Pantheon movie of the month - LET THERE BE LIGHT (1946)

Paul Thomas Anderson has cited John Huston's post-war documentary, LET THERE BE LIGHT, as a key influence on the themes, style and dialogue of his film, THE MASTER. With that in mind, I hunted downloaded a copy of the restored film from the wonderful people at the US National Film Registry, to see if it would shed any light on that elusive, troubling work.

The movie is an hour-long black and white documentary produced by the US Army Pictorial Services, in 1946, designed to show their troops the "after-care" that the traumatised might receive before re-entering civilian life. The movie was ground-breaking in three respects.  First, it was the first film to show the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder, in an era when that was very imperfectly  understood.  Second, it the filming took place in a segregated hospital on Long Island, in an era when the US Army was still segregated. Thirdly, despite being shot by the director who is most closely associated with the rugged, mythic American Man, it shows a desperately affecting sensitivity to, and respect for, the men, in an era when they might have been written off as flaky or cry-babies, or just plain mad.

It was clearly seen as too ground-breaking. Suppressed by the Army until 1980, as being too honest a portrayal of the damage war can do to men, and therefore "bad for recruitment".

LET THERE BE LIGHT takes the form of group and single interviews with servicemen struggling, like Freddie Quell, with PTSD, as well as fly-on-the-wall footage of classes they attend and treatment they receive.  The movie imposes a redemptive arc on the men, from admission, through drug therapy, hypnosis and eventually to being released rehabilitated.  But viewers know that all is not well. The men are ashamed of their problems, unable to articulate why they're so hurt, and even as we see them sent back to "real life" we know they are ill-equipped to cope.

It's a deeply affecting film. None of the men are as physically broken as Freddie Quell, presumably because the US Army would not have allowed them on film. In fact, what strikes us is how articulate and composed they are - how respectful and trusting in the institution that has maimed them - and indeed how naive they are about how civilian society will treat them.  One particular soldier, an African-American man, speaks calmly and movingly about "breaking out" of the narrow social circle in which he was constrained before the war.  Another soldier has complete belief that any potential employer, by virtue of his having attained the position of being an employer, will be intelligent and sensitive enough to understand his psychological problems.  All of which speaks to a time when people were more polite and more respectful or organised and established power structures.

The influence on THE MASTER is clear. Freddie Quell is shown in early scenes that echo the interviews and treatment in LET THERE BE LIGHT.  He emerges a deeply broken man unable to diagnose let alone cope with his PTSD.  This was as I had expected.  What I found more fascinating was that some of the treatment Freddie receives in The Cause also echoes the US Army's methods in the documentary: hypnotherapy, positive reinforcement, and the talking cure.  Seeing both films together makes Quell's attraction to The Cause somehow more understandable. He has been conditioned by his Army treatment to respond to such direct orders and paternalistic care. He has merely substituted Lancaster Dodd for his Army doctor. It's fascinating and heart-breaking stuff.

LET THERE BE LIGHT is available in a cleaned-up but still woefully scratchy 58 minute version thanks to the fact that it won a place in the Library of Congress' US National Film Board Registry.  (Link above). It can also be found on YouTube. It will also be included on THE MASTER blu-ray and DVD with 20 minutes of previously cut footage.

Pantheon movie of the month - THE KILLERS

THE KILLERS is a great film noir, originally released in 1946, and back on release as part of the British Film Institute's Burt Lancaster retrospective. It's now seen as the film that launched Lancaster's career, and one of the best examples of Ava Gardner's explosive screen prescence.

The movie opens with a prologue taken from an Ernest Hemingway short story. Two assassins enter a simple diner in a small town and menace the owner, his chef and an innocent bystander. They're waiting for a garage mechanic who evidently had a previous life running with wrong crowd. Echoes of HISTORY OF VIOLENCE abound. It becomes apparent that the mechanic won't be coming in and the assassins leave. The bystander then runs through the town of picket fences to warn him. It's an exhilerating scene but culminates in an outstandingly dark, brooding scene in a boarding house. The friend bursts into the mechanic's room. He's lying on his bed, his face entirely in shadow. With a morbid passivity, he thanks his friend for coming, sends him away and wait to die. Echoes of JESSE JAMES offering his back to the coward ROBERT FORD.

The rest of the movie is, like that film, a "whydunnit", penned by Anthony Veillor and John Huston. Why did the mechanic, known as the Swede, aka Ole Andersen aka Robert Lund, refuse to run? Why didn't he want to live? The answers will be uncovered by an insurance investigator played by Edmond O'Brien. And really, this is his film in terms of screen time. In a series of CITIZEN KANE style flashbacks, he'll interview people who knew the Swede and recreate his motives.

Burt Lancaster is a charismatic presence but is only ever refracted in other people's memories. He's the boxer, forced onto the sidelines by an injury and a brutally capitalistic manager. He's the dumb lug patsy hooked by Ava Gardner's gangster's moll - so obvious and vulnerable it's painful to watch. He's the fall guy for her crime, and even upon release, when she's left him for another man, he goes along with a heist in order to be close to her. Finally, he's a broken man, violent with rage, intent on self-harm.

The supporting cast is absolutely cracking and the story hangs together in a way that a Raymond Chandler novel never does. The feel of the movie is cool and detached, maybe because it's told through the eyes of the dispassionate insurance man. All the time, this tragic love story is reduced to an irrelevance - almost daring the audience to feel involved. The insurance boss tells the investigator that all he's achieved in solving the mystery is to lower the insurance premium in 1947 by a fraction of a cent. Such is the worth of The Swede. Behind the camera, we get a great orchestral score by Miklos Rozsa and superb cinematography from Woody Bredell. There's a lot of use of crane shots and characters on different levels of a building - allowing interesting perspectives and depth of vision. The continuous crane shot of the heist is particularly memorable.

It all adds up to a great film noir, not so much because of Lancaster - although he's great in it - but because of Robert Siodmak's superb ensemble cast and bleak vision.

THE KILLERS was originally released in 1946 - the year of BRIEF ENCOUNTERS, NOTORIOUS and IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE. It was nominated for Oscars for Best Director, Best Editor (Arthur Hilton), Best Score (Miklos Rozsa) and Best Screenplay (Anthony Veiller) but lost out not to any of these great films but to the Myrna Loy WW2 romance, THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES! THE KILLERS is currently playing at the BFI Southbank as part of the Burt Lancaster retrospective, and is widely available on DVD.

THE DEAD - simple, lyrical, superb

THE DEAD is a beautiful romantic period drama, based faithfully on a short story by James Joyce. It was directed by the cinematic great John Huston at the end of his life, scripted by his son Tony and starred his daughter Angelica supported by a cast of Irish thespians.

The story is set in Ireland in 1904. Two genteel ladies are giving a Christmas party at their house. They showcase their pupils' musical talents and worry about their cousin Freddy's inability to keep off the booze. An old man reads a traditional Irish poem about love betrayed. The conversation drifts from politics to religion to temperance and the first half of the short, eighty-five minute film is simply a charming depiction of intimate family life in the era. But our attention is caught by Angelica Huston playing Gretta Conroy and her husband Gabriel. Returning to their hotel after the party, Gretta is prompted to tell her husband of a young boy who loved her passionately and fatally. It is a deeply moving confession - or rather, reflection - and her husband's reaction contains all the slow-burning drama that one could hope for.

The great achievement of John Huston is in letting the novella breathe, rather than trussing it up for the modern audience. He sticks firmly to the 1904 setting and rarely ventures beyond the drawing room, the hallway and the hotel room except in a stunning scene of snow falling at the end. The camera movement is unintrusive, allowing us to appreciate the setting, the costumes and the incidental details of family life. As such, the quite breathtaking revelations in the second part of the film seem all the more profound.

At first, THE DEAD rather reminded me of the recent release, GABRIELLE. Both are essentially intimate chamber dramas featuring a wife's confession to her husband and his reaction to it. Both are set in turn of the twentieth century cities and portray the social lives of the middle classes. But here the similarities end. Where Chereau uses deliberately jarring visual techniques, Huston goes for realism. Where Chereau's couple are brutally cruel and the epiphanies are hard won, THE DEAD is full of gentle, blameless longing. GABRIELLE is a movie about thwarted passion and social compromise: THE DEAD is lyrical, tender and full of longing. It is a gentler, equally affecting, and superb film.

THE DEAD was originally released in 1987. It is now on limited re-release in the UK.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE - heist-noir "classic" has weathered badly

The conventional wisdom seems to be that John Huston's 1950 noir-heist movie, THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, is a pantheon movie. Not only a classic, it seems to inspire reviewers to bring out the most florid superlatives and tortured metaphors. The BBC revierer calls it "a biting, bitter espresso of a movie"; Variety praises its "ironic realism"; in The Guardian, Andrew Pulver claims it is "a Brechtian ode to the urban wasteland"; Philip French calls it "possibly the greatest heist thriller ever." By contrast, Bina007 - a firm fan of film-noir, heist movies AND John Huston, declares THE ASPHALT JUNGLE more boring than a very boring thing. To put this in perspective, I like, nay, love, cricket, possibly the most boring sport ever invented, so I know whereof I speak.

Now, THE ASHPHALT JUNGLE is not a bad film. In fact, it's really well-made. It's an intelligent, talky movie, that rejects glamour and unrealistic capers for a gritty, crime procedural. Cinematic genius, John Huston, crafts a tight script full of twists, turns, double-crosses and snappy one-liners from the novel by W.R.Burnett (the guy behind the screenplay for THE GREAT ESCAPE.) The really NEW thing about the film when it was first released was that it dared to tell a story about criminals who looked and acted like your average boring old middle-aged men and who lived in depressingly ordinary dingy apartments. The movie DARED to just spend time with differing sets of people just sitting around talking in dingy rooms.

To that end, it cast character actors rather than big Hollywood stars of the Bogart variety. The movie stars Sam Jaffe (sadly best known for being a victim of McCarthy's Red Lists) as a criminal master-mind called Doc Erwin Riedenschneider. (Now that's a Gene Wilder character waiting to happen!) The Doc may look like just another sad old man, but he's planning one last audacious jewel heist before retiring to Mexico where he can fondle pretty young women. He assembles a squad of similarly anonymous-looking men to pull off the heist - a fence, a safe-cracker, some muscle...Louis Calhern plays the fence, Alonzo Emerich - an old man with a sinister relationship to his "niece" - a cameo debut for Marilyn Monroe. The muscle is provided by an improbably named man called Dix Handley. Dix is played by Sterling Hayden, probably best known to modern viewers as General Jack D. Ripper, the man who looks scarily like Dubya and was petrified that Communists were after his precious bodily fluids in DR STRANGELOVE.

The actors are all fine as is the editing (George Boehmer and deceptively simple, austere black and white photography by Harold Rosson. What little we hear of the orchestral score by Miklós Rózsa is also fine, but for the most part the realistic tone of the movie is maintained by having no formal score - just "natural" sound effects.

The problem is that everything is fine but pedestrian. To modern eyes and ears what little action there is is spread too thin and the supposedly ground-breaking psychological insights look a little out-dated in the wake of movies such as THE GODFATHER and INFERNAL AFFAIRS. Even the twists and turns look quaint compared to THE USUAL SUSPECTS - a movie that was evidently heavily influenced by THE ASPHALT JUNGLE. And this brings me to the rub. If you're an hnest punter looking for a good night out, you probably won't enjoy THE ASPHALT JUNGLE. It's just too slow and too - well - obvious in its plotting - for jaded, modern viewers. Fans of film history aside, the movie has aged too badly to hold the general audience's interest. Its ordinariness was once its novelty - now it is its failing.

THE ASPHALT JUNGLE was originally released in 1950. It is currently on re-release in the UK. The movie is also available on DVD but be careful you're not getting the colourised version - unless of course you're delusional and actually WANT the colourised version.