Fortunate Londoners can get to see a new exhibition, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘Dune’: An exhibition of a film of a book that never was, which runs at The Drawing Room until October 25, 2009. As well as production designs from concept artists Moebius, HR Giger and Chris Foss, there’s newly commissioned work by artists Steven Claydon, Matthew Day Jackson and Vidya Gastaldon.

Jodorowsky’s proposed 1976 adaptation of the Frank Herbert novel is now the stuff of legend, and it’s possible that his outrageously ambitious plans are more fun to dream about than they would have been on the screen. But it remains a tantalising prospect that Jodorowsky might well have pulled off a science fiction equivalent of Fellini’s Satyricon. Either way, along with Stanley Kubrick’s unmade Napoleon, it’s one of the great lost film of the 1970s.

Among Jodorowsky’s proposed cast were Orson Welles, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dali, the last of whom was to play the Emperor of the Universe, who ruled from a golden toilet-cum-throne in the shape of two intertwined dolphins. Unable to secure the money from Hollywood to create the ‘Dune’ of his imagination, Jodorowsky abandoned the film before a single frame was shot. All that survives of this project is Jodorowsky’s extensive notes, and the production drawings of Moebius, Giger and Foss. These reveal a potential future for sci-fi movie making that eschewed the conservative, technology-based approach of American filmmakers in favour of something closer to a metaphysical fever-dream.

left: Emperor Shaddam IV; right: Feyd Rautha.

Moebius’s designs are wildly different from those used in David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation (which I like nonetheless). His sketch of the Emperor on the left gives some idea of how Salvador Dalí might have appeared in the film, while the figure on the right is Baron Harkonnen’s effete nephew, Feyd, a far more radical conception than the grinning fool played by Sting in the Lynch version. There’s a lot more of Moebius’s sketches at the excellent Dune.info site.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Dalí and Film
• Jodorowsky on DVD

La Tour (1987) by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters is the third story in the Cités Obscures series, although it’s the fourth volume if you want to be strictly canon about things, L’archivist, a guide to places in the Obscure World, having preceded it.

Carcere Oscura by Piranesi (1750).

This is another book where Schuiten and Peeters’ interests tick a list of my own obsessions, being a tale which seems to originate in the question “What would it be like if you crossed Piranesi’s Prisons etchings with Bruegel’s Tower of Babel?” The protagonist of La Tour, Giovanni Battista, has his name borrowed from Piranesi’s forenames and his appearance taken from Orson Welles’ Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight. The story owes something to Kafka, although it lacks Kafka’s drift towards paradox, concerning a colossal building referred to throughout as The Tower, a structure we only ever see in close-up—and then mostly from the inside—but whose height must reach several thousand feet.

Battista (above) is one of the Keepers, a group of men charged with maintaining small sections of the Tower whose structure suffers continual decay and collapse. Tired of years spent in complete isolation, and concerned that other Keepers aren’t doing their job, Battista goes in search of the Tower’s feared Inspectors, only to discover that the lack of maintenance is endemic and few of the Tower’s scattered residents have any idea of the origin or purpose of the vast building where they’ve spent their lives, never mind a concern for its upkeep. There are no Inspectors, and while Battista is worried at the beginning about vines in the stonework, we later see small forests growing among the ruins. Kafka resonances come with the mention of the mysterious Base, and the equally mysterious Pioneers, those builders and engineers who went ahead years or even centuries before, climbing skyward.

It’s a surprise reading this book after the first two with their late 19th and early 20th century appearance. The world of La Tour is quite medieval, especially the small community in which Battista finds himself after a near-fatal fall from a jerry-rigged kite. The most sophisticated technology we see is in the home of a doctor, Elias, whose house contains histories of the Tower’s construction as well as astrolabes and armillary spheres. (The latter device plays a key role in a later story.) The only clue we’re in the Obscure World at all comes with a close view of a polyhedral globe which shows the Tower on one face with the cities of Xhystos and Samaris on the others. Aside from Elias, none of the inhabitants of the Tower are aware of, or curious about, anything outside their vast building.

Elias also has a collection of paintings which show the history of the Tower’s design. Several of these are Schuiten’s variations on famous pictures, including the Bruegel Tower of Babel. Less familiar is a version of the curious Historical Monument of the American Republic (1867-88) by Erastus Salisbury Field. The paintings in the Tower are distinguished by being shown in colour while everything else is black-and-white, a distinction used later in the story to striking effect.

Historical Monument of the American Republic by Erastus Salisbury Field (1867–88).

This is a far longer book than the previous ones, and its final third concerns a fascinating journey of several weeks by Battista and a young woman, Milena, up the Tower in search of the Pioneers. Once again, I don’t want to spoil the story but it rather runs out of steam at the end; as with Les Murailles de Samaris there’s a feeling that the creators weren’t sure what to do with their splendid creation once they’d invented it. But the drawing more than makes up for that, with Schuiten once again showing an apparently effortless mastery of a given style, superbly rendering walls of Piranesian vastness, Chartres-like flying buttresses and masses of cross-hatched shading. The journey to the top of the Tower—and the return down—is worth it for the view alone.

• Piranesi / Schuiten. Arquitectura, Comics y Clasicismo | A Spanish examination of Piranesi’s influence on Schuiten.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The fantastic art archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• La fièvre d’Urbicande by Schuiten & Peeters
• Les Murailles de Samaris by Schuiten & Peeters
• The art of François Schuiten
• Taxandria, or Raoul Servais meets Paul Delvaux
• Aldous Huxley on Piranesi’s Prisons

Harold Pinter and Eartha Kitt.

2008: the year that keeps on taking.

The Guardian has a copious collection of Pinter pieces including Michael Billington’s lengthy obituary. Eartha Kitt was just as unique in her own way, prompting Orson Welles in the 1950s to call her “the most exciting woman in the world”. For my sister and I a decade later she was the most exciting Catwoman in the world and that’s how I’ll remember her. But let’s not forget those Cha-Cha Heels…

Eartha’s frivolity might seem to jar beside Pinter’s moral and political seriousness but the World Socialist Web Site managed to link the pair with a priceless headline, Harold Pinter and Eartha Kitt, artists and opponents of imperialist war. Their article tells you a few things about Eartha that many of the obituaries would have ignored. I’m sure Pinter would have been proud to hear of her speaking her mind at the White House. The world is a smaller place when talents and voices like these are gone.

It was 70 years ago today—October 30, 1938—that Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre traumatised American radio listeners with their brilliant adaptation of The War of the Worlds. I wrote about that recording last year so rather than repeat myself, here’s the final words from Howard Koch’s 1970 book about the play, The Panic Broadcast. (That’s the cover of my cheap paperback edition.) Koch was charged by Welles and producer John Houseman with the task of condensing and updating HG Wells’ novel and he ends his book with an examination of the lessons to be learned from the resulting hysteria. America’s current crop of demagogues on TV and radio—and the audiences prepared to take everything they say at face value—render his words as apposite now as they were forty years ago.

Meanwhile, how can we protect ourselves from politically biased information coming to us through the mass media? It isn’t as simple as dialing another station as in the case of the Martian scare. In my opinion, the only safeguard we have is the cultivation of a skeptical attitude toward all authority, to regard no person or office sacrosanct, to accept nothing that doesn’t accord with our experience and our knowledge acquired from other sources.

Most of my generation were brought up to give unquestioned obedience to authority, whether parental, religious or political. The result has been a compliant and conformist society that has tolerated a war every decade, all sorts of racial and economic inequities and a progressive spoliation of our planet. The management, shall we say, has been less than perfect.

But for the first time there are signs of a change and we have good reason to hope that the world won’t be lost by default. Today all authority is being questioned and challenged, especially by the young. The American people have become more concerned with public affairs on every level. They are taking less on faith; the individual intelligence is beginning to assert itself in self-protection and therein lies the promise of a society with the attributes for survival.

If the nonexistent Martians in the broadcast had anything important to teach us, I believe it is the virtue of doubting and testing everything that comes to us over the airwaves and on the printed pages – including those written by the author of this book.

• The Mercury Theatre on the Air | An archive of the radio shows

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The night that panicked America
• War of the Worlds book covers

The Mercury Theatre on the air.

Being a long-time fan of both HG Wells and Orson Welles, the latter’s radio production of War of the Worlds with the Mercury Theatre group has always held a special fascination. This was staged sixty-nine years ago today, October 30th, 1938, and famously caused panic among listeners who missed the opening and believed they were hearing genuine news reports of an alien invasion. I’ve often listened to the rather crude recording of the play around this time of year, having owned that recording on vinyl, cassette tape and CD. These days you don’t have to buy it, you can head over to Archive.org or this Mercury Theatre page and grab an mp3 to discover what all the fuss was about. The recording may be crude but the presentation still strikes me as decades ahead of its time, with a very astute sense of how ordinary people behave when faced with the news media. I’ve always loved the attention to detail, such as the moment when the man who’s been interviewed at the crash site wants to carry on talking and the interviewer has to shut him up. That same verisimilitude was carried over to the newsreel footage in Citizen Kane (which was pretty much a Mercury production for cinema) and it was those moments in the radio play which helped encourage people to think that what they were hearing was real, not drama.

Screenwriter Howard Koch, who later polished the rudimentary draft script that became Casablanca, is credited as writer of the play but the adaptation was a group effort according to Koch in his book The Panic Broadcast (1970). The idea of presenting Wells’s story as a series of news bulletins came from Orson Welles and producer John Houseman, with Koch scripting the scenes and dialogue. Most of the other Mercury adaptations took a more traditional approach and if you want some spooky listening for Halloween I’d suggest you try their version of Dracula, also from 1938. The story is severely truncated, of course, but Agnes Moorehead is very impressive as Mina, there’s some remarkable music from Bernard Herrmann and Welles plays both Arthur Seward and the sinister Count.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker
• The Door in the Wall
• Voodoo Macbeth
• War of the Worlds book covers

Before the Law from The Trial (1962).

I’d wanted to write something about this pair of animators last year but at the time there was none of their work available for online viewing. This situation has now been remedied thanks to the ubiquitous YouTube.

This is Kafka-related once again since most people have seen Alexeieff/Parker’s work—if at all—in the prologue they provided in 1962 for Orson Welles’ film of The Trial. Alexandre Alexeieff was a Russian illustrator and animator who met Claire Parker, an American art student, in Paris in 1930. The pair formed a life-long partnership and together developed a new style of animation using a pinscreen, a white board containing thousands of pins whose shadows when pushed out of the board provide the grey tones required to create a picture. At the time they began working with this most animation was flat and cartoony; the pinscreen enabled them to create the kind of subtleties of shading seen in pencil and ink drawing. Many of the effects they created are stunningly lifelike.

The prologue for The Trial is a pictorial rendering of Kafka’s parable, Before the Law, which Welles narrates. This is an impressive piece (and I always loved the distinctive Piranesi-style walls) but for a real taste of their breathtaking skill you need to see Night on Bald Mountain, whose Goya-like transformations precede Disney’s Fantasia version by nearly a decade, or their adaptation of Gogol’s The Nose. It’s a shame that YouTube’s compression degrades much of the detail in these films, they really deserve to be seen on a bigger screen, but—as with many of these obscurities—it’s good to know they’re available at all.

Alexeieff and Parker on YouTube:
• Night on Bald Mountain (1933)
• En Passant (1944)
• Before the Law (1962)
• The Nose pt. 1 | The Nose pt. 2 (1963)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka

Do you detect a theme this week? The recent Pragueness had me watching this favourite film again. I unfairly dismissed Soderbergh after his debut, Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989), which I found to be two hours of yuppie tedium despite its winning the Palme D’Or at Cannes. That prize did enable him to make Kafka (1991), however, so I shouldn’t complain although I didn’t get to see this until it turned up on TV years after its release. The film was a major flop and put Soderbergh in the wilderness until Out of Sight (1998), his first outing with George Clooney.

Kafka is one of a small group of works wherein well-known writers become embroiled in stories which exactly parallel their fiction. Joe Gores’ Hammett (filmed by Wim Wenders in 1982) did this with Dashiell Hammett while Mark Frost in his novel, The List of Seven, had a pre-Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle becoming involved in a Holmesian mystery. The screenplay for Kafka by Lem Dobbs has the author falling in with anarchist revolutionaries in order to solve the death of a co-worker and a bureaucratic conspiracy. This was obviously too clever for a general audience, being littered with references to Kafka’s life and work and also to German Expressionist cinema with names like “Orlac” and “Murnau” comprising key plot elements. Dobbs wrote a couple of other noteworthy screenplays after this, Dark City, a noirish fantasy that does what The Matrix did only with greater imagination, and The Limey (1999), another Soderbergh film with a great performance by Terence Stamp as a vengeful Cockney gangster on the loose in Los Angeles.

Alan Bennett had already done something similar to Kafka in his TV film for the BBC, The Insurance Man, which concerns a dye worker becoming enmeshed in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute where Kafka worked as a clerk. Daniel Day-Lewis made a marvellous Franz Kafka in Bennett’s play and was far more suited to the role than Jeremy Irons is in Soderbergh’s film. This is a shame since everything else about Kafka is excellent, from the moody black and white photography and fabulous cymbalom-inflected score by Cliff Martinez, to the cast, which includes the wonderful Theresa Russell, Joel Grey, Ian Holm and—in one of his last performances—Sir Alec Guinness.

Kafka is also the Prague film par excellence, making great use of the city’s Old Town and landmarks such as the Charles Bridge and Prague Castle, a building which dominates the story as well as many of the outdoor scenes. In fact I find myself watching it as much for the settings than anything else. Soderbergh enjoys cinematic pastiche and Kafka owes a great deal to The Third Man (which did for post-war Vienna what Kafka does for Prague) and—inevitably—Orson Welles’ Kafka adaptation, The Trial. Theresa Russell brings Vienna with her via Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing, Joel Grey was in Cabaret, of course, and Alec Guinness isn’t so far removed from his role as retired spy George Smiley in the BBC’s John le Carré films. And halfway through the film there’s a great surprise which I won’t spoil here.

Kafka is available on DVD finally, although if you’re in the US you’ll have to import it. Soderbergh has talked about reworking the film in a longer version which I’d like to see if he ever gets round to it. Not an easy film to find but it’s worthy of your attention.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Kafka and Kupka
• Alexander Hammid
• How to disappear completely
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague
• Giant mantis invades Prague
• Nosferatu
• Barta’s Golem

Another one bites the dust… What are the odds against two of the last surviving big names of cinema expiring in the same week? I could never get fully behind Antonioni the way I could with Bergman, I didn’t think much of the Neo-Realist school that Antonioni began as a part of and his later Italian films such as La Notte (1961) and L’Eclisse (1962) seemed like vacuous stylistic exercises. He divided opinion even among his peers—Orson Welles couldn’t bear his work whereas Stanley Kubrick put La Notte in a “ten best” list in 1963. I always enjoyed Blow Up (1966) even though it seems fatuous next to Performance while Zabriskie Point (1970) is a joke. But I like The Passenger (aka Professione: Reporter, 1975) very much.

A simple story—reporter in the Sahara swaps identities with a dead arms dealer then goes on the run—featured Jack Nicholson giving one of his last good performances before his descent into gurning self-parody. Also Ian Hendry, Steven Berkoff (between Kubrick films) and Jenny Runacre shortly before she was in Jubilee for Derek Jarman. The film works as an extended travelogue, ranging from Africa to England then into Spain as Nicholson’s character picks up student Maria Schneider on his travels and is pursued by his wife (who doesn’t believe he’s dead) and men intent on killing him. Events are resolved during a celebrated seven-minute single take where the camera passes miraculously through the iron bars of a hotel window. One of Antonioni’s finest qualities was his appreciation of architectural and cinematic space and the final shot of the film is a perfect example of this. The Passenger was out of circulation for years but is now available on DVD.

• Guardian obituary | David Thomson appreciation

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Further Back and Faster

In my obsession with all things Orson Welles, his 1936 production of Macbeth holds a special fascination, partly for being my favourite Shakespeare play, and partly for the curiosity of its production—an all-black cast that included genuine Haitian drummers who famously claimed to have drummed a Broadway critic to death after he gave the play a hostile review. The De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea is hosting an art event based on Welles’ production.

In 1936, whilst the UK was celebrating the new De La Warr Pavilion, and exciting artistic movement was reaching its close in New York—the Harlem Renaissance. A significant event within of this movement was an all-black African American version of Macbeth, presented by The Federal Theatre Project at the New Lafayette Theatre, Harlem and directed by writer and actor Orson Welles. This production became known as ‘Voodoo Macbeth‘.

There are many things that were remarkable about this unique and innovative project. The play was one of the first explorations of a modern and diasporic spin on the Shakespearian tale. It was also the point at which Welles was introduced to John Houseman, which then led to the formation of the Mercury Theatre Company that produced seminal works such as the War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane. Furthermore, the ‘Voodoo Macbeth‘ production displayed visual and aural motifs using lighting, stage design and overlapping sound which became signature elements to Welles’s later film projects.

The essence, spirit, and cross-artform experimentality of ‘Voodoo Macbeth‘ is the basis for a contemporary art, film and performance season at the De La Warr Pavilion and has been named after the production. This unique project looks at the historical and contemporary dialogue that Welles’s work had and still has with performance, film and visual art.

The curatorial concept of the De La Warr Pavilion’s exhibition Voodoo Macbeth focuses on the debate and the ideas around Welles’s unique and defining aesthetic which continues to attract much critical attention. The exhibition suggests that Welles’s approach has informed the work of many contemporary artists working in film today.

Both the historical and contemporary context of Voodoo Macbeth are explored within the exhibition and wider season of events. Original works by Orson Welles are presented alongside those of his contemporaries including Jean Cocteau, Jacques Tourneur and Lee Miller. These artists were working with film and photography during the period of the 1940s onwards and have a shared concern in exploring visual ideas and motifs around the idea of an ‘expansive frame’. As artists, they blurred the boundaries between visual art, theatre, literature and film, to produce lyrical and poetic visual works.

Work by contemporary artists within the exhibition have been selected on the basis that their work embodies the artistic narrative and the spirituality of Welles’s use of light, dark and spatial composition. The exhibition includes work by Phyllis Baldino, Glenn Ligon, Steve McQueen, Mitra Tabrizian and Kara Walker. In this context, Voodoo Macbeth explores how, for artists today, the genre and its relationship to installation practice in performance, film, sound and visual art is an important part of the process. Importantly, they do not mimic the formalist structure of film, painting and sound but endeavour to embed these works with elements of popular culture, critique and humour. Like Welles, who was a masterful story teller, these artists have developed works which take on the character of an intimate 21st century tale. Unlike Welles, these tales are tailor-made, for a gallery audience to explore and enjoy.

Produced by the De La Warr Pavilion in association with Brighton Photo Biennial and curated by associate curator David A Bailey in collaboration with BPB curator 2006 Gilane Tawadros.
The Galleries are open 10am–6pm except on Christmas Eve (closing
at 5pm), Christmas Day (closed all day) and New Year’s Eve (closing at 3pm). Free.

Voodoo Macbeth, Oct 7th–Jan 7th.

The Voodoo Macbeth exhibition is a part of the Brighton Photo Biennial, for more details on the BPB please visit their website www.bpb.org.uk, or contact them via the details below.
Biennial Office
University of Brighton
Grand Parade
Brighton BN2 0JY

Tel: +44 (01)273 643 052
Email: mail@bpb.org.uk

ONE OF THE MORE notable things about the obituaries following Stanley Kubrick’s death in March this year was the lack of consensus with regard to his achievements. All were agreed that the man had made great films, but which films those might be varied widely, the choices spanning his entire career: Dr Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Paths of Glory, even The Killing was mentioned. A lack of accord would seem inevitable given such a varied career. Critic David Thomson has always chosen The Shining, citing its fairy tale qualities and a perceived autobiographical subtext about artistic crisis (“Why does Jack Nicholson look and dress like Kubrick?” he asks). In France the often vilified Barry Lyndon and A Clockwork Orange (L’Orange Mecanique) still receive cult veneration.

After the death of Orson Welles in 1985, Kubrick became (arguably, of course) the greatest living filmmaker, the dubious status of “living legend” having been achieved a decade earlier. (In Sight & Sound’s 1992 Critics Top 10 2001 crept into tenth place, the only film listed by a living director.) The international acclaim, his presence on English soil and a refusal to barter with hacks was, no doubt, one cause of the extraordinary level of carping in the March notices. Another would be due to a common syndrome, that of intelligence and popular culture being seen as mutually exclusive. Where cinema is concerned we live in times which, as Robin Wood once said, “regards Heaven’s Gate as ‘a disaster’ and Return of the Jedi as ‘a triumph’”. Orson Welles himself is rarely mentioned without reference to sherry commercials and, in other quarters, James Joyce is routinely described as ‘unreadable’ (this, from people who buy Nick Hornby books). In an atmosphere of elevated mediocrity, Kubrick’s powerful intellect and artistry, combined with an understandable reluctance to talk to people who think Ossessione is a brand of perfume, formed unavoidable provocations. The media landscape has changed enormously since the days when Kubrick would still appear at the premier of Lolita; it’s hard to imagine John Ford or Sam Peckinpah tolerating an interrogation from Jamie Theakston or Magenta DeVine. The voracious appetites of style mags and entertainment TV demand a constant drip-feed of interviews, talk show appearances and promo tours (backed by massive PR budgets). Anyone who doesn’t play the game is regarded as insane or as some kind of traitor. To be a name director working with ’stars’ verges on the suicidal. Those two great elusive Thomases, Pynchon and Harris, both also taking years between works, escape censure by being mere writers. No one cares about Pynchon (he’s in Joyce’s ‘unreadable’ camp) while Harris has film gossip and a miscast Anthony Hopkins to deflect attention.

Nearly all the post mortem articles managed to repeat the standard litany of Kubrick complaints which have dogged him like the sherry ads dogged Welles. One of the worst, repeated in a recent biography, was that he was the bane of actors. If so, then Sterling Hayden, Timothy Carey, Joe Turkel, Peter Sellers, Leonard Rossiter, Margaret Tyzack, Patrick Magee, Godfrey Quigley and Steven Berkoff et al, were gluttons for punishment, having come back for more when asked. Philip Stone, presumably bidding for a BFI endurance award, appeared in A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon and The Shining. Leon Vitali, who played the elder Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon, had such a terrible time of it he left acting completely to join Kubrick’s permanent production staff. It seems significant that most complaints about Kubrick from the acting side came from those with prodigious egos: Kirk Douglas (who described him as “a talented shit”), Malcom McDowell (“inhuman”) and, on One Eyed Jacks, that paragon of flexibility Marlon Brando. No one who was as difficult as is so often claimed would have had talents such as Ken Adam and John Alcott returning constantly to work on his films, nor inspired such loyalty in those around him (see Anthony Frewin’s remarks in the current issue).

Invariably these kind of ill-informed comments say more about the critic than about Kubrick or, more importantly, his films. A metropolitan media that measures artistic success by the quantities of cocaine snorted in a Dean Street bar has few terms of reference for dealing with someone who chooses to sit at home for most of their life. Hence the recurrent headlines: “Kubrick the recluse”, “Kubrick the secretive, paranoid control-freak”.

Focus on Kubrick’s eccentricities often ignored the accuracy of his artistic choices. What is still seen as perversity in making a Vietnam film in the ruins of Beckton gasworks is, when the equivalent scenes are compared with Gustav Hasford’s novel, a stroke of brilliance which improves on the original by taking it out of its over-familiar jungle locale and into an area of potent metaphor. The entire last quarter of Full Metal Jacket has an nightmare quality as the film spirals through multiple deaths into darkness (with a Rolling Stones’ coda of ‘Paint It Black’). The flaming ruins seem to reach to infinity; where a jungle setting would connect only with Vietnam, the rubbled streets are the theatre of all present and future warfare, corresponding to Berlin, Beirut, Sarajevo and wherever the apocalypse is scheduled to visit next. And what other director anywhere, having shown his matchless ability to choose the perfect classical selection, would have the audacity and consummate good taste to pick out ‘Surfin’ Bird’ by The Trashmen?

This ability to crystalise ideas and metaphors in unforgettable images (the bone to spacecraft transformation in 2001) set Kubrick apart from his contemporaries, and his concentration on ideas as well as story makes him seem increasingly unique. Even acknowledged admirers like Michael Mann and Ridley Scott are unwilling or unable to compete on this level. Fortunately we have a final film left to see (setting aside the troubling presence of Tom Cruise; Ryan O’Neal was also pretty wooden during his Seventies’ heyday). Eyes Wide Shut seems to bring Kubrick’s career to a fitting close, based as it is on Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle. Schnitzler also wrote the play La Ronde which was filmed in 1950 by Max Ophüls, virtually the only director Kubrick ever referred to in interviews as a subject of admiration (by coincidence, Nicole Kidman was acting in The Blue Room, Howard Brenton’s version of La Ronde, shortly after completing her duties on the film). Eyes Wide Shut has already caused a stir in the US by having to be altered to secure an ‘R’ rating (as A Clockwork Orange was before it).

To be controversial to the last is the least one can expect of any artistic maverick. Kubrick, king of the Hollywood Mavericks, was always more than that.

John Coulthart, 1999. First published in The Edge.

“Va-va-voom!” Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Orson Welles’s great Touch of Evil (1958) both came at the end of the film noir cycle in the late 1950s. Both films look into the dark heart of American life during that decade, with Aldrich tackling nuclear paranoia and Welles dealing with racism towards Latin-Americans and political and legal corruption. Both films have long been favourites of mine and both remain startlingly relevant now, as Alex Cox discusses below. Cox might have mentioned another film that borrows the motif of the baleful nuclear box, his own Repo Man (1984).

Nuclear-powered nastiness
It’s one of the darkest noirs ever made. But, says Alex Cox, the classic Kiss Me Deadly is a parable at heart

Alex Cox
Friday June 16, 2006
The Guardian

It begins with titles that famously run backwards. Deadly … Kiss Me … Aldrich … Robert … Directed by … Then, two scenes in, a women we have assumed to be the heroine is tortured to death. This is no art film, though; no knowing homage. Instead, it’s the roughest, least compromising film noir of them all – Kiss Me Deadly.

The hero (if we can call him that) is Mike Hammer, a tough, no-nonsense detective created by pulp fiction author Micky Spillane. Spillane’s Hammer was of a different breed from the detectives who had gone before. Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op and Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe were tough and cynical, but also intelligent, decent and insightful. Spillane’s Hammer was an indecent thug. A product of Senator McCarthy and the blood-lust of the Korean war, he liked nothing better than pounding commie sympathisers’ heads against a wall until their eyeballs popped.

Robert Aldrich’s Hammer – played by the oddly named Ralph Meeker – is worse than Spillane’s. Aldrich’s protaganist is cynical and dumb; a thug without insight, a detective who fails to detect. In a way, he is a prototype for the automaton-hero played by Lee Marvin in 1967’s Point Blank, and done to a turn by Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator.

Made in 1955 – the fine black and white photography is by Ernest Laszlo – Kiss Me Deadly is filled with the trappings of modernity. Hammer has a reel-to-reel telephone answering machine in his apartment. Despite this, and his predeliction for fast sports cars and faster women, he achieves next to nothing. He doesn’t solve the mystery. He doesn’t get his man.

Kiss Me Deadly inevitably suffered problems with the British censor. But it’s hard to see what Trevelyan or Harlech could do about it, other than ban it outright. The torture of Christina (Cloris Leachman) is played off screen. It seems almost tasteful in comparison to the woman-hating antics of V for Vendetta or Kill Bill. More disturbing is Hammer’s casual sadism – as when, looking for information, he destroys an opera-lover’s record collection, or traps an old man’s hand in a desk drawer.

Aldrich was a bold and radical director, masquerading as a maker of popular action films. Kiss Me Deadly, disguised as tough-guy detective picture, is actually an anti-nuclear parable with classical allusions – most obviously, to the story of Pandora and her box.

The script was by AI Bezzerides. That must have infuriated Spillane, since Bezzerides was a leftist, blacklisted screenwriter. Aldrich took a risk working with such a writer. Aldrich, director of The Big Knife – a rigorous dissection of a corrupt, crowd-pleasing Hollywood movie star whose criminal past makes him the studio’s patsy – clearly didn’t care. Like his protagonist, he steamrollered ahead, doing what he wanted. And what he wanted, at the height of the McCarthy frenzy, was to warn us that nuclear power was going to destroy us all.

Only one character knows what Kiss Me Deadly is about. GE (General Electric?) Soberin, a spooky gangster who has got his hands on stolen nuclear material, which he intends to sell to the highest bidder. All the other men in the film are ignorant dolts, obsessed with machines and toys, most of all Hammer. By contrast, the women, including Hammer’s assistant, Velda (Aldrich regular Maxine Cooper) seem to intuit what’s going on. Only the Pandora character, Lily (Gaby Rodgers), likes what she sees: access to great power and influence. In this sense, Lily is the manliest character in the film.

Velma, the ever helpful, ever sexy, ever available secretary (who lives in the office, like Tony Curtis in The Sweet Smell of Success) loves Mike and regrets his stupidity. Without knowing what it is, she calls the box “the great whatsit”.

Perhaps as a result, the mysterious box has been described as a classic “MacGuffin” – or an arbitrary plot device of no real significance (“The 39 steps are …” Bang! “Aaargh!”) – and as a surrealist device like the boxes in Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou and Belle de Jour, and the briefcase in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.

Yet, it is neither of these things. The lead box in Kiss Me Deadly is real, and specific: its contents are glowing, unstable radioactive isotopes, which – when the box is opened – set off an explosive chain reaction that can’t be contained. Instead, the characters are the MacGuffins.

In his excellent book Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster Film, Jack Shadoian points out that in Kiss Me Deadly we know everyone’s full name (even the minor hoodlum played by Jack Elam has a name, Charlie Max). Yet Bezzerides’ excessive detail works in reverse (like the backwards title sequence) – rendering Mike’s familiar, tough-guy world both complex and meaningless. Only the box is real; only the box has meaning. Both Hammer and Soberin say their names don’t matter. Adversaries, they are identical meat puppets, driven by basic animal desires: to dominate, to take, to consume.

In the hands of another director, this might be considered accidental. But there are no accidents in Kiss Me Deadly, no irrelevant scenes. Aldrich returned to the nuclear issue for another film, late in his career: Twilight’s Last Gleaming in 1977.

This, too, was a thriller made of the horror-stuff of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which an American general, played by Burt Lancaster, tries to provoke a nuclear confrontation so as to teach the world – the hard way – of the dangers of atomic war. It’s not a successful film. Aldrich’s powers were fading, and the script is nowhere near as precise or intelligent, but clearly he cared enough about the nuclear threat to return to it a second time.

Made half a century ago, Kiss Me Deadly seems entirely contemporary. The other week, the cops knocked down doors and shot a man in east London, looking for WMD. Like Aldrich’s protagonist, they came up empty-handed, too. But still we’re warned the threat is real. The US government acts as if Mike Hammer were a nation-state, reserving the right of “extraordinary rendition” – torture, Aldrich might call it – to get to the bottom of a mystery they’ve designed.

But is the US really Hammer, the implacable, ignorant detective? Or is it Lily/Pandora, far too fascinated by the power of absolute destruction to slam the lid back on the box?

Hollywood flirted with the stolen-nuclear-material theme again recently, but got it all wrong: The Sum of All Fears lacked tension, was confused, poorly written, and inspired no fear at all. American cinema (likewise its dependent branch, in London) needs another Aldrich, a fearless director who knows what fear is, what questions to ask, and where the WMD are stashed.

Kiss Me Deadly is at the Curzon Soho, London, and selected cinemas nationwide