The Post

The Post 2017 U.S. (116 minutes) directed by Steven Spielberg; written by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer; cinematography by Janusz Kaminski; editing by Sarah Broshar and Michael Kahn; casting by Ellen Lewis; dedicated to Nora Ephron.

A movie can be a balm in troublous times, especially if that movie is a splendidly-written, brilliantly-acted, beautifully-shot tableau of troublous times past.

Steven Spielberg’s telling of the Pentagon Papers story, The Post, focused on Katharine Graham, the former owner and ‘accidental’ head of The Washington Post, and her executive editor Ben Bradlee, is such a balm. It is hard to imagine that Meryl Streep as Graham and Tom Hanks as Bradlee could be any better, and their superb performances raise those of all around them. 

 

It also is hard to imagine a more loaded gun at this historical moment than the Pentagon Papers story. But in this age of Wikileaks and King Corn Silk, The Post is a story about family, and a newspaper which, especially in former times, is very much a noisy and contentious family, and how both a family and a newspaper are the sum of each and every part.

One of the many beauties of this film is that it shows a newspaper to be a living thing of nearly infinite parts, down to single letters of type, which each day starts from scratch and ends with the miracle of a fully-integrated, finished product.

But the greatest wonder of this picture is the restraint Spielberg shows in not bill-boarding THE MESSAGE like the nine letters that spell ‘HOLLYWOOD’ on the Hollywood Hills, as so often is his wont. Yes, it is about a Strong Woman, and how this Strong Woman shone a light to others—but not at that time. Thankfully, we only get one embarrassing tracking shot of Graham descending the US Supreme Court steps bathed in the collective golden gaze of a crowd of adoring young women.

Because Meryl Streep, as Graham, embodies this message: she shows it time and again, each time better than before, without anyone’s help but the camera that loves her.

In any case, most of the young people outside the Supreme Court in our jaded memory would be either protestors, or tourists or student groups waiting in line to get in. And in 1971 it is unlikely that anyone but insiders would know who Kay Graham was, what she looked like, and what role she had played.

The Pentagon Papers began as an unvarnished internal report ordered by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on the history of US involvement in Southeast Asia. The result was a 7,000-page, 47-volume history. Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who worked at Rand Corporation, found a copy of this top secret report at Rand, took it home and copied it. He then leaked it to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan.

The Washington papers at this time—the liberal Washington Post and its soon thereafter defunct conservative competitor The Evening Star—were not national papers like The New York Times. They were publications focused on the local industry, which in Washington is national politics, and events such as White House weddings. Graham was a Washington socialite with no profession or work experience. She had grown up with her father’s paper, and her father had passed the reins to her husband Phil Graham. She became the publisher after her husband killed himself in 1963.  

Spielberg’s story takes place at a critical moment eight years later. Graham wants The Washington Post to be a quality national paper. She also needs to take the business public to ensure that it will be a going concern. Bradlee, an editor with a supernatural news sense as great editors have, feels in his bones that The Times’s Neil Sheehan is going to break a big story.

Bradlee grabs an intern, gives him $40 and tells to jump on a train to New York, go to The New York Times and find out what Neil Sheehan is working on.

‘Is that legal?’ the intern asks.

‘What do you think we do here for a living, kid?’ comes the reply.

The story moves quickly from Ellsberg (Matthew Rhys) in Vietnam; to a set piece in which Graham battles her all-male board, whom as a socialite they do not take seriously; to Bradlee’s race to try to beat a competitor to a scoop; to the enormity of the Pentagon Papers. This narrative trajectory brings Graham full circle because it leads her to McNamara (Bruce Greenwood), a key figure in the Vietnam story and one of her close personal social friends.

The Times’s publication of Sheehan’s story brings down the wrath of President Richard Nixon; The Post (and presumably a number of other papers) gets Pentagon Paper excerpts as a federal judge in New York grants the government’s request for an injunction blocking further disclosure. Bradlee’s reporters track down Ellsberg and their own set of documents. So Graham must decide whether to risk breaking the law by publishing the story, going against the wishes of her board—a composite fictional character in the person of Arthur Parsons (Bradley Whitford)—and possibly jeopardizing her IPO. The rest is history, though we were stiff afterward because the drama is so visceral.

And rather than close on a reverent note after Kay Graham says ‘I don’t think I could ever live through something like this again,’ the camera shows us a security guard finding a door taped open, passing through to the office of the Democratic National Committee. The guard calls DC Metropolitan Police: ‘I think we may have a burglary in progress at the Watergate.’  

  

Casting out demons in Québec

I Confess 1953 U.S. Warner Brothers/First National (94 minutes) directed by Alfred Hitchcock; written by George Tabori and William Archibald from a play by Paul Anthelme; director of photography, Robert Burks; music composed and directed by Dmitri Tiomkin.

AlfredHitchcock’s ‘I Confess’ is set amid Québec’s grand medieval-looking architecture and long shadows that can make it feel eerie as Prague at night, a natural fit with the Jacques Becker-Jean-Pierre Melville-Jules Dassin French crime dramas of the postwar era.

After the opening credits, we see Hitchcock stroll right to left across the screen, along the top of a staircase. A series of four ‘DIRECTION’ signs then point in a direction opposite to Hitchcock’s. They take us through town to a crime scene. A bead curtain swings. A man in a cassock exits into a night street. A man confesses a murder to a priest. The police arrive at the crime scene.

The circumstantial evidence points to Abbe Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift). The watchful Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden) spots Father Logan in the morning crowd at the crime scene. 

 

Clift was the first major ‘method’ actor. His Logan is convincing as a priest and returning combat veteran, and he photographs beautifully in black & white. But Clift’s personal life was beset with demons—perhaps not unlike Logan’s.

Father Logan has hired German refugees Otto Keller (O.E. Hasse) and his wife Alma (Dolly Haas) as church custodial staff. Keller also tends the garden of a Monsieur Villette (Ovila Légaré) in town. But he murders Villette and soon afterward confesses his crime to Father Logan in the confessional. Thereafter, the paranoid murderer and his wife, fearful that Logan will turn Keller in, stalk the priest around the rectory like creepy shadows.

Villette is presented as a sleazy lawyer. Keller apparently murdered him when the latter surprised him rifling a cashbox in Villette’s home. Keller tells his wife that the death was accidental. But he had disguised himself as a priest at least to rob Villette. Witnesses saw a priest leave the crime scene, and police later find Villette’s blood type on a cassock that Keller plants in Logan’s trunk. Nothing appears to have been stolen, and no trace evidence such as fingerprints is found at the crime scene; the ‘blunt instrument’ was wiped clean. 

The backstory is related in a statement given to police by Ruth Grandfort (Anne Baxter). Ruth grew up with Mike Logan in the same Québec neighborhood before World War II. They were in love. Mike was among the first to enlist when the war started. He told Ruth he did not want to marry ‘because the war already has made too many widows’, nor should she wait for him. After a time overseas, he stopped writing to her. Ruth eventually married Pierre Grandfort (Roger Dann), a Canadian member of parliament. But she met Logan the day his unit returned to Québec after the war.     

Baxter was not Hitchcock’s first casting pick for Ruth, but she is ideal in this role and photographs beautifully in black & white. A natural blonde, Baxter said that Hitchcock wanted her hair even lighter. Light to platinum blonde hair is ideal for black & white film under studio lighting, exactly the kind of detail that would have interested Hitchcock.

Viewers may notice that Ruth’s testimony is shot in a slow, soft romantic glow. Logan says little about himself throughout the film. According to the narrative, the war ‘changed’ him to the extent that he decided to become a Roman Catholic priest. But the detail that a québécois joined a unit based far to the west in Saskatchewan could signal an even earlier desire to change his life.

Ruth tells police that the day after Logan got back from overseas, they spent an afternoon in the country. They took shelter in a gazebo when a storm blew up—a naturalistic scene shot al fresco. They missed the last ferry and spent the night clothed and damp in the gazebo. In the morning, the gazebo owner—Villette—discovered them there. Villette recognized Mme. Grandfort and made insinuating comments. Logan knocked Villette to the ground and he and Ruth returned to town. She disclosed to the police that later, after Logan was ordained, Villette tried to blackmail her over the purported ‘affair’. 

Ruth wanted to give her friend an alibi for the evening of the murder. However, rather than saving him, the blackmail detail gives Logan a motive in the eyes of the police. The crescendo of circumstantial evidence and Logan’s obstinate refusal to speak leave Larrue and his investigators, Crown Prosecutor Willy Robertson (Brian Aherne) and Pierre Grandfort little doubt as to what happened. 

 

Later at trial, Keller puts his thumb on the circumstantial scale by dilating on Father Logan’s ‘distress’ in the church the evening of the murder. ‘After the event he wept. He promised a new start. I made no comment. What should I resent?’

This produces a classic Hitchcock dilemma: Father Logan is the prime suspect and the actual murderer has confessed the crime to him; yet the priest’s dedication to his calling will not let him violate the sanctity of the confessional, regardless of how despicable the culprit, even to save himself. 

Also Hitchcockian is a sense that many people’s individual guilt seek a public scapegoat for a deliverance from evil if not absolution. The question Hitchcock appears to resolve is, if vengeance truly is the Lord’s, will He repay?

This masterpiece concludes with a grand dénouement in the Québec’s landmark Chateau Frontenac. 

The Ring

The Ring 1927 U.K. (89 minutes) written and directed by Alfred Hitchcock; cinematography by John J. Cox.

This visually inventive black & white silent film, Alfred Hitchcock’s fourth feature and his only original screenplay, is a terrific boxing picture with more life than a great many technicolor talkies.

In The Ring, one of film’s great visual storytellers sets a love story amid the kinetic activity of an amusement park and the drama of the boxing ring. What we see through Hitchcock’s camera eye looks similar to the dynamic camera work that was coming out of 1920s Weimar Germany and the Kuleshov Workshop of the State Film School in Moscow. He assembles his shots in an efficient narrative which guides a viewer’s thoughts and emotions, even makes the viewer a vicarious participant in that one can feel the movement and hear the sounds.

 
We know that Hitchcock worked at the famous UFA film studios in Berlin briefly in the mid-1920s and joined F.W. Murnau on the set while Murnau was shooting Der Letzte Mann (1924-The Last Laugh). We also know that he and his lifelong collaborator Alma Reville saw many German and Soviet films in London. But rather than simply having ‘absorbed’ influence, Hitchcock’s work suggests that this experience inspired and encouraged him to develop thinking already advanced on these lines, ideas that continued to develop throughout his long career into the visual poetry of such films as North by Northwest (1959) and The Birds (1963).

His main difficulty at first must have been selling this vision to producers who expected to see adaptations of traditional stage drama. But this challenge likely spurred Hitchcock to invent even more ingenious ways to tell stories without words. The Ring is the first film that shows the range of his genius for telling a story in pictures. The facts that he just had left Gaumont and that this also was the first movie for his new employer, British International Pictures, may have helped.

The opening sequence brings the viewer through a busy weekend or holiday amusement park in a manner similar to Dziga Vertov’s later Man with a Movie Camera (1929-Человек с кино-аппаратом) or Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer’s People on Sunday (1930-Menschen am Sonntag). The viewer arrives at the front of a booth in which a crowd is amusing itself by dunking a carny. The carny is a black man, and the scene is sure to offend mainstream sensibilities in the 21st century US. A small boy hits the man in the face with an egg, to great gales of laughter from the crowd, including a policeman. But this breaks the rules of the game. The white booth manager sets the policeman after the boy and his friend.

Two skeptical dunking spectators then move to a nearby booth which features ‘One Round’ Jack Sander (Carl Brisson), who welcomes all comers to last a round with him in the boxing ring. People pay admission to see this carny pugilist make fools of young bucks, blowhards, drunks and others, including middle-aged men put up by their wives. Again, the humor is heavy-handed and physical in a way that would not be acceptable as entertainment in the US and the UK today, the crowd amused by others’ discomfort and distress—and not just because they have black skin.

It is noteworthy that one of Jack’s team is a black man who, like the others, looks as though he actually could be a boxer, and appears throughout the rest of the film as one of ‘the boys’. Hitchcock knew boxing as a fan and frequent fight attendee. Brisson himself had been a prizefighter before the First World War, and uncredited cast members include legendary British boxer Eugene Corri (as MC) and ‘Bombardier Billy Wells’, British and British Empire champion from 1911 until 1919.

The two spectators in our story turn out to be Bob Corby, ‘Heavyweight Champion of Australia’ (Ian Hunter), and his manager, James Ware (Forrester Harvey). They are scouting local talent for a sparring partner for Corby. Corby also is drawn to Mabel (Lillian Hall Davis), the ticket-taker outside the boxing tent, who is engaged to be Jack’s wife. 

In a dynamic sequence of shots, Corby, removing his jacket and hat and stepping into the ring in a bow tie, packs the house when he goes an unprecedented four rounds with Jack. Jack has natural ability but needs seasoning to become a professional boxer; he and Mabel also have emotional growing up to do. Mabel marries Jack, but falls for the celebrity champ Corby.

At Mabel and Jack’s wedding ceremony, another ring—Mabel’s wedding band—is misplaced, confused with a button and then recovered by Jack’s bemused best man and trainer (Gordon Harker) in beautifully mimed sequence. Jack places this ring on Mabel’s hand, where it remains.
Thus the story shows Jack grow in two arenas, as a boxer and a husband, culminating in his heavyweight fight with Corby for the title and to win back Mabel’s affection.