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Films: Two Cheers for America
By Richard Fuller

Associate Editor, HI WAY Magazine, Westminster Press, Philadelphia, Pa.

IN the October, 1967, issue of THEOLOGY TODAY, I wrote about the number of interesting films coming out of England and the many directors going there to make them. As it happens, last year was a good one for the colonies. Bonnie and Clyde went to England and knocked them dead. The director of that film stayed home. So did some of his colleagues. They dealt with American situations and characters and gave us some of the year's most interesting and disturbing films. (The interesting ones usually do disturb).

If I sound chauvinistic, let me hurry and say I'm talking about four directors. One of them, John Frankenheimer, you can't count on. (His latest film is Grand Prix. I didn't see it. I don't want to know what it's like to be run over by a racing car.) Another, Stuart Rosenberg, has made only one feature film, which makes him an unknown quantity at this point. The other directors are Mike Nichols and Arthur Penn. We can expect everything of them.

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All these men have done work for TV or the stage or both. This suggests that television, and maybe the stage, is a good training ground-a kind of minor league-for our best directors. If you watch much TV you've noticed that the technique usually exceeds the content, if any. There's plenty of both in the four films I want to write about.

I'll start on the bottom rung of achievement and work up. John Frankenheimer is uneven. These are his earlier works: The Young Stranger, The Young Savages, All Fall Down, Birdman of Alcatraz, The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, The Train. Most of these films are a frustrating mixture of good and bad things. The Manchurian Candidate has clever editing, during a brain-washing episode, along with some poor acting and an ending that cheats for the sake of suspense. (Most suspense films depend on the withholding of information.) The Train could have been a good film. Oddly enough, there is poor dubbing in the film and there is Burt Lancaster, the former acrobat, sabotaging trains, and a good performance by Paul Scofield. Frankenheimer's first film, The Young Stranger, is a good early look at the generation gap with fine performances from James MacArthur, Kim Hunter, and James Daly. But Mike Nichols' second film, The Graduate, deals with similar material and makes The Young Stranger look like-well, undergraduate work. So it goes with all these films.

Frankenheimer's most interesting film-alas, uneven-is Seconds, which I saw last year, but which seems to have been released, and soon forgotten, toward the end of 1966. It was probably forgotten or ignored or both because Rock Hudson is in it. In spite of this fact, the film is serious. In fact, terrifying.

It begins like this. A man in his fifties, Arthur Hamilton, boards a commuter train out of a dark, sinister New York. He senses someone following him. The images are distorted, foreshadowing the distorted story of the film. Arthur arrives home. We eventually discover what's disturbing him. He's been getting telephone calls from a friend he thought dead. The friend offers Arthur a chance to be reborn. Not in a spiritual sense. Physically. Arthur finally agrees.

So begins his descent into hell. He is instructed to go to an address that turns out to be a seedy tailor shop. From there he is directed to a meat plant. Appropriate, as it turns out. He is given

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a butcher's white coat and hat. (Conservative Arthur, a banker, looks absurd in the outfit.) He is bundled into a truck and driven off to the Company. There he is drugged and sexually blackmailed, for future use, and then remade surgically. New face, new body, new teeth. Arthur emerges, after his bandages are removed, twenty years younger. Or, as one critic observed, he comes out as Rock Hudson, the ultimate nightmare.

His second life begins. He's a painter. He's given a girl. (By the Company, it turns out.) What he isn't given is happiness, that elusive goal Americans endlessly pursue and don't catch. Unfortunately, the middle portion of the film needs a new face, new body, and any teeth at all. There's a silly orgiastic sequence with half-dressed men and women romping about in a vat of grapes, pursuing happiness, apparently. A bit later, Arthur himself starts drinking and carrying on, revealing to others his true past. He realizes that most of the people around him are Company retreads. He's horrified. He's not happy.

He's called back to the Company where the friendly, fatherly founder-brilliantly created by Will Geer-advises young Arthur and talks about his dream: the second chance, the new life. Arthur has failed. But someone else might make a go of it. And so the dream-the nightmare-goes on.

Arthur's nightmare takes on immediate reality. He soon realizes that he is going back to surgery, this time to provide a cadaver for another possible retread. As Arthur is wheeled toward the surgery, a minister reads over him. The minister is authorized to handle any faith. Meanwhile Arthur screams. The sequence is one of the most unnerving I've ever experienced. Perhaps too unnerving. Americans don't like the idea of getting old. We've made a fetish out of looking and being and thinking young. Who wants that dream wheeled off to an operating room and turned into a cadaver? Half of this parable of happiness pursued and not caught is brilliant. The other half you'll forget. Frankenheimer is now adapting Bernard Malamud's The Fixer as a film. He may yet give us a full-length, interesting, disturbing nightmare.

Stuart Rosenberg's first film, Cool Hand Luke, isn't quite a nightmare. A daymare, perhaps. It's about pain: the slow breaking and destroying and killing of a man on a southern chain gang. For contrast, this study in pain is filmed in pastoral color. Paul Newman

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plays Luke, the man who bluffs his way through a card game holding "nothing." The card game is shorthand for life.

Rosenberg has commented on the character and the novel by Donn Pearce: "I was fascinated. It was the first time I had come across an existentialist hero-not an anti-hero-in American literature. Here was a man not so much a rebel as nonconformist, a man who didn't belong, committed to no external idea, but to himself, and desperately concerned to express that commitment."

Maybe. Fortunately, Rosenberg knows how to tell a story in forceful, memorable images. The credits of the film end with a close-up of a pair of mirror sunglasses on a face that looks like a patch of pockmarked moon. Luke will pitch himself against these glasses, this face. The face is about as resilient and responsive as the moon.

While drunk, Luke snips the heads off some parking meters. For this absurd action he is given an absurd two years on a chain gang. The eventual outcome of the film is suggested early. Luke gets into a fight with a bigger man, is beaten, but will not go down. The men who have gathered for an exciting fight slowly back away as Luke refuses to stay down. As you watch this film, you also want to back off because you know Luke will be destroyed, and it isn't pleasant to watch.

Rosenberg is right when he says Luke isn't an anti-hero or a rebel. He's more interesting than that. in one funny, absurd sequence, Luke bets he can eat 50 eggs in an hour. He eats those eggs. Hardboiled, of course. After he finishes, he lies on a table, stomach pregnant with eggs.

He also, I'm sorry to say, lies with arms outstretched, as if crucified. The worst is yet to come. Near the end of the film, Luke escapes from the chain gang prison for the third or fourth time. He ends up in a deserted wooden church. He looks upward, wondering if He's there. He has a conversation with Him. No response. Luke, after all, is an existentialist hero.

The trouble with symbols and scenes of this kind is that directors stick them in the way a cook garnishes boiled potatoes with parsley. They may look nice but they don't add anything. Contrast the scenes I've mentioned with the way Ingmar Bergman uses religious themes and symbols in The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries and Rosenberg looks like a schoolboy.

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Mike Nichols isn't a schoolboy. With The Graduate, his second film, he graduates into the world of good, serious directors. His first film, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, was a vehicle, not a movie, and it broke down at that roadside diner. It should have stayed home, in George's and Martha's hell.

The Graduate moves. It's in color. And Nichols, heady with talent, uses almost every trick a director can use in a film, sometimes too many. It doesn't matter. He has a story to tell that is often hilarious and pathetic at the same time. Benjamin Braddock is the graduate. He arrives in Los Angeles from an eastern college where he has won distinction as a student and an athlete. Now he faces that terrible, yawning abyss: the transition from college, where you pursue ideas, to life, where you pursue the buck. For Benjamin the abyss is too wide. He drifts. While he does, the wife of his father's law partner, Mrs. Robinson, proceeds to seduce passive, poignant, funny Benjamin Braddock, graduate. Certain scenes in certain films have a way of becoming immediate classics. The scene where Mrs. Robinson attempts to seduce Ben-bridging the generation gap?-is one of those classic scenes.

There is also a line of dialogue in the film that may achieve the same status. Ben and Mrs. Robinson finally do have an affair. (He calls her "Mrs. Robinson" throughout.) But Ben wants to communicate, outside of bed, if possible. "Can't we liven it up," he says, "with a little conversation?"

They can't, of course. But Ben eventually communicates with and comes to love Mrs. Robinson's daughter, Elaine. Then he loses her, because of his affair with her mother, and then pursues her-his happiness.

It sounds like an unlikely, improbable story. In other hands, it might be. Nichols has a way with this story and a way with actors. Mrs. Robinson is played by Anne Bancroft. Do I need to say that she's one of the best film actresses in the world? Ben is played by Dustin Hoffman. You've never seen him before. These two actors convey their characters in a single action. At the beginning of the film, Mrs. Robinson pursues Ben to his room. He wants to be alone. She won't let him alone. She lights a cigarette and looks for an ashtray. Ben doesn't smoke. Naturally. She drops a haughty match into a wastebasket. Then she asks Ben to drive her home and drops that cigarette, lighted, into the wastebasket. The

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way she does so-brittle, attractive, wry, amused-and the way Ben rushes to snatch it out and put it out---conveys much of their characters and what their relationship will be like. Ben never quite extinguishes the flame in Mrs. Robinson. But no one could.

Nichols is so persuasive a director that he can shift, halfway through his film, from satire to a love story and still make it funny, absurd, and moving. Ben ultimately pursues Elaine to a Presbyterian church where she has just married another man. He doesn't care. He steals her. (The scene is reminiscent of the English film Morgan.) This scene also inspired one of those wonderful letters to the Sunday New York Times, a letter almost as amusing as the movie. Why, the letter demanded, didn't a minister complain about that scene.

You may be tired of hearing about Bonnie and Clyde. It's no longer a film. It's a way of life. "Bonnie fashions" gaze out at us from the covers and interiors of magazines. The two characters form a collage on a Time cover, while inside is a hymn to the movie. Abroad, those two bank robbers are leaving a large dent in the box offices of London, Paris, and Stockholm. It is the film of the year. American or otherwise.

In a way, it encompasses the films I've been writing about. The lives of Bonnie and Clyde turn into a nightmare as they pathetically pursue money. The film soon changes from being a burlesque of the thirties into a study of pain inflicted and received. (This pain has been misinterpreted as mindless violence. It isn't.) The film is often hilarious.

It's also quite complex in its swift movement from one mood to another. The scene of the first killing, for instance. Bonnie and Clyde saunter into a crossroads country bank. Meanwhile, C. W. Moss, their getaway driver, is carefully parking the getaway car in a free parking space. We might be in a Mack Sennett farce. Bonnie and Clyde-guns in one hand, money in the other-back out of the bank, frantically looking for their car. They finally find it parked, run to it, hop in, scream at C. W. The car bangs forward into one car, backward into another. At last, C. W. gets the car loose, but not before a bank official leaps onto the running board. Without thinking and without meaning to, Clyde fires his gun. Window pane and face shatter. The laughter strangles in our throats. But Penn is not done with us. He cuts to a movie theater.

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The movie is a musical. Chorus girls sing a silly, ironic ditty: "We're in the money." When we see Bonnie in the audience, she's staring with vacant absorption at the screen. The pain hasn't touched her yet. Behind her sits Clyde, nearly hysterical. Near him sits C. W. Moss, in tears.

The movie is filled with complex, complicated scenes like the one I've described. Often the absurd and the poignant are joined and they go together without a seam. After another robbery by the notorious Barrow gang, they drive off down that lonely road. Bonnie gets into one of her domestic quarrels with Clyde. She demands that he pull over and they have it out. He drives into a field. She storms off. He follows her. In her anger she lacerates him where he is most vulnerable. He's impotent. He can say nothing. He turns from her, walks off. We see the anger in Bonnie's face dissolve. She goes after Clyde. As he turns, and she moves toward him, he crosses his arms, as if to protect himself. She tries to tell him she didn't mean it. You feel tremendous compassion for both of them. Cruelty and compassion collide within Bonnie, the way they do in most of us.

Automobiles are used so much in movies that they've almost replaced people as the stars. Cars are very important in Bonnie and Clyde. I can't think of another movie that has used them as well: as a metaphor, the way most movies use them, and as the place--on the road-where Bonnie and Clyde live, love, and die. Literally. The range is tremendous.

Bonnie and Clyde is Arthur Penn's fifth movie. His first two, The Left-Handed Gun and The Miracle Worker, I've seen only on television. I remember the first one as interesting, offbeat, and tedious in places. An unusual western, The Miracle Worker is adapted from a play. It's one of those plays that depends for its impact on your knowing that the events actually happened. Or that the people are more or less real. Play and film are about how Annie Sullivan teaches little Helen Keller to speak. When she finally says, "Water," there isn't a dry eye in the theater. It's heartwarming.

Penn's next films were Mickey One and The Chase and I haven't seen either. Both were assaulted and battered, the second one for its violence. Recently he directed something called Flesh and Blood on television, a two hour disaster by William Hanley. I could take only fifteen minutes.

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Which gets me back to the title of this piece. Two cheers seems about right. It doesn't pay to be too optimistic. A few years ago, I would have confidently predicted that John Huston would go on to be the grand, great old director in American films. But it's so difficult getting anything serious said in commercial filmmaking that we should be grateful for one interesting, unsettling film. Four films-even two half good ones-is a visual banquet. Not bad for the colonies.