Posted February 27, 2018 by D. K. Holm at All Classical

Hitchcock and the "Third Way" of Understanding Films

 

 

When the BBC released the results of its poll of an unknown number of international critics about their favorite American movies, Alfred Hitchcock made the list five times – for Psycho, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Notorious ... and Marnie (at number 47). This placement sparked the usual groaning. Why Marnie and not Rear Window? Of all the directors represented on the list, Hitchcock was the most likely to have numerous masterpieces between his first American film in 1940, and the last “good ones” in the early 1960s. But Marnie has become a particularly vexatious point of debate among some film quackers over the years, especially since Robin Wood’s Hitchcock’s Films, the first book in English on the director’s career, in which the late scholar dedicated a chapter to defending Marnie from dense critics. Since then, the debate hasn’t died down. Talk about notorious!

The BBC 100 has only re-ignited the controversy. Who were these writers who picked the film and how could it rise so high in the list? For some reason this information is difficult to track down, but then, I’m notoriously bad at Google searches. A synecdoche of the ire the film inspires is one blogger who alternates between year-round Oscar predictions, industry grievances, and proper cinematic sideburns disguised as diary entries. In a few error-filled columns, the blogger ran down Marnie and mocked those who came to its defense. On the other hand, critical luminaries such as Glenn Kenny and Dave Kehr have long been supporters of Marnie.

The debate, or at least the resistance to Marnie as a film worthy of inclusion in an all-time best list exposes an interesting chasm within the critical community, to use the term loosely. Despite the blogger’s call for some kind of weird vigilante attack on Marnie lovers, which unfortunately the Internet is all too easily roused to do these days – for which see the lynch mob mentality over the second season of True Detective, – Marnie is unlikely to go away or its champions be suppressed. There is already one whole book on the making of the film, Marnie figures significantly in the so far hundreds of books on the director, and the latest issue of CineACTION!, the Canadian film journal that Robin Wood helped found 30 years ago, coincidentally features a cover story on Marnie.[1]

The conflict isn’t between “tradition of quality” types like the blogger who finds films such as Shane the pinnacle of Hollywood craft versus the egghead intellectuals with no sense of how an audience interacts with a film, though the conflict is probably in part that. It’s that there is a third way. Yes, some academics do “read too much” into a film particularly if they are drawing upon Freudianism and other bankrupted ideologies. But go back and read the Marnie chapter by Wood, if you have it. It’s a carefully reasoned look at the choices Hitchcock made, with an analysis that if not explaining away such “mistakes” as bad process shots, painted backdrops, and psychological inconsistencies, at least sees them in accord with the overall meaning or seeming ambition of the film’s psychological portrayal. The “third way,” however, is an interest in the director as a person behind a film. The tradition of quality blogger can like North by Northwest as a “well made film” that pleases the audience and was validated as good because people paid to see it [2] – essentially the vantage point of a producer or studio executive, a meddling busybody with snap judgments and easy dismissals, the Rex Reed school of thought. The academic is good at tracking meaning and similarities and progressions of a film though a director’s career as it interacts with the business, the public, and the earlier films, all valuable. The third way, however, asks for great sympathy for a director’s works, both as a whole and individually. So for example, a fan of Samuel Fuller or of Hitchcock and Marnie looks at the film not for its tradition of quality craft but for its expression of the director’s personality. The “sloppiness,” the extremes of quietude and loudness, the psychological flaws are interesting in themselves because they bespeak either passion (as in Fuller) or some kind of inner crisis we can never truly know, as possibly in the case of Hitchcock.[3]

It’s assumed that Hitchcock “identifies” with Mark Rutland, the Sean Connery character who takes an interest in the case of the mysterious, chilly secretary whom he identifies as the robber of one of his colleagues. Like other Hitchcock characters he “rescues” Marnie – although the ending of the film is ambiguous, even somewhat open ended, and anyway, there aren’t that many male rescuers in Hitchcock films outside of Grant in Notorious, women being usually in that position. What if in some strange way Hitchcock identified with Marnie? That Marnie and Marnie herself represent Hitchcock’s struggle with the terror of sex, and who, like Marnie, chose a life of “crime, making films that are usually about thieves, murderers, and spies? From a position such as this, one can “forgive” a director many a “mistake” or break from the prevailing definition of the well-made film, a definition that shifts from decade to decade or from new technology to new technology. The results are that Hitchcock’s movies, like Kubrick’s, often look better out of their time, than in them.

 

[1] It’s a reprint from the massive book A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock.

 

[2] Hitchcock himself in interviews all too often took box office as validation over critical enthusiasm.

 

[3] By the way, until there is one other witness than Tippi Hedren to the alleged sexual harassment of which she charges him, I will remain dubious, as does Patrick McGilligan in his definitive bio of Hitchcock.

Originally posted at All Classical on 11 August 2015

Two More for the Third Wave

 

Another couple of names to add to the list of Third Wave cinema writers list from a couple of days ago are Peter Stanfield and Tag Gallagher.

 

 

Peter Stanfield is a professor at the University of Kent and author of several books, including The Cool and the Crazy: Fifties Pop Cinema with chapters on Korean War movies, juvenile delinquent pix, offbeat music films, hot rod tales, and others. He has also published 'Unamerican’ Hollywood, about the films of the Blacklist era, a book on Hollywood westerns of the ‘30s, Maximum Movies-Pulp Fictions: Film Culture and the Worlds of Samuel Fuller, Mickey Spillane, and Jim Thompson, and the recent Hoodlum Movies, about the motorcycle gang cycle of exploitation thrillers. I knew the name but the first thing I’ve read is an essay in Steve Neale’s anthology Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, from 2002. “‘Film Noir Like You’ve Never Seen’: Jim Thompson Adaptations and Cycles of Neo-Noir” focuses on the peculiar occurrence of a bunch of Thompson films that appeared almost all at once in the 1990s. That same cycle inspired my book on Film Soleil, but as usual my title does not appear in the bibliography. Nevertheless, Mr. Stanfield has done thorough research and traces the background that led to the Thompson resurgence, before addressing the “meaning” of them and the similar companion neo-noirs, or films soleils, subsequently released. This is an authoritative essay and demands attention. Now I have to read all of Peter Stanfield’s books.

 

 

 

Tag Gallagher has written two superb biographical-critical studies, on John Ford, and on Roberto Rossellini, as well as a series of highly informative video essays on visual style for a string of Criterion Collection DVDs. I was reminded of him just today while flipping through a random issue of Film Comment, from November-December 1998, 20 years ago. The cover feature is Mr. Gallagher’s essay on Douglas Sirk, "White Melodrama: Douglas Sirk," (I think ... the graphic design of the first page is confusing). It’s a piece in which he tries to save Sirk from his “champions,” in a sort of Orwellian manner. They get him wrong. And Mr. Gallagher is here to set them straight. The crux is that Sirk’s champions define Sirk as an ironist who is subverting the melodrama. But Mr. Gallagher both remembers seeing the movies of the ‘50s at the time and being both aware of the elements of the stories that undercut the world of the Eisenhower years, and also being moved by the uplifting endings, which he asserts that Sirk “meant.” Two films on which he concentrates are Summer Storm and A Scandal in Paris, both starring his close friend George Sanders. Mr. Gallagher also isolates a running theme in the films, the role of savior who intervenes in another’s life, surprisingly taken from Sirk’s own experiences, and usually played by Rock Hudson. He finds thematic and autobiographical material in a pair of little regarded Sirk films, All I Desire and A Time to Love and a Time to Die. This is a definitive essay on Sirk, a must-read, and should be widely anthologized.

The Webs She Weaves

"The Emmanuelle piece and the Skin piece I wrote for you is entirely my work.  It's my writing."  – Lianne Spiderbaby to Tim Lucas

Why haven't I been spiderbabied?

This tongue in cheek self-query is not entirely in jest. Rather it is a measure of the temperature in the zeitgeist teacup.

Lianne Spiderbaby is the horror fangirl who writes for Famous Monsters of Filmland, Fangoria, and FEARnet on line. In print, she has appeared in the Rondo-award-winning Video Watchdog, Vice, Film Journal International, Cineplex Canada, and apparently even Horse Sport magazine. Ms Spiderbaby was herself awarded a Rondo¹ award, as host on a YouTube internet show called Fright Bytes with her brother. The 5-10² foot blonde Canadian also  appeared in a horror film, the similarly named Coffin Baby, and St. Martin's Press is slated to publish her survey book Grindhouse Girls: Cinema's Hardest Working Women, later this year (2013).³ But Ms Spiderbaby's impressive and energetic credits were soured over the weekend (July 12-14)  when Mike White of Impossibly Funky  revealed the prolific writer as a serial plagiarist. The fallout has not settled yet, but there are rumors that a key member of Tarantino's creative team was fired, which may or may not have anything to do with the Spiderbaby affair.


Among the many victims was my colleague Shawn Levy. Mr. Levy wrote a review of Pedro Amodovar's The Skin I Live In for the Oregonian. Ms. Spiderbaby wrote about that film, a knock off of Franju's Eyes Without a Face, among other films, for Video Watchdog. Ms. Spiderbaby lifted whole paragraphs from Mr. Levy's review. And as a Cinema Studies graduate from the University of Toronto (in 2007 ... with honors), Ms Spiderbaby was also savvy enough to steal from Laura Mulvey and Mary Ann Doane for the same piece. Well, after all, one can't expect the editors of small journals with a specialized audience to be familiar with the heady discourses of film theorists or the reviews that appear in cultural backwaters such as Portland, Oregon, even if they are posted on the Internet for the globe to read if it so chooses. At least we now know of one person who dod. 

Ever her pen name is borrowed, from a Jack Hill movie called Spider Baby. Directed by Jack Hill. Hill is a favorite director of Quentin Tarantino. Who is dating Spiderbaby, which is partially why the story has been getting such traction in the L. A. Times, the Guardian, and elsewhere.

On the various fan boards and talk backs, people have jokingly asserted that they are now famous outside the small world of Internet fandom thanks to her spiderbabying them. But this touches on a real mood. Our desire to make ourselves known – as Spiderbaby wished to be known – can result in a distortion of our ethics. Hell, if my words are stolen, by Tarantino's girlfriend, that's almost like he knows me!

There is reason to believe that Ms. Spiderbaby has heard of me, since I have published books on her boyfriend. But either I haven't written enough on horror, or she deemed my prose unsuitable for her performance piece project. I'm almost insulted.

Think that plagiarism doesn't have an impact on the victim? Look at the situation of Neal Bowers.  The Iowa State U professor and poet was plagiarized by a Portland, Oregon, area resident using the name David Sumner⁴ over the course of several years, couldn't get him to stop, and Bowers, according to Wikipedia, felt compelled to stop writing poetry for 10 years in the wake of the relentless plagiarizer's endeavors and Mr. Bowers's own frustration in getting editors and others to take the matter seriously. The story was covered in the New York Times.

Like a controversial court decision or a whistleblower incident, the Spiderbaby case has become a nexus for numerous interesting threads in the culture, or at least where culture and sub-cultures meet. What is plagiarism? Why is it not taken seriously? Why do people do it? Why do people write for free on the Internet in the first place? How do these virtual societies police themselves? What do people get out of liking horror films, anyway? What is the role of women in the horror fan base? How pervasive is the sexism? The Spiderbaby case brings to mind the situation of one Damian Arlyn, an Oregon actor and video store clerk who started a blog in 2007 more or less dedicated to his favorite director, Steven Spielberg. He initiated a gimmicky project – common in blogs to this day – called 31 Days of Spielberg, in which he was going to view the helmer's films in order and write on them daily. He ran into trouble and apparently began to life passages from other sources, embarrassingly from the work of Warren Buckland, a prominent Spielberg scholar. In a mealy-mouthed response to the accusations, Mr. Arlyn admitted to making mistakes, and attempted to turn himself into the victim, with the help of friends who rushed to make comments and offer support and sympathy for him in his time of trouble.

Reading the fan sites and talk backs concerning Ms Spiderbaby has been fascinating. Similar agents of disingenuousness have emerged. There were the properly aggrieved writers desperately trying to get others to take the charges seriously. There was the fascinating adding up of yet new daily discoveries of Ms Spiderbaby's perfidy. There were those who rushed to defend her as someone who simply made a few mistakes. Editors came forward with strained defenses that needed to be almost immediately retracted in light of yet more revelations, and crusty old venerated elders and sacred cows let out their sexist and homophobic burps, like noxious bubbles from a cartoon drunk. Yet when you add up the names and nicknames, only seven to 10 people are really taking the situation seriously on any given website. Hovering over all these statements is the shadow of Tarantino himself, the nerd who made good.

I'm reminded of one of my best friends, a woman who moved to Hollywood to write about film, and maybe to write films herself. Like Ms Spiderbaby she wrote for an array of websites and worked at fly-by-night operations, meeting other critics and of course inevitably filmmakers themselves.⁵ She is pretty but also smart, a dedicated defender of her favorite actors, actresses, movies, and directors, and a good arguer – you tangle with her at your peril. My friend conducted herself ethically. Ms Spiderbaby is the black swan side of what my friend tried to do with her career, and one bit of fallout from Ms. Spiderbaby's strategy is the gloom and suspicion it casts on legitimate members of the film and criticism community.

¹ The Rondos are an annual independent award named after acromegaly-suffering actor Rondo Hatton.

² Ingrid Bergman's height

³ Ms Spiderbaby won a Rondo for "Best Multimidea" and was a runner-up in the "Best Writer" (!) catagory. Perhaps that last catagory should have been "Best Writers."

4 Real name David S. Jones, then of Aloha, Oregon.

5 She even encountered Tarantino himself from time to time. At a public screening once she saw him staring at her shoes from his end of their shared aisle.

Andrew Sarris, 1928 - 2012

 

 

Today I am not sure why I was so resistant, but I remember back in the fall of 1972 feeling suspicious, dismissive, and at times even afraid of the so-called auteur theory. I would debate with its local acolyte, Jeff Godsill, endlessly. I am not sure now what changed my mind or won me over, but it may have been the fact that the first book I bought as a kid was Hitchcock-Truffaut, and that implied in that purchase was the belief that the director was the author of the works. Thus, as Stuart Byron describes it in Favorite Movies, the acceptance of auteurism came as a religious revelation and the god was Andrew Sarris.

Being a comic book obsessive as a tyke I turned that collecting mania to my favorite reviewers and writers, and began amassing collections of Sarris, Robin Wood, Durgnat, and numerous others. The first copy of the Village Voice I bought contained Sarris's two-part consideration of four films exemplifying violence in the cinema.¹ I subscribed, with the indulgence of my mom, and dutifully tore out Sarris's reviews and filed them in folders by year.²

Still have them. Yesterday upon learning of Sarris's death at the age of 83 I pulled out his review of Bang the Drum Slowly from 6 September, 1973, a review that seems representative of Sarris's breadth of reference. In the course of the review he mentions Fat City, Paper Lion, Maurie, Brian's Song, the taboo on sports films v. war films, Darwin, sports on TV, Catch-22, sentimentality v. pathos, Cocteau,  the Keystone Cops, The Best Years of Our Lives, Odd Man Out, Lou Gehrig, Melville, Hamlet, and the Kennedys. All to focus on a baseball movie adapted from the Mark Harris novel by John Hancock. As my colleague Shawn Levy once said, Sarris wrote every review as if he were making the definitive statement on the film at hand.

Just as Freud was not as Freudian as his followers, Sarris was a flexible auteurist. He was sensitive to acting, scripting, photography, and the other facets of filmmaking and their contributors, as well as the political and sociological realms from which movies emerged. The director may not always be the best candidate for a film's authorship, but he or she is often the most interesting to follow. Later I developed an interest in screenwriters but for all the words on the page a movie is rarely written in the sense that a Joe Mankiewicz film or screwball comedy or a Robert Towne script is written where often the ideas are embedded in lively dialogue. Still, I enjoy reading screenplays as much as seeing the movies made from them.

And he was also able to change his mind, a characteristic that was often oddly held against him. From 2001 to Billy Wilder and John Huston, Sarris was inclined to revise first impressions, from the foundational believe that cinema is a vast ocean into which one must dip continuously.

Though opponents such as Dwight Macdonald mocked Sarris's prose style, without every explaining why, I loved the way he wrote, as much as I did the styles of Wood and Durgnant. It was a distinctive style, with its alliteration and its stately demeanor that could just as well descend to anger as identifiable as the images of a Ford or a Hitchcock, and able to allow numerous tangents while always keeping an eye on the main subject. Most important, the style was less wearing than that of, say, Pauline Kael, who was tolerable only in small, bi-weekly doses.³

In February of 1976, I wrote Sarris an illiterate fan letter which he was nice enough to answer anyway. Of all the fan letters I've written, only Sarris and Gore Vidal answered, at least back in the snail mail days. I mention this only as a means to underscore Sarris's much-commented-upon courtliness and and generosity and evenness of temper. More evidence of that mood can be found in the documentary For the Love of Movies, which should be required viewing for all cinema goers.

 

There was a somewhat premature festschift dedicated to Sarris which was published in 2001 (or maybe it came out just in time), and Molly Haskell published a memoir of being with Sarris through a rare illness, called Love and Other Infectious Diseases, which is also interesting for its descriptions of film culture at the time, and for Ms. Haskells always soothing prose style.  But what one now hopes is that the Library of America, having already cannonized Farber and Kael, will now take on Sarris with a one-to-two volume collection.

 

 

1 Acquired at the Fourth Avenue News in downtown Portland, situated in a hole-in-the-wall between the Blue Mouse theater, which showed vaguely erotic adult fare such as The Happy Hooker and House of Whipcord, and the Round-Up, open 24-hours and showing four films cycled in one at a time so that every four days the bill was all new, a late night refuge for the then-homeless or indigent, and hosting a bathroom of lethal mien.

2 The two part violence article isn't (yet) in Google Books's Voice archive, but one hopes it will be there soon.

3 To paraphrase Evelyn Waugh on Tom Dreiberg, Pauline Kael was not as nice as she looked, as we learn from the lady's recent biography.

Time Lord

With his fingers in fiction, journalism, hit TV shows, audio books, his own website, even games, Michael Crichton is another king of all media. Yet, shocking as it may be to say, artistic success in the movies has only eluded him. I've liked some of the films he has directed himself, especially Looker, but the last six or more films based on his books, from Rising Sun on, are at best unmemorable. Jurassic Park may be fair Crichton, but it is lesser Spielberg. And it's telling that for The Lost World they more or less threw out the book, while plans to film Airframe possibly with Sigourney Weaver under the direction of John McTiernan, have, as of this writing, been canceled. At some point there will be a Jurassic Park 3, apparently based on a book called Embryo.

Scribes attempting to adapt his latest novel, Timeline will face pitfalls similar to those posed by Airframe and the others. As with the air disaster book, Timeline purports on the surface to be one thing, but once you get into it, the book turns out to be entirely something else.

At first exposure, Airframe was an unnerving exploration of the technology that keeps airplanes in the air. But gradually you realized that Crichton had really mounted that embarrassing hobby horse of critic-hatred, one that superstars from Frank Sinatra to George Clooney have mounted, decrying the inaccuracy, mendacity, unprofessionalism, and sheer sloppiness of journalists. That's not a particularly cinematic premise, and sure to raise the hackles of hacks everywhere. Even worse, as far as an adapter is concerned, the air disaster investigator at the heart of the book, once to be played by Weaver, all too often finds herself in passive situations, at the mercy of weather and wind, of planes and pilots.

Timeline imposes similar impediments to smooth cinematic translation. On the plain of mega-publicity, the book is officially about time travel (or space travel, as characters in the book insist that it really is). But in reality it is a brief against Bill Gates, and the exploitation of modern technology for amusement. If the reader feels as if he has been there before, he has, in that the character Robert Doniger /Bill Gates is another stand in for John Hammond in Jurassic Park, which was itself a reconsideration of ideas that Crichton had already put forward in Westworld. The book's loathing for Doniger is intense; he has few if any redeeming characteristics, and most of his traits are based on what we have learned about Gates from two biographies and numerous profiles, such as his impatience with others and ridiculing of any outside idea as the stupidest thing he's ever heard of. It is a measure of the book's hatred of Doniger that he is accorded one of the worst revenges suffered by any character in the whole Crichton canon—he is teleported back to the middle ages and is coughed on by a victim of the Black Plague. As long as the potential adapter of this book keeps its real priorities in mind, though, he may make sense of a text that is in fact three separate books in one.

The novel begins (after prefatory material meant to convince us that time travel is plausible) with a grumpy tourist husband and his wife driving through the Arizona desert looking for Indian crafts. Amid the swirling dust, they think they hit an Indian or an old geezer who seems to have appeared out of nowhere. Rushing him to the hospital, the man's body provides clues right out of a Sherlock Holmes story (and Crichton admits that Doyle, whom he still reads for pleasure, is the main inspiration for his work). This is a top notch Crichton opener, and in setting and tone reminiscent of The Andromeda Strain (hospitals, desert). Several characters are introduced, however, including an Indian policeman, who fail to figure in the rest of the book. There are several of these red herrings in the novel, and they must be deemphasized by the adapter or the viewer will be confused.

Then we meet the book's real main characters, Doniger and his assistants (whom he continually brutalizes), and then Professor Edward Johnston, a Harvard historian, and his team. They are in someplace called Dordogne, in France, engaged in an archeological dig, resurrecting a series of castles, monasteries, and attendant towns, all financed, for a reason that actually is never really explained, by Doniger. Johnston's assistants are the real heroes of the book. One is a past-obsessed historian, Andre Marek; another is a cliff-face climbing token female, Kate Ericson; and finally there is Johnston's protege, Chris Hughes, the Everyman of the book, whose reactions to things more or less represent what the dense reader would think if he were experiencing the past first hand, too. The only problem with this guy is that he's not funny, and he needs to be to ofset the dour tone of most of the book—the whole project needs a really big dose of humor to fly.

We learn that Doniger is manufacturing some kind of time / space travel device. We then learn that the dig has some connection to it. The guy at the start of the book, who dies and is unimportant except as an intro to the whole plot, was a renegade figure in Doniger's company, and he seems to have messed up some stuff. Anyway, Doniger wants Johnston to go back to the past and fix things. So Johnston disappears for a while (actually the bulk of the book. For audiences to remember his character he will need to be played by someone very vivid and likable, so that the tension of the team's travel back has weight).

One of the best parts of the novel is when the characters unearth a document that is 600 years old, but written in Johnston's handwriting, pleading for help. The only problem with this sequence is that the reader, and of course the viewer, already guess what is going on, so this is one of those classic sequences, so prevalent in TV cop shows, in which the viewer knows more than the characters, and sits there twiddling their thumbs waiting for the fictional people to catch up as they talk out loud and mull over stuff that we already know. If at all possible, this must be eliminated from the film.

At this point, because the team has a spy in its midst (again, a thread that is left hanging by Crichton), Doniger comes after them, both to shut them up, but also to ask them to go back into the past and rescue Johnston, who is trapped in medieval France, caught between two warring factions in the very town they are excavating.

Thus we come to the only part of the novel that Crichton's fans are interested in—the explanation of time travel. This scene unfolds much like they always do in Crichton. One guy does the explaining. His auditors ask questions. The flow isn't particularly good, and in a movie, with all the visual distractions, the audience may not grasp key points in an explanatory sequence that in a sense is irrelevant (so they go back in time, who cares how? just do it). On the other hand, there will always be those viewers (like me) who can't get their mind around the whole concept of time travel fantasies (vide the latest Austin Powers vehicle). Like prison films, it is one of my least favorite genres. But there are some enjoyable nuggets here. For example, Crichton discounts the belief that if you go back into the "past" you will change the present. For one thing, his puppet explains, you are not important enough. Second, it is all happening in a parallel universe with no contiguous relationship with this one.

Crichton does write page turners. We sail through his books, eager to find out what happens next. He lures us on because we associate him with brainy and informative discussions that are at the cutting edge of scientific knowledge. He taps into that same hunger that James Michener fed, the pop novelist as tutorial leader. Unfortunately, the one overall attitude one takes away from Crichton, at least the later books, is boredom. He is impatient: with the necessity to construct a plot; with language (Crichton, unlike most novelists, evinces absolutely no love of the English language), with readers and their desire for such mundane things as adventure and thrills.

The whole time travel technique seems plausible when it is explained in the book (there are parallel universes breaking off of ours all the time; people can get to one via a "wormhole"; the person has to be "faxed," or broken down and reconstituted in the other place) despite the fact that Crichton avoids just explaining how it is really done, that is, the technical aspects of the actual transporting process. But then, since it is currently impossible, even almost unimaginable, he can't be blamed for failing to imagine it. In the movie, with steam and gizmos and rising music and things shaking, viewers will believe that several people have been transported "back" to April 7th 1357.

Frankly, the whole "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" middle of the novel is the most boring part of the book. Conveniently, the Marek character speaks the local lingo, and has been practicing jousting and court behavior for years. But the situation is also hard to follow. There seems to be two castles, a secret underground passage, a stand-off of some kind between two competing factions, blah blah blah. Dull. It's all an excuse to provide cinematic fodder, and there to exploit the briefly the various skills of the characters that Crichton introduced pro forma when we first met them, such as Ericson's wall climbing skill. There is a big hall sequence, there is a joust, there is an escape from a dungeon, and then a whole lot of chases, all against the deadline that the characters have to get back. George McDonald Fraser does all this stuff much better. There is the "surprise" that one of Marek's enemies is another renegade from the "present" who has turned into a villain and likes it better back in the 14th century. There is also the "surprise" that Marek, who knows so much about that time, would prefer to stay there himself. Appropriate poignant farewell scene follows.

One miscue that Crichton obeys is to alternate between the present and the past. While the kids are all forced to joust in France, Doniger and his aides are trying to figure out how to rescue them (the machines all blew up). Crichton follows around Daniel Stern, one of Johnston's team who chickened out and decided to stay behind. He also happens to come up with all the ideas for getting them back. However, in the movie itself, it would be much more suspenseful to stay in the past, and explain how they are rescued later. The adaptor needs to create a real sense of isolation in a strange world, of people trapped, otherwise it is tedious period costumery. Crichton violates that, but as happens all too often, his screenwriters can fix his mistakes. If anyone ever gets hired to do it.

For already, Timeline The Movie is in trouble. According to the Publisher's Weekly of November 1, quoting Salon , there is some confusion as to whether any of Hollywood's studios actually want to make a movie of the film. Supposedly, the cost of recreating medieval 14th century France, even in this age of CGI, and despite the fact that there have been several films about Saint Joan lately, was viewed as prohibitive by Disney, Fox, Warners, Paramount, Sony, and Universal, but Crichton's new agent, the friendless Michael Ovitz, is viewed as a deterrent to a happy contract. The movie, if ever made, wouldn't hit the screens until of summer of 2001 or 2002 anyway, and who knows if anyone at in that timeline will still be interested in time travel and jousting.