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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 29, No. 7. 1966.

Films

page 8

Films

New Kramer film outstanding

Stanley Kramer, as a producer, has the ability to hire and coordinate the activities of first-rate directors, writers, actors and expert technicians.

His finished products are usually films of interest and merit. Champion, The Men, High Noon, Death Of A Salesman, The Wild One, Member Of The Wedding, A Child Is Waiting and Invitation To A Gunfighter all come from the Kramer stable—a fine lot of films in anyone's book.

As a director, however, he is a suspect proposition since his own work has ranged from the absurdities of Not As A Stranger to the excellent The, Defiant Ones. He has demon-strated an outstanding ability in at least one respect and that lies in his handling of actors. Witness the performances of Poitier and Curtis in The Defiant Ones, Tracy and March (if they need directing) in Inherit The Wind, and Tracy. Schell and Clift in Judgement At Nuremburg.

This facility is notably demonstrated in his Ship Of Fools, which was screened in Wellington recently. Adapted from Katherine Anne Porter's novel by Abby Mann (a Kramer regular), the film deals with the happenings on board a German passenger ship in 1933. There are travellers of many nationalities and many types, including both Jewish and pro-Nazi Germans.

As many have observed, the situation is a familiar one: put a number of people in a confined environment and observe their behaviour as they react on one another. Personal consequences are on this occasion supplemented, as might be expected, by political ones. The novel (and the script) rather smartly puts knowing words in the mouths of the characters, and allusions to the German situation, the rise of Nazism and the predicament of the Jews, are numerous. One Jew questions. "There are millions of Jews in Germany. What are they going to do, kill us all?" The audience sniggers.

It is. however, the develop-ing personal relationships, especially the affair between the doctor and the Contessa. which give substance to the film and provide its main interest. Kramer's direction is straightforward, which is. perhaps, a good thing, since he has demonstrated in the past that having hit upon an initially interesting technique he proceeds to flog it to death (e.g. the boring, omnipresent elliptical panning shots in Judgement at Nuremburg).

Kramer's straightforward approach, combined with fine Oscar-winning photography competent editing, and appropriate music, works well. He eschews cinematic bril-liancles, being content to milk the dramatic potential for all it is worth. He has succeeded admirably.

The script often sounds like a tract, but this has always been a characteristic of Abby Mann, with his penchant for social significance. The trouble with this emphasis is that it reduces the characters; to mere ciphers—mouthpieces in succeeding rounds of intellectual ping-pong. Despite this drawback. Vivien Leigh, Lee Marvin, Jose Ferrer and Michael Dunn for the most part come across as flesh-and-blood people, and they are ably supported in the minor roles.

Simone Signoret is fine as the contessa bound for exile and there is a quite stunning performance from a teutonic, ravaged Oskar Werner as the ship's doctor. Their love affair emerges as the core of the film and. despite any good intentions Kramer may have had otherwise, they conjure up a magic which is worth all the moralising and socio-political clap-trap put together. It is to Kramer's credit, however, that he has captured on film a relationship of such genuinely moving dimensions.

Welles Revealed

A book has recently come my way entitled "The Cinema of Orson Welles." Written by Peter Cowie, the author of "International Film Guide," and illustrated with stills from a number of films, this excellent little book attempts a survey of his completed films together with comments on Welles as an actor, his uncompleted projects and Wel-lesian characters. There are separate chapters on Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Am-bersons, The Stranger. Lady From Shanghai, Macbeth, Othello, Confidential Report, Touch of Evil, and The Trial, with scenario extracts from Kane and Ambersons

One of the most interesting features of the book is a list of Welles's unrealised film projects, for many of which complete scenarios have actually, been written. The list includes Heart Of Darkness, War And Peace, Crime And Punishment. Henry IV (Pirandello), Cyrano de Bergerac.l Moby Dick, Ulysses, Julius Caesar, Salome, The Pickwick: Papers, The Odyssey and/or The Iliad, and Masquerade. Cowie frequently hints that it has only been lack of finance which has deterred Welles from making more than ten films in the last twenty-five years. (His Chimes At Midnight has just been completed and was screened at this year's Cannes festival.)

Lack of finance has, at any rate, been the chief obstacle to the completion of Don Quixote, a film which Welles has been shooting sporadically since 1955. According to Cowie only "ten minutes remains to be shot, and these, one senses, Welles is almost afraid to do." Welles has remarked elsewhere, however/ that proceeds from The Trial will enable him to complete' the film.

In all probability Don Quixote will turn out to be worth the ten years wait. Cowie comments: "One of the episodes in the film shows Don Quixote in a cinema, rushing to the aid of the heroine, menaced by traitors! in a spectacle, only to split the screen (this is. of course, Welles's interpretation of the: fight with the Moors), in an-other, the 'windmills' of the novel are reincarnated in the form of a power-shovel that sucks Don Quixote down into the mud; in yet another, he defends a bull in the ring. The final episode, as yet incomplete, shows Don Quixote and his squire surviving an atomic cataclysm apparently unharmed."

Also of interest is Cowie's unstinted admiration of The Trial, which he describes as "the one film since Citizen Kane that has been released in the form Welles intended." To those who would complain about the differences in the endings of the novel and the film, Cowie writes: "The final sentence of the book: "'Like a dog!" he said: it was if he meant the shame of it to outlive him' implies a defeatism that Welles cannot accept." Also significant is Welles's remark, when speaking of Othello, "assuming that the film is an art form. I took the line that you can adapt a classic freely and vigorously for the cinema."

The film theorist Siegfried Kracauer has defined the essence of film as being "the redemption of physical reality." Welles, however, makes two interesting comments which reflect his personal vision: "A film is a dream. A dream that is perhaps vulgar stupid, dull and shapeles; if is perhaps a nightmare. But a dream is never an illusion.

"The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which mes-sages reach us from another world, a world that is not ours and that brings us to the heart of a great secret. Here magic begins . . . A film is a ribbon of dreams."

This view approximates that of the great Spanish director Luis Buenuel. who finds a definition of cinema in "poetic mystery."

The most famous French film critic Andre Bazin has said of Welles: "There is in him a curious mixture of barbarism, cunning, childishness and poetic genius." I unre-servedly recommend Cowie's book as a penetrating glimpse of the personality and workings of one of the supreme talents of the cinema.

Rex Benson.