Film of the Year

1949: Tick, Tick, Tick

White Heat (1949)
Directed by Raoul Walsh
114 min.; U.S.A.; Black and White; Mono

Last week I looked at Anatole Litvak's The Snake Pit (1948), a social problem picture starring Olivia de Havilland about mental illness and the poor conditions inside the underfunded, overcrowded state mental hospitals in post-war America. The picture predicted that the former problem was curable through time-consuming psychotherapy but offered no solution for the latter problem. After WWII and before the advent of antipsychotic drugs there was an increase in demands on psychiatry and state hospitals for solutions to mental illness so it's no wonder that we find the subject turn up in motion pictures made in the post-war era including variations on genre pictures. As a follow up to the previous post, I'm going to explore one of these genre pictures (one I've never seen before) and determine what role mental illness plays in it. 

I'd be hard pressed to find a more thrilling and intense genre variation than Raoul Walsh' gangster picture, White Heat (1949). James Cagney plays Cody Jarrett, a psychotic hoodlum obsessed with his mother who leads a robbery of Treasury Department funds from a mail train and murders the engineers in cold blood.  With Treasury agents closing in on his gang, Jarrett turns himself into the police for a lesser crime while the heat dies down. While in prison, he learns that his mother (she's also his criminal accomplice and mentor) has been killed by a member of his own gang. WIth the help of a convict eager to win the gang leader's approval he escapes from prison and takes revenge on the murderer.  Now, Jarrett plays the parent-figure, taking the kid into his gang with the guarantee that they evenly split an upcoming heist. Too bad the "kid" happens to be an undercover Treasury agent, and Jarrett's diseased mind is finally about to snap with explosive results.  White Heat (1949) places madness at the center of one criminal miscreant's nefarious career and gives us the opportunity to consider how the inclusion of a psychopathic antihero contributes to what some critics and film historians consider to be the finest gangster film of all time.

Everybody's dirty: a great film noir moment in White Heat. Partially hidden in shadow, the fugitive Jarrett is determined to have revenge on Big Ed (Steve Cochran) for murdering his Ma while Jarrett's wife Verna (Virigina Mayo), who had previously deserted him to be with Big Ed, now betrays her lover.

White Heat marked the return of James Cagney to Warner Bros. and gangster pictures after nearly seven years of producing independent features. The story goes that once Warner Bros. made Cagney an offer he couldn't refuse and he learned that the studio planned his comeback to be a return to the mobster roles that made him famous back in the 1930s, the actor suggested the gimmick of making the character mentally ill.  This innovation ensured a fresh take on the tired gangster subgenre, suggested a way for it to be reborn following its near disappearance during the war, and, no doubt, allowed Cagney to dig into a more interesting character. Little Caesar's (1931) Rico Bandello may have showed signs of narcissism or megalomania, but he's outmatched by Cody Jarrett's bizarre pathology: psychosomatic headaches, agonizing tantrums, obsession with his mother, wide mood swings, sudden turns to violence, transference, propensity for murder. The innovation also frees the script from the gangster picture's familiar rise and fall scenario; it removes the need to include causation from external social, economic, and/or ethnic factors; best of all, it places primary emphasis on the antihero himself and struggles of his psyche.

Thankfully, Walsh doesn't surrender the gangster film to the world of the affected mind just because his lead character is mentally ill. White Heat isn't some Daliesque version of The Public Enemy (1931). In fact, except for one auditory hallucination coupled with a brief semi-surreal montage (see images above), which was likely used only for dramatic effect, Walsh keeps us completely distanced from Jarrett's inner reality. This provides Cagney with the freedom to act out his character's traumas rather than react to them. Though a surreal gangster picture might be cool (anyone out there know if one has been attempted on screen yet?) Walsh gives us a fast paced suspense thriller with split storytelling detailing Jarrett's final days as a gang leader and the methodical Treasury agents' manhunt for him.

In an unusual chase scene montage with dissolves, Walsh reinforces the T-men's reliance on technology to find and capture Jarrett. Here we see a prowl car with a strange circular antenna, a bank of electronic equipment, and a huge map of the city--parts of an effort to use an oscillator to track down the hoodlum.

However the antihero himself, not the manhunt, is the real focus of the picture.  One reason is because Cagney, with his tough-talking vernacular, screwed up face, and quick gestures, is so much fun to watch.  But, for me the more significant reason is because the script converts his madness into a mechanism for suspense.  Early in the picture, after we've been introduced to the nature of Jarrett's crimes and the outward manifestations of his mental problems, Walsh puts us in the office of Treasury agent Phil Evans (John Archer), the man in charge of the Jarrett investigation. Here Evans gives undercover agent Hank Fallon (Edmond O'Brien) Cody Jarrett's psychological case history.  A number of key revelations come to light in this profile.  First, Jarrett's father went mad and died in an institution.  Second, his father's mental problems "rubbed off on Cody."  Third, Jarrett is obsessed with having his mother's attention and approval.  Finally, Evans predicts that Jarrett's mind will soon "crack apart at the seams" so the agents are on a race against time to nab him.  This pseudo-psychiatric explanation does not serve as a solution to the mystery of Cody Jarrett or open the possibility of an eventual recovery a la Virginia Cunningham in The Snake Pit (1948). Instead, it sets up Jarrett's madness as being hereditary, incurable, and dangerous. The scene is crucial to understanding White Heat because it places the character's mental illness at the center of the plot and foreshadows the outcome of the story.  Jarrett's imminent psychotic breakdown is predictable and inevitable. We know that he's going to explode at some point in the picture but the question is, when will he go off?  The gangster has become a living time bomb, tick, tick, tick, and we're kept in suspense waiting for him to go boom.  Hitchcock himself couldn't have done it any better.

"Maybe I am nuts." Elements of horror and expressionism--dark shapes, confining spaces, angular lines, Cagney's maniacal grin--fuel the terrific payoff of White Heat.

With a set-up like that we want Walsh to construct a big explosive payoff. And boy, does he ever. When Jarrett finally cracks we see just how far his madness drives him. If you haven't seen White Heat then you deserve to see this ending, at least once, because it's one of those moments accompanied by a great line that make an indelible impression on the cinematic imagination. Of course, you may have already seen Cody Jarrett's famous final scene because it's clipped, cropped and available on YouTube and probably playing in an advertisement somewhere.  But do yourself a favor and see it in the context of White Heat. You won't be sorry.

This post written by Thom Ryan
Copyright 2008 Thom Ryan Some rights reserved

1948: The Mad, Mad, Mad World

The Snake Pit (1948)
Directed by Anatole Litvak
108 min.;U.S.A.; Black and White; Mono

It feels good to be back in the film blogsphere.  After the two-plus-week break I feel anxious to see what's been happening on the blogs in my blogroll.  I feel just as skin-crawlingly anxious to restart the Film of the Year project, looking at film history and/or history through one film per year.  Let's see...we left off at 1948.  Hmm...where to (re)start?  Well, where did we leave off?   In the post for 1947 we looked at Carol Reed's manhunt picture Odd Man Out (1947).  I wrote about how that film opened a door for me to a cinema tradition I hadn't been aware of previously, the cinema of Northern Ireland.  I pointed to a number of Reed's recognizable filmmaking techniques and other elements at play in the movie.  A host of film bloggers joined in the discussion in the comments section and fleshed out the examination of the film with insights on the film's charm, structure, audience appeal, characterizations and more. We also talked about the film's theme of alienation.  That theme, about the lone individual lost among enemies in a hostile or alien environment, seems to turn up often in post-war cinema.

When I sit down to write about a motion picture from a given year I like to find an element in the previous year's movie that serves as link between the two.  The link could be an actor, director, studio, topic, technique, or theme.  In Odd Man Out, the anti-hero Johnny McQueen suffers from a number of psychic breakdowns.  Reed dramatizes these breakdowns through impressionistic imagery that evokes McQueen's trouble state of mind.  Watching that reminded me of the great expressionist phantasmagoria of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), half of which is seen through the nightmare interior reality of an inmate of an insane asylum.  I wondered what other representations of mental illness, its twist on reality, and the methods of its treatment exist on film?  As luck would have it, Twentieth Century-Fox released one the finest attempts in motion pictures to explore questions about mental illness and its treatment in 1948...

The Snake Pit (1948), based on Mary Jane Ward's real life experiences recorded in her book of the same name, stars Olivia de Havilland as Virginia Cunningham, a struggling novelist who suffers from a form of paranoid schizophrenia.  Shortly after marrying, Virigina suffers a major breakdown and is sent to a state mental hospital.  Under the care of the calm, kindly and oh, so rational Dr. Kik (Green for Danger's (1945) Leo Genn), an adherent of Freudian psychotherapy, she undergoes a series of treatments including electroshock therapy, hydrotherapy, narcosynthesis, and psychoanalysis.  These treatments, combined with the overcrowded, understaffed hospital and the strict regimentation she's forced to endure, only serve to exacerbate Virginia's doubts and fears.  She feels ever more alienated from the staff, the other patients, and even herself.  Late in the picture, she's punished for not complying with hospital rules and sent to the terrifying dungeon-like ward 33, the ward reserved for the most severe cases.  Here she makes a breakthrough by convincing herself that she's not as sick as the others in the ward and therefore can get well after all.  She and Dr. Kik proceed with the slow process of psychoanalysis and uncover the origins of her illness.  No longer doubting her own thoughts or reality, Virginia is declared cured by the hospital staff board and released.

The movie-going public must have been drawn to the unusual subject matter and/or by de Havilland's star power because The Snake Pit was one of the top ten box office pictures of 1948.  It was nominated for Academy Awards for best motion picture, directing, actress, screenplay and music, and received an award for sound recording directed by Thomas T. Moulton.  Critics and reviewers in publications like Time, The New Republic, Variety, and the New York Times praised the quality of the film and applauded the filmmakers for producing a film that examined such an important and timely subject.  At once melodrama and social problem picture, entertainment and exposé, The Snake Pit remains significant today for helping us grasp some sense of the attitudes and feelings about mental illness and state hospitalization prevalent in the United States in the late 1940s.

There is evidence of mounting public concern over the care of the mentally ill in state run hospitals in the post-war years.  After World War II public demand on psychiatry and the already overcrowded state mental hospitals increased, and in 1945 the American Psychiatric Association released a set of standards to improve treatment in mental hospitals, public and private.  However, according to columnist Albert Deutsch, author of a 1948 exposé about the conditions in state mental hospitals titled The Shame of the States, "not a single state mental hospital meets, or has ever met, even the minimum standards set by the A.P.A. in all major aspects of care and treatment" ("Hearded Like Cattle," Time, 20 December 1948).

However, co-producer/director Anatole Litvak told the New York Times that his purpose wasn't to make a film that presented frightening images of the mentally ill or the "various scientific methods used to effect rehabilition."  He wasn't making a horror film.  Rather, he wished to encourage public concern about mental illness and the conditions in state mental hospitals.  Further, he intended the film "to reassure people that mental disorder is an illness which can be cured" ("Of Litvak and The Pit," New York Times, 7 November 1948, X5).  The structure of Litvak's film, awakening interest in a perceived social problem, illustrating some of the possible dangers involved, and then soothing fears by showing that the problem can be overcome through solutions already available, is characteristic of other social problem pictures I've written about on this blog, such as Traffic in Souls (1912), The Wet Parade (1932), and Confessions of a Nazi Spy (also directed by Litvak, 1939).  

Virgina trapped in ward 33, the titular snake pit. One of the few impressionistic shots in the film.

There's so much to write about this picture and topic that a blog post cannot possibly contain all of the questions let alone examine the answers.  So, I'm going to focus on one aspect of the filmmaking: Litvak's approach to identifying the nature of Virginia's illness.  In the film, the director allows us to experience two contrasting perspectives of reality at the same time by neatly dividing the scenes between what we see and what we hear.  With a few exceptions (see above), Litvak's camera maintains the perspective of an objective observer.  This has the effect of allowing us to view Virginia's and the other hospital patient's irrational behavior, and observe methods of treatment and management by the staff.  In the second perspective, Litvak and Moulton employ the sound of Virginia's interior voice, and other voices heard inside her head, to help us understand her delusional take on the occurances in the film.  By using the tools of cinema, Litvak contrasts these two perspectives on reality and aids the audience to understand Virginia's illness by comparing the reality of the picture with the sound of her paranoid interior monologue through voice over.  This technique is doubly effective for cinephiles because we typically expect voice over to confirm what we see on the screen not to cause doubt about its veracity or contradict it.

Litvak's method of contrasting what we see on the screen with the way the main character tells herself (and us) she perceives things has since become a familiar way to differentiate opposing perceptions of reality on film.  I wonder, what other approaches have filmmakers tried over the ensuing years to convince the audience that a character is mentally ill? or that a character's perception of reality differs from those around her? or that we in the audience might not be able to trust the version of reality that is being presented on the screen or through the speakers?  (For some reason I'm drawn to my David Lynch collection right now.)  What are some of your favorite films that explore these ideas and contradictions?  Other than Caligari some of mine include Schatten (1923), Un chien andalou (1929), Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), Videodrome (1983), Jacob's Ladder (1990), Lost Highway (1997), Abre Los Ojos (1997), The Messenger (1999), Memento (2000), and Donnie Darko (2001).

--a more general question: what are some of your favorite films that either comment on mental illness and its treatment or borrow themes of mental illness or psychoanalysis for variations on familiar genres like horror, thrillers, melodrama, comedy?  Some of mine include, M (1931), Psycho (1960), Repulsion (1965), Le Roi de coeur (1966), Sisters (1973), One Flew Over the Coo-Coos Nest (1975), and Halloween (1978).

This post written by Thom Ryan
Copyright 2008 Thom Ryan Some rights reserved

Blue Turns to Gray

Last night I was enjoying William A. Wellman's terrific western, Yellow Sky (1948) when I noticed a strange looking shot near the end of the picture. I wonder if any film experts out there can help me figure out how it was photographed.

Yellow Sky is based on an unpublished novel by Little Caesar scribe W.R. Burnette. Set in 1867, it tells the story of six outlaws driven by United States Army forces across seventy miles of scorching salt desert in the Arizona (or is it New Mexico?) Territory. Near death, they crawl into a ghost town inhabited only by a tough talking, rifle bearing gal named Mike (Anne Baxter) and her prospector grandfather (James Barton). The outlaws soon discover Grandpa's secret: a fortune in gold. Greed and lust overtake the men and they square off against Mike, Grandpa, and each other.

Early in the film the leader of the outlaws, Stretch (Gregory Peck) tries to force Mike to kiss him. In response, she decks him, shoots him, and then tells him that he smells bad. Pride wounded deeper than flesh, the Civil War veteran washes up and puts on what looks to be a Union blue cavalry shirt (see below left). Later, Stretch, still wearing the dark shirt, hunts his former partners through the ghost town at night (see below right).

Watching the night scene I noticed that Peck's face had an odd glow to it. At first glance I figured that Wellman and Director of Photography Joe MacDonald aimed a reflector at his face to lighten it up under his hat. But then I noticed that Peck's dark shirt had suddenly turned gray! Is there some combination of a particular film stock and type of light responsible for the effect? Did Wellman simply have Peck change into lighter wardrobe for the night shot? The shirt is dark again in the next scene. Maybe the filmmakers resorted to using a negative black and white image to avoid retakes of an underexposed night shot? The problem with that theory is that his hat still looks dark. Maybe the transformation wasn't the result of solving a technical problem but was staged on purpose--Union blue to Confederate gray. That seems unlikely because the rest of the picture is photographed with a eye for realism. Hmm. Any other ideas? Any one familiar with the production history of the picture? How about other examples of wardrobe changing tone/color between day and night shots in black and white movies? Any wardrobe experts out there have a theory?

1947: Northern Noir

Odd Man Out (1947)

Directed by Carol Reed

116 min.; United Kingdom; Black and White; Mono

After viewing Carol Reed's atmospheric crime drama Odd Man Out (1947) I'm convinced that the director's first major post-war feature is every bit as visually rich and engrossing as its more famous sibling, The Third Man (1949), if not even more so. In the film Johnny McQueen (James Mason), the fugitive chief of an "illegal organization" (read: the Irish Republican Army) operating in "a city of Northern Ireland" (read: Belfast), leads a robbery at a linen mill to finance the organization's operations. Safe house operator Kathleen (Kathleen Ryan), whose unspoken love for Johnny is apparent to everyone but him, and his lieutenant Dennis (Robert Newton) predict that after nearly a year in prison and in hiding following his escape Johnny is no longer emotionally equipped to lead the raid. He brushes off their objections but, as predicted, Johnny suffers a breakdown during the getaway phase of the robbery and is assaulted by one of the mill's cashiers armed with a pistol. In the struggle, he kills the man and is mortally wounded himself then left behind by his fleeing comrades. Hearing the grave news, Kathleen searches for a way to rescue Johnny while he, delirious and slowly bleeding to death, struggles to hide out in the city backstreets and avoid a police dragnet. Amidst these dual story lines we encounter a number of colorful city dwellers and are introduced to their own conflicts. However, our prime concern is the fate of Johnny and Kathleen who are trapped in parallel downward spiraling trajectories edging ever nearer toward each other and ultimate destruction.

The film is based on F.L. Green's 1945 novel of the same name. Green was born in England but relocated to Belfast in 1934. After reading the novel, director Carol Reed travelled to Belfast to discuss a film version with the author and subsequently they worked on the script together. As part of an ultimately unsuccessful attempt by U.K. companies to secure major distribution of British prestige pictures in America after the war, this motion picture benefits from prestige level funding, an extended shooting schedule, and a genuine box office star in James Mason. According to John Hill, Professor of Media at Royal Holloway, University of London, and author of Cinema and Northern Ireland: Film, Culture and Politics (London: BFI Publishing, 2006), Odd Man Out was also the "first major fiction feature to deal with the 'troubles' in Northern Ireland since partition" (Hill 124). Hill's research places the picture within the rocky political and cultural context of post-war Northern Ireland--a context that the filmmakers are purposefully vague about in the movie even as they find creative ways to acknowledge it. For Hill, the "de-contextualizing aesthetic tends to reinforce previously existing views of the 'troubles' as largely inexplicable" (126). I would venture to add that the de-contextualization also tends to open the film up to a wider, universal appeal. Cinephiles don't necessarily have to hail from Ireland or be well-versed in the history and politics of the conflict between unionists and nationalists to be moved by the picture. In truth, both the history and the film itself fascinate me. So, while I continue reading Hill's excellent book I'll share eight things I admire about Odd Man Out...

1. Crosstown Traffic. In some parts of the film director Carol Reed appears to have been influenced by the documentary style realism affecting the look and feel of contemporary Italian neorealism and American semidocumentary crime dramas, and he shot some scenes of Odd Man Out on location in Belfast and around London. In the scene that provides the screencap above we follow a black car around the streets as it picks up Johnny and his comrades before the robbery at the mill. Shooting on the street means giving up some level of control. We can almost hear the director shouting at the man on the bicycle, "No! Don't look at the camera! Sir, don't look at the camera!...Ahh, CUT!"

2. A Poetic Vision of the North. If the daylight scenes of Belfast "a city of Northern Ireland" reflect a documentary style realism then by nightfall we discover Reed experimenting with a kind of poetic realism too. Casual fans of the pre-war French style (like me) might suspect some sections of Odd Man Out to be the work of famous set designer Alexandre Trauner because Reed and his team imagine a city of rain-soaked avenues, softly glowing windows, lonely figures, shiny wet cobblestones, and brick walls alternately drenched in pools of darkness and restrained light reminiscent of Trauner's and director Marcel Carne's version of La Havre in Le Quai des brumes (1938). The result is a mysterious, abundantly dark urban evironment that threatens to envelope Johnny and deepens our understanding of his sense of alienation and despair.

3. James Mason as Johnny McQueen. At one point in the film Kathleen says that she'll fend off the police inquiries by "giving them a dose of silence." But, if there's one nearly silent role in the film it's that of Johnny McQueen played by James Mason. As he spends the majority of this film alone or drifting in and out of consciousness Mason has to play worried, wounded, delirious, suffering, resisting, hopeless, and all the rest of the anti-hero's trials with little in the way of dialogue. A less talented actor wouldn't be able to hold our interest for the length of the film, but the result here is terrific. Aided and abetted by star power, Mason emotes with body, posture, facial expressions, eyes, and any number of small gestures...I didn't realize how much I've missed this style of acting since this blog turned the sync sound corner back in 1928 and everyone began talking all the time. :D

4. Euphemisms Galore. The great irony, and the great achievement, in the writing of Odd Man Out for the screen is that the story takes place within the political milieu of the "troubles" in Northern Ireland yet the conflict and those involved are not referred to directly. More, the film is all about a wounded Irish Reblican Army chief on the run in Belfast but the city and the IRA are not mentioned. An opening title scroll states that the film isn't about politics at all, and refers to the IRA only as "an illegal organization." As the film continues we find the screenwriters scratching their heads for more alternative ways to refer to it: "our organization in this city," "his friends," "headquarters," "your people," "the boys," "his own crowd," etc.

5. Not Exactly Our Gang. Midway through the picture, Johnny's lieutenant, the tough and clever Dennis, is searching the backstreets for his chief when he suddenly finds himself confronted by a rabble of noisy children who shake him down for money and cigarettes. When the big bad rebel soldier tells them to back off or he'll call the police they respond, "there ain't no police 'round here! Mister, give us a penny!" The scene is played for dark humor, but it recalls stories of poverty stricken children surviving post-war Europe in contemporary films like Germany Year Zero (1948) and Somewhere in Europe (1947).

6. The Streets of Northern Noir. In one of my favorite sequences from the film, Dennis draws the police after him to allow Johnny to avoid a barricade. The ensuing chase is filmed in expressionist style lighting with long shadows trailing after figures darting through alleyways at night (see image top of post). This sequence visually mines a rich dark vein of suspense that I find reminiscent of Fritz Lang's moody thriller M (1931). Notice how the fascinating shot above opens up screen space by breaking the frame into various horizontal and vertical spaces that imply height, width, and aid the illusion depth in the image. The leading lines work with the dynamic lighting to bring our eyes to the silhouetted policeman pursuing Dennis from the cobblestone street on the left side of the image. Meanwhile, vertical lines on the right side of the image lead our eyes up from the street to Dennis' own shadowy form running on the scaffold in the extreme right. These elements combine with the running actors and supply a sense of tense action and pursuit.

7. Tripping with Johnny. Not content with creating realistic views of Belfast, poetic images of that same city at night, or expressionistic chase sequences, Reed also experiments with revealing his anti-hero's damaged internal reality through chaotic jerky camera, extreme and even impossible perspectives, superimposed imagery, and canted camera in an increasingly bizarre series of hallucinations. Johnny's mental troubles range from a brief spell of disorientation in the car ride to the robbery that looks like an outtake from Rene Clair's Entr'act (1924) to a famous confrontation with talking bubbles in a puddle of beer much later in the film. I prefer an equally surreal scene in which the wounded protagonist is confronted by hallucinations of a mute Father Tom and a gallery of grotesque portraits. In response, the delirious Johnny recalls Father Tom's preaching and, in Mason's thunderous voice, recites some of the finest lines from the thirteenth chapter of Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians.

8. Kathleen's Courage Equal to Desire (spoiler alert). The final fate of Johnny McQueen is decided not by the rebel chieftain himself, but by Kathleen. Throughout the film everyone Johnny runs across wants to use him to his own advantage; they help Johnny because they fear his organization or they refuse to help him because they fear the police. Only Kathleen wants to do something for him. She hints to Father Tom that she wants to protect Johnny in this world and beyond. As screen love affairs go theirs is an entirely off screen affair, and may only exist in her mind. They don't appear together as a couple until the final scene of the film and even then they consummate their relationship through an act of martyrdom. Kathleen's expressed desire to love and protect Johnny is matched by her courage to commit the ultimate act of sacrifice--a decision she makes for them both.

This post written by Thom Ryan
Copyright 2008 Thom Ryan Some rights reserved

1946: Reflections on Cinema after Viewing Maya Deren's Ritual in Transfigured Time

Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)
Directed by Maya Deren
15 min.; U.S.A.; Black and White; Silent

A few posts back I inquired about what we film bloggers mean when we use the term, "cinematic." As an adjective used to describe everything from motion pictures to music, televisions shows, literature, and video games, the term's ubiquity is easily matched by its connotative ambiguity and flexibility. Happily, a number of knowledgeable bloggers offered some thoughtful responses to the query (my thanks, everybody). However, while these responses offered to reinforce some of my own understanding of "cinematic" none managed to complete my association with the word. I had some definition in mind that I sensed, but found I couldn't readily articulate.

Then I read A.L. Rees' essay "Avant-Garde Film: The Second Wave" and the description of the work of filmmaker Maya Deren in the Oxford History of World Cinema. Rees writes that for Deren film has an objective aspect of realism, but with editing also manipulates both time and space to "create a new language that is film's alone" (539). Now the reluctant definition of "cinematic" finally came forward. I realized that, for me too, "cinematic" implies not only the look and sound, but also both the manipulation of space and time in motion pictures. For, through various styles of editing and tricks of cinematography movies can make leaps through time, cause the fourth dimension to slow down, run backwards, or even suspend for us. That clicked for me. I immediately sought out some of Deren's pictures to see for myself how her work might fit this idea of "cinematic."

Deren novices (like myself) have help getting to know the filmmaker and her work thanks to Martina Kudlacek's fine biographical motion picture, In the Mirror of Maya Deren (2002). Deren was born Eleanora Derenkowski to privilege in 1917 during the Bolshevik revolution in Kiev, Russia. In 1922 her family, like many Jewish families living in Russia at the time, emigrated to the United States. After receiving a degree in English she toured with the Katherine Dunham dance company in Los Angeles in 1942. There she met Alexander Hammid, an experimental filmmaker from Czechoslovakia. The couple married and moved to New York the following year. At her request, Hammid renamed her Maya after a Hindu goddess who holds a veil in front of our eyes that hides the spiritual word from us. At the time Deren was working as a poet but found the need to translate images into verbal form irritating. For her, Hammid's motion picture camera was a welcome solution to this problem. Deren said that for her film was a way to make the world dance as opposed to her dancing for the world. In 1943, Deren made her best known picture, Meshes of the Afternoon. Meshes is an acknowledged masterpiece; Deren was awarded the Grand Prix Internationale for 16 mm experimental film at the Cannes Film Festival for it in 1947. However, since the year currently under study at this blog is 1946 I turned my attention to the surreal Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), a 16mm black and white picture photographed by Hella Heyman, who, along with Hammid, had captured the littoral dreamscape imagery in Deren's previous offering, At Land (1944).

In Ritual in Transfigured Time, Deren contrasts two women (played by herself and Rita Christiani), their identities and their interpersonal relationships. The pair begin the film connected by a string of yarn. Dancing, they separate and meet dozens of the same people before both focusing on one man. The film concludes when they come together again in the one experience we all share: death. The low-key lighting may reflect some of the (then) current trends in American crime pictures, but the rest of the style is far removed from any Hollywood offering that I've seen from the 1940s. What makes the picture so radically different is that Deren eschews the linear storytelling of the classic Hollywood style in favor of montage, slow motion, and forms of dance. More, the film is a study in duality and the unknown links that bind us. The women are near doppelgängers of each other (reminding me of Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974) and Mulholland Drive (2001) in particular). Seen another way it is a drama of desire and loss resulting in death rather than the more familiar happy ending. However, the aforementioned editing style, use of slow-motion and reverse action, the lack of dialogue, the lack of music to cue emotional connections, the dancing, and the whispering, scratchy sound of film running past the play head of the projector deprive the causal movie fan of the familiar ways we recognize and follow a picture's story logic. The result can be frustrating (my fellow viewer did not care for it one whit).

Back in 1946 Ritual in Transfigured Time and Deren's other films were shown at various avant-garde film exhibitions in museums, playhouses, and theaters (the one advertised above left was held in 1949), and she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for "Creative Work in the Field of Motion Pictures." French avant garde architect, Le Corbusier was quoted in the press as saying her films offered an "escape from the stupidity of make-believe." But other opinions of her work seem to reflect a frustration with artistic filmmaking. For example, check out the following excerpt from a front page preview of an exhibition of her films in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1947:

The samples of modern "art" which demand (and are given) a thousand lines of carefully written prose to explain the artist's meaning have nothing on three short films to be shown tonight at the Berkshire Museum...People will like the movie tonight for varying reasons, one of which being that it won't take very long--33 minutes. And Maya is interesting to look at. In those 33 minutes she slides down a rock precipice, goes swimming, gets murdered, almost drowns (we thought), and does quite a bit of running and walking. She has big strong legs. Those liking abstruse symbols can wonder why keys come out of her mouth or why flowers (said to be symbolic of fertility) are dropped on a white pillow. When the key comes out of her mouth there is a reasonably absorbing close-up of Miss Deren's lips. ("Silent Movies Will Thrill, Will Chill Museum Members," The Berkshire Eagle (1 August 1947), 1)

Today, if you surf around film websites and blogs you'll find that writers who admire Deren's contribution to cinema attribute the mysterious charm of her work to something called "dream logic" or a dreamlike quality. For me, that quality appears rooted in the filmmaker's unique way of manipulating both space and time on the screen. The "transfigured" time being imaged through the use of montage, rhythmic editing, stop motion, and over-cranked camera. Deren herself expressed the sense of time in her films as being time in motion, each moment becoming the next, not fixed to any immediate Now (to make the interpretation of the title complete the "ritual" refers to the forms of dance that imply relationships between individuals in the film). Grasping this sense of time in transition in cinema makes it easier to enjoy Deren's film--not as a series of images progressing through cause and effect events in a narrative arc, but rather a state of continuous transformation in which anything is possible. Perhaps it's best to allow films to wash over us like a pieces of music and experience them as human beings rather than mine them for logical meaning.

Hmm...I suppose that wouldn't demand opposing or ignoring assumptions I readily make about motion pictures and how we experience them--that they usually exist in narrative frameworks and function in ways that reflect our everyday experience of reality--it just means understanding that they don't necessarily have to exist and function that way. I wonder, if I released all expectations on cinema, and gave up the need to interpret it according to the logic of professionally taught disciplines, would that make experiencing it more fascinating, more enjoyable than it is already?

Perhaps one day I'll reach the point where I can experience cinema that way all the time, but I admit I find the concept slippery and opposed to a lifetime of teaching and learning. I feel like Yoda is standing at my shoulder reminding me to unlearn what I have learned. Maybe the transition, the change in conscious thought, is too difficult. Maybe it's my stubborn Irish streak (as Mom calls it). Or maybe it's really easier than I think, and I'm focusing too directly. Perhaps I've already made the transition yet fail to realize it.

My very sincere thanks to Jennifer MacMillan for the kind help and inspiration.

This post written by Thom Ryan
Copyright 2008 Thom Ryan Some rights reserved

1945: War is Hell

G.I. Joe (aka Ernie Pyle's Story of G.I. Joe 1945)
Directed by William Wellman
68 min.; U.S.A.; Black and White; Mono

Note: This is the final post in a series I've been writing about war-related films released during World War II. A full list of the war films I've been immersed in can be found here.

The combat scenes in G.I Joe are rendered in documentary style realism and even integrate footage of real battles. Here flares, tracer bullets, and exploding artillery light up this night-for-night shot of the battle of the Kasserine Pass.

Produced by independent producer Lester Cowan and directed by William Wellman, G.I. Joe is about a group of American infantry soldiers fighting in North Africa, Sicily and Italy during World War II. More than any other Hollywood war picture released during World War II G.I. Joe depicts the war with an increased sense of realism by enlisting the cooperation of the Army, employing trained soldiers and accurate equipment, setting action on location or on realistic sets, giving major roles to new faces, and weaving a narrative around the ordeals suffered by individual soldiers. In addition, the picture also avoids many of the things that prevent most Hollywood treatments of the war from verisimilitude: traditional romanticism, overused script ideas, stock characters, unrealistic effects of weapons and impossible feats in combat, theatrical sets, patriotic platitudes, trite or flowery dialogue, and Hollywood stars. The men are led by tough and fatherly Captain Bill Walker (Pvt. Robert Mitchum in his breakout lead role) and accompanied by famous war reporter, Ernie Pyle (Capt. Burgess Meredith). Most Americans who served during World War II never saw combat. This is a movie about those who did.

G.I. Joe successfully navigates between the horror of World War II and the war's meaning due in large part to the fact that it rarely strays from the humble yet perspicacious voice of its chief influence, Ernie Pyle. The wiry thin Indiana-born journalist rose to national prominence when his war reportage appeared in hundreds of daily and weekly newspapers, and two collections of his columns became best-selling books. In an age before portable video and 24-hour cable news, Pyle lived with the frontline soldiers and wrote thoughtfully, and in clear language, about the men who fought and died for the rest of the nation. His best dispatches melded war events with personal details turning a combat soldier's ordeal into a kind of shared experience for fellow soldiers and the folks back home. In 1944 he was awarded the Pulizter Prize. According to the AFI notes on G.I. Joe, it was Pyle who convinced William Wellman to direct the picture, but the journalist never saw the finished film. In 1945 he was killed by an enemy machine gunner while covering the Battle of Okinawa. The screenplay is based, in part, on the real Pyle's experiences among the infantry in North Africa and Italy, but he isn't the true focus of the picture. This film is about the men who faced the brunt of the war each day and suffered the most casualties, the combat soldiers.

Ernie Pyle (Burgess Meredith) lives with the men in a dug out cave at the Battle of Monte Cassino. The motivated lighting, long dramatic shadows, and low-key lighting of the interior shots in G.I. Joe extend a sense of doom.

It's been written that the frontline experience is often one of long spells of frustrating inactivity punctuated by brief periods of intense terror. G.I. Joe reflects this stark dynamic in contrasting interior and exterior production designs. Much of the film takes place in locations and on sets meant to represent North Africa and Italy where the men are subjected to dust storms, rain, and ankle deep mud on long marches to confront the enemy. The major combat scene is set in a recreation of a war ravaged Italian town. It is brightly lit with half-demolished buildings crowded with debris. We get a sense of a soldier's exposure to a hidden enemy who could be lurking anywhere among the dusty, jagged rubble. Death comes quick and unexpectedly in this film, and often from an enemy we never see. When they're hit the men don't stiffen, reach up toward heaven and utter a last few poignant words before dying. Rather, their still forms, or simple absence from the rest of the picture, remind us of the human cost of each military objective. The bombed-out streets and broken buildings add a great touch of realism, but may also have been a creative cost-saving measure because Wellman and his team used the backs of existing buildings at the RKO-Pathé backlot in Culver City. Reportedly, the buildings were from standing sets of films stretching all the way back to The Godless Girl (1929) and needed little extra dressing to make them look authentic.

Major portions of the film are also spent in two dark interior locations. The first is a temporary headquarters in Tunisia where the company fights its first battle and suffers it first defeat at the Battle of the Kasserine Pass. The second interior location is a cold, dirty and cramped cave dug out below Monte Cassino. The former interior features the brooding intensity of film noir style low key lighting while the caves are expressionist fields of candlelit chiaroscuro (see above image left). Both provide the haggard looking men with venues to vocalize frustration, with a helping of ironic humor, about the war, the military, even the homefront. There's none of the flag-waving speeches of earlier war pictures and very little, if any, mention of the enemy. The men are more concerned about a good meal, a hot shower, the opposite sex, mail call, and living through another partrol than anything else. Both locations explore how the men suffer privations together so we grasp some sense of their unique community.

Director William Wellman admitted to having a predilection for rain on film. Here he gets his characters wet again and seems to tip his hat to Bill Mauldin's famous World War II strip in The Stars and Stripes (right). See the full comic here.

Many film historians and critics identify G.I. Joe as one of Hollywood's most sober and realistic dramatizations of the war. Back in 1945 critics and reviewers also praised its realism and it may have been the only Hollywood combat film to win general approval from that most deservedly discriminating audience of all for war pictures, the combat soldiers themselves. Yet the film was not nominated for an Academy Award for best picture nor has the success of more recent projects that mine the same vein, such as the excellent HBO series Band of Brothers, helped G.I. Joe achieve a level of popularity comparable to the other great films that presented the war as a Hollywood myth: Casablanca (1942), Sgt. York (1941), Bataan (1943), and Mrs. Miniver (1942). It deserves greater recognition because it's cinematic proof that just as war can be translated to the screen as a venue for smart mouthed heroes and comic book tough-guys, outlandish situations, or weepy romance it can also be dramatized as a tragic endeavor that affects real human beings. G.I. Joe is a fiction film that comes close to the verisimilitude of the WWII combat report documentaries like The Memphis Belle (1944) without giving up any of Hollywood's standard quality of production, the filmmaker's artistic license, or audience expectations of the narrative.

But, exactly what does this film have to say about war and the potential of the post-war world? In the documentary Men Who Make the Movies (1973), director William Wellman asserts that G.I. Joe is "a film against war." Unfortunately, he doesn't go into greater detail (I haven't read his autobiography so perhaps he expands on the point there) but I assume he refers to the unpolished portrayal of the combat soldier's experience as one of daily misery that ultimately ends in death. But even though Wellman and crew break with many of the conventions of previously released war pictures and depict the front line experience and certainty of death in near documentary style realism they also create an entertaining movie in G.I. Joe. Like other movies that contain anti-war messages, such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Apocalypse Now! (1979), Three Kings (1999), this one also entertains its audience by turning the war into a Hollywood myth, a most realistic looking myth, but pure Hollywood just the same. In a previous post about All Quiet on the Western Front I wondered if many movie-goers actually went to see the picture for the action rather than any anti-war messages even during the pre-war peak of the isolationist/non-interventionist/interventionist debate. If we take Wellman at his word then same question is valid for G.I. Joe. After all, in September 1945, after having just achieved victory in the most terrible conflict the world has ever known at the expense of countless lives, and after years of messages in the media, especially on film, indoctrinating the masses to the idea that the WWII must be fought, it seems very unlikely that audiences would've packed the theatres to see a film protesting war. That Cowan's company must have been aware of this fact is confirmed by the way the film was advertised to general audiences (see image left). The copy reads like its selling a Hollywood musical: "This is their story! Sometimes tender...Often funny...But always human!" There's not a word against war--or even about combat scenes--but there are plenty of happy male and female faces, and even a romantic couple. The heart shaped promo for the picture's Academy Award nominated song "Linda" is icing on the cake. The ad promotes the movie as a typical Hollywood wartime comedy/drama rather than an adult film about the experiences of combat soldiers. At any rate, the experience of watching G.I. Joe may leave us convinced that war is indeed a terrible thing, but I think that's self-evident. I don't see the picture as anti-war, but rather a cinematic reflection of Ernie Pyle's attempts to help us recognize that we owe a debt to soldiers fighting and dying on the front lines: it's our responsibility to make sure that their sacrifices are not made in vain. Or in the words gravely spoken by Mitchum in the film, "if only we could create something good out of all of this energy."

Since G.I. Joe was released in the final year of World War II it serves to wrap-up the war as far as my blog is concerned. Each of the war films I've explored over the past weeks is an individual text produced for specific reasons, but each also represents an attempt to derive some meaning from the war and express that meaning to the audience. When I began looking at WWII pictures I had high hopes that a few war films would provide a satisfactory survey of the different ways filmmakers approached the subject. Boy was I wrong. I watched dozens of movies and still feel unsatisfied. I've been unable to locate many DVD versions of war films from most of the countries involved and I've only glimpsed a tiny fragment of the various ways that war is reflected and interpreted on the screen. In The True Glory (1945), a campaign documentary about Allied cooperation in the drive toward Berlin and final victory in Europe, General Eisenhower says of the war, "to tell the whole story would take years." I'm convinced that it will also take years to experience the whole story of the war as told through the cinema.

Next time, back to the one film per year rule and (finally) the first post-war film.

This post written by Thom Ryan
Copyright 2008 Thom Ryan Some rights reserved

1944: Revenge

Days of Glory (1944)
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
86 Min.; U.S.A.; Black and White: Mono

Early in Days of Glory we encounter warfare, guerilla style, with this unusual subjective shot through a rifle scope.

My two favorite Hollywood films of 1944 are the film noir staple, Double Indemnity (1944) and Preston Sturges' satire on small town values The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944). However, this post continues my ongoing one-film-per-year look at movies made during World War II that tell us something about the war. Having already written about a homefront drama and a combat documentary from 1944 in past blog-a-thons I resisted the urge to write about Since You Went Away (1944) or With the Marines at Tarawa (1944) this week. Instead I looked at a rare thing from Hollywood: a pro-Russian war picture.

Before the war Hollywood released relatively few motion pictures about the Soviet Union--the so-called "Russian vogue" star vehicles for the likes of John Gilbert and Greta Garbo in the 1920s, Ernst Lubitsch's communists vs capitalists comedy with Garbo, Ninotchka (1939), and King Vidor's Comrade X (1940) being exceptional examples. Generally speaking, except for a period in 1943-44, the war did not significantly change this situation despite the fact that the Soviet Union was America's ally. According to Dorothy Jones, only some five percent of the total number of Hollywood releases in the first three years of the war dealt with the allied countries, and a mere handful of these were concerned with the Russian front. However, ever since Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 newspapers, radio reports and newsreels carried stories of the brutal fighting and suffering, and by 1943 the Red Army's victories at places like Stalingrad and Leningrad brought an increased significance to promoting America's new ally. As noted in Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, the Bureau of Motion Pictures of The Office of War Information's Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry suggested a need for movies about the Russian people that assuaged traditional American hostility toward communism by avoiding politics and focusing on stories of individual heroism; films that made the Russian people seem just like ourselves. In response, RKO distributed Samuel Goldwyn's The North Star (1943), United Artists put out Three Russian Girls (1943), MGM released Song of Russia (1943), controversy arose over Warner Bros.'s Mission to Moscow (1943), and Columbia released Boy from Stalingrad (1943) and Counter-Attack (1945). I'm a big fan of Ninotchka, and I'm on the fence about Comrade X, but I've never seen any of these Soviet front World War II-era films before. How would a Hollywood studio handle the subject? How would such a film present a front of the war few, if any, studio producers had any first-hand knowledge of? Would the filmmakers follow the OWI's suggestion to avoid politics and "Russian-ness," and place Americanized characters on the Soviet front, or would they use Hollywood magic to transport us to a realistic U.S.S.R.? Seeking to grasp something about filmmaking, the war, and 1944, I hunted down one of these films for this week's post--RKO's Days of Glory (1944)

Director Jacques Tourneur brings motivated lighting and haunting imagery from the horror pictures he made with producer Val Lewton to Days of Glory

Before I watched the picture I wanted to get a handle on the production history. In January 1943, it was announced in the New York Times that Casey Robinson signed on as a writer-producer for RKO. An eight year veteran writer for Warner Bros., Robinson worked on Bette Davis vehicles like Dark Victory (1939) and Now Voyager (1942), and, interestingly for this topic, a comedy with Claudette Colbert and Charles Boyer as expatriate Russian aristocracy slumming in Paris titled Tovarich (1937). As part of the commitment with Robinson, RKO bought his story titled "This is Russia," and took over his deal with Tamara Toumanova, "The Black Pearl of the Russian Ballet," to star in it. Robinson had also signed Broadway actor Gregory Peck whose eight picture deal was then divided between Robinson, RKO and David O. Selznick. The working title for Robinson's first project as a producer was This is Russia retitled Revenge, but later released as Days of Glory, and his screenplay was based on a story idea by Melchior Lengyel, the guy who dreamed up Nintochka. So far, I've been unable to verify if the script was reviewed for the OWI and/or if the agency made suggestions concerning it. However, given its subject matter that seems likely (anybody willing to dig through the National Archives for me?). In April, RKO assigned Jacques Tourneur to direct the picture despite his successful record directing atmospheric B-grade horror pictures like Cat People (1942) for producer Val Lewton. According to the recent documentary Val Lewton: Man in the Shadows, RKO split up that team because the studio was eager to increase their revenue potential by placing Tourneur and Lewton on separate projects. In June 1943, an interesting story appeared in the New York Times about the casting process for this picture. In order to find the right actors to fill the supporting roles, Robinson commissioned Joseph St. Armand to draw sketches of each character. The sketches were then compiled in a book, duplicated, and sent out to theater groups, newspaper offices, agents, and the like. Suggestions and photographs of actors flooded in to RKO. Reportedly, hundreds of these sketch books were sent out so one may still exist today tucked away in a theater, library, agency or newspaper office somewhere (if anyone out there finds one please let me know). According to the AFI database, the film was in production from early July through early September 1943 and parts of it were shot on location in Cedar City, Utah. In August, the Times reported that the picture had stalled for script rewrites, and that the production was behind schedule. The slow-going was blamed on an inexperienced cast, but a first-time producer, an assigned director, and a ballet dancer and a Broadway actor in the lead roles may have contributed something to the delay as well. Without more information, though, its difficult to speculate. Okay, enough production history. Let's take a look at the film.

Released only days after the launch of the invasion of Normandy on D-Day in June 1944, RKO's war drama Days of Glory tells the story of the conversion of a dancer in the Moscow Ballet from pacifist aesthete to guerilla fighter in late 1941. Fleeing south when Hitler's troops attack outside Moscow, Nina (Tamara Toumanova) is picked up by a group of Russian partisans disrupting German supply lines from a bombed-out monestary near Tula. She soon falls in love with Vladimir (Gregory Peck), the group's leader. Though she abhors violence, Nina's experiences among the guerillas and her love for Vladimir convince her to join the partisans in a (spectacularly filmed) last suicide mission, diverting German tanks away from Tula to open the way for a Soviet counter-attack and ultimate victory in the Battle of Moscow.

Tourneur breaks with the style of much of the film for a standard Hollywood love scene between Peck and Toumanova that's as cold as the Russian winter.

The potentially fascinating story of Nina's integration into the guerilla group--and by extension the larger international group encompassing all who were fighting the Axis powers--is unfortunately hampered by a clichéd romance that develops between Nina and Vladimir. Screen newcomers Toumanova and Peck lack screen chemistry, and Robinson's script loads them with long-winded, flowery declarations of love that are incongruous with Tourneur's gloomy atmosphere, and seem downright ridiculous in the guerilla milieu.

We learn little about Russian culture beyond drinking tea, and eating kasha, potato soup and borsch (I kept wondering when the vodka would show up). The characters do refer to one another as comrade, and Vladimir recalls his participation in a great public works project, but there's no mention of communism. The aforementioned OWI Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry includes a statement that likely influenced Robinson's script in this regard. "Yes, we Americans reject Communism. But we do not reject our Russian ally." In other words, the OWI proposed that filmmakers keep silent about politics but promote the alliance. I'm not the first one to notice that, and the suggestion reminds me of fellow film blogger Jacqueline T. Lynch's assertion a few posts back that the OWI engaged in "quite a juggling act" when it came to war information. But I wouldn't blame gov't script suggestions for the picture's shortcomings because instead of making the Russian characters seem more like ourselves--as the OWI Manual suggests--Days of Glory simply presents us with stock characters. As romantic leads, Peck and Toumanova adhere to certain audience expectations and are prevented from persuading us that their characters are genuine. But the supporting roles are blatant stereotypes introduced as such by v.o. narration in the opening sequence, "and here's Sasha the lovable drunk, Fedor the sentimental blacksmith, Yelena the farm girl turned fighter, and Petrov the quiet one..." and so on.

A desperate mission through the wilderness. Tourneur uses falling snow and cattails to obscure our vision, expressing the characters' sense of isolation and upsetting our ability to predict what will happen next.

The imagery, music, and Jacques Tourneur's direction are much more enjoyable than the hackneyed script. Tourneur also bows to familiar conventions in a few spots, like a by-the-numbers love scene and a brilliantly tense segment borrowed from any number of westerns in which the guerillas dynamite a supply train just before an armored escort arrives to stop them. But, the look and feel of most of the film seems to benefit from the influence of what Tourneur describes in Val Lewton: Man in the Shadows as a "measure of poetry" in his horror film collaborations with Lewton. Theatrical sets dynamically lighted for the roving camera combine with the brooding score and express the characters' growing sense of doom in a way I found slightly reminiscent of the feel of late 1930s films I've seen by Marcel Carné. But where Carné places his characters in stylized real locations Tourneur and crew carve their own lyrical world out of the shadowy ruined monastery and the Russian wilderness. The interior shots feature familiar deep shadows and the director's famous corridor shots beckon our attention; even the combat scenes have an unnatural resonance. In too few and too brief moments, Tourneur opens up screen space to encompass the vastness of the land. For Tourneur biographer Chris Fujiwara the stagy approach breaks with the director's previous style, "The stifling unreality of the project is alien to Tourneur's cinema, one of whose qualities is a meticulously conveyed sense of social and physical reality" (Fujiwara, 109). But, in this kind of setting dramatized stories of heroism and self-sacrifice can thrive like fairytales, and the more subtle expressive imagery (see image left) affects our inner selves even if the story we're watching falls flat.

I enjoyed the look of this film, and I plan to seek out more films directed by Tourneur (I've seen four so far). But, as a war film and as a history of the war Days of Glory unfortunately tells us too little about the significance of Russian guerillas, the counter-attack near Tula, or the Battle of Moscow. The filmmaking extends some sense of the doomed lives of Russian guerilla fighters, but it doesn't reflect what the war in Russia was really like or the character of those fighting it in any meaningful way. Likewise, the script doesn't allow much room for the source of the partisans' desperation and drive to defend their country. There is an explanation of the necessity for the guerilla's final mission (a standoff against enemy tanks creatively filmed using back projection seemlessly integrated with the foreground action), but there's just not enough here about who these civilian volunteers are or what the sacrifice of their lives means in the grand scheme of the war.

In 1944, the picture tanked at the box office and was roundly dismissed by many critics and reviewers. In the New York Times, Bosely Crowther charged "Mr. Robinson failed to provide a first-class script and Jacques Tourneur...failed to make the best of what he had. As a consequence, 'Days of Glory' is more heroic in conception than effect." The Chicago Tribune's Mae Tinée praised the cinematography and hailed the cast of new players, but admitted that "the story of the movie is not particularly unlike many others." Wood Soanes complained in the Oakland Tribune, "Had [Robinson] been as successful in his writing as he was in his production 'Days of Glory' could be written into the record as something more important that it is...It takes more than a melodramatic climax to make a great picture." And Time's reviewer quipped, "somehow it all seems rather silly...none of it comes any nearer the Russian war than the lobby of an 'art' movie theater."

Why, I wonder, did the picture fare so poorly? One might speculate that after the string of Russian front war pictures in 1943-44 mentioned above, and the focus of war news shifting to the Battle of Normandy that the movie-going public's appetite for the subject was sated. But, the argument can also be made that an excellent picture can draw an audience and impress critics regardless of the timing of the release or how often the subject has been done before. The lack of established stars and the poor script likely contributed to the weak box office and poor reaction but I wonder if there's more operating here. Perhaps Robinson's familiar script and Tourneur's lyrical filmmaking were simply out of step with developments in war pictures by 1944. Perhaps the criticism heaped on Days of Glory reflects desire to see a more accurate depiction of the everyday people who fought and died (or survived) in the war instead of a typical Hollywood picture framed around war events. Or perhaps critics and audiences, fed on war reports, war newsreels and combat report documentaries for four or five years, yearned for Hollywood filmmakers to reproduce the conflict as it really was albeit in a narrative form in the relative safety of the movie theater. Ultimate realism may be impossible. As Samuel Fuller wrote in The Big Red One, "to make a real war movie would be to occasionally fire at the audience from behind the screen during a battle scene." Yet some filmmakers were making strides toward cinematic realism in features during the war. Next time I'll look for a Hollywood war film that takes a major step in that direction.

References/Works Cited

Bosley Crowther, "Days of Glory," New York Times (17 June 1943), 10.

Chris Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (John Hopkins UP, 2001), 108-111.

Dorothy B. Jones, "The Hollywood War Film: 1942-1944," Hollywood Quarterly 1.1 (October 1945), 1-19.

Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 272-277.

"Screen News Here and in Hollywood," New York Times (7 January 1943), X25.

"Screen News Here and in Hollywood," New York Times (18 August 1943), X25.

Wood Soanes, "'Days of Glory' Offers Tale of Russian Guerrillas and is Only 'Slightly Terrific'," Oakland Tribune (6 October 1944), 13.

Fred Stanley, "Hollywood Goes to the Rock and Rills Again," New York Times (6 June 1943), X3.

Stanley, "Hollywood Views the Russian Front," New York Times (3 October 1943), X3.

Mae Tinée, "'Days of Glory' Has New Faces, Familiar Plot," Chicago Tribune (26 June 1944), 17.

"The New Pictures," Time (3 July 1944).

This post written by Thom Ryan
Copyright 2008 Thom Ryan Some rights reserved