Noir City 9 shines spotlight on cinematic darkness

The American roots of film noir begin with the crime fiction that emerged during the 1930s from the pens of writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and multitudes of lesser-known talents. In the wake of the Great Depression, these pulp authors reshaped the literary landscape with dark, cynical, morally ambivalent tales of crime, sex and vice — stories steeped in shadowy imagery, tough talk, and a hardscrabble hyper-realism that portrayed a brutal, hostile world. There were no heroes, only anti-heroes — self-preserving pragmatists whose cynicism was born of dashed hopes and faded ideals.

It was only a matter of time before these stories infiltrated Hollywood, merging with the stark, shadowy imagery of German Expressionism, which crossed the Atlantic along with the refugees who left Germany just ahead of Hitler's advancing stormtroopers. And thus a bold and distinctly downbeat genre was born, a German-American hybrid that introduced a stock of melodramatic characters: the dangerous and brooding urban gangster-villain; the tormented innocent caught up in nefarious circumstances beyond his control or comprehension; the icy, diabolical femme fatale; and an array of edgy protagonists ranging from the introspective, tormented, world-weary anti-hero to the twitchy, slippery, would-be hero, the third-rate, small-time hood looking to get ahead in a hostile world for which he is ill-equipped.

Noir City, the annual film festival that celebrates these dark cinematic gems and presents them on the big screen in all their tawdry glory, returns to San Francisco's Castro Theater this Friday with another 10-day program of dames, destruction and depravity. The festival is full of rarities; in fact, most of films in this year's program are not available on DVD.

The festival features 24 films, from A-list masterpieces to B-movie programmers, and kicks off at 7:30 p.m. Friday with Robert Taylor and Audrey Totter in Curtis Bernhardt's High Wall (1947), presented in a new 35-mm print preserved by the Film Noir Foundation. The double feature continues with Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), a Peter Lorre film that some consider the first American noir.

Highlights include two classics from George Cukor: Gaslight (1944), starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, and A Double Life, with Ronald Colman's Oscar-winning performance as a Broadway actor slipping into madness; Strangers in the Night (1944), just one of director Anthony Mann's many great films; Marilyn Monroe as a mentally unstable babysitter who seduces Richard Widmark in Don't Bother to Knock (1952); Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), playing the role created by Agnes Moorhead in the original radio production that was one of the most famous broadcasts from that medium's golden age; and what noir festival would be complete without at least one Humphrey Bogart film? This year, it's The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), in which Bogart plays a mentally unhinged painter with murderous designs on his wife — Stanwyck again.

But the festival's best shows are often the lesser-known gems, pictures large and small that have, for one reason or another, slipped into semi-obscurity over the years.

Olivia de Havilland turns in two strong performances The Dark Mirror (1946), portraying identical twins caught up in a murder investigation. A psychologist aids in unravelling the crime by subjecting the sisters to the usual round of Rorschach tests, and though de Havilland ably delineates the sweet, kindly sister from the jealous and possibly dangerous one, director Robert Siodmak takes pity on the audience by giving the girls personalized necklaces that spell out their names in bold letters — it's as though Siodmak was taking advice from a bad editorial cartoonist.

Woman on the Beach (1947) was directed by the great Jean Renoir, yet the film was drastically cut before its release. Still, it's a strong enough little film, with Robert Ryan as the lovestruck innocent caught in the grip of seductress Joan Bennet. Like an apparition, she appears on the beach and before long Ryan has stepped into the role of savior, trying to free the distressed damsel from the clutches of her husband, an aging painter who has lost his sight, his muse, and, we're left to assume, his virility.

Joan Bennett appears again in a film by another festival regular, director Fritz Lang, whose German films exerted a strong influence on noir. In America, Lang's vision was curtailed, sometimes for the better, but oftentimes for the worse. With Secret Beyond the Door (1948), Lang had simply lost his mojo, spinning a nonsense tale of psychoanalytic babble while hoping his visual flair would carry the day. It didn't, but it's still an entertaining affair, with Bennet struggling to unravel the mysteries of Michael Redgrave's tormented psyche. The film will be presented in a new print restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, a project funded by Martin Scorcese's Film Foundation.

Noir City 9. Through Jan 30 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. For more information see www.noircity.com or www.thecastrotheatre.com.

Photo: Olivia de Havilland portrays identical twins caught in a murder investigation in Robert Siodmak's The Dark Mirror (1946).

Deconstructing Hef

Haven't we seen enough of Hugh Hefner in his smoking robe and pajamas? Hasn't it been a couple of decades since we'd seen enough? Well, perhaps we can take one last look. His heyday may be long gone, his image and impact reduced by self-caricature and the sort of privilege that allows the wealthy to drift into irrevelance and senility with all their illusions intact; but whatever your take on the man, his mission and his achievements, Hefner has had a significant impact on American culture.

Brigitte Berman's new documentary, Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel, puts these achievements into context, challenging our preconceived notions of a man who has spent nearly 60 years battling the government, the religious right and outraged feminists in his efforts to push us toward "a healthier attitude toward sex." The film opens Friday, Aug. 20 at Landmark's Lumiere Theater in San Francisco and at Shattuck Cinemas in downtown Berkeley.

But sex is only one aspect of Hefner's career on the public stage. He fought for civil rights, and not merely as a celebrity endorser; he put his money and reputation on the line in defense of the First Amendment; he spoke out against the Vietnam War. In the '50s, '60s and '70s, Hefner never shied away from fighting for the causes he believed in. Newsman Mike Wallace didn't particularly like Hefner when he first interviewed him for 60 Minutes, and he didn't find Hefner's arguments convincing. But years later, Wallace did come to like Hefner, and said that, more than that, he trusted him; for Hefner, whether you agreed with him or not, was always honest and upfront with his beliefs.

Hugh Hefner's improbable journey began when, as a young family man, he came to realize that he was not required to simply live out the model provided by his parents. Seeking an outlet for his creative talents as a writer and cartoonist, he began planning a men's magazine. It would be an intelligent magazine with a stable of talented writers and artists providing provocative essays, literary fiction, sharp cartoons and plenty of humor. But the most daring premise of his venture was its frank sexuality. Hefner would challenge accepted notions of sexual propriety and he would challenge sexually repressive laws, making the claim that, if those laws were enforced, most of the population would face prison sentences of at least five years. His magazine would would air out the sexual taboos of the 1950s with the radical idea that, not only was sex a natural and very important aspect of life, but that women liked it, too.

The first Playboy centerfold was a long rumored but rarely seen nude photo of Marilyn Monroe that Hefner tracked down. Soon Hefner would move from purchasing photos of models and would further explicate his view of sex by staging his own photo sessions, seeking amateur girl-next-door types, presenting sex as common, healthy, fun — even pure in a slightly prurient way.

The magazine courted controversy from the beginning, and Hefner took on his opponents without hesitation, fighting his battles in editorials, in other media, and in the courts. Circulation climbed quickly; within a few years Playboy surpassed Esquire by selling 700,000 copies a month. In time that number would reach 2 million.

Soon Playboy became a high-profile brand and the empire expanded to include a syndicated television show, in which Hefner showcased artists, musicians and intellectuals. His willingness to bring in black guests, including mixed-race vocal groups, thrust him into the civil rights debate, as did his support for Lenny Bruce, whom Hefner provided with legal counsel when the comedian was arrested for obscenity. When Hefner learned that the owners of his Playboy nightclub franchises in the South were, in accordance with discriminatory state laws, refusing to admit black customers or book black performers, he bought the clubs back and ran them himself, defying the law by booking controversial comedian Dick Gregory. As Gregory put it, the white attitude toward black entertainers at the time was, "You can sing to me, nigger, but you can't talk."

Feminists considered these causes and the literary content of his magazine a sort of front, a clever ploy to raise the stature of the magazine and to legitimize Hefner's real vocation: pornography. They called him on the inherent misogyny of the presentation of the girl next door as a closeted wild animal, waiting to spring into action at the snap of a man's fingers; they criticized his promotion of an unattainable physical ideal that few women could emulate; they claimed that he treated women as commodities, as mere fodder for male fantasy, and that the practice was harmful to men as well as women.

The film includes a confrontation with critics on the Dick Cavett Show during which Hefner did not have an answer for these allegations. In a telling moment, he refers to his two feminist critics as girls, making his blind spot apparent: In Hefner's eyes, he's no sexist, no misogynist; he loves girls. Women, however, a more complex proposition.

It's a curious mindset that can't see the problematic nature of Hefner's relations with, and presentations of, women. The glamor of the parties at the Playboy mansion, where Hefner supplied his celebrity friends with wine, food and beautiful women, doesn't conceal his role as a sort of high-society pimp. He fails to recognize the possibility that women are drawn to him not out of love or physical attraction, but because of his money and power and star-making potential, his ability to launch a young woman on a career path as he did Jenny McCarthy, Shannon Tweed and Pamela Anderson. His proclamations of sexual honesty and freedom belie the fact that his view of sex is not only relentlessly male-centric but blatantly adolescent. Thus his provocative centerfolds spurred a national debate while simultaneously retarding it; they put sex center-stage but it was a rather limited view of sex, and when that point was made, Hefner and Playboy were ill-prepared for the debate that followed.

In the Reagan years, Playboy was beset by a boycott campaign that pressured convenience stores to drop the magazine, leading to significant losses in circulation which it never recovered. The nightclubs closed; a Playmate was murdered; and Hefner suffered a stroke. His brush with death changed his outlook and he tried marriage and family life again; but once that marriage failed, he returned to his swinging ways with a vengeance, overcompensating with polygamous relationships with a bevy of young, buxom blondes.

Dr. Ruth Westheimer, for years a friend, supporter and admirer of Hefner, says she no longer mentions his name when debating issues of sexual freedom; he mixed up his personal life with his mission, she says, so that the self-caricature of his later years has undermined his credibility and the merits of his arguments — people just don't take him seriously anymore. Other friends interviewed in the film say that love is his "rosebud," the elusive childhood longing that motivates the man.

So if your image of Hefner is a doddering old fool drifting into senility with a bleach-blonde silicon doll on each arm, his lascivious grin masking the emptiness inside as his improbably buoyant companions serve as substitutes for love ... well, fair enough. But it's the extremist who push the limits, who forges the debate and pushes us toward progress. Hefner established the other end of the spectrum; we may not travel even half the distance across that spectrum, but at least we know the limits, allowing us to better define ourselves and our place on the continuum. Hefner is happy to help people to define their values, even if they only define them in opposition to his own.

Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel

124 minutes. Not rated. Directed by Brigitte Berman. Featuring Hugh Hefner, Jim Brown, Gene Simmons, Jenny McCarthy, Mike Wallace, Dick Gregory, Reverend Jesse Jackson, Tony Bennett, James Caan, Joan Baez, David Steinberg, George Lucas, Bill Maher, Pete Seeger. www.hughhefnerplayboyactivistrebel.com.

Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr.

In 1928, Buster Keaton was wrapping up an astounding decade of independent filmmaking, seemingly with another decade or two stretched out before him. But circumstances conspired to bring his remarkable string of sterling comedies to a premature end. During production on his tenth feature film, Steamboat Bill, Jr., Keaton's marriage ended in bitter divorce and Joseph Schenk, Keaton's producer and brother-in-law, sold his contract to MGM, a move that would render silent comedy's most innovative auteur a mere shift worker in Hollywood's largest cinema assembly line. And with the talkies just around the corner, it's no wonder that Keaton's loss of personal and professional autonomy should lead to a fierce bout of alcoholism and steep career decline.

The great clown's depression is on clear display in Steamboat Bill's — and indeed the silent era's — most spectacular stunt, in which Buster stands motionless as gale-force winds bring a thousand-pound wall crashing down around him, the frame of a second-floor window passing neatly over his head and around his shoulders, leaving him stunned but unscathed. Keaton's crew tried to dissuade him from performing the stunt; the photographer cranked the camera with his eyes averted, and the co-director refused to take part at all, taking refuge in a nearby tent while praying for Keaton's soul.

Keaton's career had reached an artistic if not commercial peak a couple of years earlier with The General, his Civil War comedy masterpiece. It was an expensive production that made relatively little profit and drew mixed reviews, prompting Schenk to require Keaton to make a markedly less ambitious follow-up. Keaton kept costs down on his next few films, including Steamboat Bill, saving his money for a lavish finish in which a hurricane wreaks havoc on River Junction. It's a remarkable sequence of daring stunts and comedic destruction, providing a climactic conclusion to Keaton's independent career, one that would, unfortunately, foreshadow the stormy times that lay ahead for him.

1928. 70 minutes. $29.95. www.kino.com.

Noir City Brings Cinema’s Dark Side to the Castro

An “eternal juvenile” no more, Dick Powell finally broke free of the battery of baby-faced roles he endured in a seemingly endless series of bright-eyed 1930s Warner Bros. musicals. With middle age fast approaching, Powell struggled to carve out a new identity for himself, jumping ship from one studio to another in search of a new career path.

Eventually he succeeded. Two examples of Dick Powell born again will screen this weekend as part of Noir City, the annual film noir festival at San Francisco’s Castro Theater. This year’s theme is “Lust and Larceny” and there is plenty of both throughout the 10-day series, which kicks off Friday with Pitfall, featuring Powell and Lizabeth Scott, and continues through Jan. 31. Powell appears again in Cry Danger, showing Saturday, Jan. 23.

In an effort to shed his boyish Warner Bros. image, Powell bought out his contract and signed with Paramount, only to bolt again when the studio denied him the lead in Double Indemnity. Soon enough Powell signed with RKO, and landed the plum role of shamus Philip Marlowe in the Raymond Chandler adaptation Murder My Sweet.

This breakthrough role was followed by more in the same vein: dark, hard-bitten dramas with a world-weary edge, a distinctly American genre to which French critics would ultimately give the name. Powell parlayed his second wave of cinematic success into a couple of radio gigs as well, including one of his signature characters, the private detective Richard Diamond. Powell was even secure enough by this point to include a nod to his earlier persona, finishing each episode by crooning a tune to his paramour.

It was at this time that Powell made one of his best, but least-known films, Cry Danger. Powell plays a sardonic, embittered ex-con, determined after five years in the pen to set a few things straight. Dry, drunken, down-on-his-luck Richard Erdman is along for the ride as a battle-scarred ex-Marine angling for a payday as reward for getting Powell out of prison.

Cry Danger showed at Noir City a couple of years ago, and though it was a murky 16-millimeter print—the only print available at the time—it was a crowd-pleaser. The evening was made all the more entertaining by the presence of Richard Erdman, who proved himself every bit the charismatic wisecracker even in his 80s. This year, the film screens in a brand-new 35-millimeter print, a rare opportunity to see this acerbic crime classic in peak condition.

In addition to Powell, this year’s program pays tribute to festival favorite Richard Widmark with a Jan. 29 double feature. Slattery’s Hurricane shows Widmark in one of his early leading roles, firmly

establishing the persona that would sustain him through several classics of the genre: tough, jaded, maybe a bit sleazy, but with a kind of weary decency waiting to shine through. Second on the bill is the Samuel Fuller noir masterpiece Pickup On South Street, with Widmark as an underworld conman, a pick-pocket who lives by his wits. Widmark seduces Jean Peters and plays the commies and the feds against each other while knocking back beers chilled in the icy waters beneath his shabby dockside shack.

The festival is full of rarities, films not available on DVD, many not available even on VHS. Another seldom-seen gem is Human Desire, one of director Fritz Lang’s better American films. Adapted from Emile Zola’s novel La Bete Humaine, Human Desire is a melodrama of love, lust and betrayal amid the freightyards of Philadelphia. Glen Ford plays a soldier just back from the Korean War who wants nothing more than to settle back into his life as a railroad engineer, with time to fish, catch a movie, or even step out with a nice girl, if he can find one. What he finds however is Vicky, played by perennial film noir femme fatale Gloria Grahame, whose marriage to Broderick Crawford is teetering on the edge of a spectacular collapse.

Lang had a checkered career in Hollywood, with neither the resources nor the autonomy he enjoyed in his pre-war German career. But Human Desire shows him in fine form, employing the intelligence and artistry that characterized his silent and early sound-era masterpieces. Long stretches pass artfully without dialogue, and the sights and sounds of trains, railroad tracks and freightyards are used to excellent effect, keeping the drama taut while filling the screen with compelling imagery.

Other highlights of the festival include Larceny, a dizzying melodrama of twists and turns centering around greed, corruption, and of course, dangerous dames; Marilyn Monroe in Niagara and Asphalt Jungle; A Place in the Sun, an adaptation of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift; Escape in the Fog, in which a nurse is haunted by a dream of a murder committed on the Golden Gate Bridge; and an evening entitled “Bad Girls of Film Noir,” featuring “poor man’s Marilyn Monroe” Cleo Moore in a double bill of One Girl’s Confession and Women’s Prison.

Noir City

Friday, Jan 22 through Sunday, Jan 31 at the Castro Theater, San Francisco. www.noircity.com.

Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles

Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles (1961) covers one night in the lives of young Native Americans living in Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill district. Mackenzie began interviewing a group of Indians in Los Angeles in 1956 and secured their support in producing an independent film that would provide a realistic portrayal of their community’s daily life. The film was completed in 1961 but has rarely been seen until its restoration by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and its subsequent theatrical release by Milestone.

The Exiles follows a group of young Native American men as they essentially forsake their women for a night on the town, meeting up with friends at bars, cavorting with other women, venturing into the hills for drinking, drumming and fighting. They make their way along a circuit of Indian hangouts, small oases in a white man’s city where they can be together and, hopefully, left alone to be themselves. Meanwhile, a lonely wife goes to the movies and finally returns to the home of a friend so that she doesn’t have to sleep alone. In the morning she is able to watch as her husband and his friends finally stumble home drunk through the streets of Bunker Hill.

The rough, gritty, low-budget aesthetic recalls Shadows, John Cassavetes’ first film, set in New York. Both films feel loose and improvised, giving the impression of an authentic depiction of a place and time. And both focus attention on the cities themselves, using the urban landscapes as contexts for the lives of the characters, while also providing a sort of snapshot of a city at a particular point in time.

Milestone is a small company that picks and chooses its material, often sinking much of the company’s resources into a single theatrical and DVD release. The company is responsible for making some rare and important films available to the movie-going public, including I Am Cuba and Killer of Sheep—an impressive streak of significant releases that continues with The Exiles.

72 minutes. $29.95. www.exilesfilm.com. www.milestonefilms.com.

New Releases From Kino Appeal to the Cinephile

Avant-Garde 3 (1922-1955)

Kino has released the third in its series of avant-garde films, this newest editi

on containing 20 films produced between 1922 and 1955. These collections feature rare but valuable films that demonstrate the outer reaches of cinema, a seemingly boundless medium in the hands of artists making films with no consideration for the commercial market—art for art’s sake. Avant-Garde 3 draws from the collections of Raymond Rohauer and George Eastman House in an effort “to illuminate the degree to which cinema’s evolution has been influenced by those filmmakers who occupy its periphery.”

In addition to its historical value, Avant-Garde 3, like its predecessors, provides a fascinating, eccentric and eclectic viewing experience. The films range in length from two minutes to 65 minutes and in subject matter from Edgar Allan Poe adaptations to home movies.

$29.95. www.kino.com.

How to be a Woman and How to be a Man (1950s)

A series of 1950s short educational films provides an instructive glance at who we once were and what we thought our children should be—and how they should be taught what they should be.

These films from Kino can be seen in several ways. At the simplest level, they’re entertaining, both on their own merits and as a time capsule of film production techniques and acting styles. But one cannot help but ask questions

as well. For instance, do these films represent a progressive embrace of a new medium, designed to tackle tough topics in a way teacher-student and parent-child interactions could not? Or do they mark the beginning of the abnegation of these duties, of a tendency to let the screen—first film and later television—to impart the lessons of adulthood? It’s a strange lesson indeed, to remove person-to-person contact from instruction in person-to-person

conduct.

$19.95 each. www.kino.com.

Gaumont Treasures 1897–1913

Kino has released another in its series of historical film collections. Following on such impressive and important releases as The Movies Begin and the Thomas Edison collection, the company has put together a

three-disc set called Gaumont Treasures 1897–1913, compiling more than 75 films from the early French studi

o, the Gaumont Film Company.

Each disc is devoted to one of Gaumont’s esteemed artistic directors. Disc one features the work of Alice Guy, whose contribution to the evolution of the art form places her among the ranks of Edwin Porter and her fellow countrymen George Melies and the Lumiere Brothers. The 60 films on this disc range in length from a few seconds to two and three reels and include early experiments in sound and hand-coloring.

Disc two features the work of Louis Feuillade, best known for Les Vampires and as an early mentor to Abel Gance. Though Feuillade made nearly 800 films for Gaumont, relatively few survive. This collection of 13 films includes his work in a range of genres, including comedy, tragedy, fantasy, social commentary and historical epic.

Disc three showcases the work of Leonce Perret, a man who had a profound impact on the advancement of French cinema but whose work is largely unknown in the United States. This set contains two films, the 43-minute Mystery of the Rocks of Kador, and the 124-minute Child of Paris, in which Perret demonstrated a mastery of the form that critic Georges Sadoul claimed was more expert and refined than that of the celebrated D.W. Griffith.

$79.95. www.kino.com.

The Films of William Klein at Pacific Film Archive

American expatriate filmmaker William Klein’s work shows a wide and eclectic range. He started as a photographer before making his way into motion pictures, both fiction and nonfiction.

Pacific Film Archive is presenting a retrospective of his work, “Top Bill: The Films of William Klein,” starting Friday and running through Oct. 11.

Klein is perhaps best known in the mainstream film world for his documentary, Muhammad Ali, the Greatest (1974), which screens Friday night at 6:30 p.m., and for The Little Richard Story (1980), showing Sept. 24.

But most of Klein’s work has been in a more avant-garde vein. His first fiction film, Who Are You, Polly Magoo? (1966), shows Saturday at 8:40 p.m. and follows the seemingly meteoric rise of a young Brooklyn-born model, an average freckle-faced girl who ascends to the top of the European fashion world. Klein had done time in that world as a fashion photographer, and here he turns his camera around to reveal a blistering portrait of a vacuous, image-obsessed culture. Polly is essentially what she has always been, a simple girl, youthful, callow and naive, but through the magic of makeup, wigs and a loving lens she is transformed into a goddess, an icon, a harbinger of a youth movement that she is only dimly aware of and that may not really exist anyway.

Klein captures the phenomenon from all angles, from the media-created cultural movement that Polly is said to represent, to the political ramifications of that cultural shift, and the simpler, more primal level of love and sex and fantasy, as Polly is essentially reduced to a static, seamless sex object, a blank slate of penetrating gazes, parted lips and kinky costumes upon which men can project their seediest desires.

Klein followed with more stinging satires, including Mr. Freedom (1969), showing Sept. 19, and The Model Couple (1977), screening Oct. 10.

The Rough-Hewn Art of John Cassavetes

John Cassavetes’ Shadows speeds and skips along like its jazz score, with the hip, street-savvy spirit of structured improvisation. Images and plot points are strung together like loose, individual notes that gradually cohere into rhythm and melody and refrain. 

Criterion has released restored prints of Shadows (1959) and Faces (1968) in stand-alone editions. The two films were previously available only as part of a larger box set of Cassavetes’ films. 

Shadows (1959), Cassavetes’ first film as a director, was an experimental, anti-Hollywood film. Shot on the cheap on Actors’ Studio sets and on location in the streets of New York, the film essentially launched the American independent film movement with its gritty, do-it-yourself aesthetic. 

With its low-budget production values—rough-hewn, high-contrast photography and an often out-of-sync soundtrack—the film was surely a challenge to the eyes and ears of the era’s moviegoers. And really, it still is.Shadows is unapologetically ragged, by both design and necessity, it’s homemade aesthetic lending it an aura of authenticity in comparison with the slick Hollywood entertainments in which Cassavetes the actor labored to finance the work of Cassavetes the director. 

Cassavetes was dissatisfied with his first completed version. It was too loose, too fractured, so he rewrote and re-shot portions of the film and followed with a second version that gave greater shape to the work. 

The story concerns the relationships and activities of a trio of African-American siblings, touching on many issues, from family to friendship to love to race. 

In a sense, the film represents a return to the earliest days of the motion picture, when filmmakers shot on location, under the open sun and on open terrain—a time when budgets were small and equipment more primitive. With Shadows, Cassavetes recaptured the spirit of adventure that suffuses the work of cinema’s pioneers. Thus, what is often cited as the birth of independent cinema is more akin to a rebirth—one of many that the art form has undergone and continues to undergo, as each generation manages to find its own way of stripping away the layers of artifice to delve deeper into the medium, to rediscover the simple, elemental power of what is still essentially the art of photographing the human face. 

Criterion. $29.95 each. www.criterion.com. 

Newspaper Noir: San Francisco's Noir City 7

The struggle of World War II and the triumph of its conclusion brought to the silver screen a vision of a nation bold and patriotic, wholesome and optimistic. From propaganda films to brassy celebratory musicals, Hollywood’s program of A-list releases rolled out a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked presentation of Norman Rockwell’s America.

But there was another side to the story.

Not everyone could forget the horrors of war, could ignore the blood and mud stains of battle, could wipe away the imagery of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. Many found it impossible to simply lay down their weapons and retire to the suburbs; for them the terror of the war lingered, and in Hollywood that creeping malaise manifested itself in the form of an anxious, fearful and pessimistic cinema—the stuff of B movies.

More than a decade later the French would give a name to it: film noir. But in America, during the genre’s heyday of the 1940s and ’50s, it had no name. Crime dramas, they were simply called, but it went deeper than that. The urban angst that was allowed no expression in the can-do spirit of mainstream film gave rise to a genre that went beyond mere crime in the depiction of a pervasive moral corruption and a spiraling spiritual decay. Living in the shadow of the Holocaust and under the cloud of imminent nuclear annihilation, there were, as William Faulkner once said, no longer problems of the spirit but only the question: When will I be blown up?

Noir City, the San Francisco film festival that celebrates this era of cinematic darkness, perversity and mayhem, presents its annual 10-day orgy of angst beginning this Friday at the Castro Theater. The festival screens a double bill every day through Feb. 1.

The stark, gloomy, high-contrast imagery of noir came from overseas, carried across the Atlantic by filmmakers who left Germany just ahead of Hitler’s stormtroopers. The expressionism of 1920s and ’30s German cinema, replete with its shadows, darkness, and undercurrents of psychic decay, infiltrated the Hollywood studio system and merged with the American gangster genre of tough-talking wise guys inspired by the pulp fiction of the 1930s. This hybrid genre introduced a stock of dramatic characters: the dangerous and brooding urban gangster-villain; the tormented innocent caught up in nefarious circumstances beyond his control or comprehension; the icy, diabolical femme fatale; and an array of edgy protagonists ranging from the introspective, world-weary anti-hero—think Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep—to the twitchy, slippery, would-be hero, the third-rate, small-time hood looking to get ahead in a hostile world for which he is ill-equipped—think Richard Widmark in Night and the City.

Eventually the netherworld of noir infiltrated the A list, its blackness spreading like spilled ink on porous newsprint. Billy Wilder, one of the many European refugees who worked in the genre, perfected it with the star-studded Double Indemnity (1944), and the style became so prevalent and nearly respectable that only a few years later, in 1950, Wilder saw fit to take it down a peg, satirizing noir and Hollywood itself with impish glee in Sunset Boulevard.

Noir City impresario Eddie Muller has crafted another program of classics and rarities, cleverly centered for maximum publicity on a theme guaranteed to bring him plenty of ink: “Newspaper Noir.” For with newspapers themselves currently immersed in their own noirish melodrama—jobs on the line and the fate of the medium in doubt—what film critic could resist a chance to wallow in that uncertainty by delving into Muller’s festival of fear and loathing?

For beleaguered journalists, the pleasures are many, beginning with the temptation to indulge in the nostalgic fantasy of the old-school newspaperman, a gumshoe reporter gazing skeptically from beneath the brim of a jaunty fedora, coldly examining the facts through the drifting smoke of an angled cigarette. No white-collar J-school grad, he; his sleepless nights are spent roaming rain-soaked streets and decadent nightclubs, trash-strewn alleys and cut-rate motels—places where anything can happen, and often has, just before he arrives. But enough of romance; the flip side of this coin is a dose of hard-boiled reality served with a dash of existentialist nightmare, as the modern-day journalist is more akin to Widmark than Bogart—cowering, doomed and anxiety-ridden, forever on the run from controlling forces poised to dispense a fate worse than a pink slip.

The festival begins with the former. Deadline USA (1952) is a bold and elegiac story of old-school journalistic integrity. Editor Bogart battles the avarice and ignorance that leads two spoiled and spiteful heiresses to put his paper on the block, and worse still, to sell it to an unworthy, scandal-mongering competitor who doubtless intends to bolster his own tawdry tabloid by closing down the competition. It’s a familiar story here in the Bay Area as the MediaNews chain has gobbled up a string of once-proud papers, large and small, to encircle the metropolis with a newspaper empire that consolidates its profits in Denver by cutting local staff and starving its newspapers of news. As rumors circulate about an impending MediaNews takeover of the only remaining Bay Area prize, the ailing San Francisco Chronicle, and as publicly traded corporations continue to run the nation's smaller independents out of business, Deadline USA only gains in relevance.

The festival closes with a look at the underbelly of the news world with the classic Clifford Odets-penned Sweet Smell of Success (1957), in which Burt Lancaster, as gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker, toys with Tony Curtis in a demonstration of the heady abuse of power acquired through the pen. And between there are several more classics—including The Killers (1946), another Lancaster vehicle—but many more rarities, most not available on DVD, including Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and While the City Sleeps (both 1956), two wrongly neglected noirs by another towering figure of German cinema, Fritz Lang, whose early work was instrumental in shaping the genre.

Occasionally the selections veer slightly from newspapers into other media. The Unsuspected (1947), for example, stars Claude Rains as a radio personality who manages to maintain his celebrity as those around him begin to mysteriously die off. Directed by Michael Curtiz, the Hungarian director best known today for Casablanca (1942), and scored by German émigré Franz Waxman, the film is produced with a deft touch, including a lovely expressionist motif in which the killer’s reflection, upside down and ominous, always appears just as he commits his crime, drifting into focus in the glass top of a table or in the black wax of a record—a succinct visual cue that the world is out of kilter.

Desperate (1947), a quick and dirty thriller, features the always suave and menacing Raymond Burr tracking innocent Steve Brodie to exact revenge over the execution of Burr’s hoodlum brother. Director Anthony Mann sets the tone in the first few minutes with a classic mise en scene that shows a darkened gangster hideout illuminated only by a swinging lamp, set into motion by the flailing arms of man sent flying with a right hook from Burr’s ruthless gangster.

Noir City 7. Friday, Jan. 23, through Sunday, Feb. 1 at the Castro Theater, 429 Castro St., San Francisco. www.noircity.com.

Touch of Evil: Three Versions of an Orson Welles Masterpiece

Textual authenticity is a central issue in the work of Orson Welles. The director saw so many of his films altered in the editing room by his producers that only a few of his completed pictures can be said to fully represent his original intentions. 

This has made the prospect of releasing "restorations" of Welles' films on DVD a bit complicated. Some of his pictures exist in multiple versions; some exist only in a single, bastardized version; and many of his films were never completed at all. 

The Criterion Collection set the standard for Welles releases a couple of years back with the company's three-disc set of Mr. Arkadin. There was no single version of that film that could be said to represent the director's original vision, so Criterion released all of them, including a "composite" version which attempted to recreate the film according to written evidence and best guesses as to the director's intent. None of these versions are the final word; Criterion simply put all the material out there for viewers to make of it what they will. 

Universal's new 50th anniversary edition of Touch of Evil follows this model, and the two-disc set is precisely the sort of release that is sorely needed for the Welles canon. Containing all three extant versions of the film, it provides an excellent perspective on the shape and scope of this 1958 noir masterpiece. 

Among the many Welles films that were altered and re-edited without his consent, Touch of Evil might be said to have fared the best, or perhaps suffered least. The studio-sanctioned version, released in 1958, was a lesser film than what Welles had intended, but studio interference could not subdue or destroy the power of Welles' imagery and narrative. 

However, years later, a longer cut was found, and for decades this version supplanted the original version, as it was believed to be at least slightly closer to Welles' intent. 

In 1998, Rialto released a new version, re-edited in accordance with a 58-page memo Welles sent to Universal after having previewed the studio's truncated version of his film. The restoration was not a "director's cut," for Welles never completed his own final cut before the studio removed him from the project. Nor was Welles' memo a plea to return entirely to his original design. Welles' memo took into account new footage shot by the studio without his involvement, dismissing some of it yet praising some of it as well. The memo was essentially an attempt at cooperation and diplomacy, saying to the studio, "Given what we have now, here's how we can make this a great picture." 

The restored version is, for the most part, a significant improvement. Welles' editing patterns were restored, including his elaborate cross-cutting between two story lines; the score and soundtrack were reshaped in accordance with his requests; and the credits were moved from the opening sequence to the end, offering an unobstructed view of one of the most spectacular opening shots ever filmed. 

Critics still found plenty wrong, suggesting that the pacing in the second half of the film was too slow. Some preferred one of the previous versions to the new, but until now the restoration was the only version available on DVD. 

To finally be able to see all three side by side, to compare the repercussions of every edit and adjustment, is a gift for Welles fans. Hopefully similar releases will follow, with multiple versions of his landmark works: Hamlet and Othello, both before and after their soundtracks were altered; The Stranger and Lady From Shanghai, with descriptions, stills, storyboards and shooting scripts to explain Welles' original visions for those films and how they were dramatically cut and reshaped by his producers; and perhaps one day someone will finally discover missing footage of The Magnificent Ambersons, and we may perhaps get an approximation of the masterpiece that might have been. 

Universal's Touch of Evil stands in contrast to Image Entertainment's release of Welles' unfinished opus, Don Quixote, which offers a 1992 recreation — a purely hypothetical one — of what Welles intended with this highly amorphous project. 

It is not Image's fault that so little of Welles' Quixote footage is available. The company has endeavored to present us with what is essentially the only available home video release of Quixote, and there is merit in that. But what's available is, unfortunately, a butchered and largely discredited restoration project undertaken by a one-time Welles associate who had nothing to do with this particular film. 

Don Quixote was indeed a quixotic adventure for Welles, a project he worked on for decades. He was questioned about it so often he threatened to release it under the title When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote? It still isn't quite certain if he ever intended to finish Quixote. Writers and painters have works they keep for themselves, he once said; why not filmmakers? 

Shot independently and often on the fly over many years, Welles outlived the two principal actors—Francisco Reiguera and Akim Tamiroff—and in fact, never had a final script. The film was largely improvised, using available locations, actors and conditions to fashion his narrative. 

In 1992, Jess Franco, who served as an assistant to Welles on Chimes at Midnight, obtained as much Quixote footage as he could, re-recorded much of the dialogue and music, and edited the footage into something resembling a film. Though there are many excellent shots and scenes, and plenty of evidence of good performances and dialogue, the result is not the least bit impressive. 

The odds were against Franco, but indeed the odds were so bad that there was really no reason to go through with the project. Legal battles kept him from obtaining much of the footage, including perhaps the most arresting scene—available for viewing on YouTube—of Quixote in a movie theater, drawing his sword and stepping up to rescue a celluloid maiden by slashing the screen to ribbons. Without the film's most innovative and famous scene, how could any completed version claim relevance? 

But even without these omissions, the project should not have been attempted. After all, Welles himself claimed that he kept the footage scattered in various storage facilities to prevent a project like this one from being attempted without his consent. He didn't want some hack to try to assemble this, his most cherished and personal film, into some dim-witted, half-formed movie. His was a unique and idiosyncratic vision that could not be replicated, even with the best of intentions. 

One day perhaps this film too will be given a decent DVD release. Done properly, it would simply gather all the existing footage like a documentary, grouping scenes for clarity but otherwise with no attempt to structure it as a narrative. It wouldn't make for a great commercial success certainly, but rather it would present us with something of a historical document, allowing us to see Don Quixote as it exists — as a mass of footage lovingly shot but never fully edited. In other words, leave the incomplete film incomplete and let us imagine, as we must with so many of Welles' films, what might have been. 

Touch of Evil (1958). 95 minutes / 109 minutes / 111 minutes. Universal. $26.99. 

Orson Welles' Don Quixote (1992). 115 minutes. www.image-entertainment.com. 

Anthony Mann's The Furies

Ambition, deception, manipulation and dispossession: The Furies (1950), Anthony Mann's genre-defying noir-epic-western-melodrama, has enough treachery and love and treacherous love to fill several pictures. 

Mann brought everything he had learned during his apprenticeship in the world of noir — even his cinematographer — to this, one of his first forays into the western, a genre to which he had long aspired. Also completed and released that same year was Winchester '73, one of the more famous and accomplished of Mann's westerns, and the first of many collaborations with Jimmy Stewart. 

Winchester '73, along with Mann's later westerns, especially the ones featuring Stewart, has long overshadowed The Furies. And while there may be plenty of justification for that fact — Mann having matured greatly as a director over time — The Furies does not deserve to be overlooked. For while it is certainly a flawed film, it has more than its merits: fascinating dynamics, superb photography, and excellent performances by Walter Houston and Barbara Stanwyck, two formidable actors at the peak of their talents in their portrayal of a father-daughter relationship so Freudian that it borders on incest. 

Houston, in his final screen appearance, delivers a delightfully hammy portrayal of a ham-fisted tycoon, a lordly lord of the manor forever seeking to re-establish his prowess and power. Houston plays it for all it's worth, making his T.C. Jeffords into a brawling blowhard, full of bluster and braggadocio. As with his celebrated role in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Houston manages to walk the line of histrionic bombast without quite slipping into caricature, rendering Jeffords by turns a tyrant and a fool, but always a man—human, humane and fallible. 

Stanwyck is at her steely, brassy best as Jeffords' daughter, a wild, tempestuous siren of a tomboy and heiress to his sprawling New Mexico ranch. Stanwyck manages once again to defy her era's gender stereotypes; her Vance Jeffords is strong-willed, wily and tough as the rugged landscape she oversees. And yet her beauty, sensuality and charismatic self-confidence, even arrogance, make her as alluring as any eye-batting southwestern belle. 

The bond between father and daughter is as sexual as it is familial, and as ruthless as it is tender. T.C. and Vance admire each other with a curious gleam in their eyes, looking upon each other with equal parts fascination and wariness. The proud T.C. does not want to give up an inch of his domain, while Vance is eager to prove herself every bit as much a ruthless tycoon as her father by taking over his role. Mann squares them off in face-to-face compositions, each leaning toward the other in shots that convey both aggression and love. T.C. is frequently pictured in his office, where mounted bull horns on the wall perch just above his head, signaling both his swaggering arrogance and his susceptibility to the feints and jabs of the stoic Rip Darrow, played by Wendell Corey with the haughty stillness of a matador. 

Criterion has given the film the full treatment, with an excellent (if phallic symbol-obsessed) commentary by film historian Jim Kitses, and a pressing of the novel by Niven Busch on which the film was based. 

The Furies (1950). 109 minutes. Criterion Collection. $39.95. www.criterion.com. 

Indiana Jones Loses His Footing

If the Indiana Jones films were never exactly realistic, they were at least grounded; they were rooted in archaeology, in the earth—in the discovery of things ancient and mysterious, yes, but always terrestrial. Jones himself was grounded too, an unlikely hero by turns deft and incompetent, benefiting from equal doses of intelligence and dumb luck. And that made him all the more charming and his adventures all the more appealing. For the wide-eyed child in the audience, there was no need to conjure images of outer space, of aliens or monsters or supernatural powers; all you needed was a hat, a jacket and a rope. The fantasy was all the more effective for containing the illusion that it was within reach.

Throughout the first three films, producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg kept the series fairly close to that essential premise. As much as possible, they kept Indiana Jones’ feet on the ground, or at least somewhere beneath—in tunnels, in caverns, in crypts and caves. And that’s precisely where the latest installment loses its footing.

As entertainment, it’s good enough. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is pleasant viewing for two hours, with all the ingredients you expect from the series: ultra-villianous villians who, despite all their diabolical powers, simply can’t shoot straight; mysterious rites and riddles encoded on crumbling parchment; plenty of self-effacing humor, even if it isn’t always all that humorous; and that familiar, charming self-awareness, an attitude that shamelessly embraces the inherent absurdity of the whole enterprise.

The series began as a throwback to the old serials that accompanied the feature each week at movie theaters across America. It was both an homage and a modern update of those cliffhangers of yesteryear, a wild, silly ride through unlikely scenarios, with thrilling action and an utter lack of pretentiousness. It’s hard to expect a series to retain its allure through one sequel much less three, but with nearly 20 years passing since the last film, expectations run abnormally high. So while there’s really not all that much to complain about—it’s still better than much of what passes for action entertainment these days, and takes itself far less seriously—Crystal Skull still manages to lose sight of one of the franchise’s essential charms.

Almost from the start, there’s something not quite right. There are hints of the supernatural waiting at the heart of the mystery, and the plot always seems poised for a plunge into Erich Von Daniken territory. But there’s always the hope that the inherent pragmatism of the character and his creators will reign in the excesses and that the solution will ultimately prove to be terrestrial in origin.

And yet, after two hours of chases that are three minutes longer than you’d like and four minutes longer than necessary, fight scenes with so many punches thrown that it seems there’s a quota in place, and three—count ‘em, three—waterfalls through which John Hurt never loses his grip on the prize, we come to an absurdly un-Indy-like ending that almost renders the hero obsolete during a spectacularly unspectacular special effects sequence. As a swirling paranormal maelstrom of destruction swirls overhead, Jones stands small and silhouetted in the immediate foreground, a mere observer of digital effects that are meaningless, emotionless and, despite all their fury, dramaless. Cast in shadow and virtually inanimate, Indiana looks, for all intents and purposes, like one of us, like a member of the audience just a few rows ahead—and just as irrelevant to the action on screen.

Despite the whirlwind of gimmickry that has been added to the formula, it is the old standbys that still deliver—the snakes, scorpions, quicksand, and, in one of the film’s most effective sequences, a swarming colony of man-eating ants. Lucas and Spielberg could have saved themselves a great deal of trouble had they stuck with the creepy-crawlies and stayed clear of the close encounters.

Scorsese and the Stones: Shine a Light

You may ask, Why another Rolling Stones concert film? Aren’t they a tad past their prime? And haven’t these guys had enough camera time over the past 45 years? 

The answer is simple: Not only is it unprecedented for a rock ’n’ roll band to stay together this long, to keep recording and performing well into their 60s, but the Stones are undoubtedly a better live band today than they’ve ever been. 

Martin Scorsese’s new concert film, Shine a Light, showing at Shattuck Cinemas and in an IMAX version at San Francisco’s Metreon, captures the latter-day Stones in its current incarnation as the hardest-working band in show business. 

The dynamics of the band’s performances have changed over the years, and at nearly every significant stage of their development they’ve had a great director drop in to document the proceedings. In the early 1960s they were a British white-boy blues band, with much of their repertoire drawn from the songbooks of their Chicago blues idols: Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy. By the late ’60s, the band was something quite different, having carved out its own identity with a unique sound that blended their influences into an idiosyncratic new brand of rock. The band’s image had grown darker, and their live shows began to take on a somewhat menacing air—the Stones seemed genuinely dangerous. The era reached its conclusion with the infamous free concert at Altamont in which a man was murdered by Hell’s Angels right in front of the stage, a harrowing moment caught on film in the first of the great films about the Stones, Gimme Shelter. 

By the early ’70s the aura of danger had faded a bit, and the Stones took on an air of camp rock ’n’ roll decadence, dabbling in reggae and disco, glitter and makeup, and staging ever more outrageous live performances. Once again, they were put on the big screen in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones. In the 1980s, the Stones set out on rock’s first stadium tour, proving that even while pushing 40, they were still the biggest band in the world, and the great director Hal Ashby caught it all on film in Let’s Spend the Night Together. Since that time, as the band morphed into a smoothly run global enterprise, they’ve been competently filmed by a variety of lesser-known directors for the band’s various DVD releases. 

But here they get another great director, one able to go beyond the mechanics and craft of a concert film to strive for something more, to attempt to capture the essence of a live performance and transform it into something distinctly cinematic. 

Critics have complained that Shine a Light isn’t a documentary, that it neither seeks nor provides much insight into the inner workings of the band and the secret to its longevity. These critics are missing the point. There is no shortage of documentaries about the band’s storied career. Perhaps it is true that the definitive Stones documentary has yet to be made, and perhaps Scorsese, coming off well-received films about Bob Dylan and blues, is just the man to do it. But this is not that film. Here Scorsese is simply interested in the performance itself. The Stones have never been particularly introspective, never sentimental, never prone to dwelling on the past. Thus it is entirely fitting that Shine a Light should simply focus on the moment. 

A good concert film first requires a good concert, but more than that it requires an understanding of what makes that concert good. Most of the ingredients are here: a great band at the peak of its form; a great venue, New York’s Beacon Theater, intimate and packed to the rafters; and a great director to capture it all. What is missing from Shine a Light is a true Stones crowd. The occasion was a benefit concert for Global Warming Awareness, with Bill and Hillary Clinton and their vast entourage taking up the center of one balcony. But the real problem is the floor crowd, which Scorsese decided to fill with a bevy of photogenic 20-something women—hardly the Stones’ prime demographic these days. As a result, much of the first few rows are filled with young fillies more focused on being photographed than on the band and the music. Their conspicuous placement and posturing only detracts from the film. 

Still, you’ve never seen such a beautifully photographed concert. Scorsese matches the movement of his cameras to the pace of the band, following guitarists Keith Richards and Ron Wood around the stage, registering the crack of Charlie Watts’ tightly controlled drumming, and relentlessly pursuing singer Mick Jagger as Jagger relentlessly pursues the audience. Scorsese built a team of top-notch cinematographers to man the 17 cameras that relentlessly traverse the theater to keep pace with the whirling dervish that is Jagger. Low-angle shots transform the lights and ceilings into a dizzying pattern that swirls above the heads of the band as they roam the stage and dart in and out along the catwalk. Close-ups of the guitarists give a glimpse of the band’s unique dual-guitar attack, in which both trade off playing lead and rhythm. And plenty of screen time is given to the cast of backing musicians, most of whom have been touring with the Rolling Stones for at least 20 years, and, in the case of saxophonist Bobby Keyes, for nearly 40. 

And Scorsese never loses sight of the crowd, keeping them dappled in warm light and misty shadow, as much a part of the tableau as the gilded theater and set design. 

Though the set list begins and ends with stalwart Stones classics, 12 of the concert’s 18 songs are lesser-known or at least less-often-performed tracks. After the behind-the-scenes prologue, which, in the IMAX version, is projected at standard movie size, the frame immediately expands to full IMAX size at the first notes of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and the frenetic pace, rapid editing and flashing lights make the experience a bit overwhelming. But things settle down a bit with “Shattered,” as the Stones settle into gear and highlight album tracks and overlooked gems, with a special emphasis on 1978’s Some Girls album. And in between, Scorsese peppers the film with brief archival clips from interviews with the Stones through the decades, most of them adding a light comedic touch to the proceedings. There is just one misstep, as Scorsese interrupts Richards’ rendition of the rarely performed “Connection” with clips of interviews with the guitarist. 

Fittingly, the one moment where Scorsese’s restless camera comes to a stop, if only for a few seconds, is for a prolonged close-up of guest star Buddy Guy. Fitting because Guy, as one of the still-living icons of the Chicago blues sound of the 1950s, is at the very center of what the Stones are all about. He joins them for a cover of “Champagne and Reefer,” a song by the great Muddy Waters, the man who more than anyone else inspired the Stones’ music and identity. They even took their name from a Waters song. Sure, most of their signature riffs are based on the guitar work of Chuck Berry, and there were myriad other influences along the way. But it was Waters, along with the rest of the electrified, urban, plugged-in Chicago blues masters, that led the way for a quintet of English white boys in the early 1960s. 

The Stones have always been loyal to those roots and paid homage to them, sharing the stage with their idols and helping to bring greater fame to those elder gentlemen, even when it means getting blown off the stage by them. For all of Jagger’s manic energy and cheeky posturing, for all Keith Richards’ swaggering attitude, it is Buddy Guy who summons the essence of the hard, driven sound that inspired them, with his deft, soulful guitar work and powerful, resonant voice. As Guy solos, standing firmly at center stage, the band circles him, surrounding the man like worshippers paying tribute to the sound and spirit which launched them on their five-decade journey.

B-Movie Shakespeare: Orson Welles' Macbeth

With just a few exceptions, when we talk about an Orson Welles film we talk about a tangled mess of topics all at once. We talk about the film as it exists and the film as it might have been; we talk about intentions and motivations, disagreements and compromises, edits and changes; we talk about artistic integrity versus commercial considerations, about the rights of the artist contrasted with the rights of studios, stockholders, producers and distributors.

When left to his own devices—or, more accurately, the devices of himself and his chosen collaborators—Welles created great cinema. Yet Citizen Kane is perhaps the only one of his films to reach theaters entirely without compromise. A couple of others survived with only compromised production values as opposed to compromised content, but most of the Welles filmography is the story of films that are at best approximations, and at worst mere remnants, of the dreams that gave birth to them.

The Orson Welles of caricature—of bloated budgets and extended, meandering production schedules—would come later. In the 1940s his films were produced in the same manner in which he had produced his stage and radio projects. Budgets were relatively small, schedules were adhered to (though always pushed to the last second); planning and rehearsals were thorough but open to last-minute changes and improvisations. And in this climate he produced two of his greatest works: Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons.

After Kane nearly brought down RKO studios in 1941 by taking on William Randolph Hearst, the most powerful media mogul of his day, Welles’ career took an unexpected turn. Though RKO and Welles survived the battle with Hearst, the studio became wary of its star director. But it was ultimately the gloom of Ambersons and the freewheeling experimentalism of Welles’ South American documentary project It’s All True that finally derailed Welles, and he spent the next few years struggling to win back the trust of his benefactors.

His reputation—some say justly, some unjustly—became that of a troublemaker, an arrogant, budget-busting, non-commercial maverick. Having conquered Broadway at 20, radio at 21 and film at 24, he was not used to failure, or to playing the supplicant. And he must have found it galling that he, whose genius had always included the successful marriage of commercial entertainment with high art, should be branded an unbankable risk.

The Stranger (1944) was a purely commercial product, delivered on time and under budget for International Pictures. With the exception of a few flourishes here and there, it is the least Wellesian of his films and thus the least interesting. Lady From Shanghai (1947) was begun as payback for a loan that Columbia Studios chief Harry Cohn had given Welles for one of his stage productions. Shanghai too was a commercial film, with a few twists. But it was those unwanted twists that angered Cohn, who re-edited much of it and added a cheap score.

It was at this time that Welles, looking to find a studio that would back him as RKO had with Kane, joined Republic Studios, a low-budget producer of B movies, mostly westerns. Republic was willing to support a pet project of his: a stark, spare adaptation of Macbeth. Shakespeare was Welles' foundation as an artist: As a teenager he had published a series of guidebooks for adapting the works of the Bard to the modern stage, and as a young man he had made his reputation with the so-called “voodoo Macbeth,” a Roosevelt-era public works project in which he staged a sensational Haitian version of the play in Harlem with an all-black cast consisting mostly of first-time actors. Shakespearian tragedy underlies much of Welles’ self-written dramas, and he would return to the plays themselves on stage, radio and screen for much of his life.

Welles concocted a multi-faceted approach to the new Macbeth that would hold down expenses while maximizing rehearsal. He took a cast consisting largely of players from his own Mercury Theater on the road to Salt Lake City, where they would stage the play three times a day for four days as part of the Utah Centennial Festival. The festival would pick up the tab for the costumes, Republic would pay for the sets. When the theatrical run was over, the company would adjourn to the studio where, with three cameras operating at all times, shooting several scenes simultanously with the actors miming to a pre-recorded soundtrack, they would shoot the film in just three weeks. It would be a semi-radical but inexpensive experiment in stripped-down, streamlined filmmaking. (This is in marked contrast to his next project, the nomadic, globe-trotting four-year odyssey that would become Othello.)

Welles first adapted Macbeth to a screenplay, using his own guidebooks to fashion a dramatic restructuring of the play, emphasizing the witchcraft and heightening the horror and melodrama in the creation of a sort of high-art B picture. It is not so much an adaptation as a re-imagining, for Welles had no interest in simply filming the play; his goal was to rediscover much of the brash, barnstorming fun and frolic of Shakespeare, qualities he felt had been lost over decades of stuffy academization of the Bard. His intent was to use Macbeth as a starting point for something quite different, for something purely cinematic. He then adapted the screenplay to the stage for the Utah performances.

Much of Welles’ vaunted innovation throughout his career stemmed from necessity, from improvisation in the face of less than perfect circumstances. His radio shows conjured whole worlds on a merciless weekly deadline; the shadowy photography of Kane was conceived primarily as a method of concealing the lack of sets; and the staging of a famous scene in Othello amid the swirling steam of a Turkish bath was another inspired bit of improvisation, compensating for the fact that Welles’ supplier failed to deliver the costumes. From the beginning, Macbeth was essentially built on a framework of improvisation amid low-budget circumstances, its design consisting of papier-maché sets rising above a bare soundstage, its staging and photographic angles organized around the necessities of the quick three-camera shooting schedule.

Republic released the film in Europe to good reviews, but tested it only in select cities in America. They had already required Welles to cut about 20 minutes from it, but now they cut still more and insisted that as much of the dialogue as possible be re-recorded without the Scottish accents. (Welles had sought to return the play to its roots by abandoning the hybrid English accents that had become standard for interpretations of Shakespeare with a Scottish burr.) When this highly compromised version was finally officially released in the States after a lengthy delay, critical reception was largely hostile. While some of the footage has been replaced since then, and the Scottish-accent soundtrack restored, the film, like so many other Welles films, is still not quite the film he intended.

The film still draws mixed reviews. Joseph McBride, one of Welles’ most sympathetic biographers, bemoans the lack of subtlety of Welles in the title role, the weakness of Jeanette Nolan as Lady Macbeth, and what he considers the budget-hampered photographic style, in which the actors move more than the camera. Meanwhile, David Thomson, generally one of Welles’ more critical biographers, describes the acting as “heartfelt and liberated” and flatly states that “no film since Kane had had so profoundly organized or expressive a photographic style.”

Welles’ films, like the man himself, retain the power to polarize his most ardent fans, even after 60 years.